She messages him: Come see my working-class ass before it’s firmly planted in the upper-middle class.
• •
The Coffee Bean is full, but everyone seems young and healthy and in a good mood, and she’s wondering where the hell all these people live. It can’t be Serenos. There are four men who all seem to look the same despite different color hair and varying heights and builds, and she can’t pinpoint it, but whatever it is must be an illusion: They can’t be as beautiful, tan, and pulled together as they appear. She’s at the glass door, and the aviator glasses and short skirt and tight blouse and black strappy Jimmy Choos from her Boston days give her the confidence to smile at the one in the group who gets the door for her, and his teeth are bright white and she laughs and asks him, “What the hell?”
He looks puzzled.
“Your teeth,” she says.
He’s stopped in his tracks, still holding the door. He smells like a six-foot mimosa.
“They’re insane,” she adds.
“Thanks.”
The business card he slips her reads Interscope and as she leaves the group of men, she feels their eyes on her, a familiar sensation, and decides then, on a wide, crowded sidewalk, gleaming towers and tall palms and fountains and buses and yellow sports cars and silver Maseratis racing on a nameless street, to text JW even though he didn’t respond to the previous two. She Googles Lawrence De Bent. She Googles West Side Rentals and goes to their website and checks listings for rentals in Manhattan, Hermosa, and Laguna Beach. She rereads the last message from JW, the one he sent ten minutes ago. She lightly thumbs the screen. She knows how it was and this isn’t that.
Remember I told you I felt like a teenager in the basement of my ex?? Well I didn’t finish.
So finish, she writes back.
Wanna fuck you like you’re a teenager.
36
It’s the first week of October. It’s the hottest week since they arrived in June. The heat is unrelenting. For some reason, Kostya and Marina have Halloween decorations on their front lawn already: a family of zombies that appears frighteningly real at night. Nick and Phoebe are exhausted. It’s midnight and they’ve each been up since six. Nick had a nosebleed an hour ago from the dry hot air. Phoebe is premenstrual and cramping. Nick keeps the bedroom door open, as much to listen for strange noises as to keep from suffocating.
“Spell it out, Phoebe. What do we have left?”
That’s easy, she thinks. She adjusts the volume on the baby monitor she keeps bedside. What is left is Jackson. What’s left with JW? An answer, yes or no: Will he produce for her? His third wife, Japanese, lonely, must spend as much time as Phoebe would wondering who he’s texting or calling or Skyping, who’s taking the gold elevator up to his hotel suite or boarding a flight with tickets he paid for to meet him in Maui or San Francisco. Between the lines of her text messages with JW is a stark reality. She needs him more than ever. What’s left? Closing the sale with JW. What’s confusing her is the rush of adrenaline that comes with each text he sends, the resulting agitation and inability to sleep without copious amounts of pink and yellow benzodiazepines.
“I’ll answer my own question,” Nick says as he leaves the room. “Nothing is left. And there’s nothing inside of you. It took me ten years to see through you because I’m an idiot.”
Phoebe closes her eyes. She remains upright on the bed, legs crossed. She’s nodding. She’s waiting him out. She bites her upper lip. Another moment or two and the right words will ignite her. They don’t come, though. Nick leaves the room, closes the door quietly behind him.
37
The rumors are all true, it turns out. Stories about a home invasion two blocks over by men with shaved heads from Tustin, tying up the Hamid family in the bonus room and stripping the house of everything—electronics, their two cars, all the granite and stainless steel appliances. They took the wife to the nearest ATM and made her withdraw the maximum. Brought her back to the house, lit it on fire, and left.
Saturday morning, in the predawn darkness, Nick watched from their bedroom window as a black Nissan Maxima with tinted windows and Nevada plates crept along Carousel Court, stopping at the edge of the young neighbor’s yard. The car idled for twenty minutes before Nick walked outside, stood barefoot and shirtless in their driveway, a sweaty callused hand clutching a tire iron. He leaned back against Phoebe’s Explorer and lit a cigarette, stared at Metzger’s tent, hoping he was inside it, awake, ready. The car turned around, left.
On Monday, the lead story on KCAL was about a home invasion/double murder ten miles from Serenos in La Habra. The image on the screen that made Nick get up off the sectional and leave the house without explanation to walk next door to the young neighbor’s house: a black Nissan Maxima with tinted windows, Nevada plates. Next door, the house was dark inside. There was no car in the driveway. Nick pounded on the front door. Nothing. He walked around the side of the house and found the empty pool filled with charred remains: furniture, papers, books, dishware, clothes. A body could be buried in there and no one would ever know.
Nick is alone in the cool kitchen. It’s four A.M. The house hums, electrical currents, the wind pressing against window frames, the central air flowing, keeping up with the demand for lower and lower temperatures. Nick sits on a leather barstool at the granite island, concentrates on the rhythm of his heart. Sticky beat, the physician called it when Nick went to the ER after working thirty-two hours straight last week, when he couldn’t drive home, choking on his own breath, throat tightening. The Asian woman told him, “Sticky beat,” and added, “You’re young. Relax. Enjoy your life.” The irregular heartbeat was simply stress, lack of sleep, nothing to worry about. Nick is bringing a third bottle of Dos Equis to his lips when his iPhone vibrates on the granite island. The message is from a number he doesn’t recognize, a 919 area code: scurrd yet?
38
Phoebe’s alone in the house. Blackjack sleeps at the foot of Jackson’s crib. The man who found him called him Blackjack because he was lucky to be alive. So they stick with that.
She finishes a bottle of Beringer white zinfandel that Nick brought home, she thinks, as some kind of fuck-you. “We can’t afford what you drink,” he said when she placed two bottles in their cart the last time they shopped together.
She opens another bottle. Nick is working tonight, then who knows? She wonders if he’s met someone else, that girl Mallory. Or maybe someone from the office he should be working in. Maybe they met when he came out for interviews and stayed in touch. Maybe he’s been fucking her since they arrived. Maybe she’s the reason he’s insisting they stay out here. Maybe Phoebe’s the victim in all of this. Maybe Phoebe should finally give herself a break. She is, after all, doing something about it.
• •
Nine months ago, it was Phoebe’s thirty-second birthday. They were drinking alone. Jackson went down easily, early. A bottle of Stags’ Leap with a pink bow on it was next to Nick’s laptop on the glass coffee table between them.
She sat on the couch, Nick on the floor. She was still in her work clothes, Nick in torn black jeans and a gray Emerson T-shirt. The one-bedroom was quiet, drafty, and clean. The two coats of banana crème were still drying, the air thick with the scent of fresh paint. She asked why, and he said, “Happy birthday.” Then he added, “Because it needed it.”
Sheets were balled up in a corner of the main room, brushes, pans, and rollers. “You did it?” Phoebe said, and laughed.
“Of course not.”
Nick waited until that day, her thirty-second birthday, to lay it out.
“Why now?”
“It was overdue.”
She scanned the apartment. “Looks good.”
It was Wednesday. Nick’s new production-manager position with the Encino firm was confirmed the previous Friday. He’d kept it to himself. He could start as soon as they got out there. He asked for four
weeks. He would have asked for longer because he knew this about the offer and the firm and the work, the expectations, uprooting his fragile family, the night sweats that left him drenched, shivering, thirsty, sitting up alone on the living room sofa, drenched underwear and a blanket over his shoulders, the gray light of dawn and the cold realization: He did not want it. Any of it. The job and the associated pressure to justify their faith in him. This was all for her. He was fine exactly where he was. Phoebe was the one who’d gone off the rails. Phoebe needed help. And if she’d taken fewer coping pills and slept a little more, she’d have seen the idling UPS truck in the right lane at dusk.
So Nick opened his laptop, double-clicked the link to a website, turned the screen to Phoebe.
Phoebe studied it. “What am I looking at?”
“We’re Nobody Productions. That’s their website.”
“Great name. So what?”
“They do commercials, some short films.”
She was nodding. “They’re in Boston?”
“Nope.”
Nick opened his Yahoo! account, double-clicked the email from We’re Nobody Productions in Encino, California, one of three production companies offering him a position out of the forty-two he’d inquired with. He’d flown out there once, lied to Phoebe, said it was for his job recruiting a client. The interview had gone well enough, apparently.
She read the offer letter, the terms, which were generous. She reread it. She stared at Nick. Her lower lip did that thing it did when she was happy, disappeared inside her mouth.
Double-clicking websites and watching Phoebe absorb the news and seeing her expression soften, the distance in her eyes, made Nick forget for a moment how little he cared about this job, taking on new responsibilities, proving himself all over again, not to himself or some new firm but to his wife. For that, he resented her. But not now. She was tall and beautiful, with that jaw and that hair, and the confidence she moved with seemed like a test to Nick: See if you can keep up with me, keep me engaged, amused, in love, and this can work. He realized that as much as he wanted to win her respect, he loathed the part of her that expected him to try again and again. But not in that moment, that Wednesday night of her thirtieth birthday. The next phase of their life together unfolded in front of her on a laptop screen. It overwhelmed her and it was because of him.
Nick was buzzed from the validation that came from the L.A. firm’s offer. It didn’t matter that the production company was obscure, only four years old, and that he didn’t want the position.
“We’ll need a place to crash,” Nick said, feeling playful, reacting to Phoebe’s reaction, “and they’re all, ‘Start whenever’ and saying they can help find us a place. And I’m all, ‘I got it.’ So there’s this.” He clicked a link to a real-estate website, turned the screen back to Phoebe. The image was of a pale blue bungalow squeezed in on a narrow concrete strip. The slide show cycled through various images of the property: the master with the hardwood floor, the child’s bedroom with the ceiling fan, the living room, the kitchen with the small island, all-new appliances, granite countertops, the rooftop deck with the partial ocean view.
“Furnished. Three months. Near the beach. Collect our thoughts.”
“Nick.”
“The offer is generous enough. We can swing it. They’d have me start this summer. The rental is in Hermosa Beach. And we have it. It’s done. The money is better than what I make now, so I can cover the rent. Enough with our savings to switch things up. There’s a lot more we can do. And I kind of think now is the time to do it. I kind of think when you pushed me out the door when I didn’t want to go down there after Katrina, it was a bit of a wake-up call. And now I’m awake. And you’re killing yourself out there, and it’s just . . . time.”
They could have left the next day. They could have packed their clothes and Jackson and just driven west. Or the following week or that weekend.
“Let’s go sooner. Let’s go now,” Phoebe said. “Why wait?”
Nick laughed.
“You shouldn’t wait. Just get started.”
“We have time.”
There was a sudden pause. It was tense and familiar. Nick took her hands. “It’s your birthday, baby.” It was Nick slowing things down, it was Phoebe pushing.
“Jesus, Nick.”
They needed some time, though, to do it right, to maximize the payoff. They needed enough time to find and upgrade and flip the right property, then go all in and, when the time was right, cash out.
“Damn straight,” she said. She had both hands on his face and just held it there.
The buzz didn’t wear off. They lay awake in bed that night.
“I don’t need it, Nick.”
“We do,” he said.
“I don’t need two months off.”
“Three.”
“We can’t afford it. And the house flip. It doesn’t add up.”
“Since when does that stop anyone? It can and will,” he said.
“You think there’s something wrong with me.”
“Phoebe, you’re tired.”
“I can’t do this. Spend a summer sitting—”
“A few months with your son. Some time to yourselves. Apartment hunting.”
“You’re not making that much more.”
“It works. And with what we should clear from selling the house.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll get a nanny, too. We can swing a couple days a week. You can hang out on the beach. Explore.”
“You’re treating this like it’s a breakdown. I’m not sick.”
“Time and rest. Jesus, you nearly died.”
“That was months ago. I’m fine.”
“And you’ve been working since. And it’s crushing you. Enough.”
She sighed. She still swallowed Advil by the handful, she still got migraines. She had three titanium pins in her left ankle that still had to be removed.
“Get excited.”
“I am. I will.”
“The summer is yours.”
“I can do my job anywhere, too. I can talk to people, and it’s no different out there. I can plug in and go.”
“Not this summer. You’re on vacation. Just hang out and be a mom.” Nick sighed. And that was it. He delivered the words with genuine confidence in his voice. He felt a sense of calm he’d felt only once as an adult: in the delivery room with Phoebe, holding her hand, at her ear. Just like then, it felt as though everything had been thought of, nothing left to chance, and it was for her and them and he could read her, knew that when the faint lines on her forehead vanished and her shoulders dropped, the tension released, she’d never felt safer.
She seemed to process all of it, or she tried: three months in a furnished rental on the beach to spend with her son, teaching him to swim, shopping, apartment searching, weekend trips up and down the coast.
“We need another car.”
“We’ll get one.”
“It’s expensive. Insurance and registration.”
“We’ll get a hybrid. Save on gas.”
“Three months?”
“Three months.”
She exhaled. “I don’t know—”
“I know,” he said.
“So tell me again,” she said as she slid her leg over him and sat up, straddled him.
“We do it. We go.”
“Your stuff, Nick. It’s so good. You deserve this.”
“Don’t.”
“It is. Why do you think they hired you? This is your time.”
“I love us. Like this. I love us,” he said.
It had been a long time. He tried to remember the last time they were this optimistic about anything other than Jackson, and he couldn’t. Nick had watched her Klonopin disappear and reappear and disappear again. He read the texts she didn’
t bother to delete from the physician clients who wanted her to get them off in exchange for more ’scripts. He found the JPEGs she sent: Phoebe in the dressing room at Bebe or Nordstrom, snapping images of herself, an arm across her bare breasts, topless with only her hair covering her, yellow lace boy shorts and French-manicured fingernails slipping under the waistband. Each image a piece of her sold off.
“Best case?” she said now.
Nick flipped her over and she let out a burst of laughter and he came on her stomach and chest and she cursed and laughed some more as he collapsed next to her.
“Best case is we make a killing,” he said, and he was out of breath and she was laughing quietly and said, “California and you all over my chest. Best birthday ever.”
It took Phoebe two hours online to learn what the comps sold for on Carousel Court, the other new-construction homes with similar square footage and pools but without the degree of upgrades they had in mind. What Nick couldn’t know is that she would finance the move, the house, the expenditure on upgrades, ensure profitability, and invest in them with JW’s money.
39
The early-morning mist is warm and thick and Phoebe is shrouded in it. She stands in the driveway reading a message from JW:
You last night: incredible. Almost like the real thing. Could taste you.
And then: Tell me this: did he get you the personal massager or did you pick it out yourself? Can I get you one?
Then: As I said, was only in town for a night but next time in person. Not that Skyping isn’t amazing. Am checking out. Want the room?
Yes.