Boss gets in his white Lexus and leans out the window, hands an envelope to Nick, and tells him, “Thursday. Get me word that night. We’re scheduled for Saturday morning.”
Inside the envelope: two sets of numbered house keys, the address of each house on a corresponding index card. Also in the envelope: two tickets to Thursday night’s Angels game.
Arik grabs the envelope then removes his iPhone and enters the addresses to the houses. Nick looks at the cards.
Arik laughs. “I got this house, dude.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Have you been to Tarzana? You don’t want this one. There won’t be anything in there anyway.”
Nick’s search engine is slow, but he enters “Tarzana” on his handheld and waits.
“Meet me there.”
“Pick me up,” Arik says.
Nick reads about Tarzana: It’s in the San Fernando Valley and, according to Wikipedia, is a wealthy community with average home values assessed at nine hundred thousand dollars. Nick realizes this property is a gift from Boss, a home stocked with goodies.
“Don’t go there first,” Nick warns him. The house is a four-bedroom with a three-car garage.
“You have the keys to the castle,” Arik says, and shrugs.
Nick stares at his green eyes and wide forehead and bleached-blond crew cut and acne: He’s a kid. He’s alien to Nick. He’s the offspring of some adults who found themselves in a soulless tract of ranch houses forty miles from Los Angeles. He may as well be an Eskimo. Somehow they speak the same language. Nick wonders: Was he this adrift when he was Arik’s age? Nick produced a radio show at Emerson College when he was nineteen, carried a full course load, and a work-study job at the dining hall on the weekends. Nick was considering NPR, online journalism, something edgier. Phoebe at nineteen was enlisting the help of third-year Harvard law students to file suit against her mother’s former employer for gender discrimination when DuPont fired her for insubordination. (Some workers were inadvertently exposed to hazardous materials in her plant, and she wouldn’t let it go.)
Nick and Phoebe at nineteen weren’t setting the world on fire, but, unlike Arik, something burned inside them. Arik’s got this grin on his face that fades into a faraway gaze. Something occurs to him and his focus returns. “Will you give me the tickets, at least?” Arik says. “You’re not going to use them.”
Nick hands him the Angels tickets.
• •
After dropping Arik off, Nick makes two calls. The first is to Jaime, one of the Honduran brothers, who gives Nick the number of the guy who took the black dog from the house the other night. When he calls the number, he gets voice mail, leaves a message, then sends a text explaining that he’s willing to pay for the dog and to please give a call back.
The windows are down and warm air rushes through the car as Nick plugs in and cues the Black Keys on his iPod and “My Mind Is Ramblin’ ” comes from the speakers. Nick is turning over numbers in his mind.
In a Starbucks not far from Serenos, he sips a double espresso, makes notes on his iPhone. Six houses. That’s what he decides. He’ll rent six houses to six families. He’ll collect the first month’s rent from each family and a deposit of one month’s rent. He’ll rent each house month-to-month for a minimum of a thousand each. He’ll earn twelve thousand from six houses in addition to the monthly rent for as long as each occupant stays. Some will leave without warning, so whatever he collects in rent is a bonus. Six houses will be twelve thousand dollars. Double that and he’ll have twenty-four. Can he handle twelve houses? If he can push it to twelve houses, for three months each, he’ll be bringing in close to fifty thousand dollars in cash.
He scans the contacts in his iPhone, finds the name he needs. “Yes. Mai? Hi. This is Nick Maguire. Nick and Phoebe and Jackson from down the street on Carousel Court. Yes. Thank you.”
He’s up and sticking a finger in his ear and pushing the warm glass door open and stepping outside into the wind and heat. Nick saw Mai pushing an orange double stroller onto Carousel Court yesterday afternoon, one of the seats empty, and stopped the car and introduced himself. They’d always said hello in passing and waved, and she’d smiled at Jackson. He asked her now about rates and availability, whether the empty seat in the Graco is available. He’s pacing the wide concrete walkway, smiling and nodding as he speaks, as though Mai is there in front of him. And he’s grinning because the call goes well and she’s available. She can start immediately.
He’s still smiling when he’s back inside the Starbucks, because with this move they can finally stop waking Jackson up in the dark and carrying him half-asleep to the car, dropping him off alone at Bouncin’ Babies. Phoebe can sleep an extra hour in the morning. Neither of them will have to rush to day care to pick him up. And Phoebe can talk to someone about her meds, because Nick can’t be the only one telling her she’s playing with fire.
A moment later, a call comes that Nick was hoping for. The man who took the abandoned dog home the other night is returning Nick’s call, responding to the message. Nick offers him fifty dollars for it. The man says seventy-five. Nick will call or text to arrange a pickup in the next week or so. It’s falling into place, Nick thinks.
Twelve houses. Spread out across Los Angeles, San Bernardino, maybe the Valley, wherever Boss has properties lined up. Unlike the cicada shells littering the dry grass, the houses have just enough meat on the bone to attract the scavengers and jackals and birds of prey. He exhales. He surveys the Starbucks. Sunlight floods the place. A Latino kid in a Celtics jersey holds the door for a young mother pushing a yellow Bugaboo double stroller. The babies wear blue sandals and red sunglasses. Everything pops: the colors, the people, the thick warm aroma of coffee, the bright sunlight, the steady wind, and the trees shaking, bending in it.
12
The sticker on the back of the white Cutlass Ciera reads: Ask Me About My AK-47. Phoebe is stuck in stop-and-start traffic, midmorning on the 110. They have $2,998 in savings. There will be no Serenos Montessori for Jackson. There will be no nanny. No help at all, is all Phoebe can think. The Discover is their only working credit card. She’s swallowing her second dose of Klonopin with Propranolol and Effexor kickers. Listening to her favorite Blondfire track as the first warm wave washes over her from the inside out, she is making a mental list for Whole Foods: sun-dried tomatoes, butternut squash, and the cherimoya she slices in half, freezes, then feeds like sorbet to Jackson. A series of texts flood her iPhone, breaks the spell. But not one is from JW. They’re all from her regional GSK manager, because her quarterly sales numbers are in.
Got your first #s: not encouraging
Why aren’t they ordering from you? Thought you were the star back east, Phoebe?
Ask yourself: what am I not doing out here that I could be doing?
Bottom third in volume this quarter
From diamond status to bottom third not good.
News flash: simply showing up for appt’s isn’t enough, Phoebe. Do what you know how to do and get them back up ;) SHOW THEM how badly you need them
When her handheld finally stops vibrating, she responds: @ gym firming up ass.
I know you’re up to this.
You remind me of my last DM back east
How’s that?
Better left unsaid
Is yours a job you can afford to lose?
Phoebe stands at the reception desk in a cold, shimmering medical office that’s all glass and polished chrome edges, the samples in a small black case she pulls behind her. The girl behind the counter is taking calls and wearing too much foundation. It’s caked on, concealing a breakout on her cheekbones. She’s likely a temp, Phoebe thinks. Just starting out. Her fingernails are manicured and her handheld is open to a social networking app she keeps checking even though the calls are pouring in. She’s not long for this job. And yet Phoebe can’t shake the u
rge to trade places with her: to be twenty-six, untethered, apparently unconcerned about stability, marital, financial, or emotional. Phoebe grabs a lollipop from a crystal dish and pops it in her mouth and recalls exactly where she was when she was twenty-six.
Her iPhone vibrates.
• •
When she was twenty-six, Phoebe was stabbing an olive in an untouched dirty martini with a silver pick in a warmly lit restaurant across the table from the managing partner of the firm she was leaving. JW was ordering another and trying to convince her to stay, while Nick was at home with his blown-out knee, keeping it elevated, waiting for Phoebe to get home and the Percocet to kick in.
“This is a career-track position you’re walking away from.”
“Not without an MBA.”
“I don’t want you to leave.”
“I can’t handle it.”
There was no nobility in ending an affair. It was simply stanching the bleeding. She’d sat in her cubicle untwisting paper clips at the end of too many workdays, waiting for JW to summon her to his office. She’d walked to the gym after and showered there, then sat on the T, always in the rear by the window, the rocking of the streetcar somehow soothing. She’d stared at the television screen next to Nick, who’d be asleep on the couch, their bodies idling in the flickering glow of their darkened apartment. There was no recovering from this. She was doing permanent damage. Sound sleep came only after Nick’s surgery, when she found his Percocet.
Meanwhile, in the hushed corner of a dimly lit restaurant, JW was telling her there was something special inside her. He said it was something he needed to be around.
“We all have someone like that at work,” he said. She was that person for him. He offered to increase her salary. He told her she could have an office of her own. He promised he wouldn’t call her cell or text or expect anything.
She didn’t care if any of it was true. She couldn’t start a life with Nick like this.
JW made her a proposition. One without expectations or obligations. It was something he was returning to, a question she’d posed when she first started that he wanted to answer.
“I’m paraphrasing, but something along the lines of ‘How do these assholes do it?’ Right? You asked me about your colleagues, the twenty-five-year-old white boys who were all your age but somehow selling off condos, financing their first million-dollar homes. What was their fucking secret?” He held up four fingers, kept the middle one down. He said his father had lost a finger. He said his father also had a mouth full of cancer from chewing tobacco for the three decades he’d spent on his knees splicing copper wires and refilling Freon tanks.
JW described a quiet, hardworking, big-hearted father who would have made his sons whole when he died, left them equity. And before that, had he had the means, he would have paid JW’s first mortgage so that when he sold, he could have used the cash to buy the million-dollar house. JW said his own father would have leveraged his relationships to get his sons started. That was how it worked. Not complicated, he said. “Now I have it and I’m using it. Like he would have. And like I will for my own family.” He removed a checkbook and wrote something, tore it free, and placed it within arm’s reach on the white tablecloth. “Your leg up.” He leaned back in his chair, finished off his drink.
She stared at the black ink on the face of the pale green check. Phoebe knew JW relished the fact that he could write her a check for a hundred thousand dollars without hesitation.
“I’m supposed to refuse this. That’s the right thing to do.”
“Don’t overthink it.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Take a trip. Sardinia, maybe?”
“This is”—she held out the check—“inappropriate.”
The 675-square-foot one-bedroom apartment with the pale blue carpet and cracked storm windows was the reason she considered it. Nick’s desire to launch a film career of his own was the reason. Did she deceive Nick, betray his trust? Of course. Was she new to all of this and overwhelmed and young, entitled to a lapse in judgment without having to sacrifice her marriage?
“Don’t tell me I earned it.”
“I’ll write you recommendations. I’ll make the necessary calls for any business school you want.” He finished his drink. He looked around the restaurant. He sighed, satisfied with himself. “This should change your life, Phoebe. If you’re as smart as I think you are.”
The olive in her glass was a shredded, pulpy mess. She could feel the bits as she swallowed.
“And I’m sorry.”
She waited.
“For pushing you to stay. You’re doing the right thing.”
“Am I?”
“You’ll be fine. I’ll find you something. But you’re right. This thing between us—” He looked away. “It’s no way to start a life with someone.”
In the cab on the way home, she removed a small pill case and swallowed a Percocet. She removed the check and stared at the unusually large pale green rectangle before her, his signature illegible. She noticed the memo: Because we don’t all start from zero.
• •
The message for Phoebe is from JW.
Just harvested my basil and pesto
He’s resuming a conversation that he initiated with her years ago, when she was a twenty-four-year-old new hire. A decadent dialogue she thought she’d ended but willingly resumed. In his world, chocolate Labradors walk off-leash on residential streets. Town cars, not cabs. Warm almonds in the dish and two Range Rovers and the restored Alfa Romeo he’s quietly proud of.
He details his casually elegant summer life in Maine. He’s gardening. Harvesting bell peppers, basil, and tomatoes. They’re hiking tomorrow, sailing if the weather holds. Phoebe doesn’t ask who he means when he says “we,” assumes he means his current wife and maybe a kid or two.
So the wife’s in wine country. Why not hop on a plane?
Why don’t you? You were coming, remember? In days not weeks.
I’m here.
Where?
In the city. Come say hi.
• •
In the elevator of the medical office, she turns off her iPhone, something she used to do before she ended things with JW. She did it not because she didn’t want JW’s messages or calls pouring in while she was sharing the couch with Nick, but because the suspense was a rush: powering it on, watching the screen, waiting for the vibration, the chime; an adolescent game with new technology. She’d outgrown it, she thought.
• •
Later that night, after washing and folding all of Jackson’s clothes and pouring out milk from a gallon jug a day before the expiration date and printing out a list of positions from Monster.com that Nick can apply for, she lies restless next to Jackson’s crib and turns her iPhone back on.
No messages.
It occurs to her, watching the spinning, shadowy blades of the ceiling fan, that she could use a hundred-thousand-dollar check now more than ever.
She taps out a text to JW: How long are you here?
He doesn’t respond.
• •
The text that arrives nearly an hour later is just a link to a website for a place called Hotel Bamboo. Phoebe opens it. She scrolls through images of spare, clean suites accented with lush gardens and koi ponds, sunken bathtubs and open-air fire pits, set deep in the canyons of Los Angeles.
Then a message from him: Zen Suite
She doesn’t respond.
Come say hello. I leave Sunday.
JW is here and wants to see her, but on his terms. That’s something Phoebe can’t do. Not this time. She doesn’t respond to his last few messages. She finds Hotel Bamboo on Google Maps. She opens another page she bookmarked on her iPhone. The link she sends to JW is for a financial analyst position in management with D&C in Laguna Beach.
They used to be a client
of ours, right? Can you make this happen?
There’s no response. She knows all too well that it could be an hour or a week before JW replies, if he replies at all. He could joke with her or take her seriously. He could toy, tease, and treat her like he used to: some young tough-acting thing who reminded him of his youth. Or he could take her at face value: a professional seeking advancement, playing angles, capitalizing on connections. How he sees her no longer matters, if it ever did. All that matters now is that he not take a month to respond.
13
It’s morning. Nick is driving through predawn darkness. He’s sore and he stinks even after rinsing off. The stench of garbage lines his dry nostrils. He has two initial assessments scheduled in Chino Hills and Tarzana next week.
Last night he drove a gloved fist through a plate-glass window. He took a sledgehammer to armoires and overpriced bed frames that couldn’t fit in the Dumpsters in one piece—furniture people could use. He plugged in the yellow Dyson vacuum cleaner. It still worked. He carried it past the Dumpster, dropped it in the backseat of his Forester. The grandfather clock. No one wanted it. “Don’t you people have grandmothers who would kill for something this ugly?” Nick called out, and when the members of the crew who could hear him all yelled, “Crush it!,” he swung the sledgehammer with such force that the clock exploded on contact, all splintered wood and glass. It used to be that some of the crew kept whatever was left behind, or sold it on Craigslist, but now there’s no time. Too many houses to trash out, too many unwanted belongings. Their livelihood depends on working fast, doing away with the leftovers. Who has time to coordinate with Salvation Army to haul this shit away? The men work for profit, not charity, so Dumpsters and landfills are the only solution. Nick destroyed everything he could and felt satisfaction in the moment. The best he could hope for last night, what he kept in mind as he worked—that jaw of hers and crushing things.