Carousel Court (8 page)

She held the open laptop awkwardly between them. She could smell his aftershave: lighter, almost floral.

“Want to come watch tonight?”

She cleared her throat. “Why do you want me to watch you?”

“Only if you want to. Do you want to?”

Nick is home, she thought. He's home by now and on the couch watching
SportsCenter
, eating leftover Thai or the rest of his burrito from lunch.

“Watch you play hockey with your friends?”

She studied the flecks of white and reddish-brown stubble on his chin. Through the sweeping window behind him, the electric-blue bridge against the night sky.

“This is weird,” she said.

He took the laptop from her, placed it on his desk, and returned to her. “What is?”

“I don't even know what this is,” she said.

He took her hands. She considered what she'd say to Nick, how she'd rationalize the decision: Do you realize what someone like that can do for someone like me?

So you're some kind of whore? he'd say.

This is our life, Nick. I've made my choice, and I chose you. And it wasn't a mistake. This thing with JW was a calculated risk, and I took it. And the last part would be less than truthful. There was very little calculation involved. Only the adrenaline rush when the door closed behind her and they were alone.

“
Close your eyes,” he said. “Open your hand.”

She followed his directions.

He placed an object in her right hand. “Open your eyes.” It was her smartphone. She'd left it in his office. “If you
ever
leave this anywhere other than this office or your home, you will lose your job.”

She said nothing.

“You realize the sensitivity of the information on there.”

“The password—”

“Forget the password. Anyone can bypass that.”

She apologized and started to leave.

“Phoebe,” he said. “You have to earn trust.”

• •

The following night, after he returned her smartphone to her, Phoebe was again in JW's corner office. It was after eight. The floor was nearly deserted, hushed. Only the cleaning staff made any noise. His shoes were off. He wore a blue oxford, untucked, no tie. He tapped out a text message on his personal phone.

He brought a hand to her face, her jaw.

“The door,” she said.

“What about it?”

She moved past him to the window. There were so many boats in the harbor. All the red and white lights drifting across the black water. “So do something.” The voice that came from her was steady. Without hesitation and before she could manage to turn around, she felt all the weight of him lean against her, pressing them both against the glass, and she wondered how much force it could withstand.

After, he talked about his family. He smiled when he showed her pictures of his son building sandcastles on a beach, wearing a life vest in a boat on some lake. He seemed to listen when he asked about her relationship with Nick and how they met in college and their apartment and the stupid details of life with no real money as newlyweds and nonstop sex and no sense of where the hell life was taking them. God, he missed those days.

“And these?” she asked. “Will you miss these days when they're gone?”

“I'll miss this.”

“What is
this
?” she asked him.

He laughed. “Hell if I know.”

• •

A routine developed between them at work. She'd be at her desk, having called Nick to tell him she was going to yoga or drinks with friends,
and she'd have spent twenty minutes in the ladies' room applying MAC eyeliner and Sephora powder that she'd picked up at lunch because it was Thursday and that worked best for JW. His office was always dark except for his desk lamp, and he'd be on his cell and in the middle of things and it was after seven, almost eight, and she'd lock the door behind her and stand at the sweeping glass window and stare out at the new bridge, glowing blue and stuffed with red taillights and white headlights and the cold black water she couldn't see flowing beneath it, and she'd feel her heart race when his call ended and keep her back to him and close her eyes the moment his hands moved up and under her skirt until she was guiding his fingertips gently, easily, inside of her. The thought occurred to her, irrational as it was: This is rubbing off on me. This life and world, the small details of JW, his measured but intense breathing through his nose, the ease with which he maneuvered them across the room, the crispness of his shirt, the warmth of his neck and the faint lines around his eyes and the flecks of gray in his sideburns. She was satiating an appetite she didn't know she had, an appetite that seemed to border on compulsion.

It was bullshit, she thought. She told him this, laughing, one night in his office. “This is ridiculous,” she said. Her warm forehead pressed against cold glass.

“What is?”

“This view.” She held her hands wide, palms spread, pressing hard against the window as she found his eyes in its reflection.

“Tell me to stop,” he said, and slid his hand around her tight waist and pressed himself against her. “Tell me I don't deserve you.”

How could Phoebe know what this man deserved? She knew enough not to answer.

“You have everything in front of you,” he said. “To be twenty-six again. Jesus.”

“Come inside me.”

The decadence with JW was somehow irresistible. It felt mature and otherworldly. Town cars dropped them off and picked them up. He chopped spruce trees for the woodstove in his family's cabin. He took Phoebe there on a Saturday morning (when work had kept Nick
stuck in Hartford for the weekend) and drove her back to the city the next morning. He spoon-fed her frozen cherimoya that seemed to melt on her tongue in his dimly lit office. He made no apologies or excuses for himself and never once told her he loved her or said a disparaging word about his wife except that she tried too hard sometimes to keep everything in order.

“You,” he said a year or so after their first time together in his office, “need a mentor.”

“Are you volunteering?”

“Produce,” he said. “That's what you tell yourself. Produce. If you do, you'll be fine. If you don't, you won't last.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Of course.”

“Make me a senior analyst,” she said.

“With no MBA.”

“But with you as a mentor.”

“You're on track,” he said.

“For what?”

“There's a path. Don't overthink it. Follow it and you'll have everything you want.”

“That's a cop-out.”

“You remind me of—”

“Don't say your daughter.”

“Me.”

She wondered briefly if there was something special about her, some intangible quality that cut through—her aggressiveness, the innate ability she'd always seemed to possess to use her looks, her sexuality, in any situation, with just enough subtlety not to offend or embarrass herself. So many others underplayed or overplayed their hand. She never did. She managed it every time, and this time, when it mattered most, she was nailing it.

“Can we make a deal?”

“Name it.”

“Something significant. When I've got my MBA. Help me land somewhere.”

“If you earn your MBA, I'm all yours,” he said.

“I'm not walking away from this without something real. Understand that.”

• •

Idling in the Explorer, air-conditioning blasting, before pulling out of the Bouncin' Babies lot, she taps out a text message:

Well it's late summer so . . . you're in Maine at the lake house with the wide dock and blue sailboats. You're in khaki shorts, gray T, and leather sandals, and your Tag Heuer is wrapped around your thick tan wrist as you sip your second mint julep, and you haven't decided yet: lobster or crab or maybe a Chilean sea bass, and there's nowhere on the planet you'd rather be . . . with maybe one exception.

There's no response.

10

A
ll the night jobs are scheduled late, in the quietest hours, for a reason: High-risk properties require an element of surprise, and the less attention they call to themselves, the easier the work. There's been talk at EverythingMustGo! of moving all the work to overnight hours, but there are too many houses now, springing up like weeds, too much money to be made not to work day
and
night.

Tonight feels different. It's Rialto, not as nice as Agoura Hills. And tonight, when he left the house with his clean tools, he and Phoebe weren't speaking since he can't take Jackson to the pediatrician tomorrow because he's working all night and she can't because she has appointments all day and he called bullshit and told her to skip Equinox for once and she asked for the last five film production positions he applied for.

The Hondurans can't keep the dog they found, and he says he'll take it even though Phoebe called him a bitch from the top of the stairs as he left the house, so he left the front door wide open and Metzger was standing outside of his tent and Kostya was walking his German shepherds off-leash past the house and Phoebe stood in the doorway and didn't care who was around: “I'm tired, too, Nick!” she screamed, slammed the door.

Outside
. Nick sends the text to Arik at a little after nine. The street is wide and dimly lit, cluttered with Hondas and pickup trucks, shadowy apartments and condo complexes, Sunset Ridge and Savoy West. Arik is twenty-two and a fifth-year senior at UC Riverside. The long yellow fingernails distract from his tattoos around three fingers where rings would be and the others up and down the backs of his arms and the back of his neck. He's jittery like a junkie, though as far as Nick knows, Arik drops E, smokes weed, maybe some 'shrooms, but that's it. He says he can get twelve dollars a pill and give Nick half up front in cash if he'll fork over some of Phoebe's samples. Nick may have been tempted if things were getting worse or if he didn't have the new, potentially lucrative idea. A plan he'll keep to himself.

The text back from Arik:
Shit. Dude. Come in.

Arik shares his apartment with Mallory, and Mallory looks barely twenty and is gorgeous, and Nick knows this about Mallory: She'll walk barefoot through a Starbucks, and the barista and the men on their laptops and even the young mothers with their City Minis and chai teas will watch her breeze through. She's tall and sleepy-looking, lets him in. Calls out to Arik after saying hey to Nick. Arik's apartment is filled mostly with possessions he took from abandoned houses: IKEA furniture, a guitar on the hardwood floor, a foosball table, an Xbox, two wall-mounted plasmas, a python in a red-lit terrarium. Everything's up on Craigslist and eBay. But it's the foosball table and the sleepy, pretty housemate that trigger a sudden wistfulness in Nick: What he'd give to be twenty-one again. He flops down on the chair, picks up the guitar, watches Mallory texting and smoking and fixing her hair in the kitchen. He could sit here all night. He could blend in so easily, he thinks. Days of vague promise and nights that start no earlier than eleven, never amounting to anything. Mallory is making plans for her night that starts at midnight.

“Have you ever heard of Deep?” she asks. She's not wearing a bra.

Nick shakes his head. He could watch her thumb the white handheld until he comes.

Arik bursts from a room. “You
must
stop playing that track!” He's laughing, pulling a T-shirt over his head, boots on, untied. Two insane Chihuahuas charge Nick, and Mallory puts her cigarette down, walks over, and, apologizing, bends over to pick up the yapping dogs while Nick lazily stares down her scoop-neck T-shirt. She seems to hold the pose for a beat too long. Nick asks if she's ever heard of Charles Manson. She stands up with a quizzical look on her face.

“You look like a Manson girl,” he says.

“I don't know what that is.” She's shushing her Chihuahuas.

“The hair. Your whole look. It's working.”

Mallory just stares at him. She's simultaneously pale and glowing.

“Promise me,” Arik whines. “Let me download you some new shit.”

“I like her voice,” Mallory says, and kisses the head of one of her dogs. “I'll turn it down.”

“Google it,” Nick says. “Manson girls.”

“I'll do that.”

Arik's close-cropped blond hair almost makes him look like a skinhead, though he wears a black Bloc Party T-shirt and long green board shorts and leather bracelets and necklaces.

“God, I'm old,” Nick says.

According to Arik, they all have to move out, and Mallory wants a place with two of her girlfriends. Nick knows this: An unfurnished four-bedroom lies vacant half a mile from campus, a mile from where they are now. It was abandoned weeks ago and, according to Boss, belongs to Bank of America and is a low-priority property. They trashed it out last week. It could sit idle for months. Mallory could be in there as soon as Nick changes the locks. Glancing at her flawless skin and the navel ring, he thinks he wouldn't mind helping her out.

• •

Arik follows Nick outside and into hot, gusting winds. A woman shrieks. A man chases his trucker cap across the parking lot. Arik curses. Nick looks back and shields his eyes as he tries for one last glimpse of Mallory, but she's gone. Arik is texting someone as he gets
in the car and says, “Take the 10,” even though Nick knows this; he put the address in Google Maps before he left the house.

Arik laughs at something he's reading, sends another text. “ 'Shrooms from Eureka. Down with that?” he asks.

Nick waves him off, distracted by the prospect of houses, renters, changing locks, painting and cleaning, listing. And collecting: deposits, first/last, monthly or bimonthly rent. Keys and addresses. And a time line: How long has a house been empty, and how long will it stay that way? How much risk is there, and is it worth it?