The Cake House (24 page)

Inside was a bright set of rooms with prints of famous paintings on the walls: one of naked women lying down on a hillside and another that had swirls of a blue-and-yellow sky over a village. Leafy plants nestled between the chairs and couch in the waiting area, where a coffee service and water cooler hummed in a corner and plenty of magazines sat on the coffee table. The receptionist’s desk was empty, with a sign placed at an angle: “Please take a seat. The receptionist will be with you in a minute.” Past the receptionist’s desk, I saw a pantry with a microwave and a refrigerator.

Claude flicked the light switch, then stood in the middle of the room looking like he didn’t know what to do with me.

Despite the appearance of habitation in all the rooms—cluttered desks, scattered file folders—it felt empty, abandoned by its employees. I followed Claude to the largest office, his office. He had two picture frames on his desk. One was perhaps last year’s school portrait of Alex, from the shoulders up, his smile showing that same hint of arrogance he always carried. In the other photo, a young Alex stood next to his father with a large costumed cartoon animal on the other side. The cartoon had his arm around Alex’s narrow shoulders, its wide, vacant, plastic eyes staring straight ahead. Beneath the cartoon’s head was a grate where the human underneath must have been sweating and counting the minutes until his workday ended. Alex’s eyes were cast to the floor. He looked uncomfortable in his shorts, with one sock pulled over his calf and the other bunched around his ankle. Such a miserable little boy. I put the photo back on Claude’s desk.

Unlike the rest of Global Securities, Claude’s office thrummed with his energy. It smelled like him. His big desk contained files and notepads, a dried-up plant. A computer took up a chunk of space off to the side. Two chairs faced the desk, and I suddenly had a vision of my parents sitting in this office, meeting with Claude, with my father standing up, coming around the desk to give Claude a handshake, to slap Claude on the shoulder in camaraderie.

“You might be bored,” Claude said, sounding uncertain.

“I won’t get in the way. I can help.”

Tilting his head, he led me to a small room—part copy room, part storage area, packed with open boxes filled with unsorted piles of paper. He sat me down before a large machine with metal toothy grooves on top and buttons down its side, pushing a box of paperwork over.

“You can shred these,” he said, pointing to disorganized stacks of folders and documents. “I’ve been putting it off. This’ll be a big help.”

Photocopied forms, fill-in-the-blank questions with the answers given in handwriting. “Have you ever invested before?” “Do you typically invest large amounts or small amounts?” “How much do you have available in liquid funds?” “How did you hear about Global Securities?” The forms were signed by Bob Anders, Xavier Villalobos, Desiree Robinson, Raymond and Helena Myers.

“You don’t need these anymore?”

He grinned. “I’m happy you’re here,” he said. “No, I don’t need them anymore.”

As I started feeding the machine sheet after sheet of other people’s lives, Claude made coffee and went into his office, putting on the radio. He kept his door open, and I could see him sitting at his desk. We both worked in silence and strange camaraderie as the shredder hummed and chewed.

The phone rang and Claude answered, changing from the man who could sit with me in the darkroom into Claude the businessman, Claude the charmer. On the phone, he used words and phrases that were meaningless to me: future trading, high-yield investments, acceptable losses, and on and on. How do you trade the future? What was an acceptable loss? In a strange way, it was similar to the cop language I had heard Deputy Mike use the day he found me riding my bike naked. I wondered who was on the other end of the call. Was it a colleague? Or was it a client, someone whose name might be on a form in the pile I had in my hands, moments away from being fed to the shredding machine?

I paid closer attention, not only to the words he spoke but to the way he spoke them.

“You don’t want to do this,” he said. “
Listen to me.
This isn’t one of those penny-ante mutual funds handled by some anonymous manager. I personally watch every dollar I invest on behalf of my clients—I sweat over it. If you cash out now, you’re throwing away an immense advantage.”

Silence.

“I see,” he said in a darker tone. “No, of course, I’m sorry to hear that, but listen, the market is changing, daily, believe me, you don’t want to—All right. I can see I won’t change your mind. I just don’t want you to blame me later, when you look back and realize the colossal mistake you made. No, it’s all right. It’ll take some time. Six to eight weeks, per our terms of service, and penalties, of course.”

I turned back to the machine. The machine’s hunger never ended, its stomach emptied into black garbage bags. It vibrated, growled, shuddered. I ran my hand down its flank where its heat was expelled with static electricity, my hair rising on my head, sparks shooting from my fingertips.

Claude entered the copy room to share a candy bar and a soda. Our fingers shocked each other, jarring all the way up my arm. He watched me tear the wrapper from the candy bar.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

I bit off a mouthful and tried to smile. “Fan
tas
tic.”

He smiled at my sarcasm, sipped his soda, and stared at the wall, lost in thought. I handed him back the rest of the candy bar. He was the one who looked tired.

“Bad day?” I asked.

His eyes shifted to me with a sudden unguarded intensity.

I jumped when the office door opened with a jingle. Claude pushed the half-eaten candy bar at me and fumbled
with his can of soda in his haste to greet whoever had entered, shoving both into my hands. I peeked around the corner; a man older than Claude with gray hair and two deep-set raccoon-ringed eyes stood by the water cooler. It was the man from the football game, with the teenage son who was a friend of Alex’s, the same man whom Claude had talked to the entire night.

Claude held out his hand. “Harold,” he said in his big, booming businessman voice, and Harold gave an answering grin as they shook hands. “This is unexpected, but it’s good to see you.” Claude led Harold to his office without acknowledging my presence. “Come in, have a seat. How’s your family?” He shut the door, muffling their voices.

The smell of melted chocolate lingered on my fingers. I tried to hear what they were saying as I picked up another fistful of papers. The top one read, “William Stuart, married with one daughter, who heard about Global Securities via the
Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
”

The machine hummed, waiting. I stared down at William Stuart’s application, thinking of the football game, of Harold, of the smell of chocolate, of Alex at the football game, of the ache and sting between my legs.

Then I saw the signature down at the bottom of the page, in the box reserved for in-office use: Robert Douglas, my father’s name, written in his style of jagged lines. The shock of his name made me look up to see if anyone had noticed, but Claude was still secluded with Harold. The rest of the office pulsed in its pervasive silence. I looked at the next form and saw his name again in the box marked for in-office use. And again. How many more? How many times had I unknowingly fed my father to the shredding machine?

He hadn’t been a client. He had never had the type of money a client of Claude’s would need to invest. No, all this time, he had been an employee. He had worked for Claude. “Claude’s the ticket,” he had said. “I do this work for him, and we got it made.”

The machine roared to life, and I fed my father into its mouth.

After Harold left, Claude said he would drive me home and come back to the office. He needed to stay longer than he’d thought.

“Can I ask you something?” I asked as he shut and locked the door to the office, distracted.

“Of course, sweetie,” he said, but he didn’t wait for me and I had to break into a run to catch up. In the car, Claude glanced in my direction while backing the Mercedes out of its parking spot. “Did you have a question?”

I took a deep breath and thought about how to frame my questions. I wanted to know what my father had done for Claude, the kind of work he’d done. I wanted to know why he’d called it a game.

Before I could speak, Claude patted my leg. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll have time to work in the darkroom later. There are a few tricks I know we can do without a developing tank.”

As he spoke, he tapped at the steering wheel. It reminded
me of Alex. Claude pushed the Mercedes into traffic, tapping at the steering wheel, gazing into the distance with a faraway expression. He wasn’t thinking about me or the darkroom. Those were just words he said because he thought I wanted to hear them.

“Great,” I said, and turned to look out the window.

Claude dropped me off at the house. I found my mother in the kitchen, surrounded by groceries. She was unpacking bags, the counter crowded with vegetables and packaged food. “You’re back,” she said, with a strange, relieved smile. “You can help me with dinner.”

I sighed and sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. “Can I ask you a question?”

She didn’t look up from where she was pulling out pots and pans.

“About Dad?” I continued.

She stopped and became still, her hand on the handle of a saucepan. When she turned, her face held an expression of resigned fear. Then the phone rang. I jumped, and my mother took in a breath before she left for the hallway. I heard her answer and then say, “Just a moment.” Then she called for Alex.

I went out into the hallway to see Alex come down from his room and felt my entire body awaken, wondering how long he had been home and if he had thought of me at all. There was a moment with all of us looking at one another before he took the phone. There were no other phone extensions, no place for him to go for a private conversation, but he picked up the phone and carried it to the other side of the house, as far as the cord would let him.

My mother and I went back into the kitchen, my questions
forgotten as I chopped a cucumber into wedges and tried to listen to Alex’s conversation.

IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS
, Alex acted as if nothing had changed between us. To him, we were the same stepbrother and stepsister who used to listen to music and ride our bikes together, as if he hadn’t taken my virginity in the darkness of the garage. At school he was rarely alone, surrounded by his friends or sitting with Joey. The weeks drained toward winter, shrinking the days into stubby, short stumps of limp light. When school closed for the holidays, I spent all my time either in the darkroom or with my camera outside taking pictures, avoiding Alex as much as he avoided me.

On Christmas Eve, my mother wore a patterned dress all in Christmas colors with her hair up in a twist stuck through with a pencil. She looked like someone else’s mother, not the woman who had raised me the previous fourteen years.

She came to the darkroom with her hip cocked to one side, wielding a vegetable peeler like a knife. “That’s enough photography for one day,” she said. “I need your help.”

I knew that tone. With a muffled sigh, I followed her into the kitchen. She was planning to cook a turkey, pie, and macaroni and cheese. I started the mashed potatoes, peeling and digging out bruises and gnarled rooted eyes, loving the feel of the potatoes with their brown strips of rough potato skin, the sweet dirt smell of them. The day had turned warm enough for open windows that let in the clean scent of a recently washed world.

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with Claude,” my mother said as she mixed the cheese and macaroni together.
She was trying for a tone of indifference, of idle curiosity. “What is it that keeps the two of you so occupied?”

The potato slipped from my hand and I had to chase it around the sink. I found her unease—or was it jealousy?—difficult to comprehend. Perhaps seeing Claude and me together, like a father and daughter, was something she hadn’t realized could happen. That I might choose Claude, that I might choose him even over my father. Maybe she worried that I would learn that my father had worked for Claude.

“I thought you wanted us to get along.” I stopped skinning the potato, turning it around in my wet hands. “Isn’t that the whole point? Aren’t we supposed to be a family?”

“I know, I know,” she said. “Of course we are.” She set the macaroni on the counter. “It’s just that …,” she began, then seemed to change her mind. “Have you gone to his office again?”

For the first time, I noticed the few gray hairs that sprung from the top of her head. They were difficult to see amid the honeyed strands, but at that moment the light from the window bathed the both of us in the clarity of midmorning.

Alex walked into the kitchen. He paused when he saw how we faced each other, then continued to the refrigerator to grab a can of soda. As he walked past, my skin prickled and the hairs on my arm rose.

My mother looked from me to Alex, then back to me. She creased her brow and searched my face.

“Something’s changed,” she said after Alex had left the kitchen.

“Mom,” I said, annoyed.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, God. Just—” She took me by the shoulders. I
ducked away, raising an arm to fend her off. But I did know what she meant. Even though I looked the same on the outside as I always did, my hips, my breasts, even my skin felt different. I couldn’t tell her what had happened in the garage. “Nothing’s wrong. Leave me alone.”

She continued her silent inspection of my face. Through the kitchen window I saw the Mercedes pull into the driveway, a tree strapped to its top. Claude honked. I went back to peeling potatoes, afraid she could see the stain of Alex in the heat of my cheeks. Claude honked again, and she moved toward the door.

Carrying one end of the tree through the door, Claude beamed when he saw her. “Merry Christmas,” he trumpeted, setting the tree down for a moment to spread his arms wide. She rocked back on her heels when he kissed her, but he didn’t notice, picking the tree back up and marching through the living room with Alex holding the other end, trailing pine needles like confetti.