Club Deception

by Sarah Skilton

  Kaimi sighed. “Don’t do that thing where you order for me.”

  “But you said you’ve never been here, and I know what’s good.”

  “But you don’t know what I like.”

  “That’s why I asked, so I can tailor it to you. Why do you have to make it a thing?”

  “Fine, just order. But if I don’t like it, I’m throwing it in your face.”

  “Wow, okay.” He laughed, and she snorted, picturing him smeared with food.

  “I mean it.”

  There was something exasperatingly mesmerizing about Landon. He was beautiful but also outspoken. He made no apologies for his beliefs, yet when presented with a conflicting point of view, he was willing to listen or even concede, which was rare.

  He addressed their waitress. “She’ll have the short rib banh mi, and I’ll have the filet mignon.”

  “Reverse it and we’re good to go,” Kaimi interrupted.

  The waitress glanced between them for a second, then left them to their bickering.

  “I’m old-fashioned, so what?” Landon asked. “I think it’s nice for the guy to order. And open doors, pull out chairs, that sort of thing.”

  She shook her head. “You’re such a liar. What happened to, ‘You got her now, playa!’?” she quoted from his lecture.

  “Come on, do I sound anything like that when I’m being real? Here, with you?”

  “Are you? Being real? How am I supposed to tell?”

  “Because I code-switch with the best of them.”

  She examined him carefully. “What do you mean?”

  “White father, black mother. I’ve been straddling two worlds my whole life. Didn’t you notice I talk differently at my seminar than I do in regular conversation?”

  “Yeah, but I figured that was part of your so-called persona.”

  “That’s a con job, this is my personal life. I can talk ‘white’ and ‘black,’ ‘gangsta’ and ‘corporate,’ depending on the situation. Magic helped a lot, too. The kids at school, they all assumed I was black, until parent/teacher night or whatever when Dad would come by. Here’s this white guy in a polo shirt, calling himself my old man, and it threw their world out of alignment. Thought I was fronting. Thought I was a liar, too, just like you do. ‘What are you?’ they’d say. And I’d say, ‘I’m magic.’ And I’d show ’em a card trick. It defused the situation, distracted them, made me okay again. I didn’t have to answer that shit. Because I had magic.”

  Kaimi’s throat constricted. She pictured him as a kid, which she could do because of his Facebook photos. He’d been round and soft, all glasses and high socks, begging to be picked on. What are you? She pictured the other kids’ contemptuous, taunting faces. Such a horrible question. What are you? He’d been brave, is what he’d been. Brave, and clever.

  He took a long sip of his sangria.

  “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

  “Because I want you to like me,” he said. “I like you. Or at least, I liked the girl I met last week. With the piercings and the badass shaved head. Who are you trying to be right now?”

  She frowned. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “So tell me some things. You got any siblings?”

  “A sister. She’s older by fifteen years.”

  “I always wanted a sibling,” he said wistfully. “Always.”

  “My parents had me when they were on the wrong side of forty, and they could never control me. And Grace, my sister, was always on their side, so it felt like I had three parents instead of two.”

  “You said the other day your family’s not very traditional?”

  “Well, I’m not bilingual or anything but we honor some traditions. I mean, we had a dol—a big first birthday party—but they canceled my coming-of-age day when I was a teenager. Ha. ‘Not mature enough yet,’ they said. I was a bit of a wild child.”

  “How were you wild? Like, sneaking out at night?”

  “I used to shoplift.” She frowned. She hadn’t meant to let that slip. “Just a bad patch in junior high. I never got caught, except by Grace, who made me confess.”

  “Why’d you shoplift?”

  “The point is, my parents signed me up for art classes after school and in the summer, to keep me out of trouble. I was an expensive mistake. I feel bad now for what I put them through.”

  “That’s how you got interested in art?”

  “Yeah, except I was terrible at it. Those who can’t, appraise.”

  Maybe it was the frothy cocktail, or the fact that he’d told her so much about his life, but she decided to open up a little more. None of it matters. I won’t be seeing him again after tonight. “I haven’t spoken to Grace in a while. A lot of family drama going on right now.”

  “You’ll work it out,” he said.

  “How do you know?” She couldn’t pretend it didn’t feel good to hear those words, though.

  He smiled, just a little. “’Cause you’re a hustler. Like me.”

  She bristled. “I am not a hustler.”

  “Of course you are.” He stood up. “Excuse me a sec, I have to visit the men’s room. Don’t eat all my food when it arrives.”

  “You’re the hustler,” she called to his retreating back.

  She was dazed by their conversation, by her desire to stay in her seat and wait for him to return so they could continue talking. Get up, she ordered herself. Get up, get up, before you run out of time.

  His suit jacket was slung over the back of his chair, the wallet in plain view in the pocket. She quickly opened it, found his valet ticket, and darted for the front of the hotel. They brought around his Prius (a Prius!) and handed her the keys. She told the valet she’d forgotten her purse, ducked back inside the hotel, and took photos of his house key with her phone. She’d be creating a copy of it based on the images. They needed to be to scale, so she used her own valet ticket as context for the sizing. Giddy and light-headed—the gin helped in that regard—she returned to the valet stand. She played stupid, returned his keys to the valets, and said she’d be staying longer. Back to her table she ran, and slipped Landon’s wallet back inside his coat pocket.

  Landon returned a moment later and seemed happy to see her.

  She theatrically pulled the peony from her hair and placed it on the table as a centerpiece. “Better?” she asked.

  “Much better,” he said.

  They ate half of their respective meals, then swapped plates. Both were delicious, which was annoying; he’d chosen well. Seeing her finish every morsel of the filet mignon, he grinned and all but said, I told you so.

  Landon paid the check, which she didn’t protest; it was a business expense, and if he got to feel like a big old-fashioned manly man in the process, then fine.

  * * *

  Without access to the University of Hawaii’s 3-D printer, Kaimi would have to use a do-it-yourself method to copy his key.

  She set up shop at the kitchen table of the one-bedroom apartment she was renting by the week. Furnished, corporate, and utilitarian, the Oakwoods sat on a gated, sprawling compound between Universal City and Burbank. According to the rental manager, during pilot season (January to April) they housed actors from New York, Texas, and the Midwest who’d come to town to maximize their chances of landing a role for the following season’s TV shows. Luckily, in the fall the buildings were much less crowded. Except for the occasional child star with eerily perfect posture, teeth, and clothing, Kaimi rarely ran into neighbors. She liked the quiet, and having access to the pool and hot tub at night.

  At her makeshift worktable, she regarded her supplies and got to work. Using a metal soda can, paper, scissors, glue, Blu Tack, her laptop computer, a standard printer, and a hard-backed ruler, she constructed a facsimile of Landon’s key. The trick was to go slow, cut only large and vague shapes at first, then slowly add the precise grooves. It was like arts and crafts at a summer camp for spies.

  An hour later, lying in bed, she was pleased with her ef
forts. One thing bothered her: Landon had proven to be a charming dinner companion, astonishingly easy to talk to.

  She almost had a change of heart about robbing him.

  Almost.

  Claire

  Did I really send my husband of twenty years packing so I could transform his young, dumb, full-of-cum apprentice into Stage Magician of the Year?

  Claire stood in the shower and turned the knob as close to freezing as she could stand. She needed a jolt to the heart, needed to blast through the surreal fog of her situation. Cold water smacked her in the face like shards of glass raining down, but she forced herself to stay put as a full-body shudder rolled through her.

  Felix had no formal training and even less experience. She couldn’t have picked a more difficult challenge for herself if she’d tried. Did empty-nest syndrome come with a side effect of insanity? She felt like one of those idiots who rarely left the couch but signed up to hike the Grand Canyon. At least the idiots would be rescued by helicopter (albeit ordered to pay a steep fine). She had no such backup plan.

  The events of the night before made her reasons for staying with Jonathan all those years null and void—a pointless prison sentence where she’d played both prisoner and jailer.

  No, that wasn’t quite true; she would never have divorced him with a child in the house. One way or another she’d have muddled through until Eden left for college. No sense pretending otherwise.

  Annnnnd the curtain rises on opening night of Pygmalion in Hell, starring Claire Fredericksson. In a surprise twist, an understudy will play the role of Claire for each and every performance because Claire is incapable of getting onstage.

  That was the real problem, the true problem, the only problem. What a different life she could have led if not for that. Participating in magic instead of observing it. Even Jonathan’s philandering could’ve been prevented had their joint magic show gone forward, she was certain. Eden would’ve seen the world. Claire and Jonathan could’ve built a magic empire together, publicly.

  It wasn’t as though she hadn’t tried to fix herself. She’d made attempts throughout her entire adult life. Visualization and breathing exercises briefly got her hopes up, only to crush them again. Beta-blockers made her faint. Xanax made her strangely hyper, with an added bonus of hand tremors. Alcohol was an obvious destroyer of skill and subtlety, both required to succeed in magic. (Though of course that didn’t stop some magicians from performing while tipsy; she just wasn’t one of them.)

  No, there was no cure for what ailed her. She had needed Jonathan. Now she needed Felix. In fact, it was imperative that he win because the prize money might be her only source of income for the rest of the year. Whatever settlement came from their divorce would take months to sort out.

  Maybe young, dumb, and full of cum isn’t so bad. It has its uses.

  For one thing, she could control him. She knew how to shake him up. (You had to give Jonathan credit for consistency; when Felix stepped backstage to the greenroom, Claire was fairly certain he’d find Jonathan in a compromising position. The way he’d reacted told her everything she needed to know about their burgeoning partnership.)

  He’ll do exactly what I ask for the routine because he doesn’t have the knowledge or ability to suggest alternatives, and because he wants me to be happy.

  It didn’t hurt that he was easy on the eyes, as Jonathan would say; or that in the brief time they’d spent on the couch, he’d nearly sent her over the edge. (However inept his spelling, he was eager but unhurried; he was going to take his time, which was admirable, but dammit, why couldn’t he have finished?)

  She didn’t know how much of her attraction to him had to do with Felix and how much had to do with her missed opportunity with Patrick Blake. Either reason was irrelevant now; she couldn’t screw around with a student. They had to pour all their energy and resources into making him an expert on the Schrödinger’s Cat routine.

  Besides, revenge sex was fleeting. Besting Jonathan for Magician of the Year was eternal.

  The stream from the shower remained ice-cold, causing her skin to tingle, but this time she shuddered with delight. Jonny’s self-aggrandizing walkout last night was better than serving him with divorce papers, she decided. Let him believe he got the last word. In a month’s time I’ll be the one laughing.

  She scrubbed her arms, legs, and feet into raw smoothness with her mesh loofah, trying to wipe away through sheer, punishing insistence the image of Felix’s bottom lip, which was so full and supple you could bounce a quarter off it. If only they’d had five more seconds…

  The phone rang in the bedroom, and she turned off the water to hear the caller ID announce it was Eden.

  Claire frantically toweled off and pulled on a robe, then picked up the phone on the seventh ring, out of breath.

  “Hey, baby, everything okay?” She tried to hide the panic in her voice, her mind already conjuring up disasters she couldn’t protect her beloved daughter from.

  “Yeah, why?”

  Her pulse slowly returned to normal. “You usually call on Sundays. I thought something had happened.”

  “No, I’m fine. What, I can’t call just ’cuz?” she teased.

  “Of course you can. How’d your civ test go?”

  Eden was majoring in civil engineering and minoring in theater. Unencumbered by her mother’s affliction, she enjoyed the spotlight and would have preferred her degree in reverse, but Jonathan and Claire had made it a requirement of her tuition checks that theater take a backseat to something more practical.

  “Okay. I got a B-minus on the civ test, but an A on my partner scene. Which, I think, tells you all you need to know about that,” she said cheekily.

  “Yeah yeah yeah, don’t you know we have copies of all your tests forwarded to us?”

  “Mom! You do not.”

  She got a kick out of scandalizing Eden. “Sure we do. It’s a new perk for parents. We also GPS’d your phone and set up a camera over your bed. Don’t look for it, you’ll never find it.”

  Eden laughed. “Stop.”

  “Tell me about the boy.”

  “Well, okay. There’s not much to tell. We went to Pasha with a group and split the meze platter. His roommate’s cute, too, though. Ugh. I don’t know.”

  “Date them both.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, my mother. Who has been telling me to play the field since I was nine.”

  “Keeps ’em on their toes. If they know there’s competition, they’ll rise to the occasion of treating you better than the other guy. And you shouldn’t be looking to settle down anytime soon anyway.”

  “I know, I know. So the reason I’m calling is I was thinking about Aunt Brandy. Remember when I was eight and she took me to the Halloween parade in West Hollywood with Uncle Cal and we stayed out till four in the morning?”

  “I almost called the cops.”

  “It was the best!”

  “It wasn’t ‘the best’; you spent the next two days ill from all the candy they let you have, and you had nightmares about the costumes for a week.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” Eden had woken at six a.m. in her own throw-up, her face and hair crusted with it, frightened and confused; Jonathan was still asleep from a flurry of shows the previous night, Halloween being to magicians what Christmas Eve was to Santa Claus, and Claire had spent the day tending to their daughter, feeding her sips of water, holding a cold washcloth to her forehead, and promising her it would end soon. All Eden could remember was the fun that preceded the nightmare, of course. Wasn’t that parenthood in a nutshell? (Wasn’t that life with Brandy in a nutshell?)

  “It was three years ago, wasn’t it? When her heart stopped?”

  “That’s right.” Claire swallowed around the painful lump in her throat. As euphemisms went, it wasn’t bad, and it also had the distinction of being true. Brandy’s heart had stopped. Just not from a genetic defect, as they’d led Eden to believe.

  What was it Brandy used to
say whenever she lit a cigarette and someone told her, “Smoking will kill you”?

  “Living will kill you. Piece by piece. If you’re lucky, it’ll start with your heart. The rest’s easier after that.”

  In a way, she got her wish.

  Eden’s voice pulled her back from the abyss. “I’ll light a candle for her tonight at chapel.”

  “Thanks, baby.”

  “Is Dad there?

  “No, he’s in Atlantic City.” Another euphemism. This one meant, “Living elsewhere until you come home and we break the news to you in person.” The last decision they’d made as a couple was to keep Eden in the dark about their breakup until they could all be in the same room. He wouldn’t renege on that deal. When it came to their daughter, they didn’t waver. After all, they’d kept that nasty business in Indiana hidden from her for over a decade.

  “You guys working twenty-four seven on Magician of the Year?” she asked with affection and familiarity.

  Claire swallowed again. “Something like that.”

  “Then I should probably let you go.” (“I should probably let you go,” was Eden’s new way of hanging up, and it made Claire feel impossibly un-chic.)

  “Just remember, ‘Beer before liquor, never been sicker. Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear.’”

  She could almost see Eden roll her eyes on the other end. Eden never drank, as far as Claire knew. She was a serious girl, bright and hardworking, introverted except when called upon to become someone else in a play. Claire missed her so sharply she had to continually and deliberately misinterpret her absence. If she recognized Eden’s departure for Rice University as the beginning of more and longer departures, instead of a temporary educational necessity, she probably wouldn’t get out of bed.

  “Love you, Mom. Say hi to Dad.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Click.

  Claire stood in her robe, the phone heavy in her hand. Should she give in and make the call? The past two years they’d acknowledged their mutual loss on this day, but it might be overstepping now that Wifey: The Sequel was around. She might even pick up Cal’s phone and chirp, Clarke residence, Jessica speaking.