Money Matters

by Brian Finney

  He arrived half an hour late, looking nothing like his photo. He must have been at least in his mid-forties. His hair was thinning, and he needed glasses to read the menu. If he’d been hiking it must have been after dark; his pale skin showed no sign of having encountered the sun. He also had a facial twitch that soon got on my nerves. Unfair, I know. But I couldn’t help it.

  He chose a table that gave him a clear line of sight to the TV that was tuned to a football game with USC playing some team from Oregon. He spent more time watching the screen than looking at me. Eric ordered filet mignon and lobster tail for himself and, before I could open my mouth, he ordered Caesar salad with shrimp for me. When I shot him an incredulous look, he explained, “My mother always orders that. She swears by it.”

  It went downhill from there. Next his cell phone rang and he took time out to talk to his mother: “Can we talk about this later? You don’t know her . . . of course I will.” Subsequently, as the waiter stopped by to ask us what drink we would like next, I was saying how much I liked Zuckerman Bound. “I’ll have one of those,” he told the waiter. He couldn’t have got very far reading Roth. No sooner had we extricated ourselves from that fracas than his mother was on the phone again: “I told you, I’m having a meal . . . What’s not good enough for you? I’ll be home by 8:30 at the latest.” A minute later his face lit up as USC scored a touchdown. He showed more animation watching the game than at anything I could say or do.

  When his cell phone rang a third time I didn’t wait for him to answer. “Maybe you should have dinner with your mother instead,” I said. Throwing a twenty onto the table, I stormed out of the place.

  When I got home Tricia said, “You should have asked to change places with him to cut him off from the TV, and after the first phone call suggested a moratorium on calls. Still, he clearly wasn’t worth that much effort. I’d have downed my margarita and told him he was a jerk as I left. And never pay for the first meal unless you really like the guy.” On the ball, as always—and ruthless, of course.

  Two weeks later Gary was back. I was happy to settle for the devil I knew. Bad choice, it turns out.

  ✽✽✽

  My phone rings as I am staring at it, trying to figure out how to tell Felicia what I’d found at Susan’s apartment, and my conclusion that something is terribly wrong.

  There’s a coincidence. It’s Felicia.

  “Jenny? That you?”

  “Hi, Felicia. What’s up?”

  “You have time to drop by the house?” She sounds strained. “Is urgente.”

  “I guess I could if it’s really urgent. I’m in Palos Verdes. Why?”

  “I can’t say you on the phone. It’s personal. Please. Ven!”

  “Okay. I’m on my way.”

  “Muchas gracias, amiga. I’ll have a salad ready. Hasta pronto.”

  ✽✽✽

  Felicia greets me at Todd’s back door, dishcloth in hand. She is flustered. We hug. I feel enveloped by her warmth and love.

  “You looking smart,” she says looking me up and down.

  “I just went to Susan’s apartment.”

  “What you find?”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but nothing good.”

  “What you mean?” Felicia asks fearfully.

  “The owner showed me images of the last rent check he’d received, supposedly from her.”

  “Supposedly? Why you say that?”

  “Because it came from a phony address.”

  “What has happened to her?” Felicia demands. “I miss her so much.” Tears fill her eyes.

  “I don’t know. Something weird is going on, for sure.” I realize I am deeply troubled by the false address on the check.

  “I know it was no right.” Felicia thumps the kitchen counter with exasperation.

  Despite feeling shaken myself, I try to calm her down. “It certainly is suspicious, but there is no evidence so far that Susan has come to any harm.”

  “Harm,” Felicia almost shouts. “Why does a person want to hurt her?”

  “They wouldn’t. There is probably a perfectly ordinary explanation for her disappearance. Like she was so hurt by the breakup that she went overseas somewhere.”

  “I hope you right,” Felicia says, grasping at this straw I offer her. “I know you find her soon,” she says, reassuring herself.

  She means it. It’s my problem now.

  After a long pause she says, “Come and have some lunch.”

  Felicia and I sit down on stools at the wooden kitchen counter where she has put out a bowl of mixed salad, sliced green chorizo from Toluca, and a small bowl of chipotle chilies in adobo sauce. She takes a basket of warmed-up tortillas from the oven and pours a cold lemon drink from a glass jug into two green recycled glass tumblers.

  “Que aproveche!” Felicia appears to have regained her equilibrium.

  “So what’s so secret you can’t tell me on the phone?” I ask.

  “Eat some chiles. They’re specialty.” Now she’s teasing me by delaying her story.

  “Todd’s not home?”

  “No. Señor Granger is with that antipático brother of his at an election meeting in Irvine.”

  “The anti-immigration rally?”

  Felicia nods. “They say blood stronger than water.”

  “Thicker.”

  “What?”

  “The saying is, ‘Blood is thicker than water.’”

  “Why do Señor Granger appear with people who hate immigrants?”

  “I have no idea.” Like Felicia, I cannot connect the Todd who supports Felicia with the guy who’s bankrolling Dan’s hate campaign. It just doesn’t add up. Todd seems to have a heart of gold. And yet he allies himself with a party that wants to punish unions, get rid of public services for the poor, and deport undocumented immigrants.

  “What was it you wanted to tell me?” I ask.

  “I was cleaning the kitchen this morning,” she answers. “I picked up the picture of Mr. Todd with Susan in Fiji, with the buttons on it—”

  She looks at me questioningly. “The digital picture frame?” I say.

  She nods. “By mistake I push one button and it make a noise. I pressed another button to try to stop it and you know what?”

  “What?”

  “It was a movie of me talking yesterday to Quan, the pool maintenance jornalero, here in the kitchen. But it wasn’t a movie. It was the real conversation.”

  I give this a moment’s thought. “I find it hard to believe that Todd would use a nanny cam on you” I say. “He trusts you completely.”

  “Watch it.” Felicia gets up and fetches the framed photo.

  I press the PLAY button and see Felicia pouring a glass of water for Quan. She says, “I know you don’t drink so clean.” She means non-alcoholic. She’s flirting with him.

  Quan replies in a similar tone: “Why would I need anything stronger, when I have you for company?”

  Felicia laughs.

  “Thank you for the water,” Quan says and leaves the kitchen.

  “It’s a motion-detector video camera,” I say. “This is something I know about. It must have an SD card inside.” I turn it round, open the back, and take out the secure digital memory card. These cards that are barely an inch long are portable and can carry an awful lot of data. “On my other job I spend my evenings fast forwarding through these things.”

  “Why Señor Granger do this to me?” Felicia wails.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I trust him. He trust me.”

  “I know. It makes no sense.”

  I turn the SD card over. I recognize the label on the back. It’s one of Total Surveillance’s. I take out my iPhone and copy the serial number.

  “This belongs to the company I work for,” I tell Felicia. “I’m going there this evening. I’ll check it out.”

  Felicia looks bewildered.

  “Maybe I can find who commissioned this in the company records,” I say reassuringly.

  “E
spero que sí.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  I replace the card, rewind it to where it last stopped playing, and press ERASE to eliminate the record of my visit and my conversation with Felicia about the device.

  ✽✽✽

  I need a break. I park on Larkspur and scramble down the slope to Corona del Mar State Beach. On this beautiful Saturday, the beach is crowded with families enjoying this stretch of sand and sea. At the same time it has a secluded, private feel to it, being walled in on one side by the cliffs and on the other by the rock pier that forms the east entrance to Newport Harbor. Every firepit is occupied, some by families, others by groups of what look like UC Irvine students.

  I walk south to the rocky, less crowded section of the beach. The tide is coming in. I linger over the tide pools, crystal clear and alive with small anemones, crabs, snails, and monster-size starfish. I wonder what it must feel like spending your life clamped to a rock, exposed to the sun and stars. The repetition of the waves must be so reassuring. My own existence doesn’t seem to amount to anything more. Am I better or worse off being able to think about it? Why do we assume there has to be some purpose to our life? Or if, like Tricia, you think it has no purpose, how do you find the motivation to go on with it all? What’s the point of it?

  I’m cursed with my parents’ outlook, which insists on examining all sides of any issue. All that does is leave me ambivalent.

  Well, not always. What is worse than ambivalence is the alternative: close-mindedness and prejudice. Dan’s extreme stand on immigration, for example. You can only adopt that stance if you have no empathy for others. I prefer ambivalence to that any day.

  Still, too much sympathy can leave my wants and needs out altogether. Look at Mom. She has spent her life sacrificing herself to Dad, Tricia, and me, and all those social causes that Dad has chosen for both of them. This has turned her into a product of endless repressions with no core sense of herself. No wonder she seems lost much of the time.

  ✽✽✽

  Why would Todd want to secretly spy on Felicia (or maybe all of us), I wonder some time later, as I drive back to Tricia’s apartment once more. Is he more paranoid than he gives out? Has another employee accused Felicia of stealing? He couldn’t possibly believe that. Or did he set up surveillance in the kitchen because he suspects someone else? He is after all a CEO. It’s true that CEOs are some of the most ruthless assholes in America. Yet Todd doesn’t come across as one. I’m baffled.

  The NPR news on the car radio interrupts my thoughts:

  “Republican gubernatorial nominee Dan Granger admitted today that he had employed Alfonso Gomez, a worker without documentation, to help in the construction of an apartment above the garage of his house. ‘I only discovered his status after he fell off a scaffold and injured his back in late September,’ State Senator Granger declared. ‘I reported him to the U.S. Immigration authorities, and he was deported shortly after.’”

  “Contacted in Guadalajara, Mexico, Gomez claimed that the senator knew he was illegal five months ago after he received a letter from the Social Security Administration advising him that Gomez’s social security number didn’t match. Asked what help Gomez had received following the injury, Gomez told our reporter that the senator had paid his cab fare to the emergency room. After that, the senator refused to have any further contact, refusing to pay the earnings he owed Gomez. ‘Senator Granger treated me like a piece of garbage,’ Gomez said. ‘I was thrown away once I was no more use to him.’”

  “In his debate with the Democratic gubernatorial nominee yesterday, Senator Granger said that employers should be held accountable for hiring undocumented workers.”

  So he’s not just a slime ball, but a hypocrite as well. Not to mention heartless. How could that creep be the brother of Todd? I suppose the same question could be asked about Tricia and me. As different as night and day.

  ✽✽✽

  When I get back to Venice in the early afternoon I decide to indulge myself. It’s Saturday, after all. I head for my favorite gallery, LA Louver, which has a new mixed show of figurative painting by well-known sixties artists like Hockney, Diebenkorn, and Kossoff. I circle round the stark main gallery with its white walls and polished concrete floors, lingering in front of the paintings that capture my eye. I realize that almost every painted female figure appears to be either isolated from her surroundings, or distrustful of what she is looking at. Charles Garabedian shows a nude Jean Harlow in an unrecognizable landscape pointing her index finger at some unattainable object just beyond the frame of the canvas. Leon Kossoff’s Nude on a Red Bed depicts her huddled on a flat red platform of a bed with a yellow splash for a pillow and a fawn-colored backdrop. There are no consoling objects, no lamps or chairs draped with discarded clothes. Just a cowering naked woman robbed of any sense of self. Even Rebecca Campbell’s painting of a mother lying on a bed holding a baby and grasping a young boy by the hand shows her gazing into space, not at them, with apprehension.

  Have we women always felt ultimately alone in the universe? Vulnerable, fearful, perpetually in danger? Why do I feel so alienated from my friends and family? I cannot identify either with my parents’ continual self-sacrifices, or with Tricia’s obsessive pursuit of money as the only route to happiness, and to hell with the rest of us. Now that I think about it, I felt lost and lonely throughout my childhood. My friends all seemed to find some security in their families. But I could never share my feelings of vulnerability with either of my parents. They were too wrapped up in one another’s life. And Tricia had already embarked on a lifetime battle with the world—including me.

  I remember one occasion when my history teacher in high school accused me of plagiarism. She told me that an essay I had turned in on Abraham Lincoln was too sophisticated for someone my age. She gave me twenty-four hours to come up with an explanation of where I had obtained the material. When I told my parents what she had said, my mother wouldn’t take the charge seriously and just laughed. My father actually sided with the teacher, asking what sources I’d used. As for Tricia, she advised me to tell the teacher to get lost. Eventually I solved my problem by myself. I entered my essay in an online plagiarism checker, and it came up blank. When I showed this to the teacher, she just said, “It seems I underestimated your abilities.” No apology. My point is that any of my friends would have had an irate parent in the principal’s office demanding that the teacher apologize and be disciplined.

  So I grew up feeling I was on my own. And yet I was convinced that this was not natural. We all need some support from those close to us. This sense of isolation only made me try harder to embrace others, to offer them what I was missing. That in turn has led me to constantly put myself last. No one is going to give me a prize for that. Yet working for a cause has always fulfilled me more than working just for the sake of the money. I believe that it is possible to please yourself while working for the well-being of others.

  I think of David Hockney’s painting of Mike Izzo in the exhibition. Behind the seated young man is the reflection of him from the rear and behind him the reflection of Hockney seated at his easel painting him. That’s what the other painters omitted—their own relation to the sitters. Relationships matter to me. I won’t live my life as Tricia does—one woman battling the rest of the world. The portrayal of women as isolated and at war is itself a half-truth, a perspective created by men.

  Baffled by these thoughts, I let myself into the apartment—I notice I cannot get myself to say “my” or even “our,” even though I pay Tricia rent—and raid the fridge for a cookie and lemonade.

  ✽✽✽

  It’s almost 6 pm as I drive into the Total Surveillance underground parking lot. I swore I’d stop comparing myself to Tricia, but I can’t help juxtaposing the evening each of us is about to experience. Ralph, an ex-client to whom Tricia sold a three-million-dollar house on the Venice canals, netting her more money than I earn in three years, is taking her to Leap of Faith, a musical starring Ra�
�l Esparza and Brooke Shields. Before the show, they’re having dinner at Kagaya, an expensive shabu-shabu restaurant in Little Tokyo. Not that Tricia will be eating the shabu-shabu beef (she counts each day’s calorie intake). She told me she’ll stick to tofu soup, steamed fish and green tea mousse. Washed down with lots of top-quality chilled sake, of course. After the show they’ll go back to his place on Linnie Canal for a nightcap and “the payoff” as she calls it.

  I, on the other hand, will spend the evening fast-forwarding through hours of surveillance tapes, trying to identify sordid moments of criminal or immoral conduct. Wouldn’t I rather be doing what Tricia’s doing tonight? Well, no. But I would rather be going to the Halloween party I had to turn down at my friend Alice’s, which my work is preventing me from attending. Alice is incredibly social. She seems to know everyone in Venice. She’s divorced and appears to be happily self-sufficient and self-confident. Unlike me, she says what she thinks and still remains friends with those she speaks the truth to. She’s my role model, but I have no idea how to transform myself to be more like her.

  As I park my car in a space reserved for Total Surveillance, I notice that Grant’s gleaming black BMW 531i is still there. I guess a CEO has to work overtime occasionally to earn his annual salary of over a million dollars plus bonuses and stock options. Grant seems to be a nice guy, but he must have a ruthless side to be where he is.

  I have given myself enough time before my shift to first stop by the registry. The registry is a soulless, windowless room filled with metal filing cabinets that should have been replaced by digital storage years ago. I ask the duty clerk, looking bored behind a desk littered with papers, to get me the records, which are ordered numerically. So it’s easy to find the card I copied in Todd’s kitchen: #4357: 399 BAY ISLAND—KITCHEN.