Carousel Court

by Joe McGinniss

  Some assholes might pay a visit. Blame me if they do. They may show up looking like this. Shoot them instead.

  He attaches an image of a white latex mask.

  72

  It’s almost noon. She is supposed to meet JW at a country store in Malibu. From her rental car, she calls Mai.

  “Is he awake?” He is. “Can I say hello to him?”

  Jackson says, “Hi, Mommy! Froggy looking at me,” about a frog in a small koi pond Mai has in their backyard.

  “I’ll see you very, very soon, precious, okay?”

  • •

  The little shop off the beach is closing early because of the fires. A man stands on the roof, douses it with water from a hose. The store is nearly empty and smells like pine. The floor creaks beneath Phoebe’s sandals. The tan bohemian woman behind the counter wears a crochet top and jean shorts and is watching local news coverage of the fires. Phoebe hears the rushed urgent tones of the two other customers; they’re escaping to Santa Barbara.

  Phoebe picks out a twelve-dollar pastel sea-glass key chain for the keys to the Manhattan apartment. The woman behind the counter gives her a sympathetic look, her gaze falling to the torn collar of Phoebe’s stained white cotton dress. Phoebe’s sunglasses fall from the top of her head when she reaches for the credit card that was declined. She hands the woman a ten-dollar bill, and as she’s reaching into her bag to search for more cash, the woman says, “That’s fine.”

  Phoebe awaits word from JW, the only reason she’s here. His condition for seeing him. He likes the game. He sent her instructions: Rent a car. Directions: Take the 110 West, then PCH to Malibu, the little shop at the first exit past the 76 station, text me when you’re there.

  From the front seat of the car, she dangles the apartment keys and new key chain from freshly manicured fingernails. She snaps the image and sends it. The response is immediate: Those aren’t real. The keys.

  ?

  I was making a point. Closing a deal.

  Of course, she writes back.

  She didn’t know. Of course she thought the keys were real. A set of three silver keys to the heavy oak door that opened up to her thirty-third-floor three-bedroom with a glimpse of Central Park and rooftop deck and the fresh start. A golden opportunity, a leg up, a clean break that, if she didn’t fully deserve, she would surely earn.

  If I’m in NYC tomorrow, where can I get a real set of keys?

  See you soon.

  She buries her feet in the cold wet sand of the beach. The spray off the ocean is foamy and has a polluted pink tinge, wraps itself around her as the tide moves in. She closes her eyes. The surf is pounding. Her head throbs from no sleep. Gray and white gulls idle in strong gusts off the water, cry out. She won’t move until he calls.

  • •

  “Where are you?” JW’s voice is rushed.

  “Where you told me to be.”

  “Stay put. Almost there.” He’s driving. Phoebe can barely hear his voice over the wind.

  “Then where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Why this secrecy?”

  “It’s a surprise.” Everything goes quiet. She waits a beat, wonders if he dropped the call. He clears his throat.

  “I want to go tonight. I can fly to New York tonight.”

  There’s no response.

  • •

  The black BMW that arrives an hour later is his and the only other car aside from hers in the gravel lot. He doesn’t get out; the windows are tinted. The message on her phone is from him: Follow me.

  • •

  The main house is ranch-style, midcentury, and lies beyond a massive stone archway. It’s deserted. JW says, “I have keys,” dangles a set of two brass keys in front of Phoebe, who refuses to get out of her car. A helicopter, the third she’s seen, passes low overhead. They park in a deserted circular gravel lot. JW slings a leather bag over his shoulder and grabs a Financial Times and his iPad, sets the alarm of the car, and approaches Phoebe, who sits in the idling rental car, still gripping the wheel, the air-conditioning blasting. He motions for her to come, follows a cobblestone path leading down a dry ivy-­covered hillside, dotted with eucalyptus and short palms, which becomes dirt until they reach the guest cabin: yellow, small, but neat and clean.

  The air-conditioning has been turned off and the place is only a white king-size bed, a low whiskey-colored leather sofa and matching armchair, and a white plush throw rug. Candles are everywhere and JW immediately turns on the thermostat and the cool air is instantaneous and flows through black metal teeth in the hardwood floor. On the wall over the bed, Phoebe sees them: three bronze men ascending braided iron ropes. They’re nude, muscular, and determined.

  “Bruschetta,” JW says, standing over a mini refrigerator. “Brie, pinot, Pellegrino, roasted cashews.” Then he makes a sound of deep satisfaction. “She didn’t. She did. God love her.” He produces a silver tray of oysters. The note he reads is from the proprietor of the bed-and-breakfast: “ ‘Fresh today from Water Grill, per your request.’ ” He hands the rice-paper note to Phoebe. What he didn’t read: Be safe! Phoebe assumes it’s a reference to the fires.

  “Sit,” he says. “Open wide.” He holds a shell to her mouth. It requires every ounce of will not to slap it from his hand. The grip of her interlaced fingers is too tight. She offers a tight smile, keeps her mouth closed, shakes her head.

  “More for me,” he says, and slurps the oyster, spilling some on his chin, wiping it with the back of his hand. “I’m not some kind of monster. I know you’re ascribing all sorts of motivations to what must seem like schizophrenic plotting and replotting.”

  She watches. He won’t stop moving, checking out the room, pulling back the sheer white curtains, rechecking the thermostat. “And I know you’re here for some clarity, and we’ll figure it out. As we always have.” He ducks through a narrow doorway that must be the bathroom, then dips back out. “Oh, Jesus, I am wrecked,” he announces as he stretches, and when his arms extend, the hem of his oxford rises to reveal some extra weight around the middle. “Eat, eat. Come on.” He’s walking back to the silver oyster tray.

  She grabs his left forearm and squeezes. “How do these assholes do it?”

  Their eyes lock. His are bloodshot and tired, the creases in his forehead pronounced, his stubble more gray than brown.

  “I used to ask you,” she says. “How all the young assholes who worked for you could afford million-dollar homes before they turned twenty-nine.”

  He pulls his arm from her grip. If this were New York, the suite at the Regency Hotel, or even his office in Boston, he’d hang on to her hand, play with her fingers. Instead he moves to the bed, sucks down a third oyster—eyes closed, head back, two big swallows—then wipes his chin.

  “A leg up,” she says.

  He stares at her. Finally focuses exclusively on her: Phoebe Maguire, thirty-two years old, from Claymont, Delaware, via Boston via Carousel Court in Serenos, California. She is, according to the person in the world who knows her best, a broke, unemployed whore. She is a mother failing her child. She is a wife who quit on her husband. She broke every promise, explicit and implied. Tonight she believes it all.

  JW’s eyes are glassy and his gaze is distant, his mind somewhere else, not on her. He snaps out of it. “You’re wasting away.” He sits up. “There’s nothing to you.” The musculature is gone from her shoulders and neck. She knows this because the straps of this dress, which held it in place once, don’t any longer. “Co-signing some rental house in Laguna before you even have an offer? Serious letdown, Phoebe. I’d hoped you’d come further.”

  Her laugh at this moment is unnerving. She stops at the window looking down the canyon and places her open hand on the glass. It’s hot. She knows something now that she didn’t before she followed him through the door: There are only a few places she should be, and this remote cabin
with JW is not one of them. She’s needed at home. Jackson. Not here with JW, her benefactor for eight years, who lost more money in the last year than she’ll earn in a lifetime. She remembers that night in Boston six years ago, what he said he saw in her, the reason he would give her the leg up. He stares blankly at her when he looks up from his tablet, and it’s the emptiness of his look that ignites the flash of fury she can barely contain.

  “So what did you do with it? The money I invested in you,” he says.

  “The most responsible investment you can make,” she says flatly. “The house.”

  He shakes his head, points a remote control toward the television, clicks on local news coverage of the fires. “That was the play.” She’d wired it to Nick’s account last year, when they decided on the cabana and the landscaping upgrades, the rock-climbing wall, the hourglass pool.

  Nick asked and she told him: The money was from her dead aunt.

  She stares at aerial shots of a single home that lies in the path of the advancing fires. The camera zooms in on the deserted house: massive, white, with acres of land and a pool and children’s toys scattered across the dry turf.

  “Fucking Saks?” she says.

  “Bad idea,” he says. “Horrible. The worst.” Their eyes lock. “What is it with me? I do these things . . .” He trails off. “Have—something,” he says, and glances at her knees. He could slide his hands between them in this instant, and she’s not convinced she wouldn’t let him. “You’re so skinny.”

  “Saks,” she repeats. “The offer.” Her eyes are trained on his loafers. “I’m ready now. The apartment, I can make it work.”

  “Believe me when I tell you,” he says. “Let it go. The whole Saks thing. That was me being a dick. I was playing with you. I was certainly not in the best shape when I did.”

  “Just let me get there. Let me get settled and figure it out as we go.”

  “Things are a mess for me right now.”

  Phoebe leans back on the sofa. Her arms are folded over her chest as tightly as her legs are crossed. The four Klonopins she swallowed on the way here are kicking in, but her stomach is empty and the nausea starts. She speaks in order to hear her own voice, hoping to move through the disorientation. She is here, meeting him, for a reason that seemed sound at one point but not now.

  • •

  He’s up from the bed, turns the television off. He unbuttons and removes his shirt. His body is less taut than before but more tan. The faded blue T-shirt he pulls from his bag looks new and clean when he pulls it over his head. Written across the chest in bold white letters: Why Always Me? “A consolation prize from my divorce lawyer,” he says about the shirt.

  He falls to the sofa, throws his feet up on the coffee table, knocks a glass votive candleholder to the floor. It lands with a thud. Phoebe instinctively reaches for it. JW’s eyes close and he rubs his face with two hands. Heavier than it looks, the thick glass rectangle is larger than her hand, is chipped, and has sharp corners. She rests the glass thing on the table, stares through it, her fingerprints clouding it. An inexplicable urge to clean it overwhelms her. She leans forward, reaches for it.

  “So I will say this, Phoebe.” His voice rises, startles her. “Something isn’t sitting well with me. It’s not your imagination.”

  She looks away from the candleholder to him, leans back on the sofa, and adjusts herself. The sudden tingling in her spine sharpens, needles her as he speaks.

  “The whole house thing in Laguna,” he says, then stops. “What were you thinking? Asking me for that? For help, to what, co-sign, put you and your family in a house?”

  She speaks quietly, her voice even, if not soft. She knows something now: Decisions have been made by JW, avenues forward cut off, including the last one, which may never have been real—a clean break and a fresh start for her and Jackson in New York. “You gave me the keys to an apartment in Manhattan,” she says. “You can’t complain about me asking for some help renting a house.”

  “I’m not saying it’s logical or makes sense.”

  “It isn’t. It doesn’t.”

  He’s still got his legs on the table, bare feet crossed, twitching. She watches his big toes; his nails are yellowing and need to be trimmed. One is all black, dried blood. Maybe from hockey, she thinks. Maybe from sailing or riding or stubbing it against the base of the new Caruso acrylic Japanese soaking air tub he sent her a picture of in September, an invitation.

  “It’s a gut thing,” he says.

  “Do you mind?” she says, and in one motion pushes his feet from the table.

  The move startles him. He sits up, laughs a bit. “Yes,” he says. “I do mind.” He returns his feet to the table. Their eyes meet. “It’s the dynamic. You asking instead of me offering. It’s one thing when you’re starting out and I can cut you a check. Give you a leg up. I get that. I loved doing that. And I was actually happy to do it again, when you reached out and asked me to come ‘save’ you out here. Okay, I thought. I’ve been there. You do what you must when you’re up against it.” He removes his feet from the table and leans forward, massages his knees as he speaks. “But this whole business of asking me to call some Orange County Realtor?” He’s shaking his head. The disdain is genuine.

  She blinks, rapidly. She processes his words and his body language, and she’s no longer as cool as she thought. He’s no longer questioning or even criticizing, she thinks. He’s exposing her.

  “Of course you’re not moving to New York for a retail job at Saks. That was juvenile, sending that. Besides, how could you afford the rent?”

  “I thought—”

  “That I’d pay for you to live there? I knew that’s what you were assuming. First month, maybe. But come on.”

  She swallows. Her throat is dry.

  “I was a little pissed,” he says. “Even disappointed. I have to be honest with you: That really turned me off.”

  “One call.” Her voice is halting and she hates herself in the moment, not for what she did, the call she made to JW about the house, the play she made, asking too much, but for her voice cracking. She clears her throat. “A single call doesn’t—”

  “Hear me out, Phoebe. And promise me”—he stands and walks toward his overnight bag on the bed, his back to her—“that you won’t blame yourself.” He’s removing items, clothing, toiletries. He’s unpacking. “You’re actually not the only reason this isn’t happening.”

  • •

  She was okay with it, or she thought she was, seconds ago. Of course the move, leaving Nick, was unreasonable, and flying tonight ludicrous. But hearing it confirmed that the last of JW’s offers is off the table, no Manhattan apartments or consulting careers or clean starts with hardwood floors and a French-speaking nanny for Jackson. Of course the 10:50 P.M. flight will leave without her.

  Phoebe is checking her iPhone, walking around the cabin, the hardwood creaking under her feet.

  JW watches her run her fingers lightly across the cool bronze backs of the muscular naked climbing men. Three little Nicks, she thinks. Nickels, she thinks. But there’s nothing funny. The ropes the bronze men hang from are nooses.

  He suggests a moratorium on contact.

  “After tonight,” she says.

  “Of course. Then let’s lock in some clarity to our relationship, as it were.”

  “As it were,” she echoes, mocking him.

  He says they can always be together, that it can be fun like it was.

  “Like it was,” she repeats.

  “The favors. Just stop asking.” He studies her as if assessing. “You’re better than that. You’re not twenty-six anymore.” She pauses at the doorway to the bathroom. His hand hovers over his abdomen, slides under the waistband of his pants. “Smartest girl in the room,” he adds.

  She slips into the bathroom. She spills some pink and yellow pills from her bottle into her h
and and throws them back, swallows them down.

  When she returns, she hears him say the divorce is taking forever. He complains about financial disclosures and settlements and the financial hits he’s taking, and then Phoebe’s calling asking for him to co-sign on a rental property. “And I’m looking forward to hearing your voice—”

  “And?”

  “—during the shitstorm raining down on me, and it’s you, but you’re not asking how I am or when I’ll be out here so we can be together. You’re asking me for more.”

  She’s nodding, hearing him out.

  He’s back to the call she made to him, its impact and how it threw him off and surprised him and how the extent of their totally unanticipated negotiations and the totality of her unseemly pushback and angling and neediness kept him from sleeping that whole night. Is there something wrong with him, he thought, some vulnerability she senses, some weakness all the women in his life see and try to exploit? “I mean, do you understand the nuance in what I’m spelling out here?”

  She laughs. He doesn’t smile. He’s taking it too far, taking it out on her. She needs to leave. The nausea is a thick taut rope pulled through her gut. She closes her eyes as she considers the heat pushing in from outside and is unsure she can remain standing when it occurs to her: She wants to go home.

  “God knows you work hard and have expertise in your field, and there’s no shortage of effort. You were so good in Boston. Industrious.” He gestures, implies a ceiling with his free hand, the one not idling in his pants. She’s just not cut out for it, financial advisory work. The hard-core quantitative skills. The cognitive abilities. He’s being honest now, and he’s grateful that she’s willing to listen, to hear him out. A lot of people couldn’t sit for a real outside assessment, especially from someone they care about.

  “By the way,” he says, “I will not accept that this somehow ends today. I want us to continue when you’re ready.” He brings a leg up, crosses it over his raised knee. “I love us.”