“Has something happened to Victor. Are you serious? He lost his job. Remember? You fired him.”
“His other clients?”
“This and that. But, come on. He was at your house all week. You were the client, Iris.”
“Bill, I’m so sorry! I thought it was a good deal. Maybe it still is, if you wait, ride it out? The senior brokers and I went through it at the office, I mean, it’s a reputable lender! Nellie said the value of Kingsgate—”
“Someone in your position will not get this, Iris, but you can’t wait if you can’t pay. They don’t let you wait. You understand?”
“Yes.” She looks miserably at the tulips. “Will you sell?”
“That’s the point. It’s unsellable. You said, values will rise. Mortgages at all-time lows. When everything started to slide, I made a promise to myself I would never blame Victor. I would not be mad at Victor. But I can be mad at myself. And I can be mad at you, Iris. Every time I drive past those ugly towers with their little iron terraces good for nothing but suicide and bike storage, and every time I walk through that bullshit courtyard with the one remaining pansy letting us all know we’re in the shitter, I’m mad at you and I’m mad at me. And when the rates go up again—I mean, that rate isn’t fixed, of course it’s not—and the boiler breaks and the mice nest in the oven, that is, if we can hang in there, if we’re lucky, if we are able to stay with our tanked credit and our remodeled bathroom, it’ll be on you, Iris. Iris, Victor’s dear friend. Shame.”
“I didn’t know! I swear. Bill!” Her free hand covers her mouth.
He shakes his head. “I believe you. I can’t believe it, that I believe you. Victor’s right, I guess. You’re like our beautiful little house with its pretty rainbow window that you can’t see through. You really didn’t notice what you chose to surround yourself with? What I can’t put together is, you’re not naive. That’s not it. And you’re not dumb. I guess it doesn’t matter how we got here. Bad or blind, it’s ended up the same, hasn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t, I, what can I do?” She fumbles in her pocket and presses the button on her keychain. The car bleeps and unlocks. She steps toward it.
He touches her arm gently. “I wanted you to know. I saw you in there getting your coffee, and the thing I want you to know I still haven’t said. I’m sorry I yelled. I don’t do that. But what I want you to know is that we were at the beginning of our home study. Now they don’t want us.”
“Your home study?”
He shakes his head. “When you get close to the top of the list, they send a social worker to evaluate the fitness of your home. For adoption. Your financial stability and the safety of your environs. These are important factors. We were great candidates. Now, not so great. Now we’re stranded on every wait list at every agency we registered with. It was never Victor’s dream to have a child, but it was mine. You hardly know me, and look how much you’ve changed my life. I have no one to blame but myself. But I wanted you to know.” He turns and strides back past the green awning, into the Starbucks.
In the car, driving the ten minutes to the office, she’s glad her pregnancy is so early he hadn’t noticed. She has and does not have everything he wants. It was a good deal, she tells herself, without any conviction, trying to argue her way out of the thrumming dread that she’s destroyed a good family for a bad one.
They all told her what a good deal it was, Nellie and the mortgage broker and the inspector. Not the best deal in the world, but good for Victor, for what Victor had. Now she’s in the office, has Paula in front of her, and she’s asking Paula, Is Nellie in? Paula, what happened with Kingsgate? And Paula says, I don’t know, it was a good sales cycle for us, all around. And later, Nellie, behind her cluttered desk: “Iris, we have no obligation to a client’s experience after sale. That’s not our function. Every home in the area has lost value this year. Mine, yours, theirs. You can’t run into one angry client and absorb their anxiety and allow it to color your feeling about what we do. If that’s how you react, maybe this isn’t the game for you. You’re not responsible for the future. We don’t broker dishonest deals. We do broker deals in an up market and then the market goes down. Thirty years, I’ve seen it happen more than once. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not our responsibility. How could it be? Everything you did was standard and transparent and legal, period. You helped your client become a homeowner under the open eye of the law. Don’t let some hysterical person who’s mismanaged his finances get into your head.”
On the way home that evening, Iris drives out of her way to Kingsgate and almost turns in, but does not. Instead she takes the narrower, siphon route running parallel behind it, where she’s not driven before. On the one side is the pretty approach from the highway, but on the other, over the ridge of the bent, low metal guardrail, she sees a sprawling alien miniature city, a gridded maze of flaring pipes and steaming metal drums the size of houses. A waste-management facility, the hill sloping toward it littered with trash. She should’ve known it was there. Maybe Nellie Turner and the rest all knew it was there and sent her to sell because she was new to Stockport, and a fucking idiot besides. Maybe not. She’d never bothered to drive all the way around. She considers quitting, but she can’t be at home with George. She must have somewhere to go during the day. They need the income.
She pulls into the driveway, sees the light in George’s office is on. As she’s assembling her face into a veneer of carefree greeting, she remembers Bob leaning across his desk, the vivid, violent painting behind him, and the serious, almost angry way he said, I saw you first.
34
Esme sits beside her in the backseat. Javier is driving. Esme is reading from a list pressed against her knee, written in pencil and ripped from a notebook, the corners of the page fluttering in the warm wind from the open windows. She’s reviewing the staff’s preparations at Booth Hill.
CeCe looks out the window, at the white line racing the concrete, the trees stretching by. Let me not forget this day. Where is this from, a hymn? Something she had to sing in school. Let me not—admonitory and sentimental at once—as good a definition of piety as any. No, thank you. She’ll take forgetting. That morning, she made her thanks to the doctors and nurses and physical therapists, to young Orlow and the receptionists. Said goodbye to Yasser and to the lake. As they drove away, she turned her neck and watched the concrete portico and automatic doors at the main entrance recede. The clot of facility buildings shrank and lost all detail with the distance. The black road spooled out. The car turned. Oak Park ceased to be.
Esme, being wise and long-tested, has broken the house report into regular spring chores and chores particular to a homecoming after so long away. She’s had the windows washed, the floors waxed, the silver and crystal polished, the mattresses turned, the drapery and rugs cleaned, the table linens counted and pressed, the lightbulbs and water filters changed, the alarms and intercoms tested, the lawn seeded and trimmed, the trees pruned, the outdoor furniture retrieved from storage, the path between CeCe’s and George’s houses cleared, and the gift closet restocked with all manner of hostess and holiday gifts, professionally wrapped and labeled as to the contents. Mr. Shoebridge, the expert long in charge of annually assessing the art for any necessary restoration or cleaning, is booked for next week.
Particular to this homecoming, the cupboards and refrigerator are restocked per CeCe’s regular lists, but also per the new nutritionist’s guidelines, who, to CeCe’s displeasure, believes in nothing so much as dinosaur kale. The newspaper and magazine subscriptions are renewed. Her social diary and Rolodex have been put out on her desk along with the laptop she’d requested—“Someone will know the one I should get”—and a list of tutors in computer basics for her to consider. Esme had refused the task of interviewing and selecting a tutor as beyond the bounds of her duties. CeCe admitted she was right. Outside, the veranda awning is on order to be replaced, having been damaged in the same winter storm that broke the upstairs window. CeCe�
��s hundred feet of beach have been re-sanded with three hundred tons of white sand, and this year with “an assortment of shells and corals for baby Douglas to find, like you asked.” Esme sighs. “I put a copy of the shells invoice on your desk because it’s too much. But house accountant”—Esme, having passionately loathed Mr. Pitt from the start, will not call him by his name—“has paid it.”
CeCe’s bed, her effects, and the rest of the furniture at Oak Park, are a half hour behind them on the road. The movers are tasked with restoring the larger pieces to their proper locations at Booth Hill in such a fashion as not to disturb CeCe’s first day back home, having run a drill with Esme the week before. CeCe’s everyday wardrobe, the five closets, has been laundered by Madame Relais in Manhattan and returned to the house by padded truck; the weekly standing order of flowers is reinstated. She doesn’t like to pilfer her garden, nor can she or Esme arrange flora as well as good-natured Beth, whom they’ve never met but only spoken to on the phone, whose work they admire.
“I thought I couldn’t get the flowers in time,” Esme says. “The first order comes today. We had the boathouse cleaned. We didn’t do anything with the boat. You want the boat painted?”
The road gathers into an expressway. Bleak, but to be moving fast, the air sweeping through the car, is invigorating. Esme clutches her list.
“Have it painted. Now why,” CeCe demands, the wind against her cheek, “was the veranda awning damaged? Was it not rolled for winter?”
“One foot out all season. How I didn’t notice, I don’t know.”
“We were distracted. Grounds isn’t your job. Have you already ordered the fabric? I might want a change. What’s your opinion of a wider stripe? And I’m thinking of rearranging the furniture in the living room. Tighter in, more friendly.”
“The rugs. You’ll be able to see the impressions from the chairs.”
“You can’t fix that?”
“It’s a lot of years in one spot. I’ll try. Can we do schedule? Tomorrow I’m making lunch for you and George and Iris? Shrimp salad? How is pineapple upside-down cake?”
Dread at George’s name. She’d finally called, asked Iris when they were free for lunch in the most congenial tone she could muster. “The queen is back,” she couldn’t resist saying, as Iris hung up. That she was George’s queen had not entered her mind until she’d read it in Esme’s press clippings. To discover if she will be able to love and dislike her son at the same time—a heavy mission to hang on shrimp salad. Is an upside-down pineapple cake what one wants to contemplate at the conclusion of such an assessment? An assessment not of George, but her own capacity. If she can’t, she’s not sure what will become of them, or how they will go on.
“No cake. Fruit. Or, I could go to their house instead. A gesture. They don’t always have to come to me. I’m worried, though. I might not be able to hold myself back.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see. They’re having a hard time.”
CeCe leans forward and puts her hands on the leather and mahogany of the open partition and shouts against the wind. “What do you think, Javier?”
“No way I’m getting involved in this conversation.”
“You never get involved in any conversation. You’re no fun, Javi.”
“This is not my place of fun.”
“The man never gives an inch,” she says to Esme.
“No,” Esme says.
Her iron gates. Javier punches the code. The gates swing back. They take so long to open. They drive up the hill, to the white house and the green lawn. The bright sea, rolling in below.
35
The next morning, CeCe decides that instead of driving around to Somner’s Rest, she’ll walk the path. But first, to business. At her desk, she opens the laptop, an alien slice of aluminum. Esme has unpacked it and charged it for her. CeCe considers the tumbling, three-dimensional letters in the middle of the screen, pulsing the word welcome. She closes the laptop and opens a drawer. She takes out a piece of stationery and makes some notes. She straightens her back and flips through her Rolodex. She calls Nan for leads on a new personal assistant, not liking the previous one enough to rehire. Still under the premise of looking for an assistant, she calls a few locals—Dana Barnes and Ellie Baker and the Rahvs—who she knows will gossip around town that they’ve had a chat with Cecilia Somner, same as she ever was. She ignores Dana’s and Ellie’s exclamations at hearing from her, ignores their inquiries as to how she’s been. She schedules a meeting for Annie Mason and the foundation’s staff to come to the house with presentations of all she’s only nominally kept up with in the last year, and to expect to stay the day. She does not tell Esme that when she awoke she looked for the French doors and the bed crank and Round Lake and did not understand what was happening. But her calm was restored by breakfast: a poached egg and a croissant with orange marmalade in the sunroom off the veranda. A bright spring wind blurred the vermilion peonies and the lilac bushes and ragged the sea at high tide. After breakfast, she walked through the garden and along the beach, then visited each room to turn the small treasures of the house over in her hands, as she had the day before.
Esme brings a pot of bergamot tea to CeCe’s desk. On the tray is a card with the number of the home-care nurse who is to check on her several times a week.
“Call,” Esme says, and leaves her.
CeCe sticks the card in the back of the Rolodex. Instead, she schedules a house call with her lawyer and another with the woman from Ortez to come to do her hair and her nails. Ortez puts her on hold for two entire Billie Holiday numbers, disagreeably followed at a much higher volume by the opening to Bach’s Prelude in C Major. She must find an assistant, posthaste. She’s avoiding the only call that matters. It’s time to see George. Yes, she’ll walk the path and surprise them with how strong she is. Does she hope to see gladness spread across their faces, or to demonstrate she’s well despite the outrage of their neglect? Both. It can’t be more than a quarter mile. Shorter than around the lake. She finds Esme in the hall.
“Now? It’s too early.”
“I’m not getting anything done.”
“You want me to call?”
“No. I want them to see. Don’t look at me that way. Allow my mischief. Earrings.”
“I’ll get the box.”
She listens to Esme trudge upstairs and down—Esme, who had the night before made one of CeCe’s favorite meals, pecan-crusted trout in brown butter, with watercress. She’d eaten in the kitchen, asking Esme questions about how she’d handled difficulties with her own children, Esme answering opaquely as she liked.
CeCe chooses a pair of emerald studs that once matched her eyes. Soon enough they’re on the path, Esme accompanying her for the uneven ground, the birds jabbering in the trees. They come out the other side. The house is as she remembered, a stack of rectangles ostentatious in its austerity. Iris is standing a hundred yards away under the ash, talking to a man in coveralls, kneeling at the base of the tree.
“Hello! Iris, hello!” CeCe calls, once she’s passed the covered pool. Iris spins around. For once, her clothes aren’t tight—jeans and a long, blue T-shirt, her hair in a ponytail, a look of surprise overtaking her fine features. The dog gallops over to CeCe, his maroon tongue flopping out. He’s raced back to Iris by the time CeCe is upon them.
“CeCe! Esme, oh, hi, Esme. I wasn’t—did you walk here? I wasn’t expecting you until one.” They embrace awkwardly. There’s some change in Iris. Gaunter under the eyes. Her face more lined, though also more flushed. Yes, CeCe remembers how quickly it begins to happen at that age, the wear of the years arriving all at once. And something—a weary alarm. Iris’s eyes flick up to the bedroom window. She’s trying to hide where she looks, but the dog lifts his muzzle in the direction of the window and begins to bark.
“Am I interrupting? Should I turn around and go home? I can. As you can see.”
“No, no, I’m so sorry. Ce
Ce! That’s wonderful!” This time Iris’s hug is real, and unbalancing. “It’s just, I haven’t had a chance to clean the house. But that’s not important. You’re here. And you walked! I can’t believe it!”
“Hello to you too, dog.” CeCe pats the top of 3D’s head. He wags in a circle. “Look! He thinks he likes me. He’s forgotten. Maybe he and I will start anew.”
“The situation is—” the man under the tree begins, rising heavily off his knees, his hand on the bark.
“I’m sorry, CeCe. It seems to be an emergency.”
“I don’t mind. Finish up. Esme, I’ll call you if I need.”
“Okay.” Esme frowns and heads back across the lawn.
“The roots are strangling the septic,” the man continues. “It’s a mess down there. I wish you had me out a couple of years ago. You’ve got five, maybe six crushed pipes. First we replace the pipes, then we Vaporoot. Cauterize the offending roots, save the tree. We can do Monday.”
“How dreadful,” CeCe says.
“If it doesn’t work?”
“The tree’s got to go. Everybody looks sad when I say that. Also sad is right now you got no bathroom. Here, cards for Callahead and Handy Can. They’re both okay. You’ll want to book it for the week, in case.”
“Monday!” CeCe says. “You need to fix this right away.”
“Thank you, it’s okay,” Iris says. “Can I—can I call you later about pricing?”
“Sure thing. Have a nice day.” The man gets into his van.
“Wasn’t he the comedian,” CeCe says, meaning to make Iris laugh, because Iris looks as if she’s about to cry. “You should stay with me until it’s fixed.”
“Come in. George is asleep.”
Inside, it takes CeCe a moment to understand what she sees. Despite the glass wall, it’s dim: the vegetation on the other side has crept closer than she remembers, creating the unpleasant effect of being sealed in a giant terrarium. Below her, the fetid grotto is choked with leaves.
The Unfortunates: A Novel Page 29