He couldn’t tell if she was affecting an air of sophistication or if she really did believe in a marital version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. In any case, it was all theoretical—he had never really been tempted, and he’d never worried about Figgy. She was too busy, too insecure, too manically consumed by her own life to start living a secret one.
Now, though, he’d begun to worry. When had that started? Since she’d gone back into production? Her days were so long now, and late at night he’d find himself fixating on all the attractive and attentive men surrounding her at work. He’d seen them, scruffy Yale-grad baby writers and ruggedly handsome actors, all of them fawning and flirtatious in the presence of the lady boss. Alex had identified one guy in particular, Zev someone—he was their house DP, and like most directors of photography, he was arty and masculine and foreign, with wiry black hair, green eyes, and a deep, glottal accent. (He was Israeli, wasn’t he? Figgy would love that.) Alex imagined her huddling with Zev over shot lists late into the night, then coming home to her newly unemployed husband at the kitchen counter stressing over the new carpool schedule. How could she not stray? Or at least be tempted to? And how would he ever know? She’d made it clear she’d never tell.
Or maybe Alex just wasn’t used to spending so much time alone. Wherever its source, the thought quickly replicated and got caught in a feedback loop, repeating over and over as he went about his day: While you knock around the house by your lonesome, Figgy is moving on, moving up, at the show with all the fancy people… If you fail to Hold Up Your End she’ll be gone gone gone….
The voice only amplified when he visited Figgy at work. She’d asked that he bring the kids by the studio a few times a week, “so they remember who their mom is.” He didn’t mind. It was a thrill to get waved through the guard gate and find his assigned spot in the crew lot and then venture into the vast, cavernous stages, where burly Teamsters hauled around lighting rigs and flats of scenery. Inevitably some young woman from props would swoop up one of the kids for a raid on the catering truck for gelato or hot chocolate. Unlimited free Red Vines? As far as the kids were concerned, their mom was the overlord of a magical realm of helpful attendants and unlimited sweets.
It seemed pretty great to Alex, too. Just before production began, on a whim, Figgy had the art department do up her office to resemble the inside of the I Dream of Jeannie bottle, with a round, silk-covered queen-size bed in place of a desk. Alex and the kids would barge into her office and find her propped up against a pile of fluffy cushions, her laptop balanced on a breakfast tray and her assistant, Anne-Marie, a Korean USC grad with bleached teeth, running in and out with fresh batches of tea and sunflower seeds. If Figgy wasn’t in bed, she’d be in the writer’s room stationed at the end of a long conference table, surrounded by dry-erase boards and a staff of wisecracking young writers who always appeared to be dressed for a backyard barbecue.
Alex knew the work could be ridiculously hard and the politics and hierarchies were brutal, but sampled periodically, from the safe distance of a visiting spouse, Figgy’s workplace looked like the best clubhouse ever.
If you don’t hold up your end… she’ll be gone gone gone.
And then a month after production began, the money arrived. There was no beeping truck, no giant check, no crash of cymbals, no clinking of champagne flutes. The only way Alex knew they had it was a call from Valerie, an associate in the Encino accounting firm they’d hired last year when Figgy’s show was picked up.
“FYI—the first studio payment just cleared,” she said cheerfully. “I can stick it in a cash account or money market but wanted to check with you first. Where do you stand on munis?”
“I’m pro-munis, absolutely,” he said, knowing nothing whatsoever about munis. “Let me talk to Figgy and get her to weigh in. We’ll talk things over.”
But of course there was no talking things over with Figgy, who greeted news of the payment that night in bed with a weary, “It’s about fucking time,” before vanishing behind a cushioned sleep mask and passing out. Alex knew better than to think Figgy would care one way or another about municipal bonds; she was even fuzzier on finances than Alex. In annual meetings with the bookkeeper, she’d squint during the discussion of tax brackets and deductions and then come out with the only economic question that seemed to make any sense to her:
“How long can we survive if I have a nervous breakdown tomorrow and no one ever hires me again?”
Which left Alex as family CFO as well as domestic first responder. In this capacity, he let a few days pass before getting back to the accountant. He knew they needed to make a decision, but it somehow cheered him that the new infusion was only temporarily contained. It wasn’t locked down. It was liquid. It didn’t belong in municipals. It belonged in a house.
• • •
And so Alex kept up the house hunt. He checked in with Colby each morning and did a tour of open houses on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Still, every time he got in Colby’s car, he was struck by the wrongness of it all—the forced friendship between them, the peppery whiff of Colby’s cologne, the smooth jazz on his car radio. The houses weren’t much better. Colby had learned to steer away from the crazy moderns and grand McMansions, which left the deeply creepy, the highly impractical, or the offensively tacky. Great recession or not, it turned out that high-twos-low-threes was not exactly the ticket to easy street he’d imagined it would be.
And then, two weeks into the hunt, Colby called about a pocket listing a few blocks down from Griffith Park. The house was on Sumter Court, a looping side street a few blocks away from the duplex Alex had lived in during his temping days. As they pulled up to the address in Colby’s Mercedes, Alex’s heart began to race. He leapt out of the car and hurried to the tall iron gate, peering down a leafy path at a pink Mediterranean centered in the middle of a flat acre. The gate buzzed and Alex took three steps into the garden and stopped.
The last time he’d been here, the lawn was overgrown, the pool was halfway drained, and Alex was a trespasser. But there was no mistaking it. It was his Come the Revolution House, restored and repainted and up for grabs to the highest bidder.
• • •
He wandered from room to room, his mouth slack and head spinning, pausing in the same cavernous, wood-paneled room he’d peered into twenty-odd years before. Could you even call it a house? Or was it a compound? An estate? It was enormous, with a drawing room (a drawing room!), a solarium (solarium!), and actual provenance—the architect had what Colby had called “A-list credits.”
What really got Alex was the yard—one lawn spilled into another, with park benches and gurgling fountains peeking out from leafy corners, all of it shaded by fragrant eucalyptus and old-growth redwoods. He surveyed the scene and pictured Sylvie frolicking across the grass, twirling a white parasol. He wanted this yard with an unadulterated ache. The feeling was only slightly undercut by a nagging picture of the gardeners he knew maintained all this water-chugging, non-native flora, who he knew in an instant were Latino, underpaid, and armed with squealing, smoke-belching leaf blowers.
In any case, it was beyond them—way too expensive, too grand, too old. Even with the recent influx of money, Alex was sure there wasn’t a jumbo loan jumbo enough to swing it. Besides, their new money was just that: new. This place reeked of Old.
Besides, in the fantasy of his youth, he’d taken possession of this house after the actual owners fled. He hadn’t bought it; he’d reclaimed it. He’d strung up hammocks in the ballroom, burned antiques in the fireplace. He didn’t want to buy it; he wanted to invade it.
Now he was really here, in the role of a potential buyer. It was all wrong. There had been no revolution, no urban uprising. He wasn’t the proletariat. He was the oppressor.
He caught up with Colby on the back patio, where he was talking to the seller’s agent, an elegant Persian woman in a nubby-fabric cardigan. Colby broke off a conversation about “the list price, vis-à-vis the neighborhood specs,” raised his
eyebrows at Alex, and quickly sized him up. He laughed and clapped him on the back. “I’ve seen that look before my friend. You’re in love. Don’t deny it. It’s incredible. Nice? Nice!”
“It’s definitely nice,” Alex said. He had to give it to him: Somehow, Colby had succeeded in delivering his literal dream house.
Colby took him by the elbow and turned them away. “The agent says she’s got multiple offers coming in tomorrow. If you want to make a move, we should be first.”
Alex coughed and shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s pretty out of our range, pricewise.”
Colby frowned. “Oh, you’d be amazed what a good mortgage broker can make happen,” he said, pulling out his cell phone. “Let’s just get Figgy down here. See if she can swing by? Get her feeling on it. This house is gonna go fast—I don’t want you two missing out.”
Colby punched in her number—Alex registering that Colby had her work number on speed-dial, which meant the two of them had been talking a lot more than he realized—and in a few short sentences, he got across the message that she needed to get over here. Fast. Then Colby hurried out to his car to “get some papers together.”
Fifteen minutes later, Figgy was walking down the flagstone path with Colby at her side, a bulging manila folder under his arm. Alex trailed behind as they made a brisk tour through the property. This wasn’t the nervous, nail-chewing Figgy at all. This was the other Figgy, the hard-charging dynamo, the ass-kicker who picked up her Emmy with a fist bump. Alex flashed back to the delivery room at Cedars-Sinai hospital when Sam was born. She’d spent much of the pregnancy a nauseous wreck, hobbled and terrified about the violence that was about to break out in her holiest of holies. But when the day arrived and it turned out the baby was positioned badly and labor would be worse even than she had feared, a steely calm fell over her. Alex nearly fainted when the doctor wiped away a miasma of fluids and advanced on her with a glinting pair of metal salad tongs. But Figgy kept calm, receding somewhere deep inside herself. He could still see her staring up at him, stroking his splotchy cheek with the back of her middle finger and saying, simply, “I got this.”
And she did. All ten pounds, nine ounces of it.
Now that same preternatural calm was back.
After the tour, she plopped into a wicker lounge chair by the pool. The last glimmer of sun was disappearing below the hills of Griffith Park, lighting up the yard with a thin violet glow.
“So,” he said.
“So,” she agreed.
“You love it?”
“What’s not to love?” she said. “What about you?”
“I’m terrified,” he said with a laugh. “Isn’t a little out of our league?”
A sly grin crept across Figgy’s face. “Out of your league maybe.”
He winced and looked out over the swimming pool. Little candles on floating cups made golden flecks on the surface. This was entirely too pleasant a place to stage a protest, but he needed to talk some sense. “Remember what you always say about studio executives? What they crave more than anything else in the world?”
“A reason for living?”
“Besides that,” Alex said. “They want a writer with a mortgage. One they can push around. And who’s to say Katherine doesn’t storm off tomorrow or the writers’ strike doesn’t happen again or you show up and find your office occupied by some hack the network has decided is the next Chuck Lorre? What then?”
Figgy looked away and sucked in a deep breath. “We’ll be fine—we just will. If we close escrow soon, we can use the house for shooting. Wouldn’t this be perfect for the commissioner’s house?”
Angela Bassett was in talks to play the local police commissioner in a six-episode arc of the new season. As Figgy had scripted the part, the commissioner becomes obsessed with the madam played by Katherine Pool during a surveillance operation. Episode eight ended at a fundraiser at the commissioner’s house with the madam and the commissioner engaged in some hot girl-on-girl action (known in the writers’ room as “goga”).
“Standard fee for that kind of shoot is eight thousand a day,” Figgy said, the calculations ticking across her face. “We could do five or six days before we move in, pay for most of the remodel. If we move a few scenes inside, I could do a few product placements and get us a new fridge, at least a dishwasher.”
She hopped up and went toward the French doors leading to the kitchen. “What have they got in there now?”
Alex trailed after her. Eight thousand? For a single day? Maybe she was right. Maybe they could pull this off. What was he so opposed to anyway? Maybe the fact that he’d been here before was a good omen—like the discovery of the ’zine, a sign that he was on the right path. Besides, all that space, that land—how could that not be good for the kids, the dog, everyone? It obviously made Figgy happy. Her happiness made everyone happier. All boats rose. Did he really think buying a house like this would somehow corrupt them? Maybe it was a win-win world after all. Maybe it was like he’d told his dad—just a house.
He followed her through the French doors, resolute now. Cheerful even. Figgy wanted it—and Alex wanted it for her. Was he really going to let some crazy apocalyptic fantasy get in the way of their happiness? Figgy marched through the back door into the kitchen, Alex close on her heels.
• • •
In the kitchen they found a woman with a severe black bob and a drapey, scoop-neck top, furiously pumping the valves of a gigantic countertop stainless steel cappuccino maker embedded with the word MAGNIFICA. Next to her, an older man emerged from a cloud of hissing steam, revealing a full head of silver hair and a pair of reading glasses dangling on a gold chain.
“The open house ended a half hour ago,” the man said, mashing his hands in a damp rag.
Alex shrugged and advanced into the room. “Oh, sorry, we won’t be a minute,” he said, the words scrambling together. “I’m Alex Sherman-Zicklin. This is my wife Figgy. Also Sherman-Zicklin. Hyphenates—we went that route. Beautiful home!”
“Rex Benjamin.” He looked them over, and then nodded slowly. “Lots to see here, obviously. People have been in and out all day—but I’ve gotta get out into the yard before we lose the light. Finish with the compost.”
“Sorry?”
“Truckload of compost in the driveway,” he said, moving past them. “Spreading it around the azaleas. Once a year—they’ll die without it.”
The door shut hard behind him as he tromped out. Figgy and Alex watched him go.
“Espresso?” The woman was collecting cups from the cabinet. The skin on her arms and neck was an unnatural shade of orange; Alex guessed she’d had some assistance in the tanning department. “Don’t mind Rex. He’s not himself. Don’t mind either one of us. I’m Judy—the wife. Everything’s pretty scattered, as you can imagine. Him with his compost. Me with my estate sale. Everything’s available, you know. The light fixtures, the plants, the furniture. Everything must go!”
“Okay then,” Alex said. “We’ll keep that in mind.”
Judy yanked a lever on the machine and a squealing hiss filled the room. Alex admired the coffee machine’s coiled tubes and gleaming metal finish. While rotating a cup under the spout, Judy nodded toward Figgy. “Did you get up to the shoe closet? I must have three hundred pairs up there. A little Imelda Marcos, I know—but what can I say? Women and their shoes, right? You’re what? About a nine? Nine and a half? Same as me. I’ve barely worn half of them. I’ll do twenty-five a pair, Ferragamos, too.”
Figgy leaned over. “I’ll have a look.”
There was another awkward pause as Judy poured foam over their coffees, her jaw set.
Alex coughed and offered, “Are you moving far? Out of state?”
“We’re not sure where we’re going,” she said. “But we’re not going anywhere ’til we get rid of everything. We can’t just sit around ignoring the phone, talking to lawyers, spreading compost. Compost, can you believe it?”
“I’m sorry—I d
on’t understand,” Alex said. “What happened? Did something happen?”
“Oh, I thought you knew—I thought everyone knew,” she cried. She laid a coffee cup down on the tile countertop with a definitive clink. “We’ve had some bad luck. That’s what Rex calls it: ‘a rather epic turn of bad luck’. But you ask me, luck has nothing to do with it. The lawyers are calling it ‘misappropriation’. But come on—it’s thievery. That’s why we’re selling. The things you see, the little bit of equity in the house—that’s it. That’s all we’ve got.”
“What? How?”
Her face scrunched up, a fluttering in her upper lip. “It was a trust,” she said. “Isn’t that rich? Trust? All our money, all my family money. Rex turned it all over to this money manager—Greg Helman? The Whiz of WeHo? It was in all the papers—took a plea for fraud, looking at twenty years. Lot of good it’ll do us. We’re wiped out.”
“Oh, God,” Alex said. “I’m so sorry.”
Judy looked down into her cup, examining the pattern of the foam. “What can you do?”
She set her cup down on the granite countertop and shrugged, the silence stretching out far past Alex’s comfort. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but stopped short—at least you have your health? Sorry your family lost everything, thanks for letting us pick through the ruins? He looked over beseechingly at Figgy, who shot him a look and stepped forward. “Well, I guess we better take a look at those Ferragamos of yours.”
Seven
News of the Benjamins’ misfortune sent Colby into a frenzy; they needed to act fast, he said, go in big, make a bold first move. “I love a distress sale!” he said, hyperventilating. Figgy was in the front seat, and Colby was behind the wheel; they’d been parked on the curb of Sumter Court strategizing for the past half hour, the offer propped up on the parking brake of Colby’s Mercedes. Alex kept quiet in back, slumped in his seat, a light year away. The two of them up front were like teenagers warming up for a makeout sesh, each palpably aroused by the pile of documents between them and the obscene financial risk it described.
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