Keeper of the Keys

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “She’s at the UCLA Medical Center.”

  “She’s having her baby?”

  “I don’t know about that. They took her in an ambulance.”

  Ambulance? Weren’t those big white vehicles repositories of urgently sick people who might not make it? Didn’t they screech up the street, awakening babies and dogs and making people grind their teeth? “Why?”

  “I’m afraid there’s been an accident. She got hit by a car.”

  A tap, tap, tap at his office door interrupted Ray. He had rolled in about three-thirty in the afternoon, entirely missing the Antoniou deadline, missing the meeting.

  “Come in.”

  “Here at last. Praise God,” said Denise. “However.”

  “Hi, Denise.” The good news was, she was still willing to talk to him.

  She stepped inside the door to his office carefully.

  “I want to tell you things can’t go on this way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we need you here. We need a leader.”

  “Where’s Martin?”

  “He came in for the meeting. When you didn’t show up, he sent Antoniou away and left. He didn’t even talk to Suzanne. I think he’s feeling scared, just like we all are. What’s going on? You’re never here anymore.”

  Ray shifted in his chair. “I’m sorry.”

  Denise sat down hard on a bench under the window. The light picked up a brash red in her dark hair. “Ray, I’m thinking of quitting.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “We’re all frightened. Wondering. About Leigh. I’m worried about you every minute. I don’t want to leave you, but…”

  Ray said, “What’s that got to do with Antoniou?” But it was obvious. His personal problems were wrecking the firm. “Look,” he said to that unwavering stare. “Don’t quit. I need you. This will all blow over soon. I’ll get Antoniou to sign on. I promise. Don’t worry about it. We put you in a tough position.” She relaxed slightly at this. “This temporary situation isn’t going to change anything. The firm is top priority for both Martin and me.”

  “We need this commission,” Denise said. “But-”

  “What?”

  “When Antoniou got here and looked at the plans, I definitely got the impression he’s unhappy.”

  “What doesn’t he like?”

  “The design?” And this was accompanied by a look almost of pity. He doesn’t like my design, Ray thought, the incredible modernist manse that would jut like a ship’s prow off the bluff, the glass, the movable walls, the copper cladding, all the great ideas Ray had painstakingly culled and synthesized. Antoniou had nodded and nodded and nodded again as Ray described his vision. The son of a bitch-with a sinking feeling, Ray thought, I don’t have the energy to start all over on this thing.

  Thinking aloud, he said, “I just have to sell him on it. What time is it?”

  “Almost four. Uh, but…”

  “Yes?” He waited.

  She gulped. “Please, Ray. Maybe you should see a doctor. You don’t look good. You’re all banged up and your eyes look all starey.”

  Martin arrived a few minutes later from his daily visit to the trattoria’s wine bar, bleary-eyed. “Thanks to your no-show, Antoniou is hedging. When you didn’t make the meeting, he refused to sign off on the preliminary design fee. He refused to write a check. You insulted him, Ray. Nice going.”

  “I’m surprised you couldn’t handle him without me, Martin. You’re the persuader. That’s your job. You didn’t need me.”

  “It was you he wanted to talk to. Because he-can’t-stand-your-design.”

  “I’ll make it up to him.”

  “Good. Because he wants you to meet him on his boat this evening. He has a yacht he keeps at Newport Harbor, right off Balboa Island. Near a place called Blackie’s.”

  “Oh, no,” Ray said, wondering how he could ever do this.

  Martin consulted his watch. “You can just make it by six. He needs to show you he’s the boss, make you meet him on his territory. He’s difficult, Ray.”

  “I’ll grab the drawings and get going.”

  Denise said, “I have some old Dramamine pills. Let me get them for you.”

  “I have a baseball cap in my office,” Martin said.

  “I have a Windbreaker,” Denise offered.

  He packed up the portfolio with Denise’s drawings. Glancing at the calendar, he saw that it had been six days since that last fight with Leigh, and four days since he had punched Martin.

  But all this disarray had been decades in the making, starting with his mother’s journeys. He was quite sure of that, but he couldn’t say why.

  14

  A ntoniou awaited him at one of the Newport Harbor docks, wearing a captain’s hat that covered his bald pate and probably made his kids giggle. In his sixties, he had blinding white teeth under a gray mustache and a handshake that would make a weaker man cry. Ray made sure not to grimace. The bright summer evening was windless, the sea calm.

  The client didn’t seem angry, about to pull the job. He put his arm around Ray, gesturing and talking about the harbor and the fish catch.

  They walked a long way up the dock, passing dozens of boats, small, large, metal, multi- and single-hulled. While Antoniou talked about a race around the world won by a giant catamaran in sixty-two days, Ray steamed.

  Martin was the schmoozer. Martin went out with clients to odd ethnic food places, sailed on their crummy boats, danced with the wives or cracked jokes with the husbands. Ray shouldn’t have to do this stuff. He was the artist.

  Near the end of the dock, they stopped at one of the largest boats Ray had ever seen. White-painted double hulls lifted huge decks and a central saloon. Aisles along each side led to a wide wooden deck, where a green nylon net drape hung over the water.

  “That’s the place to be when we get going,” Antoniou said, pointing forward. “It stays cool. Meanwhile, what can I get you to drink?” He led Ray into the cabin, which held leather plush seating in a luxurious booth arrangement, a stainless-steel long bar on one side, and a chef banging away behind it.

  Antoniou saw Ray looking and smiled and rubbed the tips of the fingers of his right hand together. Yeah, I have plenty, the fingers boasted.

  They set off, motoring slowly out of the harbor toward the open sea. Apparently, such large catamarans could have motors and did not necessarily teeter on one hull. Antoniou assured him that it had a high stability quotient, that he wanted a boat where he could play with the kids and not worry that one of them might take an unexpected plunge. “Someday I’ll go for one that’s suitable for racing. Maybe when the grandkids are teenagers, and all this starts to look stodgy.”

  The crew, at least two additional people, took care of the work. One steered, another scurried around doing whatever needed doing, including serving a platter of shrimp in cocktail sauce, crab cakes, and crunchy bits of toast. He left Antoniou and Ray the heavy task of popping a champagne bottle.

  “Now then,” he said. “No distraction. We talk. No, don’t pull out your drawings. We don’t need them. Relax. We are on the sea, on a glorious evening.”

  “Denise said you had some problems with the drawings.”

  “Problems. Yes, problems. Ray, you are a brilliant designer. Everybody says so. But-you bring me this house that looks like some science-fiction movie. Angles and concrete. Walls that appear and disappear. Don’t you know me better than this yet?”

  “When you talked about it-my design-with Martin I thought he said-”

  “It’s a beautiful design. But not for me. I want white columns, my friend. Through which I glimpse the infinite sea. A portico. A row of olives. A turquoise pool. You put in this long black skinny thing, Ray. It seems to be edged in metal. How can my family swim in that?”

  “ Mediterranean,” Ray said, looking down. Boredom filled him. How many Mediterraneans had he designed in the last five years? They were all Mediterraneans. Every last jack one of them wanted a
Mediterranean, and he was sick of designing them.

  “You can redo the design? Along those lines?”

  “Why not?” Ray said. “White columns, right?”

  Antoniou’s face broke into a broad smile. “That’s a boy,” he said. “And one other important thing I didn’t mention to Martin. It just came to me, in fact. It makes me feel excited about building this home, Ray.”

  Ray raised his eyebrows, smiled, looked accommodating.

  “A man like me has needs beyond ordinary, you understand? I need a place where I can be myself. I never had one as a child. I’d like you to build me a secret room. A basement. An adult playroom. Stone walls, like a dungeon. A good lock on the door.”

  “A dungeon?”

  “For the ambiance. You know what I mean, Ray. I will tell you how to finish it later. Nothing illegal will happen there, I swear. Just personal play.”

  “I know just the lock and key,” Ray said. “A big, ornate, medieval-looking key.”

  “Only one key. And Ray-”

  “Yes?” Ray, eager, at the ready to serve his master, listened carefully.

  “I don’t want Martin to know.”

  “Then I can’t put it on the official design, the plans. I can prepare you a private set of plans. I can help you get it built privately, yes.”

  Antoniou smiled. “It’s fun, this idea, eh? I was hoping you were not the squeamish type.”

  “You need two places to hang people upside down or one?”

  “Ha, ha. That’s a boy. That’s a boy!” Then Antoniou leaned in with a serious expression and said, “Can you put a metal-you know, a hook sort of thing-in the mortar between the stones?”

  “Sure,” Ray said. Consider it done, Saddam, he said to himself.

  “And a safe for valuables?”

  “No problem.” Now Ray thought of Esmé’s hidey-holes.

  “I’m going to be grateful, Ray. You’ll see.” He sat back and had a drink, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. “You know we meet again tomorrow, with Martin?”

  “Okay.”

  “Be ready for that.”

  Ray removed himself, with the excuse that he needed to take a whiz in the boat’s tiny marbled head. When he came back, Antoniou was stuffing himself on canapés, bouzouki music playing softly in the background. His face in repose was sullen, the lines coming down from his nose to his mouth etched from decades exercising power. How had he ever mistaken this Marquis de Sade for someone who would allow him really to use his talents? Ray looked into the mirror above the sink, holding its sides, feeling trapped.

  By now, the boat skimmed along the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The verdant hills displayed hundreds of Mediterraneans Ray automatically hated.

  “Sit down by me.”

  Ray obeyed. Water foamed alongside, making a rushing sound. Even through his sunglasses, reflections blazed like shots of lightning, so much so that he had to close his eyes.

  Antoniou placed his hand on Ray’s thigh. He squinted up at Ray, who chewed on an olive.

  Somehow, Ray had been expecting this. He didn’t flinch at the touch. Instead he took Antoniou’s hand in his own and held it. “Antoniou, if it was any guy, it’d be you, I swear. I’d be a lucky man. However.” He gave the hand a kiss, squeezed it again, and put it neatly back to rest on Antoniou’s own leg.

  Antoniou, at first startled, began to laugh. “Lotta men like both, you know.”

  “It never hurts to ask,” Ray agreed.

  “At least I got a kiss out of you.”

  Ray laughed. “Some big deal, huh?”

  The client shrugged, totally accepting. For a while, they just drank and moved through the water, the clouds scudding by, the white foam spraying their faces, the sun going down. Then they moved down to the netting for a while, lying side by side, arms behind their heads, companionable, like a raptor and a naive proto-chicken. Ray felt thoroughly beaten. He kept his smile and told a few good ones even so.

  Back on deck, Antoniou excused himself. He returned looking refreshed and perfectly pleased with his life of mansions and yachts and dungeons.

  “I love it out here,” he said. “My wife expects me at nine, but let’s open another bottle. Now, I want to know more about you, Ray. I’m hoping this evening’s the first day of a beautiful”-he paused and waggled his eyebrows-“business relationship. You have any kids? Tell me about your wife.”

  “No kids.” He talked about Leigh, taking care to say nothing real. He talked about her furniture-making, the church where they married, the vacation they had taken a few years ago in Brazil. As he talked, he pictured his wife; her gravity, hollow eyes, the way she would trace his eyebrow with her finger before leaning over to kiss him, the thrilling deep kiss. He remembered her complete abandonment in bed, her soft breasts-

  But he told Antoniou nothing of this, nothing of the reality of his wife. This, the client had not earned.

  “You continue to love her,” Antoniou said, pouring himself a final glass of champagne. “Lucky woman. And she loves you, I am sure.”

  “Oh, yes,” Ray lied, relieved to see that Antoniou had now turned his regard toward the young chef, who, judging by the twinkle in his eye, welcomed the attention. Ray had been a passing yen and there were no hard feelings.

  Later, as darkness came, driving home, Ray realized that he had returned to the tricks of his childhood, channeling another person. Not for the first time, he had mined Martin’s character, thinking, how would Martin handle this?

  He wondered if this talent at impersonation masked an empty soul, as Leigh had once accused. Wasn’t he just calling up elements of himself to become other characters, tapping into places in his personality that lay undeveloped inside him? He couldn’t display grace under pressure, unless grace lurked somewhere inside there, correct?

  He had kissed the client’s hand, pimped for the firm, saved the day. All right, it wasn’t grace he had displayed. Maybe he had been obsequious. He had nodded encouragingly while Antoniou talked about his columns and olive trees.

  Leigh-her gray eyes. Her integrity. He swiped his fingers across his cheeks, erasing what he could.

  Kat headed straight for the hospital. UCLA Medical Center held at least six hundred patients. Kat found the parking lot, vast, distant from the building, and tried to find a place as close to the palm-studded entrance as possible. Often, this counterintuitive action worked, and this time it did, when a blue Acura pulled out of a perfectly located spot not five spots from the front entry.

  Kat let the Acura out, barely, then swerved her Echo into the spot it had left vacant, cutting off at least one other eager, possibly equally crazed, family member who would now have to spend the next hour cruising aimlessly.

  Why hadn’t they called her?

  She locked the car. Coming through the Westwood Plaza entrance, she made her way into the hospital.

  A friendly receptionist told her she might find her sister on level five, so she waited with a motley crew for the double doors of the elevator to open. On her left, a man in a wheelchair, his head twisted to the right in a permanently frozen position, moaned. His wife bent down and caressed his cheek. On her left, a middle-aged woman, maybe fifty, with wiry blonde hair that flew out of her head like Medusa’s snakes, rested on crutches.

  “What happened?” Kat asked, hoping this was not an awkward question.

  “I fell off a sidewalk at a street fair,” the woman answered, “while checking out the bonsai booth. The silver lining is, I’m building my upper body strength.” She laughed.

  The nurses’ station, a large central area surrounded by counter-space and speckled with computers, did not exhibit a neighborly air; no warm cuddly pictures, no flowers.

  “Okay,” a male nurse said. “Her name comes up on page one.”

  “What room?”

  The man studied whatever it was he viewed on the computer screen. Games? Instant messages? Kat wondered.

  “Hmm,” he said ominously.

  I hate you, K
at replied internally. She realized the last time she had been in a hospital was when she went to find Tom there, and eventually found him in the morgue. “An ambulance brought her,” she said instead, helpfully.

  “I’m thinking room five oh eight,” he said. “She’s in recovery. Just got there from the OR. Hmm.”

  Stop saying that, Kat thought, or I will hit you.

  “Through the double doors and on your right.”

  She found 508 without too many wrong turns, opened the door, and greeted her sister inside. Raoul, looking like a man holding on to a lifeline, was clasping his wife’s hand with both of his.

  Jacki had the window side. On the door side, Jacki’s roommate was a woman who spoke right up. “Arrgh,” the roommate cried in greeting. “Crap! I hate my life!” Thin and pallid as a tubercular character in a novel, she had thrown her white sheets off and lay splayed like an automobile crash dummy, post-collision.

  “Hey,” Kat said to her sister.

  “Hey.” Jacki’s droopy blue eyes gazed at her. “I know you.”

  Scared, Kat just took her hand. Her sister, for the past few months whale-sized, now appeared diminished, the sheet over her stomach collapsed like a fallen parachute. Where was the baby? Kat didn’t dare ask.

  Raoul said, “She’s okay, Kat. Really.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “No time. I’m really sorry. It happened really fast, and then they operated-”

  All the pent-up concern Kat had been repressing flooded out and she started crying. “Jacki! Boo hoo hoo.”

  “Quit that. Ma always said you sound like a dying animal when you cry and it’s true,” Jacki said groggily. “Ow, Raoul, something hurts bad down by my right foot.”

  “She’s doped up, Kat,” Raoul said, apologizing for Jacki’s crankiness. “Just woke up. I’ll get the nurse in here, honey.”

  “They doped me up, hoping I won’t notice every freaking thing went wrong that could go wrong.”

  Kat said nothing, just squeezed Jacki’s hand.

  “Ouch,” Jacki said weakly.