Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  The girls shrugged apologetically, not recognizing any of the titles. “We don’t catch many films, actually,” Trudy said.

  “You should really see the preserve,” Margot said. “It’s only twelve miles down the coast.”

  “I’ll try to stop by sometime.”

  “Are you busy right now?” Trudy asked.

  “Now?” Woody said. “Not really, I guess.”

  “Because you should really see it, and, um, we could really use a ride.”

  “A ride?”

  “Our car died last month. We sold it for scrap,” Trudy said. “We’ve been hitching, or trying to, but for some reason people won’t stop for us.”

  “It’s perplexing,” Margot said, “two comely ladies like us, don’t you think? I’m telling you, T., we need to show more skin.”

  “We’d really appreciate it,” Trudy said. “We walked all the way into town today. We’re exhausted.”

  The thought of these two foul castaways in his pristine car was not at all appealing, but reluctantly he consented. He wanted to find out more about Trudy, or, more to the point, about Kyle. He led them to his Range Rover, Margot limping so noticeably, Woody wondered if she had a knee brace or an artificial leg under her fat cargo pants.

  “This is your car?” Trudy asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s an SUV,” she said. “We can’t ride in an SUV.”

  “You can’t?”

  “No. We’re diametrically opposed to SUVs.”

  “Oh, come on,” Margot said to Trudy. “We can make an exception just this once, can’t we?” She pouted at Trudy pleadingly. “We need to get back to our little fledglings.”

  Trudy climbed onto the front passenger seat, Margot in back. Once the doors were shut, their smell was overpowering. Woody turned on the air-conditioning and rolled down his window, then put the Range Rover in reverse.

  “Look! The car has a camera!” Margot said. She pointed at the touchscreen on his dashboard. There was a camera mounted on the tail of his SUV, transmitting a wide-angle rearview color image whenever he backed up. “That is so cool!”

  “There’s a GPS navigation system, too,” Woody said. “Give me the address for the preserve. I’ll plug it in.”

  “It doesn’t have an address,” Trudy told him.

  “What about something nearby?”

  “Just head south on Highway 1. I’ll tell you where to turn.”

  Once away from the store, the girls began pulling things out from underneath their clothes, not just the shampoo and bars of soap, but also toothpaste, floss, blocks of cheese, zucchinis, tomatoes, bananas, packages of pasta, carrots, a sack of potatoes, a bottle of Italian dressing, a jar of Dijon mustard, bags of trail mix, they kept coming, how had they been able to get away with shoplifting all of these things? As they voided item after item, tossing them into a rucksack, the girls got smaller and smaller, their clothes seeming to deflate, and Woody realized they weren’t the slightest bit overweight, were, in fact, rather mal-nourished, which they proved with their next flurry of actions, Margot swinging her leg on top of the back seat and extracting, hand over hand, an impossibly long baguette from the cuff of her pants leg. Trudy tore the cellophane off some cheese with her teeth, and Margot whipped out an enormous bowie knife as Trudy dug her thumbs into the baguette, creating a channel, and Margot cut into the cheese and handed rough hunks off to Trudy, who crammed them into the bread and ripped the loaf in half and gave one to Margot, and immediately they began ravishing the sandwiches.

  “Sorry,” Trudy said, her mouth full. “We haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. Want some?”

  “No, thanks,” Woody said, aghast by the crumbs and bits of cheese dropping onto his seats and carpeting.

  Within seconds, the girls had wolfed down the sandwiches and then swallowed several bananas and shoveled away the bags of trail mix, washing it down with a gargantuan bottle of water they split between them. Finally sated, Trudy, breathing heavily, told Woody, “We’ve sort of run out of funds, if we’re being too subtle for you. We were supposed to get some money wired to us, but there was a snag. I feel terrible about stealing from a mom-and-pop, but it’s too difficult to shoplift at the Safeway with their security.”

  “Who’s been paying you to restore the birds?” he asked. “The park service? The Audubon Society?”

  “Oh, we don’t get paid,” she said.

  “Hey, what are these things?” Margot asked, pointing at the video screens embedded into the backs of the front headrests.

  “It’s a DVD player.”

  “No kidding?” She saw the remote control in front of her and punched a button, which instantly resumed playing the movie that was still docked midscene.

  “You don’t get paid?” Woody said.

  Margot turned up the sound on the 360-degree Harman Kardon Logic digital surround-sound system.

  “He took the fucking bags,” a character said.

  “That fucking snitch,” another character said. “He thinks he can fuck with us? No one fucks with us.”

  “We’re volunteers,” Trudy told Woody, raising her voice over the dialogue.

  “I don’t understand. You’re not real researchers?”

  “We’re trained field biologists. Margot and I have degrees in environmental science from UVM.”

  Vermont, Woody thought. It figured. “Are you writing a book or something?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “What are you trying to get out of the project?”

  “Get out of it? We’re trying to save the birds. There used to be tens of thousands of snowy plovers along the West Coast, but now there’re only about fifteen hundred. It’s a travesty, what the government’s done, allowing all these developments up and down the coast. The plover’s on the federal Endangered Species list, but somehow this conglomerate got approval for this stupid golf course and completely disrupted their nesting grounds.”

  “We are going to fuck him up good, know what I mean?”

  “Fucking right we are. Better fucking believe it. The Messiah is coming to visit you with righteous indignation, brother Judas.”

  “Margot,” Trudy said, swiveling around to face her friend, who was mindlessly engrossed in the movie. “Margot!” Trudy screamed.

  “What?” Margot screamed back.

  “Can you turn that down?”

  “What?”

  “I cannot believe you. You have been behaving heinously today.”

  Margot flipped her the bird.

  “Pop open that panel,” Woody told her. Margot did, and pulled out a pair of wireless headphones. Woody used the touchscreen to redirect the soundtrack.

  “Thank you,” Trudy said. “What is that DVD?”

  “Lying in Wait.”

  “That’s one of your movies?”

  “Yeah,” Woody said, feeling strangely embarrassed. “But my next project, it’ll be—”

  “That’s the type of movies you make?”

  “My next one, I’ve got Dalton Lee directing.” She didn’t know who Dalton Lee was. “It’s going to be an art-house film.” He began telling her the plot, but as he did so, he couldn’t even convince himself that it wouldn’t be another genre movie.

  “It sounds…,” Trudy said. “I don’t know…” She was disappointed in him, it was plain to see. “You really look wonderful, Woody. You’re dressed so beautifully. I’m glad you’re on your feet again. I guess you had it pretty rough for a while, didn’t you?” she said.

  So she knew. “Kyle told you?”

  She nodded.

  “Can I ask you something? Did you have a falling out with your family?”

  “Why do you think that?” she said sarcastically. “I’m not in contact with them at all anymore.”

  “But you still talk to Kyle, don’t you? How’s he doing?”

  She turned to him. “Woody, don’t you know?”

  He had lost touch with Kyle, with everyone else from Harvard, after he had been indicted
. The last he’d heard, Kyle was leading the convertible arbitrage investment team for Goldman Sachs in Manhattan and living in Westchester County, married, with three kids, inhabiting the very sort of life Woody had hoped he would have. He purposely tried to avoid news of his former friends, but no matter what he did, somehow the Harvard alumni office always tracked him down, forwarding donation pleas and newsletters and magazines wherever he moved. He always dumped them straight into the trash, unopened. “Do I know what?” he asked.

  “He died,” Trudy said.

  Woody thought he had misunderstood her at first. “What happened? When?”

  “He committed suicide. Four years ago.”

  “What?”

  “He shot himself on Christmas Day, 2001. He drove to the train station in White Plains and sat in his car and shot himself in the parking lot.”

  “My God,” Woody said.

  They didn’t speak the rest of the way to Bidwell Marsh Preserve, listening uncomfortably to Margot’s punctuated laughs, gasps, and snorts as she watched the movie. They drove past farms, cow pastures, and rolling hills, and when the highway dipped into a wooded area, Trudy had him turn onto an unmarked dirt road. They bumped down the ruts, the road narrowing dramatically and becoming rougher, making the Range Rover rock and pitch, the engine grinding a bit. After a mile or so, the road ended at a clearing of sorts, although it wasn’t very wide at all, and Woody worried he wouldn’t be able to turn around.

  Trudy opened her door and hoisted the rucksack. “Hey, let’s go, Margot,” she said.

  “Let me just finish this scene,” Margot shouted, still wearing the headphones. “This thing is a hoot!”

  “Trudy,” Woody said. “Was something happening with Kyle? With his career? Was he in trouble?”

  “No, he wasn’t in trouble,” she said, climbing out of the car. “Not in that way.”

  “Why, then? Why’d he do it?”

  Trudy shifted the straps of the rucksack on her shoulders. “I don’t know. He was unhappy. Obviously he was unhappy. That was a stupid thing to say.”

  “Did he leave a note?”

  “I guess you could call it a note,” she told him. “He scribbled a line on the back of an envelope, a utility bill. It said, ‘I have everything.’”

  “That’s it? That’s all he wrote?”

  “Yes.” She banged her hand on the back window. “Margot! Get out of this car right this instant. I am so disgusted with you.” She walked around to the driver’s side and said to Woody, “Come see the plovers.”

  “I can’t right now. I have an appointment.”

  “Come tomorrow, then. Just walk down the path to the ocean.” She pointed to a trail he hadn’t noticed.

  “Okay, I’ll try.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.” He took out his money clip and flicked off several bills. “Trudy, here, take this.”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “Take it,” he said.

  She accepted the money and awkwardly leaned through the window and hugged him. “It’s so good to see you, Woody,” she said. “When I was little, I was deeply in love with you.”

  HE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT to do with the news. Kyle Thorneberry—he’d committed suicide? It was impossible. It didn’t make sense. There had to have been a reason, something must have happened—with his job, with his marriage, with money. Woody didn’t care what Trudy had said. People didn’t kill themselves for no reason, they didn’t blow their brains out because they had everything. Something must have been in the offing, a scandal of some sort: Kyle had made a colossal mistake that would soon be exposed, an error in judgment that would cost Goldman Sachs billions, for that was the rarefied, almost unimaginable arena in which Kyle had worked, responsible for billions of dollars. Or maybe the SEC or the attorney general, with so much attention being paid to hedge fund managers then, was investigating his division and was about to come down on him. He was going to be fired, humiliated, disgraced, possibly jailed. Or it could have been drugs, gambling, a sexual indiscretion or, more likely, perversion, an incurable disease—something. There had to have been something going on. Maybe he’d even been murdered, his death set up to look like a suicide.

  As soon as he emerged from the dirt road and was back onto the highway, Woody carefully enunciated, “Call Roland,” activating the hands-free phone in his car, which automatically extended the antenna mounted on the roof and made the call to his assistant.

  “Yallow,” Roland said.

  “Where the hell are you?” Woody asked. It had taken Roland nearly four rings to answer, and there was a lot of background noise, people talking, laughing. Had the little pipsqueak skipped out of the office early? Was he forwarding calls to his cell phone? He’d caught him doing exactly that once before.

  “I’m in a restaurant,” Roland said. “I’m eating lunch.”

  It was almost one o’clock. Lyndon—what a surprise—had not called Woody about lunch.

  “Which restaurant?” Woody asked.

  “Chow Bella, the new fusion place on La Cienega.”

  “How is it?”

  “Not bad.”

  “What’d you order?”

  “Pizza. Peking duck pizza.”

  Woody didn’t believe him. Roland was a stickler about his cholesterol intake, and he rarely went out for lunch, preferring a regular office delivery of specialty macrobiotic meals. Woody knew a way to ferret him out. “This is a bad connection,” he said. “Let me call you back. I’ll call you on the restaurant landline.”

  “But I hear you clear as a bell.”

  “You’re breaking up on my end.”

  “Call me direct on my cell,” Roland said. “I’ve got five bars. It’s the forwarding that’s probably the problem.”

  “Let’s just use the landline. Go over to the hostess.”

  “Woody, wait,” Roland said. “I’m, uh, actually not at the restaurant. I’m in, well, a bar.”

  “You are this close to being fired, Roland.”

  “Oh, come on, chill out, Woody.”

  “Chill out? Chill out? Are you out of your mind? Are you drunk?”

  “It’s Friday afternoon, Labor Day weekend! I went in this morning and took care of that contract and then sat on my ass with nothing to do. I told you, everyone’s already shut down for the weekend. So I decided to call it a day. Is that so unreasonable? You’re on vacation yourself.”

  “This is not a vacation, and you are not me. You do not get to do what I do. This is not a socialist enterprise. This is an unwavering state of fascist rule. Do you understand me?”

  What Woody got in response was not the appropriate contriteness, not an apology, not simpering pleas to be returned to Woody’s good graces, but a sigh, a loud insolent sigh, full of attitude, full of like-I-could-really-give-a-shit presumption, that might as well have been a Bronx cheer.

  “If you say so,” Roland told Woody.

  “Wrong answer, you little pissant. You have an hour to clear out of the office,” Woody said, and hung up. He had had enough of Roland. He was efficient and knowledgeable, but young, twenty-six, and overly ambitious. He thought he was capable of taking over Woody’s job. He was a good assistant, really the best he’d ever had, but Woody would find another assistant. He could not let this type of insubordination stand. Once you allowed someone to undermine your authority, once you tolerated the slightest breach in hierarchy, the game was lost. People had to know their place. No one ever wanted to stay in his place, of course. That was just human nature. People were solipsistic, and ultimately no one ever did anything that wouldn’t redound to them, that wouldn’t be in their self-interests. It was an evolutionary fact, a principle of behavior that was predictable and immutable and therefore comforting. In this Darwinian world of winners and losers, altruism was an illusion, loyalty a sham. Respect was not something you earned. You established it by force and manipulation. You coerced it into being because you had something of value that the other person did not. That
was the definition of power, and if it wasn’t ingrained over and over by brute example, you were open to mutiny, betrayal, to disasters and defeats, to endless snubs and slights.

  This had been the problem with the assistant manager at the Fairmont Hotel, the arrogant little runtface who’d had the temerity to rebuff him. Woody had misread the situation, he saw now. He had been turning it over in his mind, examining it, “particalizing it,” as he liked to say, not able to let it go. (Let it go, let it go. Breathe in, then breathe out, and feel it releasing, dissipating into the air into nothing, his therapist, Dan, told him uselessly.) Erroneously he had believed the assistant manager would be impressed by money, tendered with a soft, egalitarian touch, but people like that needed to be quickly cowed, reminded of their puniness and impotence and immediately put in their place. Woody had played it all wrong.

  He knew how to play Roland, however. He didn’t really want to fire him. For the most part, he did an excellent job, and they had a good rapport. And, sad as it was to admit, Roland was as close to a friend as Woody had in L.A. He was indulging in a little bluff, just as he had been bluffing with Ling Ling, never intending to send her back to Hong Kong this morning, when she had, as he’d known she would, meekly asked for his forgiveness.

  He decided to let Roland sweat it out for a while. He had to eat something. He was famished. He drove back to town and parked. He’d intended to find a deli in which he could get, as prescribed by his personal nutritionist, a good, healthy, low-fat, lowcarb sandwich—turkey with lettuce and tomato on whole grain, maybe a skosh of mustard—but Roland’s mention of Chow Bella whetted his appetite for Italian, and he found a trattoria called La Bettola on Main Street. The place wasn’t Drago or Valentino in L.A., but it wasn’t bad, not bad at all. This morning, he’d even discovered a funky gourmet coffeehouse, Java Hut, that had an outstanding Jamaican Blue Mountain. This town was growing on him. It had a few things to say for itself.

  In the trattoria, he ordered a linguini carbonara with poached egg, smoked bacon, and parmesan—he couldn’t help himself—followed by a tiramisu—he couldn’t resist—with a tiny scoop of amaretto gelato on the side and a tiny biscotto, washed down with an espresso.