I revved the car down the main road, past the Chinese place where we get takeout, a hair salon, nail salon, exercise studio, and the clothes shop I have wandered into on weekends and briskly exited, where everything is cream or brown or gray except for one coral scarf and the iPad they use as a register. The looks I get in that store make me feel unlikably corporate. It was weird to be in my neighborhood in the middle of a weekday. There were an astounding number of people just moseying along the sidewalk with their dogs or strollers or—a popular configuration—both. We glided past a corner shop that has, on a ledge inside its long front window, four big cards, each with a letter on them. Every time I’d been past, they spelled “N-O-P-E.” Now they had been rearranged to spell “O-P-E-N” and I was so jarred that I almost missed the turn.
I turned onto my street. It’s narrow, woodsy, and gently winding, tucked behind a private elementary school I am already mentally prepared for Nova not to be admitted to. My street is bounded on each side by hedges, fences, and walls, with wide gates that crest over each driveway: ornate or expensively simple, wrought iron or wood, according to the owner’s taste. A very plentiful number of garbage cans and recycling bins were lined up outside each gate—today was, I suppose, garbage day—and the sheer number of cans (seven, eight, more) hinted at the extent of the operations behind the fence.
There was a perfectly trimmed hedge, along which a stocky, short, dark-skinned man dressed all in white walked, plucking out every last fallen brown petal.
“This is where you live?” Michelle said.
“Up ahead.”
I’m not sentimental normally. Nor nostalgic. So much of my life is about looking forward to the future, when we’ll all wear Conch and the Clitch will be a funny story in our company legend. But sitting beside her, feeling vulnerable, I felt a kind of connection. I knew what it felt like to get in over your head.
I drove slowly. Twenty-five is the speed limit. I stayed well under it, slowed by thought.
“Do you like it here?” she asked.
I nodded. What’s not to like?
The street is one of the loveliest in this lovely town—the crazy zoning keeps it stratospherically expensive, but everybody’s liberal, complicated stuff!—but it’s as if the houses are too shy to be seen by strangers. They demurely turn away from the street, shaded by their deeply inclined roofs and the layers of plantings that screen them from view. Transparency at work, deep privacy at home.
She had taken my Conch. How could I not have noticed her taking it? She knew things about me that even I didn’t remember anymore, like my love of butterscotch sundaes. The thought was strangely exciting.
As you drive down the street there’s the occasional whiff of some large piece of outdoor sculpture—a Calder, say, on the back lawn, surrounded by trees. At my neighbor’s house, their kids’ tree house is glimpsable through the lacework of leaves. It is a beautiful little tree house, buttressed underneath by four thick columns, barely needing—not needing, basically irrelevant to—the tree it abuts.
Michelle had gone silent, watching out the window. It’s not showy, this street, although that’s a technicality: it’s covetable. Every sconce, house number, gate hinge, and paving stone has been carefully chosen, though these details are hardly visible among the foliage, the lush plantings. I watched her take it in.
“These cars are kind of…normal,” she remarked. She meant the ones parked along the road, outside the fences.
“It’s a very down-to-earth community,” I said. What I meant was, those cars belong to the housekeepers. Or the babysitters, the arborists, the professional organizers, the carpenters, the personal chefs, all the people whose hard work keeps these households going.
We approached the wall bordering my property. It’s a thickly ivied brick wall, with a row of laurel bushes planted in front. In front of the laurels is another layer of ivy, this time as ground cover. There’s one spot with a perfect oval carved out of the ivy for the yellow fire hydrant set there. In an ideal world we could replace the fire hydrant with one that’s more European-looking and better designed, and more in keeping with the naturalistic setting, but I haven’t seen any in the catalogs.
Graceful ornamental trees frame our driveway’s entrance. I turned the car, stopped in front of our closed gate, and rolled down my window. Into the keypad (subtle, metal, on a single curved, cantilevered leg) I punched the code, shading it from Michelle’s view with my hand. Though for all I knew, she already knew it. Silently the halves of the gate opened wide.
“Not bad,” she murmured, looking subdued, perhaps embarrassed. It’s not bad. A very low-key kind of grandeur. Artistically arranged boulders. Careful, tasteful landscaping. A turn in the driveway as you approach the house, with a gnarled madrona that comes suddenly into view, like a present you unwrap with your eyes. I parked in front of the house and turned off the car. “Come on in,” I said. The wall, the gate, the plantings: it wasn’t enough to protect me. Anything could get you, could leap out of an open sky, if it wanted to.
* * *
—
“When I imagined being here, it was warmer,” Michelle said, wrapping her arms around herself.
“That’s a common misconception about the Bay Area,” I said, leading her down the path and through the kitchen door. I hustled her through the dark, clean kitchen into the dining room. I don’t spend much time in the kitchen, less since they started making yogurt in tubes. “I need the contact information for the people you’ve been working with. I’ll also need a detailed accounting of the dates, times, and places you met with them. Start organizing your notes so you can go through them with my lawyer. Are you listening? Here, sit.” Our dining room table is round to facilitate the exchange of ideas between high-level peers. A large abstract print on the wall depicts aggressive swooshes, like the unstoppable upward trajectories of the kind of people we invite to dinner. I got out some paper and a pen, an obsolete technology still useful in niche situations like this one. “You can make a list. Or a grid. I prefer grids myself. I like that extra dimension.”
“Nice house,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, but I thought it would be fancier.”
“It’s a very nice house,” I said factually. Our realtor had said exactly that (with a slightly fishy look, as if she thought Rafe and I were likely to dispute her assessment). The editors of Sunset once put our pergola on the cover. “Now, come on. Give me some names and dates.”
She picked up the pen. Well, good. First step. Break tasks into manageable chunks, that’s the way.
“So what I need to know is, first: Who were you working for? And what did you do for them? What was that card you had, the business card?”
She produced it. It had a blue logo, like stylized waves, from a logo genre often used for spas and dental offices. It had an address that looked like the Conch factory address. Although of course that’s the only address I know in Malaysia, so probably they all look quite similar.
“How long have you lived in this house?”
“A few years. I really need you to focus and answer my questions.” I spoke in a low, authoritative, yet gentle voice. It was the tone Rafe used the time a bird flew into the house. The bird had whizzed around the downstairs, into and out of the fireplace, and then hit the dining room wall and fallen dazed in the corner. Rafe murmured to it while getting it into a box. He drove it to some kind of bird repair farm, where they took it in, accepted our charitable donation on its behalf, and later sent us a postcard to tell us it had died.
“So, to summarize, you stole my Conch and replaced it with another one, at the behest of someone, whose name you will write right here.” I drew a line on the paper. Best to treat her like Nova. She was closer in age to Nova than to me—that was a startling thought.
“Right, I switched it back.”
“What do you mean, back?”
“They’d already stolen it to copy, I guess? Anyway, I didn’t really get the woman’s name.”
“Michelle
. Let me quickly remind you that I have grounds for prosecution. You stole my passport! You trespassed at Conch! If you can’t be straight with me I’m going to call the police.”
“I think you would have called by now if you were going to,” she said. “I’m not avoiding, I just don’t know what to tell you. I needed the money and I didn’t want to ask too many questions.”
“So you came today to get SportConch. We don’t even have the prototype ready yet.”
“They want it. But I just want to be done with them. I came to see you.”
“Me?”
“I felt like we hit it off,” Michelle said. “I read some stuff about you and thought I could give it a try, being you. If I got rich I could build a theater of my own and star in the productions. Just a thought.” At the office I’d thought she was appealingly fresh and effective, but now I was horrified by her deficits in drive and focus.
She drew a free-form star on the paper, which was otherwise blank. The sketch looked a bit like a storm cloud. “I thought I could live in your pool house.”
“We don’t have that kind of pool house.”
“I’m starting to see that.”
Some insistent burbles from the kitchen and then the very low early shriek of a soon-to-boil teakettle. It rose in pitch, asserting itself.
“Coming,” a voice shouted, and Rafe strode in. “Holy shit, you’re home,” he said. He went into the kitchen and emphatically twisted a dial on the stove, ending the drama. “I thought you were Jacqui. What happened, did you get fired?”
“You’re home,” I said, trying to strain the surprise from my voice. I noticed Michelle noticing him, taking in his height, his casually scruffy T-shirt, and the sly pleasure he was taking in the possibility of me having been fired. He was a man, I thought, who looked better in jeans and T-shirts than in suits. That bothered me. Just doesn’t seem like my type. “Sorry to disappoint you. Wasn’t fired. But why are you home? Are the kids OK?”
He came back into the dining room carrying a mug. “I’m going in late. I had some stuff to take care of.” Something in his body language made me look past him to the hallway, where there were some flat, unassembled bankers’ boxes leaning against the wall. He was looking steadily at me when I looked back at him; he knew I’d seen them and was waiting for me to react.
“You haven’t even been into the office yet? It’s almost eleven! When are you going in?” I was conscious I was speaking differently than usual, that having Michelle present had inflected my speech with a bright, insincere quality, as if I were a corporate trainer.
“Hi,” Rafe said, turning to Michelle. I decoded all the data compressed in that syllable: ignoring my surprise that he hadn’t made it into the office, the implied rebuke that I hadn’t introduced him, the pride in his own good manners. The efficiency of marital data compression algorithms rivals that of the most advanced internet software. “You the new assistant? Lucky you. She doesn’t usually bring ’em here.” A deft dip of the tea bag. It was like a secret life he had here.
“We met in Spain,” I said.
“That so?” Rafe said. He gave Michelle a second look.
“At that entrepreneur conference?” I prompted.
“So what’s your billion-dollar idea?” Rafe asked her. “What are you working on? Autonomous self-driving suitcases? Dog underwear? Sorry—I’ve been around all this crap too long.” His voice was light but I sensed he was including me, the house, and Conch in that “all.”
“We connected over some shared passions,” I said. “Feel free to chime in here, Michelle.”
“I was doing a study-abroad,” she said. She spoke tentatively, wary of the tension in the air.
I nodded vigorously, approving of this direction. “I interned abroad. Very worthwhile experience and even more popular now, I understand, with the U.S. government’s restrictions on what constitutes an unpaid internship.”
Rafe said something to Michelle in Spanish. She replied, slowly.
“Bueno!” he said encouragingly. He asked her something else and she stammered a reply. I didn’t know what they were saying. They continued to speak, and I felt left out. Can Conch insta-translate? Maybe someday, but that’s hard to do.
“I found your jump drive,” a voice called from another room.
“Thanks, Jacqui!” Rafe yelled back. “Can you throw it down here? Your tea’s ready.”
“I got out all the suitcases,” Jacqui said, coming through the doorway.
“Where are you guys going?” Michelle asked.
“Ho ho,” Jacqui said. She got her tea from the kitchen and let out a guttural laugh. Then she came back into the dining room and whistled. She totally disapproved. Jacqui’s uncompromisingly judgmental—I love that about her. “He’s moving away,” Jacqui confided. “With the kids.”
“To Brazil,” Rafe said simply.
“Oh, wow,” Michelle said. “I didn’t realize. This could fuck up my pool house plan.” She turned to Rafe. “So you speak Portuguese too? Why’d you guys decide to go there?”
“I’m not moving.” I couldn’t bear to hear more. “Rafe’s taking a new role at work and will be in Brazil for the foreseeable.” “For the foreseeable” was a Rafe phrase I sometimes overheard him use on the phone, and by adopting it I felt like I was proving my loyalty, making it seem like this had been my idea. “Just for the near term.” There was consolation in that phrase. The near term, the place in which I happen to live, looking out on the smoky vistas of the medium and long term.
“Not to pry, but…you’re getting divorced?”
“No, the opposite,” I said with the insistent, delusional brightness that my life kept calling for. I made some gestures as if I were testing the elasticity of a long rubber band, to simulate the stretchiness of Rafe’s and my geographically unbreakable relational bond. “Listen, my sinuses are blocked. I have a lot of trouble.” I waved at my face, explanatorily. “I have to take care of this. Excuse me.”
Such a relief to close myself in my bathroom, so tasteful, so serene, so spa-like, with its textured grass cloth wallpaper. The grass cloth is a diamond pattern in which alternate rows of diamonds shine subtly for reasons not clear even after careful daily study while brushing my teeth. When I am nauseous the pattern makes me more nauseous, and I find my eyes following individual fibers as they wend inward and outward to form diamonds, the way as a child on long car rides my eyes followed telephone wires.
I saline-rinsed, and a fiery pain rose in the back of my head. The pain burned down to nothing, like wadded paper ashifying in the fireplace on a November night. The experience was somewhat cathartic. When Rafe was my boyfriend I used to call him from the bathroom at work. It was the only place with privacy. We had a lot of intense early conversations, including one of the first times he said he loved me, while I sat on the counter by the sink, examining my hair for split ends, riveted by his voice, embarrassed when the cleaning person came in with the cart and broke the mood. That bathroom was always empty because there were very few women at that company.
I went back into the foyer. Through the archway I could see them in the dining room, still talking. Rafe had sat down with her. He was leaning back in his chair, gesturing. I could tell he was talking about himself, possibly São Paulo (a variation on himself). He combed his hair back with his whole (large) hand and flung out his arm. Showing off. Occupying the maximum space he could occupy. He hadn’t had to be taught power poses; emulating forest predators came naturally to him. Michelle looked annoyingly rapt. I felt like, how could I have felt such a sense of connection with her? How could I ever have thought she was me?
In our foyer is an alcove with an art piece. We have a special little spotlight that picks it out at night. It’s a fulgurite. They’re these things that form underground during a lightning strike.
Mine looks like a mess of tree roots. It was created from sand and soil fusing together, when the sand becomes superheated and turns to glass. I was given it by a board I served on, as
a leaving present. I didn’t know what it was at first either, but I have since learned. A little printed card that came with the sculpture explained it. It’s a piece that is unique and obviously has special resonance for me. Something similar happened on a larger scale in the desert when they tested the atomic bomb—glassy sheets formed out of the fused sand.
Normally I just enjoy the piece for its unique look, its symbolism, the fact that it fits very nicely into this preexisting alcove in our house that I wasn’t sure how we were going to fill. I ran my fingers over the bumps and troughs of its tubey surface.
In the e-newsletter of an octogenarian futurist who once made a pass at me in an elevator, I’d read about something called the Zeigarnik effect. This is a phenomenon in which people experience intrusive thoughts about a task they’ve begun but haven’t yet completed. A tiny piece of cognitive energy is devoted, continuously, to maintaining the knowledge that you need to go back and finish up. This idea itself has stayed with me like an uncompleted task, awaiting its eventual application: a commencement speech, maybe, or a provocative op-ed. I thought of it now, how the lightning strike had sparked something inside me, setting me on a new path, but left something else unfinished.
I ran my finger over the surface of the fulgurite. The fulgurite seemed like evidence that you couldn’t go through something like I had and come out the same as before. The intensity of it had to change you at some basic level, the way sedimentary rock turned into that other kind that’s harder. My life had taken such an abrupt and irrevocable turn; perhaps deep in the skunkworks of my brain, part of me might want to revisit who I used to be.
The Glitch_A Novel Page 27