All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  “Like Dante’s inferno,” says Margaret. “I can practically hear my skin sizzle.”

  “You wearing sunscreen?”

  “No,” says Margaret.

  He reaches into his bag and pulls out a sticky-looking tube of SPF 45. “You should. You’re really pale. You don’t want to end up with skin cancer.”

  Margaret is strangely touched by this gesture. She takes the tube from him and gingerly squirts lotion on her arms and legs, smearing it in with a sweaty palm, aware, the whole time, of his curious eyes observing her.

  “Don’t forget your back,” he says. She reaches an arm behind and swipes vaguely at her shoulder as he watches. “Here, let me do it.”

  Margaret lets him take the tube from her. When his hand touches her back, the rough skin of his fingers tickles. His palm is warm against her flesh and unexpectedly intimate through the sticky lotion. She breaks out in goose bumps. Embarrassed, she pulls away.

  “That’s fine,” she says. “I’m going to lie on my back anyway.”

  She lies down, expecting James to go on with his pool cleaning, but he sits on the end of her chaise and lazily chews on a fingernail. Unsure what to say, she picks up her book, but even with it held up in front of her face she can feel him watching her. Acutely conscious that Lizzie’s oversized swimsuit droops in an unflattering way around her breasts, she tries unobtrusively to press her chest forward, then feels shallow for being so vain. Finally she gives up and drops the book in her sticky lap, staining the leather cover with sunscreen.

  “So…?” she asks, cocking a friendly eyebrow. “What’s up?”

  “Just curious.”

  “About?”

  “What’s your deal anyway?”

  “What do you mean?”

  James shrugs and examines his other hand for hangnails. “I don’t see a whole lot of people our age around here. It’s all soccer moms and little kids. Are you just on vacation, or did you move back home?”

  “I’m taking time off from capitalism. Which, it turns out, is pretty hard to do. It finds you, wherever you are.” She offers a wry smile, vaguely concerned that she might have shown her cards too soon.

  “Your mom says you’re a successful writer.”

  “My mother tends toward hyperbole. Don’t trust her.”

  James shrugs. “I don’t know about that. Your mom is pretty cool. She’s always friendly. Makes me lemonade and cookies and stuff.”

  “Yeah, that’s her specialty. One could say, her purpose in life.”

  James sucks at the tip of his finger and shades his face from the sun. “Wanna smoke some weed?” he asks. “I’ve got some killer Humboldt.”

  This is not what Margaret expected to hear. Surprised, she sits upright and instinctively glances at the house to check if her mother is standing in the window, policing against such a grave infraction of house rules. No one is there. Margaret turns back to James and smiles. “Absolutely,” she says. “Here?”

  “We can go in the pool shed,” he says. “No one ever goes in there but me.”

  Margaret follows James along the path behind the rhododendron bushes to the shack at the back of the garden. The shed is long and narrow, like a walk-in closet—if she opens her arms, she can touch both walls at once—and built from whitewashed concrete. It is cool in here, a haven for the spiders that have taken up residence in the corners. Margaret plops down on a pool raft that has been inflated and placed in the center of the room, next to the water heater and pump. The smell of chlorine reminds her of summers as a child, days when she spent so much time in the pool she could still smell the chemicals on her skin when she lay in bed at night listening to the cicadas in the garden.

  James settles in next to her on the raft, kicking aside a couple of bottles of pool chemicals to make room for his legs. She watches as he pulls a hand-blown glass pipe and a plastic baggie from his shorts pocket. He holds the pipe close to his face as he loads it, scrutinizing the pot, pinching out the fattest buds. He hands her the pipe and leans over to light it for her. She is aware, as she inhales the sweet, sticky smoke, of his hand hovering just inches away from her nose. James holds the lighter steadily, cupping it with his other hand to keep the flame from singeing her.

  The pot flows through her like a long sigh. “God, that’s good,” she says and leans backward until she is flat on the raft. She closes her eyes and listens to James flicking at the lighter, hears the rush of his breath as he exhales a plume of smoke. Behind her, the pool pump emits its electric heartbeat.

  “So,” says James. “Why are you hiding out?”

  “How could you tell I’m hiding out?”

  “It’s not hard to figure out.”

  “Well, let’s just say that I’ve run into a little trouble with the nice people at Visa,” she says. “And MasterCard, actually. And one or two collection agencies.”

  James sparks up the pipe again and inhales deeply before responding. “When I lived in New York I knew a guy who lived in the subway tunnels. He was totally broke,” he says. “He made these crazy-ass sculptures out of broken bicycle locks. Apparently there are lots of broken bicycle locks in New York. Anyway, this guy lives in a tunnel where the only light at all is from his flashlight and he sleeps on a sleeping bag on top of a row of orange crates and he can hear the rats squeaking away underneath the crates at night. And he lives down there in the dark for, like, six months while he builds these insane sculptures that look like the digestive tract of some kind of mutant monster. And somehow this guy, who smells like rat piss and garbage, wanders into some trendy gallery and convinces the owner to come down into the tunnel and look at his work. This art-dealer guy proclaims him a genius and carts all the sculptures away and sells them for a goddamn fortune. And now the guy is living in a loft in SoHo for, like, five grand a month. He hangs out with Chloë Sevigny.”

  Margaret tries to follow the relevance of this story to her own life, but she’s grown too hazy to capture the intent of his narrative. “Is this some follow-your-dreams morality tale?”

  James is quiet for a moment. “No point, really,” he says. “Just felt like telling you. Happiest guy I ever met.”

  “Now that he’s rich and successful?”

  “Well, yeah,” James says, looking contemplative. “I guess.”

  “Oh,” says Margaret, disappointed. She rolls on her side on the mattress, bobbing gently on her cushion of air. “Why were you living in New York?”

  “I was getting my PhD at Columbia,” he says.

  Margaret tries to sit up and almost falls over. “A PhD in what?”

  “Chemistry. I dropped out.”

  “Why?”

  “Too much work,” he says. “It was stressing me out. I never got enough sleep and I’d wake up in the morning with a dry mouth and a headache and need to drink six cups of coffee to get out of bed. And then I’d spend the whole day feeling like I was twelve steps behind where I should be. I’d kill myself for these tight-assed professors who were overloading us with work to see how much they could make us endure before they gave us some totally arbitrary grade. And I realized that this is what it would be like for the rest of my life and I decided that that kind of life sucks. So I moved here.”

  “Why Santa Rita?”

  James shrugs. “Rich people always have lots of money to spend.”

  “And you became a pool boy?”

  “Well, you know, it’s still chemistry.”

  “It’s indentured slavery. You can’t possibly be making more than eight dollars an hour.”

  “Twenty,” he says. “And I’ve got other sources of income. I’m saving up to move to Puerto Escondido, this surf town down in Mexico. I think I might open a bar on the beach. Sell surfboards.”

  “Huh,” says Margaret, as she reaches for the pipe. “You surf?”

  “No,” he says. “But I could.”

  “Right,” says Margaret. And after taking another hit she closes her eyes. She can vividly see Mexico: the immaculate white-sand beach
es, the stolidly proletariat Mexican fishermen, sunsets on the beach and cold Coronas. Chilled coconuts and carnitas tacos. Serapes hand-woven by indigenous artisans. “I’ve always wanted to learn to surf,” she says and, surprisingly, means it. Four years in L.A. and she only went to the beach twice; she’d spent all her time working on Snatch instead. What a waste, she thinks.

  “I gotta get to work,” says James. He stands up and wipes his hands on his shorts. “Got two more houses today.”

  “Thanks,” says Margaret. “It was nice talking. And thanks for the pot.”

  James pauses at the door of the pool shed and chews on a thumbnail. He looks out at the garden and then back at her. “By the way,” he says. “I think your mom might have a problem.”

  “Yeah?” says Margaret, surprised. “You know about the divorce? I wouldn’t have thought she’d tell you.”

  James swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing in the sun. “Aw, forget it. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m stoned.”

  Margaret tries to focus her eyes on him, but her head is wobbling too much. “Don’t worry, I’m helping her out,” she says.

  “Good,” says James, and disappears.

  When Margaret gathers the energy to rise up off the air mattress, a few minutes later, James is already gone. She goes back to her chaise and stares down at the law books. She shouldn’t have gotten stoned. Now she won’t be able to understand anything in them. The day stretches before her, empty and hot and blurry.

  She gathers up her books, puts her sundress back on, and moves to the cool darkness of her father’s abandoned study. The house is silent—her mother is napping, her sister off at swim camp. Blearily, Margaret turns on the computer to check her e-mail. Josephine has e-mailed her twice, asking where she’s disappeared to, why her phone is turned off, demanding to know if she’s okay. Claire has invited her to her latest art opening, and Alexis has even sent an e-mail from Tokyo, where she is on location, that reads, simply, “????” Margaret absorbs their concern but can’t quite summon a cogent (or honest) response—not now. Not yet. Instead, she types one line to all three of them. “Hi guys, Home taking care of my mother. Will write more soon. XO M.” She clicks “Send,” satisfied that she’s put them off for a while.

  As the computer chugs away, retrieving a pile of spam, the telephone rings once, and Margaret automatically picks it up and hangs it right back up again, cutting it off without even checking to see who is on the other side. The words of the e-mails blur, then come back into focus, then split again into a kaleidoscope of meaningless letters. Squinting hard, she stops abruptly at the sight of her father’s name on an e-mail dated five days earlier. For a minute, she thinks she’s hallucinating it, but when she blinks and looks again it’s still there: Paul Miller .

  “Margaret,” it reads, “I’ve been trying to reach you but it seems your phone (phones?) has been cut off. I have something urgent to discuss with you. Please call me as soon as possible. Love, Dad.”

  Margaret stares at the message, trying to decipher what it means, but her brain spins in lazy circles and doesn’t deliver a clue. She registers a sense of alarm, however—this mystery must be resolved immediately. Could it have something to do with the IPO? The divorce? Urgent! She picks up the phone and begins to dial her father’s office number, but the sound of Janice moving around in the hall above her causes her to stop. What if Janice walks in on her while she’s on the phone with her dad? She sits there, the phone warming in her hand, and vacantly reflects on the catastrophe that might ensue. Talking to her father from within the sacred confines of Janice’s home would be, in a way, like an infidelity, akin to Paul having sex with Beverly in Janice’s bed. And what if Janice picked up the phone by mistake and heard them talking? Cruel! She stares at the keypad of the phone and suddenly even the sound of her breath seems very loud in the quiet house. There’s absolutely no way she can call him without Janice overhearing her. And she doesn’t even have a cell phone anymore.

  Urgent! The word triggers an ache in Margaret both animal and instinctive—made worse because she’s stoned. What can she do? The only logical thing, Margaret puzzles out, from this deliciously dulled state, would be to get in her car and drive to see her father in person. She might even serve as a sort of ambassador or emissary for her mother, the white flag of neutrality flying behind her as she leaves home turf and enters enemy territory. (Or would that be the demilitarized zone?) Janice wouldn’t have to know about her visit until Margaret returned home with Paul’s surrender in hand. Or a truce, at the minimum. It’s possible, right?

  Deep inside, somewhere near her spleen, a warning signal tells her this is a very bad idea. It would be wiser to just stay at home, ignore the e-mail, and avoid any sort of conflict. Is there really anything to be gained? (Almost a half billion dollars! She pushes this thought away before it can fully form.) But the embarrassing truth, which even her marijuana high can’t quite obscure, is that the novelty of finally being sought out by her father is something Margaret is unable to resist.

  traffic on the 101 is light, which is a relief, because Margaret is aware that her faculties are blunted. She drives behind a gardener’s truck that spills a cloud of grass clippings onto the hood of her car. Her air-conditioning unit splutters and hisses out an anemic stream of tepid air. She rolls down the window, and the crosswind whips her hair into a wild nest. The tape deck grinds through a warped PJ Harvey cassette, then reverses direction to play the other side.

  By the time she reaches the office park, she has sobered up enough to wonder whether this is a good idea and can’t quite recall what she planned to say to her father in the first place. She stares up at the black glass facade—a forbidding blank monolith designed to ensure that outsiders mind their own damn business—and then smooths her hair, wipes her face with the hem of her skirt, and examines herself in the broken rearview mirror. She wishes she had thought to change out of the tired orange terry-cloth sundress. Sweat trickles down between her breasts. She feels dizzy.

  The lobby of Applied Pharmaceuticals is blindingly white. The walls are painted white. The floors are white marble. The couches are white leather, sitting on a white shag rug. On the walls hang framed photographs of the apple-green Coifex pills, blown up to three hundred times their actual size. The Coifex logo has also been enlarged and rendered in green neon. Sitting in its eerie glow is the receptionist, an attractive young Asian woman with her hair pulled up into a tight bun and trendy black geek glasses perched on the end of her nose. She is wearing green, too: green shirtdress, green shoes, green clip in her hair. Margaret wonders whether this has been mandated by upper management or whether she chose the color out of allegiance to her employers. Either way, it strikes Margaret as a depressing display of corporate fealty. Then again, she probably has stock options.

  “I’m here to see Paul Miller,” she informs the receptionist.

  The woman lifts the receiver and holds it six inches from her head. “And who may I say is here?”

  “His daughter,” says Margaret.

  The receptionist dials and then leans over, cupping her hand around the phone so that Margaret can’t hear her, and holds a brief conversation with someone on the other end of the line.

  She sits up again. “He wants to know which one?”

  “What?”

  “Which daughter are you?”

  “His firstborn.”

  After a brief conference, Margaret is pointed in the direction of the elevator and instructed to ride to the fourth floor. When the elevator opens, Paul’s assistant, Evan, is waiting for her. “Well, hi!” he says, patting her on the shoulder. She shrugs away. He guides her through a warren of cubicles toward the back of the vast room, where a bank of tall wooden doors screen the more important members of the Coifex family from the hoi polloi. “So good to see you again. How are you? And your sister?”

  “Surviving,” says Margaret, remembering the last time she saw him, marching out their front door with three
suitcases. “Considering.”

  Evan blanches. “Right.” They reach the last office and he knocks twice, gently, before tipping open the door and gesturing her in with a grandiose sweep of his hand. She takes a deep breath, chasing away the last cobwebs of her marijuana high with a blast of air-conditioned oxygen. She rubs her arms and walks in.

  Paul’s office is so silent that she can hear the whine of the fluorescent lights overhead. Her father is sitting behind a vast mahogany desk, staring at a point on the floor. He glances up at her, winks, and holds one finger aloft in the air. It’s only then that she notices the wireless earpiece plugged into his left ear.

  She comes to a halt just inside the door. He has gained a bit of weight around his middle, and the wide expanse of his forehead reflects the lighting overhead. Everything about her father is solid—jowls that are fleshy and tanned from weekends on the golf course, a muscular neck that battles against the collar of his button-down shirt—except for his mouth, which is pink and delicate and reveals sharp but tiny white teeth. It’s the mouth of a girl. He wears trim wire-framed glasses and a pinstriped suit with a green satin tie the exact color of the Coifex logo, and looks carnivorous and powerfully self-entitled, as if he is about to savor a twelve-course meal cooked just for him. Money suits him.

  “That’s great, great,” he says into the earpiece. “Look, tell them the report is due any day now and send them a gift basket, okay?…No, not the doctors, the VCs.”

  Hanging up, he stands and comes around to the front of his desk. There is an awkward moment as he leans forward and places his arms around Margaret’s shoulders in a bear hug. Margaret, taken aback, puts her hand on the wide part of his back, feeling the expensive Italian wool under her palms. They both pull away quickly.