The Grift

by Debra Ginsberg

  What she really needed, Madeline thought, was to get some kind of glance into the future so at least she could be prepared for what was coming. This Madeline did trust in—she’d been seeing an astrologer/psychic in La Jolla regularly until a few months ago when the woman decided to retire, of all things. How did you retire if you were a psychic? Wasn’t that against some kind of code? Not that her ex-psychic was that great to begin with. Madeline’s panic turned to anger. Her psychic had actually sucked when you got right down to it, even at a hundred dollars a session.

  Madeline’s mind shifted to the psychic whom her event coordinator had booked for their holiday party back in December. What was the woman’s name? Marina. That was it. Madeline hadn’t had a chance to speak to her, let alone get a reading, because there was so much going on that night. Between getting that whole sushi thing set up, making sure everyone was getting enough but not too much to drink and Andrew’s foul mood, Madeline had spent the whole night in a state of dithering anxiety. But people were raving about the psychic, she remembered. They’d loved her.

  “Namaste.” Lydia had to raise her voice considerably against the sound of the rain, robbing her ending cue of its intended peacefulness.

  “Namaste,” Madeline mumbled along with the other would-be yogis, and she was off her mat and putting on her sweatshirt before the rest of them could even roll over and sit up. This was one of the best yoga classes in a city that had them by the gross, but today Madeline couldn’t wait to leave. Besides, she was now on a mission; she wanted to find this Marina and make an appointment as soon as possible. Maybe even today.

  “Damn it.” Madeline stood at the door, staring out at what had become a full-on winter storm. In this part of the world, winter was a term used mostly to delineate holidays rather than temperature changes, and was only somewhat helpful in predicting periods of precipitation. This was why Madeline had decided to park her car several blocks away in Moonlight Beach. The clouds had looked heavy and she’d thought it might rain, but with the selfish optimism of most southern Californians, she’d figured it wouldn’t rain on her. It was this very type of thinking that kept the locals from buying, selling or using umbrellas.

  “Really coming down out there, isn’t it?”

  Madeline turned to the voice and saw Lydia smiling behind her. “I was so stupid,” Madeline said. “I should have parked closer, but I wanted to get in a walk before yoga. There’s no way I’m running through this now. I’ll drown before I get to my car.”

  “I actually biked down here this morning,” Lydia said. “I’m going to wait it out at Darling’s across the street. I could use a hot drink, anyway. Do you want to join me?”

  “I don’t know,” Madeline said, staring out at the wet streets. “I should probably…” Probably what? There was nothing Madeline had to do: no cooking, no cleaning and certainly no child to take care of. Her one goal for the day was to track down a psychic. Sudden tears formed behind her eyes and she struggled to contain them. This was her third rapid change of emotion in the space of fifteen minutes and she felt like she was going crazy. These hormones were going to kill her.

  “Are you okay, Madeline? You seemed a little distracted today.” Lydia’s broad face radiated concern. Madeline decided to take a chance.

  “I’m going through kind of a rough patch right now,” she said. “Wish I had a little direction or guidance or something.”

  “Don’t we all?” Lydia said. “Seems like it’s getting harder and harder to maintain equilibrium these days, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does,” Madeline said, feeling fresh tears push at the backs of her eyes. She wiped at them quickly and drew in a deep breath.

  Lydia tipped her head slightly to one side and gave Madeline a penetrating look. “Come on, Madeline, have a cup of coffee with me. We can talk. I won’t keep you forever, I promise. How long can it rain, right?”

  Madeline smiled. She could feel her muscles loosening and her jaw relax. Parking so far away hadn’t been such a stupid move after all. She needed more friends; better friends, real friends. Maybe Lydia would be that kind of friend. “Okay,” she said. “I’m game.”

  “Great,” Lydia said. “It’s before lunch, so with any luck we’ll get a table by the window.”

  “Luck,” Madeline repeated. She had a feeling hers was about to change.

  Chapter 6

  It was a bit of blind luck that Eddie happened to look up from his San Diego Union-Tribune at the exact moment two women made their dash across Highway 101. Had he given the right-wing Republican bullshit on the editorial page three more seconds of his time, he would have missed a glorious vision: two wet, bouncing, beautiful sets of tits coming straight at him.

  Eddie stared out through the rain-bleared window of Darling’s and revised his opinion slightly as the women crossed and ran, laughing and soaked, into the restaurant. Only one of the two pairs of braless breasts was truly outstanding—firm, round, probably fake—but he wasn’t complaining. Wet T-shirts in a coffee shop on a Tuesday morning were a rare treat indeed.

  Eddie watched with pleasure as the two women begged the hostess for a table next to the window. The one on the right had a plain face—Eddie had finally allowed his gaze to travel up that high—but came with a nice, well-toned body. The one on the left, though, long-legged, tan, with damp and tousled blond hair, was prime. She looked extremely well maintained, Eddie thought, and that probably meant there was a man—and money—at home. As if to prove him right, the blonde raised her left hand to push the hair out of her eyes and flashed a giant rock on her ring finger. Had to be three, maybe four carats at least, Eddie reckoned, although he’d never been close enough to a diamond that size to judge. His own wife wore a plain gold band, same as the one he wore, with the date of their wedding inscribed on the inside. It had been Eddie’s experience that the bigger the diamond, the bigger the bitch who wore it and the bigger the asshole who had given it to her. It had also been Eddie’s experience that women tended to writhe and flail their arms when they came and those goddamn rings scratched like hell.

  Eddie noticed that the two women and the tiny black-haired hostess were staring at him staring at them, and he busted out his trademark grin. He had been doubly blessed with dimples and good teeth and he never failed to use them to his best advantage. The hostess came over to his table, clutching a couple of plastic-covered menus to her flat chest.

  “Hey,” she said, “how’re you doing?”

  “Just fine,” Eddie answered. “Soon as I get my breakfast I’ll be even better.”

  “Oh, you haven’t eaten yet?”

  Eddie saw that the two women were still standing at the door, straining to hear their conversation. “No, I have not,” he told the hostess. “What’s the problem?” He glanced again in the direction of the ladies at the door.

  “Oh, no, I just…We were wondering if you’d mind…those people”—and here she gestured at the door—“are dying for a window table, and since you’re only one person sitting at a table for four, we were wondering if you’d mind moving to the bar?”

  Eddie considered the situation and weighed his options. “I’d rather not move to the bar,” he told the hostess, watching her little face fold into a scowl. “Got a bad back—don’t do too well on a stool, if you know what I mean. But I’d be happy to have the ladies join me here.” He turned his smile up to full wattage and shouted across the restaurant, “Ladies—plenty of room over here for two more!”

  “Whatever,” the hostess said, making her way back to the door, where she relayed Eddie’s message. He wasn’t particularly surprised when he wasn’t taken up on his offer. Plain Face looked like she’d probably have gone for it, but Diamond Ring was just pissed. “Thanks anyway,” Diamond Ring called as the hostess led them to two cramped stools at the bar. The flat tone of her voice was the very definition of insincerity. Hell with her, then.

  Eddie shrugged, turned back around to face the window and picked up his newspaper. Goddamn it,
women were such a pain in the ass. But he loved them—all of them. Women were Eddie’s drug of choice, and like any addiction they caused great pleasure, made him do stupid things and left him with great regret. It was because of a woman that he was even sitting here right now, allowing himself to be snubbed by the likes of Diamond Ring.

  Although Eddie managed a large hardware and home repair shop one exit up the freeway in Leucadia, he never spent any time in this glossy, New Age, tofu-eating part of San Diego, preferring to keep himself removed from the foolish, faddish trends that went along with this side of the social spectrum. He lived down south and inland in El Cajon with his wife, Tina, and their two teenage boys. Tina worked down there, too, as a secretary at his boys’ high school. It was a perfect arrangement: she kept an eye on them, they had her close by and nobody worried themselves about him. That kind of privacy was worth every minute of his daily commute, which kept Eddie’s two worlds separate, although at seventy miles round-trip, the goddamn gas prices were killing him. Normally, he’d be taking this rare weekday off to do some work around his own house. He’d been installing those kitchen cabinets for what seemed like years already, his wife on him all the time about them, but he’d told Cassie—no, he’d promised her—he’d do this other thing today.

  The waitress interrupted Eddie’s musings by delivering his breakfast: scrambled eggs, bacon and cheesy potatoes. None of these items was available to him at home. Eddie’s wife had taken him off red meat and anything else worth eating after his last cholesterol test had come back close to three hundred. She wouldn’t let him drink, either. Eddie felt a stab of guilt about cheating with this heavy breakfast. It was, oddly, a less comfortable guilt than the one he felt when he cheated on her with Cassie.

  But Cassie…There was no way to resist her even if he’d tried. Little red-lipped face shaped like a heart to match that heart-shaped pleasure palace between her legs. Cassie would go for it—and enjoy it—anywhere, at any time. Damn, she was hot. And so willing. Eddie never could figure out why.

  He’d decided long ago that it was pointless to try to pretend he wasn’t married or to lead a girl to believe there might be some kind of future beyond some good conversation and some excellent fucking. All modesty aside, he knew he was great in the sack—women never faked it with Eddie. He also had a sense of humor—wasn’t afraid to laugh at himself, either—and they liked that. But if you couldn’t laugh at yourself after where he’d been (although he never talked about his time in prison with anyone, not even his wife), then you were on a slow road to hell for sure.

  But even knowing that he’d never leave his wife, knowing that he loved his wife—because Eddie didn’t dish out that crap about his wife not understanding him or not having sex with him or whatever—even with all of that they were still willing to get what they could and to ride it out as long as possible. This was the thing that just confused the hell out of him. Great in bed could only get you so far, right? There was never time for cuddling and movies and weekends. Snatch and run. Why did so many of them go for that?

  But they did. And he had to be careful, because sometimes they acted like it was all okay, like they wanted it this way themselves, but then they got too involved. Take Cassie, for example. She was so good at always turning the conversation back to him, asking him questions about what kinds of books he’d read when he was a kid, what kinds of movies he liked to watch, what kinds of music he liked to listen to now and how was it different from the music he listened to when he was younger. She wanted to know about his tattoos, how old was he when he got them and what was he thinking about at the time. Eddie was well practiced in keeping off the topic of that time in his life and found that a strong, pained silence usually shut off more questions. That was another thing about women—they got turned on by dark secrets as long as they didn’t know what those secrets were. But that was Cassie’s business. She cut hair and had to talk to people about themselves all day long—that was how he’d met her in the first place.

  Almost a year ago already, he’d needed a haircut and his usual guy was on vacation, so he’d stopped into the little place in the strip mall where Cassie worked, and she’d had a chair available. Right away he knew they’d end up naked together sooner or later. She smelled so good, like fresh-cut flowers, and he could see the yes in her eyes as she leaned over him, brushing her plump little tits against his shoulders, trailing her fingers down the back of his neck.

  He tipped her ten dollars on a twenty-dollar haircut and told her, “You’re gorgeous and I’m very attracted to you.”

  “Thank you,” she said, “and I feel the same about you.”

  “Shall we do something about it?”

  She touched his wedding ring with her fingertip. “Isn’t that going to be a problem?”

  “Not for me,” he said. After that it was only a matter of the details.

  Thinking about her now, Eddie was almost drooling. He thought about Cassie often—more than he wanted to—and sometimes lately she was in his dreams and he woke up hard. He’d gotten too tangled up with Cassie, he knew it, and soon he’d have to find a way to cool the whole thing off. She was sweet—so sweet—but she wasn’t stupid. She was starting to want more than he could give her. He knew the signs. She was starting to cry—quietly but wetly—after they had sex now, and a few weeks ago she’d told him that she loved him. No, she’d told him that she had fallen in love with him. More often now she was starting her sentences with “I wish” or “If only” and ending them with “Never mind; it’s okay.”

  Cassie knew the rules, but it was only a matter of time before her desire reached that critical mass peculiar to women. If she got to that point, it would result in one of two outcomes. She’d either tell him that she was sorry, but it was too hard to keep giving herself emotionally to a man who was unavailable and they’d have to end it, or she’d go Fatal Attraction on him and start looking for bunnies to boil.

  It was because he feared turning Cassie toward the latter scenario that Eddie had agreed to go to this psychic whatever-her-name-was. Cassie had given him the reading as a birthday present months ago, explaining that she couldn’t give him an object of any kind that might be discovered by his wife. The reading could give him some insight into his past, Cassie had said, and maybe some into his future. It would mean a lot to her if he didn’t make any noises about how ridiculous these kinds of things were and would just open his mind and go. Even though he suspected Cassie was hoping the psychic would tell him to dump his wife and take up with her (maybe she’d even planned this out in advance), Eddie promised he’d go. Well, he owed her that much. And even though she was a reasonable girl, you could never really tell. There weren’t too many things in the world that frightened Eddie, but the unpredictability of a woman’s mood was one of them.

  Eddie checked his watch as he gulped down the rest of his coffee. Still had an hour before he was supposed to be at this thing and the address was practically around the corner, but he didn’t want to sit in Darling’s anymore. The place was starting to fill up in spite of the pouring rain and the atmosphere was getting steamy and loud. Thinking about his situation with Cassie was starting to give him a headache and the cheesy potatoes were giving him heartburn. He caught the waitress’s eye and gestured for his check.

  Too bad it was raining so hard. This would be a perfect time to go sit on the beach, maybe have a smoke (although Eddie was supposed to have given that up as well). He lived so close to it, but Eddie rarely saw the ocean. Two, maybe three blocks from where he sat now, the waves were breaking against the hard, wet sand. There were probably surfers out there, too. There wasn’t any kind of weather that kept those guys out of the water.

  That’s what he’d do, Eddie decided. He’d get in the truck, park at the beach and watch the waves and surfers. Maybe even take a quick nap. He had time and the ocean was beautiful in the rain.

  Chapter 7

  Cooper washed down his dry cranberry scone with the end of his double soy latte and sho
ved his napkin into the empty paper cup. Not much of a lunch, but he was preparing a big, intricate dinner for Max tonight and he didn’t want to load up ahead of time. He cooked much better on an empty stomach, anyway. He should be at the Harvest Ranch Market right now, in fact, buying salmon and blueberries, not sitting in his car in front of the giant green glass–and-marble building where Max had his psychiatric practice. This building also housed a group of plastic surgeons and a fertility clinic. It was a bizarre combination of specialties, Cooper thought, but he supposed it made some sense. They were all very costly, and elective, medical services. Where else should you go than some of the most expensive real estate in the country with a drop-dead gorgeous view of the Pacific Ocean? And it was beautiful—even in the rain. Made you want to get liposuction or go crazy just so you could watch the waves from the waiting room.

  It was still catting and dogging out there, Cooper observed. Even if he made a run for it, he’d get soaking wet. Of course, he shouldn’t actually go in at all. He was probably out of his mind to see Max at his office. It was one of Max’s cardinal rules—Don’t show up at the office. As if Cooper would go ballistic, scream or do something so incredibly gay that Max would somehow be found guilty (read: queer) by association. As if Max’s patients didn’t do the same every damn day of the week. They were the crazy ones, not him. He was normal. Actually, it was Max who was off his head. It was 2006, for crying out loud. Gay was so out in the open (for lack of better words) that it was almost passé. Hello, Brokeback Mountain?

  Yet here he was, tiptoeing around like a frightened mistress whose married lover had threatened to end the affair if it ever went public. Ridiculous and humiliating is what it was. Cooper didn’t know why he put up with it.