The Grift

by Debra Ginsberg

  “I’m Madeline.”

  “Like the book?” he asked. “Or like the cookie?”

  Madeline’s smile grew bigger and she finally reached out and shook his hand. Satisfied with himself, Eddie turned back to Marina and gazed at her with a kind of desperate longing that made her feel sick. “Mind if I join you two?” he asked.

  For an absurd moment, the three of them did an updated version of the face-off scene from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Marina looked to Madeline, Madeline to Eddie, Eddie to Marina and back around again, each one trying to see the motivations of the others through the thick haze of their own—and each one ready to draw a metaphorical gun. It was Marina who finally broke the silence by standing up abruptly and announcing, “I’m really sorry, but I have to go. I have an appointment and I’m running late.” She fished a five-dollar bill from her pocket and placed it on the table. “Madeline, it was great to see you.” She nodded at Eddie. “Ed,” she said.

  “Marina, wait,” Madeline said. “We haven’t—”

  “Take care,” Marina said, turning away from them both and walking too fast out of Darling’s and onto the street. The jangle of the ridiculous bell on the restaurant’s door echoed in her head as she ducked down a side street to take the long way around to her office.

  That uneasiness turned into alarm when she finally reached her building. There, tossed against her office door, lay a pile of torn, rotting roses half buried in dark, damp dirt. Small clods of earth were sprinkled along the ground. Fear made a heated knot in Marina’s stomach. Florida, she thought. It’s Florida all over again. She looked up and around, as if she could see who had left the mess, even though she knew whoever it was would be long gone. If anything, the street and the parking lot were quieter than usual.

  There were many worse things that could have been dumped on her doorstep, but there was something so violent about these dead flowers, clearly torn from their roots and crawling, she could see now, with feasting insects. Marina felt completely powerless and naked. Her eyes stung with sharp tears. But one moment of fear and self-pity was all she would allow herself. By the time Marina had bagged up the rotten dirt and taken it out to the Dumpster behind her office, she had already half convinced herself that there was nothing ominous about a pile of decaying flowers, which had probably been left there by some bored kids with nothing better to do. And as she brushed the last traces of earth away from her front door, just in time for her first client of the day to walk through it, she’d decided that she’d altogether overreacted. Her meeting with Madeline had made her edgy. That was all it was.

  Marina had booked her day full to make up for the cuts she’d made in her appointments over the last few weeks to better serve her dating schedule, and she had to work hard to maintain a sense of focus. As the hours wore on, she pushed the morning’s anxiety to the farthest corner of her brain and allowed her thoughts to return to Gideon. Whatever feelings of hesitancy she’d had about their relationship in the morning melted away by the afternoon. By the time Cassie arrived for her appointment, the last of the day, Marina’s anticipation had turned into fierce longing, and Gideon had become nothing short of a glowing knight waiting to carry her off into the sunset. And all of this only served to make her time with Cassie more annoying.

  Marina’s hopes for a quick, smooth reading were scuttled almost immediately. The girl was both whiny and demanding, and nothing Marina said was what she wanted to hear. When Marina pulled the Hermit from her tarot deck and explained that it meant Cassie needed to take time alone for reflection, Cassie insisted on pulling another. When Marina said that a transit of Saturn over Cassie’s natal Venus showed the need to reevaluate her feelings about relationships, Cassie countered that there must be something else in the stars that had a more positive connotation.

  Marina came close to taking the easy way out: telling Cassie that, yes, perhaps there was light at the end of her dark romantic tunnel and that her “man” (whom Cassie steadfastly refused to identify) would finally realize that she was the woman he’d been looking for his entire life. But then Cassie, who talked too much and listened very little, offered up a piece of information: She’d lied about being pregnant to buy some time with the object of her affection.

  “I know, I know, it’s wrong to lie,” Cassie said, “but it’s the only way I can get him to realize how much he loves me.”

  “And do you think he’ll still love you once he finds out you’ve lied to him?” Marina asked. “Don’t you think that might make him angry?”

  Cassie shrugged. “He’s a liar, too,” she said. “How could he get angry with me? Besides, I could always get pregnant and then it wouldn’t be a lie. Let’s look at the cards again. Maybe they have something to say about that.”

  For the first time since she’d met him, Marina felt a stab of sympathy for Eddie. “Cassie—” she began and stopped herself, wondering if it was worth it to make this effort and why she cared to in the first place. “Speaking to you now just woman to woman—not as your psychic—I think this is a very bad idea. People get very hurt and angry when they’ve been lied to, especially about something like this. You can’t build a right on so many wrongs.” She shuffled through her tarot deck until she found the Tower. One of the most dramatic cards in the deck, it showed lightning igniting the top of a castle, flames bursting from its dark windows. In the foreground a man and a woman were shown falling, arms outstretched, to the rocks below. Marina placed the card in front of Cassie. “This is what can happen,” she said.

  But Cassie was neither looking nor listening. She looked at Marina, a dreamy expression on her face. “Have you ever been in love?” she asked. “I mean, really in love?”

  Marina remembered the first time she’d met Cassie, at Madeline’s party, and how the girl had asked her the same thing then. Gideon’s smiling face appeared again in her mind’s eye.

  No, she thought but didn’t say. Not until now.

  Chapter 18

  It was one of those California mornings so sparkling and perfect it begged to be photographed and made into a postcard for the tourism bureau. The air was warm and bright without even the slightest hint of winter, and the ocean mixed a thousand shades of blue as it tossed jewel-studded waves to the shore. Marina stood in the queue outside Rosa’s, waiting for her turn to order coffee. Her knees were trembling and her hands were shaking, aftershocks of the earthquake that had torn her apart inside only hours before. But on the outside, nothing had changed and everything looked the same. It was critical she remember that. The most important thing to do—the only thing to do—was to pretend that everything was still normal.

  In the line ahead of her, beach walkers clad in shorts and spandex halter tops vacillated between cranberry muffins and apple turnovers. There was so little variety in the offerings, but they still agonized over the choice. People always took so much time with the small things, savoring their ability to pick one over the other, rating their decisions later. I should have had the muffin; this turnover is too greasy. I’m glad I chose the turnover; it’s delicious. The less significant the outcome, the more time spent on the choice. You could control the outcome of breakfast by what you chose to eat and then you could do it all again the next morning. But you only got one shot with the big choices and then everything changed forever. You could never undo a bad choice over a big thing. You couldn’t go back the next day and pick the damn muffin instead of the turnover. You could never again decide that it would be worth it to ignore your own rules for the sake of what you thought was love. Once the egg was broken, all the king’s men just stood there looking at it. It was a terrible choice she’d made, Marina thought; a huge mistake. And now…what? Pretend everything is normal and carry on. It was crisis-mode denial, but it was all she could do.

  It was finally her turn and Marina took her place in front of Rosa. The woman gave Marina the abbreviated smile she reserved for regulars and asked, “Coffee today?”

  “Yes, please,” Marina answered. “L
arge.”

  “Muffin?”

  “Just coffee, please.”

  When Rosa turned around to get the coffee, Marina saw the girl who had been standing behind her. Slender and very pale, the girl looked like a much younger version of Rosa. She was barefoot and dressed in what appeared to be a hospital gown. Marina watched as the girl stared at Rosa with an expression of ineffable sadness and then reached out with a thin arm to stroke Rosa’s back. If Rosa noticed, she gave no indication; she just carried on hustling hot coffee, Styrofoam cups and plastic lids. The girl looked sick, Marina thought. Why was she working with Rosa, who hardly ever had help anyway? And why was she dressed in a hospital gown? It certainly didn’t seem like a fashion statement.

  Rosa took Marina’s money and made change at the register. The girl reached over again and touched Rosa’s face. Once more, Rosa ignored her.

  “Thank you,” Rosa said, putting the change in Marina’s hand. The girl was now standing so close to Rosa that their bodies were touching.

  “Is that your daughter?” Marina said, smiling at the girl. “She looks just like you.” The girl turned her attention to Marina for the first time, looking mildly surprised, but Rosa’s face blanched and her eyes widened, showing both fear and sorrow. Marina was completely confused. Rosa’s reaction was so inappropriate it set off loud alarm bells in Marina’s head. She could feel the prickle of sudden perspiration along her back.

  “What did you say?” Rosa asked. “I don’t understand you.”

  There was something wrong, very wrong, but Marina pressed on. She gestured to the girl. “I just said she must be your daughter. She looks like you. She’s…lovely. Must be nice to have some help.”

  Rosa turned to the girl and stared right through her at some unseen point. “My daughter…” Rosa started and then choked on a sob, tears making their way down her cheeks. “My daughter is dead. She died last month.”

  “Oh, I…I am so sorry. I didn’t…” Marina felt heat redden her face. She clutched her cup too tightly and hot coffee spilled on her fingers, burning them. The girl who wasn’t there was still staring at her, now mouthing the words Tell her. “I’m so sorry,” Marina repeated, putting her cup down and slowly backing away.

  “Can you see her?” Rosa asked, her voice thick with grief.

  Tell her, the girl mouthed.

  “Can you see her?” Rosa was crying now. “Please tell me.”

  Tell her tell her tell her tell her.

  “I’m sorry, Rosa; I’m sorry. I have to go now.” Marina turned and walked as fast as she could toward the beach without breaking into a run. “Hey,” she heard behind her, “you left your coffee. Hey!” But Marina didn’t turn around or stop until she’d crossed the street, climbed down the rocks and run across the sand to the water’s edge.

  Marina sat down with her knees up and her head buried between them, making herself as small as possible, trying to figure out what had just happened. There was a fierce pounding behind her forehead and she felt like crying. The sun was warm on her back, but she had started shivering. This was not in the pretend-everything-is-normal plan by half. She’d never be able to go to Rosa’s again—not after that performance.

  Marina fixed her gaze on a broken piece of shell next to her foot, focusing on the dark wet grains of sand stuck inside its curved edge. She was afraid to look up, afraid of what else she might see that wasn’t there. Only the girl had been there, Marina was sure of it, and just not in the flesh. Rosa knew. Tell her, the girl had demanded. Tell her what?

  Marina picked up the shell and gripped it in her hand until the jagged edges bit into her palm; the sharp pain was a welcome reminder of reality. No, she told herself, she hadn’t really seen anything at all. In her overstressed paranoid state, she had projected her own fears and discomfort onto the scenery around her. It was a horrible coincidence that Rosa happened to have had a daughter who’d died. And, more than a coincidence, it was just bad luck. Reflexively, Marina reached up to her chest to feel the reassuring weight of the ring around her neck. But it wasn’t there—it would never be there again—and she let her hand drop uselessly to her side. Like a fresh burn, a sudden pain pulsed in the spot where the ruby used to rest between her breasts. Her skin had its own memory of what her mind would never be able to forget. But what was worse than the memory was that it obscured those first sweet moments. It would always be the bad that she remembered first, Marina thought, never the slim promise of happily ever after that came before it. If only time could have stopped right there. Yesterday—could it possibly have been just yesterday? She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to lock herself into the amber of that moment.

  Gideon had been the good end to a bad day. Her meeting with Madeline, the pile of dead roses and her appointment with Cassie had all swirled into a potent mix of negativity. Marina felt tense and uneasy when she finally said good-bye to Cassie, the sun sinking in time with her mood. Then Gideon called and set everything to right.

  “I’m coming to pick you up,” he said. “I’ll meet you at your house.”

  “Is there anything special I should wear…or do?”

  “You’re fishing,” he told her, “but I’m not biting. It’s a surprise. Wear whatever you’re most comfortable in. Does that help?”

  “Not at all,” she said, smiling.

  It wasn’t until Marina got home that she realized Gideon hadn’t told her when he’d be picking her up. She didn’t know how much time she had to get ready for whatever it was he had planned for her. She felt gritty and in need of another shower, so she stripped off her clothes and her chain. Halfway to the bathroom, it occurred to her that she wouldn’t be able to hear him at the door if she was in the shower. She stood still in the middle of her room for a moment, naked and frozen with indecision. In the end, she opted to stay dry and change clothes. She pulled a pair of old soft jeans from her closet and then, on impulse, she took out an embroidered lace bra that had never before seen the light of day. Marina caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she reached around to secure the hooks. The bra was beautiful and alluring and obviously designed to be worn alone. A definite statement of intent, Marina thought, although by the time it was uncovered—if it was uncovered—that intent would be obvious. Marina finished her ensemble with a black cotton turtleneck and was about to slip the chain back around her neck when she heard Gideon pulling into her driveway. Tucking the ring and chain into the pocket of her jeans, Marina grabbed her purse and flew to the front door.

  Gideon’s hand was raised and ready to knock when she opened the door. He took in her appearance and smiled. “In a hurry?” he asked. Marina noticed that he was dressed similarly to her, in faded jeans and a pale chambray shirt. His hair was damp as if it had just been washed and she regretted that she hadn’t had time to take a shower. Looking at him spurred a quick memory of how she’d pleasured herself that morning and she blushed.

  “Not in a hurry, no,” she said. “I just wanted to be ready.”

  “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s a surprise, right?”

  “I thought maybe you…considering what you do, it would be difficult to surprise you.”

  “It isn’t like that,” Marina said. “Just because—”

  “I know,” he interrupted. “I’m just kidding.” Gideon smiled again, but his eyes were very dark; there was nothing to indicate that he was anything but serious. “Well, since you are ready, let’s go, shall we?”

  Once they were in Gideon’s truck and on the road, their conversation dwindled into an expectant but easy silence. Gideon turned on the radio, still set to the oldies rock station, and the sound of Jefferson Starship’s “Miracles” filled the space between them.

  Gideon drummed his fingers softly on the steering wheel even though the song was heavier on melody than rhythm. For a moment Marina found herself wishing she really was psychic so she could read the thoughts in his head. As he wove through streets heading east along the San Elij
o Lagoon, it occurred to her how much she still didn’t know about him. It had only been two months, after all, and they hadn’t spent that much time together if you added it all up. She knew he was renting a condo in Oceanside, but he’d never taken her there. (“It’s ugly,” he’d told her. “I’d be embarrassed.”) He was a general contractor working on a development near where he lived, but Marina didn’t exactly know what he did there. (“Very boring,” he’d said.) He claimed to have come from Texas, but he’d offered no details of the place and she didn’t know where he’d grown up or gone to school. She did know that he was an only child—they had that in common—but she didn’t know if there was an ex-wife or even a child in his past. But maybe that didn’t matter; maybe slow discovery was better than knowing all at once. At any point Marina could have pushed for more details, but she never had.

  He was driving toward Rancho Santa Fe, the expensive and beautiful neighborhood where Madeline and Andrew lived. Marina knew the way well.

  “I guess we’re not going to Lucky,” she said finally.

  “No,” he answered. “I think you’ll like this better.”

  “So much cloak-and-dagger,” she said, instantly realizing that she sounded ridiculous. She’d spent most of her life perfecting a tone of grave seriousness. Flippancy was a language she didn’t know how to speak. But Gideon didn’t seem to care or even notice. He was busy turning left, then right, and then parking on the side of a lushly landscaped hill.

  “The mystery is over,” he said. “We’re here.” He took Marina’s hand as she got out of the car and he led her through what looked like a miniature community of cottages with little paths between them. It was only when they arrived at a numbered door and he pulled out a plastic key card that she realized they were at a hotel.

  “Well,” she said softly as he opened the door. “This is…something.”

  The suite was large and airy, a perfect interplay of white down, bleached wood and gray marble. There was a fireplace in one corner of the room and double doors leading to a private patio beyond that. And there was a bed: king-size, four-poster and covered with a canopy. Marina’s eyes moved from the bed to the night table beside it, where a giant bouquet of long-stemmed pink roses stretched out of a glass vase. The whole room was full of their scent. Marina flashed on the image of the rotten roses on her doorstep, but then it was gone, replaced by the beautiful scene in front of her. She reached for words that would make him understand how she was feeling, but she couldn’t find them. Surprised was inadequate, as was happy or any of the words she had for joy. She had nothing with which to compare this experience. Nobody had ever done anything like this for her before.