by Lee Nichols
“See?” he says, pointing to a window frame with a combination of triumph and frustration. “There. The wrong color.”
It’s white. Exactly the same white as the other two window frames. “The other ones too?” I ask.
“No. Those are right.”
I squint at the windows. “They’re exactly the same.”
He insists they’re not, blathering on about color samples and paint mixing.
“Even if they are the slightest bit different,” I say. “There’s no way anyone could ever tell.”
“I can tell,” he says.
“That’s it?” I ask, dumbfounded. “That’s the reason you’re not moving in?”
“No, there’s more.” He leads me to the kitchen. “Notice the knobs?”
They are unpolished nickel and beautiful. “Are they antiques?”
“Well, yeah. But don’t you see it?”
“What, are they a millimeter crooked?”
“No, they got that right the third time. But look. They messed up the color gradation. This one, in the middle, is darker than these two. It should have gone at the end. Now they need to redo all the knobs, starting here.”
Bubbles of delight rise within me. The ocean, the house, his company: I laugh. “Merrick, you’re neurotic!” I say it like it’s the most wonderful thing, and maybe it is.
“You think so?”
“You are obsessive-compulsive, with borderline ridiculous disorder.” I open a set of French doors and step onto the patio. It’s Jerusalem stone, surrounded by palms. An oasis, overlooking the ocean. “In fact, it’s a miracle you can live here at all. I think the waves break in an irregular pattern.”
He stands beside me and we watch the waves. He seems satisfied with himself. I can’t tell why. Because he showed me how anal he is? Because he discovered that I don’t share his obsession? Did I just pass a test, or fail one?
But I don’t think he’s the sort for pop quizzes. More the sort to try to send a message. I give him a sidelong glance, and he’s looking at me. I know there’s some perfect thing to say, to figure him out and send a message of my own, but instead I point to three white wooden boxes perched on the cliffside. “What are those?”
“Bees.”
“Neil got his honey from the sea, huh?”
“Temporarily.”
“You know you’re never gonna get rid of them now.”
“Yeah. I won an argument with Neil exactly once, and that’s because he passed out.”
“Did he build the house for you?”
“Most of it.”
I give him a thoughtful expression. “Ah, now I get it. Things are all starting to make sense—now that I’ve seen your house, I mean.”
He gives me the gray eyes. They match the color of the ocean in the sunlight. “I’m afraid to ask.”
“Neil’s argument group,” I say.
“You mean discussion group.”
“Right. Anyway, he started the argument—”
“Discussion—”
“—group because of inner rage, right?”
“Well, that and his wife,” he says.
“Now I know where his rage comes from.” I smile. “Clients like you.”
“Sure,” he laughs. “I’m infuriating.”
Is he saying I’m the infuriating one? Probably. But it doesn’t matter. We stand, in a comfortable silence, watching the surfers and dog walkers on the beach. That will soon be me and Miu. The thought makes me happy.
“I heard how you got fired,” he says. “Monty told me.”
Monty told him? Is nothing sacred in that bar?
“I wanted to say, that was really decent of you. You should be proud.”
“For getting fired?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer, but I know what he means.
“Thanks,” I say.
“And now you can get a real job.” He must see something in my face, because he immediately says: “I mean, instead of a surreal job, like that one.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re good at everything. Look at this house, your career. Meetings in New York.” I pick at the pins holding my hair back, and stare out to sea. “I suck at everything. Real employers don’t want to hire me.”
“Well, if you could do anything, what would you do?”
I’m surprised to hear the same question I asked Nyla. It sounded good when I said it, but now it’s clearly crap. “I don’t know. I was really good at the psychic thing.”
“Elle.” He says it like he’s been taking lessons from Maya.
“No, seriously. I was good at it. Maya says I should go to school to be a therapist. But I don’t want to deal with real problems. I want the silly stuff, you know—the little, girlfriendy things they need another perspective on. Things they’re too embarrassed to tell their therapist, because they think they’re supposed to be doing serious Freudian work. I’m good at that stuff.”
“You’re good at a lot of stuff.”
I snort. “Sure. My fiancé married another woman. I’m six thousand dollars in debt and have no income or prospects. I’ve been fired from two jobs in three months. I—”
“Your fiancé did what?”
“You didn’t hear about that?” I look at him. “I thought everyone told you everything about me.”
He shakes his head. “He married another woman?”
“After six years,” I say, bitterly, and it all comes tumbling out: “Six years, and we’re planning the wedding, and he leaves town for a business trip, and in like a week comes back married to another woman. And so I…I mean, how ready was he to get married? Totally ready. And we’d been together six years. But one short trip to Iowa—Iowa!—and he finds someone he loves more than me. And all I know are people from his firm, and my parents are no help, and it’s like I don’t have anyone, except Maya, so I come back here, and I can’t find a job or a place to live or…or…” I suddenly want to be naked in front of Merrick. I want him to see who I am, who I really am. I want to strip away all the crap and bullshit, and just tell him.
So I do. At length.
I start crying halfway through, but keep talking. He keeps listening. I finally end with a sobbing: “…I suck. I just suck. I fail at everything, and every time I think it’s gonna work out, it falls apart.”
I cry into his shoulder. The sun sets. Pelicans skim the waves. The scent of seaweed hangs in the salt air.
My tears dry and I pull away from him, embarrassed.
He takes my hand and squeezes. “He didn’t even know, did he?”
I look at him, confused.
“You leave D.C., you come here and live in a trailer—”
“Trolley,” I sniffle, but he doesn’t hear.
“—because that’s all you can afford, and you try the investigation thing, and that doesn’t work, and you try the psychic thing, and that does, except you’re not going to screw people for money, so they fire you. You think you’re some kind of pathetic loser, but you get knocked down hard by your fiancé, and you stand up tall. You get knocked by the psychic place, by the lawsuit and the landlords, and the credit cards and whatever, and you’re a fucking Weeble—you wobble, but you keep getting up and up.” He takes my face in his hands. “You should be proud, Elle. It doesn’t matter, what you’ve failed at. That’s just stuff that happened. What matters is you—and you are something to be proud of.”
Silence descends. The world consists of him and me—the world is empty and full, overfull, and I feel everything all at once, and I’m not sure if I remember how to breathe. Well. Apparently I’m in love. And I think: how long has this been going on?
“Merrick,” I say. “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
The words emerge like the tide, soft and relentless. I hear them as if they were spoken by someone else, and I don’t even regret that I said them.
“Louis, honey?” A woman’s voice from inside the house. “Are you here?” She steps onto the deck; petite, neat, contained and pretty. Everyt
hing I’m not. And suddenly it’s true: I have forgotten how to breathe. I am suffocating. This cannot be happening. There must be some explanation.
“Your sister?” I choke.
“No, she’s my—”
“Girl Friday,” the woman says, and puts a possessive hand on Merrick’s arm.
“Elle,” Merrick says carefully. “This is Betsy.”
Chapter 33
I lock my apartment door behind me and stumble for the phone. Must call Maya. Must call Dr. Kevorkian. Must call someone.
I pick up the phone, and a male voice says: “Yo.”
“What? Hello? I didn’t hear the phone ring. Hello?”
“It rang,” the voice says, “Bitch.”
Dingle. Not the someone I had in mind.
“Now I know where you live,” he says. “I want my suit, bitch. Now.”
“You really gotta work on that bitch thing, Dingle. How about you say asshole, instead. As in you’re an asshole.” I hang up.
I don’t feel any better. I call Maya. She’s not home. I call Rusty’s and order an extra-large pineapple-and-garlic pizza. I eat every piece but one, and continue to not feel better. I spend the rest of the night obsessively conditioning my hair, cleaning my apartment, and trying to forget what happened after Merrick said Elle, this is Betsy.
The next morning, I wake partially renewed. Screw Merrick and Betsy and Oprah and everyone. Today, I get Miu Miu.
I check the parking lot from the kitchen window. Merrick’s car is gone. I grab the last slice of pizza and go.
Twenty minutes later, I’m filling out paperwork in the shelter office. The nice volunteer brings Miu on the leash. When Miu sees me, she hunches her left shoulder and swipes the air with her right paw.
“Ohmigod!” I say. “Did you see that? She made a punch at me! Who’s my girl? Who’s my Miu Miu?” I look at the volunteer. “Did you see that?”
She nods. “Boxers do that, when they’re excited and want to play. It’s why they’re called boxers. But I’ve never seen Sca—Miu Miu do it before. She likes you.”
Boxers do that? They box? I had no idea. It is so neat. And of course she likes me. I love her. She has to at least like me. I hug her and she looks into my eyes with her big, brown, pathetic, needy eyes, and…
I panic. I mean, what am I doing? She needs serious help. She needs a real person, a responsible person. Not me. Is it fair to her? I didn’t even know boxers boxed. What if I can’t take care of her right? What if she’s unhappy with me? What if she gets sicker? What if she dies?
Miu leans against me, in what is an obvious plea for support. I can feel her ribs. Her skin is warm leather. A globule of drool bobs below one of her jowls.
“She’ll be doing doughnuts in no time,” the volunteer says.
“Doughnuts? Is that a drool thing?” I ask. “Or a poop thing?”
She laughs. “When she greets you, she’ll probably curve into a circle, like a doughnut. Or a kidney bean, some people call it the kidney bean. Boxers do that, too—just so you know.”
She’s a hairless boxing kidney bean. She’s pathetic and overwhelming and hopeless. And once I sign my name and pay the fees, she’s mine forever. God. This is scary. My face freezes in a petrified smile. It’s so permanent. And I don’t know if I can do it. Nurse her and love her and everything, forever. I mean, it’s marriage. It’s marriage to a bizarre and demanding freak.
“Now you know how Louis felt,” the volunteer says.
“What?”
“Her coat,” the volunteer says. “It’ll grow back in no time.”
Oh.
I sign my name. This hopeless and overwhelming dog is now mine.
She likes pineapple-and-garlic pizza. She likes to stick her snout out the window. I glance in the side-view mirror, and she looks like a regular dog, because all that’s visible is head. And one flapping jowl. I speed up, and the jowl gets stuck in the “up” position. It’s bright pink inside. She doesn’t seem to care it’s stuck, but I slow down anyway.
We go to the Wilcox Property for a walk. Well, technically, it’s the Douglas Family Preserve now, because Michael Douglas donated a lot of money, but it was the Wilcox while I was growing up, so that’s what Miu and I call it. I park on the street, refusing to acknowledge how close I am to Merrick’s neurotically obsessive-compulsive house, and tie Miu’s horse-blanket-type cape around her. Well, she has no fur. She needs something. I tell her she’s the hardest-working dog in show business as I fiddle with the cape. She drools.
We slowly creep along the trail, sniffing gopher holes and admiring the view of the ocean from the cliffs. Halfway around, a swarm of small yappie dogs encircles us and Miu stands with a sort of noble patience, allowing herself to be sniffed. The yappie dogs’ owner tell me what a cute sweater she’s wearing. I don’t want people thinking I’m the sort who puts sweaters on dogs for no reason, so I pull it back to reveal her scaly pebbled skin. The woman recoils in horror, and I’m satisfied.
We’re almost back to the car when a big male rottweiler bounds over. Miu sits. No aggression. No fighting. No hard-to-get. No growling. But no sniffing allowed. I like this dog.
Four days later, Miu and I pick up a sandwich at Tuttis in Montecito and have lunch at Butterfly Beach. Miu sleeps during the car ride home, then hobbles fairly spryly upstairs. She heads straight for her doggie den and settles onto her cashmere.
I curl up in the sitting nook and watch her as she sleeps. It’s scary, being responsible for two when I’ve totally failed to be responsible for one. But I can do this. It’s like I told people who called when I was a psychic: Do it, then think about it, not the other way around. So I completed my first task. Now I’ve got to think about it.
I do my finances. My costs are $600/month for rent. $100 for utilities. $100 for food and gas. Maybe $250. Well, call it $450, including car insurance and magazines and random costs like $20 for a cab ride home from the Mesa. $350 to Carlos and creditors. That’s fifteen hundred dollars a month.
I write $1500 in my notebook, and circle it twice. Miu Miu stands and leans against me and presses her dry nose against the circles.
“No problem,” I tell her. “Plus fifty bucks a month for you—but that evens out because I don’t have to join a gym for exercise.” Because between walking her and cleaning her ectoplasmic drool from the walls, I’m working both my lower and upper body. Oh, and I love her. She’s depressed and needy and pathetic, and pees on the floor every time I come home. And I dote on her. Who’d have guessed?
“But that,” I explain, “is before tax. We need $1500 after tax. So say…$2000 a month? Does that sound fair? They can’t take more than five hundred bucks from a single poor woman with one dependent, can they? So that’s $500 a week…” I do the math. “Twelve dollars an hour.”
Oh, God. I can’t make twelve dollars an hour. I was making ten at Psychic Connexion, and that was stretching it. I’m going to have to get two jobs, and I can’t even get one. I lay on my back and stare at the ceiling. I don’t know what to do. Miu stands over me, the bottom of her chest three inches from my nose. Her skin is gross. I rub it.
Earning twelve dollars an hour for eight hours a day for five days a week is the minimum necessary to put dog food on the table. Maybe I can work weekends. Seven days a week. I can do this, because I have to.
So I throw on my best leftover clothes and tell Miu I’ll be back in an hour. There are a dozen stores in Santa Barbara I love. I’ll hit each one, and ask for a job. Start with Honeysuckle, the little garden shop. Then I’ll start again, with restaurants. Always wanted to be a waitress.
I do a Merrick-check as I head downstairs. I know he’s gone, because his car’s not here, but I peek outside from habit, and my stalker is standing on the steps. Wearing what has to be a mink coat—a sort of old-fashioned brown chubbie. It’s sixty-eight degrees out, and she wearing a chubbie? Up close, I see her hair is the unlikely shade of cherry cola, teased beyond endurance, and her fuchsia lipstick bleeds into the
lines around her lips.
I try to slink back inside, but she spots me.
“Elle? Elle Medina?”
I want to say, who’s asking? I say: “Yes, I’m Elle.”
“Oh, thank goodness! I’m Valentine. I called you at the Psychic Network?”
Oh, no. Very bad. This is the Montecito woman with the broken dog—and I recommended doggie acupuncture. Probably the dog died, and she’s suing me. “Valentine—of course I remember. What a lovely coat!”
“This old thing? A present from my second husband. After he died, I mean—he was too cheap while alive to buy me more than a new apron every anniversary.”
I laugh, mostly to cover my discomfort. “Well, you must have quite a collection of aprons.”
“Not at all. We were only married sixteen months.”
“Oh. Yes. I see. Well…this is a surprise. Um, how did you find me?”
“I called to speak with you, and they told me you were fired! Well, I gave the woman a talking-to. Fired, I said. How could you fire the best psychic you’ve ever had? And the woman—Adelaide?—she agreed, and gave me your address.”
“Ah.” Not a lawsuit, then. “Well, here I am.”
“I am so very glad I found you. You saved Rowdy’s life. He lives for romping, you know. Without use of his legs…quelle rapprochement! That means, ‘what good is life?’ Two visits to the acupuncturist, and he is quite almost back to his old self. I so deeply appreciate it. I wanted to thank you in person.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I’m glad to hear Rowdy is feeling, um, rowdier.”
We stand silently for a moment.
“Anyway,” I gesture toward the front door. “I’ve gotta—you know.”
“Oh, you can’t! Not yet. I need a reading. I’m desperate.”
A reading? It’s one thing pretending to be psychic on the phone, under the aegis of an organization which encourages that sort of playacting. But face-to-face? Out of the question. “Well, you see, Valentine. The trouble is that I’m not really a, I mean…of course with Rowdy I did get something of an intuitive, uh, message, but in fact I’m not—”