What was left now?
My cases.
I turned on my computer and went to work.
There is an array of techniques for making people stop what they are doing, and the first of LA’s sin eaters had generally relied on old Mob methods of intimidation. They’d put a dead rat in the mailbox. If that didn’t work, the subject might come home and find the china cabinet overturned, sofas and mattresses cut open, clothes slashed. If there was a pet, it would be found dead in the kitchen sink. These men were thugs through and through, and they’d had a thug’s lack of imagination.
My preferred approach was to play the good cop. I’d make my subjects think that I’d come over to their side, or at least understood their grievances. If they thought they’d been treated badly, I’d pretend to agree with them. Yes, I’d say, you have a right to be angry. You have a right to want revenge, or at least compensation for all you’ve had to put up with. But you have to be reasonable, I’d tell them. If you want too much, you’ll end up getting nothing.
Claire Fontaine’s case was a different story. She’d never asked Miller for money. She didn’t want to bankrupt him. She wanted to destroy his reputation. If she continued on this path, I had no doubt that she’d leave nothing but ruin in her wake. Just like my mother had.
It was nearly midnight when my phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID and knew that at least the first aspect of my plan was working.
“Hello.”
“Julie? It’s Claire Fontaine. We met on the pier this afternoon.”
I faked Julie’s bouncy, energetic voice.
“Oh, yes. Claire, how are you?”
“I hope it’s not too late to call, but you said I could do it anytime.”
“Absolutely. What’s up?”
She told me that the girl she mentored was willing to speak with me. She added a few details. Her name was Destiny, and she’d bounced around a little before ending up on Venice Beach.
We arranged to meet at a restaurant tomorrow afternoon.
It was an approach I’d used many times before. You slip into another identity, then insinuate yourself into your mark’s life. With this call, I knew I could pull off this deception once again, because on the pier I’d sensed that Claire was lonely. She needed someone to whom she could tell her deepest, darkest thoughts. When people reach that point, you can draw them out as you draw them in.
First, though, I had to insure that no matter what I did or who I became, Claire would trust me. With that in mind, I got right to work.
I printed a card with Julie Cooper’s name, phone number, and email address.
After that I thought through other elements of this new identity, considering the best way to approach Destiny. I came up with a way to get her attention and created a photo file on my phone for just that purpose. I even rehearsed what Julie Cooper would say or do to make sure I could do it smoothly and casually. I couldn’t be an actress playing Julie, stumbling over lines, forgetting aspects of the part. I had to be Julie Cooper.
Last, I needed to plant a loaded item within the conversation I was going to have with Destiny. A detail that would prove that I was acquainted with the street life of the city. That’s when I came up with Vicki Page, a woman I’d dealt with several times as a cop and whom I thought Destiny might have run into during her time on Venice Beach. Once Destiny knew I’d heard of Vicki, she’d figure I was a legit reporter.
By the time I’d completed the work of identity transformation, I felt certain that I had all the elements in place.
Destiny would fall for it.
Most important, so would Claire.
I was quite confident that very soon I’d be her best friend.
PART III
Claire
WHEN I ARRIVE at my father’s apartment, he is sitting on the balcony, watching hummingbirds swoop around their feeder. He is in his late seventies but looks older. There is a drawn quality to his face. A suppressed anger seeps from him.
I hand him the doughnuts.
“Snowies?” he asks before he opens the box.
His tone is vaguely doubtful, as if I have more than likely failed to bring him the type of doughnut he prefers.
“Snowies, yes,” I tell him.
A few months after my mother died, he met Rose. Considerably younger. Full of energy. He called her his “firecracker.” They dated for a year, and the whole time he was besotted with her. He wanted to marry her, but she hated kids. That’s how I became his ball and chain.
He takes out one of the doughnuts and bites into it like an animal, tearing at it with his teeth. He is always this way, vaguely snarling.
He finishes his one doughnut and closes the cardboard lid over the rest. “Always save something for later, Claire.”
He has forever given me precisely this kind of fatherly advice: I should buy, not rent. Penny saved, penny earned. You can’t spend yourself rich.
“Still no man in your life?” he asks in the tone of an accusation, as if I am too crazy to love. Still, he wants me to find a man, a husband.
His smile is oddly mirthless.
“You’ll meet someone,” he says in a way that makes it clear he doesn’t think my prospects are particularly good.
This is the same man who still considers Simon a “real find,” a rich man I should never have accused of anything, “since you only had Melody’s word.”
Melody’s word.
He never believed her either.
Sometimes I imagine Simon and my father in league with each other. Sitting in some bar together, plotting how to bring me to my senses. My father soothing Simon’s frayed nerves, commiserating with him, even apologizing for my “problems.”
He wipes away the white flecks left by the snowy by raking his right arm across his mouth. Swiftly. Roughly. Almost violently. Nearly all his physical movements have this frenzy. As if he is frantically cleaning up a murder scene. Wiping away prints. Mopping up blood.
After he tried to drown me, I never stopped being afraid of him. I cringed when he put his arms around me and held my breath until he released me. Each time he let me go, it felt like a stay of execution. The one time I confronted him about the boat, he flew into a rage. Are you still nursing that stupid crap! I was fifteen, and his explosive reaction frightened me, silenced me. I never mentioned it again.
“What’s new?” he says.
I don’t tell him about Simon’s marriage plans, and certainly nothing about the letter I wrote to him. If I did, it would only confirm my father’s certainty that I am hopelessly deranged. He has spent his life denying what he did. This must surely make him feel that he and Simon are mutual victims of my delusions.
Why do I see him, bring him snowies?
There is no good answer to that question.
Perhaps it’s because I have never given up on some sort of reconciliation, a confession that would unburden his heart and open mine to him. This feeling reminds me of a painting I once saw on the streets of Paris. A tiny white egg in the palm of an enormous hand. The gigantic fingers are violently drawing in, and the egg seems almost to shrink in anticipation of being crushed. It was called Hope. My hope that my father will one day admit what he did is that frail egg.
“How’s the teaching coming along?” my father asks. “You have plenty of clients?”
“Never plenty, but there are enough.”
“You should teach online instead of being in your car all day.”
His confidence that he is always right comes across as a kind of bluster. “Driving from place to place takes up too much time and cuts down on the profit,” he adds.
His tone is almost scolding, as if I should have figured this out long ago. “It’s better to do everything on your computer. Isn’t that what people do now?”
“Some do.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I like personal contact,” I tell him.
“Hm,” my father grunts.
He shrugs, because once again I’ve rejected his
generously offered paternal counsel.
“Well, it’s your business, not mine.”
We’ve spent our lives keeping our distance from each other. In his eyes, I am still the “frightened little bird” he used to call me each time I shrank away from him.
I stay a little while longer with my father, then leave.
The text bell rings as I reach my car.
It’s from Phil.
Liked your response. Thought about it. Would still like to meet you. Understand if you say no. Just felt like trying.
Trying. The word touches me.
I want to answer him. Perhaps meet him for coffee. But my world is too complicated now. I don’t know what Simon may do next. Nor what I will do in response. My life no longer seems entirely my own. Certainly not one I should pull someone else into. I don’t answer Phil’s text, but I don’t delete it, either. It seems strange to me that simply leaving his message on my phone feels like an act of faith.
2.
Ray is waiting at the same table as before.
He stands as I come forward.
“Good morning,” he says brightly.
I sit down and begin to take out my materials.
Ray watches me silently.
There is a certain intensity in his gaze that makes me fear that Ava has told him more about me than she should have. Does he think I’m weak? Pathetic? Bitter? Crazy? Just having these questions makes me feel paranoid, though I know that I have not descended into madness. It isn’t everyone I fear or distrust, after all. It is only Simon.
I notice that Ray is looking at my hands.
When he sees this, he quickly catches himself.
“Oh, sorry,” he says. “I just saw that you don’t have a wedding ring.”
“I’m divorced.”
“Do you mind if I ask whether you have children?”
He laughs before I can answer.
“I mean, since I’m at a child’s level in French, I thought a woman who’s had children might be more patient with me.”
“I had a daughter.”
The had registers gravely in his eyes. A daughter in the past tense.
I know that such a statement requires at least a small explanation.
“She died,” I tell him. “Five years ago.”
Abruptly my past, present, and future all seem to lie as if in ghostly pentimento beneath the image of Melody on the boat, standing in the rain, speaking hesitantly but resolutely. Mom, I have to tell you something.
“I’m sorry,” Ray says.
He doesn’t ask for more details and clearly regrets what he’d earlier thought to be a quite ordinary question.
There is an awkward silence while we both look for ways to change the subject.
I take the nearest to hand.
“How about you?” I ask as cheerfully as I can.
“Divorced. But I have a lovely daughter. Her name is Jade. She’s eight years old.”
He says nothing more about his daughter, and I add no further information about Melody.
I begin the lesson and it goes smoothly. Even during these brief exchanges, his accent improves.
When the hour ends, it seems to have passed very quickly.
Ray again appears to have more energy than when it began.
“It works like an exercise for my whole brain,” he tells me cheerfully.
I fall back on a professional response.
“That’s true. Studies show that learning a language improves all the cognitive skills. I know that sounds like part of a sales pitch, but it’s true.”
“Well, you don’t have sell me,” Ray says. “I’m convinced you’re the right person for me.”
I’m flattered by what he just said, but I keep my growing attraction to him carefully in check.
Love once felt easy.
But as Ray leaves and I pack up my materials, I think of Simon and wonder if anything will ever be easy for me again.
3.
Simon is still on my mind as I head for my car.
I know this is crazy, but I can’t help thinking of him lurking behind some hidden nook or following me from a distance. I am trapped by his ubiquity, the way his presence, or the dread of it, pervades everything. I can’t stop thinking about what he is and what he is going to do. He surrounds me like an acrid odor. I feel him as a sharp tingling in the air.
I stop, take a deep breath, and try to pull myself together.
I don’t want to be like this.
Listening for footsteps behind me.
Catching my breath as cars approach.
Imagining Simon all around me.
As if he is a shape-shifter, able to assume different forms.
I remind myself that I am not deranged, not delusional. Steady, Claire, I tell myself. Control yourself.
I manage to walk unhurriedly toward my car, but I glance about continually. Left. Right. Behind me.
I feel myself becoming a different person. Inhabited by Simon. As if I am his changeling.
Simon is winning.
I know this because I hesitate before reaching for the ignition key.
When I finally turn it, the engine fires to life. I feel relief when the car doesn’t explode.
•
The phone rings just as I reach my next client. It’s Ava.
“Simon called me,” she says.
I’m stunned that he has done this. Ava has been my best friend for ten years, but she had little to do with Simon while we were married and has had nothing at all since the divorce. How desperate he must be to have called her. I feel as if the temperature has suddenly risen, the storm closer, its deadly lightning much nearer to me now.
“When did he call?”
“Five minutes ago. He says you threatened him, Claire.”
“I warned him.”
“Warned? Threatened? What’s the difference?”
“They’re completely different.”
“Not really,” Ava insists. She is clearly annoyed. “Not really, Claire,” she repeats.
For her this is just a matter of semantics. The bottom line is that I have foolishly and impulsively gotten myself into big trouble.
“What did Simon say to you?” I ask her.
“He claims you’ve had some kind of breakdown.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous or not, he’s afraid of you. Of what you might do. He actually mentioned that you have a gun.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Do you have a gun, Claire?”
“It’s Max’s old gun. We used to go to a firing range in the desert. It was . . . recreational.”
“But you still have it—that’s my point.”
I realize that Simon is coming across as the one who tells the truth, I the one who slants it.
He is the straight line.
I am the twisting one.
I have to restore my credibility.
“That gun stays in a locked drawer, Ava,” I tell her insistently. “I haven’t seen it for years.”
“Well, all I can say is that you’re freaking Simon out.”
“Well, he can go—”
“Here’s the rule, Claire,” Ava interrupts. “The ex’s future marriage is out of bounds. As a matter of fact, everything in his life is out of bounds. You have to say to yourself, ‘He lives on Mars now. I have nothing to do with him.’ ”
When I offer no argument she plunges ahead.
“By the way, why didn’t you tell me you’d called him? No, even better, why didn’t you tell me before you did it?”
The answer is that she would have tried to talk me out of it, and I’d feared she might succeed.
“I had to do it,” I reply weakly. “Emma is—”
“Out of bounds, that’s what Emma is!” Ava cries. “You want to help a kid, give to UNICEF. What you don’t do is stick your nose into Simon Miller’s business a full five years after you divorced him.”
I want to throw my phone out the window or smash
it against a concrete wall.
“The whole system is on his side, Claire,” Ava adds pointedly. “Accept it. He will get what he wants. Men like Simon always do.”
Something cracks in me.
“I have to go.”
I hang up just as Ava begins to speak again.
For a time I sit behind the wheel, peering at the phone, half hoping Ava will call back.
She doesn’t, but a few minutes later I hear the ting of a message.
I pull over to read it.
At first there are no words.
It is only a photograph.
In extreme close-up.
Of two darkly staring eyes that seem to grasp for me, like talons.
There is a flashing violence in them, a sense of swooping down.
They are the eyes of a predatory bird.
Beneath them, two words.
Written in Satanic script, like a message sent from hell.
Once again he has found me.
The Watchman.
4.
Of course I say nothing about the eyes of the Watchman when I meet Destiny at 24/7 at the end of her shift.
The restaurant is almost empty now. Destiny calls it her “home away from home.” Cal, the manager, provides meals as part of her salary and makes no effort to eject her from her favored booth as long as business is slow.
I have told her very little about Simon or Melody.
We talk about her desire to leave Los Angeles. She doesn’t know where she wants to go. “Just somewhere else,” she says.
The waitress arrives.
She puts my soup in front of Destiny and Destiny’s cheeseburger in front of me.
“Anything else?”
“No, thanks,” Destiny says.
She switches our plates as Muriel rumbles heavily back toward the kitchen.
“See what I mean?”
Her expression conveys complete disdain.
“It’s not just that she’s fat. It’s that she’s stupid.”
Destiny takes a bite from her burger.
“Thrice cursed. That’s what my tenth-grade teacher used to say. ‘That girl is thrice cursed.’ Meaning three of ’em.”
She takes a sip of diet soda.
“That’s Muriel. Fat. Dumb.”
When Muriel’s third curse doesn’t immediately occur to her, she gives up with a shrug.
An Inconvenient Woman Page 8
