by E. G. Scott
“Did they bring up anything other than what they asked this morning?”
“No. Just more of the same.” He’s got an edge.
“I just meant . . . never mind. Did they say anything about a lawyer?”
I can tell by the cadence of his exhale he’s frustrated with me, but I’m not sure about what exactly. I want to give him a good lashing about the bank account to show him who should really be pissed in this conversation.
“They’re probably going to come to talk to you again. They wanted to speak with me alone, and I’m sure they’ll want the same from you.”
My tongue is practically bleeding from biting it about the money. If I do it now, I won’t have enough information on the back end to know if he’s lying. If I can’t pick apart the thread of lies right away, it will all get too tangled. Better to wait. But the prospect of Paul getting on an airplane tomorrow unleashes a surge of fear in me.
“What time are you home tonight?”
“Late. Remember? Wes and I are taking out the Murray Hill assholes. They are looking to get a bit of the local flavor before they drop a few million on weekend house number three. And I brought my bag for the trip just in case I decide to crash at Wes’s. We have an early flight.”
“Oh. I thought I would see you before you left.”
“Sorry, love. You’ll be asleep if I do make it home tonight anyway.” He softens.
He’s mistaking my lament for wanting to see him out of love. I’m careful to keep the meter of my voice even and not sound too forced.
“Right. Well, I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Love you, honey.”
“Mean it?”
“More than anything.” I don’t miss a beat.
The grandfather clock in the hallway chimes four times. The sound is equally familiar and disorienting. I stretch my legs before I get back to sleuthing and click around in the more obvious secret-keepers like email and Facebook. He hasn’t posted anything for more than a year, and there isn’t as much as an exchanged emoji or vaguely flirtatious comment with an old high school girlfriend. I pull up his activity log and see that the only lurking he’s been doing is on competing real estate companies’ pages in the area. I leave FB and start clicking around in his folders. Frustratingly, he’s logged out of his email, and the usual passwords aren’t working. I pull up recently opened Word documents and see that our insurance policies have been opened by Paul in the last month. I skim through the fine print on his policy and mine, but nothing looks out of place.
The complete lack of porn tucked away in some innocuously named folder is the most suspicious thing so far. Whatever it is I think I’m going to find is well hidden or nonexistent. I try to come up with explanations about why he would have taken the money and not told me that would make sense. I come up empty in that effort as well.
I take a moment to look away from the screen and around our home. For all of the dream planning we did for the house in Cold Spring Harbor, the cottage suffered. If a home is a reflection of the people who live in it, we are utterly beige. This was supposed to be our transition home before the real one. The knickknacks and mass-produced wall art is stuff we picked up in the checkout line at Bed Bath & Beyond as an afterthought. Our house could be a page out of a catalog for the domestically unimaginative. Even as the years passed and we remained here, we didn’t put any money into making it ours. Looking around at it now, I’m realizing how boring it all is.
The widowed ceramic bookend on the mantel, a turquoise Chinese guardian lion, is the most ornate thing in the room. Paul hasn’t even noticed its mate missing. There seems to be a lot of that going around.
The bookend met its demise when Paul came home one night, a couple of years earlier, drunk. This in and of itself was disturbing since he wasn’t one to lose control and generally didn’t drink more than one or two light beers. This night he appeared to have had nine or ten. He’d sat on the couch next to me, our arms almost touching, physically closer than we’d been in a long time. I’d been itching to take a pill, feeling the weight of whatever he had to tell me engulf us and wondering if he’d even notice in his impaired state. I controlled myself. At that point I had stricter rules about my daily limit.
“My business is done. There’s no money coming in. Absolutely none,” he told the floor. “I fired the last of the guys today. Some of them refused to leave, said they’d stay on and help finish the jobs. They didn’t understand that no one was going to pay to finish any of those houses.” Duff came over to him, sensing his despair, and rested his giant head in Paul’s lap and whined. Paul cried quietly into his fur. “It was awful. One of the worst fucking days of my life.”
I hated seeing him this way. I’d never seen him get completely vulnerable, even when he was talking about things that had happened when he was growing up. Terrible, traumatic things didn’t break him like this. I also had no idea how to comfort him. I’d never learned how to do that when I was a kid. Nobody had ever done it for me.
I wish I could say that I meant everything I told him, or that I didn’t just say the same rote platitudes in three different ways. But I was processing the newfound distaste of this weak side of him.
“It will be okay, honey. It will get better. Things will start turning around. And we don’t have to worry about money too much. We always have my salary and the Cold Spring Harbor money, worst-case scenario.”
I didn’t mean it. I would be furious if we had to start living off that money. He tensed up.
“Absolutely not. We are not touching the money for the house. I’ll figure something out.” He was wobbly when he stood but steeled himself and walked upstairs and fell face-first into bed. He was snoring loudly by the time I reached the top of the stairs.
After I turned his head to the side so he wouldn’t asphyxiate, I stomped downstairs, grabbed one of the bookends, and threw it against the back of the fireplace, where it spectacularly exploded into hundreds of ceramic shards and dust. My fury was so much bigger than my control or awareness of it. I didn’t realize what I’d done until many minutes later. Sometimes my anger is like that. The rage has been within me for so long, I wonder if I came out of my mother that way. I’ve worked hard to keep it under wraps, especially from my husband.
The streetlights come on and the last tendrils of sunlight cast eerie shadows on the wood floor. Hours have passed as I’ve clicked through dead-end folders and documents. I move to his real estate folders. All of this snooping is making it clear how removed I’ve been.
I open a to-do list dated around the time he was first out of work. “1. Find a new job, 2. Train for a half marathon, 3. Start cooking, 4. Work on house blueprints.” He’d abandoned the list shortly after he created it, clearly. Best-laid plans. He started to wilt after his business was gone. The couch became his “office” and his pajamas his “work clothes.” We joked about his early retirement and made light of his facial hair cultivation, but resentment and anger metastasized in me.
Paul being home all the time put me on high alert about finding better hiding places for the additional pills I’d started to need. I wasn’t going over the line, but the line had moved a few paces forward to cope with our new arrangement. I had my acceptable, legitimate prescription pills in the medicine cabinet as usual, which were “as needed,” and my supplementary supply in places I knew he wouldn’t stumble upon in his newfound time in our house all day long.
My obsessiveness wasn’t limited to my chemical self-medication. I hid in my job. I began to exercise twice a day to have excuses to be away from the house and to reassure myself that I wasn’t overdoing it with the pills. If I could run three miles and then spin, I was healthier than most of America.
It seemed like the more active and extreme I became with work and working out, the less motivated he became. We had always been a seesaw of ambition, but now he wa
s deadweight. I couldn’t stand the sight of him licking his wounds. I knew it wasn’t his fault that people could barely afford their current mortgages, let alone build new homes, but my anger, unchecked, just kept growing. Defeated was a terrible look on him. I didn’t marry a man who would grow a beard and stay in his pajamas all day. That wasn’t him. Until it was. He was giving up and I had to look away. I now push back against the crushing feeling of how different things could have been if I hadn’t.
I offered up antidepressant samples from work to try, in the hopes they would make up for my absence of empathy and understanding. He refused, never a fan of pharmaceuticals as a solution. He found them to be “the easy way out.” For me, things at work had gotten especially bad with the Euphellis trials. I’d started taking an Ativan to get through the evenings. I found that with a glass of wine, mixing pills and alcohol—something I’d never imagined myself doing—made the distance between us feel vaguely cozy instead of strained. Though whether I felt the reality, we continued to move apart until we were barely speaking. He would retreat to one end of the couch and stare at his phone for hours, allegedly reading the news, while I’d lose myself on the opposite end in hour upon hour of whatever show we could agree to binge.
It was Wes, one of his oldest friends, who finally snapped him out of it. Wes had made millions convincing the greedy adult children of Eastern Long Island to sell their parents’ modest homes and property for seven and eight figures to the rich and striving. Wes, who knew the potential sales savant my husband was, saw an opportunity.
The morning after the call from Wes, Paul had already gotten out of bed, gone for a run with Duff, and made me breakfast before my alarm went off. He was shaved, dressed in a suit, smiling hugely over a cup of coffee. He was the spitting image of the man I’d given up hoping would return. I felt an old stirring for his hands on my body. He could tell. He put his arms around me and whispered my nickname into my ear before gently pushing me to the floor. Then he passionately told me all of his plans for getting back on top.
I poke around the official-looking sell sheets for Hamptons houses, one larger than the next, some with Wes’s well-chiseled headshot featured, others with Paul’s smiling face and contact info. I click on a “Sold” folder, and then a sell sheet for a modestly sized bungalow in Southampton overlooking the ocean, surrounded by a spread of land three times the size of the actual house. The asking price was seventeen million dollars, an amount carrying a commission of at least a million. The sale was nearly a year ago. Why Paul would leech our life savings with a commission like that is baffling.
The old stir of pain becoming rage thunders deep in me. Paul has greatly underestimated my capacity to make plans of my own.
four
PAUL
Before
IT’S AMAZING HOW GOOD you can be at something precisely because you don’t give a shit about it.
My plans to get my business going were still stalled, and I was really itching to bring money into the equation. Rebecca being the sole breadwinner had worn our marriage just about as thin as it could stand, and what had begun as a quiet whisper of resentment had slowly grown into a steady drone.
“How was your day, babe? Anything exciting?”
“Whole lot of the same. How was work?”
“Same old. Mark’s being Mark, so that’s a ton of fun. Did you and Duff get down to the beach?”
“Yup. Just like every other day.” There’s so much edge to my response that I’m surprised it doesn’t slice my mouth on the way out. As the words hit her ears, I watch her eyes narrow. In three, two, one . . .
“Um, okay. Just touching base. You want to talk later?”
I do not. “Sure thing, kid. Oh, and I noticed your stash in the kitchen cabinet is getting a little low. Might be time for a refill.” I excuse myself and step into the office, as if I have things to do.
My wife certainly seemed comfortable wearing the tailor-made pants in our relationship. I’m not sure if she still even monitored the balance in our joint account—I hadn’t been able to contribute anything for a long time, after all—but I’m quite positive that she was still dumping her share in there like clockwork. I could just picture the smirk on her face as she deposited the money. The smirk that would only soften to become something more gently malevolent.
God bless Wes. I got the call early in the morning as I was sitting on the back porch.
There was still dew on the grass.
“Wes.”
“Hey, limpdick.”
“What’s up, fuckface?”
“That wildebeest still eating you out of house and home?”
“You still getting fat off of swindling morons into overpriced prefabs?”
“Funny you should ask.”
He ran me through the ins and outs of the real estate game, got me licensed, and set me up with some decent properties, considering my rookie status. Nepotism really does make the world go round.
I found, quite by accident, that the key was not caring. And I couldn’t have cared less. If I couldn’t build houses, I thought, I wanted nothing to do with the real estate business. The amazing thing was, my shitty attitude began to pay dividends almost immediately. My lackadaisical approach to the whole enterprise had the effect of luring the client in. I pulled off an unprecedented percentage of sales in my first year on the job. Even Wes was astonished.
I realized quickly that the oversell was where most agents went wrong. Push this address too hard, that amenity too much, and you lose the client before you have a chance to get the hook through their lip. They sense the desperation coming off you and they shut down before they’ve had the opportunity to get turned on. The trick with these marks—and they are marks, after all; we’re just the confidence men running the hustle—is to get them all worked up through the power of suggestion. Give them just enough to whet their appetite, but not enough to slake their thirst. Size them up, figure out what they’re looking for, and proceed accordingly. Mention this feature, underplay that one. Start with something inessential, then bury the thing that’s going to ultimately get them on the line. Let them suss it out, feel like they’ve dug it up themselves. In the end, it’s really all seduction. And I’d like to think that’s an area I’m well versed in.
* * *
“YOUR HUSBAND DOESN’T do it like this, does he?”
“No one does it to me like you do, Paul.”
“Whose is this?”
“It’s yours, baby. It’s all yours.”
“That’s right.”
“You can handle it, can’t you?”
“Keep getting cute with me and we’ll see if you can handle it.”
“I want it. I want it so bad.”
Thank God for Sheila. Before Wes came through with the real estate gig, she really helped me keep it together. I was beginning to flounder. Doubt was sinking in. And I’m not talking about your everyday, occasional, on-the-surface type of doubt. I’m talking about the kind that gets its fangs into you and begins to gradually, mercilessly sap the fucking life out of you.
Looking back, I was a pretty sad sack. Actually, I was a complete wreck. I was wandering around the house, unshaven, in a bathrobe, barely communicating with my wife, much less the larger world outside my door. The only thing I had going for me then—the only thing that kept me at all together—was those days with Sheila.
When she and I first met, I was in a better headspace. I was still optimistic that I was on my way back up the ladder. To my mind, it was simply bad luck that had kept me out of work for as long as I’d been. Duff and I would meet up with Sheila and Molly for our morning walks to the bay. We’d let the dogs off leash to run around while we caught up on each other’s day. We’d take the dogs back to her place, where they’d scamper around in the yard while we defiled each other. It was a very enjoyable diversion.
Things changed. Over the cours
e of the next year, we began to gradually sink deeper into a shared hole. Not because of each other, but because of the chaos that was swirling through each of our lives. I had become increasingly dejected by what was seeming more and more like a hopeless dream of returning to my former professional glory, and she was finding herself trudging through the quagmire of a steadily fracturing relationship with her husband. His job took him out on the road most of the time, and it had become clear to her that he was carrying on an affair with one of the coworkers he traveled with. The sting from that revelation, along with what I’d come to understand as long-running emotional abuse on his part, was really fucking with her.
These parallel circumstances had the effect of pulling us closer together as they pushed us farther apart. We were each isolated in our own frustration and quiet rage, and desperately clung to each other to keep from getting sucked down. It was all we could do to not completely give up and give over to the darkness.
We abandoned all pretense. We stopped meeting with the dogs for walks to the bay. As soon as Rebecca would leave for work, I’d let Duff out to run around in the backyard and head to Sheila’s. We began to speak less and less. There was little need for it, as neither of us had much worth saying. All the talking we needed to do we did with our bodies. She began to leave the front door open, with only the screen door between her and the animal that was now making visits to her home. I’d walk through that door and find out what I was in for. Sometimes she’d grab me as I came in, push me up against the wall, and begin to ravage me. Other times, she’d be sitting, naked, on the sofa, waiting for me to manhandle her.
We figured out a rhythm, silently. We’d size each other up and figure out who needed what. It became the way in which we communicated the frustrations and resentments in the other parts of our lives. I’d walk through that door, and we’d take one look at each other and figure out instantly who needed to get fucked and who needed to do the fucking.
