I never told Alice I’d gone to see JoAnne, and I haven’t told her about this meeting either. I was worried that she might want to come with me, which would get her into trouble if JoAnne lost her grip and started to blab to Neil.
I’ll admit, it does feel weird—almost illicit—going to meet her again. Nonetheless, I want to get more details about Eli and Elaine, and I want to see if she will reveal anything else about Neil or The Pact. Last time, I was certain there were things she wasn’t telling me. I got the feeling that maybe she just wanted to get a better sense of me, to renew our old friendship before she got down to the real details.
I don’t leave my phone with Huang. I take Uber to a coffee shop near the ball park. While waiting for my hot chocolate, I remove the battery from my phone. Then I head over to the Caltrain station and take the first train south to Hillsdale. I buy the office some chips and candy bars at Trader Joe’s, so I’ll have a bag to carry around the mall. I walk through Trader Joe’s and Barnes & Noble, alert to my surroundings. As far as I can tell, I’m alone. I wander through a few more stores, just to make sure.
Ten minutes before the hour, I set up in the corner at the far end of the food court, about a hundred yards from where JoAnne and I last sat. I watch the doors, waiting for her to walk in. I buy a couple of corn dogs and another green lemonade.
I wait. Ten minutes, nineteen minutes, thirty-three. I keep checking the time, watching all the entry points, getting more nervous by the minute. At some point I look down and realize that I’ve eaten both corn dogs, though I don’t even remember putting them in my mouth. The lemonade is gone too.
JoAnne doesn’t show. Shit. What can it mean?
At twelve forty-five, I stand, clear my table, and retrace my steps, up the escalator, back into the mall. What do I do now? I didn’t plan for a no-show. For some reason, I’d convinced myself that JoAnne was as eager to talk to me as I was to talk to her.
I walk around Nordstrom, through Uniqlo, and out the back of the mall. I’m confused. Anxious. Worried for JoAnne, worried for myself, and—okay—maybe disappointed. Maybe there was something more to this meeting than wanting to learn about The Pact. I realize guiltily that some part of me just really wanted to see JoAnne. If Alice was someone else in another life, so was I. Not to the same extreme, and for me it was so long ago. By the time I met Alice, I was fully the adult version of myself. But before that, there was college me—not exactly confident, but blindly hopeful, naïvely idealistic—and JoAnne was there during those years. JoAnne knew that version of me.
I try not to let paranoia set in. I decide to head back, give the food court one last chance. I stand at the top of the escalator that leads down into the food court. I can see almost every table from here. Nothing. As I’m about to step onto the escalator, I notice a large guy in a black turtleneck standing in front of the tempura place. He isn’t with anyone, and he isn’t eating anything. I’ve been watching him for a couple of minutes when he pulls out his phone and makes a call. I’ve never seen him before, but something seems off. He’s not Declan, the guy who came to take Alice to Fernley, but he’s certainly a reasonable facsimile. I quickly retreat into the mall. Then I escape through the Gap and out a side door.
A black Cadillac Escalade is idling by the curb. There’s a woman sitting at the wheel, but I can’t make out her face through the tinted windows. Is it JoAnne? Five parking spaces down from the SUV, I see an empty Bentley. Blue, very nice, just like Neil’s. With the rise of Silicon Valley, all of the recent IPOs, the vesting of Facebook and Google, there’s a lot of money on the Peninsula these days, so a Bentley isn’t really that surprising. Although what would a guy with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar car want to buy at the mall?
There are a million reasons JoAnne might have missed our meeting today, and I run through each of them on my long journey back to the office.
53
“How did your meeting go yesterday?” I ask Alice. It’s the end of March, and I’m looking forward to the start of a new month. Spring always makes me feel optimistic, and I tell myself this year should be no different.
“Okay,” she says, kicking off her heels in the entryway. “Dave took me for an early dinner at a Mexican place by his office. He can be a jerk, but in the end I think he means well.”
“That’s awfully forgiving of you, after the way he behaved.”
She heads into the kitchen and returns with a bottle of orange Calistoga. “I asked him about all that, actually.” I take down two glasses, and Alice pours. “He said he almost lost his first wife due to working too much—he didn’t want to see me go through the same thing.”
“So,” I say, unable to hide my sarcasm, “he was doing it for me?”
“Yes. We are happy now, aren’t we?”
“Of course.” I take some cheese out of the fridge and melt butter in a skillet. I put the cheese between slices of sourdough bread. “You’re almost all done with Dave, then.”
“Actually, he hired me for a suit he’s filing against a builder. It’s small, but it won’t hurt with the partners.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? How do you know he’s not just hiring you so that he can continue to pry into our lives?” The butter sizzles and I slide the sandwich into the pan.
“It’s not like that,” she says, staring into her glass. Yet I don’t trust Dave.
“I got you something,” she says. She goes into the entryway and returns with a wrapped gift. I can tell without opening it that it’s a book.
“You didn’t need to do that. You just gave me a birthday present.”
Alice gives me an appraising look. “You still haven’t finished The Manual, have you?”
I flip the sandwiches with a spatula. “It’s so long.”
“Gifts related to special occasions, to include birthdays, Christmas, and other holidays such as Valentine’s Day, should not be counted as satisfaction of the monthly gift requirement,” she recites.
As I tear off the wrapping paper, I realize I’m in trouble. I don’t have anything for Alice. Shit, I should have kept the scarf. Inside the box, I discover a copy of a Richard Brautigan book, Willard and His Bowling Trophies. For years, I’ve been collecting first editions of the novel, Brautigan’s best. As they’ve become increasingly hard to find, the joke has grown that I might soon own every copy. Alice has snapped up several copies online, but she takes particular pride in the ones that require actual legwork. Whenever she travels outside of the Bay Area, she checks used bookstores to see if she can find another copy.
It’s a nice specimen, even signed on the title page with an inscription to a girl named Delilah. Brautigan was popular with the hippie girls.
“Perfect,” I say. I go into the living room and put it on the bookshelf beside the other copies. Back in the kitchen, I find Alice plating the sandwiches with some raspberries and spoonfuls of crème fraîche. She carries the plates into the dining room and beckons me to sit.
“I thought this was the thirtieth,” I say.
“Thirty-first.” She checks her watch. “It’s seven twenty-nine. You can still pick something up if you hurry—try Park Life, maybe.”
“Good idea.” I eat a few bites of the sandwich and leave the raspberries. Of course, it’s not Alice I’m worried about; it’s The Pact. But how will they know if she doesn’t tell them?
It takes me sixteen minutes to get to Park Life, but of course there’s no parking. I circle the block twice before maneuvering the Jeep into an illegal spot. When I get to the door, it’s already closed. Shit. I run three blocks to the bookstore. It’s not very creative, since she already gave me a book, but she does love to read. The bookstore is closed too. There’s nothing else around here but bars, Chinese grocers, and restaurants. I’m screwed.
When I get home, I apologize profusely. “I actually bought you something, but I left it on the train.”
She looks at me intently. “When were you on the train?”
“Just for some meeting in Palo
Alto.”
“What meeting?”
“Work stuff. Don’t make me bore you with it. Anyway, sorry about the gift.”
“It’s no biggie,” Alice says, but I can tell she’s disappointed. And she still seems to be mulling over my story about the train. “Let’s just hope they don’t find out.”
“I’ll get you something tomorrow,” I promise.
The next day, I drive back to Park Life as soon as it opens. Thinking ahead, I buy three gifts—a bracelet with a gold pendant shaped like California, a coffee-table book about street photography, and a T-shirt that says I LEFT MY HEART IN OSLO. I have them all nicely wrapped. When I get home, I hide two of the gifts in my closet. Of course, there’s probably some rule against stocking up on presents. That night, when she gets home from work, I hand her the most expensive of the three—the bracelet.
“Good work!” she says.
I know there’s no way The Pact can discover my gift tardiness, yet it doesn’t stop me from worrying about it.
54
The next weekend, we’re scheduled to join Chuck and Eve at their vacation house in Hopland. I beg Alice to make an excuse, but she refuses. She has claimed credit for this weekend trip as her quarterly requirement, and she doesn’t want to sacrifice it.
“Can’t we just tell them I had something come up at work?” I find time with Pact members to be extremely stressful. I’m worried that I might do something that will get me into trouble. I’m even more worried for Alice.
“You need to make your peace with The Pact,” she tells me. It’s something we’ve been saying to each other since we heard it repeated by Dave and Vivian. It’s a joke between us, a black humor reminder of this weird, crazy rabbit hole we’ve tumbled into. Oddly, though, this time Alice doesn’t seem to be entirely joking. “Besides, I need some sun, and it’s supposed to be eighty in Hopland.”
An hour later, we’re in the car, headed across the Golden Gate Bridge. A double double at In-N-Out in Mill Valley improves my mood. Past San Rafael, as the darkness starts to come on, I ask Alice about her session with Dave today. It was her last, finally, and I’m relieved she’s finished.
“I think it might not be all bad to have a sounding board,” she says. “It lets me get out of my own head. I used to wonder about your patients, about why they would pay so much to come see you. Now I understand.”
“What did you talk about?”
Alice pushes her seat back and props her bare feet up on the dashboard. “Today we talked a lot about you. Dave asked about your practice, how it’s going, whether you have new clients—those sorts of things. He had an odd question, though. He wanted to know if you’d thought about opening an office down the Peninsula. He said there’s a good market for your sort of thing in San Mateo. He said to tell you to consider checking out the area around the Hillsdale mall.”
“What?” I blurt, alarmed.
“It seemed important to him—not sure why.”
I know why, of course, but if I tell Alice that The Pact has been spying on me at the Hillsdale mall, I’ll have to tell her why I was there. Shit.
The weekend turns out to be more fun than I expected, although I can never entirely relax, thanks to Dave’s reference to Hillsdale. I assumed there’d be a lot of talk about The Pact, in a gung ho Amway sort of way, but there’s none of that. There is a third couple, one we didn’t know were coming. Mick and Sarah are our age, from North Carolina, and when Chuck introduces us he jokes that they are our Southern doppelgängers. They have a good sense of humor, they watch the same television shows, and Mick, like me, hates olives and bell peppers. Sarah, like Alice, has brought four pairs of shoes. If I’m honest, though, from a purely aesthetic point of view, maybe the husband is slightly better looking than I am, the wife slightly less attractive than Alice. Sarah works in sales for a solar company; Mick is a musician—a keyboardist for a band you might have heard of. I find myself watching Alice, wondering: Would she be happier if she were married to a guy like Mick?
Still, the weather is perfect, Alice is relaxed, and Chuck and Eve are generous, attentive hosts. On the second morning, The Pact has yet to come up. Chuck has gone for a run, Mick and Sarah are visiting a winery, and Alice is on her laptop in our room, working on a brief. I find myself alone on the patio with Eve.
“By the way,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant, “do you remember a guy from The Pact named Eli?”
“No,” she says sharply. Then she gets up and heads into the house.
I sit alone on the patio, staring at the grapevines on a nearby hill wilting in the drought, thinking of a Soviet story I read in college. The piece was about a waiter who lived on one side of a duplex. The other side was inhabited by a grumpy elderly man. As the story goes, the police show up at the waiter’s apartment over and over, asking if he has been spying on his neighbor. He says no, and they go away only to come back the next day with the same complaint. It goes on for weeks, the police continually harassing him for spying on his neighbor. The weird part is that he’d never thought much about the neighbor until the police showed up.
After being accused of spying ten or fifteen times, the waiter starts to wonder: What could the old man be doing that made him so paranoid? What was he hiding? The waiter gets so curious, he climbs through the attic and looks down on his neighbor’s apartment. The roof caves in, the police show up, and things go downhill from there.
55
Two days after we return from Hopland, I have the group meeting for teens of divorced parents. Conrad and Isobel arrive a few minutes early, and everyone else arrives a few minutes late. While waiting for the session to begin, I arrange cookies, cheese, and soft drinks on a foldout table. Conrad and Isobel, who attend the same pricey private school, sit in the foldout chairs talking about their senior theses. Conrad, who drives a brand-new Land Rover and lives in a mansion in Pacific Heights, is doing his on the need for socialism in America, without a trace of irony. Isobel is doing hers on cults.
“How do you know what’s a cult and what’s not?” Conrad asks.
She flips through her big orange binder and settles on a page filled with tiny handwriting. “That’s the key question. I’m still sorting it out, but my impression is that a cult has to have some or all of the following things.” She reads from a list: “A) A taboo against sharing the group’s secrets with outsiders. B) Some sort of penalty for leaving the group. C) A set of goals or beliefs that are outside of the mainstream. D) A single charismatic leader. E) An insistence on having members donate their work, personal property, and money to the group without compensation.”
“I think B and D are the most interesting,” she says.
“Is the Catholic church a cult?” I ask. “You’ve got the charismatic leader—the Pope—and you can be excommunicated if you don’t follow the rules.”
She frowns, thinking. “I don’t think so. If something is around for long enough, or becomes super-popular, I’m not sure it can be classified as a cult. Also, a cult is desperate to keep people in the fold, and the Catholic church seems like it would rather lose members than have members who overtly disagree with its teachings. Also, the church’s views are mostly noble—charity and good deeds—and aren’t outside the mainstream.”
Conrad gets up to check out the snack table. “What about the Mormons?”
“No, I think they’re legit. They have some odd rituals, but the same can be said of every major world religion.”
When he comes back to the circle with his paper plate and two Cokes, Conrad sits one seat closer to Isobel. “Legitimacy is relative, isn’t it?” he says, handing one of the cans to Isobel.
She reaches over and takes a cookie from Conrad’s plate, and I can tell it makes him happy. Isobel could do worse than Conrad; despite the mild case of affluenza—not his fault, really—he’s a good kid.
“What was it like to grow up in San Francisco during the era of the People’s Temple?” Conrad asks me. I can tell he’s trying to impress Isobel.
/> “Just how old do you think I am?” I ask, curious.
He shrugs. “Fifty?”
“Not quite,” I say, smiling. “I was just a baby when Jim Jones lured his followers to Guyana. When I was growing up, though, I sometimes heard my parents talking about a family they knew who had died at Jonestown.” I think of photos I saw a few months ago on the anniversary of the massacre. I was amazed to see that the jungle had grown over the entire encampment, leaving almost no clue that Jones and his followers had ever been there.
“The good news is that cults aren’t nearly as popular now as they were back in the day,” Isobel says. “My thesis is that the Internet and increased public information have drastically reduced the appeal of cults. The ones that do exist work really hard to cut their members off from information.”
As the other kids trickle in—Emily, Marcus, Mandy, and Theo—I mull over the conversation. By Isobel’s definition, The Pact doesn’t qualify as a cult. While Orla may be a powerful figure, the goal of the group isn’t outside of the mainstream. In fact, The Pact’s goal is the very definition of the mainstream. Also, The Pact doesn’t ask for financial support, to my knowledge. The opposite is actually true, when you consider the nice parties, personal trainers, and access to relaxing weekend getaways. Of course, it does check a couple of key boxes: You’re not allowed to discuss it with anyone on the outside, and, once you’re in, there’s no easy way out.
At the heart of it, though, the mission of The Pact and my primary goal in life happen to be identical: a successful, happy marriage to the woman I love. In my heart, I know that The Pact is bad—very bad—and yet there’s no denying that its aim is to provide me with the one thing I want most.
Conrad pulls a book out of his backpack and shows me the cover. “Our right-wing lit teacher wants us to read The Fountainhead—not going to do it.”
“You should give it a chance,” I suggest.
The Marriage Pact Page 21
