Carousel Court (14 page)

A woman from a magazine profile that Phoebe read in a physician's office the other day appears in the dream, snatches Jackson from her arms. She is fierce-looking, short blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and high cheekbones. She wears a black suit and a thin pearl necklace. The woman from the story was the CFO of a Fortune 500 company and articulated her philosophy for success: Don't dwell on failure or
shortcomings. It's a waste of time. Be tenacious in the pursuit of goals. Ruthlessness is not a vice. Phoebe watches the woman rip her blouse open and press Jackson's face to her chest.

The dreams have been more intense since she started substituting Seroquel samples for her Klonopin and wine.

The response from JW came overnight. Nick is next to her in the bed. It's seven
A.M.
Her eyes are dry. He sent a succession of text messages:

Want anything from Bangkok?

Btw . . . got your email.

LA, consulting . . . agree that's more your speed, a few people/places come to mind . . . salary bump . . . all good . . . let's make it happen.

She messages back, but six hours have passed since his last communication.

That's not going to work. I need concrete info. If not D&C, what specifically do you have in mind? Deloitte and Booz have offices here.

The immediate response from JW surprises her:

Then get your ass over here like you mean it

Where?

My suite.

Nick shifts in bed; Jackson is calling out from his room. The day begins.

It's different now.

She has shortcomings and a list of failures too long to contemplate. JW chief among them. She feels herself sinking under the weight of them, so she chooses ruthlessness instead.

Is it though?

Quite

19

N
ick stands alone in the backyard, staring at the surface of the pool. Despite the chlorine and the hint of smoke from next door (the neighbor set fire to his couch last night), Nick can smell the animal. It floats in the middle of the pool, pink and gray and wet black fur. Something devoured it. Nick figures it managed to escape but, disoriented, stumbled into the water. They have to keep the cover on the pool. Phoebe never remembers, and since his overnights began, he's also forgetting. He'll build a fence around it before Jackson falls in. There's so much they should do, so much they were going to do.

Nick extends the skimmer net, drags the animal across the water to the far end, lifts the waterlogged thing from the pool. What the hell should I do with it? he thinks, then walks around to the front of the house, crosses the street to the abandoned house next to Metzger's. From the side of the drained backyard pool behind the empty house, he dumps it.

• •

The images Mallory sends are impressive: black and white, suggestive without being explicit. She wants Nick's opinion. Do any of them
make him pause, linger a little bit? They all do, but he hesitates before responding, studies them a bit longer. He's sprawled out on a chaise behind the house, sipping Phoebe's Maker's Mark from a cracked tumbler. Mallory wants to model. She also loves to train. CrossFit is her thing, she says. She wants to compete. There's an Ironman in Oahu in March. Nick is stuck on one image: the girl lying nude facedown on a mattress, a sheet draped over her ass, hair pulled back to reveal the tattooed lyrics from a Pink Floyd song on the back of her neck. But the more Mallory says she wants to do with her life, the harder it is for Nick not to think of Phoebe and how she used to be when he fell in love with her.

Nick sends the question:
Are we still going running?

Of course! Sooo . . . which one??

Nick has already downloaded the images of Mallory onto his ­iPhone, selects the one of the girl nude under the sheet and sends it back to her.

Really?

What are you doing now?

Lying in bed.

Did you run today?

Twelve miles. Sore

The sensation of someone behind him, peering over his shoulder, is overwhelming. Nick turns, finds no one, the sliding glass door still closed, dim recessed light in the kitchen. His iPhone vibrates.

Another JPEG: Mallory's hand in her panties.

Are you alone?

Yes.

Arik?

Who knows?

Nick is buzzed, tired.

I
'm making so much $$$,
he types.

Show me

My house is HUGE.

Is it?

Can't wait to put you in one

Come for me

Phoebe doesn't know he's home from work. She's passed out on the couch. It's midnight. He stood over Jackson's crib when he got home. The boy sleeps soundly, breathes clearly, allergies in check. Nick could drive forty minutes to Mallory's apartment and follow her to the bedroom, watch her crawl across the mattress until she's lying facedown, white tank pulled up over her breasts to the back of her neck.

You're making this too easy

U want to work for it??

We
don't sleep in the same bed. I know she wants it that way. I can't solve it.

So have something easy.

We barely see each other. We fight all the time.

You think too much.

She'd be happier if I were dead.

Take this ;)

The image that arrives is Mallory, back arched, offering her ass. He masturbates on the patio. He stares at the black sky, and the words from one more series of text messages from Mallory ring in his thoughts:
It's fire season,
she wrote,
you can't see the moon. I'm
sooo high. The lights are flickering in my room.

And then:
When the fire comes they should let it go, burn it all down and start again.

Silhouettes of dry palms sway in the wind. The cicadas are deafening. He's almost there when an image flashes across his mind: Phoebe leaning over JW's desk, looking back over her shoulder at Nick sitting on the leather couch in the man's office while JW pounds her from behind. It burns when he comes.

20

W
hy does she drive? Phoebe's trying to relax, but her breathing is short in the dry heat and she's overtired, her foot twitching, still pumping the brakes, and Marina is asking her lazily from the shade of an umbrella why she drives. She drives because that's her job. She drives because she's got no option; in debt with this economy, she's not in a position to gamble, to take it lightly, to play the games she played back east, push back against rude managers, skip appointments. They can't afford for Phoebe to do any of that out here. So she drives. And drives for Jackson is the easy answer, the most instinctive, the only one that makes sense.

Kostya wades in the shallow end of the pool, dunking and holding his son's head under, staring at the women, at Phoebe. She doesn't stare back.

Marina's sucking on a frozen banana. “You must feel crazy.” She dips the banana in her daiquiri, licks a trickle from her wrist. It's not that Marina doesn't understand. She knows what Phoebe does for a living. She knows the answer to her own question. Phoebe hears it differently. She sees the blood-orange sky and watches Kostya pretend to drown his son and the steady hum of cicadas and the burning wind on
her face, and when she turns to Marina, the shadows have shifted and the woman is less a commiserating friend than some spectral presence posing unanswerable questions.

Why does she drive? What possesses Phoebe to think this time will be different than the last, when she rammed the company car into the back of the idling UPS truck, high on Klonopin, Jackson's spine twisted, nearly snapped, his soft forehead striking the back of the passenger seat like a ripe peach thrown against a wall?

The scream is the boy freeing himself from his father, coming up for air in the pool. The game is over. The boy is scared and crying. Marina calls out in Russian, chastens Kostya.

Phoebe's simple answer to the question: She drives for Jackson. If she tells herself this, that she spends the time on the road doing her job, earning what she does, for her son and his relative safety with Mai, then she stays between the two white lines in her mind, the serpentine but narrow path she follows until she sleeps (then the lines don't exist and there are no roads at all, just Jackson climbing their living room wall, stuck at the top, in tears, losing his grip, landing hard). When she loses focus, strays from her narrow lane, she drives for visits to an unnaturally dark, hushed office so that a sixty-one-year-old family physician can hug her and not let go and she can feel his erection through his cheap slacks against her abdomen as he presses his thin lips and unshaven face against her ear and his warm breath is stale, and the picture of his tired-looking wife on his desk as he hesitates before asking if Phoebe will watch him masturbate.

She drives because she's trapped, because she knew better but didn't find her voice when Nick dangled it in front of her: a summer off with her son by the beach. She drives with some hope that the hours spent alone will be enough time to piece together a solution, the sinkhole threatening to swallow them whole.

“It works,” Phoebe finally says. That's the answer she offers Marina, who probably doesn't hear because, like Kostya and their son, she looks skyward at yet another police or fire helicopter passing low overhead.

Marina throws the last chunk of banana at her husband, who floats facedown on the water, looks dead. “For now,” Marina says as Phoebe watches the sky.

21

P
hoebe waits next to Pink Taco on a busy street in West Hollywood. The late-afternoon sun feels warm on her neck. She left her car with the valet at the hotel across the street, per JW's instructions. He sent a series of texts overnight. Also for JW, she wears the fringed linen-blend skirt from Mint Collection on Melrose that he linked to in a text he sent last week. It's short and teasing, and her hair is pulled up in a ponytail the way he likes it. He has a couple of hours before he leaves for Thailand.

Nick left Jackson with her this morning, left the house without speaking. She called Mai. She messaged Nick:
She's bringing him home @ 4. I won't be back.

The words
LIVE RADIANTLY
are stamped on a billboard below a woman who looks anything but radiant: The black-and-white image is faded. Someone has outlined her face with yellow paint and cut out her eyes, two black spheres that look nowhere, see nothing.

Phoebe turns away from the image and chews a fresh piece of spearmint gum. She'll get her car and drive home. Or to the beach. She'll get Jackson and take him to watch the seagulls. She's shaking when she hears a voice cry out. It's so filled with rage and desperation
that she's sure someone must be dying. A madwoman in all black with white hair and bright red lipstick is accosting pedestrians. Her blotchy face is bloated and she's barefoot. Phoebe edges close to the curb, looks down at her iPhone screen, hoping to avoid the woman. Cross the street, she thinks to herself. But her feet won't move. The light turns, traffic slows, and the afternoon shadows shift. The intersection where she stands and its sweeping murals advertising flavored vodka and women's clothing and looming hotels and hills and the madwoman whose voice falls silent and the black eyes on the billboard telling her how to live all trigger a wave of panic in Phoebe. She swallowed ten milligrams of Klonopin before she left the house. Now she sticks her hand in her bag, finds a Seroquel.

The wind is the madwoman breathing, poised to sink her teeth into Phoebe's neck. A flesh-eating zombie went on a rampage recently in Echo Park. It was on the news. They said he was high on PCP. He ate the faces of three homeless men before police shot him dead.

Her phone vibrates. It's JW:
Turn around

She does. A black BMW idles on the corner; the passenger door opens.

Get in.

Phoebe notices that she casts no shadow in the refracted sunlight. A stillness settles over everything: the cars that idle at the red light; the eucalyptus and tall palms, motionless.

She can't do this. Not now, not again. She knows one thing if nothing else: She's incapable of managing another turn with JW.

The light turns and a bus roars past and breaks the spell. The madwoman is gone. On the white screen of her handheld, small letters tell her what to do.

Get In.

Live Radiantly.

The open car door is a mouth ready to swallow her whole.

22

P
hoebe drives home past wilting palms behind walls that line the cracked freeways and choked traffic and the translucent brown air and hears the low-flying helicopters and Harleys and breathes the exhaust on Sepulveda and Moorpark and at every backed-up intersection in Pomona. Her veins are wide and loose from the Seroquel and Klonopin. She can feel the blood flow. Tension melts away. She reads the message from Nick about not paying attention. She refills the tank using her Discover card because there's no money on the company gas card. She sees the two boxers in the backseat of the black Land Rover in the full-service lane and doesn't quietly resent the young Asian mother but instead asks if the dogs are from a breeder. “They're great with kids,” Phoebe says, and the woman nods and seems uneasy, and Phoebe notices the two girls in the backseat with the dogs and considers asking the woman about pediatricians, but the woman is on the phone now, windows up. Though it's impractical and unaffordable, Phoebe recalls the image of the dog Nick sent from the house, the animal left behind.

She taps out a message to JW:
Maybe the Polo Lounge for drinks when you return??