Keeper of the Keys (2 page)

Ray finished pasting a few more shakes. Leigh watched, although she appeared preoccupied. “You missed dinner.” He tried for a normal tone. He did not want her to have the slightest clue about how very, very upset he had been about the images that arose in his mind during her absence. See, this was the thing about relationships. His mother had warned him that the heart was the nastiest place in the body, not the genitals. She had encouraged him to have loads of girlfriends but to keep his heart private, but then Leigh had come along and plucked it right out of him as easily as if she were picking a wildflower along a road.

How could she?

“I thought you said you would cook tonight,” he went on. How surprising, to continue operating as if they had something to salvage.

Did they? The thought confused him, and for a moment, he stopped working and tried to think.

She looked startled. “I did? Oh. I guess I did. Sorry. I forgot. I really am sorry, Ray, but I had something else to do, and so I just—” She tried to squeeze his arm, but he moved away. Instead, she picked up a piece of balsa he had formed into an intricate porch trim, then put it down when she saw the look he was giving her. “I stopped by the drugstore to get a few things.”

“That took, generously, one hour,” Ray said. He tinkered with a small step leading up to a porch. He couldn’t seem to get the porch right. Memory failed him sometimes. How many people could remember such detail, going back twenty-five years or more? He did pretty well, considering how the mind worked, how emotions colored and distorted memory.

He tried again, but couldn’t get the stair to sit right. He had trimmed it too tight. He pushed through it with his thumb, breaking the lightweight wood in half. “What else did you do?”

A wrinkle between her brows registered something in his voice. “Errands,” she said. She eyed the now ruined porch step.

“Must have been a lot of them. Errands.”

“I drove around, okay? I wasn’t ready to come home.”

“It’s the anniversary of Tom Tinsley’s death, isn’t it? You went to the cemetery. You always do, Leigh. I’ve known it since we got married.”

She didn’t answer.

“Brought him flowers. Had a chat with a dead man. I never could understand that routine. See, it seems to me you should celebrate someone’s life, not their day of death.”

“It wasn’t a celebration, Ray.”

“No. I guess not. But I get tired of eating alone, Leigh, and it seems I eat alone an awful damn lot these days.”

“Look, I didn’t come down here to fight with you, okay? I poured us some wine. Why don’t you put this stuff away for now. Let’s talk, okay?”

The glue flowed, balsa wood meticulously slid into place. He had it exactly right this time, and stepped back to admire its perfection. “Maybe later.” He suppressed the urge he felt to start in on her, but that didn’t stop the heat rising inside him or the emotions preparing to launch like fireballs. He studied the architectural model of the house, the tiny floor plan fully visible as though a hurricane had blown the roof off. He admired its neatness, although possibly the front window should be larger?

“Damn it!” She slapped at his hand, knocking a small piece of wood out of it. “What is wrong with you? What is all this crap? Your own sick celebration? I mean, you lived in a bunch of houses when you were a kid. Millions of kids do, but they move on, not pissing life away on a screwy hobby, trying to resurrect a screwy past!”

He picked up the piece that had fallen and laid it carefully on his table next to a pile of scraps. “I’ve explained it to you,” he said, with what he thought was amazing restraint. “I developed my love for architecture living in these funny little boxes. It’s a hobby, like boatbuilding or hunting. It makes me feel good.”

“You used to say every house you lived in had an aura. I thought about that. I thought, what, was this one warm? Did this one protect him? Did this one scare him? I forgave that thing that took you so far away from me. But you’ve become obsessed. You’re at it all the time. You won’t even go to the movies with me anymore.” She stopped and he saw the effort she expended calming herself. “Look, Ray. I just can’t live so disconnected from you or from how we used to be. We were so close. We told each other everything!”

“Not anymore, we don’t.”

“I’m trying, okay? I’ve got things to say. Things I need to tell you.”

“Okay.” He slammed his fist down on the table, keeping his voice steady but unable to unclench his hands. “You want to talk? We’ll talk.” Fear came up in her face, and while he hated himself, he also could not stop himself now. She wanted an adult. She had one, had his full fucking attention now.

“Not here. Come upstairs. Please.”

“First why don’t you tell me about where you go when you don’t go to the store or to work or to the cemetery. How about let’s start with that?”

A silence as palpable as the haze hanging over the canyon outside sucked the oxygen from the air. Ray let his hand dig down into his pocket.

Her voice sounded small. “I get lonely.”

He pulled out a key and threw it on the table. It spun, then landed in front of the miniature garage.

“I was going to tell you, Ray.” She wiped tears from her eyes. “Tonight.”

“You left it on the TV.” The cheesy motel on Pacific Coast Highway still used old-fashioned keys, which had surprised him. He thought metal keys were becoming as obsolete as dial phones.

“But you didn’t say anything.” She put her face in her hands.

“Neither did you.” Pain crept through his heart like a slow-motion bullet.

“I want to explain—”

“You gave yourself away so cheap,” Ray said, pacing around the table. “It’s totally mechanical to him, attracting other people. He’s not even that good-looking; he’s just a smooth salesman. We used to laugh about him, Leigh! Remember? Now you—How could you?”

Her hands combed through her long hair. “I don’t know.”

He put both hands in his pockets. His left hand landed on a coil of copper wire. How quickly he could coil this wire around her neck and end this pain forever.

He pictured the whole thing. He could do this, yes. The love they once had, now compromised; the pain so intense he couldn’t think straight; the fear he had of the future; all emotions could be shoved back into memory, safe as an old letter gathering dust in a box.

He reached up and slid his hand behind her neck and pulled her down toward him, the other hand still in his pocket, holding the wire tense. He buried himself in her hair and the scent of her skin. He could. He could kill her. He could easily kill her. Keeping her close as he stood up, he thought about exactly how.

1

A
white yacht floated deep in smooth water not a hundred feet away, separated from Kat and Jacki by the sheet of glass that made up the back wall of the restaurant. A man in a white cap moved about on deck. Blinding white boats floated at their moorings a long way out under a hot cloudless sky. Kat took off her cotton blazer and nudged off her dressy shoes under the table. Her sister, Jacki, sat across from her, marine-blue eyes hidden by huge sunglasses, lipsticked, wearing a sleeveless blouse that overhung her eight-months-along middle like a steep-eaved roof. “Have a good morning?” Jacki asked.

“The usual schizoid Sunday in August. I read the paper in my jammies and enjoyed myself until I made the mistake of returning a business phone call and had this knockdown fight with one very angry owner in La Cienega who thought his house should be worth double my appraisal. Sorry I’m late. I couldn’t find legal parking so I’ll probably get towed.”

“The walk nearly killed me.” Jacki lived right here in Marina del Rey, only two blocks away in a loft condo with her husband, Raoul, who taught bioethics and biology at UCLA. Kat couldn’t afford this area on one income, so lived several miles south in Hermosa Beach.

“Braggart. I should have had a margarita instead of this latte,” Kat said, taking a sip. “Things always go better with tequila.”

“You drink too much.”

“So do you when you’re not pregnant.”

“Already the low blows,” Jacki said comfortably, offering her a napkin, “and you’ve only been here”—she consulted her watch—“three minutes.”

“You started it.”

“So I should get the last word.”

Kat nodded. “Always end as you start. I remember that from the one creative writing course I took at Long Beach State.”

“I ordered a turkey on rye for you, okay?”

Kat nodded again, taking the napkin and setting it beside her plate. She made a note to herself to stop for a bottle of wine on the way home. Evenings had been much easier to get through lately, what with this new habit of getting slightly shitfaced every night. Yes, later she would undoubtedly violate the Buddha’s Fifth Precept against intoxicants once again this evening, because she didn’t seem to have any control over anything anymore, but the main thing was to be on the path and do the best you can at any given moment. She was drinking coffee right now and not hurting anything, not engaged in any sexual misconduct, not stealing, not getting whacked on chardonnay, piling up merit to piss away later tonight.

Jacki had just started her maternity leave, and she was becoming quite irksome now that she didn’t have a job on which to expend her prodigious energies. She called Kat a half-dozen times a day.

Leaning back in the blue-trimmed wicker chair, Kat decided she didn’t really mind. In fact, she didn’t have much of a life outside her work and Jacki these days. Her sister’s phone calls gave her a sense of normality. “I love the air here,” she said, breathing deeply, as a sea breeze swept across the patio. “I heard it was a hundred and eight in San Bernardino yesterday. Imagine being there next month, in September, when it really gets hot. We’re lucky, living on the coast. They say being near large bodies of water makes the air heavier or something and so it’s healthier for you.”

“Fewer cooties is what I hear.”

“Ask Raoul, and be sure to use the word ‘cooties.’ He knows all that special science stuff.” Kat checked out the nearby tables, but they were full of women just like her and Jacki at this time of day. The pasty and pudgy waiter wasn’t hot. His dress shirt gaped enough to display part of a blue tattoo she really didn’t want to see the rest of. It took the pressure off, not having to be aware of him or to wonder what he thought of her.

“Hey, you know, Kat,” Jacki was saying, waving her hand at the cloudless sky and ocean beyond, “if we have no other legacy when we die, at least they can say we got the hell out of Whittier.”

“That’s such a Whittier thing to say,” Kat said.

They laughed. They had grown up in a two-story house with a living/dining combo, three bedrooms, and windows closed off at all times with dark drapes against the hot, dusty outside. The town had become a scapegoat for them. Once there had been orange groves, times their parents nostalgically remembered, before their time, before the World War II vets arrived with their new wives and big families, hungry for safe, cheap housing. The old Quaker town thirty miles inland became just another suburb bursting with tract houses, absorbed into the basin-wide suburb which was L.A.

“If Daddy had only let us fix the place up—get some—”

“A/c,” Kat finished. “God, what he inflicted on us, and I don’t mean his sense of humor.” Kat and Jacki both kept their condos frosty in summer. They would go without food before they would give up air-conditioning.

“Remember? He said it was to save the earth when what he was really doing was saving to buy the girlfriend a Camaro,” Jacki said.

“Which she took with her. We never thanked her enough for leaving him.”

“You did pretty well. Even Ma got a kick out of those roses you sent her,” said Jacki.

But for months after her husband left and again after their brother, Tom, died, their mother had just sat dully on her couch, exuding, in that dim overhot room, the familiar smell of what Kat secretly called Eau de Dumped, the smell of the lonely women of Southern California. No emollients, no deodorant, could disguise that stink of loneliness.

I ought to take a whiff of my own armpits, Kat thought glumly, and tasted the hot milky drink the waiter had just brought.

In her working life as a realtor, Jacki had always appeared supremely coifed and styled. Today she wore her streaked hair snapped into a clip, the dark roots shiny and clean but untreated. Her skin looked pinker these days, no doubt due to the pregnancy, but the color didn’t hide the million freckles she usually erased with foundation. Kat said, “You’re starting to look just like Ma when we were little. I expect you to say, any second now, ‘Pick your nose again and I’m calling the cops.’”

Jacki swatted at her.

“You said you wanted to talk to me about something?” Kat asked.

But Jacki, relaxed since leaving her job and under the spell of a modified endocrine system heavy on the maternal hormones, appeared in no hurry to discuss whatever was bugging her. “I ordered myself a salad, nothing heavy. I’ll graze like the enormous hippo I have become and continue with meal number six of the day when Raoul gets home. You have plans tonight?”

“Not really, no.” Unless maybe getting laid by someone Kat had not yet met counted as making plans. His name was Nikola and he had a promising twinkle in his eye, at least in the one-inch shot he had posted on Match.com. They were on for dinner at a bistro in Hermosa.

“What do you do for fun these days?” Jacki asked.

“Work sixteen hours a day, as you well know. I looked at six houses today desperately seeking comps for an old thirties shack on the beach at Zuma that only has one bathroom.”

“Some fun,” Jacki said. She too had always worked long hours, but somehow had found time to date her husband, cook elegant dinners, host quasi-scintillating friends, see all the latest movies and concerts, and it seemed, organize good weather wherever she went. Now, she would have her baby at age thirty-six, just like she had always planned. “So how much did you decide it was worth?”

“A million three. A teardown.”

“Who’s listing it?” They talked about their favorite subject, residential real estate, for a few minutes. Kat worked as an appraiser, comparing ineffables. Jacki was a realtor. Real estate cluttered up their genes, and besides, with the market smokin’ as it was, they were both making enough money to live and sock away a little, and to hope for The Big Lebowski, the monster hit, to come someday and wipe out all their financial insecurities.