Swindlers (7 page)

The sun was not kind to Carol Llewelyn. Her
make-up was too thick; her lashes too black and too brittle. She
was in that inadmissible part of middle-age, when the vanity of
youth has been reduced to the sad and useless lie that she was only
forty-nine. The dress she wore, though perfectly pressed, was a
little frayed, and a little out of fashion; and the silver-blue
Mercedes she drove, though clean and polished to a shine, was
almost ten years old. It was easy to imagine her, after a grueling
day of smiling through the inane remarks of prospective buyers who
did not know what they wanted, and could not afford it if they did,
going back to her small condominium and kicking off her shoes,
lighting up a cigarette and tossing down a beer.

“Last year, wasn’t it?” she asked as she
unlocked the front door. “You were on television, on all the time –
some trial that had everyone’s attention. You won, didn’t you?”

She gave me the look of someone who wished
things had turned out differently, not the trial, but what had
happened with her daughter. It was what she had told me at the
time, when the engagement had been broken off.

“You were too serious for her. You were
starting law school. Jean wanted to have a good time, and, well…you
remember. I told her she was making a mistake.”

Her eyes brightened with encouragement, the
same look she had given me the last time I had seen her, just after
the engagement ended and I did not think anything would ever be any
good again.

“And I was right,” she went on. “You’ve
become everything I thought you would be, and Jean’s now been
married and divorced and married again.”

She took a picture from her wallet and handed
it to me. Jean, the girl I had fallen in love with and wanted to
marry, was standing with her arms around three small children. The
carefree look had gone from her eyes and even her smile seemed
solemn.

“Three kids and a couple of husbands will do
that to you,” said Carol, who, when it came to her daughter, had
always been able to read my mind. “Are you married?”

“Me? No.”

“Close?” she asked, eager to know.

I laughed and told her that I had not felt
about anyone what I had felt about Jean.

“You’ll say hello for me?”

“Of course. She asks about you. She won’t say
it, but she wishes she had it to do over.”

She left the front door open and led me into
the kitchen in back. Pouring a glass of water from the tap, she
took a sip and sighed with small pleasure. She tossed the rest in
the sink, wiped the glass dry and put it back in the cupboard.
Opening the refrigerator, her eyes lit up.

“Here,” she said, handing me a cold bottle of
beer. “They won’t mind. After standing outside, waiting for me in
that heat, you deserve it.”

We sat down at a table next to the window and
I took a drink, and then I took another. Carol watched me, waiting
for me to tell her why I had suddenly called and asked to see her.
A car stopped outside. Her eyes darted down the hallway to the
front door, but the car started up again and with a shadow of
disappointment her gaze came back to mine.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t see you earlier, that I
had to ask you to meet me here,” she started to explain. “It’s too
warm in here, isn’t it? I better check the thermostat.”

She disappeared down the hallway, her steps a
hard echo on the gleaming hardwood floor. A few moments later, she
was back, nodding to herself as she made a mental note.

“They had it set too high. A big, expensive
house – and they’re trying to save a few dollars on the electric
bill. Everybody’s desperate now, trying to sell in a market like
this,” she mumbled. Suddenly, her eyes brightened, and she bent
forward, wondering, from the delighted expression on her face, why
she had not thought of it before. “Have you ever thought about
living out here? Thought about getting out of the city? This would
be a wonderful place for you, perfect for someone who likes his
privacy.” She turned her head toward the window, making sure my
eyes would follow. “Look out there: a pool, a tennis court, and
with that vine-covered fence you don’t even know you have
neighbors! I can get you a very good price,” she promised
confidentially.

After years of selling real estate, it was
what Carol Llewelyn had become, her identity. Saying no was a
little like telling her that you preferred someone else. Even if
she had not been the mother of the only girl I had ever really been
in love with, even if she had not always been so remarkably kind to
me, I still would have felt an obligation to let her down gently,
to make it sound as if I was not saying no at all.

“I like living in the city,” I said, feeling
foolish and defensive; “but if I ever change my mind….”

She filed it away, another name, different
because of the minor part I had once played in her life, but
another name on the list that grew longer every week, names to
remember, names to call again. I lived in San Francisco, and I
liked it there, but people change and, even if they don’t, no one
stays in the same place for very long.

“This week has been just impossible: new
houses to see, buyers who have to be taken around, buyers who
usually have to wait until their own house sells.” Something caught
her eye, a drawer that had not been completely shut. “Anyway,
you’re here, and this isn’t a bad place to talk.” She shut the
drawer the other side of the kitchen and came back. “I was a little
surprised when you said it was something about Justine.”

I told her what had happened; not all of it,
of course. I did not tell her what had happened on the deck of Blue
Zephyr late at night while the other guests were getting drunk down
below and how close we had come to being caught; I did not tell her
that Justine had slipped into my bed hours later, after she and her
husband had quarreled. I told her only that I had not recognized
Justine, that I had no idea that Danielle was the kid I used to
tease when I was going out with her sister.

“Half-sister,” said Carol Llewelyn. She
turned away, as if there was something not quite right about it,
something she would have preferred to keep hidden, and then,
reaching across the table, gave my hand a squeeze. “I didn’t do a
very good job of things. The girls had different fathers. At least
I was married to the first one.” Crossing her arms, she leaned back
and fixed me with a warm, steady, glance. “He was gorgeous, Jean’s
father: blonde, blue eyes, with tight fitting jeans and a summer
tan, nineteen years old and he stole my seventeen year old heart,
along with my virginity. I was pregnant before the summer ended and
married in the fall.”

She paused, and then laughed quietly at her
hesitation even now to discuss what she thought the failures of her
life. The laughter died away and her mouth began to tremble, but
she stopped it with a smile, brave and sad and determined.

“I always liked it, when you and Jean were
engaged, how easy everything seemed, how I never felt I had to hold
anything back, whenever we talked. It must be those honest eyes of
yours. I knew that whatever someone told you, you would not think
less of them because of it. I’ve never told anyone what I just told
you. God, it was so long ago; I was so young, so….It doesn’t matter
now; I can’t go back and change it. We were married in the fall,
and he left a few months later. He told me he was going, that he
just couldn’t settle down, stay in the same place, work a regular
job. He said he knew it wasn’t fair, but he couldn’t help what he
was, and so he left me and I cried for weeks, praying he would come
back and knowing he never would. He only married me because he
thought he had to, and then, before he could see the child he
fathered and maybe feel something that might make him stay, he ran
away. Maybe that’s where Jean got it, the blonde good looks she
had, the refusal to take life on anyone’s terms but her own, the
way she only wanted to think about today and never tomorrow, the
only thing important having a good time. That’s why you fell in
love with her, isn’t it? – You were always so serious, and she
could pull you out of that, make you think about nothing but her.
Justine was not anything like her.”

The doorbell rang. Startled that she had not
heard the car, she jumped up from the chair and went to greet the
young couple that had just arrived.

“Take your time; look around. If you have any
questions, just let me know. I’ll just be in the kitchen. I’m
helping someone write up an offer.”

When she came back to the table, I raised an
eyebrow.

“It wasn’t exactly a lie,” she whispered with
a mischievous grin. “I’m still hoping you’ll change your mind.”

Her gaze drifted toward the window, out to
the trees and the close cut grass and the kidney shaped pool and
the tennis court, out to the ivy covered fence that guaranteed the
privacy of anyone lucky enough to live a privileged life in which
money and the cost of things were never an issue. A soft, wistful
smile played at the corners of her aging mouth and she put aside
the brandished aura of busy efficiency.

“Justine’s father – I would have married
him.” She looked at me with a quizzical expression, as if wondering
what my reaction was going to be, and then she told me, quite
without any sense of guilt, that she had not been able to marry
Justine’s father because, “He was already married.”

I had always liked her, and I knew she had
always liked me, and I was old enough now to have a better
understanding of what makes people do the things they do. There
was, so far as I was concerned, nothing to condemn in what she had
done or how she had chosen to live her life.

“You haven’t had very good luck with men,
have you? And I haven’t had very good luck with women.”

“Depends on how you look at it,” said Carol
with a good-natured laugh. “I was in love twice, and both times I
got a daughter. Worse things could have happened.” A shrewd,
worried look came into her eyes. “And you fell in love with both of
them, didn’t you? First Jean, and now, unless I miss my guess,
Justine.”

I started to deny it, but I could not; not
entirely, anyway.

“No, I didn’t fall in love with her; I
probably could have, though, if she hadn’t been married, and if
there had been more time, if….” I threw up my hands in frustration.
I did not know anything, what I felt, why I was even here, asking
about a woman I was never going to see again. I was curious, that
was all; curious about how Justine had become Danielle, how the kid
I had known, the girl no one noticed, had become the woman every
other woman wanted to look like and every man who saw her wanted to
have.

“That’s the funny thing,” said Carol. “She
never had a date in high school; no one ever asked her out. She
wasn’t bad looking; she just wasn’t obviously pretty.”

“Obviously pretty?”

“I could see it: what she was going to look
like. It was all there: the perfect structure of her face, the
large, green blue eyes, the soft luster of her hair; but she was
skinny and, worse yet, much too serious for her age. I don’t really
remember a single time she laughed.” Reminded of something, she
shook her head. “She laughed at her sister,” she said, staring at
me as if this almost forgotten fact had a new significance.
“Laughed when she found out Jean had broken of her engagement; told
her - she was only sixteen, her sister twenty-two – that she was a
fool and that one day she would regret it. That was the difference
between them,” added Carol with a thoughtful gaze. “Justine always
knew exactly what she thought; with Jean you never knew what she
was going to do.”

The young couple that had been wandering
through the house looked around the corner to say goodbye. Carol
would not hear of it.

“Not before you see the pool!”

It was fun to watch. She was on her feet,
walking toward them as if the pool were some prize possession of
her own, one she shared, when she shared it at all, only with her
closest, most trusted friends. I had seen some of that in Justine,
the way she had made everyone feel important. It was a gift, an
instinct for playing a part, playing it so well that it was not
really playing at all, but, for the time they were doing it, what
they really were. I watched now, seeing the daughter in the mother,
as Carol Llewelyn led the young man and his young wife through the
French doors onto the stone patio where, under the shade of a
eucalyptus tree, long strips of tan bark peeling from the trunk,
she made them feel what it would be like to live here in the quiet
dry heat of a long summer’s day.

“They’ll be back,” she said
with an air of satisfaction after she waved goodbye from the front
door. “They want it. I could see it in their eyes. They’ll go
someplace, a restaurant, sit across a table and talk it over. They
can’t afford it, but they’re young, and they come from money. Did
you see what they’re driving? The market is down. This house would
have gone for twenty, thirty percent higher a year or so ago. It’s
a good time to buy. That’s what they’ll tell themselves.” A shrewd,
knowing grin cut across her mouth. “He’s still in love with her;
he’ll take it as a challenge. Sweet, really; men always love women
more than they are loved back – while it lasts, that is,” she
whispered as she went to greet another, older, couple at the
door.

Another car stopped outside, and another one
after that. She met each new arrival before they could take a step
inside, saying their names out loud to make sure she remembered
them. Soon there seemed to be people in every room, poking their
heads in closets, trying door knobs, looking all around. A man in
his sixties wanted to know about the security system and whether
the gate at the bottom of the drive could be closed electronically
from inside the house. Whatever the question, she not only had an
answer but gave it as if she had been waiting all day for someone
smart enough to ask something as sensible as that.