The Decent Proposal (10 page)

“Found the wine.”

He'd drunk the first bottle in one long glug. Then on to the second, which had taken a little longer. The third he'd downed half over the sink before hauling it to the sofa, where he decided to rest his eyes a few minutes before finishing. She owed him this: a nice drink and a nap. It wasn't asking much. All their
babbling had to be worth something. He was forgetting already, about Rhonda, Scott, and Sherry. . . . He knew nothing of the world till she was standing over him.

“And drank it.”

“Yeah, thanks, I put that together myself,” she snapped. “What I mean is: why?”

Because I needed you and you weren't there.
How the fuck had this happened? How had she snuck her way inside his life? He was surprised his life was still a whole enough entity for an inside to exist. It felt more like shattered fragments connected by bits of chicken wire and frayed string, a loose assortment that barely held itself together anymore. One day it would break apart and cease to exist as a single entity, and this, he guessed, was what dying would be. But he saw now that he cared that she was angry with him; he felt remorse at having done her wrong. That he could even see the top of the well was due to the fact that she stood at its lip looking down at him. In the same moment that he needed her more than ever, she never felt farther away. He began to cry.

“You gotta gimme another chance,” he heaved between sobs. “You gotta forgive me.”

Jesus Christ
, thought Elizabeth, handing him a tissue. Could this night get any more ridiculous? She had to get him out of here.

“I forgive you, Orpheus.”

He left only after she promised she'd see him the next morning like usual. When he was gone, she grabbed the used sponge from underneath her sink and tried to lift the urine stain from her cushion with hot, soapy water. It didn't work. She put the cushion in a plastic bag and settled for dousing the couch with Febreze to neutralize the smell.

Elizabeth perched on the edge of the puffy white armchair she used for reading, which was now the only seating option
in the room. She thought about her night: the two hours she'd spent with Richard, and then coming home to Orpheus passed out on her couch. Was this all really happening to her? Since when had her life become so . . . interesting? It was almost midnight, well past her regular bedtime, and even though she was exhausted she knew it would be hours before she got to sleep. She picked up her phone, scrolling through her contacts. She wanted to talk to someone, to tell at least one person in her life everything that had happened to her, but it was too late to call any of her East Coast friends, and she hardly ever called them anyway, so wrapped up were they in lives demonstrably bigger than hers, encompassing not just a career but a partner—and as the years slipped by, more often than not a child or two as well. For a moment she actually considered calling her parents, who, after getting over the shock of her calling in the first place, would tell her that taking money from a stranger was as ill advised as taking candy. But she guessed that secretly her mother, who was addicted to several telenovelas, would be tickled by the idea of her meeting weekly with an unknown man, and come to terms with the proposal much more quickly than her no-nonsense father . . . especially if they ever met Richard in person. Elizabeth actually laughed—alone, at midnight, like a crazy person—at the thought of her parents meeting Richard. Her mother would
adore
him. And her father would
not
.

She took after her father, for the most part.

THE NEXT DAY
Orpheus waited for her by the basketball courts, but she didn't show. He spent the whole day there, and by nightfall was convinced she had abandoned him forever. When he came back the next morning, it was more from habit than any real sense of hope.

But there she was.

“Good morning,” she said quietly, handing over his coffee and bagel.

“Morning,” he said.

“Beautiful day, isn't it?” The sun was shining.

“Sure is,” he nodded. “Looks like June gloom's over.”

“No marine layer,” she agreed.

Their eyes met. It felt awkward between them, like that first morning when they had still been strangers to each other.

“Lily, I'm sor—”

“It's okay,” she said, not wanting to rehash the events of two nights earlier, especially after spending the better part of Sunday on her hands and knees scrubbing the wine stain. It had been no use; the stain had bonded to the very fibers of her carpet, and in the end she'd had to cut it out and order a new swatch. She'd also gotten her locks changed, just in case, and dropped off her cushion at her local dry cleaner, pretending she had a nephew staying with her.

Partly to smooth over the awkwardness, and partly because she was still bursting to tell
someone
, Elizabeth chose this moment to tell Orpheus about the proposal.

She told him everything—from Jonathan Hertzfeld's first phone call, to her date with Richard on Saturday—and when she was done she sat back, waiting for his reaction. Telling Orpheus about the proposal was like introducing one crazy person to another, the Marquis de Sade to Joan of Arc: who knew what might happen? Would they fall in love? Tear each other to pieces? It was anybody's guess.

He didn't like it, not a single thing about it. The anonymous benefactor, the lawyer, the million dollars, it all sounded fishy to him. It was outrageous—preposterous!—like something out of
Great Expectations
. He told her as much, and she smiled:

“I thought the same thing.”

Orpheus wanted to tell her she was treating the proposal too
lightly: a shiny apple offered up by a leering stranger. She needed to look carefully for the strings that were attached, and surely edged with razors. Life was always finding a way to drag you to hell. If not, then what explanation was there for his calamity? He couldn't merely be unlucky, since that sort of misfortune—gaping, infinite—was in itself a version of cruelty. He used to be fond of telling his children that “anything was possible.” It was a means of motivating them to try harder, to do better, and this phrase haunted him now alongside their obliterated faces. It was true. Anything
was
possible. The world was filled with horrors.

“Tell me more about the guy,” he said.

She mentioned how Richard had thought the proposal was a reality series, and joked that sometimes she wondered if he was in on it.

“He probably is!” Orpheus latched on to this theory eagerly, but Elizabeth shook her head, smiling again. He shook his own head right back at her, frustrated: “It's too good to be true,” he insisted. But he could tell he wasn't getting through to her.

Hmph
, thought Elizabeth. She wouldn't mention—not yet, anyway—her idea of giving him at least a portion of the money. She knew he needed help—real help—to get better. She'd love to pay for therapy and rehab, maybe a halfway house of some sort to get him off the streets and off the bottle once and for all. She knew he'd resist, not because he was prideful about charity (he accepted pennies from strangers), but because he wouldn't want the weight of her expectations placed on his shoulders. It really
was
like
Great Expectations
, except she would be Miss Havisham, which, sadly, was a better fit for her than Pip. She smiled at the thought, watching the sun climb higher in the sky, the light growing stronger with the passing of each second.

“Want to go sit on the swings?” she asked.

They did this sometimes, in a small playground abutting the sand at the heart of the Boardwalk.

“Sure,” he said.

Elizabeth had never grown out of the simple joy of sitting on a flexible strap of plastic and soaring in the air. She put her coffee on the ground and lowered herself onto the swing in her fancy pantsuit, wrapping her hands around the metal chains on either side.

“Careful!” yelled Orpheus, watching helplessly as her arcs grew larger and she flew farther and farther away. She looked carefree, like a child. He didn't like it. Orpheus preferred her serious; he liked her buttoned-up, determined air, which was the opposite of everything else he encountered on the Boardwalk. Looking at her now was like looking at her from the bottom of the well again, and he realized it was neither her fault nor his; the culprit was this crazy proposal. Without it she never would have gone out on Saturday. He wouldn't have had to break into her house. She wouldn't have missed their breakfast yesterday. Her head wouldn't be filled with some other guy. She was swinging so wildly now she was almost horizontal at the top of each arc. No, he didn't like it. And in this moment he became determined to stop it, however he could. Whatever the cost.

“Huh.”

JONATHAN HERTZFELD HUNG
up the phone and swiveled to his window. He gripped his tie pin, stroking it rapidly. Earlier that morning Miss Santiago had called him on behalf of herself and Mr. Baumbach, requesting reimbursement for their outings as well as a stipend to pay for certain materials—books and DVDs, she said—that they planned to discuss each week, as if they were in some sort of multimedia club. They had obviously agreed to the scheme in the only spirit rationally possible—a mercenary one—but his client hadn't seemed to mind, and had instructed him to pay whatever bills the duo sent him. He would do as he was told, of course, and be there to suffer the consequences.
Such
is the lot of the lawyer
, he thought, grabbing his suit jacket with a sigh.

He went for a walk to clear his head. There was a black-and-white façade among the storefronts of the Century City Mall that had always intrigued him from the window of his office—a zebra grazing inside the colorful jungle of shops on either side of it. On closer inspection it turned out to be a cosmetics shop called Sephora: a women's store. He was disappointed. (Technically, Sephora offered an entire wall of men's cologne, but Jonathan barely realized cologne existed.) While he hesitated on the threshold, a saleswoman swooped down on him and five minutes later she was directing him to sniff a tester strip so as not to get any perfume on him. “For the wife?” she inquired, picking up on his wedding band and surmising he could only be there for her. He nodded, lifting his nose to the paper strip and smelling roses, plus something else. Was it cantaloupe? He wanted to get out of the store; his curiosity had been satisfied and he would never come back. He bought the smallest bottle possible and found he had been fleeced a mere forty-five dollars—not bad. He thought about giving the perfume to Rivka that night. She would think it was stupid. When he returned to his office he felt somewhat refreshed, though, as the experience had forced him to focus on her for a few minutes.

When he went home that night, he presented the smart little bag to Rivka after dinner, much to her consternation. They had decided after their first anniversary, in a bygone era when stockings and hats were still in fashion for ladies and men, that they would never get each other presents. It was silly to waste money on such tokens.

Rivka questioned him sharply: “What gives?”

He told her the story of his morning.

Without commenting she dipped her hand into the bag, through layers of tissue paper. “So fussy! It's why it's so expen
sive, you know—what a waste,” and came up with the bottle of perfume. She sprayed it on her veiny wrist and sniffed.

A great heaving ensued. He had to pound her on the back. “Oh! Jonathan!” she gasped. “So awful! What were you thinking?” The bottle was thrust back into the bag and they moved on to the dishes. But later that night, he watched her take it out of the bag and put it in her special drawer, the one where she kept his old letters and photograph albums of their three children. She locked all this away, he knew, because she did not like to look on the past more than every once in a while.

“Well, well, well,” he teased her, as she slipped beneath the covers. He knew he didn't have to specify. He knew she knew exactly what he meant.

“Shut it,” she said, laying her head on his arm. It was the only way she could get to sleep. Sometimes he had to lie there for up to an hour, his arm the only part of him capable of joining her as she drifted off. He dreaded the pinpricks to come, but he wouldn't move till he saw she was sleeping. He could always tell by her breathing.

“Wha' wassit you said?” she asked him, ten or so minutes later.

Her voice had acquired the adorable little slur it always had when she was half-asleep. “When?” he asked her softly.

“When you came ba'towork.” She paused to let out a little yawn. “After buying that . . . ssstupid perfume. You said you were . . . Wha' wassit again?”

He didn't respond because he honestly didn't know. What
had
he said? She was silent for a long time. Had she fallen asleep? But no: if anything, her breathing was more rapid than before.

She lifted her head from his arm and looked up at him, wide awake. “
Refreshed
, you dolt. You said you were refreshed. Because you thought of me.”

She lay back on his arm. A few more minutes passed.

“Thank you,” she said finally.

“But I thought you hated it.”

“I did.”

“So thank you for what?”

“You know.”

And he did.

THE BOOK/MOVIE CLUB
worked. Richard and Elizabeth met for dinner at seven on Saturdays to discuss the book they'd been reading during the week, or at five to stream and then discuss a movie. On book weeks they met in restaurants in Beverly Hills, Century City, or Culver City—all decent halfway points between Venice and Silver Lake. They never went anywhere fancy, their first date at In-N-Out having established a mutual penchant for lowbrow yet quality eating. (Elizabeth never dressed up again.) On movie weeks they braved the traffic and went to her house or his apartment. Neither cooked much, so they always picked up food or ordered delivery. These were different meals from the boozy feasts Richard attended regularly with his industry friends. Elizabeth hardly ever drank, so when he was with her he generally abstained. There was no fuzziness, no loss of inhibition during their time together; they fell into a polite, al
most professional rapport, as if they were coworkers striving toward a mutually advantageous goal. They never went over their allotted time—Richard always had plans afterward, and Elizabeth was always eager to return to her routine—but they didn't have any trouble filling the two hours, either.

One week after In-N-Out, Elizabeth hosted their inaugural viewing. She was nervous about having Richard over, but her recent home violation by a homeless man tended to put such qualms in perspective, and despite her obsessive cleaning in the hours leading up to his arrival, she was less nervous than she would have been going to Richard's apartment. She at least knew where all the potential weapons were hiding.

To her surprise, she found she liked
Harold and Maude
less than before. With the movie fresh in her mind and a Campos taquito brandished between her thumb and index finger for emphasis, she was well able to get past “neat.” She complained that Maude's suicide at the end ruined it all.

“It's a grand gesture, I get that. She lived her life to the fullest and it was time to move on, but—”

She bit into her taquito and savored it a moment. Richard waited impatiently.

“—you don't just throw away life like that. Isn't that the point? Why is she so determined to die at eighty?”

“Well, eighty was a lot older back then than it is now. Don't forget, the movie came out in '71.”

“Yeah, but even so. Who knows what she might've done at eighty-one? Or ninety-two? Even if she had one more second, she didn't have any business giving it away. And she of all people would've known that. It feels like whoever made the film—”

“Colin Higgins and Hal Ashby. Writer and director.”

“—right. It feels like they just wanted to wrap things up neatly. I can see what they were going for, the irony of an actual suicide after all of Harold's fake attempts. It's elegant, but it isn't real.”

In his eagerness to respond with what struck him as an insightful rejoinder (
who says reality should be valued over elegance when telling a story?
), Richard dripped hot sauce all over her carpet.

“Oh, crap, sorry.”

He gazed at the cluster of red dots with a dismay that struck Elizabeth as far too complacent. “It's okay,” she insisted unconvincingly, rushing to her linen closet for some spray-on cleaner.
Unbelievable
. It had been only two days since the new piece of carpet was installed.

While she was thus occupied, Richard looked around a little more intently than he'd been able to do upon entering. Her place was tiny, not much larger than his one-bedroom apartment, but nevertheless it was a freaking stand-alone
house
and he was duly impressed. The décor was spare, which he supposed made sense for such a limited space, but why had she chosen to make everything white? Carpet, couch, armchair, coffee table, even the TV stand shoved into a corner like an afterthought: all aseptically white, as though her living room were a hospital lobby. Two large (white) bookcases took up most of the wall space; he saw an entire shelf dedicated to Dickens, his eye catching on titles like
Hard Times
and
Bleak House
(he half expected to see one called
Life Sucks
) before landing on the only piece of artwork in the room, a pale print modestly framed, of a painting even he could name:
Christina's World
, by Andrew Wyeth.

Richard felt instinctively that every space in this spartan little fortress—every closet, cabinet, shelf, container—held the bare minimum of impeccably ordered items, and while she was still on her hands and knees he made a quick visit to the bathroom to test his theory. He peeked underneath her sink.
Bingo.
She had none of the paraphernalia he was accustomed to seeing in other ladies' lavatories—just extra toilet paper and a few cleaning supplies. He opened her medicine cabinet.
Yup.
She had the
same amount of toiletries he did, which wasn't many, with one exception: a little plastic doohickey clamped over the middle of her half-used tube of toothpaste.
What the . . . ?
It looked to be some sort of toothpaste squeezer, for those OCD enough to insist on eking out every last drop.
Yikes
, he thought, shutting the cabinet door more forcefully than he intended, banging it loudly against the frame.

When he returned to the living room, the chemical reek of carpet cleaner hung heavy in the air, though it looked as if she'd lifted out the stain successfully. (He was too scared to ask.) She was staring at him oddly, and he wondered if she'd heard the cabinet door.

“You know,” he said, “when I was sixteen my best friend died.”

He'd had no intention of telling her this story, but in the context of their earlier conversation it was the first thing that popped into his head. He sat down and grabbed a forkful of carnitas, shoving it into his mouth to prolong the moment. He was enjoying the shocked expression he saw now on her habitually impassive face: brown eyes wide, dark brows raised.

“It was a car accident. Drunk driving. Not him, the other guy. I actually had to testify at the trial, about what Kyle was like—that was my friend, Kyle—what he said he wanted to do when he grew up, stuff like that, to show what a tragedy it was. Which was really weird. But it must've worked, cuz the driver ended up getting a really heavy sentence—”

“Good,” she said.

“I know. It was definitely worth it—to testify, I mean, even though my parents didn't want me to. But I felt like I had to, because of what happened at the funeral, which is why I'm even bringing the whole thing up.” The meat was a little dry; he took a sip of water, swishing it like mouthwash. “Kyle's family was Catholic, so it was an open-casket wake.
It's still the only time I've ever seen a dead body, and it was so crazy how totally disconnected this—this embalmed corpse was from Kyle, you know? And you'd think I would've felt this overwhelming sadness standing next to him, and part of me
was
sad, obviously, but I also felt . . .
giddy
. And
joyful
. Because I was alive. I was the furthest thing possible from this, dead meat—I know that's awful, but those're the words that came into my head, I'll never forget it—and I had to cover my mouth with my hand because I was
smiling
—actually smiling at my dead best friend whose mother was standing, like, five feet away from me. It was awful.”

“Well, you shouldn't—”

“Oh, I know. I was in shock, and I was only sixteen. It's not like I have any
guilt
about it or anything. But ever since then, when I think about the
joy
of being alive, it's always felt a little . . .”

“Heartless? Rapacious?”

“Uh, I was going to say ‘harsh,' but sure? I guess that's why I like it when Maude offs herself. It's like—this's been great and all, but now it's your turn. Which is clearly stupid—obviously they can
both
enjoy life at the same time, the world's plenty big enough. But in a way . . .”

He trailed off again. Elizabeth regarded him thoughtfully.

“I never thought about it like that,” she said finally.

For weeks they tackled
Jane Eyre
. Upon a more mature reading, Richard decided he hated Mr. Rochester.

“He tried to marry her under false pretenses, then propositioned her to become his mistress!” he exclaimed, perhaps a little too loudly for the Mormon family seated next to them at Islands.

“But only because that was the best he could do under the circumstances.”

“Yeah, because he was married!”

“But he wasn't
married
married.”

Elizabeth could easily forgive Rochester his (many) faults, because he alone had recognized the value of that little, plain, and above all
weird
Jane Eyre. There were many dashing men of literature upon whom she could have pinned her heart, but she would always prefer the man who was as flawed and fiery as his mate—missing eye, stumpy arm, and all.

“Oh right, because he was stupid enough to get tricked into marrying a crazy woman. And what, we're supposed to think it was Bertha's fault she went insane? It was passed down in her family, right? So how could she help it? Or are we supposed to think she got syphilis by sleeping around too much?”

“It's never really explained,” Elizabeth admitted, toying with her Hawaiian burger. “Maybe it's a combination of the two?”

“Bertha gets totally hosed,” retorted Richard between gulps of Dr Pepper.

“You should read
Wide Sargasso Sea
.”

“Why sarcastic see?”

“No:
Wide
,
Sargasso
,
Sea
. It's a prequel, basically. About Bertha—her life in the Caribbean, meeting Mr. Rochester, being brought to England. This woman Jean Rhys wrote it in the sixties. It's like a postcolonial response. I don't think it's very good, but if you want more Bertha in your life, you should give it a try.”

At their next session, at Sugarfish in Beverly Hills, Richard told her he'd only been able to get through a quarter of Rhys's book.

“I mean, it's a great idea, telling everything from her point of view. But it felt like a different story. With different characters.”

“Agreed,” said Elizabeth, chopsticks poised over a particularly delectable-looking piece of salmon sashimi. “Besides, Bertha isn't the point. It's not her story anyway.” While the salmon
melted on her tongue, she reflected on how strange it was that the brown girl was instructing the white boy to ignore the minority and focus on the white people as the more interesting characters. She felt the need to qualify her statement:

“It's a subversive element in the book, that the fascinating, passionate character is the plain one, not the exotic one. I wrote a paper about it in college, how the book's a reaction to all the romances written in the century before it. The heroines in those romances were always noble and upright but
so
boring.”

“How so?” Richard shoved a spicy tuna roll in his mouth, tilting one ear ever so slightly toward her.

“Like in
Ivanhoe
,” she said, “where the woman he eventually ends up with, Rowena—”

“Spoiler alert!” he mumbled, mouth still full.

“Oh, it's really long and I don't even think it's worth reading if you're not a teenager. Anyway Rowena's basically like Maid Marian—noble but
so
two-dimensional compared to this Jewish girl Rebecca, who's a healer and gets tried for witchcraft and is
so
interesting, and who everyone
knows
Ivanhoe should've ended up with. But in
Jane Eyre
the upstanding one is also the weird one, the one everything happens to
and
who gets the guy. Eventually anyway. You know?”

She was actually panting a little by the time she stopped.

“Wait, Rowena? Like my street?” Richard lived on Rowena Avenue in Silver Lake.

“Yeah, exactly like your street,” she said, spilling some soy sauce over the lip of the ceramic dish next to her plate. Richard watched it spread out in a dark circle over the tablecloth. “You know all of Silver Lake used to be called Ivanhoe?”

“I didn't, but there's a school there called Ivanhoe. And part of the reservoir.”

“Correct,” said Elizabeth, “and back in the day the whole neighborhood was called Ivanhoe, after the book. That's why
some of the streets are named after the characters. You can thank my fourth-grade social studies textbook for that fun little fact.”

“Huh!” he said, genuine pleasure inflected in the syllable. He loved learning factoids like this, especially about his beloved L.A. “Learn something new every day.”

As the weeks became months, they both learned a lot. They had no codes to rely on as Richard had with Mike, no underlying connection like what Elizabeth had with Orpheus. They were forced to spell out what they meant, and this required a general hammering, a tacit agreement to let come what may. They were like miners who chipped away at great slabs of rock during each session and went home to discover leftover slivers collected in their pockets or on the inside of their shirts. They picked these pieces off and stored them away, because even though they hadn't meant to acquire them, they were still the by-product of hard work, as precious as the larger chunks—maybe more.

For their second movie night they went to Richard's place in Silver Lake. Elizabeth rarely ventured out to what she now thought of as “east L.A.,” though her teenage self would have been mystified by this designation. Since returning from New York and settling in Venice, her reference point for what separated the “west side” of the city from everything else had shifted about ten miles, from the 110 freeway to the 405, which meant that anything east of La Brea could now properly be termed “east.” Silver Lake and its surrounding neighborhoods (Echo Park, Los Feliz) were in fact
so
far east now, they were practically a different city, and as she searched for a parking spot in and around Rowena Avenue, Elizabeth was surprised by how much the area reminded her of New York. In particular, it made her think of Brooklyn—Fort Greene, or maybe Carroll Gardens—with its cool yet cozy vibe. Dark dive bars and ancient-looking
restaurants lined the ramrod-straight boulevards, and at night, enough of these storefronts had iron railings over them to keep the area looking sufficiently edgy. Between the boulevards meandered curvy residential streets like tranquil rivers, carving quiet, domestic spaces into the gently sloping hills. For all its neighborhoody vibe, she reflected, cozy was one thing Venice would never be.