The Decent Proposal (20 page)

Mike found herself inside a tiled courtyard. The roof was sky-high and made of glass. A big fountain gurgled contentedly in the middle, an assortment of ferns and palm trees around it housing what sounded like a flock of chirping birds. Here and there she caught a flash of primary color as one of them moved. The air was steamy and smelled of wet earth. She barely had time to take this in before the woman stalked over to another door and flung it open.

“In here,” she barked, pointing.

Mike stepped through. The door slammed shut behind her, the noise from the birds and fountain ceasing instantly, as if someone had flicked a switch and muted them. She paused, bewildered. She'd been transported from the tropics to a European salon.

The room was long and narrow, with fluffy white furniture everywhere. The trellises in the bay windows filtered the afternoon sunlight flawlessly, rendering the space both bright and comforting. Fans high up in the ceiling maintained a soft breeze that blew gently on her face. Every inch of the wall opposite the windows was crammed with books, but there were no leather-bound “great books” here, no stuffy encyclopedias. Most of them were paperbacks, their bindings worn and stained, and from what Mike could see they were all popular fiction from the last two hundred years or so. On a little side table lay
The Bell Jar
, its waterlogged pages curled and separated from each other, no doubt the casualty of some aquatic mishap, probably in the pool outside. Beside it, the cover of
Vanity Fair
looked as if it had been chewed on by a baby or mauled by someone's dog. Mike guessed that every book in the room had been read in its entirety, that it was a hard-and-fast rule of the house:
you don't get to stay if you haven't been read.
Many of them had probably been consumed in this very room. It was the perfect spot for reading. She imagined curling up with a careworn volume on one of these white couches while the sun slowly set, bathing her in its soft and gentle glow. . . .

“Igggh-ack!”

It came from the far end of the room. Mike's childhood piano teacher had smoked three packs a day; she would have recognized the phlegmy hack of a smoker's cough anywhere. She walked toward it blindly.

BEVERLY BUFFUM CHAMBERS
stared, transfixed, as the lovely vision grew closer, like a shimmering oasis drawing slowly into focus. It was rare to see such beauty up close these days. There had been a time when it surrounded her, when her instinct was to disdain it because the problem with pulchritude, of course, was that it often came laden with vanity and other tedious qualities. It was boredom that Beverly abhorred above all things, so it was a surprise to discover now that the exquisite face before her was in and of itself a source of novelty.
How strange.
When she was seventeen and attending that ridiculous finishing school her father had insisted on sending her to instead of a real college (“Am I finished yet?” she asked at the end of every lesson), she wouldn't have blinked an eye at the girl who stopped short a few feet in front of her now, except to remark on her Oriental features.
Asian
, she reminded herself.
Oriental
had gone out of fashion long ago.

Her ethnicity notwithstanding, this beauty would have fit right in at all the tennis tournaments, the pool parties, the dishwater-dull banquets followed by endless rounds of cocktails, dancing, and dope during Bev's later teens and twenties, when even
she
had her own measure of beauty—on a good day anyway. (If she raised her right eyebrow and curled her top lip
just so
, some man was bound to tell her she looked like a young Bette Davis, to which she always replied, “Was Bette Davis ever really young, though?” The originality of the man's response was a fair test of his wit, or lack thereof.) She took another drag on her cigarette. It was no good avoiding the truth. She was an ugly old woman now. When had that happened?
Decades ago
, was what Charlotte would have said if she were there, and as usual Charlotte would have been right.
I should be used to this by now
, she chided herself. Old age had never quite cottoned to her mind the way it had to her body, though, and there was something mer
ciless about the contrast between herself and this exquisite girl, who had let her slender hands with their tapered, candlelike fingers fall to her sides, her dainty feet planted apart, as if she were about to draw a gun and shoot. What on earth was she doing here? Bev had half expected someone to turn up eventually, but she had no idea who this person was, or how she was connected to the names provided at the gate like a secret password:
open sesame
. She decided not to say a word. The intruder would have to be the first to speak. This was only fair. But she couldn't help giving her a smile of encouragement.

MIKE HAD TO
resist the urge to jump back when the old woman leered at her with yellow, pointed teeth, like a witch from a fairy tale. She knew that Beverly Chambers was the heiress to a container-shipping empire with a net worth believed to be several hundred million dollars. She also knew that this woman, along with one of her socialite friends, had become renowned over the last few decades for devoting herself to the California-specific problem of prison overcrowding. Mike's eyes had glazed over while she read online about the hundreds of hours they'd spent interviewing guards, administrators, and prisoners, making the case to anyone who would listen for better conditions and more serious rehabilitative efforts.
Whatever.
She had sounded exactly like the sort of rich, meddlesome old woman who would have concocted the Decent Proposal for her own idiosyncratic reasons.

Mike knew from Wikipedia that this woman was only in her early eighties, but the wizened mass of flesh in front of her looked closer to a hundred, with its sagging face, speckling of liver spots, and strawlike, thinning hair. She could have been a valuable asset for the antismoking movement simply by placing herself in front of a camera:
The Marlboro Hag
. Mike watched her take a surprisingly long drag on her cigarette (it was in fact a Parliament), exhaling the smoke in a steady stream through her
ruined nostrils. She was perched on a poofy white mushroom of a chair, and Mike revised her impression of a fairy-tale witch, likening her instead to Little Miss Muffet, aged into Old Miss Muffet the chain-smoking spinster, still sitting on her tuffet after all these years.

“My name is Michaela Kim.” Her full name sounded strange to her ears, as if it weren't quite hers, but she was out of her depth and wanted to sound as impressive as possible.

Beverly sensed her discomfort. Eight decades' worth of good manners (perhaps the finishing school wasn't such a waste after all?) took over:

“Come closer, dear, and sit down,” she said, affecting the grandmotherly tone she reserved for those occasions on which she was forced to interact with the minor members of her extended family. She had no interest in children (especially the pampered variety), but assuming the role of the doting auntie, speaking softly and using phrases like “my darling” and “my dear” was the only way she could think to make it through these exchanges without losing her mind.

Mike took a seat opposite the mushroom, on what she believed was called a fainting couch. Her reference point shifted yet again: now she was Alice sitting down to tea with the Mad Hatter.

“Would you like something to drink?” Beverly held up a tiny silver bell.

Mike could have used some water, but she dreaded the return of the grumpy fob. She shook her head
no
.

“I'm a friend of Richard Baumbach's,” she said. “His
best
friend.”

“Ah,” said Beverly, and there was a twinkle in her birdlike eye, which was sharp and piercing, the only part of her to have been seasoned rather than spoiled by the passage of time.

Mike caught the twinkle.
There it is
, she thought.
Took her
about one second to figure the whole thing out.
Tears gathered in her eyes—of sadness and frustration, but humiliation too, for being so easy to read and, in a feedback loop of self-pity, for being weak enough to cry in front of a stranger. To her horror, the tears accumulated and began to flow.
This is a disaster!
she thought, struggling to stem the tide, except that in her agitation her thoughts strayed as if by some perverted, masochistic instinct to her father, who would be gone soon, whether a year from now, or five years, or ten years, but whatever the case it would be sooner than she could bear and why couldn't she just
get it together
if not for her then for
him
? But she couldn't. The tears flowed on and on.

Beverly rang the bell after all. The old Asian woman appeared—so quickly she must have been standing outside the door.

“Get us some tissues, Peaches, will you?”

Peaches?
Somehow Mike found enough mental space inside her breakdown to gawk at this revolting Anglicization.
Seriously?

Peaches stomped out of the room. By the time she returned, Mike had recovered and was in the middle of explaining how she'd managed to find Beverly.

“‘Fetal Attraction,'
oh dear
,” Bev mumbled.

Mike smiled faintly, despite her wretchedness. One of the lesser tragedies resulting from her immoral (and potentially illegal) actions was that she hadn't been able, in what little good conscience she had left, to share this screenplay title with Richard. He would have laughed about it for a week. Maybe longer.

“No one knows I'm here. I did this all on my own. Please don't tell your lawyer,” she pleaded. “I don't want to get anyone in trouble.”

“Of course not, my dear. I won't say a single word.”
No, it will take much more than a single word
, she thought, looking forward to torturing Jonathan Hertzfeld with news of a traitor in his ranks.
Bev wouldn't tell him the junior lawyer's name, though; she would make him figure it out on his own.
Serves him right
, she thought.
For how much I pay him.

Mike didn't trust those shiny, mocking eyes for a second. She realized suddenly that she was at this woman's mercy, that if Beverly Chambers wanted to she could destroy Mike's career, her relationship with Richard (whatever
that
was at this point), pretty much her entire life. The woman named Peaches deposited the tissue box on the coffee table and looked at her for a moment with something approaching motherly concern. Beverly waved her away with a flick of the wrist, and Mike felt a bubbling of resentment toward this rich old white lady with her grand manner and her Vietnamese maid, her team of gardeners and her meddling ways. She lorded it over all of them with such ease. Mike was yet another plebe whose life she held so carelessly in her scabby claws. Why couldn't she leave well enough alone? Why was she doing this?

“Why are you doing this?”

Bev took the last possible drag of her cigarette—little more than the filter—and stubbed it out in an ashtray. She gave Mike the tiniest of nods, as if to say,
Well done. Straight to the heart of the matter.
But she didn't answer until her next cigarette was lit.

“I'm afraid I can't tell you that,” she exhaled. “We don't know each other nearly well enough.”

Mike nodded miserably. What was she doing here? She began calculating how quickly she could leave with a modicum of self-respect.

“But perhaps we can remedy that. You say you're Richard Baumbach's best friend. How did you meet?”

For the next half hour, Mike told her everything about herself. She even told her about her father's illness. It was a relief to be one hundred percent honest with a stranger. For the first time, she understood the draw of therapy.

“When did you suspect they were attached to each other?” Bev asked when they got around to the Decent Proposal again.

“Well . . . Richard started out saying
we're not going to fall in love
, so obviously I worried that was exactly what was going to happen.”

“Of course.” Bev grinned behind a wall of smoke, more Cheshire Cat than Mad Hatter now. “I assume that sometime later you had a better indication?”

“At the party, this birthday party,” said Mike. “When they danced together. To this awful song. But it didn't matter. There was chemistry, everyone could see it.”

Just as I can see how much you love him too
, thought Bev, feasting on the girl's perfect, pain-filled face. But could her lovesick impressions be trusted? Could it really have happened so quickly . . . ? Bev realized that Mike was still speaking, and with great effort she refocused her attention:

“. . . and it's just not the same anymore. Basically, I'm fucked.”

Mike looked up to see if her language had shocked the old woman.

“Would you like a drink, my dear?” Bev asked. “A
real
drink, I mean?”

“Hell yes,” said Mike without thinking. She searched again for a sign of disapproval, but Beverly Chambers laughed, a much younger laugh than Mike expected: like water rippling over stones, or the soft tinkle of bracelets on a wrist. It seemed impossible for such a pleasing sound to have come from such a body.

“Didn't have to ask
you
twice.”

Mike shrugged her shoulders, offering up a tiny smile.

Bev seized the bell again and gave it three short rings, followed by three long rings, then three more short.

“Did you just SOS?” Mike asked incredulously.

“I most certainly did,” said Bev. “That's my prearranged call
for alcohol. Unless specified otherwise, Peaches will bring in a tray of gimlets in a moment. You like gimlets, I hope?” she asked anxiously.

“I've never had one,” said Mike, and at long last the shock and disapproval she'd been waiting for leapt onto Beverly's face.

“Oh, Michaela!” Bev's hideous grimace morphed into a hideous grin. “You're in for a treat.”