Читать книгу The Drowning Girls - Paula Treick DeBoard - Страница 11

PHIL

A question: What’s the difference between a pedophile and an innocent person accused of pedophilia? What about a rapist and a person accused of rape? Practically speaking—nothing. They’re the same. One might as well be the other. It doesn’t matter if you’re innocent, because the accusation plants the suggestion, and from there the guilt grows. The innocent are the most vulnerable, really. They’ve got the most to lose—those with wives and kids who aren’t looking for something on the side.

On my first official day of work at The Palms, she was there. The office had been repainted for me, and plastic sheeting still covered my desk when I’d arrived. I’d been sorting through files in the cabinet when I heard the door close. By the time I looked up, she was sitting in one of the club chairs. Her skirt was so short that it nearly disappeared when she crossed her legs.

I smiled. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so. I have a complaint.”

I’d spent the previous week getting to know the residents, schmoozing with the men and flattering the ladies, fielding complaints about the wattage of lightbulbs and the leaky faucet in the women’s locker room and a slight hump near the service line on one of the tennis courts. I’d written it all down, made the appropriate phone calls. There had been other complaints, too—private ones—made by residents who stopped me on the sidewalk, always prefacing their thoughts with You didn’t hear it from me, but... and ending them with some variation of the same theme. Of course, I wouldn’t complain just for myself, but I’m thinking about the good of the community. Myriam Mesbah hated Helen Zhang’s dog, which barked constantly. Rich Sievert’s view was spoiled by the excavator that was digging out a pool in one of the backyards in Phase 3. The trees on the edge of the Asbills’ property dropped leaves into Janet Neimeyer’s backyard, and her gardener was forever having to blow the debris, which in turn disturbed the Asbills’ twins, who needed a midmorning nap.

But I’d smiled through it all, because this wasn’t real hustling, like selling had been—courting buyers and talking clients down from unrealistic asking prices, running from open house to open house on weeknights and weekends, waiting for above-asking-price offers that might never come. This job meant regular hours and a steady paycheck, not to mention a house Liz and I would never have been able to afford on our own.

“Buyers in these communities tend to be high-maintenance,” Jeff Parker had told me, after we’d shaken hands a second time, and the job was officially mine. He was a vice president at Parker-Lane, and eventually he would inherit his dad’s job. “The thing is to soothe them, to kiss a few asses here and there, to deal with what you can immediately and pass the buck upward for the rest. Above all—they like the quiet, the security, the exclusivity. They like to feel like they’re the most important people in the world when you’re talking to them.”

At that point I was still trying to wrap my mind around the day-to-day expectations of the job. “So essentially my job is to...”

“Bottom line, McGinnis? Keep them happy.”

It hadn’t seemed like a difficult task. How could people live here and not be happy? They had minimansions with up to six garages, golf and yoga and walking trails and all the amenities of a resort, year-round. There was enough room to spread out, to really breathe. Liz and Danielle and I had been crawling on top of each other like cockroaches in that crappy rental, sharing a single bath and a kitchen so narrow I could stand in the middle and touch the walls on either side. Here we had all the room we needed, plus some to spare.

I was surprised how much convincing it had taken to get Liz on board, when I’d jumped in feetfirst.

“Are we raiding an orphanage or something?” she had asked, counting the upstairs bedrooms.

“We could make one into a home gym,” I said.

“There’s a gym in the clubhouse. Plus golf, tennis...”

“Okay, a sewing room, a music room. Whatever you want.”

Liz laughed. “Just what every girl in the 1800s wants,” she’d murmured, but this didn’t deter me.

It was a chance at the good life. So what if we didn’t need so many bedrooms, if the job requirement was to kiss a few asses here and there?

So when Kelsey Jorgensen came into my office unannounced, when she plopped into my chair and pouted, I only said, “You’ve come to the right place, then. What can I do for you?”

She yawned in response, stretching her limbs like a cat sunning itself on the pavement. I tried not to look directly at her body, focusing instead on the tips of her fingers, the pink wink of her toes. I heard it already then, that little warning bell in the back of my mind, but I pushed it to the side.

“What you can do,” she said, dragging out the syllables, “is keep me from being so bored.”

* * *

Most days, she wandered through the clubhouse with her limbs on display in tiny dresses that fluttered in the air-conditioning, or halter tops and shorts that ended at her crotch. “I just wanted to say hello,” she would say, lingering in my doorway. “So, hello, Mr. McGinnis.” In her mouth a simple greeting sounded full of suggestion.

At first, for all of five minutes, it was entertaining. I figured it was the charm she turned on every man, equally—neighbors and groundskeepers, the college kid who maintained the play area, even, yes, the thirty-seven-year-old community relations specialist. That first day I figured, where’s the harm? This was how most of the women at The Palms acted around me, and playing along seemed to be required by the job. Deanna Sievert couldn’t talk without flirting, and Janet Neimeyer couldn’t keep her hands off me—there was always a collar to be straightened or an invisible crumb to be picked from my chin.

But I loved Liz, and I wasn’t looking.

Sure, it was flattering. It made me feel young again, like the Phil I’d been in my twenties, after my parents died and my brother, Zeke, and I pooled their assets and moved to Corfu, where we opened a bar that catered to college kids on holiday and gap years. There had always been a girl—a German tourist, or Swedish or Czech—who didn’t leave at closing time, who hinted that she needed a place to stay before her boat left the next morning. When I shook her awake, she would snuggle closer and say she could catch the next one, the next time. But I’d come to California, in part, to leave that Phil behind. I’d had too many fuzzy mornings when I cleared the condensation in the mirror and didn’t like what I saw. I wanted more out of life than a rented room, a bank account that emptied month to month, women who moved out, moved on.

When I met Liz, I knew she was the real deal—funny and sexy and so damned smart, someone who had met life on its terms. For the first time, I was the one in pursuit; she had too much riding on her life to hang around waiting for my call. She’d been the one who was hesitant to commit, who introduced me, for months, as a “friend.” She hinted that a relationship wasn’t possible until Danielle went off to college—at that point, nine years away. When I’d proposed to her at the lighthouse on a lonely stretch of Highway 1, it had been like preparing for a debate—laying out my reasons, providing evidence, anticipating the rebuttal. We’re a good team, we’ll have a great life together, and I cannot wait for you one more minute.

Sometimes, when we fought, I cursed myself for the empty years, the ones before Liz and Danielle. If only our paths had crossed sooner, we would have figured it out by now. We would have built up more trust in each other. We’d know each other’s little quirks, which buttons were the wrong ones to push. I was jealous of the older, long-married couples, who’d committed early and could spend a full life together, like the Browerses. When it came to Liz, I wanted more time, not less.

So I wasn’t looking for Kelsey Jorgensen, not at all.

She claimed boredom, a symptom of the same problem everyone had at The Palms. There were too many options and too few challenges. I knew I was exciting simply because I was someone different. So I laughed it off at first. I didn’t take it seriously. I smiled back at her. I played along.

She stopped by my office on the day of the Mesbahs’ party, and I asked if I would be seeing her that night.

She smiled. “Would you like that?”

I swallowed. It had been a fine line we’d been walking, but it was gone now. She’d practically pole-vaulted over it. “I’m looking forward to meeting your parents,” I answered, and she’d fixed me with those steely eyes. It was the right answer, but the wrong one, too.

Although Parker-Lane encouraged an open-door policy, I began closing mine, trying to avoid her. She opened it anyway, poking her head around the corner, followed by a bare shoulder, a thigh.

I feigned busyness when she arrived, replying to emails that weren’t at all urgent, taking imaginary phone calls. “I’m sorry, Kelsey. This is very important,” I would say, but she was persistent. She called my bluff, waiting patiently through one-sided conversations until I turned my attention to her. And while she waited, she coiled and uncoiled a long strand of blond hair around a finger, smiling.

It was too late to go back to that first day, but I wished I could. I would have told her I was busy, asked her to leave. I would have put her in her place as nothing more than a silly, spoiled fifteen-year-old girl. It wasn’t funny or flattering anymore; it wasn’t the sort of thing I could laugh about after a few beers. She was young and lovely, but mostly young.

Still, I tried. “Isn’t there something else you want to do today, Kelsey? Play tennis, maybe?”

She shrugged.

“It’s just that I have work to do,” I told her.

She raised an eyebrow. “You’re a community relations specialist, and I’m part of the community. So by definition, isn’t it your job to have relations with me?”

I found it was best not to be in my office at all—to have long lunches with Liz in the clubhouse, to chat with Rich Sievert at the bar, to try out the putting green with the Zhang boys or check on the progress of the homes in Phase 3. Still, hardly a day went by without her crossing my field of vision, blindsiding me with a wave, a wink.

And then one afternoon she was in my backyard, on my diving board, adjusting her bikini. She couldn’t have known I was there, watching her through the kitchen window with Liz standing next to me. And yet it was almost choreographed—the languid walk, the stretching, the perfect swan dive, the bathing suit top that slipped off, revealing her firm breast. I closed my eyes, swallowing hard. My palms went clammy, my heart hammered in my chest. Upstairs, I stripped off my shirt and sat on the edge of the bed, wondering what the hell I was going to do.