Plus One (14 page)

“Oh no,” Figgy said, gripping his arm. “You're not just letting him go. He'll come right back. Didn't you see what the website said? They leave trails of hormones. Trails! He'll come back. He'll bring friends.”

“Aw Fig, come on,” Alex said, putting the box down. “We got him, let's just open the box and be done with it.”

“Honey—he was
on me
.”

Alex paused. She wasn't wrong. If he let the rat go and it came back, he'd have to go through all this again. He quickly ran through all the ways he could dispatch the thing bumping around in the box. He could crush it. A big coffee-table book—one of those giant Taschen art books? Run it over with his car? Poison it? Stuff it in the garbage disposal?

Each idea was too horrific, too messy, too awful to contemplate. Suddenly, it came to him. Bloodless, passive, silent. He put the box down and headed for the laundry room.

On a high shelf he found a big Tupperware storage bin they used to store holiday décor. He dumped the contents into a pile,
a scattering of menorahs, pilgrim candles, and pumpkin-shaped trick-or-treat buckets.

“Sylvie, go inside and shut the door,” he said, returning to the stoop and heading toward the bushes.

She didn't move. She hopped up and down just behind Figgy, sucking on a balled-up bit of her nightgown. “No way,” she said firmly. “I wanna see.”

Alex exchanged a look with Figgy, who narrowed her eyes and made no move to take Sylvie inside.

“Go on,” Figgy said.

And so he did, dropping the end of the garden hose in the bin and then standing back as it filled, splattering the sides and making a low gurgle. When the water was close to the top, Alex turned off the hose and deposited the rat into the water.

Alex would think later how gracefully it all happened, how weirdly but perfectly timed it was for the sun to pick that precise moment to break over the neighbor's rooftop. The clear plastic bin lit up like a jewelry box, all golden and pink. The rat sank, and then began paddling around at the surface, making slow clockwise circles, its coat darkening and becoming sleek and aquatic. It seemed to swim forever, circling round and round. Alex, Figgy, and Sylvie moved closer. At some point Sylvie sat down beside the box, cupping her chin in her palms and watching intently.

After what could have been five minutes or an hour, the rat slowed and then stopped, seizing up once and then again, its tail slackening and the glow of dawn delineating the threadlike veins in its ears. Sylvie began to cry. Figgy bent down and wrapped her up in her arms.

Alex crossed his arms over his chest and shuddered.

“
Now
we move,” Figgy said, getting up and guiding Sylvie back inside. “We've got to get out of this house.”

Six

T
he hunt for a new house began in earnest the next week. As he scoured the MLS and made his first calls to agents, Alex felt an unfamiliar rush of urgency. The exterminator had plugged up holes around the foundation and stashed containers of poison in the bushes, but the house had been breached. Invisible trails of pheromones! And while he'd never admit it out loud, he was emboldened by what had become—at least in his retelling of the tale—an epic battle of father versus intruder, man versus wild. The rat, which was maybe six inches long from nose to tail, had become a feral beast. And he'd captured it, killed it! He'd repelled the threat, defended his family. Maybe he wasn't such a softie after all. Now he'd lead the charge once again, bringing his family out of the thicket and into a new and better place.

Clive had recommended a real estate agent whose name Alex vaguely recognized. It was only after hopping into the agent's pearlescent Mercedes one Tuesday morning that he realized he'd
been set up with none other than Colby McNamara. McNamara had been a fixture on local bus bench ads since the eighties. In the ads, he held a brick-size phone to a great crown of feathered auburn hair. A cartoon bubble rose over his head: “ON IT! Colby McNamara: Your Dream House Deliveryman!”

“Hello there, Mr. Sherman,” Colby said, leaning over to shake Alex's hand. Incredibly, the hair was intact; only his skin, which had the synthetic, high-gloss sheen of vinyl, gave away the twenty-plus-years between the picture and the present. “Let's go nab you that dream house!”

Alex gave a wary thumbs-up and settled in for the ride. Colby's plan for the first day was to hit three listings in the Hollywood Hills, then make a quick pass through Coldwater Canyon. As they crested Mulholland, Alex recalled heading out on similar scouting missions with his father, in the first few years after his parents' divorce. He never understood why at the time, but his dad, Barry, had used his weekend visitation days to hit every open house in the San Fernando Valley. At the time Barry was sporting a thick, blondish mustache and renting a gloomy, mustard-colored studio apartment in Van Nuys. After spending the night on a trundle bed in the living room, Alex would get into his dad's silver Lincoln and they'd head out on the hunt, Alex bitter and cross-armed in the passenger seat, Barry chasing curb signs and lawn flags to tiny Chatsworth bungalows and vast Encino estates. Nominally, Barry was looking for a good step-up from his current digs. But as the weeks spread into months, it seemed clear that Barry was content to search indefinitely, chomping on a toothpick and cranking the steering wheel, craning his head out the window and lecturing Alex on the importance of curb appeal.

It wasn't lost on Alex that Barry seemed inordinately interested in sales resulting from divorce—he'd look over every square inch of those properties, inspecting the contents of medicine cabinets and spice racks like a crime scene investigator.

“Well, now, what have we here,” he'd say, nosing around an empty closet. “All the lady's things—gone! Obviously a runner. Judging from the color of that powder room, a real
tramp,
too. Ten bucks she's down in Baja with a señor ten years her junior.”

“Come on, Rockford,” Alex would whine, hanging back. “This place reeks of cabbage. Can we please go?”

It was so pathetic, so obvious, he thought, the way his dad was working through the mental wreckage of his marriage. It was all just a sad demonstration of the deep superficiality of his father and the whole adult world.

Now he was the one looking for a house, and he wished he'd paid a little more attention when he'd had the chance.

“I think you're really going to love this property,” Colby said now, peeking out from the top of his mirrored aviators as he maneuvered the car along a narrow hill road. “Modern jewel. Real man-cave situation downstairs—you look like a guy who enjoys his poker and cigars.”

“Sure,” Alex said, grinning weakly. They'd pulled up to the entrance to what looked like a regional banking office.

“Hey, Colby, mind if I make a call?”

Colby gave him a thumbs-up. “Join me when you're ready—I'll just go inside.”

Barry was in Tucson now, recently divorced from his third wife, a high-energy, bird-faced socialite whom he was still entirely attached to. The last time they'd spoken, Barry had spent the entire conversation talking about his two step-granddaughters' ballet recital and the wonders of testosterone therapy. (“The engine's humming again!”) While Alex had zero interest in getting the update on adorable Eva or Caitlin or his dad's virility, he hoped Barry could offer some advice on the house hunt, or at least some general sense of whether Alex was foolish to be entering the market at a moment when the economy was in freefall.

“Are you crazy?” his dad hollered. A monstrous backyard
water feature thrummed in the background. “It's the best time to buy since ninety-two! Half the houses out here are in foreclosure. I'm safe, thank God, but with Lehman kaput and AIG crashed and Fannie Mae taking such a high holy dump, it's mayhem. And now's the moment you hit the jackpot? Honestly, your timing could
not
be better.”

“It's actually
Figgy
who got the deal,” Alex felt compelled to point out. “But you know—all boats rise, right?”

He'd made the same point to their accountant the day before, after she'd said they'd be safe looking “in the high twos or low threes.” He kept playing that phrase back: high twos or low threes. He was amazed at the ease with which the words rolled off the tongue, how they so spunkily described more money than he'd imagined spending on anything, ever.

The truth was that Alex felt queasy whenever he considered numbers like the high twos or low threes. None of these sorts of calculations made any sense. How could it be good, for instance, that they were making the biggest financial bet of their lives in the midst of what his dad called Total Fucking Mayhem? Banks were toppling, industries collapsing, loans imploding—all of which meant, at least theoretically, that actual people were scrambling, suffering, and being evicted, foreclosed, and laid off. And yet here his dad and bookkeeper and everyone else he knew was claiming it was
great
news. It seemed to Alex that the whole system was built on wreckage, that for every big, celebrated success there were several thousand anonymous losses, that the whole enterprise ran on the fossil fuel of failure.

“The only upside I can make out is how bad it makes Bush look,” Alex said, knee-jerk liberalism coming easily when talking to his fiercely libertarian dad. “It's all comeuppance for the red hot pigs in charge.”

“Red. Hot. Pigs.” Barry repeated. “Well then: Welcome to the pigsty, son. Jump in! The mud's fine!”

“Come on,” Alex said, getting out of Colby's car and approaching the front door. “Just because I'm looking for a bigger house doesn't make me a
pig
. I'm still me. I just have a hard time getting all excited about the fact that everyone's money is on fire.”

“You always were too sensitive,” Barry said. “But listen, if it'll make you feel any better, I could help out with the down payment. I haven't always been there for you—and it might help on the marriage front, adding some family money to the pot. Just so it doesn't feel so… one-sided.”

Alex wasn't sure whether to be touched or offended. “Thanks. Don't worry about it, though. We're fine. Figgy doesn't worry about that stuff—we're in this together.”

“Sure you are,” he said. “Just thank the Lord you found such a ball-buster for a wife. Hang on tight to that one, Alex boy.”

Then, trying to sound jokey and light but with more seriousness than Alex felt was at all humorous, Barry added, “I never have understood it, though: What is that woman doing with you, anyway?”

Oh yeah, Alex thought as he hung up and walked inside, Barry signing off with a cheerful “oink!”:
That's why I never call my dad.

• • •

Alex walked in to find Colby waiting in the entryway, his well-coiffed head lowered and hands spread out beside him as if mid-bow. “Welcome,” he purred, “to a true show house.”

Alex squinted upward. Sunlight flooded in from a pyramid-shaped skylight three or four floors above. As a guy who delivered dream houses, Colby apparently believed Alex fantasized about acres of multicolored marble and furnishings that had all the coziness of medical equipment.

“Isn't it sumptuous?” Colby said, eyes bulging.

Alex followed him upstairs, cataloging the multitude of pointy edges and sudden drop-offs and imagining all the ways Sam and Sylvie would be impaled or concussed if set loose here for five unmonitored minutes. He made a few displeased sighs, and Colby must have gotten the message because he abruptly cut off the tour and hurried them along to the next property, a newly completed spec house that he was happy to report had been built on parkland the developer managed to scoop up in a “sweet under-the-table deal with the Nature Conservancy.”

“It's nothing like the other one,” Colby said, all his enthusiasm for the modern jewel now forgotten. “This is truly the essence of elegance.”

Colby was right: It was nothing like the last place. The entry contained a chandelier the size of a satellite, a stained glass window that gave off a Jolly Rancher–green glow, and an iron railing fashioned into a tangle of grapevines.

Alex thought he'd been clear about what they were looking for—three bedrooms on one floor, pool, good flow—but he'd apparently failed on the aesthetic front. The problem, he realized now, was that Colby simply had no experience dealing with a customer like him. For that matter, Alex had little experience dealing with someone like Colby, with his crisp shirts and precise haircut and pleated slacks. Alex would've guessed he was a department store menswear salesman. The only personal detail Colby had offered at all was his devotion to a three-year-old Weimaraner named Hannah, whom he “spoiled like a baby girl.”