Plus One (15 page)

“This is super impressive, Colby—really,” Alex said. “And don't get me wrong—I've got nothing against impressive. But I wonder if we might see something a little older? Something with a little more… character?”

“Right! Got it! Character!” Colby said, his fingers suddenly breaking into a little hand jive. “You guys are
funky
.”

They headed back early, Colby promising to recheck the inventories,
Alex brooding over what to do now that the house hunt had been called off for the day. He sat down on the front steps, suddenly terrified by the to-do list that awaited him inside. There was so much to get done—or at least so many lists to make of things to get done. Lately he'd been spending an inordinate amount of time wandering around the house with a Wonder Woman notebook bought at Rite Aid, noting all the tasks that needed doing. Then he'd sit down at the dining room table and rearrange and reprioritize and incorporate previous lists into a single master list. Only then would he try to tackle an actual task. On good days he'd tick off one or two items—sort the board games in the closet, get dog license, research summer camps. Then it was time for carpool.

Meanwhile Figgy had been swallowed up by the new season of
Tricks
. The timing had been, at least on paper, perfect—Alex had quit his job just as she was getting sucked into the vortex of production. He knew the drill: Figgy would be either absent or effectively brain-dead for the next six months. She'd win the bread and he'd hold the fort. And somewhere in there, he'd carve out time to work on his own as-yet-undefined-but-nonetheless-crucial Creative Project.

“Free at last,” Huck announced the day he strolled onto the patio at Interlingua that first free week. “You, daddy-o, are one lucky fuck.”

Alex responded with a laugh and a nod before heading home to the Wonder Woman notebook, declining Huck's invitation to join him at the 11 a.m. spinning class with Annabelle, storied possessor of the Greatest Ass in All the Land. Alex could've used the workout if he ever hoped to get into those new jeans without prompting an actual aneurysm, but something told him he shouldn't be making plans that revolved around other women's asses.

Other women's asses—and their necks, arms, breasts, and really all the lady parts—seemed to be everywhere lately. The lady
butcher at Malcolm's Meat and Fish, Miranda with the blond eyelashes and the chef's whites—she was becoming a problem. Alex had been stopping by Malcolm's once or twice a week. Their product was ridiculously good, and it didn't hurt that a visit to Malcolm's also included a few minutes peering over the case watching Miranda feeding chuck into the sausage maker or thumbing out the ribs for a short loin. She had long, shapely calves and the sweetest little boobs he'd ever seen.

The last time he'd stopped by, they'd had an actual conversation. Miranda usually kept busy in the back of the shop, leaving Alex to crane his head over the case and observe her from afar. But today she marched right over while he was shooting the shit with Malcolm about the parsley–celery root slaw he'd served with halves of roasted bone marrow.

“So
you're
the guy who keeps buying up all our marrow?” she said, her cheeks flushed and eyes bright, wiping her blade on a rag tucked into a belt loop. “You back for more?”

“Maybe,” Alex said. “Pretty tempting.”

“Maybe time to cut you off.”

“What? How do you mean?”

“You've been on kind of a bender.”

She went up on tiptoes and looked over the counter, giving Alex the once-over. “You're fine for now, but keep going at this rate and say goodbye to that girlish figure.”

Alex stepped back, protectively cupping his gut. Was she razzing him, or flirting? He had gotten a little thicker around the middle—was it that obvious?

“All right then—no marrow today.” He started to turn away but stopped. “So… you cook, too?”

“Sure. It's bad. I pretty much blog every meal I make—God help me.” She pulled a pen from a can on the counter, ripped off a page of butcher paper, and scribbled something on the corner. “Check it out. Total food porn. You'll dig.”

“Thanks.” Alex took his bag back and backed away, suddenly in a hurry to get out of there. The next day, he made a point of telling Figgy about the lady butcher.

“I'm off to ogle the woman who cuts our meat!” he said as he was headed out the door. “You can't even believe it—our butcher's a babe.”

“Oh, so you're a
dirtbag
now? You gonna ditch me for some
butcher
?”

“Oh God, no,” he said. “It's nothing. It's all about the fact that she brings me meat. It's Pavlovian.”

“Good thing you're so evolved.”

They kissed and off he went, free to ogle to his heart's content. Figgy was great that way, proudly loosey-goosey. That was one of the tradeoffs for having such an independent spouse—she might not be home packing the kids' lunches, but she didn't care about the sort of marital rules and regulations that seemed so important to other wives. They Went to Bed Angry. They held grudges and slammed doors. They said “you always” and “you never” when discussing her purchase of that horrid orange couch or his daily dusting of whiskers in the bathroom sink.

The big vows were still observed—partially because Alex suspected having a real life affair would be more exhausting than exciting, but also because the only actual opportunity he'd ever recognized was at a bar where he was propositioned by a not-unhot redhead who fixed Air Force jet fighters. The whole thing was so perfectly
Top Gun
that all he could think to do was run home to tell Figgy all about it. After he'd finished describing the girl's greasy fingers and boot-camp physique, she'd said something surprising.

“You'd never tell me if you
did
cheat, would you? Don't you
ever
dare cheat. But if you do, don't be an idiot and come confessing—I do
not
want to know.”

He couldn't tell if she was affecting an air of sophistication or if she really did believe in a marital version of Don't Ask, Don't
Tell. In any case, it was all theoretical—he had never really been tempted, and he'd never worried about Figgy. She was too busy, too insecure, too manically consumed by her own life to start living a secret one.

Now, though, he'd begun to worry. When had that started? Since she'd gone back into production? Her days were so long now, and late at night he'd find himself fixating on all the attractive and attentive men surrounding her at work. He'd seen them, scruffy Yale-grad baby writers and ruggedly handsome actors, all of them fawning and flirtatious in the presence of the lady boss. Alex had identified one guy in particular, Zev someone—he was their house DP, and like most directors of photography, he was arty and masculine and foreign, with wiry black hair, green eyes, and a deep, glottal accent. (He was Israeli, wasn't he? Figgy would love that.) Alex imagined her huddling with Zev over shot lists late into the night, then coming home to her newly unemployed husband at the kitchen counter stressing over the new carpool schedule. How could she not stray? Or at least be tempted to? And how would he ever know? She'd made it clear she'd never tell.

Or maybe Alex just wasn't used to spending so much time alone. Wherever its source, the thought quickly replicated and got caught in a feedback loop, repeating over and over as he went about his day:
While you knock around the house by your lonesome, Figgy is moving on, moving up, at the show with all the fancy people… If you fail to Hold Up Your End she'll be gone gone gone….

The voice only amplified when he visited Figgy at work. She'd asked that he bring the kids by the studio a few times a week, “so they remember who their mom is.” He didn't mind. It was a thrill to get waved through the guard gate and find his assigned spot in the crew lot and then venture into the vast, cavernous stages, where burly Teamsters hauled around lighting rigs and flats of scenery. Inevitably some young woman from props would swoop up one of the kids for a raid on the catering truck for gelato or hot
chocolate. Unlimited free Red Vines? As far as the kids were concerned, their mom was the overlord of a magical realm of helpful attendants and unlimited sweets.

It seemed pretty great to Alex, too. Just before production began, on a whim, Figgy had the art department do up her office to resemble the inside of the
I Dream of Jeannie
bottle, with a round, silk-covered queen-size bed in place of a desk. Alex and the kids would barge into her office and find her propped up against a pile of fluffy cushions, her laptop balanced on a breakfast tray and her assistant, Anne-Marie, a Korean USC grad with bleached teeth, running in and out with fresh batches of tea and sunflower seeds. If Figgy wasn't in bed, she'd be in the writer's room stationed at the end of a long conference table, surrounded by dry-erase boards and a staff of wisecracking young writers who always appeared to be dressed for a backyard barbecue.

Alex knew the work could be ridiculously hard and the politics and hierarchies were brutal, but sampled periodically, from the safe distance of a visiting spouse, Figgy's workplace looked like the best clubhouse ever.

If you don't hold up your end… she'll be gone gone gone.

And then a month after production began, the money arrived. There was no beeping truck, no giant check, no crash of cymbals, no clinking of champagne flutes. The only way Alex knew they had it was a call from Valerie, an associate in the Encino accounting firm they'd hired last year when Figgy's show was picked up.

“FYI—the first studio payment just cleared,” she said cheerfully. “I can stick it in a cash account or money market but wanted to check with you first. Where do you stand on munis?”

“I'm pro-munis, absolutely,” he said, knowing nothing whatsoever about munis. “Let me talk to Figgy and get her to weigh in. We'll talk things over.”

But of course there was no talking things over with Figgy, who greeted news of the payment that night in bed with a weary,
“It's about fucking time,” before vanishing behind a cushioned sleep mask and passing out. Alex knew better than to think Figgy would care one way or another about municipal bonds; she was even fuzzier on finances than Alex. In annual meetings with the bookkeeper, she'd squint during the discussion of tax brackets and deductions and then come out with the only economic question that seemed to make any sense to her:

“How long can we survive if I have a nervous breakdown tomorrow and no one ever hires me again?”

Which left Alex as family CFO as well as domestic first responder. In this capacity, he let a few days pass before getting back to the accountant. He knew they needed to make a decision, but it somehow cheered him that the new infusion was only temporarily contained. It wasn't locked down. It was liquid. It didn't belong in municipals. It belonged in a house.

• • •

And so Alex kept up the house hunt. He checked in with Colby each morning and did a tour of open houses on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Still, every time he got in Colby's car, he was struck by the wrongness of it all—the forced friendship between them, the peppery whiff of Colby's cologne, the smooth jazz on his car radio. The houses weren't much better. Colby had learned to steer away from the crazy moderns and grand McMansions, which left the deeply creepy, the highly impractical, or the offensively tacky. Great recession or not, it turned out that high-twos-low-threes was not exactly the ticket to easy street he'd imagined it would be.

And then, two weeks into the hunt, Colby called about a pocket listing a few blocks down from Griffith Park. The house was on Sumter Court, a looping side street a few blocks away from the duplex Alex had lived in during his temping days. As
they pulled up to the address in Colby's Mercedes, Alex's heart began to race. He leapt out of the car and hurried to the tall iron gate, peering down a leafy path at a pink Mediterranean centered in the middle of a flat acre. The gate buzzed and Alex took three steps into the garden and stopped.

The last time he'd been here, the lawn was overgrown, the pool was halfway drained, and Alex was a trespasser. But there was no mistaking it. It was his Come the Revolution House, restored and repainted and up for grabs to the highest bidder.

• • •

He wandered from room to room, his mouth slack and head spinning, pausing in the same cavernous, wood-paneled room he'd peered into twenty-odd years before. Could you even call it a
house
? Or was it a compound? An estate? It was enormous, with a drawing room (a drawing room!), a solarium (solarium!), and actual provenance—the architect had what Colby had called “A-list credits.”

What really got Alex was the yard—one lawn spilled into another, with park benches and gurgling fountains peeking out from leafy corners, all of it shaded by fragrant eucalyptus and old-growth redwoods. He surveyed the scene and pictured Sylvie frolicking across the grass, twirling a white parasol. He wanted this yard with an unadulterated ache. The feeling was only slightly undercut by a nagging picture of the gardeners he knew maintained all this water-chugging, non-native flora, who he knew in an instant were Latino, underpaid, and armed with squealing, smoke-belching leaf blowers.

In any case, it was beyond them—way too expensive, too grand, too old. Even with the recent influx of money, Alex was sure there wasn't a jumbo loan jumbo enough to swing it. Besides, their new money was just that: new. This place reeked of Old.