Plus One (17 page)

When he looked back, Figgy was out of the car, standing outside his window and passing him the stack of documents. “I gotta get back to work,” she said. “We'll be shooting late—I may need to stay over tonight. Kiss the kids. Talk me up—tell them how much I love them.”

She reached in for a one-armed embrace through the car window. Alex swallowed hard, wishing she'd blow off work and help him deal. He needed her certainty, her decisiveness, the cushion against harm he felt when they were together. Left alone, he feared he might throw up all over Colby's papers.

Figgy looked at him with concern. “You know you're amazing, right?” she said. “You found this place, and now you just gotta go
get
it. I'm sorry I'm dumping this on you and disappearing.”

Alex nodded uncertainly, panic darting across his face. Figgy
gave his shoulder a squeeze before jumping in her car and heading to work. “Just pretend to know what you're doing,” she called out the window. “Fake it! It's gonna work out fine. I promise.”

• • •

Alex led Colby through the front door to find the kids sprawled in front of the TV and Rosa hovering nearby with a stack of laundry. He waved and dumped the documents on the kitchen counter.

“Hola, Rosa! Buenos días!” he said, thus exhausting his supply of Spanish.

“Hola, Mr. Alex,” Rosa smiled and stuffed a pile of Sylvie's dresses into a basket.

“Say hi to Mr. Dreamhouse everyone! This is Mr. McNamara. Kids?”

Sylvie grunted, her mouth moving the minimum required to produce sound while her eyes stayed locked on the TV. Sam popped up from the couch and followed the adults into the kitchen, where Colby was clearing a spot on the counter amid a scattering of newspapers and an assortment of vintage fondue skewers that Figgy had bought at the Rose Bowl flea market.

“How soon do you think you could get some bank statements together?” Colby asked, picking up a shellacked plaque printed with an image of praying hands and the insignia: “God Bless Our Mobile Home.” He frowned, setting the plaque down. “Best thing would be a pre-approval letter from your mortgage guy. Have you got someone?”

“Shouldn't be a problem,” Alex said, not having any idea if it would be a problem. The amount of Figgy's bonus seemed inconceivable a month ago, but now there were even more inconceivable numbers to reckon with. Alex figured the bonus would cover the twenty-five percent down, but what about after? With taxes, insurance, maintenance, their monthly nut would be… what? His
stomach churned. Figgy was so confident they'd swing it, but how did she really know? This next week she was editing episode five, shooting episode seven, and writing nine. He was on his own.

Colby tapped on Alex's shoulder and motioned toward the papers. “Don't mean to rush, but we want to get this into the office before they close,” he said. “Just put your initials where you see a green tab.”

“Green tabs—okay,” Alex said, rising up and returning to the stack.

Sam made a small whining sound and turned his attention to the dog, holding her by the collar and rubbing the bushy part of her neck. “You don't want to move, do you Albert?” he said. “You're just fine right here, aren't you, girl?”

• • •

Colby said they could expect a counter offer within a day or two. Which would give Alex time to shop for a loan, line up inspectors, and dig into the ever-deepening cavity of anxiety that had opened up the moment he'd signed the offer. Was he actually the co-signatory on a multi-million-dollar real estate deal? How did he become
that
guy?

But the counteroffer didn't come the next day, or the day after. Alex stayed busy with phone calls to accountants and brokers, assembling the ins and outs of what would be, far and away, the riskiest purchase of their lives. Valerie the accountant tried to talk them out of it: “Do you have any idea the kind of mortgage shitshows I'm dealing with over here? You've had a good year, but you're not network rich—you're cable rich. Big difference.” She finally gave her blessing with the proviso that Figgy stay on
Tricks
for at least two more seasons. “You'll be hyper-extended,” she said. “It's a house of cards, but if you can string together another couple of good years, you'll be fine—just like Lehman! Too big to fail!”

“I feel awful,” Alex said, cracking a triangle of herbed pita. He was out for lunch with Huck at the Davies Club. Alex had been wanting to check out the Davies for a while; he'd heard stories about Huck drinking Red Bulls with Tom Cruise in the rooftop lounge high above the Sunset Strip. But now that he was actually here, in a crowd of agents and Beverly Hills housewives, he wished they'd just gone to his neighborhood Thai place. Surrounded by all the fanciness, he felt panicky and extra awkward; he'd spent the last half hour describing how on his last visit to the house, he'd run into Mr. Benjamin shoveling hot clumps of manure. “He looked like one of those automatronic ghosts in the Haunted Mansion,” Alex said. “Just talking to him feels like bad luck, you know? He's at the center of this unbelievable havoc and we're just waltzing right into it. How crazy is that?
Is
it crazy? What do you think—do you think bad luck is contagious?”

“Seriously, hombre?” Huck said, picking at his beet salad. “Detachment. You can't let this get to you. You're bidding on a house. That's all. It's a fucking sport out here, okay? A game. You're like some meth-head over there, mashing your little mitts together and gnashing your pretty white teeth.”

Alex's TMJ
had
been acting up—he didn't know anyone could tell. The muscles beneath his earlobes felt sore and balled up; he imagined his molars were grinding down to dusty little stumps.

He took a deep breath and picked up his phone, looking for the one thing that had reliably relaxed him over the last few days:
meatgirl.com
. He'd had to dig through the trash container to retrieve the butcher paper on which she'd written the name of her Tumblr. Thankfully, he found the scrap and was able to decipher the name beneath a smear of grease. Miranda, it turned out, was a serious obsessive. She updated the site daily with lavishly photographed accounts of her cooking and dining. There was an account of her first-ever pig roast, a rumination on the glory of organ meat—“the pure inner essence of the animal”—and a series
of dispatches from her field trips to East L.A. carnicerias. Today there was a snapshot of mason jars filled with duck confit alongside a dish of pickled onions on the counter of her Koreatown kitchen.

Alex sighed and handed his phone to Huck. “Check out this duck—how delicious does that look?”

Huck glanced at the picture and gave Alex a dubious look. “I'm
so
over mason jars,” he said. “Can we please go back to using actual plates and stop pretending like we're frontier people? Anyhow, I've got something so much better—check this out.”

Alex took Huck's phone.

“Look—that's Bing doing a full
head spin
,” Huck said. “Unassisted! What a little badass, am I right? Preschool showcase yesterday. Seriously—kid's got some
mad
moves.”

On the screen, Katherine's adopted son Bingwen was furiously twirling at the center of a crowd of kids, arms stuck out straight and his legs scissor-kicking as he spun. When Huck told Alex about enrolling Bingwen at the new Blue Man Preschool a month or two before, he'd framed it as a crazy lark, another hilarious example of their over-the-top Hollywood lifestyle. The irony, apparently, had faded.

“Wow,” Alex said. “Is that, like, part of the standard Blue Man curriculum?”

“Sure—head spinning, puppetry, trash-can percussion,” Huck said. “
Shitload
of mime. Kid drives me crazy with all the windstorms he gets caught in. But beats macaroni crafts and circle time, am I right? Skinny dude in the back is Bing's head-spin mentor. Or maybe it's the short one.”

“That's great, Huck—but seriously?” Alex cut in. “Can we get back to the house?”

“What about it?”

“We were supposed to get an answer day before yesterday. But now they've gone silent. Radio silence. I'm going bananas.
Worst thing, it feels wrong to even be angry, you know? That poor family. What they're going through? Can you even
imagine
?”

Alex filled Huck in on the back story of the house, which they'd pieced together through friends-of-friends and realtor gossip. It seemed that the Benjamins had moved into the house a few years back after Judy's father had a stroke. She was named executor of his estate; she pooled her family money with Mr. Benjamin's savings, funneling all the accounts into a single fund operated by the money manager Greg Helman. A year later, the SEC busted Helman for raiding clients' accounts to cover a series of disastrous foreign investments.

It wasn't clear precisely how much the Benjamins had lost, but their plan now was to take the equity they had in Sumter Court and move all of them—Mr. Benjamin, Judy, her elderly father, the nurse, and a load of rattling oxygen tanks—into a rental unit they could afford, which Alex immediately pictured as a wobbly tenement wrapped in rusting fire escapes and stinking of medical waste and cat pee.

“That
is
some bad mojo,” Huck agreed. “But guys like that manage just fine. Don't forget—with the money they make on this deal, they'll be able to pay rent for the rest of their natural lives.”

“I just feel like we have no business getting anywhere near this place. I literally have
no idea
what I'm doing—and somehow I'm in charge of the whole fucking negotiation. I'm gonna screw it up.”

“Seriously, Alex—you need to relax,” Huck said. “Figgy's right—you guys deserve this house. And the guy you're getting it from, you're not taking advantage. He's
drowning
—and you're pulling up beside him in big cruise ship.”

Alex straightened up, flashing on an image of himself at the wheel of a luxury ocean liner, in one of those ridiculous Captain Stubing beanies.

Huck leaned in and made a little hooking motion with his finger. “And don't forget, this house—it's nothing but good for you. Big asset, whole new bracket. Big reset on the marital standard of living—very good for you down the line. Don't forget that anniversary of yours. You keep your head down, take care of the kids, feather that nest—it's all good.”

Alex scratched the back of his head and looked at his lap. “You're disgusting, you know that?”

“What?” Huck put his palms up and shrugged. “Be smart is all I'm saying. You start flipping out now and you lose the house
and
your lady. Don't give her any reason to bail. You don't think she's checking her watch, figuring the odds?”

Alex looked out the window and tried to wrap his head around what Huck was suggesting. Figgy had seemed distant lately, but that was just because she was busy. The other day she'd brought up the third kid discussion again—that wasn't the talk of a wife planning an exit.

“You're wrong. We're good. And I am not gonna start cataloging everything in my life in terms of ‘marital assets'.”

Huck interlaced his fingers and leaned back. “Would it be wrong if you were the woman married to a guy making bank? No way. You'd do what you do to take care of yourself. And no one would think the less of you for it.”

Huck's Blackberry vibrated on the glass table, and he snatched it up. “It's my boy Les,” he said, eyes rolling. “Kid texts me like twenty times a day. Girlfriend troubles. ‘Lindsay won't call me back!' Pathetic.”

“Is this
the
Les? Lester Price Les?”

Huck gave a slight shrug, happy to slag the likes of Lester Price, a movie actor known for playing snarky-sweet, overconfident hipsters in A-list studio projects. He was also, if the tabloids were to be believed, a raging pill popper and a class-A prick, given to ugly romantic entanglements and crazed explosions of
temper. Last year he did thirty-five hours of community service after an altercation with a fan who'd dared address him by his given name, Leslie Sychak.

“ ‘Getting a crash pad in the city,' ” Huck read. “ ‘Big pimping. Pink palace.' ”

“
Pink
palace? No way. Can't be.”

“Hold on,” Huck said, furiously thumbing out a response. “Where's the house again?”

“Street is Sumter Court,” Alex said. “Sumter—like the fort.”

Huck kept on thumbing, and then paused. He set his phone on the table and rubbed his forehead. “Yup,” he said. “Same. He put in a bid last night.”

“How can that even be?” Alex said. “That's insanity.”

“Not really—inventory is zero right now. For rollers like you and Les, there are maybe three or four halfway decent houses on the market. That's how it goes.”

Alex took a swig of iced tea and thought this over. “So
that's
why we're still waiting for our answer?” Alex said. “We're in a bidding war—with Les Price?”

“Appears so, yeah.”

“That's it then,” Alex said. “We're done.”

Huck shrugged. “He
does
need a place in the city. You'll find something else.”