The Tortilla Curtain (11 page)

There was a broom in the garage—practically the only thing left there, if you discounted the two trash cans and a box of heavy-duty garbage bags. Kyra swept the water from the front porch and then went into the bathroom in the master suite to freshen up her face before Sally Lieberman from Sunrise arrived with her buyers. The bathroom was dated, unfortunately, by its garish ceramic tiles, each with the miniature yellow, blue and green figure of a bird emblazoned on it, and by the tarnished faux-brass fixtures and cut-glass towel racks that gave the place the feel of the ladies’ room in a Mexican restaurant. Ah, well, each to her taste, Kyra was thinking, and then she caught a good look at herself in the mirror.

It was a shock. She looked awful. Haggard, frowsy, desperate, like some stressed-out Tupperware hostess or something. The problem was her nose. Or, actually, it was Sacheverell and the night she’d spent, but all the grief and shock and exhaustion of the ordeal was right there, consolidated in her nose. The tip of it was red—bright red, naming—and when the tip of her nose was red it seemed to pull her whole face in on itself like some freakish vortex, The Amazing Lady with the Shrinking Face. Ever since she’d had her nose modified when she was fourteen, it had a tendency to embarrass her in times of stress. Whatever the doctor had done to it—remove a sliver of bone, snip a bit here and there—it was always just a shade paler than her cheeks, chin and brow, and it took on color more quickly. It always seemed to be sunburned, for one thing. And when she had a cold or flu or felt agitated or depressed or overwrought it blazed out from the center of her face like something you’d expect to find at the top of a Christmas tree.

You couldn’t move property with a nose like that. But why dwell on it? She took out her compact and went to work.

Just as she was putting the finishing touches to her face she heard Sally Lieberman chiming from the front door, “We’re here!”

Sally was mid-forties, dressed like she owned the store, worked out at the gym, a real professional. Kyra had closed six properties with her over the course of the past two years and she valued her input. The buyers, though, left something to be desired. They hung back at the door, looking sulky and hard-to-please. Sally introduced them as the Paulymans, Gerald and Sue. He was frazzle-haired and unshaven, in a pair of blue jeans gone pale with use, and she had pink and black beads braided into her hair. Kyra knew from experience not to judge from first appearances—she’d once had a woman in her seventies who dressed like a bag lady but wound up writing a check for a two-point-seven-mil estate in Cold Canyon—but they didn’t look auspicious. Maybe they were musicians or TV writers, she thought, hoping for the best. They had to have something going for them or Sally wouldn’t have brought them around.

“So what’s with the wet spot on the porch?” the husband wanted to know, confronting her eyes, his voice nagging and hoarse.

You couldn’t be evasive—evasive didn’t work. Even the most complacent buyer would think you were trying to put something over on them,, and a buyer like this would eat you alive. Kyra put on her smile. “A broken sprinkler head. I’ve already called the gardener about it.”

“That porch has a real pitch to it.”

“We offer a one-year buyer-protection policy on every house we list, gratis.”

“I can’t believe this carpet,” the wife said.

“And look at this,” the husband whined, pushing past Kyra and into the living room, where he went down on his hands and knees to wet a finger and run it along the baseboard, “the paint is flaking.”

Kyra knew the type. They were looky-loos of the first stripe, abusive, angry, despicable people who’d make you show them two hundred houses and then go out and buy a trailer. Kyra gave them her spiel—deal of the century, room to spare, old-world craftsmanship, barely been lived in—handed them each a brochure with a glossy color photo of the house reproduced on the front and left them to wander at will.

By two, she had a headache. Nothing was moving, anywhere, there were no messages on her machine and only six people had showed up for the realtors’ open house she’d catered herself on a new listing in West Hills—all that Chardonnay, Brie and Danish soda bread gone to waste, not to mention half a platter of California roll, ebi and salmon sushi. She spent the rest of the afternoon at the office, doing busywork, writing up ad copy and making phone calls, endless phone calls. Three extra-strength Excedrin couldn’t begin to quell the throbbing in her temples, and every time she lifted a document from her desk she saw Sacheverell as a puppy chasing a wadded-up ball of paper as if it were a part of him that had gotten away. She called Delaney at five to see how Jordan was taking it—he was fine, Delaney told her, so absorbed in his Nintendo he wouldn’t have known a dog from a chicken—and then she left work early to close up her houses and head home.

The parking attendant gave her her keys with a smile full of teeth and a mock bow that took him almost to the ground. He was a young Latino with slicked-back hair and dancing eyes and he always made her feel good, and though it was a little thing and she knew it was his job to make the ladies feel good, she couldn’t help smiling back at him. Then she was in her ear and the rest of the world wasn’t. She switched off the car phone, fed one of her relaxation tapes into the slot in the console—waves breaking on a beach, with the odd keening cry of a seagull thrown in for variety—and eased out into the traffic snarled on the boulevard in front of the office.

Traffic was traffic, and it didn’t faze her a bit. She moved with it, sat in it, ran with its unfathomable flow. The car was her sanctuary, and with the phone switched off and the waves rolling from the front speakers to the rear and back again, nothing could touch her. Just sitting there, locked in, the exhaust rising about her, she began to feel better.

She was responsible for closing up five houses every night, seven days a week, and opening them again in the morning so her fellow realtors could show them. These were the houses she was keying on, and though they had lockboxes, she needed to make sure they were secure at night—she couldn’t count the times a careless realtor had left a window or even a door open—and to collect the cards of any of her colleagues who might have been through with a client. It added a good hour or more to her day, but it kept the sellers happy and she could go home and network with those cards while Delaney put up dinner and Jordan did his homework. And five houses was nothing, really—she’d had as many as twelve or thirteen during the boom years.

She went through the first four houses on automatic pilot—in the door, douse the lights, check on the automatic timers, punch in the alarm code and lock up, key in the lockbox—but with the last house, the Da Ros place, she took her time. This was a house you could get lost in, a house that made her other listings look like bungalows. Of all the places she’d ever shown, this was the one that really spoke to her, the sort of house she would have when she was forty and kissed Mike Bender goodbye and opened her own office. It sat high on a bluff above the canyon at the end of a private drive, with an unobstructed view of the Pacific on one side and the long green-brown spine of the Santa Monica Mountains on the other. Way below it, like some sort of fungus attached to the flank of the mountain, lay the massed orange tile rooftops of Arroyo Blanco.

There were twenty rooms, each arranged to take advantage of the views, a library, billiard room, servants’ quarters, formal gardens and fishpond. In all, the house comprised eleven thousand square feet of living space, done up in the style of an English manor house, with towering chimneys, fieldstone walls and a roof stained russet and green to counterfeit age and venerability, though it only dated back to 1988. It was on the market because of a suicide. Kyra was representing the widow, who’d gone to live in Italy after the funeral.

Her headache was gone now, but it had been replaced by a fatigue that went deeper than any physical exhaustion, a funk, a malaise she couldn’t seem to shake. All this over a dog? It was ridiculous, she knew it. There were people out there going through Dumpsters for a scrap to eat, people lined up on the streets begging for work, people who’d lost their homes, their children, their spouses, people with real problems, real grief. What was wrong with her?

Maybe it was her priorities, maybe that was it. What was she doing with her life? Cutting deals? Making Mike Bender richer? Seeing that Mr. and Mrs. Whoever found or sold or leased or rented their dream house while the world was falling to shit around her and dogs were dying and she got to spend an hour and a half a day with her son if she was lucky? She looked round her and it was as if she were waking from a dream, the sky on fire, the towers blazing above her. It was then, for just a moment, standing there in the tiled drive of Patricia Da Ros’s huge wheeling ark of a house, that she caught a glimpse of her own end, laid to rest in short skirt, heels and tailored jacket, a sheaf of escrow papers clutched in her hand.

She tried to shrug it off. Tried to tell herself that what she did was important, vital, altruistic even—after food and love, what was more important than shelter?—but the cloud wouldn’t lift and she felt numb from the balls of her feet to the crown of her head. She found herself drifting through the gardens, checking to see that everything was in order—she couldn’t help herself—and there was no carelessness here because the gardener was her own and he knew just what was expected of him. All was quiet. The koi lay deep in their pools and the lawns glistened under a soft uniform mist from the sprinklers.

It was quarter past six and still warm—uncomfortably warm—but there was an offshore breeze and Kyra could see a skein of fog unraveling across the water below. The evening would be cool. She thought of her own house then, of Delaney going round opening the windows and turning on the big slow ceiling fans to gather in the breeze while the salad chilled and the pasta steamed and Jordan kicked a ball against the garage door. If she hurried, she could be home by seven.

But she didn’t hurry. The more she thought of her own house, of her son, her husband, her solitary dog, the more enervated she felt. She lingered on the doorstep, wandered through the cavernous rooms like a ghost, ran her hand over the felt of the billiard table as if she were caressing the short stiff nap at the base of Jordan’s neck. She was just checking to see that everything was in order, that was all, but in a way, a growing way, a way that almost overwhelmed her, she didn’t want to leave, not ever again.

 

 

 

Late morning, the house silent, light muted, telephone off the hook. Delaney sat in his office, a converted bedroom fitted but with desk, couch and filing cabinets, leaning into a pool of artificial light while the sun cut precise slashes between the slats of the drawn blinds. He’d been out earlier with shovel and pickax, the heavy clay soil like asphalt, to dispose of the dog’s remains, putting an end to that chapter. Mercifully. And now he was back at work, severed limbs, distraught wives, frightened children and public meetings behind him, putting the finishing touches to his latest column: