Tooth and Claw (16 page)

The excitement was contagious, and yet it was inseparable from a certain element of competitive anxiety—this was a random drawing, after all, and there would necessarily have to be winners and losers. Still, people were outgoing and friendly, chatting amongst themselves as if they’d known one another all their lives, sharing around cold cuts and homemade potato salad, swapping stories. Everybody knew the rules—there was no favoritism here. Charles Contash was founding a town, a prět-à-porter community set down in the middle of the vacation wonderland itself, with Contash World on one side and Game Park U.S.A. on the other, and if you wanted in—no matter who you were or who you knew—you had to stand in line like anybody else.

Directly in front of me was a single mother in a powder-blue halter top designed to show off her assets, which were considerable, and in front of her were two men holding hands; immediately behind me, silently masticating crullers, was a family of four, mom, pop, sis and junior, their faces haggard and interchangeable, and behind them, a black couple burying their heads in a glossy brochure. The single mother—she’d identified herself only as Vicki—had one fat ripe cream puff of a baby slung over her left shoulder, where it (he? she?)
was playing with the thin band of her spaghetti strap, while the other child, a boy of three or so decked out in a striped polo shirt and a pair of shorts he could grow into, clung to her knee as if he’d been fastened there with a strip of Velcro. “So what did you say your name was?” she asked, swinging round on me for what must have been the hundredth time in the past hour. The baby, in this view, was a pair of blinding white diapers and two swollen, rooting legs.

I told her my name was Jackson, and that I was pleased to meet her, and before she could say
Is that your first name or last?
I clarified the issue for her: “Jackson Peters Reilly. That’s my mother’s maiden name. Jackson. And her mother’s maiden name was Peters.”

She seemed to consider this a moment, her eyes drifting in and out of focus. She patted the baby’s bottom for no good reason. “Wish I’d thought of that,” she said. “This one’s Ashley, and my son’s Ethan— Say hello, Ethan. Ethan?” And then she laughed, a hearty, hopeful laugh that had nothing to do with rejection, abandonment or a night spent on the pavement with two exhausted children while holding a place something like four hundred deep in the lottery line. “Of course, my maiden name’s Silinski, so it wouldn’t exactly sound too feminine for little baby Ashley, now would it?”

She was flirting with me, and that was okay, that was fine, because wasn’t that what I’d come down here for in the first place—to upgrade my social life? I was tired of New York. Tired of L.A. Tired of the anonymity, the hassle, the grab and squeeze and the hostility snarling just beneath the surface of every transaction, no matter how small or insignificant. “I don’t know,” I said, “sounds kind of chic to me. The doorbell rings and there’s all these neighborhood kids chanting, ‘Can Silinski come out to play?’ Or the modeling agency calls. ‘So what about Silinski,’ they say, ‘is she available?’ ”

I was doing fine, grinning and smooth-talking and sailing right along, though my back felt misaligned and my right hip throbbed where the pavement had bitten into it during a mostly sleepless night under the amber glow of the newly installed Contash streetlamps. I took a swig from my Evian bottle, tugged the plastic brim of my visor down to keep the sun from irradiating the creases at the corners of my eyes. There was one more Silinski trope on my tongue, the
one that would bring her to her knees in adoration of my wit and charm, but I never got to utter it because at that moment the rolling blast of a Civil War cannon announced the official opening of the lottery, and everybody in line crowded closer as ten thousand balloons, in the powder-blue and sun-kissed orange of the Contash Corp, rose up like a mad flock into the sky.

“Welcome, all you friends and neighbors,” boomed an amplified voice, and all eyes went to the head of the line. There, atop the four-story tower of the sales preview center, a tiny figure in the Contash colors held out his arms in benediction. “And all you little ones too—and remember, Gulpy Gator and Chowchy love you one and all, and so does our founder, Charles Contash, whose vision of community, of health and vigor and good schools and good neighbors, has never shone more brightly than it does today in Jubilation! No need to crowd, no need to fret. We’ve got two thousand Village Homes, Cottage Homes, Little Adobes and Mercado Street mini–luxury apartments available today, and three thousand more to come. So welcome, folks, and just step up and draw your lucky number from the hopper.”

The press moved forward in all its human inevitability, and I had to brace myself to avoid trampling the young woman in front of me. As it was, the family of four gouged their angles into my flesh and I found myself making a nest of my arms for her, for Vicki, who in turn was shoved up against the hand-holding men in front of her. I could smell her, her breath sweet with the mints she’d been sucking all morning and the odor of her sweat and perfume rising up out of the confinement of her halter top. “Oh, God,” she whispered, “God, I just pray—”

Her hair was in my mouth, caught in the bristles of my mustache. It was as if we were dancing, doing the Macarena or forming up a conga line, back to front. “Pray what?”

Her breath caught and then released in a respiratory tumult that was almost a sob: “That there’s just one Mercado Street mini–luxury apartment left, just one, that’s all I ask.” And then she paused, the shining new moon of her face rising over her shoulder to gaze up into mine. “And you,” she breathed, “I pray you get what you want too.”

What I wanted was a detached home in the North Village section of town, on the near side of the artificial lake, a cool four hundred fifty thousand dollars for a ninety-by-thirty-foot lot and a wraparound porch that leered promiscuously at the wraparound porches of my neighbors, ten feet away on either side—one of the Casual Contempos or even one of the Little Adobes—and I wanted it so badly I would have taken Charles Contash himself hostage to get it. “A Casual Contempo,” I said, and the family of four strained against me.

She was fighting for position. The child underfoot clung like a remora to the long tapered muscle of her leg. The baby began to fuss. She was put out, overwrought, not at all at her best, I could see that, but still her eyebrows lifted and she let out a low whistle. “Wow,” she said, “you must be rich.”

I wasn’t rich, not by the standards I’d set for myself, but I’d sold my company to a bigger company and bought off my ex-wife, and what was left was more than adequate to set me up in a new life in a new house—and no, I wasn’t retiring to Florida to play golf till I dropped dead of boredom, but just looking for what was missing in my life, for the values I’d grown up with in the suburbs, where there were no fences, no walls, no gated communities and private security guards, where everybody knew everybody else and democracy wasn’t just a tattered banner the politicians unfurled for their convenience every four years. That was what the Jubilation Company promised. That and a rock-solid property valuation, propped up by Charles Contash and all the fiscal might of his entertainment and merchandising empire. The only catch was that you had to occupy your property a minimum of nine months out of the year and nobody could sell within two years of purchase, so as to discourage speculators, but to my way of thinking that wasn’t a catch at all, if you were committed. And if you weren’t, you had no business taking up space in line to begin with. “Not really,” I said, enjoying the look on her face, the unconscious widening of her eyes, the way her lips parted in expectation. “Comfortable, I guess you’d say.”

Then the line jerked again and we all revised our footing. “Mercado Street!” somebody shouted. “Penny Lane!” countered another, and there was a flicker of nervous laughter.

From where I was standing, I could barely see over the crush. A girl in a short blue skirt and orange heels stood on a platform at the head of the line, churning a gleaming stainless-steel hopper emblazoned with the Contash logo, and an LED display stood ready to flash the numbers as people extracted the little digitized cards from the depths of it. There was a ripple of excitement as the first man in line, a phys ed teacher from Las Vegas, New Mexico, climbed the steps of the platform. Rumor had it he’d been camped on the unforgiving concrete for over a month, eating his meals out of a microwave and doing calisthenics to keep in shape. I saw a running suit (blue with orange piping, what else?) surmounted by yard-wide shoulders and a head like a wrecking ball. The man bent to the hopper, straightened up again and handed a white plastic card to the girl, who in turn ran it under a scanner. The display flickered, and then flashed the number: 3,347. “Oh, God,” Vicki muttered under her breath. My pulse was racing. I couldn’t seem to swallow. The sun hung overhead like an over-ripe orange on a limb just out of reach as the crowd released a long slow withering exhalation. So what if the phys ed teacher had camped out for a month? He was a loser, and he was going to have to wait for Phase II construction to begin before he could even hope to become part of this.

None of the next five people managed to draw under 1,000, but at least they were in, at least there was that. “They look like they want houses, don’t they?” Vicki said, a flutter of nerves undermining her voice. “I don’t mean Casual Contempos,” she said, “I wouldn’t want to jinx that for you, but maybe the Little Adobes or the Courteous Coastals. But not apartments. No way.”

Then a couple who looked as if they belonged on one of the Contash Corp’s billboards drew number 5 and the crowd let out a collective groan before people recovered themselves and a spatter of applause went up. I shut my eyes. I hadn’t eaten since the previous afternoon on the plane and I felt dizzy suddenly.
Get lucky
, I told myself.
Just get lucky, that’s all
.

A breeze came up. The line moved forward step by step, slab by slab. As each number was displayed, a thrill ran through the crowd, and they were all neighbors, or potential neighbors, but that didn’t
mean they weren’t betting against you. It took nearly an hour before the men in front of Vicki—Mark and his partner, Leonard, nicest guys in the world—mounted the steps to the platform and drew number 222. I watched in silence as they fell into each other’s arms and improvised a little four-legged jig around the stage, and then Vicki was up there with the sun bringing out the highlights in her hair and drawing the color from her eyes as if they’d been inked in. The boy fidgeted. The baby squalled. She bent forward to draw her number, and when the display flashed 17 she flew down the steps and collapsed for sheer joy in the arms of the only man she knew in that whole astonished crowd—me—and everybody must have assumed I was the father of those creamy pale children until I climbed the steps myself and thrust my own arm into the hopper.

The stage seemed to go quiet suddenly, all that tumult of voices reduced to a whisper, tongues arrested, lips frozen in mid-sentence. I was going to get what I wanted. I was sure of it. My fingers closed on a card, one of thousands, and I fished it out and handed it to the girl; an instant later the number flashed on the board—4,971—and Vicki, poised at the foot of the steps with a glazed smile, looked right through me.

T
HERE ARE PEOPLE
in this world who are content with the lot they’re given, content to bow their heads and accept what comes, to wait, sacrifice and look to the future. I’m not one of them. Within an hour of the drawing, I’d traded number 4,971 and $10,000 cash for Mark and Leonard’s number 222, and within a month of that I was reclining in a new white wicker chaise longue on the wraparound porch of my Casual Contempo discussing interior decoration with a very determined—and attractive—young woman from Coastal Design. The young woman’s name was Felicia, and she wore her hair in a French braid that exposed the long cool nape of her neck. She was looking into my eyes and telling me in her soft breathy reconstructed tones what I needed vis-à-vis the eclectic neo-traditional aesthetic of the Jubilation Community—“Really, Mr. Reilly, you can mix and match to your heart’s content, a Stickley sofa to go with your Craftsman windows set right next to a Chinese end table of lacquered rosewood
with an ormolu inlay”—when I interrupted her. I listened to the ice cubes clink in my glass a moment, then asked her if she wouldn’t prefer discussing my needs over a nice étoufée on the deck of the Cajun Kitchen overlooking lovely Lake Allagash. “Oh, I would love that, Mr. Reilly,” she said, “more than practically anything I can think of, but Jeffrey—my sweet little husband of six months?—might just voice an objection.” She crossed her legs, let one heel dangle strategically. “No, I think we’d better confine ourselves to the business at hand, don’t you?”

I wrote her a check, and within forty-eight hours I was inhabiting a color plate torn out of one of the Jubilation brochures, replete with throw rugs, armoires, sideboards, a set of kitchen chairs designed by a Swedish sadist and a pair of antique brass water pitchers—or were they spittoons?—stuffed with the Concours d’Elegance mix of dried coastal wildflowers. It hadn’t come cheap, but I wasn’t complaining. This was what I’d wanted since the breath had gone out of my marriage and I’d begun living the nomadic life of the motor court, the high-rise hotel and the inn round the corner. I was home. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt oriented and secure.

I laid in provisions, rode my Exercycle, got into a couple of books I’d always meant to read (
Crime and Punishment, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Naked and the Dead
), took a divorcée named Cecily to the Chowchy Grill for dinner and afterward to a movie at the art deco palace designed by Cesar Pelli as the centerpiece of the Mercado Street pedestrian mall, and enjoyed the relatively bugless spring weather in a rented kayak out on Lake Allagash. By the end of the second month I’d lost eight pounds, my arms felt firmer and my face was as tan as a tennis pro’s. I wished my wife could see me now, but even as I wished it, the image of her—the heavy, pouting lips and irascible lines etched into the corners of her mouth, the flaring eyes and belligerent stab of her chin—rose up to engulf me in sorrow. Raymond, that was the name of the man she was dating—Raymond, who owned his own restaurant and had a boat out on Long Island Sound.