ELIZABETH TURNED INTO her driveway, which was always a challenging endeavor since it was so minuscule: exactly the size of her car, maybe even a little smaller. Maneuvering into it was like pouring a sausage into its casing, and required her undivided attention. For this reason it wasn’t till she was unbuckling her seat belt that she saw her front door, and froze.
It was open. Her front door was open. Why the hell was her front door open? This seemed impossible, but there it was, swaying in the ocean breeze, welcoming everyone inside as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Which it wasn’t. Elizabeth never forgot to lock her door. The importance of looking after her things had been ingrained in her from an early age, and despite its doll-sized proportions, this two-bedroom, one-bathroom bungalow was easily her biggest possession. It had cost her a fortune (Venice was prime real estate these days, especially two blocks from the beach), and sometimes, when she thought about the size of her down payment and the long years of monthly mortgage bills to come, she checked in with her accountant the same way a new mother consults the family physician: to make sure nothing was amiss, to be reassured it was all going to be okay. Each time she left, she jiggled the locked doorknob exactly eight times, and this afternoon she’d done it sixteen times for good measure, knowing she’d be home late from the CityWalk.
Her heart convulsed like a bird trapped inside her chest, its tiny wings fluttering in a panic. She could have driven straight to the police station at Culver and Centinela, or dialed 911 on her cell and waited for help to come. She could have at least alerted another human being to the fact that there was a potentially dangerous situation at hand. But she did none of these things, because just then she saw something else in the shadow of her door.
It was a wheeled suitcase, the compact carry-on kind flight attendants toted briskly through airports. Once red, it was now brown, or gray, or whatever the color of filth was. Elizabeth’s fear gave way to outrage and she left her car, creeping forward, retrieving a tiny can of Mace from the bottom of her purse and brandishing it before her like a gun, right index finger poised over the nozzle.
She stepped inside on tiptoe. It was dark. She couldn’t see a thing. A layer of salty grime had coated the threshold, and her shoes squeaked while crossing it. She winced, every one of her senses on high alert. Seconds later her ear discerned a soft, cyclical rising and falling: the sound of deep, untroubled sleep. Unbelievable! she thought, flicking on the overhead lights, and letting the can fall harmlessly to her side.
He was sprawled facedown on her white sofa, his right arm spilling off the edge and pointing to the floor, the tips of his fingers brushing against the side of an overturned wine bottle, as if it were a lover. A burgundy pool leaked from the bottle’s lip into the creamy white carpet beneath it. Elizabeth swooped down, setting the bottle upright, emitting a raspy sound of surprise and annoyance that came out something like:
“GRAGH!”
The carpet was ruined.
The man stirred, flipping onto his back. He did not wake; he began, in fact, to snore. Elizabeth bent over him, shaking him by the shoulders:
“Orpheus! Wake up! Goddamnit, Orpheus! Wake UP!”
Two crusted eyelids unstuck themselves. A pair of bloodshot eyes opened to the world. He shot up in a sitting position.
They bonked heads like cartoon characters.
“Owwww! Damn it!” she howled, making more of it than it really was, rubbing her forehead ostentatiously. “What the hell?”
He blinked at her, unseeing, but after a second or two his eyes found focus. “Sorry, Lily,” he croaked at her, eyes rolling downward to something below. “I fucked up.”
She thought he meant the wine, but then she smelled it. His pants were dark around the crotch. Beneath him, a yellow circle with scalloped edges had been etched onto her sofa.
In her adult life, Elizabeth almost never spoke Spanish. Even with her parents, she insisted on speaking English the few times a year they spoke, which was an easy and effective way of maintaining the distance established between them for years now. There were the rare occasions on which people spoke it to her, such as when the waiters at Versailles (a chain of Cuban restaurants) flirted with her, or when recent immigrants (a cashier in a convenience store, an attendant at a valet station) could not speak even rudimentary English, but for the most part she abstained. Now, perhaps as a latent effort by her calmer self—who had already processed what had happened and wanted to shield him from her fury—she unleashed upon his head a torrent of expletives in her first language.
This was what she got for reaching out to people.
Six months earlier she’d noticed him on the Boardwalk, which was only a few minutes from her house. It was a lively scene—a patchwork mess of wacky street performers, aged hippies, young burnouts, yuppie joggers, Euro tourists, and a generous helping of homeless people, such as the one collecting the juiciest cigarette butts from between the cracks in the basketball courts, and stowing them in one of those black plastic bags that came with purchases in small convenience stores. Is he actually going to smoke them later? she wondered. Gross. His nylon Dodgers jacket had faded to a sickly yellow, the ruined elastic waistband sagging off his sunken frame. Salt-and-pepper dreadlocks sprouted from his head like the fronds of a palm tree or the bloom of a firework; a more modest row ringed his greasy neck, little pod-shaped excrescences that looked as if they harbored some unspeakable pestilence that would burst forth one day, fully winged, and take off into the air. His grizzled beard was thick and puffy; his nose, cheeks, and forehead were so bumpy and discolored, it looked as if his skin had melted and then hardened again. Never before had she seen so much sun damage on a black person’s skin; she didn’t even know it was possible. He must have been living out here for years, she thought. I wonder how old he is. It was hard to tell how much of the wear and tear was due to age as opposed to the elements; he could have been anywhere from forty to seventy. He reminded her of Robinson Crusoe, but worse—a castaway trapped inside a crowd, surviving off whatever scraps of human refuse he could find.
He caught her staring. She turned, but it was too late. He extracted a beaten-up coffee cup from his shopping bag and approached her.
“Hey, girl!” he shouted.
Elizabeth pitied the homeless, but as a single woman she made it a rule not to engage with them. You never knew what they were going to do; many of them were mentally ill. She lifted the book she was reading a little higher to cover her face.
“To the Lighthouse,” he read aloud.
Oh, Lord, thought Elizabeth, eyes glued to the page. What now?
“Always liked that Lily Briscoe.”
She froze, waiting for more.
“Always had a thing for her. My kinda woman.” He emitted a single, staccato burst of a chuckle from somewhere between his chest and throat—a growly, gurgly “huh” that she would come to recognize as his signature noise. “Hey, what’s that thing she keeps moving around? On the table? Com’on, you know what I mean. At dinnertime?”
A saltshaker; it was a saltshaker. Lily Briscoe was Elizabeth’s favorite too, a confirmed spinster and amateur painter who by the novel’s end achieves a measure of artistic greatness, though it will almost certainly go unrecognized and unremembered—like Lily herself. And yet she wasn’t a tragic character. She was, by her own reckoning and that of her creator, triumphant. Transcendent.
Despite her rule, Elizabeth put down the book and turned to him.
“You’ve read To the Lighthouse?”
“Whadda you think? Huh. Used to teach it,” he said, before adding as if it were a natural segue, “Spare change? I gotta get drunk.”
Elizabeth refused him the change, but she offered to buy him a coffee at Café Collage on the corner of Pacific and Windward Avenues, just off the Boardwalk. It was a crowded Sunday afternoon; there were people everywhere, and she was too curious to let him go without more of an explanation. She wasn’t averse to a little companionship, either. There were plenty of ways to occupy her time on the weekends, but every so often she felt unable to occupy her mind the way she did at work, and for this reason the weekends were occasionally a trial. It had been easier in New York, where she had friends who were always a subway ride away. In L.A. she had no one, not even the prospect of running into an acquaintance on the street, since everyone was spread so far apart. There was a reason why this anonymous homeless man had reminded her of a castaway: sometimes Los Angeles felt like a string of desert islands—millions of them, stretching to the horizon, and each holding a single exile. You had to take the initiative and affirmatively leave your island if you ever wanted to connect with another human being, or else wait for someone to come to you. And Elizabeth had grown tired of waiting.
The homeless man grumbled, but agreed, retrieving the soiled suitcase she would learn never strayed more than a few feet away from him. As they walked from the courts to the café, a few people gawked, and she allowed herself a glance in their direction, as if to say, That’s right. I’m walking and talking with a homeless man. You got a problem with that? She hadn’t felt so bold in years.
They sat on rusty metal chairs beneath a classical arcade—the kind meant for silent monks contemplating God rather than feverish teens committing videogame atrocities—built over a hundred years ago to evoke the arcades of the Piazza San Marco in the original Venice, in Italy. (When she had been forced to move back to L.A., Elizabeth had decided the only way to make her new reality tolerable was to live as close to the water as possible and become a “beach person.” To her surprise, she discovered an affinity for Venice’s peculiar atmosphere. Though the neighborhood’s interior portions had acquired a sheen of gentrification in recent years, the beachfront was as much of a modern ruins as it had been fifty years ago: the crumbly remains of a century-old amusement park populated largely by outcasts. On Fridays after In-N-Out, she parked in her tiny driveway and tried not to move her car again till Monday morning.) It was January, and even though the sun was shining it was chilly outside. Her companion cupped his hands around his coffee, dipping his grizzled chin into the warm current curling off the top.
“Hard to talk about that book,” he said, removing his fuzzy chin from the warmth and jutting it in the direction of her lap, where her copy lay. “Not like other books, where you say what happened, you said it all.”
Elizabeth nodded encouragingly. “It doesn’t really have a plot,” she said. Who was this guy?
“That’s right. Power’s in the words.” His voice grew softer. “You talk about the words rather’n juss reading ’em, you lose something.”
Elizabeth began leafing through her copy for the section at the dinner party, but before she could find it he had jumped out of his chair:
“Yo yo yo, my man!” he crowed. It was one of his homeless cohorts, who had wandered nearby. “You got anything on you, make this coffee a l’il more inneresting? Huh.”
He made the universal booze sign (thumb pointed mouthward, fingers waggling), punctuating it with a puckish bray of laughter, his wide gray tongue flopping well past his bottom lip. The friend produced a plastic Poland Spring bottle from inside his coat, an amber liquid sparkling inside it.
By this time Elizabeth was already across the street. One homeless man was enough of an adventure; two wasn’t happening, especially two who were drinking. When he saw she had left, the man merely shrugged his shoulders and poured the liquid into his coffee.
The next morning, she went to Café Collage before work and was surprised to see him sitting outside. She took his presence as a sign, and got two coffees that morning instead of one. (It occurred to her later that he might have always sat there in the mornings. It was a popular spot for vagrants, and that Monday was the first time she knew to look for him.) Elizabeth handed him the extra coffee without saying a word, and on Tuesday there he was again. She bought him another coffee, and another one the morning after that. On Thursday she added a bagel with cream cheese, and on Friday she beckoned him to follow her, which he did without hesitation, his wheeled suitcase clattering along behind him.
They went to the basketball courts. It was early, but there were runners and surfers dotting the area, and in her front pocket she had placed the tiny can of Mace that usually lived at the bottom of her purse. She knew it was a risk to lure him away from his group, but she also knew they had to be alone for him to speak plainly. And she had to hear more; she had to know who this Virginia Woolf–loving, cigarette butt–smoking homeless man was. Usually she was not so inquisitive when it came to other people. Elizabeth preferred to learn about humanity by way of books, which could be closed at will and placed upon a shelf. With real people it was only a matter of time before the questions turned the other way—before the questioner was forced to share. But the rule of reciprocity didn’t quite apply here. It was an ugly yet undeniable truth that at the root of Elizabeth’s eagerness to question this man lay not only a yearning for companionship but the snobbish notion that he wasn’t her equal, that she could ask him as many questions as she wanted without feeling an obligation to share anything about herself. If she became uncomfortable, she could press the eject button any time she wanted. For once, she failed to see the downside.
They sat on a bench situated atop the rim of a large concrete bowl inside of which a few early-rising skateboarders whizzed up, down, and around, like fish that had learned to swim in the air.
“Here you go.” She handed him another coffee and bagel.
He sniffed the wax paper suspiciously. “This cream cheese?”
She nodded brightly.
“Hate cream cheese,” he said. “Tastes like ass.” He handed it back to her.
“Oh,” she said. “I guess I should’ve asked.”
“Huh.”
They stared at each other. Elizabeth wasn’t sure how to begin.
“I know what you want,” he said.
“Excuse me?” she asked, an imaginary finger already poised over that eject button.
“You wanna hear my sob story.”
“Your what?”
“My sob story.” He smiled, displaying a set of teeth in surprisingly good shape, other than their yellow hue. They looked as if they’d been dipped in melted cheese, or wax, or gold. “Everyone out here’s got one.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said, even though she knew exactly what he meant, and knew he knew she knew.
“Com’on,” he said, “I’ve seen you out here plenny times.” (Elizabeth shifted, feeling through her jacket for the Mace.) “You must’ve overheard a few of ’em. Always bragging ’bout how bad they have it, trying to one-up each other.” He raised his voice, imbuing it with more of a lilt, a swagger: “Man oh man, you think that’s bad? Wait’ll you hear this!” When he returned to his regular volume, his accent was closer to hers than it had been before. “I don’t tell my story to just anyone. But for you?” He smiled again. “For Lily Briscoe?”
Like Scheherazade, it took him much longer than a day to tell his story. That first day, they didn’t get much further than his name.
“Orpheus?” she repeated dubiously. Was he messing with her? “Why Orpheus?”
“You know the Orpheum? Downtown?”
She nodded. It was an old vaudeville theater, beautifully restored. It even had its own organ.
“Parents met there, back in, I don’t know, long time ago. Some song ’n’ dance show.” He took a sip of coffee. “They were so ignorant, they would’ve named me Orpheum. Huh. But a doctor got ahold of ’em, said Orpheus was more proper. Lucky me, I guess.”
He didn’t ask her name, and she never told him. On the rare occasion he had to call her anything he called her Lily, and she never corrected him. She grew to love her new name.
She learned he’d grown up not too far from her—in Florence, another neighborhood inside South Central—but at a time when black families had only recently won the right to live there, or anywhere south of Slauson Avenue. This meant he must have grown up in the early fifties, she calculated, putting him in his late sixties now. Elizabeth knew all about racially restrictive covenants from her first-year property law class, but she’d never known anybody who’d actually lived in the shadow of one.
“What was it like?”
He told her about the firebombings—front lawns covered in flames, neighbors (mostly black, a few white) sprinting over with buckets of water, the fire department mysteriously unavailable. He described the “white flight” that within a few years had ceded the neighborhood to the black gangs who had no common enemy anymore, and began fighting among themselves. He explained how the urban decay set in and would not let up, an infectious rot that festered and grew. Elizabeth knew from her own childhood experience a few blocks away, in Westmont, how the story went from there.
They established a pattern: he waited for her by the basketball courts and she brought him coffee and a buttered bagel. Each day he told her a little more, and slowly, like the blooming of a pale and watery flower, his sob story unfolded.
Orpheus was too smart to get caught up in the violence tearing apart his neighborhood. School was his domain, and he ruled it like a king. His first real trial happened when he was nine years old and won his school’s spelling bee, beating out thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. He was preparing to compete in the L.A.-wide regional—the intermediate step before the national competition—when a rule that compelled each school district to contribute to a “spelling bee fund” or else face disqualification prevented him from competing. He wasn’t crushed; he was furious. It was on this occasion that his mother first instructed him to defy the expectations of all those who didn’t know him. To act on his anger was what those people expected. His duty, she told him, was to do the opposite.
He continued doing the opposite—through high school, college, and graduate school. He became an English professor specializing in the early modernists, Virginia Woolf included. Whenever anyone expressed surprise over his ignorance of Richard Wright or Ralph Ellison, Orpheus thought of his mother. (“No Toni Morrison, no Maya Angelou either. Never read a word of ’em.”) On the same principle by which he shunned black authors, he dated only black women, refusing to become one of those black men who abandoned their race after accruing the benefits of a higher education. And when his girlfriend Rhonda became pregnant he married her immediately, thereby avoiding the biggest stereotype of all: the black man who couldn’t commit, who left an unwed mother and fatherless children in his wake.
They had a son and a daughter, Scott and Sherry (“whitest names I could find”), and one summer, when Scott was thirteen and Sherry was ten, they took a family vacation to the Grand Canyon. On the way back they took the scenic route through Utah. It was late, and Scott and Sherry were asleep in the back, Rhonda out cold in the passenger seat. He had coffee and a good night’s sleep to keep him up, and he drove straight through the night, wishing he could see the beautiful purple-gray mountains on either side of him. The plan was to get back to their faculty house in Westwood by dawn. The children had music lessons the next day. Traffic, at least, would be a breeze.
A little after 3 a.m., he saw a sea of red each time his car rose over a crest. It turned out to be brake lights: a line of cars at a standstill for what looked like miles. He took his place in that line, his family sound asleep beside him. At least they would be well rested. He sat there for a solid half hour reciting poetry from memory, a habit of his whenever he was forced into idleness and unable to read. But he only knew so many poems, and eventually he got out of his car, walking forward to investigate.
A minute later the second boulder of the evening rolled down from the beautiful purple-gray mountains. The first had been the cause of the snarled traffic. It hadn’t hit anyone, merely blocked the road in both directions with rubble that took hours to clear away. Orpheus felt the crash behind him before he saw it. He twisted, the reverberation knocking him to his feet. Tiny pebbles showered his body, tearing his shirt, coating him in a film of dust. Suddenly he knew, and hobbled back to his family to be proven wrong.
The boulder had flattened half the car in front of his, which thankfully for its driver had been empty in the back. His vehicle, of course, had been crushed flat. An investigation of the accident attributed no cause to the rolling rocks. There was no construction nearby, no evidence of foul play. There were signs posted all over the road, after all, warning of this specific danger. People drove at their own risk. It was just “one of those things.” He remembered a policeman on the scene shrugging his brawny shoulders when he thought Orpheus wasn’t looking. But what’re you gonna do? the shrug intimated weakly. The officer was the first in a long line of what Orpheus came to call the “shruggers”—policemen, state officials, lawyers, judges, grief counselors, psychiatrists, friends, family, God—all shruggers. Even if they didn’t actually shrug, this was the import of all they said or left unspoken, all they did or failed to do. It was just one of those things.
He felt in his bones that the natural, the right course of events was for him to have never left his car, to have memorized just one more poem and whispered its final verse while reaching for his children, the shadow of the boulder closing in around them. He planned to kill himself. He took his time considering the best way to do it, and it was during this time that he discovered alcohol. He had been an occasional drinker before; he enjoyed a beer with friends, wine at dinner sometimes, the rare raucous binge, but he had never truly known the power of this wondrous substance till then. Vodka was his favorite, so potent and yet so smooth and tasteless once he got used to it: like magic water, which was how he came to drink it—all day, every day, from waking till sleeping. He put a handle on his bedside where others put a glass of water. He drank it whenever he felt thirsty, or anything else. It made him forget—a veritable nepenthe—and as long as he kept it up it was as though he’d been underneath that boulder after all. In an epiphany he realized that the drunken oblivion of the here and now was a surer bet than suicide. He had no faith that death would either (1) stamp him out completely, or (2) reunite him with his loved ones, and anything in between was intolerable, an actual hell, no matter what anyone else called it.
Within six months he was fired from UCLA and had lost his housing. His friends tried to help him, but he shunned them, determined to fall and to fall alone. Six months later he was living out of his red rolling suitcase in Venice, among the bums he’d taught his children to pity instead of ridicule.
Had his mother been alive, surely she would have told him that becoming a homeless drunk in the wake of his tragedy was what many people would have expected—and not even particularly imaginative people at that. There was something inevitable, though, about his headlong plummet into obscurity and squalor, as if all along he’d been destined to end up here. Perhaps his mother had known; perhaps her advice to defy expectations had been an attempt to steer him away from the very destiny she thereby assured, like the hapless character in some Greek tragedy, setting him on the path that ended here, on the basketball courts, clutching half a buttered bagel and weeping openly to a wide-eyed woman at least thirty years his junior.
Elizabeth didn’t believe him. His sob story was too sob-worthy, too awful—especially that boulder. Could boulders even be that big? But she shook her head when she was supposed to, and googled “Orpheus Utah accident boulder” the day he told her, not hoping for much. She didn’t even know his last name. But there he was: a fatter, smoother-faced, crew-cut “Orpheus Washington” staring back at her from a blurb in the digitized archives of the Los Angeles Times, detailing his tragedy twenty-two years earlier. Twenty-two years. It was an unthinkable amount of time to spend on the streets, a life sentence in a special kind of prison. It turned Elizabeth’s “rough patch” into a bed of roses, except that it didn’t, of course. But it was the beginning of a special bond between them. She would never say this to Orpheus because it would require laying herself bare (and perhaps the comparison would insult him), but she understood what it was like to be scarred—mangled even—by the past. She felt guilty she hadn’t believed him, and what began as a curiosity grew into something bigger.
“I’M SORRY, LILY, I’m sorry, Lily,” he kept muttering over and over, struggling drunkenly to sit up on the urine-stained couch. Eventually she couldn’t take it anymore.
“I trusted you, Orpheus,” she said, switching to English. “I knew you saw where I kept my key, but I purposely didn’t move it because I trusted you.” She crossed her arms, staring at him like a mother whose child has deeply disappointed her.
A few months into their routine—when the can of Mace had been returned to the bottom of her purse—Elizabeth had made a deal with him: he could either get drunk on Saturday nights or stay the night on her couch and eat takeout Chinese from Mao’s Kitchen down the block. Most Saturdays he took her up on the offer. She’d reminded him twice that morning that she was going to be away that night (she didn’t explain and he didn’t ask), that there would be no Chinese food or sleepover.
“What the hell happened?” she asked him now.
Orpheus struggled for the words. How could he explain it to her? He saw her now as if from the bottom of a well he couldn’t figure out how to climb up to reach her. He was, in fact, terrified that the bottom would fall out and he would plunge deeper into the muck. He didn’t know what to do. He was lost.
What Lily couldn’t understand was that all this time he’d been spending with her—Saturday night into Sunday morning, and sometimes even Sunday afternoon if he slept long enough—had disturbed the carefully calibrated equilibrium he’d been maintaining for the last however-many years. (L.A.’s steady weather, especially on the coast, lent itself to a timeless mode of living. It was sunny and in the 70s: was it April, August, or December? Who knew? Who cared?) The weekends were when he made most of his money begging for change, and all those bagels and potstickers combined with a meager booze fund had made it harder to maintain his habitual state of drunkenness. There had been no alcohol that night, and no friends willing to share (he’d been seeing less of them, too). He should have been angry with himself for turning his back on the reliable oblivion of the bottle, but it was easier to be angry with her. He convinced himself it was all Lily’s fault: the loneliness, the absence of alcohol. He hadn’t seen it at first, but she was just another shrugger. Fuck her. She’d done him wrong, and he’d make sure she fixed it. He’d seen her stow the spare key a dozen times underneath the potted bird-of-paradise next to her door.
“Took the spare,” he admitted now huskily.
He knew exactly where she kept her wine bottles, the only alcohol she had, a slow accumulation of holiday and incidental gifts from partners or clients after a job well done. He’d counted them: seven total, and not a single one opened. This had angered him too, as if she’d offended friends of his by failing to appreciate their charms.
“Found the wine.”
He’d drunk the first bottle in one long glug. Then on to the second, which had taken a little longer. The third he’d downed half over the sink before hauling it to the sofa, where he decided to rest his eyes a few minutes before finishing. She owed him this: a nice drink and a nap. It wasn’t asking much. All their babbling had to be worth something. He was forgetting already, about Rhonda, Scott, and Sherry. . . . He knew nothing of the world till she was standing over him.
“And drank it.”
“Yeah, thanks, I put that together myself,” she snapped. “What I mean is: why?”
Because I needed you and you weren’t there. How the fuck had this happened? How had she snuck her way inside his life? He was surprised his life was still a whole enough entity for an inside to exist. It felt more like shattered fragments connected by bits of chicken wire and frayed string, a loose assortment that barely held itself together anymore. One day it would break apart and cease to exist as a single entity, and this, he guessed, was what dying would be. But he saw now that he cared that she was angry with him; he felt remorse at having done her wrong. That he could even see the top of the well was due to the fact that she stood at its lip looking down at him. In the same moment that he needed her more than ever, she never felt farther away. He began to cry.
“You gotta gimme another chance,” he heaved between sobs. “You gotta forgive me.”
Jesus Christ, thought Elizabeth, handing him a tissue. Could this night get any more ridiculous? She had to get him out of here.
“I forgive you, Orpheus.”
He left only after she promised she’d see him the next morning like usual. When he was gone, she grabbed the used sponge from underneath her sink and tried to lift the urine stain from her cushion with hot, soapy water. It didn’t work. She put the cushion in a plastic bag and settled for dousing the couch with Febreze to neutralize the smell.
Elizabeth perched on the edge of the puffy white armchair she used for reading, which was now the only seating option in the room. She thought about her night: the two hours she’d spent with Richard, and then coming home to Orpheus passed out on her couch. Was this all really happening to her? Since when had her life become so . . . interesting? It was almost midnight, well past her regular bedtime, and even though she was exhausted she knew it would be hours before she got to sleep. She picked up her phone, scrolling through her contacts. She wanted to talk to someone, to tell at least one person in her life everything that had happened to her, but it was too late to call any of her East Coast friends, and she hardly ever called them anyway, so wrapped up were they in lives demonstrably bigger than hers, encompassing not just a career but a partner—and as the years slipped by, more often than not a child or two as well. For a moment she actually considered calling her parents, who, after getting over the shock of her calling in the first place, would tell her that taking money from a stranger was as ill advised as taking candy. But she guessed that secretly her mother, who was addicted to several telenovelas, would be tickled by the idea of her meeting weekly with an unknown man, and come to terms with the proposal much more quickly than her no-nonsense father . . . especially if they ever met Richard in person. Elizabeth actually laughed—alone, at midnight, like a crazy person—at the thought of her parents meeting Richard. Her mother would adore him. And her father would not.
She took after her father, for the most part.
THE NEXT DAY Orpheus waited for her by the basketball courts, but she didn’t show. He spent the whole day there, and by nightfall was convinced she had abandoned him forever. When he came back the next morning, it was more from habit than any real sense of hope.
But there she was.
“Good morning,” she said quietly, handing over his coffee and bagel.
“Morning,” he said.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” The sun was shining.
“Sure is,” he nodded. “Looks like June gloom’s over.”
“No marine layer,” she agreed.
Their eyes met. It felt awkward between them, like that first morning when they had still been strangers to each other.
“Lily, I’m sor—”
“It’s okay,” she said, not wanting to rehash the events of two nights earlier, especially after spending the better part of Sunday on her hands and knees scrubbing the wine stain. It had been no use; the stain had bonded to the very fibers of her carpet, and in the end she’d had to cut it out and order a new swatch. She’d also gotten her locks changed, just in case, and dropped off her cushion at her local dry cleaner, pretending she had a nephew staying with her.
Partly to smooth over the awkwardness, and partly because she was still bursting to tell someone, Elizabeth chose this moment to tell Orpheus about the proposal.
She told him everything—from Jonathan Hertzfeld’s first phone call, to her date with Richard on Saturday—and when she was done she sat back, waiting for his reaction. Telling Orpheus about the proposal was like introducing one crazy person to another, the Marquis de Sade to Joan of Arc: who knew what might happen? Would they fall in love? Tear each other to pieces? It was anybody’s guess.
He didn’t like it, not a single thing about it. The anonymous benefactor, the lawyer, the million dollars, it all sounded fishy to him. It was outrageous—preposterous!—like something out of Great Expectations. He told her as much, and she smiled:
“I thought the same thing.”
Orpheus wanted to tell her she was treating the proposal too lightly: a shiny apple offered up by a leering stranger. She needed to look carefully for the strings that were attached, and surely edged with razors. Life was always finding a way to drag you to hell. If not, then what explanation was there for his calamity? He couldn’t merely be unlucky, since that sort of misfortune—gaping, infinite—was in itself a version of cruelty. He used to be fond of telling his children that “anything was possible.” It was a means of motivating them to try harder, to do better, and this phrase haunted him now alongside their obliterated faces. It was true. Anything was possible. The world was filled with horrors.
“Tell me more about the guy,” he said.
She mentioned how Richard had thought the proposal was a reality series, and joked that sometimes she wondered if he was in on it.
“He probably is!” Orpheus latched on to this theory eagerly, but Elizabeth shook her head, smiling again. He shook his own head right back at her, frustrated: “It’s too good to be true,” he insisted. But he could tell he wasn’t getting through to her.
Hmph, thought Elizabeth. She wouldn’t mention—not yet, anyway—her idea of giving him at least a portion of the money. She knew he needed help—real help—to get better. She’d love to pay for therapy and rehab, maybe a halfway house of some sort to get him off the streets and off the bottle once and for all. She knew he’d resist, not because he was prideful about charity (he accepted pennies from strangers), but because he wouldn’t want the weight of her expectations placed on his shoulders. It really was like Great Expectations, except she would be Miss Havisham, which, sadly, was a better fit for her than Pip. She smiled at the thought, watching the sun climb higher in the sky, the light growing stronger with the passing of each second.
“Want to go sit on the swings?” she asked.
They did this sometimes, in a small playground abutting the sand at the heart of the Boardwalk.
“Sure,” he said.
Elizabeth had never grown out of the simple joy of sitting on a flexible strap of plastic and soaring in the air. She put her coffee on the ground and lowered herself onto the swing in her fancy pantsuit, wrapping her hands around the metal chains on either side.
“Careful!” yelled Orpheus, watching helplessly as her arcs grew larger and she flew farther and farther away. She looked carefree, like a child. He didn’t like it. Orpheus preferred her serious; he liked her buttoned-up, determined air, which was the opposite of everything else he encountered on the Boardwalk. Looking at her now was like looking at her from the bottom of the well again, and he realized it was neither her fault nor his; the culprit was this crazy proposal. Without it she never would have gone out on Saturday. He wouldn’t have had to break into her house. She wouldn’t have missed their breakfast yesterday. Her head wouldn’t be filled with some other guy. She was swinging so wildly now she was almost horizontal at the top of each arc. No, he didn’t like it. And in this moment he became determined to stop it, however he could. Whatever the cost.
“Huh.”
JONATHAN HERTZFELD HUNG up the phone and swiveled to his window. He gripped his tie pin, stroking it rapidly. Earlier that morning Miss Santiago had called him on behalf of herself and Mr. Baumbach, requesting reimbursement for their outings as well as a stipend to pay for certain materials—books and DVDs, she said—that they planned to discuss each week, as if they were in some sort of multimedia club. They had obviously agreed to the scheme in the only spirit rationally possible—a mercenary one—but his client hadn’t seemed to mind, and had instructed him to pay whatever bills the duo sent him. He would do as he was told, of course, and be there to suffer the consequences. Such is the lot of the lawyer, he thought, grabbing his suit jacket with a sigh.
He went for a walk to clear his head. There was a black-and-white façade among the storefronts of the Century City Mall that had always intrigued him from the window of his office—a zebra grazing inside the colorful jungle of shops on either side of it. On closer inspection it turned out to be a cosmetics shop called Sephora: a women’s store. He was disappointed. (Technically, Sephora offered an entire wall of men’s cologne, but Jonathan barely realized cologne existed.) While he hesitated on the threshold, a saleswoman swooped down on him and five minutes later she was directing him to sniff a tester strip so as not to get any perfume on him. “For the wife?” she inquired, picking up on his wedding band and surmising he could only be there for her. He nodded, lifting his nose to the paper strip and smelling roses, plus something else. Was it cantaloupe? He wanted to get out of the store; his curiosity had been satisfied and he would never come back. He bought the smallest bottle possible and found he had been fleeced a mere forty-five dollars—not bad. He thought about giving the perfume to Rivka that night. She would think it was stupid. When he returned to his office he felt somewhat refreshed, though, as the experience had forced him to focus on her for a few minutes.
When he went home that night, he presented the smart little bag to Rivka after dinner, much to her consternation. They had decided after their first anniversary, in a bygone era when stockings and hats were still in fashion for ladies and men, that they would never get each other presents. It was silly to waste money on such tokens.
Rivka questioned him sharply: “What gives?”
He told her the story of his morning.
Without commenting she dipped her hand into the bag, through layers of tissue paper. “So fussy! It’s why it’s so expensive, you know—what a waste,” and came up with the bottle of perfume. She sprayed it on her veiny wrist and sniffed.
A great heaving ensued. He had to pound her on the back. “Oh! Jonathan!” she gasped. “So awful! What were you thinking?” The bottle was thrust back into the bag and they moved on to the dishes. But later that night, he watched her take it out of the bag and put it in her special drawer, the one where she kept his old letters and photograph albums of their three children. She locked all this away, he knew, because she did not like to look on the past more than every once in a while.
“Well, well, well,” he teased her, as she slipped beneath the covers. He knew he didn’t have to specify. He knew she knew exactly what he meant.
“Shut it,” she said, laying her head on his arm. It was the only way she could get to sleep. Sometimes he had to lie there for up to an hour, his arm the only part of him capable of joining her as she drifted off. He dreaded the pinpricks to come, but he wouldn’t move till he saw she was sleeping. He could always tell by her breathing.
“Wha’ wassit you said?” she asked him, ten or so minutes later.
Her voice had acquired the adorable little slur it always had when she was half-asleep. “When?” he asked her softly.
“When you came ba’towork.” She paused to let out a little yawn. “After buying that . . . ssstupid perfume. You said you were . . . Wha’ wassit again?”
He didn’t respond because he honestly didn’t know. What had he said? She was silent for a long time. Had she fallen asleep? But no: if anything, her breathing was more rapid than before.
She lifted her head from his arm and looked up at him, wide awake. “Refreshed, you dolt. You said you were refreshed. Because you thought of me.”
She lay back on his arm. A few more minutes passed.
“Thank you,” she said finally.
“But I thought you hated it.”
“I did.”
“So thank you for what?”
“You know.”
And he did.