The Tortilla Curtain, page 8
It was apparently too much for Kyra. The relic disappeared into the depths of the freezer amid the peas and niblet corn and potato puffs, and the door slammed shut, taking all the light with it.
You didn't move property with a long face and you didn't put deals together if you could barely drag yourself out of bed in the morning-especially in this market. Nobody had to tell Kyra. She was the consummate closer--psychic, cheerleader, seductress and psychoanalyst all rolled in one--and she never let her enthusiasm flag no matter how small the transaction or how many times she'd been through the same tired motions. Somehow, though, she just couldn't seem to muster the energy. Not today. Not after what had happened to Sacheverell. It was only eleven in the morning and she felt as worn and depleted as she'd ever been in her life. All she could think about was that grisly paw in the freezer, and she wished now that she'd let Delaney go ahead with his deception. He would have buried the evidence in the morning and she'd never have been the wiser--but no, she had to see for herself, and that little foreleg with its perfectly aligned little toenails was a shock that kept her up half the night.
When she did finally manage to drift off, her dreams were haunted by wolfish shapes and images of the hunt, by bared fangs and flashing limbs and the circle of canny snouts raised to the sky in primordial triumph. She awoke to the whimpering of Osbert, and the first emotion that seized her was anger. Anger at her loss, at the vicissitudes of nature, at the Department of Fish and Game or Animal Control or whatever they were called, at the grinning stupid potbellied clown who'd put up the fence for them--why stop at six feet? Why not eight? Ten? When the anger had passed, she lay there in the washed-out light of dawn and stroked the soft familiar fluff behind the dog's ears and let the hurt overwhelm her, and it was cleansing, cathartic, a moment of release that would strengthen and sustain her. Or so she thought.
At eleven-fifteen she pulled up in front of the house she was showing--the Matzoob place, big and airy, with a marble entrance hall, six bedrooms, pool, maid's room and guesthouse, worth one-point-one two years ago and listed at eight now and lucky to move for six and a half--and the first thing she noticed was the puddle of water on the front porch. Puddle? It was a pond, a lake, and the depth of it showed all too plainly how uneven the tiles were. She silently cursed the gardener. There had to be a broken sprinkler head somewhere in the shrubbery--yes, there it was--and when the automatic timer switched on, it must have been like Niagara out here. Well, she'd have to dig around in the garage and see if she could find a broom somewhere--she couldn't very well have the buyers wading through a pond to get in the house, not to mention noticing that the tiles were coming up and the porch listing into the shrubbery. And then she'd call the gardener. What was his name--she had it in her book somewhere, not the service she usually used, some independent the Matzoobs had been big on before they moved to San Bernardino--Gutiérrez? González? Something like that.
Kyra had no patience with incompetence, and here it was, staring her in the face. How the gardener could come back week after week and not notice something as obvious as an inch and a half of water on the front porch was beyond her, and the pure immediate unalloyed aggravation of it allowed her to forget Sacheverell for the moment and focus on the matter at hand, on business, on the moving of property. Nothing escaped her. Not a crack in the plaster, a spot of mold on the wall behind the potted palm or an odor that wasn't exactly what it was supposed to be.
Odors were the key. You could tell three-quarters of everything about a house by the way it smelled--condition, upkeep, what kind of people owned it, whether the roof leaked or the basement flooded. What you didn't want was that dead tomblike smell of a shut-up house, as if it were a funeral parlor, or anything that smelled of dry rot or chemicals or even paint. Cooking odors were anathema. Ditto the stink of animals. She'd listed one house--one of her few failures--in which an old lady had died surrounded by thirty-two cats that had pissed, crapped and sprayed on every surface available, including the ceilings. The only hope for that place was to burn it down.
Now, stepping into the Matzoobs', the first thing Kyra did was close the door behind her and take a good long lingering sniff. Then she exhaled and tried it again, alert to every nuance, her nose as keen as any connoisseur's. Not bad. Not bad at all. There was maybe the faintest whiff of cooking oil from some long-forgotten meal, a trace of dog or cat, mothballs maybe, but she couldn't be sure. It helped that the place was empty--when it first went on the market eight months ago the Matzoobs were still here, the halls, closets and bathrooms steeping in their own peculiar odor. And to call the odor “peculiar” wasn't being judgmental, not at all--it was merely descriptive. Every family, every house, had its own aroma, as unique and individual as a thumbprint.
The Matzoobs' was a rich ferment of smell, ranging from the perfume of the fresh-cut flowers Sheray Matzoob favored to the pungent stab of garlic and coriander Joe Matzoob had learned to use in his gourmet cooking classes and the festering sweat socks of Matzoob Jr., the basketball star. It was a homey smell, but too complicated to do anybody any good. And the furniture was a nightmare. Big cumbersome pieces finished in an almost ebony stain that seemed to drink up what little light penetrated the thick blanket-like curtains Sheray Matzoob had inherited from her mother. And the portraits--they were something else altogether. Big, crude, cheesy things that made the Matzoobs look like ghouls, with gold-tinted frames and paint so thick it might have been applied with a butter knife.
But now the place was empty, and that suited Kyra just fine. Once in a while you'd get a place that was so exquisitely furnished you'd ask the sellers to leave their things in place until the house was in escrow, but that was rare. Most people had no taste. No dream of it. Not a clue. And yet they all thought they had it--were smug about it even--and they'd walk right out the door because of an unfortunate lamp or a deep plush carpet in a shade they couldn't fathom. All things considered, Kyra preferred it this way--a neutral environment, stripped to the essentials: walls, floors, ceilings and appliances. A vacant house became hers in a way--it had been abandoned, deserted, left in her hands and hers alone, and sometimes the sellers were off in another state or country even--and she couldn't help feeling proprietorial about it. Sometimes, making the rounds of her houses--she had forty-six current listings, more than half of them unoccupied--she felt like the queen of some fanciful country, a land of high archways, open rooms and swimming pools that would have made an inland sea if stretched end-to-end across her domain.
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: PILGRIM AT TOPANGA CREEK _Who am I, manzanita stick in hand and nylon pack clinging to my shoulders like a furled set of wings, out abroad in the wide world? Who am I, striding into the buttery glaze of evening sun amidst stands of bright blooming mustard that reach to my elbows and beyond? I'm a pilgrim, that's all, a seer, a worshiper at the shrine. No different from you, really: housebound half the day, a slave to the computer, a man who needs his daily fix of electricity as badly as any junkie needs his numinous drug. But different too, because I have these mountains to roam and these legs to carry me. Tonight__--_this evening--I am off on an adventure, a jaunt, a peregrination beneath the thin skin of the visible to breathe in the world around me as intensely as Wordsworth's leech-gatherer and his kin: I am climbing into the fastness of the Santa Monica Mountains, within sight and sound of the second-biggest city in the country (within the city limits, for that matter), to spend a solitary night.__
