The Unfortunates (36 page)
All she can do is get up and go to work and photocopy contracts. She’ll ignore what she can’t fix, which is everything else, until it falls down over her head. At least then she might be able to climb out and be free. For now, she’s bound to try to make things better. She’s not the kind of person who leaves her husband because the tides have turned. She won’t prove CeCe right. Maybe George will recover and they’ll start again. Maybe she can hold off the creditors. Maybe she’ll stay in the house with the glass wall, grow old behind the wall, stay a Somner.
Still, it takes all her energy to be warm and ordinary with George as he saunters through the house, his eyes crossing and training on some distant phantom. To overlook how their life has changed. Prescription-pill bottles with the labels ripped off are in the sock drawer. George’s skin hums beneath the surface when she can’t avoid his petulant, eager embrace. Nights, he swishes and stalks from room to room in the Yale tracksuit he unearthed who knows where, littering handfuls of index cards and scribbled pages across their house like confetti. He says he’s writing something new. Lately, he’s begun listening to his opera, again and again. Often, he forgets to take off the puffy headphones and paces back and forth with the curl of the unplugged cord slapping along as he moves, a pen stuck in jaunty menace behind his ear. He’s listening, he’d explained with guarded hostility, to the various earlier drafts of Vijay’s scoring to root out the point they’d turned on him. What leaks out of the headphones, what at first had only puzzled her, now makes her shudder. She’s given up trying to find out why CeCe will not speak to George or to her. She can guess. She’s no longer curious to discover if, in her own heart, George’s opera is as bad as they say. She no longer wonders about anything—the price she must pay for temporary peace of mind. She collates and that is all. She must order more flyers, without the laminate.
Until, one day, she supposes she’s pregnant.
She has to wait. Two weeks. She is. At the doctor’s office, she feels thrill and despair in equal measure. Too much of each, colliding out to nothing. How the door on her life might close if she has George’s child—she still has time.
At lunch one day, she gets a decaf at the Starbucks on her way back to the office. A beautiful spring afternoon—the concrete walkway to the green umbrellas is lined with bobbing, sherbet tulips, just bloomed. She stands by her car in the parking lot, the one with the bank and the dry cleaner’s and the deli. She balances her coffee on the hood of the car and works a scratch-off with a quarter. As she chucks the spent ticket into her bag, she hears a deep, urgent voice calling her name. For a moment she’s afraid it’s Bob, come all this way to press his face to hers, to maul her like a disoriented bear right in the lot. But it isn’t Bob, it’s Bill. Dear Bill! What a relief.
“Bill,” she cries, “hello!”
His long frame seems to take the small parking lot in three strides. He’s got a coffee in his hand. “Iris. I saw you inside. How are you?”
“I’m all right. It’s good to see you. How’s everything? How’s Victor? I miss Victor.”
“You can’t guess? We’re not so good.”
“Oh, no, what’s happened?”
“We’ll be okay somehow, but right now it’s tough.” He speaks in the same soft, low calm she remembers from—could it be already? Last summer. The few times after the closing she’d suggested to Victor that Bill join them for a hike or a meal, Victor rolled his eyes and said, “Work, work, working.”
“But what’s wrong?”
“No idea?” he says. “No?”
She can think of nothing. “I’m sorry, I must be missing—”
“Been to Kingsgate lately?”
“I haven’t. I’m mostly in the office.”
“Any idea what you sold us?”
“What do you mean? Of course I do. Is there something wrong with the house? Victor said you painted. That you love it.”
“It’s not that we don’t like the house, Iris. Liking the house is no longer the point. Did you look at the terms of the mortgage you urged us to get?”
“I did, absolutely.”
“Half the apartments in the towers are in pre-foreclosure. Do you know anything about that?”
She doesn’t remember hearing anything at the office. They don’t talk about Kingsgate anymore. That’s the cycle, she presumed. They made their sales and moved on. And she’s been preoccupied.
“Where’s the developer? Have you heard from them lately?”
“No,” she says. “That was before I came on. I didn’t really deal with them.”
“They’re not to be found. They’re back under whatever rock they crawled out from, is where they are.”
“But your house isn’t like the apartments.”
“Yes, our house is different. Our house is beautiful. But now our house is worthless because everything around it is worthless.”
“I don’t understand. It was a great deal.”
“It was an unethical deal. Taking advantage of us like that—when you don’t even have any need. What was that commission for you? Shoe money? Victor calls you a friend. You know how many people he considers friends? Not so many. It’s our fault for trusting you. I’m not throwing away my own responsibility here. I didn’t listen to my gut. Victor wanted it so badly.”
“Bill, the towers are nice renovations! The office, they’re professionals. I don’t think they’d set up a bad deal. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“It was an okay loan, if it hadn’t been on a misrepresented property. You’re not the mortgage company, I know that. But you were the liaison. How could you not know?
Stated
income. What a fool I was.
I
should’ve known. The scandal of those loans. All over the news for years, but I assume we’re different. I feel like a clich
é
and Kingsgate’s a dump. You had no idea? You’re on the sign, for Christ’s sake.”
“I didn’t, I don’t.” Coffee flys out of her cup. “This is the first I’m hearing—I’d just started. I was new!”
A momentary confusion crosses his face. “You know, I almost believe you.”
“The whole market’s down. Everywhere, everything’s down.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t help. But the market was already down. And the market’s down because of deals people like you make for people like us. We were doing okay.” He stops, and when he resumes, his voice is calm again. Iris feels as if he is looking down at her from a great height. “We were doing okay even when the payments jumped. Tricky fine print, there. Our fault, yes, our fault. Buyer beware. We were just able to handle it. We were scared, but what we didn’t see coming! You know what doesn’t do well in a recession?”
“I don’t know. A lot of things?”
“Yes, a lot of things. One being nonessential luxury retail. Like, say, handmade artisan jewelry. I’m down sixty percent. I love what I do. I’ll keep doing it. It’ll come back, maybe.”
“Your beautiful jewelry!”
“At least we had Victor’s income. And then we didn’t.”
“What’s happened? Has something happened to Victor?”
“
Has something happened to Victor
. Are you serious? He lost his job. Remember? You fired him.”
“His other clients?”
“This and that. But, come on. He was at your house all week.
You
were the client, Iris.”
“Bill, I’m so sorry! I thought it was a good deal. Maybe it still is, if you wait, ride it out? The senior brokers and I went through it at the office, I mean, it’s a reputable lender! Nellie said the value of Kingsgate—”
“Someone in your position will not get this, Iris, but you can’t wait if you can’t pay. They don’t let you wait. You understand?”
“Yes.” She looks miserably at the tulips. “Will you sell?”
“That’s the point. It’s unsellable. You said, values will rise. Mortgages at all-time lows. When everything started to slide, I made a promise to myself I would never blame Victor. I would not be mad at Victor. But I can be mad at myself. And I can be mad at you, Iris. Every time I drive past those ugly towers with their little iron terraces good for nothing but suicide and bike storage, and every time I walk through that bullshit courtyard with the one remaining pansy letting us all know we’re in the shitter, I’m mad at you and I’m mad at me. And when the rates go up again—I mean, that rate isn’t fixed, of course it’s not—and the boiler breaks and the mice nest in the oven, that is, if we can hang in there, if we’re lucky, if we are able to stay with our tanked credit and our remodeled bathroom, it’ll be on you, Iris. Iris, Victor’s dear friend. Shame.”
“I didn’t know! I swear. Bill!” Her free hand covers her mouth.
He shakes his head. “I believe you. I can’t believe it, that I believe you. Victor’s right, I guess. You’re like our beautiful little house with its pretty rainbow window that you can’t see through. You really didn’t notice what you chose to surround yourself with? What I can’t put together is, you’re not naive. That’s not it. And you’re not dumb. I guess it doesn’t matter how we got here. Bad or blind, it’s ended up the same, hasn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t, I, what can I do?” She fumbles in her pocket and presses the button on her keychain. The car bleeps and unlocks. She steps toward it.
He touches her arm gently. “I wanted you to know. I saw you in there getting your coffee, and the thing I want you to know I still haven’t said. I’m sorry I yelled. I don’t do that. But what I want you to know is that we were at the beginning of our home study. Now they don’t want us.”
“Your home study?”
He shakes his head. “When you get close to the top of the list, they send a social worker to evaluate the fitness of your home. For adoption. Your financial stability and the safety of your environs. These are important factors. We were great candidates. Now, not so great. Now we’re stranded on every wait list at every agency we registered with. It was never Victor’s dream to have a child, but it was mine. You hardly know me, and look how much you’ve changed my life. I have no one to blame but myself. But I wanted you to know.” He turns and strides back past the green awning, into the Starbucks.
In the car, driving the ten minutes to the office, she’s glad her pregnancy is so early he hadn’t noticed. She has and does not have everything he wants. It was a good deal, she tells herself, without any conviction, trying to argue her way out of the thrumming dread that she’s destroyed a good family for a bad one.
They all told her what a good deal it was, Nellie and the mortgage broker and the inspector. Not the best deal in the world, but good for Victor, for what Victor had. Now she’s in the office, has Paula in front of her, and she’s asking Paula,
Is Nellie in? Paula, what happened with Kingsgate?
And Paula says,
I don’t know, it was a good sales cycle for us, all around.
And later, Nellie, behind her cluttered desk: “Iris, we have no obligation to a client’s experience after sale. That’s not our function. Every home in the area has lost value this year. Mine, yours, theirs. You can’t run into one angry client and absorb their anxiety and allow it to color your feeling about what we do. If that’s how you react, maybe this isn’t the game for you. You’re not responsible for the future. We don’t broker dishonest deals. We do broker deals in an up market and then the market goes down. Thirty years, I’ve seen it happen more than once. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not our responsibility. How could it be? Everything you did was standard and transparent and legal, period. You helped your client become a homeowner under the open eye of the law. Don’t let some hysterical person who’s mismanaged his finances get into your head.”
On the way home that evening, Iris drives out of her way to Kingsgate and almost turns in, but does not. Instead she takes the narrower, siphon route running parallel behind it, where she’s not driven before. On the one side is the pretty approach from the highway, but on the other, over the ridge of the bent, low metal guardrail, she sees a sprawling alien miniature city, a gridded maze of flaring pipes and steaming metal drums the size of houses. A waste-management facility, the hill sloping toward it littered with trash. She should’ve known it was there. Maybe Nellie Turner and the rest all knew it was there and sent her to sell because she was new to Stockport, and a fucking idiot besides. Maybe not. She’d never bothered to drive all the way around. She considers quitting, but she can’t be at home with George. She must have somewhere to go during the day. They need the income.
She pulls into the driveway, sees the light in George’s office is on. As she’s assembling her face into a veneer of carefree greeting, she remembers Bob leaning across his desk, the vivid, violent painting behind him, and the serious, almost angry way he said,
I saw you first
.
Esme sits beside her in the backseat. Javier is driving. Esme is reading from a list pressed against her knee, written in pencil and ripped from a notebook, the corners of the page fluttering in the warm wind from the open windows. She’s reviewing the staff’s preparations at Booth Hill.
CeCe looks out the window, at the white line racing the concrete, the trees stretching by.
Let me not forget this day.
Where is this from, a hymn? Something she had to sing in school.
Let me not
—admonitory and sentimental at once—as good a definition of piety as any. No, thank you. She’ll take forgetting. That morning, she made her thanks to the doctors and nurses and physical therapists, to young Orlow and the receptionists. Said goodbye to Yasser and to the lake. As they drove away, she turned her neck and watched the concrete portico and automatic doors at the main entrance recede. The clot of facility buildings shrank and lost all detail with the distance. The black road spooled out. The car turned. Oak Park ceased to be.
Esme, being wise and long-tested, has broken the house report into regular spring chores and chores particular to a homecoming after so long away. She’s had the windows washed, the floors waxed, the silver and crystal polished, the mattresses turned, the drapery and rugs cleaned, the table linens counted and pressed, the lightbulbs and water filters changed, the alarms and intercoms tested, the lawn seeded and trimmed, the trees pruned, the outdoor furniture retrieved from storage, the path between CeCe’s and George’s houses cleared, and the gift closet restocked with all manner of hostess and holiday gifts, professionally wrapped and labeled as to the contents. Mr. Shoebridge, the expert long in charge of annually assessing the art for any necessary restoration or cleaning, is booked for next week.
