Chapter 7
“Real wood floors. Original to the house. The roof is slate, if you can believe it.” The real estate agent messed with the lock box some more then yanked the key free.
“How about the pipes?” Iván asked. Pipes were his obsession. We’d looked at a bunch of houses so far and he’d asked about the pipes specifically each time. I elbowed him in the ribs and rolled my eyes.
The agent looked at the papers in her hand. “Updated about three years ago. Of course, you’ll find out more if you chose to do an inspection.”
Deciding that it really was the best option, I had moved into Iván’s apartment the weekend after Thanksgiving. It had been the day after a guy was shot on the street in front of Mikey’s apartment. Iván had read about it in the news and absolutely flipped out, and I hadn’t been too calm myself, either.
He made several huge guys from the swim team help us and it took about three seconds to clear out Mikey’s apartment of anything worth keeping, like my flea market lamp that I loved, and we headed into San Francisco. I put Mikey’s things in the storage unit in the basement of Iván’s building. Well, he put them there for me.
It was definitely weird, living together. Being roommates, I meant. Our schedules generally meshed, except that I knew he was staying late around campus in order to drive me home from Benji’s at night. He said it was a good thing, because he was studying for finals, and it kept him from going out with the friends I didn’t like. That made me sound like a controlling shrew, until he admitted that he had realized that he didn’t really like them much, either.
We were really apart most of the day, so even though we lived together—I meant, we were roommates—we didn’t see each other a whole lot more. We did still have a class together. And Iván had a habit of popping up sometimes, like waiting for me after class to say hello or to give me a ride to Benji’s. Lately I had started to do the same for him. I had brought him a disgusting giant espresso that morning, and when he walked out of the lecture hall and saw me leaning against the wall with the cup, he had been ridiculously happy. It made me happy, too.
Now we looked around the entryway of this latest listing, as the real estate agent called the homes we toured. The house was really big my standards, and by Iván’s, it wasn’t tiny. “Five bedrooms and an office upstairs. The pool you wanted, and a pool house out back.” The agent skimmed down the listing. “In-law unit above the garage. Remodeled kitchen when they did the pipes that you asked about. Family room off the kitchen, butler’s pantry, library. This one is going to go fast.”
We wandered through the house, not saying much. I felt excitement growing in my stomach. If I could, I would have bought it. I loved it. I just loved it. You could have a family here. You could put down roots here. It just felt like a home.
At one point Iván had taken my hand, and I squeezed it and smiled at him.
“Te gusta. You like this one,” he stated.
“What do you think?” I asked cautiously. “You’ll be the one buying it. For a billion dollars.”
“That’s your accounting background talking.” He smiled at me. “I love it. I think it’s perfect.”
The real estate agent got excited too. “Do you want to put in an offer?”
Iván nodded. “Let’s go back to your office and figure it out. Maura, I’ll drop you at Benji’s on the way.”
We weren’t too far from where they lived. I was bouncing a little as Iván drove me over.
“Are you that happy about the house?” he asked.
“Yes! It’s so silly, because it isn’t mine, but I think it’s perfect too. It has everything on your list.”
“And everything on yours.” He had forced me to make my own dream house list when we sat down to figure out his must-haves.
“Maybe someday I’ll find a place like that for me, too. Right now, I’ll just enjoy yours.” I smiled at him but he kept his eyes on the road.
“If we can get the deal done fast, maybe you’ll be living there. There’s room for my parents to visit and stay for a while if they want. I’d like for you to meet them.”
“Really? Remember that I don’t do that well with parents.”
“You will with my parents, because they’re not…” He lapsed into a long string of cursing in Spanish. I shouldn’t have brought that up. Anything to do with Robin pissed him off to no end.
He pulled up to the curb in front of Benji’s and stopped. “I’m going to be a while with the agent,” Iván told me, “so I’ll pick you up here.”
“Ok, thanks. I like it when you pick me up,” I admitted.
“Yeah?”
“I mean, I know if you say it, you’ll be there.” Maybe a little late, but always there. “It’s nice.” I was feeling so over-the-top happy. Probably it was the house that had done it. “Hey, I was thinking, would you give Benji swim lessons? I feel like after your unparalleled success with me, you might be ready to take on another client. Seriously, I think it would be great for him to learn. Good for his asthma and his confidence.”
“I’d be happy to. We can bring him to the pool any afternoon you want.”
“Thanks, Iván.”
“You’re an unparalleled success, huh?”
“I might even be ready to go on tour,” I bragged.
“Yes, the swimming tour is definitely something for us to consider for your future.” We both started laughing.
The school bus turned the corner of the street and pulled to a stop. Kids started to slowly descend the steps. “There he is, the little guy,” I said as Benji stepped down from the bus. As we watched, hands from behind him connected hard with the middle of his back and he went sprawling onto the sidewalk, backpack flying over his head.
I was out of the car and running toward him before I knew I was doing it. Iván passed me.
“Benji!” I picked him up off the ground and hugged him. The kid who had pushed him took one look at Iván and ran for the hills.
Iván turned to the bus driver. “Did you see that?” he demanded. “What are you going to do about it?”
We held up the bus as Iván watched the driver call in the incident to the school, and both the driver and the receptionist on the other end of the line promised that there would be consequences. Benji was a mess, knees and palms bleeding, crying and trying to get away from me to run home. Finally, I just picked him up and Iván got his bag and we went into the kitchen to Joana. We put him on the counter and cleaned up his knees and hands and got him ice and a lollypop that Joana produced from her purse.
“I’ll see you later,” Iván told me quietly, emerging from the corner where he had been watching, and squeezing my shoulder. He smoothed out the worried creases on my forehead, then ran his thumb over my lip where I had been biting it. “He’ll be ok.” He closed the back door quietly behind himself.
“Was that the real Iván Marrero?” Benji asked, his voice still trembling.
“It was. I’m sorry I didn’t introduce you. But you know what I was thinking? Now that you and I are getting so good at cooking with Joana—” she snorted and made Benji smile— “maybe you’d want to take swim lessons. With Iván.”
Benji’s eyes got big. “Maura, there’s a biography of him in our school library. It’s one of the little short books for kids who aren’t very smart, but still.”
I refrained from telling him not to make remarks like that about the other kids. “What do you think? Would you want to?”
“I’m a bad swimmer,” he said, looking at his knees as Joana applied the final bandage. “In Costa Rica I couldn’t go with the snorkeling boat because I couldn’t swim well enough. I had to stay with the babysitter.”
From all that he had previously told me, it sounded like most of his Costa Rican vacation over Thanksgiving had been spent with one babysitter or another. “I can guarantee you’re a better swimmer than I am. I can’t do arms and legs at the same time.”
“Really?” He looked shocked. “Even I can do that.”
“Told you. Hey, buddy. Was that the same kid who pushed down you before when you got off the bus?”
Benji’s eyes welled up. “Drew. He’s a jerk. He’s mean to everyone, but especially me.”
I hugged him. “It’s ok. We’re going to figure this out.”
Part of figuring it out meant telling Mr. and Mrs. Dorset, and I had absolutely no desire to have another interlude with him in the study or a tête-à-tête with her, sisterhood notwithstanding. Instead, I wrote a long note, one to Mr. Dorset, and one to Mrs. Dorset (I forced myself to address it to “Undine”) while Benji played Blazer. I included the numbers and extensions of the principal at Benji’s school and his teacher, just in case they felt like getting in touch with them. I didn’t think that would happen, but I definitely would be on the phone with the school in the morning myself. They were going to talk to me if I had to stage a sit-in at the main office. That probably wouldn’t look good in front of the tuition-paying parents.
I glanced up from my letters to his screen where he was making a pile of what looked like ears of corn. “Did I tell you that I met the guy who invented this game?”
Benji turned to me, his mouth a perfect O. “You met the creator of Blazer? Which one, Siarheij Vajciuskievic or Chalermchai Chevapravatdumrong?”
“Um, I think the second one. Maybe the first. It was hard to hear his name. Iván knows him.”
Clearly, this was better than the swim lesson idea. “Could I meet him?”
I ruffled his hair. “Why don’t we ask Iván, buddy? I’m sure he’ll try to make it happen.” Iván was like that.
He was in the driveway waiting when I came out, calling goodbye to Joana. “So? What happened with the house?” I asked immediately.
“What happened with Benji?” he countered.
I sighed. “He’s ok. I’m going to call the school tomorrow and make sure they’re doing something about this. The problem is, the teachers can’t be everywhere at once, watching over Benji all the time. A while ago Mikey suggested that I teach him how to hit.”
“I don’t think he should get into fights, but it might make him feel better to know that he can defend himself.”
“Maybe I will, then.” When Iván looked at me questioningly, I shrugged. “I went to some rough schools. I used to get bullied a lot until I got to high school and started to stand up for myself. I can fight, but mostly pretty dirty. Think eye gouging and hair pulling. But I know how to throw a punch.”
“I learn more about you every day.”
We got into the car and he backed it up. As we came to the corner of the street, another car passed us. “Ugh, that’s Mr. Dorset.” He was visible under the streetlight, hunched over the wheel like a vulture.
Iván stared hard at the car. “Joana said something to me at Thanksgiving about him, about keeping him away from you. Does he bother you?”
“Mr. Dorset? No. I just keep my distance.”
“So he is making moves on you.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” I told Iván. “I hope you know that.”
“Does Mr. Dorset?” He reached over and put his finger on my lip and I stopped biting it.
“I told him no. He gets it.”
Iván nodded and drove for another block. “I put in an offer on the house.”
“Oh my God!” I was literally clapping.
“That doesn’t mean we’ll get it,” he cautioned. “The real estate agent thinks this will be a multiple offer situation, as she calls it. But there’s a good chance.”
“Iván, that’s so exciting. I really hope it works out.”
“Me too.”
We drove toward the bridge. I was thinking of putting furniture in the rooms, what colors I would paint the walls. But it was Iván’s house, and he would make those decisions.
“Dylan and Julia will be here tomorrow,” he broke the silence. “I told them we’d come see them for breakfast.”
“I’m invited too?”
“Of course. I want you to meet them. They live in northern Michigan now, and they don’t leave too much. Dylan is an orn—I can’t ever remember how to say the word. In Spanish he’s an ornitólogo. A guy who studies birds.”
“It’s almost the same word in English. Ornithologist.”
He nodded. “From the pool, to birds.” He laughed. “De piscina a pájaros.”
I repeated the word. “Pájaros. Would you want to do something like that? Totally different?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m finding that I enjoy coaching. I’ll complete my degree, and then I’ll stay on. If they’ll have me.”
“I’m betting they will. If I’m any example, you’re an excellent coach.”
His hand came back to my knee. “Ah yes, the swim tour.”
“I forgot to tell you that I signed up for it after dinner,” I told him, and we both laughed together.
The next morning, bright and early, I called Benji’s school. At first, the Head of Schools didn’t want to talk to me, again, but when I started using the words “abuse” and “news headlines about a private school” she said that they were fully aware of the problem.
“Benjamin is a very bright, very studious little boy. He does have problems in how he interacts with the other children.”
“Are you blaming him for what happened yesterday?” I asked, incredulous and enraged.
“Not at all, and the boy who pushed him will face serious consequences. I mention it because no matter where Benjamin attends school, my suggestion is that he receives some guidance about his relationships with others. Perhaps a therapist would be better suited to helping him. Believe me when I say that I want the best for your son. I mean, Benjamin.”
I had caught onto a particular phrase. “What do you mean, ‘wherever Benjamin attends school?’ He attends your school. And I know that one of the things you tout on your website and on your tours is the social and emotional wellbeing of the students there. His social and emotional wellbeing is, well, in the toilet right now. I think you guys need to be the ones to help him, and I’d like to hear a concrete plan about how you’re going to do it.”
“Ms. Sutherland, as grateful as I am for your concern about him, I need to speak to Benjamin’s parents. I’ve reached out to them several times. Do you have another number or way to get in touch with either of them?”
Those bastards. They weren’t doing anything to help their son! I hung up eventually, turned to Iván, and shook my head. It wasn’t good.
We drove over to have breakfast with his friends, Dylan and Julia. When we came into the restaurant, I recognized Dylan right away from the videos and pictures I had seen of him with Iván online. He was really handsome, blonde and green-eyed, but he seemed very austere. Cold. Then a woman stepped out from behind him, her hands on her stomach. She was clearly pregnant and Iván stopped dead.
“Julia! ¡Tía, felicidades!” He gave her a huge hug. “You’re good at keeping secrets!”
“That’s enough,” Dylan said, and Iván let go and laughed. They hugged too, then Iván beckoned me forward.
“This is Maura,” he told them and I smiled, my eyes on Julia’s stomach.
“How far along are you?” I asked.
“Five months. Almost six.” She seemed a little shy, but she was beaming.
“Congratulations,” I said.
The three of them talked and laughed through the meal. Iván was happy and relaxed in a way that he definitely hadn’t been when we’d met his other friends for dinner. He told them about his new house and job, and they talked about the baby, Julia’s work. Apparently, she wrote for Iván’s website. I caught him looking at her a few times, in a funny way.
“Maura, how do you two know each other?” Julia asked me. She spoke so low, I had to lean forward.
“We’re roommates.”
Dylan heard this. “Roommates? Are you kidding?”
I stared at him. “No. I needed a place to live, and Iván very generously let me stay with him.”
Dylan and his wife exchanged a look. I couldn’t interpret the message that seemed to pass between them.
“How are the birds?” Iván asked, grinning at him. “Have you killed any rare ones lately?”
Dylan sighed. “Man, you are always such an asshole.”
We went from the restaurant over to the pool, where Dylan and Iván wanted to swim together. Dylan insisted on driving. “I’ve been in the car with you before,” he told Iván.
“No, he’s much better,” I defended him. “He has his permit now. He’ll get a license soon.”
Dylan’s eyebrows went up. “That’s progress.” That was what I thought, too. But Dylan still wanted to drive, and given that his pregnant wife was a passenger, and Iván’s prior misadventures on the road, I could fully understand it.
At the pool, both Dylan and Iván immediately stripped down and dove in. It was quite a sight to see. Julia stood with me on the side, watching them.
“Iván has been a really good friend to us in a lot of ways,” she commented.
“Really?”
“Well, you know he’s kind of a financial genius.”
“No, I didn’t know that.” He seemed to have a lot of money and was definitely comfortable spending it, but I had assumed it was all from swimming, endorsements, things like that.
Julia was nodding. “He makes really smart investments. He’s in charge of everything in his life, not a manager or an agent. He negotiates everything himself. He helped us a lot, figuring out what to do for our future and for Dylan’s family.”
“Good for him.”
“But I don’t mean just financially. Iván has helped us in a lot of ways. Even my mom, too. She had an injury, a while ago now, and Iván came to Michigan. He was so great to her. I’ll never forget it.”
“Are you two close? You and your mom?”
She nodded. “Very. She’s so excited about the baby.” She looked at me sideways. “How long have you been living in his apartment?”
My temper flared up. I could see what she was getting at. “I’m not using him for a free place to live.” But my heart sank a little. Was I? Was I doing the same thing I had done with Robin? I reminded myself that I had loved Robin. I still felt bad.
“You don’t seem like that, like someone in his retinue,” Julia said.
“His what?”
She laughed a little. “That’s what he used to call all the people he went out with. His retinue. They were mostly just hangers-on, interested in his fame, his money. I didn’t like it. He deserves better.” She looked at me again.
“I agree. I didn’t like that group when I met them.” I was glad that Julia was on his side, but I got even angrier. She thought I was like those people?
“That’s good.” We watched Iván and Dylan swim. They were so in synch and graceful, it was almost like watching musicians playing in a symphony. Beautiful. I started to relax.
“What are you studying?” Julia asked me.
I told her a little about myself. A very little. I was from Los Angeles, I was studying accounting. She seemed to approve, asking me more about Benji and tutoring. We sat and talked for quite a while. Then she hesitated a second, and said, “I remember when I first met Iván. Dylan told me to be careful, that he had a woman in every city.”
It was like she slapped me in the face. “What are you trying to say?” I asked coldly.
“I hope you’re not mad.” Way too late for that. “It’s just, he plays the field a lot.”
“We’re roommates. That’s all,” I told her.
“I’m glad,” she told me seriously. “I’m glad he has a real friend in you. You’re not like the other women in his life. Not at all.”
Dylan called to her from the pool. All of a sudden, she was taking off her clothes, revealing a bikini underneath, her baby belly rounded out over the bottoms. She was so tiny, from the back you wouldn’t have even known that she was pregnant until she turned around.
She was smiling at her husband and he grinned back, standing at the side and holding up his arms.
“You’re a swimmer too?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not like these guys! I swam in college and I still do Masters. Are you going in?”
“No.”
“I won’t last too long,” Julia told me, and then walked over to Dylan. He lifted her into the pool and then stood holding her, his forehead bent to hers as she put her arms around his neck. They talked together quietly.
A cold feeling had been building in my chest and I tried to swallow it down. I recognized what it was: jealously. I was jealous of this woman and her husband and her baby. I was jealous that she had a mom excited about her child. I jealous that she knew Iván and they were close enough for her to be protective of him, I was jealous of the way I had seen him look at her. Now, as I watched her start to move, I was even jealous of how she could swim. I was ashamed of myself for feeling that way and I didn’t understand it. Lots of people had lots of things that I never did. It just had never bothered me so much before.
I walked to the end of Iván’s lane. When he came into the wall, I tapped him on the shoulder and he stopped swimming.
“Do you want to go?” He started to pull himself out, but I shook my head no.
“No, no, you stay. I’m heading over to the studio.”
“I’m going to show them the school and some of the sights. They haven’t been out here for a long time. Are you sure you don’t want to come?”
I shook my head again. “I have to get to work.”
“Tonight—” he started to say, but I interrupted.
“You should go out, just the three of you. I’ll see you back at the apartment later.”
He reached up and grabbed my ankle with a dripping hand. “Are you sure? Is everything ok?”
“Yes, sure! I’ll see you later. Have fun, ok? Tell them that I said it was nice to meet them both.” Iván didn’t look convinced, so I made a shooing motion. “Dylan’s way ahead of you.” He quickly pushed off the wall and swam down the pool.
I told myself that I had been neglecting Anouk, and that it was a good thing for me to go in to work early. It didn’t erase the shame I felt, because I knew it was a lie. I had run away from the pool, like a baby.
Don’t dwell. Don’t dwell. I repeated that to myself on the way to the studio. Julia had what I never would, don’t dwell. She had never struggled in her life, don’t dwell. Don’t be a whiny little bitch, as one of my foster mothers had said to me. Don’t dwell.
Anouk’s office was a mess. It took me forever to get through her latest financial entanglements and get the books in order, send out the monthly invoices, pay all her business bills, and deal with several complaints from her tenant who ran a failing Tibetan bowl shop. Anouk owned the studio building, which included a small retail space next door that rotated through businesses that were never, ever going to succeed. The last one before the Tibetan bowls had been called “mix it UP” and sold vintage cassette tapes that people had filled with weird music mixes. The woman who ran it spent most of her time rewinding them with a ballpoint pen. Before that had been the poisonous snake guy, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had shut that down very quickly. To my utter happiness.
It was unbelievably lucky that Anouk owned the real estate, because dance studios were not the most profitable businesses, and rent on a space that size would have cost a mint in her location. I had thought it showed incredible forethought and sensible planning, until she admitted to me that she got the property as repayment of a debt over something about the ponies. She bet on them, too.
I looked through a file folder of documents I had found on the floor. They appeared to say that she was taking out a mortgage on the property. I looked more closely. A second mortgage. At an incredibly high interest rate. It was almost usurious.
“Anouk, what is this?” I asked, holding out the papers when she came in.
She stuck her cigarette in her mouth and took them from me. “First you steal my passport, now you nose into this,” she complained, blowing out a mouthful of smoke.
“I did not steal your passport. You asked me to get it renewed for you, then took it back and got mad. What’s going on? Do you need money?”
“I had a bad streak in Reno over Thanksgiving,” she said, the French accent totally gone. “Fucking baccarat.”
“Really? That thing with the shoe in the movies?”
She nodded. “I’m short.”
“Shit. You know, we could get tougher about those outstanding accounts. Some of those parents owe you a lot, going back years. I know you don’t like to do it, but it’s probably a few thousand dollars that we could collect.”
“Seventy-five.”
“What?”
“That’s how much I need. Seventy-five K.”
I swallowed audibly. “Oh.”
“This came, too.” She reached into the pocket of her very voluminous, handwoven-wool skirt and pulled out a certified letter. From the IRS.
“Oh,” I said again. “Shit.”
“Do you think you can deal with it?”
“I’m not a CPA yet, Anouk. I’ve never had anything to do with your taxes.” Thank God. “You need to talk to the person who prepared them.”
“She left the country. I think permanently.”
“Anouk! Ok, then you probably need to talk to a lawyer.”
She shrugged. “Let’s dance now, worry later.”
I changed into my leotard and she put me through the wringer. I ended the lesson hanging onto the barre, red-faced, and gasping for breath.
“Not bad,” she said. “I was thinking. Beryl from the Intro II class, her mom is a lawyer, right?”
“I think she does estate planning. You need to get a tax attorney.” I stood up and looked at her pointedly. “Right away, ok, Anouk? The IRS doesn’t like to be put off.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She lit another cigarette. She was really going at it today. “Listen, Maura, I don’t think I can keep you on. I can’t pay you.”
“You can pay me in dance lessons. We’ve done that before.”
“No,” she shook her head. “I know you need the money.”
“I have a roommate now, and I’m not spending as much on commuting or groceries or utilities. You can pay me in the lessons.”
“It means a lot to you to dance,” Anouk said quietly. “I remember feeling the same way. I wish you had come to me sooner, when you were a kid.”
“Me too.” I hugged her, which I had never done before. “We’ll work it out. Call a lawyer.”
The retinue. I had just admitted it to Anouk. I was living rent-free, letting Iván buy most of the food, pay the bills. I had become part of the retinue that Julia described. I was using him, just like those other so-called friends.
I sat on the bus to Benji’s, miserable. It was only when I got off that I realized it had been packed with people, but I had been ok.