Lie Still

4

“OK, what’s the deal?” I asked, slathering my belly with Coppertone. “Are they some kind of high society Texas cult?”

My sunglasses skied down the sweat on my nose as I leaned deep into the cushion of a lounge chair cushion. I was mesmerized by the drop-off edge of Misty’s pool where water met flat blue Texas sky. It was as if there was nothing to prevent me from swimming right up into the clouds.

The sun felt good after the icy air-conditioning. A radicchio salad with fresh shrimp, takeout from Central Market, settled nicely in my tummy. Misty had called this morning to make the date for lunch and a little old-fashioned Texas “laying out,” to hell with grammar.

“I should have helped you more last night,” she said. “Those parties are like a Tilt-A-Whirl. I could hold your hand, but there’s really no way to get off until the ride stops.”

I found Misty’s own situation curious. She lived in a modernist’s dream on an exclusive hilltop: a million-dollar-plus house with geometric windows that stared down on a few Mexican-tiled roofs peeking out from the lush greenery of live oaks. The nearest neighbors, I presumed.

Up close, the stones in Misty’s dollar-sign necklace were fake, but the near-invisible, high-tech security system protecting us at the moment was worthy of a nutty dictator in Dubai. Most people wouldn’t notice. I had a former ATF agent for a husband, whose hobby was spotting them.

The place was spacious but not huge. Maybe 3,500 square feet total. Black wood floors gleamed. Triangle skylights, stainless appliances, sharp corners. Scattered Oriental silk rugs lay in the open spaces and a vivid Kandinsky wannabe sat over the fireplace, warming things up.

My life had taken a dramatic leap, I decided, from antique-filled, four-story vertical townhouses of the old moneyed to cavernous spaces with high ceilings and air-conditioning bills that must hit at least a grand a month.

An hour earlier, Misty had grabbed a pitcher of iced raspberry tea and two salads in plastic containers from the near-empty refrigerator. I glimpsed milk, Dijon mustard, and a six-pack of Evian on the shelves before she shut the door. She ushered me to a sunlight-flooded room off the kitchen and we sat Japanese-style on the floor at a low dark-wood table. We leaned companionably against bright square cushions. Lunch had been filled with easy, shallow conversation. No jumping into emotional or intellectual depth.

I learned that her husband, currently on a trip to Japan, handled international real estate and roamed the world. They moved here from California after her husband’s company headquarters relocated to Dallas. She tried to give the impression that she happily played the role of corporate wife, but I didn’t buy it. Misty seemed too intelligent and purposeful for that. I didn’t feel comfortable enough with her to pursue the truth.

However, I did want to finagle a few more details about Caroline. I adjusted the tilt on my lounge chair and tried again.

“What’s La Warwick’s story?”

Something flashed in Misty’s eyes. “It’s too late for me. But you… you should run the other way.” Seeing my bewildered look, she said, “Caroline gets off on trying to fix other people’s pain. She worms her way in, figures out where you’re most vulnerable, how you can be useful. Your husband, for example. He could be useful.” It was a much blunter answer than I expected and it chilled me. My second warning. First Gretchen, now Misty.

“You’ve only known Caroline for a few months, right? Surely she’s not that bad. For the most part, these women appear harmless. Rich and bitchy, but harmless.”

“One of those rich and bitchy women told me that Caroline got her drunk and then recorded her blabbing about an affair she was having with her kid’s soccer coach. On video.”

“You’re telling me Caroline blackmails people?”

Misty shrugged. “Call it what you want. The next day, when the woman sobered up, Caroline emailed her the iPhone video with a warning to stop having the affair, that it was immoral and potentially devastating to her children. So she did.”

Misty took another swig of water while I thought about that. I wasn’t seriously bothered. A father’s affair wrecked one of my childhood friends. Took a chunk out of her forever. My friend was now on her fourth marriage. Caroline’s videotaping was sneaky, but apparently in a gray moral area for me.

“The women in that club aren’t harmless,” Misty said abruptly. “You weren’t so far off with the cult idea. Caroline is their little Hitler. They need to belong. At whatever cost.”

I opened my mouth to respond, then thought better of it. For the third time since we’d settled outside, Misty tugged down the bottom of her white, conservative one-piece, cut low on her bottom and high around the neck, like a competitive swimmer’s suit. It reminded me of something my mother used to wear. Misty wore a flimsy black coverup with sheer sleeves over it.

“I burn,” she said. From what I could see, Misty owned the body of a sixteen-year-old, without a dimple of fat or cellulite on her, so the modesty confused me. Especially since I was all out there, with my basketball belly, in a yellow-polka-dotted bikini. Especially since I knew Misty had funky taste in high heels. As Misty repositioned herself, I noticed faded scars on the insides of her thighs. So Mary Ann wasn’t making that up.

“Car accident as a kid,” she said, seeing where my eyes landed. Her legs closed up tight. Embarrassed.

“I can barely see them,” I lied.

The conversation had veered sharply into dark and uncomfortable territory, derailing my single-minded purpose in coming here: to make a friend. I watched goose bumps prick up under a streak of rosy sunburn on my arm, where I missed a spot with the sunscreen. I lathered on more sunscreen and decided to ease us back the other way. “How did you find this house? I love it.”

“An… acquaintance told me about it. The previous owner invents high-tech alarm systems for museums. Started messing around in his barn in Edna, Texas, at thirteen. One of his devices is now used in the Louvre.”

That explained the house’s top-of-the-line security system. The artist in me liked the idea that the Mona Lisa was protected by a device born in a barn, like Jesus.

“Tell me about you,” Misty said. “You ran an art gallery? And what’s the story with your husband? The word is that he’s a good-looking version of Michael Chiklis.”

I laughed. “For his already giant ego’s sake, I won’t share that. Mike led an ATF team on special ops all over the United States, and he’s still here. Alive, I mean. And all of his guys. Every one of them.” A little pride leaked into my voice.

“What made him take this job in Clairmont? Everybody’s wondering.” Misty rose to splash water on her legs and then stretched out again beside me. “Seems like this place would drive him out of his mind after all that excitement.”

“Frankly, we’d both like a lot less excitement. Mike’s thirty-five. I’m thirty-two. New York saps you. It’s a very hard place to live. And we never knew when he’d be assigned to a case and have to take off.”

I laid a hand on my stomach.

“This baby is a reason to change. Even if it’s just for a few years, this is a good break for us.” I was glad the sunglasses hid tears stinging behind my eyes. Damn hormones. I wasn’t going to open up to this reticent new friend about the miscarriages.

“It seems like it would be hard to give up everything that you’ve both worked for.” Misty’s voice sounded wistful.

“Don’t get me wrong. I loved my job. Helping people pick out beautiful things to live with. Giving a break every now and then to a young artist. But I could easily slip into a seventy-hour work week before an opening, especially if Mike was working and I had nothing to go home to. I had no time or space in our apartment to paint. What about you?”

“I’m in an in-between phase,” Misty replied vaguely. “Trying to figure out what’s next.”

She said earlier over our salads that she attended USC but she didn’t say when or claim a degree or say what she studied. She’d managed to sidestep all of my questions about her family or her childhood. She didn’t spare any goopy emotion on her husband. I couldn’t put my finger on her accent, blunted, an accent from nowhere.

Still, I liked her. I understood the layers of the private soul.

The house, oddly silent, felt empty of spirits other than Misty’s. The stillness wasn’t even disturbed by the friendly rumble of a refrigerator, but then hers was a sleek machine and not the ten-year-old Maytag that came with our home.

“When will Todd be back?” I asked.

“He’s overseeing the building of a corporate headquarters in Osaka right now. I’d guess three months. Maybe four.” Alone in a grand house, lots of windows, no man. Turn on that cowboy’s alarm, girl.

Misty tilted the Evian bottle toward her lips even though it was empty.

I had detected an edge in her voice, but before I could say anything she got up, murmuring about a kink in the pool sweeper.

I lay back and drifted, letting the sun soak my brain like crack cocaine.

She returned five minutes later and our talk grew superficial and drowsy, with longer and longer pauses in between. We fell quiet. When my eyes opened again, the sun had started its descent and the chair beside me was empty, Misty’s towel tossed over the edge.

I must have drifted off. I dug through my beach bag for my cell phone. Almost four. Good grief. All the books said I’d be suffused with energy at this point in the pregnancy. Instead I was nodding off like a grandmother.

I took a quick dunk in the pool to rinse away the sweat and grease, and toweled myself off.

“Misty?” I entered the tiled mud room, although I guess in a modern masterpiece like this it was called something grander. A mini-washer and dryer were stacked one on top of the other, and a neat basket of clean rolled-up beach towels rested on the floor near the door, next to five pairs of size 6 flip-flops. They looked barely worn.

I ventured farther inside, past the kitchen, into the sunken great room at the front of the house, my own flip-flops echoing like little drum clicks in the cool silence. Goose bumps pricked my legs and shoulders, and I wrapped the towel more tightly around me.

“Misty?” I called louder this time, moving toward the spiral steel-and-wood staircase that hung in the air at the far end of the room, invisibly suspended, a work of art in itself.

I didn’t feel good about leaving without a goodbye. Or staying there alone, for that matter.

A few more minutes and I’d call again. Probably she was in the bathroom.

I wandered aimlessly around sleek leather furniture, running my fingers over a large vessel sculpted and hammered out of copper. I recognized the artist, found her mark, wondered if Misty knew the heat and sweat and muscle and pounding that went into making it an object of beauty. Ayesha. I sold her jewelry in my gallery after she figured out she could make more money per hour of sweat by melting metal into beautiful little things.

I leaned in to inspect the piece hanging over the fireplace. Maybe not a wannabe. It looked like a genuine Kandinsky.

Der Blaue Reiter. The Blue Rider. A horseman riding with his girl, a blur across a green space, the background colors popping across the canvas. I’d seen it in person before, years ago. A small fortune in paper and paint. I couldn’t believe it was in a private collection now. This had to be a glorious copy. Even my practiced scrutiny couldn’t tell.

My eyes swept the black-and-white photographs that lined the walls, almost certainly snapped by the same artist, one who favored farm landscapes and small-town America from the less blessed side of the tracks. No signature, but the work was somehow familiar, like I’d seen it in one of thousands of catalogs I had thumbed through.

I was particularly struck by a shot of a frame house falling in on itself. An old Chevy was rusting on the lawn, and a man’s T-shirt hung on a clothesline, bleached white and stark, more like a flag of surrender than a symbol of hope.

At the end of my tour, I found myself in the corner at a round glass table that held the few personal objects in the room.

I lifted a heavy silver frame with a recent snapshot of Misty. Her arms were wrapped around a good-looking, dark-haired man I assumed to be Todd. He emoted nice and cute, like a really smart guy who came into his prime after high school and never looked back. But you never knew.

I replaced it carefully and picked up the other picture on the table, also framed expensively. It was faded and a little blurry and not particularly well composed, the kind of photo that usually ends up in the bottom of the box or tossed out as unworthy. But it was easy to love the cherubic little girl with gold curly hair who grinned out at me, perched on a boy’s bike, shoving the toy bauble on her finger toward the camera, showing it off.

Misty? The eyes, something around the nose. Maybe. I’d had blond hair at that age, too, but nature took its course. I smiled back.

“Emily.”

I jumped, almost dropping the little girl, and knocking Todd and Misty over, onto the glass. She had slipped up behind me.

“Sorry, Emily, I didn’t mean to scare you. Can I please have that photo?” She didn’t wait for me to hand it to her, snatching it out of my hands. “Probably not good to scare a pregnant woman. I was on the phone with Todd.”

Really? I wondered. Why was I so sure that she was lying? That-wherever she had been-she’d been watching me? Then again, hadn’t I thought the same thing after I left that bizarre pink room last night? That someone besides Big Kitty had their eyes on me? When had I gotten this paranoid?

Misty’s body language was tense. She was holding the photograph of the little girl flat against her chest. Not happy with me. Or the conversation with Todd hadn’t gone well.

“Thank you so much for today,” I stammered. “I’m sorry I fell asleep.”

“No problem. You needed it, I’m sure.”

She edged us toward the door. Why did she even display that snapshot if she didn’t want anyone to see it? We walked up the few steps that led to the polished black granite landing by the front door.

Impulsively, I made a decision. It seemed more ridiculous not to ask.

“Misty, who is the girl in the picture? You?”

She looked at me carefully before answering, deciding, I think, whether I could be trusted.

Later, I would brood about her words, about her use of the present tense instead of the past, before I knew Misty’s secrets and after. How stupidly I’d misinterpreted everything.

She said, without a trace of a smile, “It is the happiest day of my life.”