Card Sharks (2 page)

“You'll have to be more specific.”

“He's that guy who comes to visit his relatives every once in a while. You know, the kind of guy your parents and his parents think you might really hit it off with, and they force you to sit next to each other at a dinner party, like, every five years? The kind of guy you've technically known your whole life but don't really know the specifics of.”

“I don't think I ever met him. Why? He's back?”

“He's back. And I'm supposed to take him with me to tonight's benefit. And I'm so not good at keeping lackluster conversation going. It's so stressful. Will you go instead of me?”

“Me at one of those charity events without you? I think not. I'd have no one to talk to.”

“You could talk to Peter.”

“He's your neighbor's nephew who comes around every five years. Maybe this year he'll be eligible.”

“One would think if he were eligible, I'd have noticed it over the course of our respective lifetimes.”

“True. But sorry. No can do.”

There was a little pause on the other end of the line. “Is Donny coming over?”

“Why would you ask that?” Marianne said, righteously indignant.

“Just asking. Not judging.”

“Fair enough. Seriously, though, sorry I can't help you out. Maybe it will exceed your expectations. And besides, you'll still have Friday. The all-important, much-potential Friday.” She cleared her throat. “Speaking of which, what are you doing on Friday?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line, then, “Nothing.”

“Nothing, huh,” Marianne echoed.

“Nothing. Oh, my God. This really is Wednesday, isn't it? I thought we were still on Tuesday. I guess I lost track. It's almost Friday!”

“So you have something planned then?”

Another pause. “Well, no. Nothing. My parents bought a table for a dinner to raise money in support of that field mouse that was supposed to be endangered, so I could've gone to that if I'd wanted to, but it was canceled when they found out that there was another field mouse that had some similar DNA, so
it's really okay if people go ahead and develop property in the habitat of the first mouse, because if it's accidentally killed during construction and goes extinct, we've already got that other mouse that's close enough. . . . So what are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Marianne said.

“Nothing, huh,” Bijoux echoed. “Fuck.”

“Yeah. Exactly. So you wanna come over and watch TV at my place Friday?”

“Yeah. Do you have a Friday lunch already scheduled? Because I might be able to get passes to SportsClub.”

“No way!”

“Way,” Bijoux said. “And if that pans out just right, we won't have to date each other on Friday night.”

“Oh, excellent. I'll work it out. See you.”

“See you.”

Click
.

Well, okay, then. That was a relief. Friday night all planned out. Sort of.
Marianne sighed, sharpened her pencil, and got to work sheltering the earnings from someone else's life.

Several clients and many more cups of coffee later, Marianne closed out her workday, left the office, picked up her car, and hit the freeway system.

Life had become a series of blue-penciled tick marks. A pattern, a routine . . . you got what you saw; you saw what you got. You got into the car after work and started answering the messages left on your cell phone and any messages left in the office since you left work. You got home and made dinner and then turned on the television to “unwind.”

Did anyone ever just sit down on the couch in the living room in complete silence and think about what they were doing? Or were the days just going to pass like this?

Apparently, the days were just going to pass like this.

Marianne felt the customary low-level thrill she always got
when exiting the freeway to her neighborhood. How sad was it that her day was so predictable she had to get her jollies by envying the people zipping down the carpool lane and getting off by exiting the off-ramp.

Marianne lived in the Valley—the same Valley with the horrible song and the bad reputation. She'd told Bijoux a million times how much she hated living in the Valley and that she'd moved there by accident without really knowing what she was getting into. As it was, Marianne lived in a nice little old-fashioned complex with a central courtyard that would have been very
Melrose Place
if it had had a pool and hot guys lounging about, and she had nice leafy green trees right outside her window without having to look up in the canyons to see nature.

Park the car. Out of the car. Up the stairs. Into the apartment. Dinnertime.

Marianne dropped her coat and bag on the floor by the door, beelined to the kitchen, turned the stove to 325 degrees, and removed a package of premade chicken enchiladas from Whole Foods, an organic Fuji apple, and a bottled water from the fridge. She stripped off her clothes and hung up the twinset and the skirt, kicking the shoes to the wall and dumping everything else in the laundry hamper. On with the sweats. Then she went into the bathroom, pausing to stare into the mirror.
Yikes. Let's have a moment of silence in honor of the remains of the day.

She looked left. She looked right. And she decided she would speak to her hairdresser about highlights of some kind. On her, at least, brunette was a nice way of saying brown. Brown. Mousy freaking brown. She put her hair up into a ponytail, then opened her makeup drawer. The drawer shone with a rainbow of colors. The slight tint in her foundation moisturizer had worn off, and there was a dusting of gray under her eyes
from the shedding mascara, but she didn't bother fixing any of that. Marianne went straight to the colored eye pencils, the eye glitter, the browbone highlighter . . . it was all in the eyes. Peacock greens and blues, purple liner, blue mascara, purple glitter. When she was finished, she had the eyes of a Las Vegas showgirl. Marianne smiled at her reflection, slapped on a little lip balm, and went to pop her dinner in the oven and turn on the TV to unwind.

B
ijoux was, indeed, lolling. Lolling, lolling, lolling. Lolling about the mansion, to be precise. She liked lolling. She wasn't like Marianne, who always seemed to want to do something and felt almost guilty when she wasn't. Bijoux wanted to do something only if she really wanted to do it. Doing something just for the sake of having something to do made absolutely no sense. Of course, Bijoux went out a lot anyway, because she had a very good reason that absolutely made sense.

She desperately needed to marry rich.

Mustering the energy to put down her
Cosmopolitan
and roll over on the chaise longue to look at the clock, Bjioux decided that she should really start getting ready for the event.

She went to her closet and pushed the button, watching the fuchsias, the oranges, the hot pinks, and the turquoises spin before her eyes. Bijoux picked out a minidress, one of those low-V-neck chiffon “handkerchief hem” styles, and a pair of high-heel platform boots with satin striping. Racy lingerie underneath, of course, on the off chance that this was the day
that an eligible male suddenly materialized. And bedroom-beach hair, carefully crafted via the use of a special pomade that was supposed to make you look as fabulous as possible by making your hair look as dirty as possible. Lots of glitter and blingy stuff. Hair clips, rings, necklaces, too. She had a closet full of bait, and by the time she was through, she'd look like the twinkling feathery lure on the end of a platinum fishhook. If she didn't start with at least two hours to spare, she'd never get it all done in time for the event.
I have to loll about all day. If I didn't I'd never have the energy for all of this.

The rich-husband thing had become a mission because Bijoux's parents had informed her just five years ago that she would not be inheriting their millions. It wasn't that they didn't love her. It wasn't that they didn't care. She just had the bad luck to be born of accidental multimillionaires with social consciences. In short, her parents were a couple of hippies who'd invented a new use for hemp that had apparently revolutionized some form of overseas industry.

And after living in mansions with maids and chefs and spending lots of money on expensive designer clothing, handbags, and jewelry, they'd decided the entire family should return to their “roots,” and when Bijoux turned thirty, they would donate the rest of their money for things like abolishing world hunger and positive social change.

Not that Bijoux disagreed with the basic premises of these things. But she would have strongly preferred if they'd set her up with a trust fund before spending the balance on preventing the extinction of the Romulus monkey of the Verdungali forest, or making sure the tribespeople of Morasai had enough mechanical pencils with which to school their children.

As far as Bijoux was concerned, providing mechanical pencils to tribespeople was a snotty imperialist act just barely disguising the imposition of one's own societal mores on another
group of disinterested peoples. She doubted very much that the tribespeople of Morasai even wanted mechanical pencils; if they wanted pencils at all, they would have already developed an age-old tradition of carving their own pencils from a rare species of teak complete with an ingrained spiritual essence that Faber-Castell couldn't possibly—or at least, hadn't until now—offer up, not even in a bonus package with a free highlighter.

She soon realized that trying to explain this sort of thing was difficult without making oneself sound very bad. It was hard to verbalize that you thought your parents should pass along their wealth to you when they died without coming off like a complete ass.

She was just trying to make do with what she'd become and what she had to work with. And the two ends were having a hell of a time meeting.

Go ahead and set those parameters when the kid is three and send her off to a commune, but don't raise her to be a useless socialite only to pull out the rug and suddenly say that she will not be able to live in the manner to which she's become accustomed.
It was too late for Bijoux to build any more character than she already had, and frankly, she was petrified about her future.

It all came around to the fact that Bijoux knew herself, and she knew that in order to survive she was going to have to marry well. It was nothing the women of Jane Austen's time—and really, those before and after—hadn't figured out, and there was no reason to think that a woman like Bijoux Sterling should have to approach life any differently.

So when she was finished preparing her look, she took a long, deep breath and reminded herself what it was all for. And then she proceeded out the door and headed toward Mrs. Keegan's property across the street.

All of the homes in these winding canyons had long, arching driveways, plenty of greenery, and the occasional tastelessly enormous statuary. One practically needed a GPS device to negotiate the route from the street up to the front door. As Bijoux carefully picked her way across the pavement in her outrageously high heels, her arms out wide on either side for balance, the double-wide front doors of the Keegan mansion slowly opened up—they were clearly triggered by remote—and Mrs. Keegan appeared in the doorway, perfectly framed as if she were still a working actress in Hollywood. “Hello, Mrs. Keegan!”

“Good evening, Bijoux, dear!”

The doors continued to open, revealing a less choreographed tableau: a tuxedoed male, bending over as he swiped a green plastic lint remover down the length of his pant legs.

Bijoux continued tottering up the walkway, and he stood up and smiled. Was that her nephew, Peter Graham? Grown-up Peter Graham? He looked like the California beach itself. Ocean-blue eyes, sandy-blond hair.
Hello, sunshine!
Well, perhaps he was actually a bit oversunned, but not in that gross hang-out-by-the-pool-in-a-giant-gold-and-diamond-Rolex-and-a-teeny-tiny-purple-Speedo kind of way. Burnt tan in a more working-journalist way, as if to say,
I stand in the wilds of Africa and take photos of lions as they lunge in my direction and try to eat the leg off my travel assistant.

In spite of her surprise, she managed to prevent herself from widemouthed gaping, tripping on her heels, or otherwise making a fool of herself. But her brain was practically spinning in a futile attempt to process how it was that he'd escaped her notice so many times. Plastic surgery? Couldn't be. Bovine growth hormone? Hopefully not. She didn't know him that well, but she certainly didn't want his penis falling off.

What was it, then? Perhaps she just hadn't been paying attention. The faint memories she had were of someone much younger who used to come into town during the holidays every so often and encourage the other kids on the block to incite riot at Christmas parties, then step back and document it all with his Polaroid while everyone else got in trouble. Of course, Bijoux never got in trouble; she was watching from the sidelines, too, apparently outside the scope of his lens.

Polaroid boy was now sexy journalist man, and the adult version waved the lint remover in the air and said, “New cat. I wouldn't get too close.”

Bijoux stayed on the walk, not wanting cat hair on her outfit, and waited for Peter to come out to her. Mrs. Keegan appeared in the doorway and waved a languid hand in the air. “Peter, you remember Bijoux. Bijoux, my nephew, Peter.”

“Hello. Great to see you again,” he said. “And thanks for letting me tag along.” He raised a small silver voice recorder and then tucked it into the breast pocket of his tuxedo.

“It's great to see you, too,” Bijoux said, suddenly shy. Of course, there was no point in being shy; as she'd alluded to Marianne, Peter's mother—Mrs. Keegan's sister—hadn't married rich, which meant that Peter did not, by default, meet the requirement of being currently wealthy or poised for inheritance unless he'd come to town for the explicit purpose of offing his aunt. Not likely, and hence, not eligible.

“Do you mind if I follow?” he asked.

“No problem,” Bijoux said, slightly annoyed by the fact that he was taking his own getaway car, even though she'd just decided he wasn't eligible.

She stepped back off the curb and headed to the Mercedes sitting in front of the mansion grounds. The
FOR SALE
sign stuck
to the rear driver's-side window made her cringe a little, but Peter probably hadn't even noticed.

It wasn't that long of a drive over the hill; just twenty minutes, really. At the front of the Hotel Bel-Air, Bijoux put on the brake, checked her teeth for lipstick in the rearview mirror, then stepped out of the car and handed the keys to the valet. The theme was Casino Royale. The drinks were shaken, not stirred, of course, and served in beautiful crystal wide-brimmed martini glasses, olive optional. The lure was the opportunity to gamble for donated prizes thanks to the usual roster of wealthy L.A. denizens who could afford to fork over a week in their Paris apartments or were willing to spare the genuine Elvis artifacts that had been sitting in the vast basements of their ocean-view mansions. And the cast of characters was about the same as always.

Bijoux waved to a couple of society pals across the room and looked around for the seating cards. That was a missed detail: no numbered seating cards in the lobby. She'd been to so many of these things she could consider hanging out a shingle as an event planner if things really got bad. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that.

“Do you mind if I peel off for a moment and grab some pictures?” Peter asked from behind her back. “This is kind of a scene.”

“No problem. I'll find our table.”

He nodded and slipped away.

Peering at the calligraphy on the nearest table, Bijoux jumped in surprise as the hostess came up behind her. The enormously wide brim of her flower-laden hat brushed against the back of Bijoux's neck as she fluttered anxiously around the table.

“Oh, dear God. Oh, sweet Jesus.” The hostess clasped her
hands together and shook them, raising her eyes unto what Bijoux guessed might be the heavens. “The count is all off. The seating arrangements are shot to hell. Be a doll, Bijoux, and sit at that table over there. Otherwise it will look so empty.” Bijoux sighed and let the hostess steer her with her palm in the small of her back to what she usually referred to as the Table of Zero Possibility. Every charity function had one. And Bijoux sometimes felt as though she'd been sent a lifelong subscription to its membership. The Table of Zero Possibility was usually filled with recent widows, thirteen-year-olds at their first event, or terminally boring married couples. She was actually grateful to have Peter along for the ride this time, because she was tempted just to run into the ladies' room and have a cry.

He slid into the chair next to her, fiddling with the knobby things on his camera. “So how's this function work?” he whispered.

“We eat, we listen to impassioned speeches about the cause and about the hard work of the board, and then we go buy tickets and try to accumulate enough chips to win one of the donated prizes.”

“Got it.” He looked around and ducked his head back down to her. “Any chance there'll be dancing on tabletops?”

Bijoux smiled. “I wouldn't count on it.”

Peter reoriented his chair to face her more squarely. “So what exactly are you up to these days? What do you do?”

“What do I do?” Bijoux still hadn't worked out the right response to that question. Polite society women didn't use the term
mercenary
in mixed company. “I do this,” she said brightly. “I . . . support.”

She fiddled with the silverware, keenly aware of the slight sheen of sweat that had settled into the cradle above her upper
lip. She'd dressed to impress; she knew she was successfully making a statement, but her short skirt was scrunching up toward her crotch, and her wild platform boots that looked like they had such marvelous arch support had given her twin blisters on both her feet. The chiffon felt soggy against her nervous skin. And one of the cluster of fake eyelashes at the corner of her left eye had sagged and was bothering her contact lens.

But she was blond, buxom, and had dressed for attention—which seemed to be effective, given that she'd just caught the boring married man across the table glancing at her cleavage—and so now that she had everyone's attention, there was no justification for complaining.

“So is this something particularly close to your heart?” Peter asked.

“Sorry, what?”

“I was just asking if this cause was particularly close to your heart.”

Bijoux processed the question and realized that she didn't even know what “this” was.
Spotted owl, pampas grass, save the trees, buy an acre of the Amazon, adopt a tiger, feed a child . . . dear God.
She smiled woodenly and answered, “All of them are worthy.”
Oh, Lord. I might as well throw in my thoughts on world peace.

Peter's eyebrow twitched and he just smiled politely. Great. Everything about the way he was looking at her made it obvious he thought she was fake. And that completely pissed Bijoux off.

Of course I'm fake. This is L.A. And after all, you are a journalist. Your daily life hangs on what other people do and say. You literally feed yourself off the ins and outs of other people's situations, comments, and beliefs. You . . . you with your probably borrowed tuxedo and patent
shoes—though admittedly you look pretty hot—you certainly wouldn't be here in your own real life. You clearly don't belong here at . . . at . . .
Bijoux looked through the party favor bag for clues and found the “thank you for donating” card.
You clearly don't belong here at the Support Support fund-raiser, apparently a very worthy cause that helps the poor afford proper undergarments to be worn while interviewing for jobs. So there.