Card Sharks (5 page)

She rang the doorbell and waited. Rosa answered the door.

“Hola, Rosa. ¿Cómo estas?”

“Bien. Muy bien, Señorita Sterling.”

“Um, ¿Señora Keegan está?”

“Noooo. Señora Keegan no está.”
Rosa waited, a bright
smile on her face that probably hid what she was really thinking; that Bijoux's Spanish was a total embarrassment.

Bijoux peeked behind Rosa into the house.
“El perro está?”

“El
perro?
No. El perro no está. El
gato
está.”
She thought Bijoux had mixed up the animal word.

“Right. I was getting to the cat part. I just thought . . .” And then it hit her. The cat would work. She'd promised to spend time with the cat anyway. “Right.
El gato.
” Bijoux chewed her lower lip. “Okay.
Estoy toma el gato a mi casa para . . . para . . .
pet it.
Estoy
pet
el gato.
”

Rosa frowned, put her hands on her hips, and slipped right out of her Spanish. “You're going to take the cat and pet it? Is that really what you meant to say?”

Bijoux nodded. “Señora Keegan asked me to, and I just figured I might as well do it over at my house to, you know, help it acclimate to other areas of the neighborhood better.”

Rosa's eyebrow went up, but she swallowed the smile that was forming and stepped away from the door to reveal an enormous gray Persian cat clouded by more cat hair than seemed possible for just one animal to have all on its own. It sat in the middle of a formerly pristine white shag carpet, which had taken on a dingy gray quality in the section where the cat was sitting.

Bijoux bent over and stuck her hand out. “Here, sweetie. Here, precious. Here, gorgeous . . . here—”

“Skippy,” Rosa said matter-of-factly.

Bijoux stood upright and looked over her shoulder. “Skippy?”

Rosa shrugged. “Don't ask me. I think Peter may have had something to do with it. It was supposed to be a joke, but it stuck.”

“Okay.” She turned back to the cat. “Here, Skippy. I'm Bijoux.”

The cat stared at Bijoux with clear blue eyes. Eyes that said,
You're an imbecile and we both know it.

But Bijoux was too quick. In a flash she was stuffing the cat into her tote bag, giving Rosa a more confident
adiós
smile than she actually felt, and then hightailing it back down the driveway.

Though displeased, Skippy took the jostling fairly well.

She'd intended to take the dog, but with his unexpected absence, she'd figured the cat would suffice. What was more, walking a cat would attract more attention than walking a common dog. People would look. More important, men would look.

Unfortunately, it was a hot July, the rope she was using as a leash looked unnervingly like a noose, and people were crossing the street to avoid her. Skippy finally balked, and Bijoux had to pick him up and put him in her purse. He was clearly not happy, Bijoux was not happy, and within fifteen minutes of walking up the canyon road, sirens began to wail from somewhere on a street below.

Bijoux pulled out her cell phone.

“Hello?”

“Mare, it's me.”

“You're breathing funny.”

“I'm panicked.”

“What's wrong?” Marianne asked.

“Is it legal for Animal Control to make a citizen's arrest?”

“I don't know.”

“Shit, shit, shit!”

“Calm down and tell me exactly what's happening.”

Bijoux looked behind her in the direction of the sirens. “I think I'm being tailed by some sort of law enforcement vehicle.”

“Have you done anything wrong?”

“I'm not sure. But I'm sure I look guilty. I'm speed-racing in high heels down a canyon road, talking into my cell phone with a dehydrated Persian cat in my purse.”

Silence on the other end of the line.

“Marianne, are you still there?” Bijoux asked.

“Yes, sorry. I was processing. So this is what it's come to. Is there anything I can actually do for you?”

“No, I was just calling to tell you—”

“That this has got to stop,” Marianne said, punctuating her statement with a massive sigh.

“Exactly. Hold on.” Bijoux glanced behind her again. The van was parked, and some sort of uniformed officer was striding in her direction. Sweat was already running in rivulets down her back, but she picked up the pace, stumbled in her heels, then paused long enough to take them off and carry them in one hand.

Bijoux peeked into the purse, where Skippy stared up at her, looking most displeased. “Almost home, Skippy. Almost there,” she said breathlessly as she headed to her house. Peter was just driving up to the curb. She waved him over and then keyed into the Sterling mansion. She put Skippy down in the sink and turned the water on just as a knock came at the door. “I've gotta go, Mare, but let's get together tonight.”

“Come over whenever.”

“Bye.” Bijoux hung up and opened the door. Peter and the officer stood on the doorstep.

“Hi,” Bijoux said, attempting to cover her nervousness and hoping to cause a distraction by tossing her hair around a little. “Skippy's having a drink. I was just taking care of their cat, you see. Everything's fine.”

“That's what I told him,” Peter said, a bemused expression on his face.

The officer turned to him and said, “So that's your cat. And you're okay with . . . this.”

“Yeah, everything's fine. She was taking him for an airing. Everything's just as it should be.”

Bijoux looked at him gratefully. The officer shrugged and
turned away, shaking his head as he walked back toward his van.

“You okay?” Peter asked.

“I'm fine. Thanks for asking.”

“How's Skippy?”

“Just a little dehydrated, I think. So, Peter . . . is your aunt the litigious sort? Because she should know I'm about as far away from deep pockets as you can get.”

Peter leaned against the door frame, shaking his head. He started to laugh which made Bijoux start to laugh. “Bijoux,” he said, “you're one of a kind.”

M
arianne opened the door to find Bijoux holding a bulging plastic grocery sack that was clearly stretched beyond reasonable capacity. Bijoux had changed into a black-and-yellow couture tracksuit, and the whole thing made her look like a disgruntled bee. Her massive amounts of blond hair (the result of a hair extension mishap, or what
Marianne
would term a mishap) were on top of her head. The mess was clamped up and against her head with a barrage of jeweled bobbypins and managed to look terrific.

It might have been a signal of bad things for Bijoux, but Marianne would have been more than happy to look that good without even trying. She herself wore a huge colorful silk kimono that had once been Bijoux's over a pair of faded mismatched sweats.

The two girls looked at each other and just shook their heads in wordless commiseration; then Bijoux stepped over the threshold into Marianne's apartment. “At least we're not boring,” she said.

Marianne followed her in. “That's right. Not many people could say they were thrown out of SportsClub L.A.”

Bijoux sighed. “Well, I don't think many people would choose to say it.”

Marianne just shrugged. “How's the cat? Are they pressing charges?”

“The cat's fine. And Peter's downplaying it to his aunt, which I thought was very nice of him.”

Marianne rummaged about in the grocery sack as Bijoux took her jacket off and dumped her things all over the dining room table. “You never told me how that thing went.” She rummaged some more. “Wow. You seem to have covered all the bases.” She looked up at her friend. “But I'm warning you, there's something up with my cable, and every channel has a weird gray stripe going across.”

“I don't care. It's fine,” Bijoux said.

“You don't want to go watch at your house? On the wall-size plasma TV? In an enormous mansion where servants will probably ask us if we want champagne with our Twinkies?”

“No, I like it here,” Bijoux said blandly, sorting through the stack of magazines on Marianne's coffee table. She settled into her customary spot on the couch, wrapped the decorative cashmere throw around her and got herself all comfortable, then opened up last month's
Cosmopolitan
(actually her own subscription, passed on to Marianne when Bijoux was finished).

Marianne shook her head. “Okay, then. I'll just go make some drinks.”

One would think it would make more sense for Marianne to go over to Bijoux's mansion, but Bijoux always wanted to come to Marianne's. She said that if she was going to be tossed out on her ass soon, she needed to start getting used to her new reality. Marianne refrained from pointing out that this kind of reality in this housing market still cost a sizable percentage of one's monthly salary, and without a major source of income, Bijoux would never be able to afford an apartment like hers.

“You don't mind, do you?” Bijoux suddenly called out from the living room as Marianne disappeared into the kitchen and began gathering drink supplies.

“Of course not. I just don't get it.”

“You have a nice apartment. It's homey.”

Marianne came back around the corner of the kitchen with a small plastic bag of cocktail umbrellas in her hand and leaned against the doorjamb. “Yes, but you have all the luxuries.”

“They're already being phased out. Remember that shower with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spray? Gone. A real bummer. Apparently the water used from one of those showers could hydrate an entire classroom of underprivileged drought-stricken schoolchildren for a week. Besides, I can sit on things here without worrying about how much they'd cost if I broke them.”

Marianne looked around. It
was
a nice apartment. She'd done a bang-up job. Wood flooring, warm lighting, and area rugs that felt good between the toes. It was cozy and organized and pleasant with paint job and accessories in nice, calming pastel tones of blues and grays and greens. She called it her “showplace” because it was what her bosses would have expected to see if they ever came over for dinner.

Of course, her bosses never came over for dinner, and Marianne could have afforded a much flashier place. But once she had moved, she couldn't bring herself to move again, though she would probably have been much happier somewhere busier and more energetic, like the Grove or Brentwood. She shrugged and went back into the kitchen and began mixing drinks and arranging tapas, a sigh escaping from her mouth before she even realized it was forming.

How many times had she and Bijoux repeated this scenario? It wasn't that Marianne was unhappy. There wasn't enough going on to be unhappy about. It wasn't like hanging
out with her best friend was some kind of hardship. If they'd just lower their standards, they could easily be hanging out with other people—men people.

Yes, there were tons of perfectly acceptable, average men to date. There were even perfectly acceptable, average men to date who liked smart, successful women and didn't give lectures about women who'd spent their best years concentrating on a career only to wake up at thirty-five and bitch about the men who were left and didn't it serve those selfish bitches right.

A young single woman's search for a mate was not inherently an act of desperation, though in all fairness it was understandable why so many people confused the two.

She had a friend who'd been proposed to during a football game while watching TV with a bunch of friends. The guy had turned to her during halftime and said, “So, do you want to get married?” She'd said, “Uh. Okay.” And that, in a nutshell, was Marianne's idea of hell. The whole relationship . . . so uninspired . . . such a lack of sparkle. Everything about it screamed,
You're here, I'm here, we might as well.

We might as well
wasn't at all what Marianne was looking for. She was looking for the guy who would look back at her as if she were the best thing he'd ever seen and would just know that without her, the sparkle in his life would be missing. That was the kind of relationship Marianne wanted. The one with the sparkle. For a moment there she'd thought she'd found it with Donny. Now she wasn't sure she'd ever find it.

The trouble with Los Angeles, first of all, was that it was a handicapped city from the get-go. Everyone was so damn defensive.

Meeting people in this town was built around the concept of
“not.” As in
not
someone who was an actor/writer/musician/ model.
Not
someone who was in “industry.”
Not
someone who was into the whole L.A. bullshit.
Not.
It was like a whole extra layer of
not
-ness separating people from each other.

There was a reason people complained it was impossible to meet eligible mates in this town. A million factors conspired. A) Everybody was in their car. B) When not in their car, everybody was taking a phone call. C) Oftentimes, people were both in their cars and making phone calls, which had the effect of killing off some of the overall population from which to choose.

Preconceived notions and stereotypes based on locale to go along with the preconceived notions and stereotypes about women in general. That's what the women in L.A. today were dealing with. There was something so irritating about men who specified that they were only willing to meet women who were at least five years younger or more. It wasn't just the fertility issue, because apparently any women who crossed over to the hell known as thirty-four-plus became a disgusting, unattractive, desperate shriveled prune of a shell of a human being.

But also it was because women who didn't have a man by then obviously had been self-absorbed in their own selfish careers and selves. The way Marianne saw it was, what the hell else were you going to concentrate on if you didn't have a boyfriend? Yourself and your friends and your family. Women weren't alone at this age because they'd spent too much time thinking about themselves; they were alone because the men simply weren't good enough.

She'd just read a newspaper article about how smart women had a much harder chance of finding a mate because A) men preferred stupid women, and B) both ugly and gorgeous women preferred more interesting men. And there just weren't enough
interesting men who preferred smart women to go around. And of those interesting men who preferred smart women, just like Donny, the vast majority in L.A. were apparently too busy playing poker with their other male friends to be in the right place at the right time to find the women in question.

Marianne walked out of the kitchen and placed the tray of drinks down on the coffee table. She wiped her hands on her sweatshirt. “Do you think I should freeze my eggs?”

Bijoux looked at her over the magazine. “Come again?”

“My eggs. Should I freeze them, just in case? It's the latest thing. So that if I don't meet a guy for a long time, my eggs will still be young even if I'm not.”

“That's just . . . wow. That's just . . .
wow.
Well, I think you should do whatever you think will give you the most peace,” Bijoux said.

“You don't sound too convinced.”

Bijoux studied Marianne's face for a moment. “Well, personally, I don't want kids with freezer burn.”

“Oh, for God's sake.”

“I'm just saying. The technology's still too new,” Bijoux said. “It's early yet. They may come up with some better techniques. Don't be rash.”

Marianne sat down on the arm of the couch. “I'm just beginning to think . . . I mean, I keep trying to think how it would work, and it seems like it would . . . but it just doesn't. . . . You know what I mean?”

Bijoux looked up, quirked an eyebrow, said, “Uh-huh,” and went back to her magazine.

“I simply can't marry Donny.” Marianne threw up her arms in despair. “We'd kill each other. I'm quite sure of it. There's just way too much drama. If we were meant to be together, we'd be together. But we're not together. We're together and then we're not together. We're obviously not meant to be.”

Bijoux slowly closed the magazine and folded her hands together on top. “You know what's going to happen after I leave here tonight?”

“What do you mean?”

“You're going to call up Donny, have sex, be sort of happy you did and sort of sorry it happened, decide for the umpteenth time that you must get on with your life and find somebody new, and then do the whole thing all over again. Nothing will ever change and you'll repeat the same scenario over and over again.”

“That's not true. I've sworn off him. I was right next to you at SportsClub, putting myself out there.”

Bijoux blinked up at her. Marianne sighed. There was nothing to discuss. That look said,
Same old, same old,
and that was exactly what it was. “I'll get the tapas.”

She came back out with the tapas tray and arranged everything on the table, and settled in on the couch next to her friend. Bijoux looked at the little bowls. “I need to learn how to do that. That's really cute. Was it hard?”

Marianne cocked one eyebrow. “I put the little snacks in the bowls. No, it wasn't hard.”

“Well, you mean, it's not hard for you.”

Marianne just started laughing and opened up the jar of maraschino cherries. “Your turn to pick.”

Bijoux thumbed through the
TV Guide.
“It's already started, but
Pretty in Pink,
I guess.”

“Again?”

“Would you prefer
Gandhi?
That's on, too.”

They looked at each other and in unison intoned,
“Pretty in Pink.”

Marianne flipped to the right channel and said, “Why don't we just rent a DVD one of these days and see something we've never seen?” She leaned over the TV tray and used an umbrella
toothpick to spear a cherry and a canned pineapple slice, then dropped it into Bijoux's drink.

Bijoux gestured to the TV screen with her mai tai. “This was our childhood, Marianne. We were such innocents. Molly Ringwald was our best friend and our world was high school. How could we have known? She always got the boy in the end. Though I still completely disagree with the ending of this movie. I still remember Duckie's face when he let her go.”

“Tell me you're not already crying.”

“Of course I'm not crying.” Bijoux grabbed a cocktail napkin and loudly blew her nose.

The phone rang, and Marianne reached over the arm of the couch and picked it up. “Oh, hi, Mom . . . yeah, I'm fine. Everything's fine . . . what? I'm just hanging out with Bijoux. . . . Yes, I realize it's Friday night. . . . No, we're not going out tonight. . . . No. No. No, we don't have dates. . . . No, Mom, I'm not a lesbian. Would that be better?” Marianne turned away from the phone. “She says that would be better.”

Bijoux shrugged.

“What are you up to? Oh. Oh, I see. That sounds great. Well, you go on then. Have a great time. Say hi to Daddy. Okay . . . Okay . . . Okay . . . I love you, too.” Marianne hung up the phone. “How sad is it that my parents have a better social life than I do?”