The Cake House Page 18

  Better than the photographs were the envelopes of negatives: a treasure of precious, unknown gold.

  Alex trailed a finger down my arm. My skin puckered with goose bumps; my ears grew hot. I stared at the curls that formed at the base of his neck.

  Despite the chill, he wore a short-sleeve T-shirt, the words “Mellow Yellow” written across his chest in buoyant, round letters. His breath warmed my cheek.

  “You ditched class the other day,” he said, close enough for me to see the trapped specks of gray in his eyes. “I could tell my dad.”

  “Go ahead.” I knew he wouldn’t. “You’re a few days late, anyway.”

  Alex’s almost smile had sharp edges. “Who’d you cut with?”

  “Aaron and Tom,” I said without hesitation.

  He shook his head. He had already known but had asked to see if I’d answer. “My dad will lose his shit if he ever finds out.”

  “So don’t tell him.”

  I realized it wasn’t just Alex who would be upset if I cut class and became friends with Aaron and Tom; Claude would be angry too. Alex was once again acting on his father’s behalf. Was it Aaron or Tom or both who would make Claude angry? But I knew the answer to that question, or I could guess, thinking of Tom unable to remain conscious for two seconds together during the drive back to school.

  “You’ve been spending a lot of time with him.”

  It took me a moment to realize he meant Claude. Something in the way he said it reminded me of my mother.

  “Has he asked you to do anything?” Alex’s tone was casual.

  “Like what? Like ask me to make friends with rich kids?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “What do you know?”

  “Nothing,” I said. It had been a guess. “Not enough, so don’t worry. Your secrets are safe, whatever they are.”

  He dusted his hands and jumped down from the worktable. “Take your pictures. Say no to anything else.”

  Before he could leave, I reached for the waistband of his jeans. “What happened with Tina?” I asked.

  “What do you think happened?” He grabbed my wandering hands, held them together.

  He must practice this, how to answer questions with questions. It was like a game to him, a slow way to bind me to him by acting as though he was interested. Acting as if I mattered, making me think I was special, important. Until he pushed me away afterward and left me wanting more.

  “You broke up with her.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?” he asked, so honest yet so cold.

  I tried to wrench my hands free, but he wouldn’t let go and at the same time wouldn’t let me take hold of him. Suddenly he kissed me, knocking teeth together, biting my lip. I opened for him, took him in until he let go of my hands. I scraped my hand down his stomach and under his shirt, wanting to meet his challenge. He sucked in his breath, hissing from the shock of my chilled fingers.

  I thought he would kiss me and then leave, walk away back into the house and barricade himself in his room like he had done before, but he put his hands around my waist and lifted me from the worktable. He carried me to the car, fumbled to open the door, and we tumbled onto the backseat.

  He sensed my uncertainty and squeezed my hand, turned my palm over to expose my wrist, scraping my skin with the calluses on his fingertips—his way of saying it was my choice to go or to stay. I brought his hand up to my cheek, to my neck.

  The pleather seat was as cold as it had been the night of the party, but I sought the warmth of his skin, the hidden pockets of heat. He worked my jeans down, and I lifted my torso up so he could take my shirt off. He kicked his jeans aside, pushing my legs open with his knees.

  “Wait, wait,” I said.

  Rising onto his elbow, he traced my eyebrows with the tip of his finger. “Do you want to stop?”

  “No,” I said. His stomach pressed down against mine with each breath. I didn’t want to stop, but I wasn’t certain I wanted to continue either.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, bringing his hand between my legs.

  I wasn’t sure about anything. Not about him, or about the garage we were in, or about the house. I sighed when he slid a finger inside my body and teased until I gripped his arms and pushed onto his hand.

  His eyes brightened with urgency. He had a condom.

  “It’ll hurt,” he said. I spread my legs wide, faint from the reality of what we were doing.

  “It’s okay.” I breathed into his mouth.

  His forehead pressed against mine and I couldn’t look away.

  The pain blinded. I let him mold me, turn me over in his hands, rewriting my knowledge of everything, anything. The pelvis stretched, the bones re-formed, he pushed until I had all of him. I bit his shoulder and left a ring of teeth marks embedded in his pale skin. He moved within me, panting into my ear, hard and fast, and I let him. I wanted it. I wanted it all.

  When he finished, he didn’t move and I put my arms around his back, fingers finding each knobby point of his spine.

  “Maybe it isn’t Tina who I should stay away from,” he said.

  It took a moment for my brain to engage, to comprehend and understand what he had said. It hurt that he brought Tina into this moment. I pushed at his chest until he slid off to one side. It was awkward, seeing him naked from the waist down, his wet penis brushing against my thigh.

  I turned to find my shirt and underwear. Pulling my jeans on, I slipped on my shoes, then climbed over his body, searching for balance. The car door shut behind me, unable to latch because it bounced against Alex’s extended legs. The bird sat in its nest, watching.

  The side door to the garage banged open, and Claude walked in. “Rosie,” he said. “It’s late. What are you doing in here?”

  Alex was lying down on the backseat. I didn’t dare look at him or at the car door only partly closed, or anywhere but at Claude. Could he see the stain of blood on my fingers?

  “This box,” I said, moving to the worktable. “My dad’s photographs. I was looking for them.”

  He stepped back. “Good idea,” he said, and held the garage door open for me, and I had no choice but to go through, with Claude following.

  AFTER CLAUDE AND MY MOTHER had gone to sleep, I left my room and stood outside Alex’s door. I put my hand on his doorknob, I even turned it, but it was locked.

  THE NEXT MORNING I SAT in the living room and waited for Alex to come down the stairs, perched to block him as soon as he emerged. He had been in his room all morning, and it was close to noon before I heard his footsteps stomping down the hallway. I met him at the base of the stairs. He stopped when he saw me.

  “Hi,” I said, choking on that one simple word. “Can we talk?”

  A car honked. He looked toward where the front door was, then back down at me. He put his hands on my shoulders and moved me out of his way.

  “Later,” he said, not cold but without patience, with avoidance, and I knew there would be no “later.” Before I could stop him, he left through the front door.

  I went to the bay window and pushed the curtain aside. Alex strode across the street, heading for the VW Bug parked under a tree.

  “Hey,” said Alex as he approached the car.

  The person in the VW Bug spoke—I didn’t know if it was Tina or Joey or both—but I heard only a few words: “How come” and “invite,” followed by a laugh.

  “Don’t be stupid,” answered Alex, opening the car door. “Just drive.”

  Hollowness expanded within my chest as the car pulled away. It seemed to match the soreness between my legs, the bruises that ghosted the insides of my thighs. My fingers and toes felt cold, and my mind searched for an explanation. I was certain Tina was in the car. Why had he left with her when they were supposed to be finished, when he and I had had sex the night before?

  I went to the bathroom, stripped naked, and sat at the bottom of the tub with the water pouring down my back. It had started to cool when my mother knocked and entered the bathroom. She opened the
shower door. “How long have you been in here?” she asked, holding a towel. “Do you feel okay?”

  She touched my forehead, but I yanked my head away. “I just took a shower,” I said, wrapping the towel around myself, afraid she could see the loss of my virginity on my skin. “I’m going to feel warm. Don’t worry, I’m not sick.”

  “Claude wants to ask you a question,” she said, and wouldn’t let me go until I dressed and followed her.

  Downstairs, Claude was at the dining table reading his newspaper. My mother settled in next to him with a sketchbook and colored pencil, staring at the blank page as if figuring out her plan of attack.

  “Do you know where Alex went?” I realized Claude had been watching me. “Anything going on I should know about?”

  I froze. Claude leaned back in his chair, nonchalant but for his penetrating stare, fingering the small key that opened the rolltop desk. It was that small, nervous action that betrayed Claude and allowed me to breathe. He was nervous about his money and whatever it was that Alex did for him. He wasn’t asking because he knew what Alex and I had done in the garage.

  “He doesn’t talk to me.”

  Claude smiled and spun his keys on a finger before putting them in his pocket. “He’s a teenager,” he offered as an excuse, as if I weren’t a teenager as well.

  “You can spend the day with me,” my mother said to me, her colored pencil still hovering over the blank page. She hadn’t been paying attention. “Tell me what’s going on in your life. Just you and me for a change.”

  “I need to go into the office today for a couple of hours. I should be back by three or so,” Claude said, not waiting for my answer. My mother kept her eyes on the blank page.

  “Can I go with you?” I asked before I thought about it. I wanted to get out of the house. I didn’t want to be near Alex’s room or near the garage. I didn’t want to be waiting when he came home so he could ignore me again. “You said I need a developing tank. I made room for it in the darkroom. And I need that special paper to print color negatives black and white.”

  My mother’s head finally came up. Her silence pulsed from across the table.

  Claude was slow to answer. “I have to go into the office.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I can help with things.”

  “Rosaura,” said my mother, “Claude’s been helping you all week. Isn’t that enough? Do you have to bother him at his work, too?”

  “Nonsense,” said Claude, oblivious to her pale-faced alarm. “Sure, she can come. And then I can pick up the things she needs.”

  With great effort, my mother bowed her head, gripping her pencil with white-knuckled rigidity. She refused to watch as I followed Claude out the door.

  I was silent during the drive to the camera store. My body was a constant reminder of the previous night, the way my flesh slid against itself in new and different ways, the way it felt like I had a hole inside me.

  “Everything all right?” asked Claude as he drove.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  He took my sullenness in stride, going over the complicated process of developing my own film. It had to be done in total darkness; not even the red of safelight was allowed, everything done by touch, by feel.

  “It won’t be hard for you,” Claude said, with a confidence that I didn’t share.

  At the camera store, we had to order the developing tank and the paper because they didn’t have any in stock, so I walked through the different aisles. But there wasn’t anything more I needed. Requesting to go to the store had been an excuse, and Claude had humored me. I loved looking at the different cameras, the lenses and stands and umbrella light bounces, while Claude explained how they worked and how they differed from one another and told stories from when he used to work for his school’s newspaper.

  I stopped listening but neither did I stray too far. At the back of the store, I found a few bookshelves with every sort of photography book imaginable. I picked one with the title Photo Development: The Art of Image Manipulation. It was a paperback, with a glossy cover of a woman standing in a bathroom looking at herself in the mirror, the only light coming from a bare bulb swinging fast enough to blur in a bright arc of light.

  “I had a similar book when I first started playing around,” said Claude.

  I flipped through the pages, skimming over each page full of diagrams and samples. He put a hand on my shoulder and I leaned against him. The tears came before I could stop them.

  “Rosie, Rosie,” he said, bending down. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  I opened and closed my mouth like a fish trying to breathe, but no matter how much I pushed, the words wouldn’t come.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s all right.” He rubbed my back, and I pressed against the scratchiness of his sweater. “Whatever it is, it’ll be okay.”

  “Claude,” I said, wondering if it was the first time I’d said his name out loud. “Thank you.”

  Instead of smiling or saying “you’re welcome” or giving me another hug or doing any of the things one would expect, he closed his eyes before he took the book from my hand.

  “We’ll buy this. An early Christmas present. Anything else you want?”

  “No,” I managed, wiping my face on the sleeve of my jacket.

  Ten minutes later we were riding an elevator to the sixth floor of Claude’s office building, which was dominated by gray carpets, beige walls, and dark wooden doors with ornate plaques displaying businesses’ names. We walked to the end of the hallway. The plaque next to the door read: “Global Securities, CEO Claude Fisk.”

  Inside was a bright set of rooms with prints of famous paintings on the walls: one of naked women lying down on a hillside and another that had swirls of a blue-and-yellow sky over a village. Leafy plants nestled between the chairs and couch in the waiting area, where a coffee service and water cooler hummed in a corner and plenty of magazines sat on the coffee table. The receptionist’s desk was empty, with a sign placed at an angle: “Please take a seat. The receptionist will be with you in a minute.” Past the receptionist’s desk, I saw a pantry with a microwave and a refrigerator.

  Claude flicked the light switch, then stood in the middle of the room looking like he didn’t know what to do with me.

  Despite the appearance of habitation in all the rooms—cluttered desks, scattered file folders—it felt empty, abandoned by its employees. I followed Claude to the largest office, his office. He had two picture frames on his desk. One was perhaps last year’s school portrait of Alex, from the shoulders up, his smile showing that same hint of arrogance he always carried. In the other photo, a young Alex stood next to his father with a large costumed cartoon animal on the other side. The cartoon had his arm around Alex’s narrow shoulders, its wide, vacant, plastic eyes staring straight ahead. Beneath the cartoon’s head was a grate where the human underneath must have been sweating and counting the minutes until his workday ended. Alex’s eyes were cast to the floor. He looked uncomfortable in his shorts, with one sock pulled over his calf and the other bunched around his ankle. Such a miserable little boy. I put the photo back on Claude’s desk.

  Unlike the rest of Global Securities, Claude’s office thrummed with his energy. It smelled like him. His big desk contained files and notepads, a dried-up plant. A computer took up a chunk of space off to the side. Two chairs faced the desk, and I suddenly had a vision of my parents sitting in this office, meeting with Claude, with my father standing up, coming around the desk to give Claude a handshake, to slap Claude on the shoulder in camaraderie.

  “You might be bored,” Claude said, sounding uncertain.

  “I won’t get in the way. I can help.”

  Tilting his head, he led me to a small room—part copy room, part storage area, packed with open boxes filled with unsorted piles of paper. He sat me down before a large machine with metal toothy grooves on top and buttons down its side, pushing a box of paperwork over.

  “You can shred these,” he said, pointi
ng to disorganized stacks of folders and documents. “I’ve been putting it off. This’ll be a big help.”

  Photocopied forms, fill-in-the-blank questions with the answers given in handwriting. “Have you ever invested before?” “Do you typically invest large amounts or small amounts?” “How much do you have available in liquid funds?” “How did you hear about Global Securities?” The forms were signed by Bob Anders, Xavier Villalobos, Desiree Robinson, Raymond and Helena Myers.

  “You don’t need these anymore?”

  He grinned. “I’m happy you’re here,” he said. “No, I don’t need them anymore.”

  As I started feeding the machine sheet after sheet of other people’s lives, Claude made coffee and went into his office, putting on the radio. He kept his door open, and I could see him sitting at his desk. We both worked in silence and strange camaraderie as the shredder hummed and chewed.

  The phone rang and Claude answered, changing from the man who could sit with me in the darkroom into Claude the businessman, Claude the charmer. On the phone, he used words and phrases that were meaningless to me: future trading, high-yield investments, acceptable losses, and on and on. How do you trade the future? What was an acceptable loss? In a strange way, it was similar to the cop language I had heard Deputy Mike use the day he found me riding my bike naked. I wondered who was on the other end of the call. Was it a colleague? Or was it a client, someone whose name might be on a form in the pile I had in my hands, moments away from being fed to the shredding machine?

  I paid closer attention, not only to the words he spoke but to the way he spoke them.

  “You don’t want to do this,” he said. “Listen to me. This isn’t one of those penny-ante mutual funds handled by some anonymous manager. I personally watch every dollar I invest on behalf of my clients—I sweat over it. If you cash out now, you’re throwing away an immense advantage.”

  Silence.

  “I see,” he said in a darker tone. “No, of course, I’m sorry to hear that, but listen, the market is changing, daily, believe me, you don’t want to—All right. I can see I won’t change your mind. I just don’t want you to blame me later, when you look back and realize the colossal mistake you made. No, it’s all right. It’ll take some time. Six to eight weeks, per our terms of service, and penalties, of course.”