I don’t want to play. It’s different when it’s them, when it’s something I see at a distance. Something I am aware of, but can easily ignore.
I got too close to the last one. There was something about her I liked: an innocence, a hopefulness, like she expected the fairy tale was in the castle, when it’s always in the woods that the princess learns what really matters.
“What do you want?” I shove my plate forward, finished. I don’t know why he likes it so much. It tastes like something out of a can. “What is it that you want from all this?”
He leans back in his chair, stretches his taut stomach. “I want what everyone wants: to be entertained.”
“But when is it going to be enough?”
He swallows so hard, I can see it. I think I detect a sadness behind his eyes. But maybe his eyes are just beautiful; maybe that’s the sadness. Everything is shallow with Graham: his looks, his thoughts, his actions. And there is something so attractive about that, the lack of depth. No hidden parts. No secret baggage.
But I think it hurts him sometimes, his shallowness. The way nothing matters. This pain is the thing I love most about him, because it is the thing we share: the dread, the fear, that nothing matters. Or worse, that it does for everyone else but us.
I get out of my chair and go to him. I bring his head to my stomach and he lets me. I brush his black, black hair. He’s like a predator I have caught, a monster I can hold in my hands.
I bend my knees, try to slide onto his lap.
“Don’t.” I freeze. He fixes the hair I brushed out of place. “There’s nothing more vulgar than trying to seduce your spouse.”
I wobble in place for a second, uncertain. Then I stand. Graham sets his jaw and overlooks me as I clear his plate. Then he goes to his chair at the end of the floor, the one with armrests that look like wings. He puts his socked feet on the ottoman and scrolls through the news on his phone, announcing all the bad things that are happening like they make him feel better.
“Stock market’s fucked! That fire’s at one hundred thousand acres! Another hurricane!”
And that night, we lie down in bed together, like we do every night and we will every night forever. He lets me touch him for the first twenty minutes, stroke his hair, follow the tight, muscled lines of his body with my fingers, smell the musky scent that oozes from his neck. Then he scoots away, gets down to the business of sleeping. I slide to my side of the bed to worry.
His breathing pattern slows as I gaze up at the ceiling, the tiny light fixtures like pinpricks. My stomach churns with thoughts of the game, my turn. I don’t want to play. There has to be some way out of it. Maybe I can prove myself to Graham another way. Maybe I can make him love me, finally.
He whimpers in his sleep. He always has bad dreams. Almost every night, a light squeal escapes his lips; his eyelids flicker. I used to ask him what he dreamed about. “You were crying,” I would tell him. “You were crying in your sleep.” But he always claimed not to remember. “I never dream anything,” he said. “I never have dreams.”
I brush the soft hairs on his neck to comfort him. He seizes on a sigh, then goes quiet.
Sometimes I ask myself why I stay. But I have known money long enough to realize that it always comes with strings attached. And I have known the world long enough to know that at its core, it’s a game. Either you play or you are the one being played with.
LYLA
The housekeeper arrives as promised, early the next morning. I go out to let her in. “I’ll have to make you a key,” I say, leading her into the house. I have ordered in breakfast because we don’t have anything in the cupboards. She puts the food on plates.
Graham doesn’t even notice her. He has been raised not to see help. He allows me to kiss him at the door, distracted. “Margo is going to forward you the e-mail.”
I want to protest but instead I nod. There must be a way to get out of this. I ask the housekeeper to clean but she doesn’t have any products.
“Everyone brings their own!” I say, exasperated. “We don’t have cleaning products; we only have Mo?t!” I give her money to buy some at the market. “Make sure you get bleach. And buy groceries, too. Just whatever normal people get. But better.”
By the time I sit down on the sofa with my laptop, I am already rattled.
I open my e-mail account to find a single new message. Margo has forwarded the new tenant’s paperwork to me. She’s cc’d Graham. She leaves no message of her own, no hint that this is anything other than an ordinary rental.
I read the new tenant’s plucky e-mail:
Hi!
My name is Demi Golding and I’m looking for a quiet, peaceful place in the city.
Look elsewhere.
It’s just me!
This is a must. Margo does extensive research to make sure there won’t be interference.
“We want people who won’t ask for outside help,” she once said. “People determined to make their own way in the world. Bootstrappers”—her tongue twisted with disgust—“who work so hard to get ahead that they don’t have time for anything else.”
I make $350,000 a year as a Director at Alphaspire.
I lose my breath for a second. She makes more money than Graham.
My credit score is 801. It’s very important to me that I have a good relationship with my neighbors.
You’ve come to the wrong place. You couldn’t be more wrong. Margo would say it was her fault. That she was asking for it. “There is nothing more debased than climbing the ladder!”
One last thing! Shoe closets are a must! I’m a bit of a collector.
Us, too. But not shoes.
I am still hoping for a way around this. A deus ex machina. But in the meantime, I’d better prepare. I crack my knuckles and open a new tab.
I google “Demi Golding.” Her LinkedIn profile confirms her name and her position. She got her start at a small school in a bad neighborhood, then went to NYU, got her master’s at Columbia. There is no picture. She doesn’t have Facebook or an Instagram. She is too busy for social media. Too ambitious to exist. I wonder if she’s pretty, but I doubt it. If she were pretty and smart, she wouldn’t work for a living.
I set my laptop down, pace the floor. Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. What would I do with that kind of money? Then I remember we have far more. We.
I stop at the edge of the floor, so close to the glass that I can see my breath on it.
Margo has never chosen a tenant like this, someone so accomplished. She wants me to lose.
* * *
THE GAME IS simple, in theory, but in practice it always gets messy. The tenant is the pawn. The landlord is the player. The family is the audience. We observe from a distance, talk it over at private dinners.
It started long before I came, with Graham’s nanny. According to Margo, “She had some high-minded ideas. She thought we were family.” By the time Margo was finished with her, she did not think that.
And so the games began. Chefs, housekeepers, drivers, were all fair play. Anyone who Margo felt wanted to rise above their station: an overly familiar comment, a criticism or—worse—a compliment was reason enough to say, Game on. But after a while, it seemed silly to hire someone just to crush them—after all, it’s hard enough finding good staff. And it was too easy. Margo was even a snob about the people she was a snob about. So she started taking in tenants.
When Graham was old enough to get wise to it, Margo let him play, too. They started taking turns, trying to top each other.
The most important rule was no interference—not because anyone was afraid of losing but because rich people can’t deal with any conflict they didn’t create. In fact, it’s almost impossible to “lose” the game because the players have all the advantages, and the tenants have no idea they are being played with. It’s very much like hunting. You don’t walk into the forest and punch a deer in the face. You have a gun, a deer stand and a bloated sense of your own virility.