I have often wondered what it is about the game that draws them. Is it because they fear losing their place to upstarts, ordinary people whose history is not riddled with wealth? Do they think there’s not enough room at the table? Do they want to keep the head count small? But I think their reasons are different.
Margo invented the game and she does it to prove her power, her control over everything: the light, the mood, the weather but especially people. It took me longer to work out what was in it for Graham. He’s too perverse to be political, too muddled and uneasy with himself to be so specific. I think he plays the game because he can, because he is bored, because he has appetites and wants for nothing.
He likes the pageantry of struggle. He’s only ever suffered psychic pain. Pain you can see sometimes feels like relief.
LYLA
Graham has been gone all weekend on one of his golf trips. I’m alone in the house.
I try to think but can’t, try to plot but there’s a block. My brain is starting to sweat. I sit on Graham’s chair at the apex of the floor and look over the house below: the porch, the roof, the trees and their twitch. I don’t want to do this. That is the truth. I am avoiding the game, avoiding her. Graham’s right: I’m not even trying.
If I wanted her, I would wait in the courtyard. I would bang down her door. I would send a desperate and demanding text, conjure some emergency, force her to meet me. Instead, I am making excuses. I am giving up.
Margo may have been lying when she said Graham was upset about the last one, or she may have been fishing. Because she knew I was.
Her name was Elvira. She had bright red hair that turned black underwater. She cooked dinner for herself every night. I was circling the reservoir one afternoon when I ran into her, going in the other direction. “We should walk together,” she said. “We’re going to the same place.”
I knew the rules, knew that I wasn’t supposed to interfere, so I told her, “I prefer to walk alone.”
She just smiled and said, “Me, too. We’ll be perfect together.” She walked beside me, not talking, as if alone, all the way home. Not the next day, but the day after, she caught me again, and then over and over and over. She waited for me to start talking. When I did, she talked back.
Every day when Graham was at work and Margo was above, we walked to the reservoir. Margo found out. She found out everything. She said it was a bad idea. Graham warned me not to get attached. But Elvira and I shared a wicked sense of humor, a belief that at its core the world was a joke only we got.
It was Graham’s turn, and I watched her fall in love with him the way everyone did. Watched him turn, watched her love him more. They all did. They all do. They all love Graham even more when he turns on them, because they are sure it’s their fault, something they did, something they can fix.
“How do you put up with him?” she once said to me, words tangled in a laugh, like his power was funny, how it caught you off guard.
“I don’t know,” I told her but that was a lie. I put up with him for the reason everybody did. Because beauty and money are God, and Graham is more beautiful, and has more money, than anyone I’ve ever known.
She just laughed, and I hoped she would win. I hoped he would lose, just this once. But I should have known better. I should have known that the closer the rich get to losing, the more spectacular their eventual win.
I wait for Demi but she doesn’t come. I open a bottle of Mo?t and drink it. The longer I wait, the more my resolution wanes. I feel myself sinking into the chair, immobile, inert, as if drowning. I watch the trees twitch and quiver below. My feet meld with the floor.
I’m trapped. My life is the trap.
* * *
I AWAKEN TO the sound of feet pounding up the steps. My head thumps from the champagne. I reach for my phone. It is after midnight and she is at the gate, shaking it, clattering it, trying to get in. I groan as I climb from the chair. This is not how I wanted to meet. This is not how I pictured it. This is not a winning moment.
I stop by the hallway mirror and press the wrinkles from under my eyes, run my fingertips over my hair until it lies flat.
She is rattling the gate like she knows what’s coming. I am what’s coming.
I switch the hall light on. The rattling stops. I walk across the cold living room. Beyond the windows the hills are blue, scattered with halogen lights. I steel myself up and open the door.
She freezes on the stoop, her hair a wreath of artful tangles. She wears a light blue puffer coat with a torn collar, torn jeans, dirty sneakers. She reminds me of the rich English girls Graham went to school with who wore scrunchies and did ketamine in Shoreditch.
“Are you locked out?” I say, then realize she is inside the gate. “Oh. You’re locked in.”
She steps back from it, turns to face me. Her skin is translucent around the edges, the way Graham’s gets when he drinks too much.
“Sorry. I was just making sure it was locked.” She speaks with a raspy voice and an almost complete lack of accent, like she comes from nowhere, everywhere. She is younger than I expected. And there is something about her. Right away I can tell there is something special about her, as if she is an ingenue on the cusp of fame.
“I’m Lyla.”
Her face is round. Her eyes are wide, blackish in the dark and filled with something: thrill, like we have collided on a fast train. Maybe she is drunk. Maybe she’s high. She never seems to sleep.
“We live upstairs, my husband, Graham, and I. But you probably know that.”
I step forward, offer my hand. Her hand is hot and feels immediate, electric. Her eyes widen and her lips drop open. She gasps a little at the touch, so I know she feels it, too.
Her eyes drift down, unsure. She finally says, “Sorry I woke you up.”
I say nothing. I just let her apology float between us, forever making her aware she owes me.
She stuffs her hands in her pockets. “I’d better get back down.”
“It was so nice to finally meet you.” I move toward her. She moves away. “We’ll have to meet again sometime.”
“Sure.”
“Tomorrow.”
She freezes, hovers off-balance on the top step, foot hanging down. “I don’t think I can do tomorrow.”
“I think you can.”
She laughs once. But she doesn’t refuse. She just lets her hanging foot drop, then follows it down the stairs.
I feel my blood pumping. As I close the door behind me, as I walk to the bathroom, as I prepare to go to bed. I lie on Graham’s side with my heart pounding, throbbing in my ears, too tight in my chest. I can’t fall asleep. My eyes keep popping open, as if sensing a counterattack. I tell myself it’s the alcohol. It’s not.
It’s the thrill of the game.
DEMI
I wrangled an appointment at helping hands by pretending I was writing an article about their charity. I sit on a good chair across from a woman with a row of toys with bloated heads, still in their boxes on a shelf behind her, and I can tell she doesn’t get it. She is helping people she doesn’t believe exist.
“For a lot of people, it’s a lifestyle,” she informs me. “That’s one of the problems we face. Habitual drug users, alcoholics, hippies. Especially in California. People look at it as a way of life.”
“So, you’re saying they don’t want help?” Her office is big and bright, but there are two framed pictures on the floor unhung, as if she is afraid to get too comfortable here.
“You’d be surprised how many people don’t ask for it.”
I would not be surprised. I’d tried to get an appointment here myself, but moving through their website was like playing a video game with a looping glitch, every click leading you back to where you started. Only when I pretended to be a journalist, when I made it clear I didn’t need anything—in fact, I wanted to give them press—did they message me back.
“How do people get appointments here?”
“Mostly through referrals.”
“Who refers them?”
This stumps her. She runs her nails through the hair above her ear, making a glamorous scratching sound. I don’t think she expected specifics. She seems unhappy that I am asking questions at all. During an interview.
“And you house people?” I press on. “You have housed people?”
“Yes.”