It should be easy for me to win. But I’ve never wanted to play. And I’m still rattled from the last one. The one that went wrong.
Margo blamed me. “You’d better clean this up,” she said once they removed the body. I was still shaking. Graham had an arm slung over my shoulder, drifting from comforting to casual so quickly, it unbalanced me. “After all, it is your fault.”
I made the mistake of calling the housekeeper. The second mistake in Margo’s book. The first was “interfering”—the worst crime you can commit. My job was to watch. My job was to say nothing. My name is “Complicity.” And now she wants me to play. And now she wants me to lose.
Margo has never liked me. She said I tricked Graham into marrying me, like it was a bad thing. She tried for ages to get rid of me, but now she has resigned herself. She can’t let me go. I know all about her and Graham. She has to keep me around, as long as Graham wants me.
I’m not deluded enough to think my husband loves me but I accept him, when not many would. I let him play his games. I let him be entertained. And now he wants me to play with him.
The housekeeper returns with bags of supplies. I don’t want to be here when she cleans, so I leave for a walk around the reservoir. It’s a big wild lake hidden in the hills. Most people don’t know it’s there. It has a chain-link fence around it, so even we can’t access it. Wealth is all about access. There are circles of wealth like there are circles of hell and we’re all trapped in our particular punishing privilege.
I wasn’t always rich. I was born rich. I was raised rich. But for seven months before I met Graham, I had nothing. My dad lost everything. Or rather, it turned out he’d had nothing for a long time but we were all too preoccupied to realize it. I was forced to shoplift designer bags, sell family heirlooms, steal credit cards. I almost had to get a job. It was inhuman.
I dated a lot of rich guys but none were as rich as Graham. From day one I could see there was a darkness in him, something I thought we shared. He was fucking me in the bathroom of a luxury hotel when he noticed the security tag still on my dress.
“Did you steal this?” he growled.
“I reappropriated it,” I snapped back.
On our first date, he took me to dinner at Sunset Tower. After twenty minutes, he excused himself to go to the restroom and never came back. I was disappointed, but I wasn’t done. I bought a bottle of Veuve Clicquot on his tab and finished it on the roof while I plotted.
I didn’t hear from him, but in my mind the game kept running. I started to see him in everything I couldn’t get, reflected in the glass at every designer store, the glint of the mansions on the hill, the roar of V12 engines. I was determined to make him mine.
I found out where he lived. I stole a car, and one morning when he was pulling out of his garage, I hit him so hard, it set off his air bags. I left the stolen car at the scene so someone else would take the blame. Then I showed up in his hospital room and tossed him the hood ornament from his busted Phantom.
He smiled at me for the first time with his perfectly symmetrical dimples. “You are so fucked-up.”
I sat on the edge of his hospital bed and said, “Takes one to know one.”
We were engaged in a week. It’s not every day you find someone as fucked-up as you are. Even Margo seemed to like me. I have since learned that she is her happiest, her most glittering, with the people she is most intent on destroying.
The night before we were married, on the drive back from our rehearsal dinner, Graham said to me, “By the way, Margo told me not to marry you. She says you’re a con artist.”
At the time, I thought I had been making inroads, had even convinced myself she was happy about the marriage. She did invite four thousand people. “Maybe I am a con artist,” I said, “but I’m not conning you.”
“She doesn’t think you’re conning me,” he said, rolling down the window of the chauffeured Royce. “She says you’ve conned yourself into believing you actually love me.”
I was taken aback. “But . . . what do you think?”
“I think Margo was married six times.” He shrugged again, let his hand dangle out the window.
I felt grateful that he didn’t care what she thought. I felt ungrateful that he had felt compelled to share it at all. But that was what Graham did: whatever he wanted. He never thought about things like consequences, because there never were any for him.
Maybe Margo was right. Maybe I did marry him for his money. Maybe I did con myself into believing I was in love with him. But somewhere along the way I did fall in love, with his beauty, with his sadness, with his changeable indifference to me. When he is good, he is very, very good. His dimples show. His eyes glimmer. He makes the sky fall down laughing. When he is entertained. He is like all the good things in life: forever just out of my reach. He is so twisted up in my survival, it hardly matters whether I ache for him or his money. I still feel the pain.
I want him. I need him. I can’t imagine a life without him, but even if I could leave, if I could talk myself out of love and money, there is no doubt in my mind that Margo would annihilate me. Not only would I not get a penny, but I would be lucky to walk away.
So I circle the lake, and I think about Demi. I think about what I would do if I did play the game. As I walk, my eyes keep searching for a break in the fence, a way in. I can’t help it. There is no place more beautiful than a place you can’t get to.
LYLA
As I turn the corner onto our street, I See Margo walking her dog, Bean. Her eyes meet mine. It is too late to escape.
She waits for me at the peak of the street, absently tugging on Bean’s leash. Bean grins as she pants peacefully beside her. Bean is the happiest dog I know. When I see her with Margo, I often muse that Hitler’s dogs loved him, too.
Bean is Margo’s whole world. I think she loves her even more than Graham. She buys her toys and treats, a doghouse that’s a scale replica of Margo’s own house. Biggest of all, she walks her three times a day. When you have as much money as Margo does, time is your most precious asset. Margo spends half her day walking Bean.
“Lyla.” Margo’s plastic surgery isn’t perfect. If you look closely, you can see her original face.
“Margo.”
At one time, she was more beautiful than Graham, but her beauty read as artifice. She has black hair, blue eyes with a violet tint. Like Graham, she has dimples when she smiles, and they deepen when she smirks. “Where did you come from? Not wandering the streets, I hope.”
“I went for a walk around the reservoir. I was planning my first move.”
“How quaint. Have you read the e-mail?” Bean is sniffing a piss stain on the ground.
“Of course.”
She crosses her arms. She is dressed in all white, her signature color, and with her piled black hair and her violet-tinged eyes, she looks like Elizabeth Taylor’s stand-in. “What are you thinking?”
It’s a test. Everything with Margo is a test I can’t pass. I want to tell her that she wants me to lose. Instead I say, “I don’t understand why someone like that would want to live here.”
Margo flinches, so I know I’ve scored. “Everyone wants to live here, dear.”
“Not everyone.”
“Well.” Her lip fillers stretch. “You’re still here.” She slides the leash through her fingers. “Can I give you some advice?” I want to say no but I also need help. My mind is a fog of panic. “Figure out what she wants. Then give it to her.”
“I thought I was supposed to ruin her.”
“Oh, Lyla.” She clucks her tongue, flicks the lead’s handle back and forth. “Haven’t you noticed? Giving someone what they want is the worst thing you can do to a person.” She thinks she is being clever, talking about me. “How is Graham? Are you taking care of him?” she says like she knows I can’t.