“Good idea.” I eat a few bites of the sandwich and leave the raspberries. Of course, it’s not Alice I’m worried about; it’s The Pact. But how will they know if she doesn’t tell them?
It takes me sixteen minutes to get to Park Life, but of course there’s no parking. I circle the block twice before maneuvering the Jeep into an illegal spot. When I get to the door, it’s already closed. Shit. I run three blocks to the bookstore. It’s not very creative, since she already gave me a book, but she does love to read. The bookstore is closed too. There’s nothing else around here but bars, Chinese grocers, and restaurants. I’m screwed.
When I get home, I apologize profusely. “I actually bought you something, but I left it on the train.”
She looks at me intently. “When were you on the train?”
“Just for some meeting in Palo Alto.”
“What meeting?”
“Work stuff. Don’t make me bore you with it. Anyway, sorry about the gift.”
“It’s no biggie,” Alice says, but I can tell she’s disappointed. And she still seems to be mulling over my story about the train. “Let’s just hope they don’t find out.”
“I’ll get you something tomorrow,” I promise.
The next day, I drive back to Park Life as soon as it opens. Thinking ahead, I buy three gifts—a bracelet with a gold pendant shaped like California, a coffee-table book about street photography, and a T-shirt that says I LEFT MY HEART IN OSLO. I have them all nicely wrapped. When I get home, I hide two of the gifts in my closet. Of course, there’s probably some rule against stocking up on presents. That night, when she gets home from work, I hand her the most expensive of the three—the bracelet.
“Good work!” she says.
I know there’s no way The Pact can discover my gift tardiness, yet it doesn’t stop me from worrying about it.
54
The next weekend, we’re scheduled to join Chuck and Eve at their vacation house in Hopland. I beg Alice to make an excuse, but she refuses. She has claimed credit for this weekend trip as her quarterly requirement, and she doesn’t want to sacrifice it.
“Can’t we just tell them I had something come up at work?” I find time with Pact members to be extremely stressful. I’m worried that I might do something that will get me into trouble. I’m even more worried for Alice.
“You need to make your peace with The Pact,” she tells me. It’s something we’ve been saying to each other since we heard it repeated by Dave and Vivian. It’s a joke between us, a black humor reminder of this weird, crazy rabbit hole we’ve tumbled into. Oddly, though, this time Alice doesn’t seem to be entirely joking. “Besides, I need some sun, and it’s supposed to be eighty in Hopland.”
An hour later, we’re in the car, headed across the Golden Gate Bridge. A double double at In-N-Out in Mill Valley improves my mood. Past San Rafael, as the darkness starts to come on, I ask Alice about her session with Dave today. It was her last, finally, and I’m relieved she’s finished.
“I think it might not be all bad to have a sounding board,” she says. “It lets me get out of my own head. I used to wonder about your patients, about why they would pay so much to come see you. Now I understand.”
“What did you talk about?”
Alice pushes her seat back and props her bare feet up on the dashboard. “Today we talked a lot about you. Dave asked about your practice, how it’s going, whether you have new clients—those sorts of things. He had an odd question, though. He wanted to know if you’d thought about opening an office down the Peninsula. He said there’s a good market for your sort of thing in San Mateo. He said to tell you to consider checking out the area around the Hillsdale mall.”
“What?” I blurt, alarmed.
“It seemed important to him—not sure why.”
I know why, of course, but if I tell Alice that The Pact has been spying on me at the Hillsdale mall, I’ll have to tell her why I was there. Shit.
The weekend turns out to be more fun than I expected, although I can never entirely relax, thanks to Dave’s reference to Hillsdale. I assumed there’d be a lot of talk about The Pact, in a gung ho Amway sort of way, but there’s none of that. There is a third couple, one we didn’t know were coming. Mick and Sarah are our age, from North Carolina, and when Chuck introduces us he jokes that they are our Southern doppelg?ngers. They have a good sense of humor, they watch the same television shows, and Mick, like me, hates olives and bell peppers. Sarah, like Alice, has brought four pairs of shoes. If I’m honest, though, from a purely aesthetic point of view, maybe the husband is slightly better looking than I am, the wife slightly less attractive than Alice. Sarah works in sales for a solar company; Mick is a musician—a keyboardist for a band you might have heard of. I find myself watching Alice, wondering: Would she be happier if she were married to a guy like Mick?
Still, the weather is perfect, Alice is relaxed, and Chuck and Eve are generous, attentive hosts. On the second morning, The Pact has yet to come up. Chuck has gone for a run, Mick and Sarah are visiting a winery, and Alice is on her laptop in our room, working on a brief. I find myself alone on the patio with Eve.
“By the way,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant, “do you remember a guy from The Pact named Eli?”
“No,” she says sharply. Then she gets up and heads into the house.
I sit alone on the patio, staring at the grapevines on a nearby hill wilting in the drought, thinking of a Soviet story I read in college. The piece was about a waiter who lived on one side of a duplex. The other side was inhabited by a grumpy elderly man. As the story goes, the police show up at the waiter’s apartment over and over, asking if he has been spying on his neighbor. He says no, and they go away only to come back the next day with the same complaint. It goes on for weeks, the police continually harassing him for spying on his neighbor. The weird part is that he’d never thought much about the neighbor until the police showed up.
After being accused of spying ten or fifteen times, the waiter starts to wonder: What could the old man be doing that made him so paranoid? What was he hiding? The waiter gets so curious, he climbs through the attic and looks down on his neighbor’s apartment. The roof caves in, the police show up, and things go downhill from there.
55
Two days after we return from Hopland, I have the group meeting for teens of divorced parents. Conrad and Isobel arrive a few minutes early, and everyone else arrives a few minutes late. While waiting for the session to begin, I arrange cookies, cheese, and soft drinks on a foldout table. Conrad and Isobel, who attend the same pricey private school, sit in the foldout chairs talking about their senior theses. Conrad, who drives a brand-new Land Rover and lives in a mansion in Pacific Heights, is doing his on the need for socialism in America, without a trace of irony. Isobel is doing hers on cults.