The Perfect Fraud Read online

  Claire

  Cal and I lie in bed, having exhausted ourselves with the run and the shower sex. Glancing at the bedside clock, I zip through the catalog in my mind for a reason I haven’t used in the past two weeks to explain why I’ll be late for work—again. I can’t think of anything, but I’m in such a state of delicious inertia that I’m sure, even if I tried very hard, I couldn’t come up with one reason why I’d want to get out of this bed.

  Cal snorts and rolls over onto his stomach. I’ve never known anyone who can sleep like Cal. One time we went camping in Mendocino, and since we arrived late, we got the last site, which had a beautiful view of the Pacific but was situated on a forty-five-degree decline.

  Even though we angled our sleeping bags so our heads were above our feet, the pull of gravity interrupted my sleep throughout the night. When I did finally doze off, I dreamed I had been working on a roof when somebody removed the ladder, and since the person was relocating to study the mating habits of horseshoe crabs in China, I knew I’d have to live on that roof for the rest of my life. Cal—he was asleep as soon as he zipped himself in and woke the next day, alert and refreshed, shouting for me to get up and see the amazing pods of dolphins crossing below us.

  He’s like that, how excited he gets about . . . well, everything.

  Like the first time he proposed. It was barely eight months after our corn maze collision. We both happened to be free on a Tuesday, an unusual occurrence, since we were both working retail at the time and our schedules hardly ever meshed. I discovered later this was more collusion than coincidence as he had contacted my boss and asked her to give me the day off.

  We headed to Disneyland, which we figured wouldn’t be too busy on a weekday in early fall. Except we didn’t count on it being some random school holiday—a teacher’s in-service training day or something—and there were actually crossing guards at the park’s street intersections, coordinating the mob flow. Forget about Splash Mountain. The line circled around itself five times. Same with the Matterhorn. We broke from the herd, shared a churro and a lemonade, and considered our options, which is how we ended up on the slightly less jammed Peter Pan ride. As Peter’s ship was heading from the Darlings’ house in miniature London to Neverland with the yawning mouth of the ticking alligator semisubmerged in the blue water below, Cal turned to me. Not easy to do as he was trapped under the safety bar. He took my hands in his and began, “Claire, will you . . . ,” but I cut him off with, “Oh, look, there’s Wendy walking the plank.”

  His face, once we disembarked, was that of the most lost of any of the lost boys.

  “Why?” he asked. I told him I wanted to graduate college first. I had eighteen more months until I would get my completely useless degree in English Literature. Despite my mother’s disappointment that I had no plans to go into the psychic and herbal business, and even after my father and mother pleaded that I at least learn something where I could earn a living, I refused to get the necessary credits for a teaching degree.

  I read some wonderful novels, though. And I got as far away from Pennsylvania as I could, while still staying within the contiguous United States. Of course, I found it was impossible to get a job after graduation with just an English Literature degree, and I needed to eat and pay bills, so I ended up doing what I thought I never would—working as a psychic.

  It was a good excuse, wanting to graduate first, but had the disadvantage of a hard expiration date. The day after the graduation ceremony, which I blew off (another parental disappointment), Cal took me to the most expensive restaurant in town. Over chocolate mousse, he bent down on one knee and presented me with a small black velvet box. Very discreetly, I looked into his hopeful face and mouthed No, then pretended I had dropped my napkin and made a show of letting Cal help me retrieve it. The couple next to us observed everything that happened or didn’t happen, but at least I saved Cal the embarrassment of having the whole restaurant watch me reject him. Later, as we were driving back to our apartment, I told him I loved him but I wanted us to first get established in our careers before taking the next step. He was crushed but, at the time, accepted my rationale.

  I often imagine the reason he hangs on when another man would have bolted in frustration long before is that, in some way, he believes I need rescuing. That somehow after he failed to save his parents’ marriage, he thinks he can redeem himself with me. On an intellectual level, this makes little sense, but is it possible that Cal and I are drawn to each other relative to both failing at our intended destinies? That we were both overwhelmed by the responsibilities we thought were given to us—me to continue on the path of generations of psychics and him to save a marriage that had less chance of surviving than a snowflake during a heat wave? Could it be Cal and I both opted to swing our life pendulums as far as possible away from our presumed genetic predispositions? The crown rests heavy on the head of the person who doesn’t want it or feels it’s undeserved.

  Of course, I know this isn’t the only reason why we work as a couple. Our likes (hiking, movies, Indian food, historical fiction, cats in theory but not in the house) on balance far outweigh our differences, which include political stances (he’s wrong), museums (I want to scream while he reads each and every placard beneath each and every painting), and clean sheets (at least once a week, which Cal declares unnecessary. Yes, if you live in an all-boys’ dormitory).

  Cal turns onto his back again and yawns. He opens his eyes, stretches his arms wide, and pulls me on top of him. I brush over his chest hairs with my palm. They’re springy and damp from the shower. It’s still a surprise to me that I’m with someone like Cal—mostly because of packaging. He’s not the swarthy, wiry guy with the piercing black eyes I saw beside me, or on top of me, in my fantasies. Instead, Cal’s skin burns when he walks to the mailbox. He tends toward doughy, which his height mostly camouflages. None of that matters. I love his hands, how his touch can slow my heartbeat. I love how he looks right at the clerk when he checks out at the grocery store around the corner from us. He wants the guy to know he sees him and honestly appreciates the service. How he’ll stop and give the homeless man on the street a few dollars every time he passes him and even took the time to learn his name (Jerry). He’ll listen to his story—and really, anybody’s story—but doesn’t actually need a reason to be kind—he just is. And I love his eyes, the depth of understanding there, even, and especially during those times when I don’t understand myself and the things I think or say or do. They are grayish blue or bluish gray, depending on his mood. This morning, they’re mostly blue, which tells me he’s serene and satisfied.

  I hate to ruin that.

  “Cal, have you thought any more about what we discussed? About going back to school?” I ask, sliding from him and pivoting off the bed. I walk to the bathroom and grab my toothbrush and paste.

  “Cal?” He’s slung an arm over his eyes.

  Walking back, I lift his arm. He reaches to pull me down beside him, but I curl out of his grasp.

  “No kidding,” I say. “Did you call the admissions office?”

  He throws me a look that might as well have been reinforced by a bubble above his head with LEAVE IT THE HELL ALONE, CLAIRE written inside it. Untangling himself from the sheets, he opens the closet and pulls on a navy-blue short-sleeved jersey sports shirt with the Mountain and Stream Superstore logo preprinted above the right pocket. The regulation khaki slacks and a pair of sneakers follow.

  Standing behind me while I brush my teeth, he meets my eyes in the bathroom mirror, smiles, and says, “I think the real question here, Ozzie, is why it matters so much to you if I go back to school or not.” He kisses my neck and leaves. I hear the front door close behind him and the sound of the key in the lock.

  Late already and having decided on an excuse I haven’t used for some time (car wouldn’t start, had to call AAA), I stop for an iced tea on the way to the store.

  Taking out my phone, which I had muted once we got home, I see my mother called seven mo
re times, but never left a message. I don’t want to call her from this noisy place, so I fill the waiting time thinking about what Cal said.

  His parting comment to me this morning is still on a loop through my brain. Why is it so important to me that he go back to school? After all, he works steadily, merging his meager earnings with mine. It’s not a lot, but we don’t need or use much. Hiking is free, meals out (at least where we go) are cheap, and neither of us covets driving anything other than what I refer to as “basic white underwear” cars. Nothing fancy, no need for the Victoria’s Secret upgrade. You have to have a way to get from here to there so you buy used, cheap, and sturdy, which explains my 2001 Honda and his 2003 Jeep.

  Cal works as a sales associate in an upscale outdoor activities store, selling hiking supplies like moisture-wicking socks, tents, and propane stoves. Naturally endowed with an abundance of sincere charm—as opposed to the always transparent and oily sycophancy of most salespeople—Cal’s truly good at what he does. He’s patient and sweet and willing to spend thirty-plus minutes with the geriatric who can’t decide between low- and high-top hiking boots. Systematically reviewing the pros and cons of each, he’ll eventually suggest the high-top because they have more support, without directly mentioning that, at her age, her bones are probably dried kindling held in place by sheets of parchment and the more support, the less likely a shattered ankle.

  He’s been a top performer for the past six months, and the company’s been wooing him to move into a management position, but he’s not the least bit interested. Cal’s that rare person who is happy in the now, never regretting the past or anticipating the future. Maybe I do both on his behalf because I don’t believe selling venom extractor pump kits and disposable personal urinals is what he wants or is supposed to do, that his mind and his heart yearn elsewhere—perhaps as the psychologist he intended to become before he met me.

  For certain, I am not that woman who needs her man to be in a status job. Even in my fantasies, my swarthy, wiry, piercing-eyes guy is wearing sandals, not a white lab coat and stethoscope. I don’t care what Cal does professionally or if he does anything having a title attached to it. We only need to be able to afford the fundamentals, and so far, we have.

  Same with Cal. If it would make me happy, he doesn’t care if I’m a brain or a tree surgeon or if I decide my life’s goal is to pick coffee beans in Brazil. He certainly didn’t give a damn when I told him early on in our relationship my psychic skills were bogus.

  Two months after we met, while we were sharing samosas on the outside patio at an Indian dive we’d discovered, I told Cal I make up most of what I tell my clients.

  “How?” he asked. Not, How could you fool them that way? or That’s cool because I knew psychics were big fakes all along.

  No, he was actually interested in the process, so I explained.

  “You get a certain feel for what answer the client is looking for. I mean, I studied all of the cards, so I do know what each one means. Then I try to figure out how to interpret them based on what someone wants to hear. Happy customers mean bigger tips and return business.”

  Cal responded that he bet I had a lot of happy customers and then he told me for the first time he loved me. With yogurt-mint dip dripping down my chin, I asked, “Why?”

  He looked surprised, laughed, and responded, “Do I need a reason?”

  It was the dearest thing anybody had ever said to me. That he didn’t need a justification to love me, and that I wasn’t to be measured for worthiness was liberating and exhilarating.

  Can’t I offer him that same totality of acceptance? Why do I want him to be other than he is, and why do I keep nagging him about school?

  Within a year after we escaped the maze, Cal quit his master’s in psychology program and moved south to be near me. We, or at least I, had discussed the possibility of a long-distance relationship. After all, six hours of driving wasn’t an insurmountable hurdle. I suggested he transfer credits, enroll at Berkeley, and continue in his program. Not interested in this option, instead, he got a job as a stocker at Mountain and Stream, eventually moving up in rank.

  Whether we’re watching a vapid TV rerun, or strolling through a Van Gogh exhibit at the museum (while I tap my feet as he reads about the paintings), or shopping for a new bath mat, or sitting and talking in our shoebox living room, or eating Chinese from boxes, it doesn’t matter if we go or not go anywhere—“I love you, Claire. Nothing else matters, just you.” I believe him. I believe he loves me for who I am, not for what I do or don’t do.

  “Claire? Claire? Green tea for Claire?” I’m startled by the barista shouting my name into the din.

  I pay, tip, take a straw, and get in my car.

  Maybe it’s guilt, the reason I keep urging Cal to return to college. Maybe I feel in some way I’m responsible for truncating what Cal was going to be and short-circuiting the trajectory of where his dreams seemed to have been leading him. That would certainly be a positive spin on what, in my heart, feels like the true reason—that I want Cal to pursue goals not related solely to being with me because I suspect Cal is overly dependent on me for his happiness. And that this dependency will inevitably lead to marriage and probably, children, makes my heart seize in terror.

  The reality is I cannot be responsible for anyone else’s happiness. I’m simply not reliable enough.

  4

  Rena

  I’m still shaking after the meeting with Dr. Rondolski. I check in on Stephanie, but just real quick, because I don’t want her to get upset too. On the way home, I stop at Jake’s Juice.

  Jake’s name is actually Stanley, but Stanley’s Juice didn’t sound as good. This is what he told me the first time I went to his store a year or so before Stephanie was born. I didn’t know hardly anything about nutrition and healthy eating then. There was only one nutrition course required for my nursing program, and it was pretty lame. But thanks to Stan, I know enough now that I even have a nutrition advice section in Stephanie’s Battle Blog. It’s called Rena’s Way to Well: Feed Your Kid Right. I put recommendations in there for food and supplements moms can give their sick children. I’m absolutely disgusted by what some parents will let their kids eat.

  “Hey, Rena,” Stan yells. It’s really noisy because he’s got the juicer going. He pushes some more wheatgrass in. A guy in a red bandanna pays for the green drink.

  One time, my sister and me went with my mother to a local farm. There were these goats there, and you could pay a quarter for corn kernels to feed them. But I wouldn’t do it because the week before, in Sunday school, we had a lesson about evil. Those goats, with the horns and that black line through their freaky yellow eyes, looked too much like the picture of the devil Miss Chambers taped to the wall. She said, “Children, if you do bad things, you’ll be visited by him.” It was enough to scare me off goats . . . and corn for a very long time. Besides that, what I remember most about the day was the smell. Stan’s store smells like that farm, minus the goat shit. A mixture of dirt and grass, clean but not sweet.

  Bandanna boy leaves. I climb up on one of the four bar stools next to the butcher-block counter. It’s stained from the vegetables and fruits Stan uses for his juices and smoothies. Lots of red, I’m guessing from the beets.

  He leans over the counter and kisses my cheek. It never went anywhere, Stan and me. The first time I came to his store was after one of my asshole teachers at nursing school said I should take something for anxiety because I lost it (her opinion) during a gynecology lab, knocked over an exam tray, and had to resterilize the speculum, cervical scraper, and specimen slide. I tried to tell her what happened, that my idiot lab partner didn’t have a clue where everything needed to go for the most efficiency. Sure, I know it was only a fake vag, but it should still have been done right anyway.

  I don’t do drugs. I’ve always been against that shit. Stan agreed, and that first day, he talked to me about how the brain works and then handed me a bottle of organic valerian root capsules. I
asked him how much, but he said just try them and if they worked, promise to come back.

  Those capsules were un-fucking-believable, especially for when I couldn’t sleep, which was pretty much every damn night, and I’ve gone to Stan’s store ever since. At least twice a week, I come by for his homemade oatmeal-and-flaxseed cookies. He gives me advice on all kinds of stuff, like last week, he told me how to prevent bug bites without using poison (lemon eucalyptus oil and witch hazel). The few times we fucked in the back room were just a friendly thank-you for all his help.

  After I got pregnant, I wanted to make sure my baby had the best care possible, in or out of me. Stan recommended magnesium supplements to prevent preeclampsia. In my third trimester, he said to try red raspberry leaf tea. This was supposed to make contractions stronger but without increasing the pain. Uh, really? I was in labor hell for forty-six hours and it hurt like a son-of-a-bitch.

  Okay, but most of the time, he’s given me really good advice. When Stephanie was a baby, at first the doctors were sure she had colic. They all said put her in a warm bath and swaddle her up tight. But she’d still scream for ten hours straight. I was seriously losing my mind. Stan made up this mixture he found out about when he went to India. There were at least ten things in it, like ginger, turmeric, and garlic (those were the only ones I could pronounce). But it was an honest-to-God real miracle. After a teeny, tiny amount of this paste on her tongue, no lie, she finally, finally fell asleep.

  Stephanie and me went into the store all the time, and Stan was just nuts about her. He even has this special corner with those wooden toys from Sweden or someplace and lots of stuffed animals—all different types of dogs, because one time, Stephanie told Stan she really wanted a puppy. He would give her snacks of carrots and hummus, and peanut butter and apples, and he would sit on the floor and read her a story from a book of fairy tales he kept special for her.

  “I was just thinking about Stephanie,” Stan says, wiping the counter. “Some guy brought his puppy into the store this morning, and I was remembering how she’d line up all her stuffed dogs and pretend she was the teacher.” He laughs. “She’d put them in rows, making sure the short ones were in front so they could all see and then quiz them on their colors and numbers. She told me I was her assistant and my job was to pass out treats to everyone. I remember, she used to lay them down and, real gently, cover them with the blanket. Then she’d kiss each one on the head and sing them a lullaby, with made-up words.” He stares past me out the window, where a silver convertible turns into the parking lot. “I really wish I’d taped that, her singing.” He walks around the counter, sits on the stool next to me, and asks, “So, how’s the little princess doing?”