Darryl cleared his throat. He said, “And believe me, I understand your anger. Nobody likes to lose money. But you wanted to play with the big boys, remember? Then the market went limit down three days in a row.” He paused, not certain of what he’d just heard. “What? Simultaneous buy and sell orders? Who told you that? That’s a lie. I don’t care who told you. I’ve never dumped a bad trade in your account. That one? You gave me a direct order. Well, no, I can’t play it back for you because your order came over my untaped line.” He winced and said, “Hey, c’mon, you’re calling me at home.”
He took a greedy swallow of scotch and said, “Stop it. That’s enough. I need a vacation from hearing about how I’m going to die. I’ll hang up now, okay? But call me if you get any more crazy ideas. Don’t sit there obsessing. We’re going to work this out. You have my word on that, okay? Bye, bye.” He lowered the telephone into its cradle.
While Darryl talked in his study, his wife, Caroline, drifted among the racks of clothes and shoes in her walk-in closet, searching for a simple blouse to wear. She wondered at the forces in herself that had driven her to buy so many bright, costly things. Who was the woman who’d chosen them? Where was the exhilaration and hope they’d represented? She couldn’t visualize herself in them now. The sight of them embarrassed her. When she looked around the closet, she imagined an aviary of tropical birds.
Caroline had recently turned thirty-three, and now, with a rueful laugh, she told friends that she was quickly closing the gaps: next year she’d be eighty-eight! Last week she’d resigned from her civic committees, her charities, her mothers’ groups: places where she’d been spinning her wheels. She felt herself changing. She was tired of people who thought about money and not much else — and that included herself. She yearned for a more spiritual life. She wanted to break free.
At the moment, however, she felt blocked. A free-floating gloom seemed to hang over her life.
The telephone was driving her crazy. It started ringing as soon as Darryl came home from the office. When she answered it, the caller hung up, but he stayed on if Darryl took the call. Then Darryl would hurry into his study and shut the door. He pretended that everything was fine, but she knew better. Worrying about it — and how could she not? — kept her under the thumb of depression. Caroline turned again in her closet, sorrowing over the constant losses, the daily disconnections from hope, that seemed to define her life now.
Darryl, forced out of his study by the need for more scotch, signaled his availability to Kyle, age nine, and Courtney, age eleven, by cracking open a tray of ice in the bar. They appeared behind him in the doorway, energetic and needy.
He wondered when Narciso would call again. Silence was a danger signal. Silence meant: “Grab your wallet and go out the window!” Darryl poured scotch over the smoking ice in his glass. He had to keep Narciso talking, had to draw off his anger, like draining pus from a wound, or God only knew what that maniac might do. He wondered. But what if my luck has deserted me?
He fled onto the patio with the children chattering at his heels like dwarfish furies. He sagged into a white plastic chair and tried to quiet Courtney and Kyle with the promise that if they ate all the food on their plates and didn’t give Mrs. Hernandez a hard time, they’d get a big surprise after dinner.
“Oh, what surprise?” Kyle said. Feeling full of the idea of surprise, he danced around the patio. Courtney, who liked to mimic adults, folded her arms on her chest, struck a pose, and said, “Daddy, what on earth are you talking about?”
“Something of interest to you, my little madam.” He talked to distract them, afraid that they could hear the voice of Narciso raging and threatening in his head. His children circled him — his fragile offspring, driven by such blatant needs. He felt the spinning pressure of their love. What have I done to them? he wondered and abruptly closed his mind against that thought. He offered them a face all-knowing and confident. “If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise. Wait until after dark.” He drank deeply.
“After dark!” Kyle shouted. “Wow!” Making airplane noises, he skimmed away. He ignored a barrage of furious looks from Courtney and settled into a holding pattern around the patio table. Courtney said, “But. Daddy, you didn’t answer me.”
Daddy’s attention, however, had been captured by the sapphire beauty of his swimming pool, and by his trim green lawn, where sprinklers whispered chuck, chuck, chuck and tossed quick rainbows in the evening light, and by the Lay-Z-Girl, his sixty-foot Bertram yacht, which seemed to bob in polite greeting from its mooring on the canal. It was a typical view in Biscayne Estates, just south of Miami, and fragrant with the odors of damp earth and thrusting vegetation and the faint coppery tang of the ocean, but this evening its beauty and the achievement it proclaimed seemed like a trap to Darryl. Like one of those insect-eating flowers, but on a huge scale.
At one time, this life was all Darryl had hoped for. Now the prospect of working to sustain it made him think of a photograph he’d seen in National Geographic, of Irish pilgrims crawling on their knees over a stony road in the rain.
He felt, on his eardrums, the light percussion of rock music from next door, where Mr. Dominguez, a successful importer of flowers, fruits, and vegetables from Colombia, lived with his young wife, Mercedes, and a son Kyle’s age, a sweet boy named Brandon. There was another son, from his first marriage, Jorge, a seventeen-year-old monster with shocking acne, who lived there too. Jorge was forever wounding Darryl’s sense of neighborliness with his sleek red Donzi speedboat, his roaring Corvette, his end-of-the-world music, and his endless succession of guests, who used Darryl’s lawn to drink and drug and screw and then left their detritus for Courtney and Kyle to puzzle over. Whenever Darryl trotted next door to complain, Mr. Dominguez laid a manicured hand over his heart and said, “I sorry, I sorry,” and somehow managed to imply that he was apologizing for Darryl’s bad manners, not Jorge’s.
Jorge was a painful reminder that there were millions of teenagers out there having a high old time with their parents’ money. Meanwhile, Darryl’s resources dwindled away. If only he could get a tiny slice of what those parents were wasting on their kids. The idea of offering an Armstrong Education Fund shimmered in his mind, then faded. The word “slice” had turned his thoughts back to Narciso and his death threats.
Darryl didn’t want to think about Narciso, so he let himself get angry with Jorge Dominguez. A door cracked open in Darryl’s mind, and Darryl scampered down the rough stone steps to the dark arena where he played his special version of Dungeons and Dragons with his enemies. There, in his imagination, he passed a few delightful moments clanking around, teaching Jorge Dominguez to howl out his new understanding of the word “neighbor.”
And then, from somewhere close by, Darryl heard the sounds he’d been dreading. He raced up from his mental dungeon to see the water empty from his swimming pool, and the swimming pool float into the sky and join the other clouds turning pink in the evening light. After that, the noises of a chain saw and a wood chipper came growling toward him and his gardenia bushes, hibiscus, sea grape, the low hedge of Surinam cherry that separated him from the Dominguezes, and all of his palms fell over, crumbled into mulch, and blew away. His lawn burst into flame and burned with the fierceness of tissue paper, exposing earth the color of an elephant’s hide, dusty and crazed with cracks. The Lay-Z-Girl popped her lines and fled down the canal into Biscayne Bay. Behind him, Darryl heard glass shattering and sounds of collapse and rushing wind, and he knew that if he turned around he’d find empty space where his house had once stood. His world had vanished. Ashes filled his heart.