White Ivy(71)
“Only for eight months. I was barely eighteen so they shortened the sentence.”
She was astounded. “Did you assault someone?” For some reason this was the first thing that came to mind.
“Theft. Guess I wasn’t as good as you.”
“What were you stealing?”
“Cars. Mostly in the newer developments they were building around West Maplebury. Their old shitty vans, people would park in the garage. The Ferraris and Porsches, they’d leave out in the driveway so the neighbors could see.” He jiggled his tumbler at her. “Actually, I got the idea from you. Remember how you used to tell me about stealing from yard sales with your grandmother? That rich people didn’t value anything?”
She snorted, then shook her head. “We stole old belts and bent spoons. How could you be so dumb?”
“I learned my lesson, believe me. There are far more efficient ways to earn a living.”
“Like pizza shops?”
“Like leverage.”
She thought about that. What was leverage, anyway, but unused power? It was the potential of power that was powerful. Potential, which she’d always known to be more exhilarating than even the most triumphant outcomes.
“What’s the gun for?” she asked. “It freaks me out. You could just shoot me in my sleep.”
He rolled his eyes and told her to quit being dramatic. “I keep it out of habit.”
“What kind of fucked-up habit is that?”
“Leverage, then.” He smirked in what he thought was a cocky way but she saw right through it. He was only trying to impress her, to say, see, I have leverage over you.
Something occurred to Ivy. “Did Sylvia know about you going to jail?”
“I don’t hide that stuff.”
But Sylvia had told Ivy that Roux dropped out of high school to support his dying mother, not because he’d gotten arrested. So even brazen Sylvia Speyer was capable of shame.
“You’re not involved in anything—illegal—now, are you?” she asked.
“Ah… work talk is boring.”
“You can tell me, kangaroo,” she said in a baby voice. “I can keep a secret.”
Roux stubbed out his cigarette and turned to her with burning eyes. She thought he would take her, right there on the balcony.
“You don’t have to be Sylvia,” he said, and stood up to go back inside.
* * *
THE NEXT TIME she went over, Roux continued his story. In New Mexico, after his release, he’d found a job at a ranch shoveling horse manure. The secret money he’d stashed away from the car sales he now invested in a fertilizer company that used horse manure as part of a formula that multiplied grain production, the same horse manure that Roux’s farm was producing, and whose owner had given Roux 2 percent share of the farm’s initially nonexistent profit as opposed to paying him an actual salary. Eventually, every shovel of horseshit earned Roux around five hundred dollars on the stock market. When Irena finally got ahold of him with the news of her illness, she was already on her last weeks of life, sustained by an oxygen machine. All this time, she’d never stopped being Baldassare Moretti’s mistress, the main cause of contention between mother and son. Baldassare had set up an apartment for her next to his house with a private nurse in the second bedroom; the apartment was always filled with flowers and casseroles from all of Baldassare’s relatives, including his wife and his son, Ernesto. They were apparently one big fucking family at that point. “I’ll always remember the smell,” said Roux, “right before she passed. Flowers.” Roux said he’d been moved by the way Baldassare’s entire family had come together for Irena—they paid for the funeral, the cremation, the urn, even offered to let Roux continue living in his mother’s apartment. One thing led to another, and soon Roux was managing payroll at Moretti’s restaurants, then promoted to GM, then given the green light to launch his own businesses; the division of Roux’s money and the Morettis’ money became as murky as their living situation.
“He sounds like the Godfather,” said Ivy. She laughed nervously but Roux did not. She could have pressed him for more details but she didn’t really want to know. So much of Roux’s life felt ominous and repulsive to her. The gun, for one thing. Only extremists kept handguns in the house. Rifles would have been preferable, especially displayed in a glass cabinet. Rifles were classier, for sport, while handguns hidden in a drawer were sordid things. Then there were the envelopes of cash stuffed in his drawers and wrapped in wax paper underneath the sink. The old-fashioned cell phones as blocky as cement. No friends or family besides the Morettis, and Ernesto Moretti could hardly be called a friend. He’d been an angry, churlish kid back in West Maplebury, with the kind of fragile ego and prideful blubber that made him an easy target of bullies but also a bully himself, the weak preying on the weaker, and Ivy heard the same ridicule in Roux’s voice when he spoke of Ernesto now. Under the sheen of his luxury goods, Roux’s life, current and past, was an ugly black hole, one she drew away from, the same way she still avoided looking at the vagrants on her street too closely.
But if she forgot these unsavory details, she could enjoy their arrangement. Roux liked everything modern, convenient, and preferably unattainable. He wanted the best service, the best food, he wanted to feel rich. Ivy obviously preferred her fiancé’s brand of cultured breeding, but that didn’t stop her from making ample use of Roux’s hedonistic profligacy. After sex, Roux would put on a foreign movie on his state-of-the-art television and order a feast of Maine lobster, Wagyu steak, fatty bluefin tuna shipped out that morning from Tokyo. When the weather turned cold, they soaked together in his Japanese-style tub with the heated salt rocks, their hips and legs stacked together like Tetris pieces, and afterward he would rinse out her hair with a little wooden spout he’d coaxed from a Tibetan monk who’d used it as a rice-measuring cup. Ivy fancied her and Roux as two separate but amicable pirates taking a break from plundering the world. He had his toys, his money, his art, his businesses, and she had Gideon. Rules, God, society—nothing applied to them in the impersonal sanctity of his apartment.