Eric Puchner - Model Home

“Look,” Larry said, “if you really want to stop this sludge from being dumped, we should get as many families as possible in there. Nobody gives a flying fuck about two developers. But twenty families: they could form a coalition, go to the papers with it. Raise a real stink. See what I mean? It’s in everyone’s best interest to sell these houses.”

“Are you forgetting our man jumped ship? It’s against his ‘professional ethics.’”

“Fuck the broker. We’ll do it ourselves.”

Warren closed his eyes. It had not occurred to him to lie to people. It was morally indefensible, so why did the heaviness in his legs seem to lift? Even the room itself seemed slightly bigger, as if someone had pushed back the furniture.

“Ourselves?”

“We’ll hit the phones. The streets. Whatever it takes. For Pete’s sake, enlist your fucking family.”

Warren pretended he hadn’t heard this. “You’re forgetting about the view.”

“People like construction. It’s a sign of growth. If they ask, we’ll tell them it’s a shopping mall. Honestly, it could be just what we need to sell them on the desert.”

Warren stared at the papers on his desk. “Even if we could sell the things,” he said after a minute, “how are these ‘twenty families’ going to band together if they don’t know about the dump?”

“Word will spread. Believe me. These things have a way of getting around.” Larry cocked his head toward the phone. He was no longer smiling. “This isn’t Wisconsin, Warren — it’s the desert, kill or be killed. Survival of the fittest.”

Warren stood up and walked to the bulletin board on the wall. Larry was right: it wasn’t their fault the county had decided to dump sludge near their property. Why should Warren and his family suffer? It was wrong to lie to people, in a fair and righteous world — but this was not a fair and righteous world. It was a world where you could work for twenty years to give your children something, a life you never had, and then see it whisked away by some fucking bureaucrats living off your tax dollars.

Warren stared at the twinkling Latino family pictured in the brochure. Desperate straits required desperate measures. He would do whatever he could — lie, swindle, bust his ass — to save his family. He pulled the Yellow Pages from his desk and picked up the phone.

“I need your credit card,” he said.

“What are you doing?” Larry asked.

“Ordering some business cards.” Warren untacked the brochure from the bulletin board and flipped it over so the faces weren’t visible.

Camille stood in the bathroom in her underwear, waiting for her endometrium to shed. By now, the corpus luteum should have stopped producing estrogen, which in turn should have caused the tiny veins and arteries in her uterus to pinch themselves off. Bad news, of course, for the endometrium. Good-bye, nothing there, degeneration. A week ago, it should have begun its clotty, bright red trickle from her body. She remembered the animated sequence from Look, Ma, I’m Only Bleeding, one of her best productions, in which the endometrium melts into little rainy droplets.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She’d heard about women with IUDs getting pregnant. It was definitely possible. Actual failure rate: 4 percent . Once, at a party, someone had told her about a baby being born with a Copper T in one hand: he’d come out of the womb that way, clutching it like a rattle.

Camille squatted until she was nearly sitting on the tiles and slipped a finger inside herself, reaching through the warm folds to the dimpled hardness of her cervix. The strings were still there, small and whiskery. She glanced at herself in the door of the shower. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d checked: the squatting, the single finger, felt crudely automotive.

She washed her hand carefully and went into the bedroom, surprised to find Warren sitting on the bed. He was wearing running clothes, a dickey of sweat darkening his T-shirt. All summer he’d been keeping unusual hours at work; she never knew if he was going to be lurking around the house or hanging out in the Chrysler for no reason, listening to some god-awful tape of Dustin’s. Well, the car had been stolen — he wouldn’t be doing that anymore, at least.

“What are you doing home?” he asked, tugging at his shoelaces. Maddeningly, he always tied them in double knots he couldn’t undo.

“I’ve got my presentation today,” she said. “I wanted to change clothes.”

“Presentation?”

A sizzle of anger ran through her. “For Earth to My Body: What’s Happening? Remember, I told you yesterday. I’ve got to present the script to the advisory committee.”

Camille went into her closet and surveyed the piles of carefully stacked sweaters, all pink or green or periwinkle. The kids made fun of her sometimes, calling her “the Stepford Mom.” Was it her fault if she looked good in pastels? “Did that thing with the broker go okay?” she asked.

“What?”

“The broker. You said you were meeting with him this morning.”

“Oh. Right.” He paused. “Yeah, everything’s great. There’s a lot of interest.”

She came out of the closet, but he was sitting on the far side of the bed so she couldn’t see his face. Everything’s great: it was the extent of their conversation these days. Camille wanted to believe that this was true. Sometimes, in fact, she did believe it: when you looked at all the starving people in Angola, or the four-year-olds tied to rug looms in Pakistan, sold into bonded slavery by their own families, things were comparatively very good indeed. Other times — when she examined their marriage, how little they seemed to confide in each other — she wanted to drop what she was doing and grab Warren by the shirt, to scream into his face like one of those hysterical victims in a disaster movie: We’re lost! Danger! Our lives are in peril! She wanted to save them before the engine room filled with water. Instead, she couldn’t even tell him about her period. She was too nervous — frightened — of what it might reveal.

Warren disappeared into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Camille put on her favorite outfit — the blue skirt suit with a teal bow-collared blouse — and immediately felt frumpy and self-conscious. Perhaps it was only Herradura Estates, but something about the way women looked at her here, their eyes drifting magnetically to her shoes, made her feel like an Amish person. It had not been this way in Nashotah, where people wore sweatpants out to dinner and couples walked around the lake in matching windbreakers, beaming dowdiness and goodwill. She could have fetched the mail in her pajamas and no one would have cared. Camille had not wanted to leave the lake but had done so for Warren, so he could pursue his dream project in California. In fairness, she’d been surprised at first by its virtues. She liked her job, there was tennis all year round, she had to admit the weather was glorious — but after three years in Herradura Estates she could not say she’d made any true friends. Not that people weren’t nice to her. In fact, they were perfectly kind. But that was the problem: their kindness was perfect. It had none of the goofy, shambling warmth her friends in Wisconsin had given off. She could spend hours on the phone with her best friend, Nora Lundy, chatting about the silliest things. It pained Camille to think about how many of her other friendships had dried up or dwindled to Christmas mailings, simply because she’d moved halfway across the country. Lately Warren had been bugging her about the phone bill, hinting she should limit her calls to Nora, as if she hadn’t sacrificed enough for him already.