Tess is a bigger liar than Danny has ever been.
Written for Atrata in the Take The House challenge.BUY NOW, PAY LATER
By Cherry Ice
There’s nothing quite like the smell of Los Angeles air.
Airports smell the same everywhere (ozone and recycled air, leather luggage, magazine stands, chemical cleaning supplies, and people who’ve been crammed into too-small spaces for too long a period of time), but Tess knows LA air is pressed outside Los Angeles International, and she’s been smelling it since she first sighted the buildings below, the network of highways and converging suburbs.
Tess lived in LA for two years, before she tired of the starlets and tourists, of waiting tables and depending on tips to meet the rent; before Manhattan and Vermeer seduced her, and Danny tumbled into her life.
It’s a decent walk from the terminal to the front doors, but she doesn’t mind. Wheeling her luggage behind her (red leather, monogrammed, Danny bought it for her for Christmas, she sees three like it before she leaves the building), she weaves her way through rumpled businessmen and harassed-looking parents with screaming children and bored teens. The air conditioning whines, but it’s nearly inaudible between boarding calls and the conversations of a thousand people.
Ahead of her, the outside doors slide open to disgorge a chattering Korean family, a woman with a cat carrier, a man in eyeliner and leather pants, a priest. She thinks of Connecticut and all its shades of white.
The doors slide open to let her out, and the heat hits her like a blow to the head. It’s going to be one of those days -- 10:30 and the pavement is already baking, mirages wavering across the road and parking lots, sun reflecting off cars and mirrors and windshields. The first breath of LA air is as much of a hit, all tarmac and smog and promise.
She misses North Dakota for the trails she rode as a little girl; misses Las Vegas for its bright lights and constant, frenetic energy; misses the galleries of New York and the certainty she felt about who she was and where she was going.
Tess has lived a lot of places, but the smell of Los Angeles air is always like coming home.
She takes a taxi all the way out to the hotel. Knows full well it will cost her an arm and a leg (never took a taxi when she lived here, always the bus or pounded the pavement), but it's not like she can't afford it. The cabby has a picture of a small girl with dark eyes stuck to the dashboard. He tries to talk to her at first, but catches on quickly to her one-word answers, so she spends the rest of the drive looking out the window, and cataloguing the things that have changed. The facades on the buildings and faces on the street corners are all new, but every story is the same as it's ever been.
*
"Nice place," she says, standing in the lobby of Rusty's hotel. She's not just saying it, either – art's tasteful, and the reception desk is well-carved oak. She loves Danny, but if he'd started a hotel, it would probably have ended up all odds and ends, jumbled pieces of all the things that had caught his eye. Her clothes started sticking to her in the heat outside, and in the air-conditioned lobby she starts to shiver.
Rusty looks good. He's talking to some guy (boy, she thinks, and wonders when she got so old) she vaguely recognizes from a sitcom of the moment.
Rusty seems surprised to see her, which isn't that strange because she's still a little off balance herself.
*
"How's Danny doing?" Rusty asks, ice cubes clanking in the bottom of his glass.
"Good," Tess says. She's sitting on the bed in the room Rusty showed her to, and her suitcase is sitting open on the chair. She makes no move to unpack it.
Danny's in Germany, helping beef up security at a casino (the straight and narrow chafes at him, makes him restless and uneasy), and they both know that between Connecticut and Europe, he made a two-day stopover in Los Angeles.
"How's Isabel?" she asks. "She settling in all right?" Tess hasn't seen or heard the other woman, and she knows very well that Isabel isn't out shopping on Rodeo Drive.
"She's spending some time with her father," Rusty says, holding his glass with its ice cubes as they melt.
Europe is the destination of choice, and they're sitting in Los Angeles, breathing recycled air. They know to how to hurt each other more than anyone else, because Danny has never been good at reading the people he loves.
*
Tess has never considered herself to be a liar. She said to Danny: You LIED to me, like the fact that he lied about being a thief was worse than the fact he was one.
All husbands lie to their wives, and all wives lie to their husbands. Little white lies, like: no, that tux doesn't make you look fat, or: this is delicious, honey!
But Danny, Danny never lied to her about Rusty. She's always known that Rusty was part of the deal. For a long time, she thought that if he'd been honest about that, there was nothing he couldn't tell her.
It wasn't until much later she realized it was possible Danny didn't know she knew.
*
For breakfast the next morning, Tess brings takeout from the Mexican place three blocks over. She knocks on Rusty's door at eight AM and holds the bag up. He looks at her, through the crack between the cherry wood paneling and the frame, then sighs and steps aside.
White flag waved and accepted.
They sit out on his balcony and eat tamales and orange rice. Rusty gets sauce all over his fingers and licks them clean. The sun's still low in the sky and bouncing off the other buildings around them. It lights up the balcony and Rusty's hair – he's letting it grow again, and there would be almost enough to run her fingers through.
She sits back in her chair, and turns her face to the sky. Thinks about Picasso and Vermeer and the Group of Seven.
"Tess?" he asks. She looks at him and he's rubbing his lip with his thumb. Eyebrow cocked. Curious expression. She closes her eyes and counts backwards from ten. She's at five when he says her name again.
"Tess," he says, and she opens her eyes. "Tess, what are you doing here?"
So much for the white flag. There are things they don't talk about, just as there are things she and Danny don't talk about.
"Tess," he says again, and if she doesn't start talking soon he's going to take her hand and stroke his thumb across her palm to calm her.
"Danny's in Germany," she says. "I got tired of staring at my walls."
Rusty's looking at her, head to the side. "And you didn't just call up one of the girls because?"
The silence is brittle. "I had friends in New York," she says. "In Nevada, I had Terry, one of the girls who ran cocktails downstairs, and an elderly couple who frequented the museum at the Belagio. In Connecticut, I have a studio in a house I can't invite my neighbours to, because they'll ask awkward questions like: 'What does your husband do?' or 'Where did you get your money?'"
"So you tell them Danny was heavily invested in dot-com, but got out before the crash," Rusty says. He's sprawled back across his chair, one elbow propped up on the table. His tattoo snakes its way down from the back of his hand. "You confide that you're an heiress, twelfth in line for the throne of Bolivia. You found a treasure map and followed it into the wilds of Canada, where you braved death by moose and mosquito to bring back a chest full of gold. You lie."
"I'm not – " she starts. "I don't – I'm not some sort of con artist."
"Tess," Rusty says, not unkindly. The sky overhead is blue, blue, blue and the hum of traffic floats up to them. "Tess, you lie all the time."
"Right," she says, and stands. "You know, that would have had a lot more impact if it were coming from someone who wasn't sleeping with my husband."
He smiles, long and slow with teeth showing. "That is, in fact, adultery, and not related in any way to my tendency to bear or not to bear false witness against my neighbours. At the end of the day, I know exactly which lines I've crossed."
She lets the door slam on her way out, leaves the white flag on the ground in tatters.
*
She sits in her room with the sun's reflection spilling in the window, staring at her still-packed suitcase. She thinks about going back to Connecticut, to her freshly painted home with its natural light and empty rooms. She wants to want to leave.
After awhile, the door behind her creaks open. She knows without looking who it is, because she smells tootsie pops and hear the crackle of a sucker wrapper being removed.
"It counts," Rusty says, and sits beside her on the bed. It gives slightly under his weight. "Lying to yourself counts." They're almost touching at shoulder and hip, and she's not thinking of what his hands would look like in Danny's hair, remembering what they felt like on her hips.
"So, maybe, I crossed a line," she says. The sun is warm, and she wants nothing more than to curl up in it and sleep. "Crossed a few, maybe."
"Could be," Rusty tells her, and his voice it carefully neutral. Rusty is very good at being someone else, and right now he's being no one at all.
"It's just," and she stops. Grips the bedspread beneath her fingers a little too tightly, and her hands brush his hip. "You ever wake up and realize you have everything you've ever asked for, but nothing you want?"
"Once or twice," he says, and he puts his hand on the nape of her neck and rubs it.
"What did you do about it?" she asks. The sun is warm, and it catches on dust motes in the air.
"Became someone new," he says with a shrug and a trace of bitterness. "Someone who wanted new things."
"Oh," she says, thinking about Rusty and Danny and the fact that Danny married her. She's just so damn tired.
"There are a lot of habits that are hard to break," he tells her, rolling the sucker around in his mouth. "Lying to yourself is one of the worst."
She knows, she knows that right now he's just being the guy she needs him to be, but she wants nothing more than to put her head down on his lap and sleep.
Instead, she pulls away from the hand rubbing her back and stands in front of her suitcase. She stares down at it for a minute or two, then starts unpacking.
*
So, while Danny was in jail (in jail the second time) Tess had nowhere to be. She'd gone from New York to Las Vegas, cut herself off from everyone in New York and entrenched herself with Benedict in Nevada.
Tess left home when she was nineteen, but she's always had an idea or an inkling of a plan, something to go on. After North Dakota and New York, it was as simple as 'get the hell out of dodge.'
After the heist in Nevada, she was left with three to six months of free time. Not enough time to start a life somewhere else, too long to spend on vacation.
Rusty pulled up in front of her hotel in that heap of his, told her to grab her bags, and they just rolled. Problem was, Rusty couldn't go six weeks, let along six months, without pulling something on the side. They ended up on the wrong side of some gunrunners in Texas and spent a week and a half in a motel about forty-five miles too far off the beaten path. The ice machine was always full of tepid water, the TV picked up three channels fuzzily, and Tess didn't speak to him for two days.
On the third day, she realized he'd been playing her all along, doing anything he could to keep her mind off of Danny and the second life she's had to leave behind.
On the fifth day, the heat wave that'd been threatening came down in full force, and their room's air conditioner gave one last gasping breath and died. They spent the next few days sprawled across the room, not moving. By the eighth day the temperature was above 110, and they could have cooked supper on the hood of Rusty's car.
She remembers sprawling across her bed in a tank top and faded cutoff jeans, trying not to move and waiting for the cool of the evening.
(Good things come to those who wait, her mother used to whisper as she tucked Tess in, window open and breeze coming in off the lake.)
Rusty was draped half-on half-off the couch, watching the curtains for any faint stir of air at the open window. He was so perfectly, perfectly still, hollow at the base of his throat beaded with sweat.
She wanted him in a way she hadn't wanted anything in a very long time, and she was so very tired of waiting.
*
Lying to yourself shouldn't count, Tess thinks. Turns a keycard over in between her hands and the thought over and over in her mind.
*
The door to Rusty's room isn't dead bolted, which is how she knows everything's going to be all right.
He knows she lifted his key – her fingers in his pocket brushed his leg and he looked right at her and tried not to laugh.
He's got all the lights off except one, a Tiffany in the corner spitting low beams of multicoloured light.
"The thing is," she says, closing the door softly behind her. "That I want to want it. The house, the flowers, the painting studio and the husband who sells insurance. I want to want it."
Rusty's standing, staring out at the city through the glass door of the balcony, and he inclines his head. She's standing in his room, stripped naked before him because if Tess Ocean is only the woman she's wanted to be, this the truth that the mask's been hiding.
"I know," he says, and turns from the window to where she's standing by the door, trying her best to look like she knows what she's doing.
"Danny gave me everything I asked for, and I want to want it," Tess says. Takes a step into the room, and another. "I do."
"I know," Rusty says.
"He's not happy," she says, finally. Stops close enough to Rusty to touch. "And I don't know what to do about it."
"Tess," he says, and touches her face. "What did I say? Lying to yourself is a habit you have to break again and again."
"I know," she says. Rusty's all gold and amber in the faint light, and she doesn't trust herself to look at him. "I know."
"Tess," he says again, and tilts her face to his. "I haven't told you anything you didn't already know. Why are you here?"
She traces the lines of his tattoo with one nail. "It turns out I missed you," she says, and it's nothing but the truth.
He seems a little surprised, because he's not trying to be anyone she wants, not like he was in Texas when she needed something, anything, to keep her mind off of the life she left behind and her once-again husband in jail.
She traces the lines around his hand and wrist, fingers sliding up beneath the silk of his shirt to find it. His breath is warm against her neck but the only place they're touching is where her fingertips are sliding across his arm.
He sighs, finally, a warm puff of air against her skin, and his other hand drops to her hip. "Tess," he says, voice low and teeth flashing. "It's nice to finally meet you."
She shivers, and he lets his thumb brush back and forth along the skin beneath the very bottom of her shirt.
"I'm sure I'll enjoy making your acquaintance," she says, and they're tugging each other backwards towards the bed, all artists' fingers and pickpockets' grace.
*
So Tess is a liar, and a cheater, and (she suspects) about to become a thief again.
She feels oddly fine.
*
The morning sun is creeping into the room, yellow light burning its way across the carpet. The balcony door is open, so the call of morning traffic works its way into the room.
"Danny's due back in tomorrow," Rusty says, finally. He's sprawled across more than his share of the bed, and his shiny shirt is in a pile by the glass door, catching the light and casting a hundred different colours.
"I know," Tess says, and closes her eyes. "I left him a note on the kitchen table."
Silence, then. Someone lays on the horn as they pass below, and Tess holds her breath. Finally, Rusty laughs. "I take it –"
"Seven tomorrow evening at the latest," she says.
Los Angeles air rushes through the room in a gust, all exhaust and cement and new hope, and it feels almost like home.
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