“That doesn’t look like a wild rabbit.”
“No.” He cradles it carefully. “It looks like something you’d pull out of a hat.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Margo has an animal sanctuary upstairs. Margo is my mother,” he explains. “Do you like animals? Would you like to see it?”
“Um . . .” I stretch back toward the stairwell. The bag has landed under the eaves, halfway in a planter. His nose wrinkles. He takes a step toward me. “I would love to see it.”
“Excellent.” His smile is extra sharp. He holds the rabbit over his heart. It buries its head into the crook of his elbow.
As we cross the courtyard and pass above the stairwell, the smell hits my nostrils hard. There is no way he can’t smell it, no way he won’t know. But he doesn’t pull a face. He just smiles at me without teeth, so dimples appear on either side of his lips.
We pass onto the street. “I’m sorry about the gate,” he says. “You would think this was a bad neighborhood.”
* * *
ON THE OTHER side of the street, we step through a gate and into his mother’s famous gardens. He leads me through all nine circles of hell, pauses at each to explain what they are, what the joke is. He thinks I want to appreciate them. Really, I just want my heart to stop racing.
“Fraud,” he says. My chest compresses. The garden is meant to look like flames, with bright red and yellow and orange flowers climbing up the wall. A topiary scorpion is frozen in the fire, caught midsnap.
I point at it. “It’s supposed to have the face of an honest man. Geryon, right? It has the face of an honest man but the tail of a scorpion.”
He cocks his head. “You read?”
“I have a library card.” What I don’t tell him is that I have spent actual years in the library downtown. It started when I was young. I would go there to hide. Walk through the stacks, build a great pile of books, then hunker down in a cubicle—the one on the top floor next to the staff elevator was best. And I would read one book after another, as if I could read my way into another world, make it stick. I read to save my life. Someone like him, meanwhile, reads so they can misquote books at dinner parties, corner someone and argue them into submission.
“What’s your favorite book?” he says brightly.
“Candide.”
“？‘The best of all possible worlds.’？”
“Exactly.”
“Funny.” The white rabbit is so at ease with him that it falls asleep in his arms.
I keep following him into the garden. I guess that makes me Dante. I guess that makes him Virgil. Anger. Greed. Gluttony. Lust. By the time we reach the top, although I can see his glass house down below and the trees and Demi’s car, I would swear we were in another world.
It even smells different here, although I suppose I can hold the flowers responsible for that. But the air is better. My fear has subsided. I can breathe again.
I wonder if wealth isn’t a little like heroin. My dad once explained to me the feeling of being high: You don’t feel good. You don’t feel bad. It’s the absence of feeling. Good and bad cease to exist. Dressed in Demi’s clothes, at the top of this elaborate garden, standing with a man in a three-piece suit cradling a rabbit, I feel nothing. And it’s the best feeling in the world.
I am looking at the view, drinking it all in. He waits politely.
“Why did your mother make this?”
His dimples show, and he strokes the rabbit. “It started as a joke, I guess. My mother is quite outrageous.” He looks up. His eyes have the most compelling blankness. “She likes to make people uncomfortable. She’s funny like that.” He sighs. “She’s a great fan of animals. She prefers them to people, but who doesn’t? Let me show you.”
I imagined the animal sanctuary would be like a kennel, with wire cages and boxes, but it’s not. The rabbits hop freely in a rabbit field surrounded by a low rock wall. A circular barn holds miniature horses and goats and alpacas. It’s idyllic and pastoral, the way rich people imagine farms to be.
At the rabbit enclosure, Graham struggles to extract the bunny from his arms.
“Do you think the rabbit came from here?” I ask. “It likes you.”
“Do you think?” He removes it nail by nail, then deposits it on the lawn inside the fence. “I suppose it could have come from here. My mother is very careful but sometimes the staff’s children like to play with the animals.” He swings his legs over the rock wall, sits down and watches his rabbit friend hop off. “I used to play here myself as a child. I always loved the animal world. Do you?’