That night, in bed at Sadie’s apartment, Marx asked Sadie if she was certain she wanted to make Master of the Revels, sans Sam.
“Are you saying you don’t think I’m capable?” Sadie was ready for a fight.
“No, of course not,” Marx said.
“Because I was making games without him, long before we started making games together.”
“I know that,” Marx said. “I think the games”—he chose his words carefully—“have a different energy when the two of you work together.”
“We’re barely speaking,” Sadie said. “And when we do speak, it’s not that creative, as you and everyone else at Unfair can plainly hear, and things haven’t been good for us for some time. I don’t see how we can work together. He hates the idea for Master of the Revels, and I love the idea, and I think we’ll honestly kill each other if we work on this. I don’t think we’re breaking up forever. But I do think the two of us need some time apart so that we can like each other again.
“And, maybe it’s more me than him. But I want to do something on my own. Something that is fully mine. Something that no one can attribute, for better or for worse, to Sam.”
“I understand that, and I support you. Master of the Revels, a game by Sadie Green. Let it be known! But I’m curious about something. I’ve been here the whole time, and I’ve never understood what happened between you and Sam. You two were so tight that Zoe once told me that if I needed to get you to do something, all I had to do was tell you it was for Sam, and vice versa.”
“It’s not one thing,” Sadie said. “For a long time, I thought it was one thing…But it’s everything.”
“But is there one thing?” Marx persisted.
“This will sound crazy. Sam thought it sounded crazy when I told him. You remember when we went to Dov for Ulysses? Sam claimed he didn’t know that Dov had been my teacher and my lover, and I found out that he had known both of those things.”
“How?”
“Dov had signed the CD-ROM you both were playing.”
Sadie went to her desk, and she took out the CD-ROM, and she showed it to Marx. Marx read the inscription. “God, Dov was the worst,” he said.
“I know.”
“Explain it to me. What difference does it make that Sam knew that?”
“Well, it means that he cared more about making Ichigo than he did about my well-being. For many years, I was the reverse—I loved our games, but I cared about Sam more. And for me, this betrayal came to be emblematic of all the other times I felt that Sam had chosen the games and himself over everything.”
“But that’s Sam,” Marx said. “You two aren’t that different. You’re both obsessed with the work.”
“I am different. I moved to California for him. I know there were other reasons, but you and I both essentially moved to California for him.”
“I don’t mean to dig up fossils, but Sam believed he was, in part, moving to California for you. He was worried about you. About your relationship with Dov…”
“We never spoke of that,” Sadie said. “I don’t see how that can even be true.”
“But he and I did,” Marx said. “Often.”
Sadie shook her head.
“And Sadie? Not that it necessarily matters, but I’m not certain Sam would have ever seen that Dead Sea CD-ROM. I remember that afternoon very clearly. You were sleeping in the bedroom, and Sam was going through all the games we had to look for graphical references for Ichigo, and he’d worked his way through his pile, so I went over to your bookshelf to get your games. I’m certain I would have been the one to get up and put Dead Sea in the drive, because I was always worried about Sam’s foot, and it would have been easier for me to get up and sit back down. And I know that I didn’t look at the CD, and Sam wouldn’t have had time to either.”
Marx would have liked this to be true, but Sadie knew he was mistaken.
“I know it’s not only that…” Marx continued.
“It isn’t. It’s Ichigo II, and Sam always taking credit, and maybe, as I said before, it isn’t even Sam. I just want something of my own, and I don’t want to negotiate with him. I’m only twenty-six, Marx. I don’t have to work with him on every little thing I do for the rest of my life.”
The phone rang, and Marx answered it. It was their realtor. Sadie’s lease was almost up in Clownerina, and they had put in an offer on a house in Venice, a grayish-purplish, weather-beaten two-story, with clapboard siding, east of Abbot Kinney. The house had been built in the 1920s, like most everything in L.A., and it had a dangerous, banister-less staircase, French doors everywhere, wide plank floors, and a living room with an A-frame that looked like a church. （In fact, the house had been briefly occupied by one of the many cults that pass through Southern California on the road to Enlightenment and Nirvana.） The house was in an appealing, but livable, state of decay. A thirty-foot-tall bougainvillea was in the process of strangling a palm tree out front; the fence that surrounded the property was at a 45-degree angle in places; the roof would need repairs sooner rather than later. The listing had called it a “Boho Dream”—Boho, meaning “overpriced for the work you’re about to do.” Marx spoke with the realtor, and then he covered the mouthpiece and turned to Sadie.
“She wants to know if we’re willing to come up with our offer,” Marx said.
In the time since she and Marx had been looking, they’d lost out on several houses. California real estate moved briskly. Sadie had accustomed herself to disappointment, and she didn’t get attached to any of the houses anymore. “It’s a great house,” Sadie said. “But I guess there’ll be other houses. It’s up to you.”
“I like this house,” Marx said. “I think this might be our house.”
“Let’s do it, then,” Sadie said. “We’ll come up a little, and we’ll see what happens.”
A few days later, their offer had been accepted.
Two months later, post tenting and lock changing and the endless signing of papers, they moved in.
“Should I carry you over the threshold?” Marx asked.
“We’re not married, so I think I’m good to walk on my own two feet,” Sadie said.
She unlocked the door, and they walked through to the small backyard. It was fall, and two of their three fruit trees were in season: a Fuyu persimmon tree and a guava tree.
“Sadie, do you see this? This is a persimmon tree! This is my favorite fruit.” Marx picked a fat orange persimmon from the tree, and he sat down on the now termite-free wooden deck, and he ate it, juice running down his chin. “Can you believe our luck?” Marx said. “We bought a house with a tree that has my actual favorite fruit.”
Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before. My God, she thought, he is so easy to love. “Shouldn’t you wash that?” Sadie asked.