Acting Badly. Michael Scofield

ran a palm across her eyes and stared at the red goo that smeared it. Gripping the waistband of the slacks, she grabbed her robe and hobbled along the blue, now crimson Zuni carpet into the bathroom.

      When he heard the shower’s splash, he pried off the miniskirt and lowered his buttocks onto the heap of clothes, leaning against the footboard, stenciled with the outlines of Toggenburg goats and shipped from Vermont with the headboard. He took his tumid penis and, setting his jaw, began to pump, squashed tomatoes bouncing against his chest. After a dozen strokes he groaned, arching his back to the onrush of semen that spurted into the green ruffles scalloping his wrist.

      He waited for the tingle in his thighs to subside as the sounds of shower water stopped. With his forefinger he swiped a dollop of semen off his knee and licked the sweet pungency, blinking at the concrete slab’s crack. He began to figure the cost of having it repaired. Three thousand dollars easy—the edges were crumbling. Three thousand? More like ten to jackhammer the concrete into chunks and replace the tubing. Plus a call to his lawyer to initiate a lawsuit.

      He was reaching to undo the bra when Helen marched from the bathroom in her robe. Hair sleeked back and glistening, she stared at him but said nothing until she turned away.

      “Twenty minutes if you want to eat.”

      “I’ll catch something near the office.” He wondered if she heard. All he wanted was to wander the lawn with the llamas, bask with them under the drifting clouds, whistle off flies.

      Palms cupping the bra’s soaked cotton, he blew out air and trudged to the bathroom where he dropped bra and the tomatoes into the sink.

      Five minutes down from upper Camino de Cruz Blanca, natty in a mohair turtleneck and hip-hugger black denims, Chuck mouthed the last of a poppy-seed bagel. He aimed for the driveway skirting his office at Palace and Otero, a renovated adobe perched on a mound garnished with hollyhocks to honor his mother. She had died three years before, following a head-on collision at Cerrillos and St. Michael’s with a young woman high on heroin.

      In the rear parking area Chuck spotted Alexis’s mountain bike, handlebars spread like steer horns and leaning against the flaking trunk of a salt cedar.

      Leaving his blue blazer folded over the passenger headrest, he shut the door of his Saab and hurried across the gravel with his laptop. Even at nine, the air smelled like a just-opened refrigerator. Cold chafed his ankles. The neighborhood’s feral black-and-white cat, its ribcage prominent, slinked into the waving heads of sowthistle. On the back steps he wiped dust from his loafers with a handkerchief, plucked a spiderweb from the black grille that protected the door’s window, and scratched his cheek.

      “Good morning,” he called, unlocking the door. Past Alexis’s broad back he watched the just-leased Bloomberg Financial News System—by satellite from New York—run price/earnings ratios across one of its twin screens.

      To bury his rage over how his mother had ended, two and a half years before he’d decided to update his CPA license, earned in New York City at Deloitte & Touche, and expand from calculating his and Helen’s taxes to offering advice to others from an office near the Plaza. Soon he was also counseling investors.

      Exploding a pink bubble of gum, his stocky assistant swiveled to face him. “Sorry,” she smiled, chewing. “Oh my god.” She jammed her knuckles to the braided skirt band above her pelvis.

      Plopping the laptop on his desk, he stared with her at the mustard-colored, black-banded creature creeping from a hole below the copier. Last year a workman, laying planks for a new floor, had cut a board too short. The dozens of legs they saw scrabbling resembled the tentacles of sea anemones his son Mark had described in his seventh-grade midterm. Its head pincers opened and shut as it wound along the base of the replastered wall.

      “Isn’t it gorgeous?” Alexis pinched a bunch of brown hair behind her ear. “The thing’s as long as my forearm.”

      “How do we get rid of it?”

      “Hey, boss, you aren’t scared? Look, it’s squirming up toward the latillas.” She popped another pink bubble as the centipede wriggled into the darkness between two debarked tree limbs.

      “C’mon, toss that gum while we’re talking.”

      “Sure.” The wad pinged the metal bottom of the wastebasket. “Confer at the mogul’s table?” She grabbed a sheaf of printouts from her desk.

      He strode past, inhaling the scent that always moved him—of the sheets and pillowcases his mother hung out when he was growing up. Under her shaggy sweaters and calf-length skirts, did Alexis wear bras and panties soaked in sunshine?

      He wondered what it was like biking into Santa Fe’s quiet frenzy from Arroyo Hondo. Alexis lived with a woman named Baby who was even stockier than her who raised churro sheep and called Alexis “Sweetheart.” Baby thought Alexis’s stories works of genius, “which they aren’t,” she’d insisted the day before, as she and Chuck staple-gunned Compassion for Iraqis and Stop the War Machine to laths for tomorrow’s march.

      But Chuck had read one of Alexis’s stories about a lesbian woman’s fury at her father, the president of a Masonic Lodge, for keeping an adulterous tryst with a gay man in drag. He thought Baby right.

      “Bring us some water, will you?” he called over his shoulder.

      In the big room that opened onto a kitchen, Chuck glanced through the window at the still-blossomless hollyhocks. Sitting, he stared at the abstract by a former client looming on a windowless wall. Its pink and azure contortions told Chuck, This chaos is you, buddy, big time—half an hour ago you turned androgynous.

      “Mrs. Morgan’s gonna be there?” Alexis’s contralto brought his gaze to her printouts as she set water on the table’s mahogany planks.

      “She is,” he said, gulping. The cold water calmed him.

      “She’s a loose cannon.”

      “Can be.”

      “And the mortgage guy she uses?”

      “There, too.”

      “They’ll probably want Mr. Wilkes to buy residential, right?” Alexis asked.

      “Good idea, you think?”

      “The morning news says Bush is jetting to the Azores to meet Blair and Spain’s prime minister. It’s not a last-ditch brain-racking to find peace. It’s a war council, all about oil and establishing a permanent military base, you and I know that.”

      “We do.”

      “Bloomberg shows personal bankruptcies up twenty percent in the same number of years, boss. A long-term treasury bond is paying under five percent, the lowest since the nineteen sixties.”

      “You know you already understand the blue-screened monster better than I do? After April fifteenth I’m going to start training you on our Lacerte Tax program, in case I get laid up.”

      “Sure, boss. Anyhow, you say to expect a crash if the war lengthens past a couple of months or we dictate democracy and the Iraqis balk.”

      “ ‘Balk’ meaning they turn Iraq into a second Vietnam.”

      “That’s a loud sigh.”

      He stared at her. “So what do I advise Bret Wilkes?”

      “His portfolio looks like sixty percent blue chips, thirty percent municipals, and the rest liquid in Schwab’s Value Added. His portfolio is down seventeen percent from this time last year—current value nearly a million bucks. But the prelim tax return you gave me shows an excess of business income. He needs a deduction.”

      He sighed again. “I better tell him to cash out three hundred thousand dollars and have Maxine find him income property that generates a net loss.”

      Watching him, Alexis took a fistful