Leave It to Me (21 page)

“Look, let’s be honest, Devi,” Jess said on the phone to me at the agency office. “It isn’t working out.”

“I’ll have to call you back, I’m on the line with Santa Monica about the Slater tour. Are you at home?”

“No. Devi, put Santa Monica on hold. This is urgent. It’s eating me up. I can’t handle what you must think of me. I hate not being straight with people. We didn’t plan it this way. Neither of us did. I don’t know how seriously involved you were with Ham. I mean, we need desperately to talk about the situation.”

“Are you at Ham’s?”

“It just happened, there’s no explaining it or apologizing for it. I mean, I’m not asking you to leave or anything. It just seems so awkward …”

“I’ll have to call you back, Jess, the Slater development sounds messy.”

“You’re not listening, Devi.”

“You feel guilty, deal with it. Ciao!”

The cyber-politician, Cindah Slater, didn’t get to promote her memoir,
I Keep Going Home
, in San Francisco. She was too unpopular as a spokesperson to ever be elected to any one post, in any one city. She’d found her
niche by moving beyond any issue. “It’s not drugs, it’s dealing with the effects of drugs,” she’d say. Or “We live in a postrace society,” or “I don’t give a rat’s ass about Medicare and balanced budgets. I’m looking to the real balance in this country …” She was accustomed to cheers, and when the cheers weren’t loud enough for her as-told-to memoir in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Iowa City … she had her breakdown; she slashed her wrist in a hotel bathtub. The media stayed with the breakdown-and-suicide-attempt story. A television “newsmagazine” interviewed the limo driver who had chauffeured her the evening of the Breakdown. The limo driver was a middle-aged man, with a middleweight fighter’s broken face and a spreading belly tucked into dark suit pants. He said, “You hire a limo, you get a bar, you get a TV, a cell phone, a fax machine, but no tissues to weep into. When you arrive at the limo stage, tears is verboten. So, I offered the lady my handkerchief. A personal gesture. She needed it, too, I can tell you.”

I later saw the limo driver on
Ricki Lake
and
Jenny Jones
. He wore Armani suits on both. He talked of his childhood in Romania. “You need to have spent time in hell,” he informed the studio audience, “to really appreciate heaven.”

Pragmatic advice for all readers of the imaginary syndicated column “Dear Devi.” Use your ingenuity, hustle being at the right place at the right time to turn your two-bit anonymous life into cash-cow celebrity.

FOR GUILT-STRICKEN IN SAUSALITO
: Please expect a personal response to your request.

The West Coast publicity office of Cindah Slater’s publisher’d been on the line, its fifth call, when Jess was angling for absolution. On the sixth call, the publicity people decided to cancel the rest of the Slater book tour because they couldn’t make the suicide-attempt story work to sell $24. 95 hardcovers. I spent half an office day canceling the memoirist’s Bay Area appointments. “Due to unforeseen developments …”: that was the line with the media, and with managers of bookstores.

The rest of my work that week was routine. I took messages, updated itineraries, tidied up Jess’s files and alphabetized clients’ books, starting with Ariana Ash,
This Age of Decadence
, and finishing with Herman Yanofsky,
I Winked, the Stars Wobbled
. I tried reading Ash’s novel, set in Manhattan. East Side, not Nicole’s or Angie’s West Village Manhattan. The back cover described Ash as “the Edith Wharton for the nineties,” but the thirty pages I scanned read like Martha Stewart hints on the care and feeding of East Side male availables. I tucked Ash back in her new niche on the top shelf, and pulled Yanofsky out of his cramped slot on the bottom. You didn’t have to know zilch about astronomy to fall for this astronomer. Yanofsky was into the tragedy of heroic, dying stars, the comedy of parasitical planets, the wackiness of comets, the adolescence of the solar system. He played hide-and-seek with a billion galaxies I had known nothing about in high school. He walked on “dark matter” swirling between galaxies, and I followed. The universe was a cosmic aspic embedded with worlds instead of Mama’s fruit salad.

Jess’s tormentor called twice before I got to the end of Yanofsky’s chapter “The Manifest and the Un-Manifest.” The tormentor wasn’t put off when I told him that Jess wasn’t in the office. “The message is her friend called, called again, that is. Tell her, please, that the call was local, which is to say that the friend is in the vicinity.” The voice was, strange to say, Frankie-like; I began to panic that it was meant for me. I mean, a filtered accent, something hugely foreign squeezed through the grate of English. The second time, I didn’t give the blackmailer a chance to speak. He started with a Peter Lorre laugh when he heard my “Hello, Leave It to Me.” I hung up before he’d brought that laugh to a sinister finish.

The MindWorks publicist, Mikki, faxed from New York to remind me that Ma Varuna would be traveling with her pet monkey and might need the services of a veterinarian, and then a second time notifying me of a change in M. V.’s flight schedule. Ma Varuna, formerly Bette Ann Krutch of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and her simian companion were originally scheduled to arrive on a morning flight from Portland. The second fax, addressed to me, not Jess, was handwritten on a sheet that had the elaborate Mind-Works Press logo—the serene face of Buddha with two Buddha-profiles sticking out of it in place of ears—but the fax ID at the top read
Fax Central
instead of
MindWorks. Due to the generosity of her nature, MV has given of her aura unstintingly to her legion psycho-nutrient-deprived admirers. In order to restore the healthfulness of a senior citizens’ group in Multnomah County, she has decided to conduct an unscheduled lecture and levitation demonstration in the morning, and arrive in time for her first print interview in the Bay Area
. I got the publicist’s message. Her author was exhausted, and wanted to sleep in. Portland was the eleventh city in her twelve-city promo tour. Get M. V. in and out of San Francisco before she has her collapse.

I faxed Mikki back.
Our agency delivers what it promises. Leave it to us, and relax
. I added a smiley face. Jess always personalized her faxes with smiley faces and exclamation points.

Then I looked up the names and phone numbers of three vets who specialized in exotic pets, wondered if, but didn’t verify that, Purina sold monkey chow and finally locked up at the office and headed home to Beulah Street, speculating all the way back on how I could get my own celebrity-making sound bite by snitching on Emad the closet terrorist. But to whom? To the FBI? The INS? The IRS? I wished I could share my insight on Emad with Larry … I missed Larry. I’d had no clue I’d miss him so much.

Questions I never wanted answered: Was Ma Varuna a person or a high concept? Does the supply of mystics create the demand for metaphysical healthfulness? Did Bette Ann Krutch of Delaware find true happiness when she changed her name to Ma Varuna (translated in the kit as “Mother Wind-Goddess”)? Do wind-goddesses give birth to typhoons, tornadoes and hurricanes?

I sat with a frozen yogurt and a sack of bananas in an uncrowded gate at SFO and went over the promo kit Mikki had couriered.
Vitality!
—Ma Varuna’s third hardcover—was a tough read for nonbelievers. Not that I count myself among them. Still, I’m not a believer. The believer is a different animal from the gullible. The gullible grabs at quick fixes, turns how-to books like
Vitality!
into national best-sellers. I buy on impulse, but I mail in the warranty. Yield to hope, contain the betrayal.

I gave the book a chance. It had a pretty cover. Cheetahs lunged at lotuses in green-blue space that was either a forest or an ocean. I admired the art design, then the page that listed “Other Books by Ma Varuna,” and after that the title page, and the acknowledgments page, but I didn’t get past the two “poetic
pensées
” quoted as epigraphs. The
word
pensée
was translated as “philosophical thought” in a footnote.

The first
pensée
, “Wisdom,” was printed in italicized, gilt letters.

The sage stands silent on one leg

on the snowcapped peak of Mount Everest;

Master springs from bough to leafy bough

Lassoing fruit and heaven with furry tail
.

The sage seeks but does not find
,

Master does not seek but tail-pulls in

True wisdom, which is but emptiness
.

The second
pensée
’s title must have been a printer’s error. “Nuclear Fusion” didn’t make sense for the two-line riddle:

Mother’s milk; cobra’s venom
.

Equal delicacies when tasted in heaven
.

That one I got in the gut. Deadly today, lifesaving tomorrow. I called Ham’s houseboat from the gate area on my cell phone. Jess’s voice on his tape. “We are working on the new and improved edition of the
Kamasutra
. Please leave your name and number. We’ll get back to you when we come down from heaven.”

I returned to Ma Varuna’s promotional material.

The kit included a detachable chart of a human body, divided and labeled like cuts of meat in a chart on a butcher’s wall. In place of cuts like chuck, rib, rump, flank, shank, sirloin, the nutritionist’s chart listed body sites for negative aptitudes, such as sloth, loutishness, mordancy, indecisiveness, narcissism, wrath. On the back
of the chart was a recipe for “Ma’s Bitter Melon and Fenugreek Casserole.”

The only publicity photo I found in the kit was that of a Mexican spider monkey. The monkey had a name: Master. The monkey’s tiny eyes were glazed with an appealing desperate dreaminess. Were there on-line chat rooms for a wind-goddess’s pets and spiritual daughters?

The monkey found me before I found the author. Master ignored the bananas, went for the chocolate-flavored frozen yogurt. One moment I was coddling a cone, my tongue was caressing sweet, creamy swirls; the next, my neck was lassoed by a skinny tail, and a spider monkey no bigger than a cat was licking yogurt-drip off the ridged sides of the cone.

“Low fat, I hope?”

I heard the Bacall-deep voice behind me, I breathed in the spicy sandalwood cologne, I succumbed—like Jess?—to the beauty and spell of a god or a devil. Among the slicker-clad passengers getting off the plane, Ma Varuna, in her gauzy silk tunic, her satin pants, her rich velvet cape and her silver-heeled T-strap dancing shoes, was more an apparition than a touring author in her attention-getting travel clothes.

Two factoids to pass on to Jess:

1. Deities don’t glow

2. The devil’s horns are retractable

Message to Mr. Bullock, may he burn in hell: You didn’t have a clue about what made my poem a poem, but you started all this.