The Diamond Lane (18 page)

“Called American Express. Or, we had a FAX machine at the production office.”

“She deserved it, then,” said Shirl. “She made her bed.”

“I'm not proud of it, but there it is. Dominique was very… persistent.”

“And there you were up there in the fog, in the forest, with the gorillas,” said Mimi. “I'd have done the same thing.”

“The weeks passed, still nothing from Mouse. I was convinced she was seeing Uncle Ni. It turned out she hadn't contacted me because word had gotten back to Nairobi about me and Dominique. Then I heard that Uncle Ni had proposed and she had accepted him. I thought I would go off my bean. I got sick. An abscessed liver, a result of the medicine I'd been taking for the blasted dysentery. Fever, horrid cramps. Dominique got a local doctor up from Butare. He gave me something, to this day I'm not certain what exactly, which provoked a toxic reaction. The cramps got worse, the fever higher. I was dead sure I was going to die, and before I did, I wanted to see Mouse, Uncle Ni or no Uncle Ni. At that time Flora was heading back to Nairobi. I asked her if she would go to Mouse and tell her the situation. I gave her the carved ebony ring Mouse had given me, and asked her to give it to Mouse as proof that this was true.

“I began to recover. Still, nothing from Mouse. Then, one day, at the production office, I saw a FAX had come over the wire, ripped in two, tossed in the garbage can. Dominique had intercepted it and thrown it out. It was from Mouse, saying she was coming.”

“And did she?”

“She did.”

“And you've been together ever since,” said Mimi.

“Indeed. When we returned to Nairobi she moved in with me.”

“And to think we thought she didn't have a romantic bone in her body,” said Shirl.

Tony drained his drink, stood and stretched, dissatisfied with his performance. He'd made it sound as though all he and Mouse ever did in the way of a date was meet for drinks. Then again, he didn't want it to seem as though they'd just hopped
into bed like a couple of characters in a Kingsley Amis novel, although they had.

Mimi checked on dinner. Shirl wandered into the other room to see where Auntie Barb had disappeared to. Tony found Mouse lying on the diving board, blowing smoke rings into the night.

“'Eow, poppet, takin' a bit a the evenin' air, are we?” Tony knelt by the side of the pool, twirled a finger in the water. “It's bloody freezing. Vince said you could swim all year long here.”

“Vince obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.”

“Your mother and sister loved the story.”

“They also love those phone company commercials where babies are held up to gurgle into the receiver for Gram and Gramps.”

“We're not having another row about this.”

“I just don't like our personal life being turned into a David Lean epic.”

“You would be bloody lucky if Lean wanted to do it.” You're bloody lucky Ralph and V.J. Parchman have taken an interest in it, he wanted to say.

Several days before, Ralph had rung him up. He'd done some calling around and found out that V.J. Parchman was in fact Tony's Peace Corps friend Vince. Also, and more importantly, V.J. had a deal at Columbia and was actively looking for a true-life story set in Africa. Tony and Ralph met for drinks, and Tony told him the same story he had just told Mimi and Shirl. It was, in fact, the basis for
Love Among the Gorillas
, the screenplay he had begun in Vince's filmic writing seminar in the quiet corner of the bar in Nairobi the year before.

Ralph went berserk. He adored the concept. It was a three-hankie weepie. It was a thousand theaters at Christmas. Every other movie love story paled in comparison. With Tony's permission he called V.J.'s office and briefly pitched it over the phone. The assistant pitched it even more briefly to V.J., who was interested enough to set up a meeting. Could I, Ralph asked
reverently, read the script? Tony dropped it off at his office on Wednesday afternoon at three o'clock. By the time he got back to the apartment there was a message on the machine. Ralph loved it. He would love it to be his directorial debut. He had a good relationship with V.J., or at least with his assistant, and he was sure this was something V.J. would really spark to. Tony had not told Mouse.

“Lucky? What do you mean? This is our life, not
entertainment
.”

“It's the wedding that's gotten you so on edge.” Tony sat down next to her on the diving board.

“Why am I the only one it's gotten on edge? You're involved in this too, you know.”

“Yes, but as the groom, my job is merely to get myself to the church on time, whereas –”

“– whereas I'm responsible for everything else. Great.”

“Are you saying you don't want to get married?”

Mouse looked through a wobbly, dissipating smoke ring at Mimi, Shirl, and Auntie Barb in the kitchen. They seemed to be engaged in careful debate over the appropriate salt and pepper shakers. “No.”

“Good.” He took a drag off her cigarette and gave her the smoke back in a kiss.

The end of his screenplay ended not with Mouse coming to him in Rwanda but with their wedding on the mountain, in the fog, among the gorillas.

8.

NITA KATZ
'
S OFFICE WAS IN AN OLDER BUILDING IN
Beverly Hills, the kind that used to house third-rate detective agencies in
film noir
from the nineteen-forties. It was on the sixth floor, between two mediums, each of whom was allegedly possessed by the spirit of one of the original Warner Brothers.

“How do they both stay in business?” asked Mouse. She perched uncomfortably on the edge of Nita's mooshy mauve sofa. Nita handed her a cup of coffee in a big white cup balanced on a steering wheel-sized saucer. Mimi stuck to an Evian. Sometimes even the bubbles in a Perrier brought on a binge.

“One channels Jack, the other channels Sam,” said Nita. “You should see the studio executives in and out of there. All day long. Fiancé of a client of mine has been to both. Jack always counsels making the picture but keeping the cost down. Sam says don't make the picture unless you can get somebody big box office.”

“How are they in life or death situations?” asked Mouse.

“Those
are
life or death situations,” said Mimi. “She just got back from Africa.”

“Really? Safari?”

“She
lived
there,” said Mimi. “That's why she needs you. I told her you were a genius.”

Mouse had to hold the cup and saucer with two hands. They were special
café au lait
cups imported from Italy, Nita said. Used to drinking everything from goat's milk to vodka from the
odd jar or tin camp cup, Mouse was stunned by the size. They held enough coffee and milk to float a tanker.

In fact, everything in the office, from the coffee cups to the eight-by-eight-foot lithograph of Nita's eerily poreless face – executed by, Mouse presumed, some well-known artist – hanging behind her big black laminate desk, to Nita herself, red corkscrew curls, a wonderful Roman nose, was oversized and gleaming. Mouse felt as though she had gone through a shrinking machine.

But Mouse liked Nita. She had a soft, Southern accent-tinged voice. She didn't tell Mouse what Mouse was supposed to want, would wind up wanting, or would regret she didn't have. She listened. She took discreet notes in a black snakeskin notebook.

“What kind of name is Mouse?”

“It's Frances, really. Mouse was a nickname growing up.”

“Just like I'm Mimi. Our real names are Margaret and Frances. Yucky, huh?”

“When Mimi said her sister Mouse I thought it was Mowz or something. Something Arab.”

“Nothing so exotic. Mouse, like it sounds, M-O-U-S-E. Frances, Fran, that's not such a great name. There was a girl in high school, Fran Martinotti – she's probably your cousin – anyway, she had a huge mole on her eyelid. So Frances, no. Mouse is good professionally, too.”

“It is?” said Nita. “In what sense?” She scribbled a few notes. On what, Mouse could not imagine.

Mouse was nervous. That morning she had tried on everything in her suitcase, wondering what the bride-to-be wore to one of these appointments. She settled on the Uniform of the Adult Western Woman: the oatmeal tweed blazer, khaki twill skirt, and brown pumps she'd bought in Nairobi. She saw now she could have stuck to her jeans. Mimi had warned her. Nita wore ballet tights, flats, an old linty black sweatshirt turned inside-out. She sat sideways in her chair, her legs slung over one arm.

Mouse's stomach sputtered and gurgled, making the kind of sounds rarely found outside a high school chemistry lab. “I don't know if Mimi told you,” she continued, too late to disguise them. “I make documentaries. That is, I try to. In Nairobi I found myself specializing in hardship films, documentaries that because of their location or subject are more difficult than usual to make. For example, I did a film on stalagmites. I shot for ten days in a cave a mile and half long, the width of a phone booth.”

“Oooghh.” Nita shook her wide elegant shoulders.

“You know what they said in third grade about prepositions: anywhere a mouse can go. I'm like a preposition in that sense. Or that's how I bill myself.”

“Anywhere a mouse can go?” said Nita doubtfully.

“Under, over, in, on, by –” said Mimi.

“– with,” contributed Nita.

“With, yes, with is a preposition.”

Nita stared at Mouse blankly, her thin silver pen poised above her notebook.

“Now I'm getting married,” said Mouse. “I figure I can shoot in a cave the width of a phone booth, I can get married, right?”

Nita pointed at Mouse with the end of her silver pencil. She tapped the air in front of her pale face with it. “You,” she said, “are a smart woman. What I call a Thinking Bride.”

“That's what I thought
I
was,” Mimi sputtered into her water glass.

“You want the most and the best for your money. You don't have time to waste.”

“The Thinking Bride,” laughed Mouse. “Now there's an oxymoron. Not that I don't want to get married. I do want to get married. It's just, I want something…”

“Perfect.”

“Perfect,” Mouse echoed. “The adjective on everyone's lips.”

Nita petted the glossy red nails of first one hand, then the
other. Mouse watched, mesmerized. The nails were wide and shiny. They looked like the hoods of ten tiny foreign sports cars.

Mouse raised her cup with two hands and sipped her
café au lait
. Suddenly she said, “I tell people I'm getting married, and they're all so
happy
for me. Even people who've never met Tony and hardly even know me.”

“They're jealous you have someone to work the VCR and they don't,” said Mimi.

“As a rule, the people whom you think are the most happy for you are those whom are the least happily married.”

Mouse couldn't help noticing that even though Nita seemed intelligent, she did have trouble distinguishing between that puckish grammatical duo, who and whom.

“You know,” said Mouse, “things have changed since I've been gone. I left in the early seventies and marriage was out. Out, out, out. Everyone thought of it as a prison without wails, being strapped to the same person. It made sense. Even though I was pretty young, it made sense. Why would you want to enslave yourself for life? Now I come back. I come home, and women – Mimi's friends, women I meet around – are frantic. Dying to tie the knot with anyone who's remotely eligible. Falling all over themselves to become their
mothers
, which is what I always thought we never wanted to be,” Mouse blurted out. Her knees were shaking beneath the giant saucer resting on her lap.

“We're all finding out it's easier to be our mothers than ourselves.”

“Are you your mother?” asked Mouse. “You're not your mother, surely.”

“I was my mother. I was a first grade teacher and clipped coupons in Rochester. Who could stand it? I left Gary and moved to L.A.”

“I was Shirl, Mouse,” Mimi said. “You weren't here while I was married. I made tuna casserole and scrubbed the bathroom tile once a week.”

“And now what are you?” Mouse asked Nita. “Happy?”

“I'm happy,” said Mimi.

“Lonely, mostly.” Nita laughed. The chair she was sitting on was taller than the mooshy mauve sofa. Mouse glimpsed the pink roof of her mouth; her teeth were fillingless, bone-china white. Even the back ones. “Used to be, everyone wanted to be free. Now everyone wants to be trapped. But at least they can do it in
style
, right?”

The phone rang, a modern melodic purr. Nita slid off her chair and went to her desk. “… no, no darlin'… they're going to
airlift
the crystal in… uh-huh, as in an
airplane
… six hundred thirty, wine and water… you decided on the orchids? The Fijian ones are the perfect shade, but they do wilt, I can still FAX that florist in Sumatra… I know darlin', I know… it is important… overnight service… right…”