The Diamond Lane (22 page)

E. Bomarito had soft kinky black hair and a black handlebar mustache from which hung the leftovers of a breakfast that included something gooey and beige. A wedge of furry potbelly, featured between the bottom of his limp, tie-dyed T-shirt and the tops of his jeans, was his only other notable feature. He slouched against the doorjamb while they looked around, cleaning an ear with one of his car keys. “No box office, per se, we just stick a coffee can here by the door.”

“This pole,” said Mouse, bunging it with the heel of one hand, “can't we get rid of it?”

“The pole?” said F. Bomarito, “What do you mean?”

“How do you project with this thing here?”

“She didn't tell you?” He gave Mimi a chastising glance. “This used to be a fire station.”

“I told her,” said Mimi. “Couldn't you set up a little card table? I mean, for the box office?”

“This pole is right in line with the lens.”

“Can't people just sort of schooch around it? Move their chairs?”

“Mimi,” Mouse said, “I don't care where people sit, the pole is right in line with the lens.”

Beggars can't be choosers, Mimi was about to say. Just screen your stupid movies and get on with it. She had a fifty-minute drive back to the office in midday traffic. When she got there, she had to do her homework for How to Write a Blockbuster, while pretending to be doing her regular drudge work. The homework was to write the copy for the dust jacket of her projected blockbuster on love and betrayal in the business. The class had not actually begun writing yet. First they created the publicity campaign for their projected books, then they wrote what they considered were ideal glowing reviews, then they did the dust-jacket cover copy, then a plot outline, then character sketches, then the book. They were to think of it like eating an artichoke, Ralph had said.

“We had Werner Herzog here last year,” said E. Bomarito. “He
liked
the pole.”

“I like it, too,” Mimi said. “We could have a brie wheel. Come on, Mouse it'll be a scene. I'll invite everyone I know, all our clients, and we'll get press releases out to the African community. Thaddeus knows people at the
Times
, we can get one of the Arts writers to come.”

Mimi conned Mouse into believing that this was
the
place to premiere her films. Much better than the old-fogy and obvious LAFI. Sure, the Venice Documentary Consortium redefined the word funky, and sure, E. Bomarito was the type of dandruffy intellectual and lost soul who gave documentary a bad name, but she should consider it like a trendy Lower East Side alternative-art space.

Secretly, Mimi knew it would be humiliating. She could only imagine the kind of deadbeats and never-weres who would show up, if anyone showed at all. But she promised she would do PR, she said she would see if she could scam an ad in
the
Times
, round up the little card table for the box office, prod the dim and revolting E. Bomarito to do whatever it was he usually did to promote his screenings. All this she promised. She promised it out of guilt. She promised it because she was not going to invite anyone to this whose opinion she respected, i.e., anyone she knew. Could you see Nita Katz, with her perfect hard-boiled-egg complexion, her bony white shoulders and red corkscrew curls stuck watching a documentary on elephantiasis from behind a pole in a smelly basement with the six or seven loneliest losers in L.A.? Mimi couldn't.

Mimi said she would invite her.

Mouse knew Mimi wouldn't.

THE NIGHT OF
the screening, Mimi caught Mouse talking to herself in the bathroom mirror. Her nose was an inch away from her worried image, her dry brown hands anchored against the side of the sink. “Okay, Frances. You can do this,” she exhaled.

“What are you so nervous about?” Mimi said. “It'll be great. Can I get in here to do my mascara?” She pulled her makeup bag out of the bottom drawer.

Mouse dropped the lid of the toilet and sat down, chin in hand. She wore a stretched-out black cotton sweater and black leggings, castoffs from Mimi. The leggings fell in folds around her ankles, the sweater was like a dress. Mouse resolved every morning to go out and buy herself some new clothes, but frankly she was terrified. Of the stores, the salesgirls, the selection, the prices. She had not scrutinized her looks in sixteen years, and had come to the conclusion that compared to every other woman in Los Angeles, she was a withered hag. Mimi's wrong-headed solution was a perm. Now Mouse's dark thick hair sprung straight up, a soufflé of curls. All efforts to comb it flat failed.

“You look sort of like the Bride of Frankenstein, except without the white streak. Your hair and everything,” said Mimi. She hung from the waist, scrunching her own blond curls.

“Great.”

“I meant it as a compliment,” she said. “You look really hip instead of like a Crosby, Stills and Nash groupie.”

Mouse glowered. The Pink Fiend advised her: You're just nervous about the screening. Mimi means well. After all who set up this thing for you in the first place? You're just jealous because she looks so terrific and you look like a piece of dried fruit with hair.

Mouse said nothing. Sniffy Voyeur appeared at the doorway, his big black nostrils working the smells in the bathroom. He hobbled over to Mouse and laid his pointy nose on the toilet seat between her legs. She scratched his head, worrying again that they hadn't been able to afford to get a new print of
The New Stanley
struck before the screening.

“Did Tony tell you about their meeting with V.J. Parchman?” Mimi asked.

“You mean Vince Parchman? He was supposed to be in Kenya teaching tribal mothers how to give basic medical care to their kids. He took the children to the movies – some for the first time – and told them they could make that magic, plus be richer than the richest tribesman. He got them to spend what little money they had on a screenwriting class. Some of the parents thought he was teaching a literacy class and sold cattle to pay for it.”

“Not that you would've gotten any info out of Tony anyway. Ralph won't even tell me what they're doing. He's gotten really superstitious. I think it was all those years blabbing everyone's ear off about
Girls on Gaza
, then having nothing happen. It's bad luck to talk about what you have in the works.”

“I'm just glad Tony is seeing about work,” Mouse said. “He really likes his leisure.”

“That's how I am: a sensualist who likes relaxing.”

Mouse rolled her eyes at Sniffy. His old brown eyes were milky with cataracts. His breath smelled like canned tuna. In her entire life Mouse could count the times on one hand when
she had ever seen Mimi relax. “How old is ol' Sniffy Voyeur? He must be, God, what, six –”

“– fifteen,” said Mimi. “Ivan and I got him three weeks after we were married.”

“Then he's sixteen,” said Mouse.

“He's fifteen,” said Mimi.

“Anyway, he's old. Aren't you, old guy?” She rubbed the top of his head with her knuckles. He drooled happily.

“He's not old,” said Mimi. “He's just, he's a mature dog.”

“Fifteen is old for a dog,” said Mouse.

“Not that old.”

“What about his tumor?”

“It's not a tumor,” cried Mimi. “God, you're so gloom and doom. It could be a tumor but it's probably like some hormonal thing. Get off Sniffy's case. Come here, Sniffer, come here!” Mimi slapped her thigh.

Sniffy dropped his head onto Mouse's knee and wagged his body, gazing up at her through his cataracts. Whatever was wrong with him, he was always starving, even after he'd just eaten. Once Mouse had left a peppermint in the pocket of one of her T-shirts. Sniffy had chewed through her suitcase, clawed through all her things just to get to it. The vet said his brain was telling him he was always starving, even though he wasn't. Just like the American consumer, Mouse thought.

“Sniff! Come!” He reluctantly left Mouse for Mimi. “This stupid dog. He's just like me, always falling for people who don't like him.”

‘'I like him.”

“You said he had a tumor. Don't listen to her, Sniffy.”

10.

IN VENICE, THE NIGHT WAS HEAVY WITH THE SWEET
, briny smell of salt air and sewage. There was a life-size crèche on the weedy lawn next to the Venice Documentary Consortium. The three wise men huddled in adoration over a manger brimming with scraps of 35mm film. Taped over the closed snout of one of the plaster donkeys was a hand-lettered sign:
AFRICAN MOVIS
, then an arrow pointing to an open door leading downstairs.

When Mimi and Mouse got there, E. Bomarito was standing at the bottom of the stairs with a roll of mimeographed programs he'd typed up himself on an old manual typewriter, the kind with leaping
e
's and clotted
o
's.

“Got that card table you wanted. Abbey Rents. Twenty-seven fifty.”

He fished the receipt from a greasy pouch he wore around his neck, “How ya like my nativity scene?”

“About the best you could say is that it redefines Christmas,” said Mouse, snapping out the legs of the card table.

Shirl and Auntie Barb were the first to arrive, They staked out two seats at the end of the back row. Shirl was agitated. She kept dragging off her turban to scratch her head. Her hair had grown out. It was salt-and-pepper, half an inch long, the prickly texture of Astroturf. Mouse opened a bottle of Chablis with a multipurpose implement on her Swiss Army Knife and brought Shirl and Auntie Barb each a glass dotted with floating crumbs of cork.

“Mousie Mouse, when is this thing going to start!” Shirl cried. She took the wine eagerly with shaking, spotted hands.

“We met with that corrupt L.A. lawyer person today,” said Auntie Barb accusingly, as though Mouse had suggested him. She wet her lips daintily with the wine.

The corrupt L.A. lawyer in question was Mr. Edmonton, the attorney who was bringing the suit, on Shirl's behalf, against Gateau on Melrose and the manufacturer of the ceiling fan. He had been eating at Gateau at the time of the accident; when Shirl came to at the hospital and asked for her purse she found his card, raised black ink on thick creamy stock, tucked into one of the side pockets. A note in his own hand said, “Give me a call when you feel better!”

Called him she had and, in her opinion, he had been insufferably rude. He wanted her business and now he had slighted her. He was a partner at a big downtown law firm, the kind with pastel-colored walls and matching art. He ushered her and Auntie Barb in, inquired after Shirl's health, produced two cups of instant coffee that burned the inside of Shirl's mouth, then passed her on to a surly paralegal with the fattest knees she had ever seen.

“Only God should see knees like that. She was all decked out in a leather mini. Mutton dressed as lamb.”

The fat-kneed paralegal grilled Shirl mercilessly for an hour and a half. She wanted to know about every head injury Shirl had ever had in her entire life! She wanted to know what happened the evening of the accident.

Shirl had tried to explain. “Part of the reason I'm suing is 'cause I don't know what happened. I can't
remember
. Here I was all ready to scoop up a white chocolate dumpling with strawberry sauce, then BOOM!, I'm in a strange bed with tubes coming outta my nose, a strange man at the end of my bed pinching my toes and asking me if I feel.”

Now, she told the paralegal, she had to write down everything. She'd start a new découpage project, then forget how
many coats of shellac she'd put on. She'd go find a piece of paper to make a note to herself, but by the time she found one she'd have forgotten why she needed it in the first place. She had headaches. She wanted to eat glazed doughnuts. The only thing that kept her from going insane was helping her daughter plan her wedding.

“Don't say that, Mom, please,” said Mouse. After the meeting with Nita Katz and her horrible moment at the Academy Library, Mouse had been trying to think of a way to postpone the wedding.

“It's true,” said Auntie Barb.

“What about your découpage?” said Mouse.

She surreptitiously glanced over at the door. People were arriving. Mimi's friends from her book group were here. Tony had finally turned up with Ralph. Three strangers wandered in. She felt relieved. It would be a real screening after all. Not just a tedious event to which family came because they had to, and friends came so you'd owe them one when they needed bodies at some art opening or baby shower. The strangers were glum, edgy, dressed in black. Mouse couldn't care less. Maybe they read the free listing in the
L.A. Weekly
. Maybe they were actual members of the Venice Documentary Consortium. Mouse had sort of assumed there had been only one member, the odoriferous E. Bomarito.

“Oh, honey, I'm keeping you from your party,” sighed Shirl.

“No. Go on. I'm listening.”

“Your eyeballs are drifting all over the place,” said Auntie Barb. “Everyone here does that. They pretend they're listening but all the while they're looking around for somebody more interesting. In Oregon people look you in the eye.”