The Diamond Lane (23 page)

“The instant I told that girl with the knees that you were getting married I could see the jealousy sprout up in her eyes. Then she said, ‘You said earlier that it was white chocolate dumplings in strawberry sauce. Which was it? Strawberry or raspberry?!'” Shirl burst into loud tears.

“Oh Mom, it's all right.” Mouse patted her shoulder. “She was just trying to do her job.”

“I want to sue the bejesus out of those cocksuckers.”

“Mom.”

“She doesn't know what she says anymore,” said Auntie Barb. “If this had happened in Oregon, the lawyers would be more courteous. It's the constant sun here that makes them sadistic. In Portland, it's only seventy-five cents to park downtown for two hours. You should see the city in autumn.”

“Great, Auntie Barb.”

“Don't be facetious. That's the other thing the sun does, makes people facetious. In Oregon people are courteous and kind.”

Mimi manned the “box office.” Poor Mouse, she thought, stuck in the quicksand of Shirl's complaints about Mr. Edmonton. Mimi supposed she should go and rescue her, but she had already heard the entire story over the phone. Anyway, if Mouse couldn't extricate herself from Shirl and enjoy her fifteen minutes of fame, that was her problem.

“Hi guys!” Mimi waved Sather and Darryl on through. Ralph was parking the car.

Sather, eyes bulging and haggard, was talking about some recent grueling job that made working in a sweatshop sound like getting paid to do nothing.

“– it's Thursday, and I'm
still
there –”

“– he went in on Monday morning –” said Darryl. “This is the Bataan Death Edit.”

“– I go in Monday morning. I asked the supervisor, is it going to go late tonight? And the supervisor goes
oohwahaha
! He's got a laugh like that,
oohwahaha
! You've obviously never been on this show before –”

“– which brings up the question, does the film industry make people deranged or are the deranged naturally attracted to the film industry?”

“By Thursday, by
Thursday
, I've been in the same room with
the same six guys, and we've been eating nothing but takeout deli, and no one's had a decent shit for days – sorry, Mimi – and I'm rolling through trying to find the right take of this car up and by, but there are about seventeen takes, and they all sound alike, and I have to keep rolling through –”

“– he has to keep rolling through because he keeps falling asleep over the reels!”

“– and the supervisor is standing in the middle of the room – the guy is really demented, I'm telling you – yelling, ‘Thank God for the Union, boys! We've just gone into Quadruple Platinum Overtime! We're making more than the fucking star!'”

“– but who ever has time to spend it?” asked Darryl.

“– who ever has time to go to the bank!” said Mimi.

“I made twelve thousand dollars in four days,” said Sather, “then I left the check in my coat pocket, which I left on a seat in a movie theater in Westwood.”

“The glamorous and sexy film business,” said Darryl, gargling his wine for emphasis.

“Tony and Ralph think it's glamorous and sexy,” said Mimi as Ralph stumbled in. She bumped him with her hip. “They just had their big meeting with V.J. Parchman.”

“How'd it go today?” asked Sather.

“Let's just say I'm not overwhelmed with depression.”

“This calls for a celebration, then.”

“I'll tell you how it went,” said Mimi. “V.J. had his phone calls held, then broke down and took one of them; he took notes, but also doodled. His eyes glazed over, but only twice. He loved the script, but doesn't have the money to option something right now, even though his deal's with a multibillion-dollar conglomerate. Am I close?”

This was how all those meetings went. V.J. probably had a hundred of them a month, ninety-nine of them went nowhere. Like a sighting of Big Foot, no one ever knew anyone who actually had the one-out-of-a-hundred meeting that went Somewhere, so there is no way of knowing what
that
meeting was like. Once,
in a frenzy of frustration, Ralph showed Mimi his collected datebooks. He had been to six hundred seventeen meetings that went nowhere in the last ten years. She couldn't figure out whether that made him a saint or a fool. Never face the facts. Who said that? Some famous actress.

“You are such a smart aleck,” said Ralph, pulling Mimi to him and giving her a fierce bite on the earlobe.

“I'm psychic,” said Mimi.

“It was actually better than we expected,” said Ralph, “which is to say it was only a moderate waste of time and we were not overtly humiliated.”

“Yippee, plan your Oscar speech.”

E. Bomarito left his post at the door and began herding people toward the folding chairs.

“How you doing, girls?” asked Mimi, stopping by to see if Shirl and Auntie Barb needed anything. “Can you see all right?” She glanced up, waved to Carole, who had just staggered in, a load of new scripts weighing down her beatup leather purse.

“Are you waving at Ivan?” asked Shirl. She craned her head around painfully.

“Ivan? Esparza?”

“I invited him.”

“My Ivan? You invited my Ivan?”

“Phone number's right in the book,” said Auntie Barb. “You never think to look in the book anymore. Even in Portland no one's listed.”

“Why didn't you tell me you were going to invite him? I have his number. You didn't need to go and look it up. I have it.”

Mimi did not like this kind of surprise. For one thing she would have worn something that made her stomach look flatter, not what she had on, a big shirt belted at the waist. She hadn't seen Ivan in maybe six years. He had always complimented her on her flat stomach. She also wasn't keen on his presuming she had anything to do with this really, when you got down to it, very depressing screening. Ivan had had stuff at the LAFI, at big
places in New York and Chicago. He had won an Oscar, even if it was just for documentary. Then there was the Mouse situation. She would think Mimi invited him to steal her thunder.

Mimi stood up from where she knelt beside Shirl's folding chair. She would tell Mouse it was Shirl. Shirl had invited him. They would share a moment of sisterly closeness and hope. They would remember how, before the accident, Shirl loved a practical joke. They would say, see, she's okay! She's still at it! Creating havoc for her own amusement. Inviting Ivan Esparza to the screening!

E. Bomarito strode to the front of the room. The show was beginning. There was no time to talk to Mouse, also no sign of Ivan. It occurred to Mimi that maybe the joke was on her, maybe Shirl was just teasing. Maybe Shirl didn't know what she was saying, as Auntie Barb suggested. Mimi decided it was a wait-and-see situation. She found a seat in the back.

“In this age of meaningless and tawdry Hollywood product, the Venice Documentary Consortium is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and practice of documentary film in all its forms,” intoned E. Bomarito, stroking his mustache.

Ralph and Tony sat next to each other at the end of the first row. Listening to E. Bomarito, Tony realized, not for the first time, that he was simply not a documentary filmmaker. He had made documentaries, yes, but he had always known he was destined for greater things, for making movies with “bulk” that people would stand in line to buy overpriced tickets to see. He just did not have the Calling, like Mouse and this E. Bomarito. In a past life, he wasn't a member of a religious sect whose main occupation was building monuments to God that no one would ever see, the building of which killed off the believers in the process.

His twinge of remorse was easily cured by thoughts of his new career in feature films. Ralph was pessimistic, but it seemed more of a habit than anything else. He grumbled and griped, but hadn't he spent two and a half hours after the meeting with
V.J. thinking of ways to make their perfect script more perfect? Also, if Ralph thought it was so bloody futile, then why was he heartened when, moments ago, V.J. Parchman blew in?

Of course they'd invited V.J., and of course he'd said he would come, but both Tony and Ralph had assumed it was merely good manners on both sides. They had both assumed that V.J. had better things to do than drive across town in rush-hour traffic to sit in a dank and dirty basement watching 16mm documentaries on obscure African subjects. But no! Here he was, in multipocketed khaki safari pants and vest, yelping that he wouldn't miss it for the world.

“My Africa!” he said, crooking his arm around Tony's shoulder, inhaling deeply, like a coffee baron enjoying the olfactory beauty of his Ngong Hills plantation. “Tony, old boy, you did invite Michael Brass tonight, didn't you?”

“Michael Brass?”

“You
have
been in the bush for ages. Michael Brass! He's got four of the five top shows on the telly. Rumor is he makes one-point-five, one-point-seven-five per week just in residuals.”

“That's million,” said Ralph.

“He's head of a brilliant environmental group, Stars Against Ivory. It's a quite powerful organization, really a much more together group than the Rain Forest people. Anyone can get into that – it's the bloody McDonald's of political causes. SAI is quite exclusive. They don't take just any bleeding-heart liberal. I thought certainly he'd pop by.”

“I invited Michael,” lied Mimi, bless her heart. She'd overheard the conversation and slid up to V.J., proffering a little plastic glass of wine, leaning into his homely face as though he were just the man she'd been waiting for. “Michael works with us at Talent and Artists. I'm Mimi FitzHenry.” She slid her warm hand into his. “He said he'd try to make it, though I think we're just going to do something private with him.”

“Something private?”

“A private
screening
. “Mimi laughed. “By the way, I really liked
Fatal Red Kill
.”

V.J. looked confused.

“Your last movie?”

“Oh, oh!
Lethal Red Death
, yes.”

“That's what I meant. Let's find you a seat.”

“Something on the end, in case Michael should make it. I do need to have a word with him. I've put together a petition banning the use of pianos with ivory keys in cocktail lounges 'round town.”

Mimi led him off.

“This is a good sign,” said Ralph, wiping his wide pale forehead with the back of his hand. He was sweating with excitement. “Not that we should get our hopes up. Nothing plus nothing is nothing, always remember. God, Mimi is brilliant. Isn't she brilliant? If I weren't married…

Tony silently cursed himself for wishing Mouse was just a shade less of a liability. She was so… adamant. It was an unattractive quality. A bit
too
much character, at least for this part of the world. He made her over in his mind while E. Bomarito droned on, but kept getting sidetracked from imagining her smiling complacently in a nice expensive tight sweater and miniskirt by, what he imagined, would be her unbridled fury at his poaching their African experiences for a screenplay. He dreaded her anger, then was irritated by it. She had no sense of
humor
. He folded his arms. She masked this by being witty and funny. He was angry. He should be home working on the script instead of sitting here watching these quaint documentaries that he'd already seen hundreds of times.

“… we are thrilled to be showing these films.” E. Bomarito continued. He had nervous tics that were a curse to his career as a public speaker. It was a kind of blink-blink-sniff two-step.

He unrolled the tight tube of mimeographed programs he'd been beating against his sweaty palm.
Blink-blink-sniff
. “Whadda we have here?
Allah on the Rocks. The New Stanley. The
Lepers of Miesso
. All really terrific and unbelievable portraits of life by Mouse FitzGerald and her husband –”

“– not husband –” said Mouse, too quick, too loud.

“– Tony Chetham.” Cartoon-sized drops of sweat sprang out on E. Bomarito's furry temples. He pronounced Cheatham Che-tham.

“It's Cheatham!” yelled Ralph.

“It's FitzHenry!” yelled Mimi, encouraged.

“Sorry! Sorry! I thought you were both – I thought you were related to Mitchell Chethem. We had him here last year. He does experimental stuff, mostly underwater portraits of squids mating. Anyway,”
blink-blink-sniff
, “they're just back from Ethiopia.”

“
Kenya
,” yelled a few folks in the back. Mouse rolled her lips inside her mouth. A bad habit resulting in chapped lips and smeared lipstick. She had to stop.

E. Bomarito ended by promising that Mouse would entertain questions afterward, then trotted to the back of the room and snapped off the lights, plunging everyone into stuffy blackness. A few people giggled. The blackness was bisected by a shaft of light. Mouse turned to see the frizzy head of E. Bomarito through the long wide window in the projection booth. He was also, apparently, the projectionist.