The Diamond Lane (24 page)

From the projection booth came the cymbal-like crash of a tower of metal takeup reels falling over. What was E. doing in there? He'd obviously not bothered to thread the machine in advance. The audience, numbering about twenty-five, had given up nervous laughter in favor of aimless checkout-line chat. Someone sitting behind Mouse wondered aloud if anyone had heard how video display terminals caused cataracts and miscarriages. Mouse wished she was sitting next to Tony, who was on the other side of the room. She caught a glimpse of V.J. Parchman, also on the other side of the room, and pretended she didn't see him.

E. Bomarito had a very cavalier approach to focus: the first image was a blurry ten-foot-tall red-and-blue box moving
toward the camera, accompanied by the sound of squeaking rusted wheels. It was difficult to tell whether it was a man or a refrigerator with arms.

Mimi felt panic brewing in her throat. She glanced over at Mouse and was surprised to find her serene with expectation. Because she'd lived in Africa, she had adapted to inefficiency. She had adapted to the electricity going out for days at a time because some rebel group somewhere had cut the power lines. She was used to planning elaborate shoots only to be told at the last possible minute that the trip was off because the Land Rover was dangerously low on oil and there was no oil to be had anywhere until week after next. She was amused by Los Angeles, where waitresses apologized, “I'm making a fresh pot of decaf, it'll be a few minutes.” Once she had waited seven months for a care package of decaf and coffee filters from Shirl.

Though her shoulders were relaxed, she sat on the edge of her chair, her fingers laced over one sharp kneecap. She was not nervous but a little anxious, and not because the all-important first image – the image they had gone to jail for – was hopelessly out of focus but anxious with the wonder of seeing her work big and with an audience. She had seen most of her documentaries small and by herself, or with Tony. She had seen them on video monitors. During the editing, which she had done on an ancient upright Moviola, the screen was no bigger than her hand. Her breathing was shallow. She was prepared to be as exhilarated and frightened as were her subjects when they saw themselves on film for the first time. Most of them had never seen still pictures of themselves, much less motion pictures. Stanley, star of
The New Stanley
, the blurry ten-foot red-and-blue refrigerator box, had never seen himself in a mirror, only in the reflection of a lake in northwest Kenya, where he had been a young man and a warrior, or in the plate glass windows of Nairobi, where he was a cripple and a pickpocket.

Stanley drifted in and out of focus. His body appeared as
it did because it was all torso, no legs. He got around apelike, via skateboard and calloused knuckles.

E. Bomarito, who was talking to someone in the obviously un-soundproof projection booth, finally settled on an image that was readable but soft.

Stanley rolled down the sidewalk toward the camera, passing the entrance to The New Stanley, the tourist hotel in front of which he plied his trade, stealing the diaries and travel journals of Western tourists. Even though Stanley was an ugly man, the whites of his eyes curdled yellow, one of his nostrils torn off in a fight, he had about him the charming air of a popular dictator.

Dented skateboard wheels squeaking, he rolled down the sidewalk forested with legs. Tourist legs. Legs in creased khaki safari pants, bare tanned calves extending beneath lightweight knee-length skirts, some calves young and waxed, some erupting with wormy blue varicose veins. Hanging beside the hip of one skinny young woman in mustard cotton culottes was a large colorful woven handbag, not unlike Mouse's signature camel-scented basket. The leather straps of the bag ascended out of the top of the frame, presumably hooking over the girl's shoulder. Stanley rolled a few feet beyond her, then, without much of a double take, rolled back, reached his muscular arm up and in, retrieving a small book from the purse. It was covered in dainty Victorian flowers, splotched with black ink, the result of knocking around the bottom of the bag with uncapped pens.

This shot had gotten Mouse and Tony in trouble. A policeman stationed by the hotel entrance to guard the tourists from just such a thing hauled Stanley off his skateboard by his grubby shirt collar and arrested Mouse and Tony for aiding and abetting. It took three weeks for the American Embassy to work its magic, convincing the Nairobi Police Superintendent that since Stanley was only lifting a diary, it could hardly be considered a crime. Mouse and Tony were released on the condition they deliver up the negative of the illegal shot. They did, after making a dupe.

The uneventful jail stay – toilet a stinking hole in the middle of the floor, diet of mushy
posho
and water, athletic rats that leaped up on the bottom bunk to nibble the lips of sleeping prisoners – Mouse refused to waste energy discussing. That did not prevent Tony from making it one of the centerpieces of
Love Among the Gorillas
.

Mouse had gotten used to the fireman's pole, and so had forgotten about it until the film started. As soon as Stanley came into focus, however, she knew she had been right. She cursed herself for allowing herself to be convinced the pole was no big deal just to avoid Mimi's accusation that she took things too seriously. The pole was not New York arty. The pole was a problem. It cast a four-inch-wide shadow that bisected the screen, which meant most of the time it bisected Stanley's marvelous, ugly face. Between the focus problem and the pole and the raucous frame of mind people had been cast into by E. Bomarito's error-filled intro, no one was able to settle down and watch. You could feel people squirming in their seats, crossing one leg, then the other. You could feel people waiting for an opportunity to laugh.

“Focus, already!” one of the strangers in black finally shouted. “Jesus Christ.”

After transforming Stanley into a sort of moving abstract expressionist painting for a few seconds, E. Bomarito got it right, only to have Tony – yes, Tony! Mouse would surely never forgive him – bellow, “Pole, already!” sending the house into fits. Tony laughed at their laughter. It just popped out, but he knew it wouldn't hurt to distance himself from this stuff. He turned around to see V.J. Parchman's reaction, but his chair was empty. He had already left.

Mouse stared straight ahead, not at Tony, hunkered down in his chair like any eighth grader disrupting assembly, chuckling silently into his shirt collar. Ralph, sitting next to him, had buried his face in his hands. His shoulders jerked with laughter.

Mouse stood up without a word and went to the ladies' room. When freak accidents run in your family you tend to ask
“what if” a lot. What if Fitzy hadn't decided to walk that day? What if he'd driven? Mimi didn't know how many times she'd asked that.

What if he hadn't seen the gold knot earring glinting on the hot asphalt?

What if he hadn't bent to pick it up?

What if the truck driver hadn't resorted to hundred-mile-an-hour tape but had taken his rig in and gotten the safety chain fixed?

What if Shirl had stayed on Program instead of pigging out at Gateau on Melrose?

What if Mimi hadn't lived at home the sweltering summer of Ivan and Mouse?

What if Mimi and Ivan hadn't mistaken good sex and fear of the future for love?

What if the LAFI had sprung for a screening after all?

What if Mouse had chosen to sit and stew instead of retiring to the ladies'?

What if the ladies' had been in a normal place instead of through the projection booth?

What if Shirl hadn't called Ivan?

Then Mouse would have never run into him in the projection booth, talking shop with E. Bomarito, who happened to be a good friend and fellow charter member of the Venice Documentary Consortium.

11.

IVAN SLOUCHED AGAINST THE WALL BESIDE THE PROJECTOR
, one arm locked across his ribs, a skinny shelf on which to rest the opposite elbow, moodily fingering his lips, watching
The New Stanley
through the low wide window.

Mouse recognized him instantly. The blue light from the screen illuminated his face. Still the high, rounded cheekbones. Still the flat nose, the high-cut nostrils. He had a ponytail. A ponytail made a man look like either a Milanese fashion designer or someone who survived by selling plasma. Ivan had sold plasma to help fund
Total Immersion
, for which he won the Oscar. There was also a rumor he'd sold one kidney to a Newport Beach couple desperate to save their dying child. He charged just enough to cover post-production, prints, and advertising.

Mouse thought the ponytail suited him. Unfortunately, in sixteen years his honey-colored hair had surrendered to the usual flat brown fate of blonds. His honey-colored skin had gone sallow from living on almost nothing but the wilted, congealing stuff served at cheap All You Can Eat salad bars. He had lost more weight than Mouse had imagined anyone so ripe and stocky ever could. Somewhere along the way he'd gained a small gold earring. What she couldn't see from her quick heart-in-her-throat glance was the maniacal glint that now lit up his eyes.

Long before Mouse saw Ivan's name in the magazine at the library she'd been preparing herself for just such a moment. Even when she still presumed he'd fallen off the face of the
documentary-filmmaking earth, lost in the uncharted universe of middle-level white-collar executives or well-paid waiters waiting for a break, she knew she had not seen the last of him. Still, she was shocked. Her mouth flooded with saliva. Her legs shook so hard they were barely able to carry her into the ladies'.

The ladies' was painted lavender. A defaced decal from a radical feminist health clinic was stuck to the toilet paper dispenser. Mouse sat down on the toilet, teeth chattering.
Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name
. She vaguely remembered being angry at Tony before he dropped from her mind like an anchor tossed into the sea.

Ivan! Ivan! Ivan!
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven
. The moment she'd dreamed about, the moment she'd dreaded.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us
. Her first miserable years alone in Tunisia, working at the Corsican disco, before Kenya and Tony she'd prayed she'd see him. She concocted fantastic scenarios to put herself to sleep, willing him to wind up in Tunis. Against all reason she swore she'd glimpsed him a number of times rounding a corner near her
pension
. Years later she thought she saw him padding barefoot through the Nyali Beach Hotel in Mombasa, complaining to a gaggle of German tourists, of which he was a part, about the bathtub temperature of the lazy Indian Ocean. He appeared on the platform of train stations in tiny dusty towns, sped past her on red-rutted forest roads. They had unfinished business. She knew she'd see him again, when she least expected it. She pulled a wad of toilet tissue from the dispenser, dropped it between her legs into the toilet and flushed.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory
.

Unfinished business. The last time Mouse had seen Ivan was before she left for her semester abroad, the fall of 1973. It was late August, suffocating heat. Ivan and Mimi stood in the
driveway on Cantaloupe Avenue, leaning against the door of Ivan's Camaro.

Mouse had gone to the doctor to get a typhoid vaccination for her trip. The minute her red Volkswagen puttered out of the driveway, Mimi called Ivan at a sporting goods store on Hollywood Boulevard where he worked. Mouse left at eleven o'clock. Ivan took an early lunch. Shirl was teaching a découpage class at the Sherman Oaks Recreation Center.

Ivan and Mimi snuck into the pool cabana. The roof was green corrugated plastic, casting an aquatic light on their bodies, striped with fierce tan lines. Mimi was grateful for her guilt, for the splinters driven into her shoulders, the result of being ground into the unfinished wooden bench by an overeager Ivan. There was a sign on the cabana wall, we don't swim in your toilet, so please don't pee in our pool.

Mimi read it over and over again past half-closed eyes over Ivan's thick brown shoulder. She and Mouse had thought it was such a riot growing up. It wasn't such a riot now. It made her angry at Mouse for not getting Ivan into the pool cabana herself.

For a month Ivan came to the house when Mouse was gone, so that if she came back while he was still there, everyone could pretend he had come to see her. On that last day though, for some reason, no one pretended. It was the heat, the weariness caused by the eternally clear California sky, the fact that Mouse was leaving anyway. Ivan and Mimi stood in the driveway, crooning to each other that they were bad, so bad, what were they ever going to do? when Mouse rounded the corner, some appropriate Linda Ronstadt song about love and betrayal blaring from her tinny radio. Ivan had his hands on Mimi's hips.
Putt-putt-putt
Mouse's car into the driveway.

“Hi,” she said through the open window. She turned off the engine. Linda's wailing voice died. Her arm was hot and swollen.

“Hi,” said Mimi.

“Hi,” said Ivan. He didn't drop his hands from Mimi's wide hips, and there was no talk of his being there to see anyone but
her. Mouse went into the house, pretending she didn't see. That night, with a pair of tweezers and a needle she intentionally forgot to sterilize, Mouse dug the splinters from Mimi's shoulders.