The Diamond Lane (26 page)

Mimi thought she was the only one with real writing potential in the bunch, as evidenced by the fact she was so slow. Her opposite, Peg, a Brillo Pad-permed ex-nun and self-described workshop junky, turned in reams of pages each week, all featuring legions of throbbing members and twitching nipples. They had not officially started writing yet, but Peg was already on page three hundred. Ralph used to save Peg's pages to read to Mimi in bed, providing them with many a postcoital hoot. He said that Peg was also Mimi's opposite in that Peg wrote about torrid sex but never had any, and Mimi had torrid sex but never wrote about it. Torrid, Mimi thought, is in the eye of the beholder.

They met in a room that had no desks, only bright-orange plastic chairs and merciless bars of cold fluorescent light. The class before How to Write a Blockbuster was an introductory course in convenience-store management for Asians. Various exhortations were always left on the blackboard. Correct change is a must! Arrange your shelves so ladies supplies are easy to find!

Before class, with a careless swipe of a chalky eraser, Ralph would replace these exhortations with his own: Writing a blockbuster is not about writing, it is about panning for gold! or What is your book about? Your book is about a car payment! The class that met there the next morning probably read these and found How to Write a Blockbuster as pitiful as Mimi and her classmates found Introduction to Convenience-Store Management. The thought of this was too depressing. Instead, Mimi pondered the oatmeal cookie she would eat at the break.

Tonight Ralph wanted to discuss how to effectively reduce your book to a blurb in
TV Guide
. Remember, he said, if you can't do it, how was some
TV Guide
lackey who probably never read the press kit which was put together by someone who never saw the movie which was produced by people who never read the book supposed to do it?

“Before we get rolling, any questions?” He bounced back and forth across the front of the room, tossing a stub of chalk in the air, cocky in his turquoise St. Bart's T-shirt, black jeans, and trademark Dodgers cap, every inch a man of confidence and success. The guy who's got “things happening” all over Town, who's feted by this producer, that director, so many agents he's lost count, who teaches for the fun of it!

Only Mimi knew the truth. How to Write a Blockbuster was a car payment.

Peg was curious about jacket photos. A mortician from Tarzana wondered what kind of hotels they put you up in on your publicity tour. Ralph chastised them. He said he didn't like these questions. They were putting the cart before the horse, when what they needed to concentrate on was how they would create a lively and enticing blurb. Ralph also didn't like these questions because he didn't know the answers.

At the break, Mimi bolted for the snack machine before anyone else had time to leave their seat. She gobbled down the Frisbee-sized cookie, which tasted vaguely like a disk of solidified sawdust, then rooted around the bottom of her purse for loose change for some M&Ms. On her way to her favorite restroom in the next complex of buildings, she expressed them straight from the bag into her throat, bypassing her taste buds.

As long as she got rid of it all before she went home, she never gained a pound. That was the important thing. She knew she did this for a reason but could never figure out what it was. She read articles about eating disorders, but they only confused her. She was high-strung, also a little depressed. That was the most she could say. In the meantime, while she tried to figure it
out, she didn't want to get fat. Getting fat would only make it worse.

Chocolate and doughy things slid back up easily, so no one could ever tell, no broken blood vessels around her eyes, no croaky voice from a raw throat. She got rid only of bad food. She could keep down cucumber slices and yogurt with the best of them. It was just a thing she did to make herself feel better. She considered it sort of a hobby, like Shirl's découpage. The whole process, from eating bad food to losing it, cured her anxious moods. It gave her a sense of mission. Drive-meet-eat-purge.

After she disposed of the cookie and M&Ms, eyes smarting, stomach burning, she slapped on some Extra Fuchsia lipstick, then blotted her eyes. She rinsed out her mouth and ate a mint, then reapplied some more lipstick. Sometimes Ralph liked to follow her to this far outpost for a quickie. Mimi thought he was probably living out some high school fantasy.

He waited for her outside, glancing through the homework. He rolled it into a tube and thrust it in his back pocket. “Why do you always use this restroom?” He sidled up close, unbuttoning her shirt.

“I like the privacy, sweet cheeks.”

“Me, too. Sweet boobs.” He kissed her neck, sneakily tugged down one of the cups of her bra. Both cups were stretched out as a result of this weekly ritual. Mimi made a point of wearing the same bra to class so he didn't ruin every last one she owned. He had no idea how much a decent bra cost.

Mimi supposed she liked this rather dangerous behavior. She doubted Mouse did this. Although, as Ralph bombed her neck with wet, explosive kisses, she felt as though he wasn't caressing her breast so much as twirling a combination lock, an anxious safecracker in training.

She sighed. She should have finished her dust-jacket copy.

IVAN CALLED MOUSE
on Saturday, just after two. It was clear, bright, and hot. One of those days when the girls were growing
up and Shirl made them feel guilty for staying inside. One of those days you could see the ocean from the mountains, and vice versa.

Downstairs Mimi's Armenian neighbor sang “Jingle Bell Rock” along with the radio while sweeping her tiny terrace. Mouse watched a tape E. Bomarito had lent her, a documentary he'd worked on that had won a number of awards. Sniffy Voyeur lay by the Christmas tree watching her with his Egyptian eyes, beating his tail, big as a plume of pampas grass, on the wood floor, crooning for someone to come over and pet him. Mouse lay on the uncomfortable green wicker settee taking desultory bites out of a mushy red apple: a textbook case of post-premiere depression.

She had been anxious to get a screening, anxious to get It out there. You get a decent screening, it means you're real. It means all those years away were good for something. It means you're not just a girl who dabbles, not just a girl getting married. So now she had gotten It out there. She had gotten It out there and It stunk! She didn't need a review to tell her – not that her screening had been reviewed. She arrived at this conclusion on her own.

She thought of the time and money and effort sunk into
The New Stanley
. Had anyone ever seen such a string of visual clichés? Had anyone ever seen such camera work, newscast banal interspersed with the most obvious arty shit? Had anyone ever heard such a murky sound track? It was too long, but at the same time underdeveloped, just one more “sensitive” film about an interesting weirdo. No better than the second-rate tape she was watching now, about the blind proprietor of a tattoo parlor in East Los Angeles.

“
The New Stanley
didn't hold up very well, did it?” she asked Tony. He sat on the ottoman fiddling with the remote. He tapped the sound up, then he tapped it down. She didn't care. Awards or no, E. Bomarito's doc was a bore.

Tony was waiting to go to Disneyland. He was wearing new clothes, cowboy boots and a dark shirt that brought out his
freckles, his strawberry-blond hair curling dramatically over his collar. His top button was buttoned like you saw on men in fashion advertisements.

She knew she should feel grateful Tony was marrying someone like her. Instead, she felt like she had gotten herself a cute prison warden. She knew she should discuss postponing the wedding with him but couldn't bring herself to do it. She hated her perm. She had stopped painting her fungus-infected nails. She had to find a job. She had to find a way back to Nairobi.

“You're far too critical,” said Tony. “I think
Stanley
is quite a nice film. It has so many memories attached. Mind if I fast-forward?” He was waiting for Mimi and Carole. They were going to Disneyland with Carole's grandparents, who visited every Christmas from Connecticut. Their mission was not family togetherness but the opportunity to call back to their friends on Christmas day and say, “Earl! Ruth! It's eighty degrees out here! We're wearing shorts!”

Mouse loathed Disneyland. Even when she and Mimi were eight and nine she was suspicious of it. All those grown-ups pushing and shoving to prove they're still kids at heart, The only thing she had liked was the Submarine Ride, which she would go on only with Fitzy.

“Just because people
seemed
to get a charge out of it doesn't mean it was any good,” she said. “You know that. Anyway, it was a sympathetic audience. They were obligated to like it.”

“Can't you just accept the fact that people enjoyed it and leave it at that?” Tony watched the sped-up doc, palpating his cheeks with his fingertips, feeling for whiteheads, which he squeezed between his first and second fingers, one of his less attractive habits.

“If we could remix the sound,” said Mouse.

“It's done, poppet. Put it behind you, for God's sake.”

The phone rang. Mouse answered, thinking it might be Shirl, checking in for her usual after-the-event debriefing. It was Ivan.

“Ivan wants to meet for a drink later,” she said to Tony, going back to the couch. It had been one of those brusk “uh-huh, uh-huh, sure, sure, okay, okay, bye” conversations. She kept it that way, professional, on the chance her voice would wobble out high and girlish.

“Hope you took a rain check. Love to chat with him,” said Tony, tossing the remote onto the rattan coffee table and standing.

“I think he just meant me,” she said.

“Eow! Bloody Christ! Askin' me fiancée out behind me back. What's this bugger of a world comin' to?”

“You don't care if I go?”

“Do as you like.”

“She's as trustworthy as Sniffy Voyeur,” said Mimi, tossing a handful of tampons into her purse. “Isn't she, Sniff-Sniff-Sniff?” Sniffy dragged himself up and ambled over for a scratch on the head. “Just be sure to take enough money to pay for both of you. Ivan's very big on inviting people places, then conveniently forgetting his credit cards. Not that he has any to forget. He's a thirty-four-year-old man and he's never had a checking account.”

IVAN HAD SUGGESTED
an old place on Hollywood Boulevard, prized for its layers of grime and smoke-stained walls, three bus rides away from the apartment. Even though it was December, the restaurant was humid and stuffy. The ceiling fans whirled uselessly overhead. The faces of waiters streaming past in their limp red jackets shone with sweat. At the last minute Mouse had decided to wash her jeans but had to grab them from the dryer while they were still damp so she wouldn't miss the bus. She stood just inside the door, waiting for Ivan, her waistband jungle wet and warm. She tried not to be nervous. She tried to summon up some clenched-jaw calm. She tried to pretend Ivan was a Nairobi BBC bureaucrat from whom she was trying to scam some equipment.

Ivan arrived late, wearing a yellow-and-purple-striped surfer's T-shirt Mouse recognized from sixteen years ago. Like Mouse, he wore clothes until they disintegrated and blew away. Mouse remembered that shirt, down to the holes in the armpits, from when they watched Watergate together. When he reached up to give her a brotherly clap on the shoulder, she glimpsed a tuft of dirty-blond hair peeking through a yawning seam.

Ivan was a regular at this place. He was buddies with the maître d', who until that moment had ignored Mouse, glancing at her from time to time making sure she wasn't some flotsam in off the street.

It seemed that they were having dinner, not just drinks. Menus slid into their hands, silverware was plunked down by a surly busboy. Even though Mouse was nauseated – a dinner with Ivan, love of her life! – she spread open the menu eagerly.

“What do you recommend?” She felt like a twelve-year-old pretending she was a grown-up on a date.

“The chicken salad is their specialty,” said Ivan.

The waiters responded only to the kind of wave favored by marooned motorists hailing passing traffic on a foggy night. The chicken salad turned out to be an ice cream scoop full of mayonnaise studded with greenish meat, slapped on a wilted leaf of iceberg lettuce stained by a decorative circle of beets. Every bite yielded a few hidden bones, fish-hook-sharp. Ivan had steak.

“This is really strange,” said Ivan, addressing the silverware, straightening first his knife, then his fork, then his fork, then his knife, then picking up both.

“How so?” How so. Her throat pounded. This was hardly the Ivan she remembered, brooding and noncommittal as a spy. The chicken salad was suspiciously greasy. She told Ivan it was delicious.

“Being together after all this time. I'm really sorry, Mouse. You know what I'm talking about?”

She surreptitiously plucked a piece of cartilage off her
tongue and laid it on the edge of her plate. She wanted to say, “You spineless creep, you broke my heart. Are all men as stupid as you, falling for someone like Mimi?” Instead she said, “We were all so young.”

“I was a stupid prick.”

“I wouldn't say
that
!”