The Diamond Lane (28 page)

“Maybe they were lesbians,” said Mouse. She bared her neck at the mirror and applied the cream in upward strokes, imitating Mimi.

“What does
that
mean?”

“They looked like they were really enjoying themselves, not trying to make the best of it.”

“They probably thought
you
were a lesbian, picking up a dead squirrel.”

“That restaurant Ivan and I went to was not very good.” In the same way Mimi had never asked Mouse about Africa, Mouse knew she would never ask about dinner with Ivan.

“You should have come with us to Disneyland. We
danced
. Can you believe it? They have the worst bands there, they all play the same six pop songs over and over. Tony is really good. You'd think he'd look dopey, being so tall. I got hit on by this fourteen-year-old. A
fourteen-year-old
. I mean, I know I look
young
, but – not like that!”

Mouse, hypnotized by the sight of Mimi's wide mouth in the bathroom mirror, opening and closing, opening and closing, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, had abandoned her broad upward strokes for tight small circles.

13

ON THE THURSDAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS, TONY AND RALPH
crawled up the diamond lane. They were headed across town to meet with V.J. Parchman, who had read the new draft of
Love Among the Gorillas
and wanted to talk to them immediately. He used that word,
immediately
.

Immediately
could only be good. A producer didn't summon a pair of writers to his office
immediately
if the news was bad, Tony reasoned. Despite Ralph's admonition that in this business yes meant maybe and maybe meant no, he was heartened. It put him in the Christmas spirit. It was four days after Mouse's traitorous dinner with Ivan; the morning after her unsuccessful attempt to bamboozle him into participating in a silly documentary about – good God, how could she even entertain such an idea – their wedding.

Freeway traffic limped along at thirty-five miles an hour. At this time of day, at this time of year, the drive would take at least an hour. People who had rushed out on their lunch hour to pick up a last-minute present wrapped it in the passenger seat with one hand. The usual rock tunes throbbing from car stereos were interspersed with an occasional Christmas carol sung by the latest rock icon.

Ralph cheerfully tailgated the car ahead of them: this would give them plenty of time to chant for a good meeting. They should repeat to themselves, over and over,
deal, deal, deal, deal
. Ralph said he always chanted in the car. He said that once
when he went to the movies in Westwood he'd chanted for forty-five minutes to find a parking place, and there it was, smack in front of the theater, money in the meter. Chanting for a deal was an old Buddhist trick, said Ralph.

Tony stared out the window. The man in the car next to them was brushing his teeth with an electric toothbrush. Tony was not against old Buddhist techniques, even those that sounded revisionist, but he could not keep his mind on it. He was furious with Mouse.

The night before she'd asked to be taken out to dinner. A date, you know, she said, we never have
dates
anymore, as though she'd ever had any interest in them before. She got dressed up. A mint-green silk shirt she'd just purchased, quite becoming, long silver earrings, and lipstick.

Tony should have known something was up. Whenever she wanted anything she put on lipstick.

There's some wedding business I'd like to discuss, she said. Wedding business! He thought she'd meant
wedding
business. Invitations. Rings. The whole lot of endearing details brides give themselves over to.

So out they went, to a place in Beverly Hills that served Mexican food.

She insisted they order margaritas, asked how he liked bloody Disneyland. Like the dumb unsuspecting sod he was, he thought she was really interested, instead of just biding her time, waiting for him to get a little high before she dropped the bomb. The margaritas came in a fishbowl, chunks of salt clinging to the rim.

Tony admitted he liked the fairy tale rides, Alice in Wonderland, Snow White. Rides favored by toddlers and senior citizens. How did he like the Matterhorn? she wondered. He didn't go on it. Someone had to hold the stuffed animals, the hubcap-size suckers Carole's grandparents had bought for the grandchildren back home.

“Ralph had a hilarious anecdote about an editor friend of
his. Really a talented chap, apparently, editor to the stars, rock stars, and such. He had a gig in Tokyo, editing a music video. He was there for forty hours, thirty of them spent stuck in front of a small screen in a dark room. You know how it is.”

“Uh-huh.” She lit a cigarette, blew smoke out of the side of her mouth, her eyes on his. She was certainly a whiz at feigning interest.

“At the end he had about ten hours to spare, had seen none of Tokyo – he'd wanted to have a walk about some of the rock gardens or temples, something unique to Japan. The Japanese felt quite badly for him so they took him to Disneyland.”

“Oh no.”

“It gets better. The chap had worked at Disneyland when he was at university. Four years cleaning It's a Small World.”

“Oh
no
,” said Mouse, then, after a moment: “I had an interesting dinner with Ivan Esparza the other night.”

“‘Interesting,' the nebulous, multipurpose American adjective.”

She began on a rather laborious description of the antisocial waiters and the evil green chicken salad. Tony tried to keep his mind on what she was saying, but he was struggling with the rewrite of
Love Among the Gorillas
. After debating with Ralph over several meals and through one preseason Lakers basketball game as to the exact way in which one made an almost perfect script more perfect, they agreed that what V.J. probably meant was the entire piece needed to be “pushed,” making it more dramatic.

They rewrote it thus: The Tony character is shot by the gang of elephant poachers, rather than roughed up with the butt of a rifle; the Mouse character does not simply administer first aid but cuts the bullet out with a knife; the movies they are each working on are not foreign-produced documentaries but multimillion-dollar American feature films; the Mouse character marries the Uncle Nigel character instead of just dating him; the Uncle Nigel character has raised the Tony character from infancy
instead of just getting him the occasional job with the BBC. Tony justified these changes by saying they were in keeping with the spirit of the truth. But the final scene, the wedding in the mountains among the gorillas, still troubled him.

More margaritas appeared with their meal. Mouse was expounding, for some reason, about Ivan's impressive credentials as filmmaker and fundraiser. She wasn't eating. She needed to eat. She was too thin. He liked a woman with something to hang on to. She leaned toward him, her face glazed with that earnest, furrowed look he'd begun to find so unappealing.

In the end, he thought, perhaps his character should die, and the Mouse character, upon finding him dead, offs herself. Ralph was absolutely against this. He said anything but a happy ending would kill the project immediately. Perhaps the Tony character could only appear to be dead – what was Mouse saying? A bell went off somewhere in Tony's head, like an alarm clock infiltrating an early-morning dream.

“– anyway, I told him I needed to talk to you. I felt, I mean, we are the ones getting married and Ivan, well, you know how I feel about Ivan and his work, but I wouldn't want his involvement to change any –”

“My God, did you sleep with him? Is that what you're saying!”

The couple at the next table looked up with raised eyebrows from their basket of chips. Oh goodie, a scene.

“He wants to do a documentary on our wedding. I can't believe, what's wrong with you? I can't believe you thought –”

“– our wedding?
Our
wedding?” Tony felt his face go hot with the cursed blush of the strawberry blond. He swore at himself for jumping to conclusions. He cringed, remembering how he had behaved over all that bloody business with Mouse and Uncle Ni. He remembered all his silly, baseless accusations, all those humid sleepless hours extracting tearful promises from Mouse, forcing her to swear on everything in the known world worth swearing upon that Uncle Ni had meant nothing, and that, furthermore, it was now over.

Still, she'd refused to marry him. In his mind, that had meant only one thing. Tony, ashamed of himself but unable to stop, followed her when she went out with friends, read her journal when she wasn't home, sniffed her blouses for a telltale whiff of Uncle Ni's medicinal-smelling aftershave, tortured himself with images of Mouse and Uncle Ni together in the dark womb of the editing room, struck up meaningless flirtations with the bored wives of diplomats as a way of doing to Mouse what he was sure she was doing to him. Finally, he took the job with the French production bound for Rwanda, not because he wanted the work but because one night Mouse caught him inspecting the sheets in the dirty clothes basket for signs of sex – how he was to distinguish his stains from another man's remained a mystery, even to himself – and said if he didn't take the job, she would leave him. He was angry, now, sitting in this blasted overpriced Beverly Hills restaurant, that she had elicited this stupid, humiliating behavior once again.

“I was tempted to tell him yes, but knew we had to talk.”

“I should hope so. I'm only the bloody groom.”

“Ivan's already got the funding. He has that series of films on social institutions. There was an article in a magazine I read that quoted someone at the NEA saying, ‘I would give Ivan Esparza money to do anything.' It would be a sort of ‘the making of' kind of thing. His work is respected all over the country. It would be done respectfully.”

“Respectfully my arse.”

“Tony, we have nothing in the works. If we don't get something going soon we're going to have to find jobs. Ivan said I could co-produce, which would mean –”

“– now, now, isn't that cozy. You and Ivan co-producing a documentary on our wedding. But that's the way you like it, isn't it? A little on-location shooting, a little fucking?”

“What about you and Ralph? Ever since we got here, there you are, two Hollywood guys-about-town lunching and meeting and I don't know what, watching football, you used to
hate
sports –”

“– I see what this is. I've neglected you so now you've decided to find a way to get back at me. You're jealous because I can pop into Los Angeles –”

“–
pop
into Los Angeles? What is this
pop
into business? You get more British every day. You weren't this British in Nairobi. I feel like I'm living with Churchill.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What am I talking about? What are you talking about?”

“You want to let some manic depressive –”

“– you've been talking to Mimi, I see –”

“– may I finish?”

“Finish! Finish!”

“I won't finish until you calm down. People are staring.”

“I'm sorry.” She pushed her plate away and folded her hands on the edge of the table. “Tell me your objections.”

His objections! She was the one, wasn't she? There in her green silk with her glorious heaving chest and pale eyes, those dark curls, which, at that moment, he wanted to grab, shaking her until she wept. His objections, indeed! He loved her, couldn't she see that? He didn't want a travesty made of the most important moment in their lives! Anyway, what about
Love Among the Gorillas
? V.J. thought he and Mouse were
already
married, in a private, intensely romantic ceremony in the Rwandan mountains among the gorillas. He couldn't let it he known that not only were they not married but that this fact was going to be brought to everyone's attention by the production of a silly and dull documentary about their wedding. He reached across the table and took her hands in his.

“I'm just thinking of us, poppet. We wouldn't have any control. You know documentary. Anything you say can be held against you. What if we had a row, like this? We never fight, generally, but say we do because, good God, we're sleeping on your sister's floor and your mother's had this beastly accident and we're trying to plan a wedding. We're suffering under terrible stress, y'know? We have a fight, and Ivan films it. We become the
typical engaged couple arguing over something ridiculous, don't you see? It's quite belittling.”

“Yes,” she said.

What, of course, she saw was that if she didn't have Tony's participation she wouldn't be able to do the movie. She squeezed his hands. “I'm sorry I brought it up.” She'd just have to think of something else.

WHEN TONY AND
Ralph arrived at V.J.'s office, V.J. was sitting on the edge of Emily's desk trying to get through to Michael Brass. Emily was apparently out. A stack of mail towered on the edge of her desk. The phone rang and rang.

“– I know! I know! Mr. Brass is in meetings all day, I'm just trying to – yes, yes – I heard at the last Save the Elephants meeting that Stars Against Ivory was having a fundraiser and I was just trying to confirm – yes, I'll hold.” V.J. hooked the receiver under his chin, rolling his eyes. “Michael Brass may be the most powerful bloke in the business, but his secretary is as dumb as a bleeding hippo. Go on in, I'll – yes!” he shrieked into the phone, “Is there or is there not a fundraiser? This is not just some piddling Hollywood matter, luv, the elephants are at stake – yes, I'll hold.”