The Diamond Lane (35 page)

“No one shops for lingerie on Ventura Boulevard. We're talking White Trash 2000. There are some good places in Beverly Hills.”

“I was thinking, two sisters shopping for bridal underwear. Something like that.”

“I know just the place.”

“What we're going to do – although I haven't cleared this with Ivan – is shoot my stuff first. Maybe a meeting with Nita. Finding a dress. Deciding on china and silver patterns.”

“Girl stuff.”

“Girl stuff. Meanwhile, well, I'm just going to tell you. Tony isn't crazy about this. You were there, you heard him Christmas morning. He doesn't understand it. I don't think I presented it very well. Meanwhile, I'm going to talk to him a little more. It's a ‘the making of' kind of thing, nothing exploitative, it's
serious
.”

“Exploring a social ritual or something –”

“– exactly. See, you know what I mean. Why doesn't Tony?”

“You know men. They have a way of being dense.”

“We are lucky, in fact, to be asked to participate at all.” Mouse told her the rest of her plan. How she would then show Tony all they had shot, all the footage of her picking out her bridal underwear and her dress and her china. She would prove how harmless it was, and how flattering, really. She would talk him into it. If, after all this, he still said no, she would reimburse Ivan for the film stock they had already used with money from the wedding budget, apologizing that Tony had backed out at the last minute. This was not uncommon. All documentary filmmakers knew this.

“Even I know that,” said Mimi.

“Maybe even you could talk to him,” said Mouse. “But not yet. You can't say anything to Shirl or Tony. You've got to swear.”

“I swear. You know I do. I won't say a word. It'll be fun.
Where do you want to go for coffee? There's a cute place that has great gelato down on Beverly.”

Mimi wasn't so bad. Maybe The Pink Fiend was right. Maybe Mouse was too critical. Maybe Mouse was blaming Mimi for things for which she, Mouse, was responsible. Maybe she had driven Ivan away. Anyway, Mimi couldn't help it if she was so sexy and fun that men were naturally attracted to her. Mouse relaxed, glad that she and Mimi had at last been able to talk. Sort of.

THE NEXT DAY
Mimi caromed up the narrow, coiling roads of the Hollywood Hills on her way to the Big House. The Big House was her name for the house Ralph shared with Darryl and Sather. She scrunched her hair, steering with one hand, fumbled in her purse for a newly swiped tube of her trademark Extra Fuchsia, twisted the rearview mirror so she could see to apply it, nearly taking out a row of mailboxes. The Big House was irritatingly out of the way from everywhere.

Even though it was Saturday, her writing day, she had to see Ralph. She had tried to write. Earlier, she had shooed everyone out of the apartment, then put on the Talking Heads and boogied around the living room dusting, then cleaned out the kitchen junk drawer, all in preparation for sitting down and doing her character sketches for her blockbuster on love and betrayal in the business. Finally, around two, she rounded up a yellow legal pad, a can of soda, and a Family Pak of sugarless gum, and sat down on the green wicker settee. But she had too much on her mind to work. She doodled a line of hearts down the margin. If she saw Ralph that afternoon, she could always write that evening.

She had not heard from him since class on Wednesday. This wasn't like him. They had had a standing Saturday night date for the past year. She supposed she could give him a call, but she couldn't just say, “Hi, when are you picking me up?” She knew PMS was making her oversensitive, but she imagined he'd cooled off since her temper tantrum on New Year's Eve.

She could always call him with a question about her blockbuster, but she had used that one so many times it had turned into a private joke. “Hey, I'll show you my plot points if you show me yours.” What about all this ridiculous documentary stuff with Mouse? Making a documentary on your own wedding! Who'd ever heard of such a lame thing? Even though Mimi already said she'd help – and God knew Mouse needed her help, since she was the one member of the family in the business – it wouldn't hurt to get Ralph's take on it.

The problem with calling was that Sathcr and Darryl and Ralph had a cheap telephone that didn't ring. They knew someone was calling only when the answering machine clicked on. They never picked up. Later, when they got around to replaying their messages, they never wrote them down unless it was a job offer. The fifth time Mimi got the machine she decided to drive up there. She wasn't getting any writing done anyway.

To see them, you had to drive clear to the top of the city, wasting gas and time, neither of which Mimi had. Beyond broke until she got her next paycheck, she was reduced to charging gas at an overpriced Brentwood gas station, the only place within a thirty-mile radius that accepted what few credit cards she had that weren't maxed out. She jounced over potholes with her jaw set.

The Big House was only big in comparison to the grad student-sized apartments most of Mimi's friends were forced to rent. It was, in fact, probably no bigger than the house on Cantaloupe Avenue. It was a long, chocolate-colored ranch style supported on the downhill side by spindly stilts that looked fit only for a pup tent. They rented it from a Saudi banker.

Darryl and Sather were planted in front of the TV in their Salvation Army chairs. They were watching a videotape of an old Lakers game on their three-thousand-dollar television. Mimi never understood this. They videotaped every Lakers game and watched it from beginning to end, even though they already knew the outcome. A snarl of refuse grew on the floor; empty
beer bottles, crumpled chip bags, a plastic tub of curdling blue-cheese dip. The room reeked of male, Saturday afternoon indolence.

“You guys need to open a window.”

“The Meem Machine,” said Darryl. He was shirtless, and desultorily plucked at his dense black tufts of chest hair. He idly rolled two empty beer cans back and forth on the carpet with his bare, hairy feet. “Those schmucks, they've never had a dominating Center.” He belched. “And poor Leo A. What is he? A Center? A Forward? A Forward? A Center? I ask you.” Sather wore baggy cream linen trousers, black shirt, and bolo fastened with a scorpion frozen in a chunk of Plexiglas. He watched the game from behind a veil of smoke, dangling a cigarette over an ashtray he held on his palm in front of his face.

“Just in the neighborhood?” he said to Mimi, his gaze glued to the tube.

“It's Saturday and I was just driving around.”

“Ah,” said Sather. “You don't get enough driving in during the week?”

“Jesus,” said Darryl, “
this
schmuck. How he ever got off the bench is one of the world's great mysteries.” He fast-forwarded through the next quarter. Silently they watched the players zip up and down the court, men with the energy of hummingbirds.

“Ralph around?”

Darryl nodded over his shoulder toward the kitchen. Mimi could hear snorts of laughter punctuated by feeble bursts of typing.

Tony and Ralph were spread out on the Formica kitchen table, working on
Love Among Elephants
. The mess around their ankles was the same genus as that growing on the living room floor: the wrappers of pseudofood invented to alleviate boredom, not hunger. Tony sat slouched in front of the typewriter, his long fingers covered with the Day-Glo orange dust of bargain basement cheese puffs. He foraged around the bottom of the
bag for the last crumbs before balling up the bag and tossing it at Ralph.

“She needs to suck the bullet out of the wound, to keep with the carnivore theme –” Ralph paced, flicking a pencil against the brim of his baseball cap. Ralph dearly wanted a laptop computer but could not even afford an electric typewriter. During the week he input whatever they'd written over the weekend into the computer at work.

“– you can't
suck
the bullet out for God's sake. You're thinking of a snakebite. You'd need to have lips like a bloody industrial vacuum cleaner to suck a bullet –”

“– depending on which blond-of-the-month they cast, it might not be a problem. It might be on her résumé, for –”

“– shush –” cautioned Tony as Mimi entered the room.

“Tony!” cried Mimi. “Everywhere I turn there you are. Hope I'm not interrupting.” She slid into one of the rickety kitchen chairs.

Tony sat up, nonchalantly crossed his wrists over the sheet of paper in the typewriter. He grinned at her.

“God, don't worry, I'm not looking,” she said. “You'd think you guys had the recipe for the atom bomb there.”

“We do,” said Tony. “Ralph didn't tell you?”

“You should have called,” said Ralph. “We have to get this to V.J. –”

“I was just in the neighborhood. I needed some advice on something.”

“Buy high, sell low,” said Tony.

“Get the abortion,” said Ralph.

“Ralph! You are so paranoid! People stealing your script ideas, girlfriends not using birth control.”

“It's quite a shock,” said Tony, “a FitzHenry woman asking someone's advice.”

“Thanks, Tony.” Mimi reached over and pinched his cheek. “I'll tell Mouse you said that.”

“Now I'm done for. Excuse me,” said Tony, standing. “I'll
just pop in and see what's on the box.” He wandered into the living room.

“Be thinking about the scene with the models,” said Ralph. “We gotta fix that talk thing.”

“He's so polite,” said Mimi. “Maybe it's just the accent. You know how that is? A person with a Brooklyn accent sounds rude even if they're being polite.” She sighed and scrunched her hair.

“What's up?”

She tiptoed to the sliding glass door that lead to the deck. “Can we talk outside?”

A deck cantilevered out over a steep hill forested with dusty, green prickly pear bearing sharp, finger-length spines. Ralph leaned against the rail with his arms crossed, a “get on with it” expression on his face. Why couldn't he be Tony, she thought, meaning why couldn't he be my soulmate in the way that Tony was Mouse's. She hooked her foot over the bottom rung of the rail and stared out at the hazy grid of stucco and mirrored glass glinting in the late-afternoon sun.

Since she was sworn to secrecy, she started with “I have a friend who's getting married…” but the further she got into it the more distracted Ralph became. He systematically gnawed every nail on one hand, spitting the bitten strips over the side. To get him to stop, Mimi found herself admitting it was Mouse. She recounted the events of the night before. She told him how Mouse was ganging up with Ivan behind Tony's back, and wondered what she, Mimi, should do. She wanted to be moral and ethical and still be a supportive sister. “I mean, I think some things are sacred, you know? Some things should just belong to time. Like videotaping births, I'm against that. I believe that experience should just be experience. I'm worried that Mouse thinks her wedding isn't valid unless she turns it into media.” This was the first time this had occurred to Mimi. She liked the way it sounded. Philosophical. And people said Californians were shallow.

“So what's the problem?” he said flatly. “She's a documentary filmmaker, why shouldn't she make documentaries?”

“What's wrong with you? Ever since New Year's…”

“I know, I know. This script, it just consumes you –”

“– I know, that's how it is with my blockbuster.”

“I have a lot on my mind. The class and, and this, and –”

“Listen, you can't tell Tony about this. Swear? It's supposed to be a secret. If Mouse finds out she'll
kill
me. She has no sense of humor about this kind of stuff. Promise?” She sidled up to him, fitting her hips against his. “Promise?”

“What are you talking about?”

“About that dumb wedding documentary thing.” She lifted up her sweatshirt, flashing a breast. “Want to see my narrative through-line sweet cheeks?”

“I'm supposed to be working.”

“Want to see my plot point? Want to check my story development?” She took his cap off and put it on her own head. Over his shoulder, something caught her attention snagged on the prickly pear. Something lacy and light blue, a twisted pair of women's panties. She had a pair just like them. “Is that – What is that?”

Ralph turned out of her arms and looked over the rail. “Just a dustrag or something.”

Suddenly she was not in the mood. She asked him if he had any more of those good cheese puffs left.

17

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE SHOOT, MOUSE WAS FLUNG FROM
her dreams by things she never considered – things she should have thought of earlier but tucked away to mull over when she was alone then forgot about. She cursed herself.

She tried to read her watch in the light of the streetlamp. It was either twelve-twenty or four o'clock. She rolled away from Tony, tucked her hand under her pillow, stared at a cloud of fur hugging the baseboard, illuminated by the streetlamp outside. The pillow was so thin she could feel the pulse in her head beating in her palm.