The Diamond Lane (50 page)

From downstairs, he heard a shrill female voice, over and over again, “No son of mine be hooligan!”

Mouse's suitcase was open on the floor. He pawed through it, swimming in guilt, then felt justified when he found missing a certain pair of red satin panties.

He was about to return to the bathroom, to recheck the medicine cabinet for her diaphragm, when he heard the lonesome sound of water streaming against porcelain. He froze. Someone was in the apartment. He hadn't heard anyone come in. Yet someone was home, using the bathroom, directly across from Mimi's room. He looked over his shoulder slowly, praying his neck wouldn't crack, praying the door to the bathroom was closed.

It wasn't. It was wide open. There was Mouse, bathed in the dim yellow light of the tiny bathroom, perched on the loo, her jeans nesting around her ankles, the heartbreaking red satin panties stretched between her shins, Sniffy's head on her naked thigh. She reached down to the wastebasket next to the toilet and retrieved an empty paper tube. She tapped Sniffy's nose with it, then placed it between his narrow jaws. He wagged his body in mad delight. “There you go, Sniffer. Is that your favorite toy?”

Suddenly she looked up.

“Hi,” said Tony softly.

“Oh God.” She grimaced, leaned forward and slammed the door.

Tony scurried to the living room, threw on some lights. He could still hear the sounds of Mouse slamming around the bathroom.

Tony could think only of her delicate knees, the touching patch of dark where her thighs met, the cute red satin panties! All right, he would do the wedding movie. He would forgive her for her sins, of omission and commission both. Whatever had gone on with Ivan was in the past. After all, he had had a few indiscretions himself, hadn't he? He would forgive her.

“The key?” she said flatly. She stood by the dining room table, her palm outstretched. She was wearing the green silk blouse he liked so much.

“You know that blasted phone they have up there. Doesn't ring. No one told me you'd called. So thought I'd just pop around. Just had a terrific meeting at the studio. Some executives very hot for us, Ralph and me. You have on that blouse. I love that blouse.”

“You are scum. The key, please.”

“You're thinking it's sexist, my feelings for you in that blouse.”

“I read your script.”

“You read my … oh dear. When? How?”

“How? I'm reading at the third-grade level now. You didn't know?”

“Mouse …” He had never seen her like this. Calmer than a professional assassin on Valium, eyes marble-hard, cheeks flaming. She hated him. He saw that clearly enough.

“Will you please allow me to explain?”

“No. Just leave. I want you to leave. Riding through the savanna nude with an AK-47? And the key, please.”

“That was V.J.'s idea.”

“I have a mind to call my mother's lawyer.”

“It didn't begin that way – exploitative. It began as a true account of our romance. That's the script I wrote. If you'd read it, you'd see.”

“Did you think I'd never find out?”

“I was going to tell you. I was always going to tell you. Nothing's actually jelled yet, you know. It seemed pointless until there was something concrete. I was going to change the names, am going to change the names. There was some … confusion. It's all part of the bloody game, you know. Getting a ‘go' movie. The names will be changed. I knew you'd be livid.” He heard the pleading in his voice. She stared, her gaze glued to his, silently allowing him to indict himself. He knew this technique. It was the way you got the goods from someone you were interviewing on camera. Ask a simple question, never interrupt, then wait for the victim's natural compulsion to justify and overexplain to do the rest. Well, he was smarter than that.

“Anyway, what right do you have accusing
me
? That blasted wedding documentary. You and Ivan carrying on behind my back.”

“That's completely different.”

“How is it different? I don't see how it's different.”

“In
Wedding March
truth isn't just a gimmick, for one thing.”

“You know bloody well that the presence of a camera, any camera, turns an event into a performance. Documentary's as much a pack of half-truths as anything else. You think Ivan isn't exploiting you? Isn't going to make the film say whatever he damn well pleases? At least if something is freely adapted from a true story no one suffers under any illusions. Besides, I strove for a metaphorical truth, which is a far deeper and more honest truth than you find in any documentary.”

“A more honest truth?”

“True to the spirit of the event rather than the actual occurrences.” This sounded pretty good. If he didn't make it as a writer-director, he could always be an executive.

“You made me a
swimsuit model
, Tony. A dimwitted, morally irresponsible, slutty swimsuit model.”

“Based on how smashing you look in that black bikini.”

“You think I'd sleep with a man to
console
him? In my past life I was an elephant? I cannot talk about this. It's not bad enough that you trashed my life, then you …” She shook her head. “You disgust me.”

“Can't we just put this behind us, poppet? Those things I said? On the beach? Didn't mean any of it, not a syllable. I found out about the wedding movie, I was furious. You know how I get. I wanted to, I don't know, get back at you. I behaved badly.”

“You don't get it, do you? When I think of you I get
nauseous
.”

“I'll do the movie, all right? I'll do
Wedding March
.”

“I want to take a
shower
. When I think of you, of us, I feel polluted. I feel like those people living next to toxic-waste dumps, only it's like the dump's
inside
of me.”

“And
Love Among Elephants
? It's rubbish. Come with me back up to the house and watch me burn it. I'm going to be dead honest with you, all right? I came here tonight to ask you to marry me because that's how the picture ends. The head of production comes from documentaries and is very partial to stories based in fact. It was necessary for us to live happily ever after. For the picture. I told Allyn Meyer we were getting married for the sake of the movie. But now I'm here, I see you again. I'm miserable up there, away from you. I do want to marry you, I always did, movie or no movie. And even though we had a terrific meeting today, even though Allyn Meyer is very very very hot on
Love Among Elephants
, I will burn it. I will call her tomorrow and tell her everything's off. That's how much I love you.”

“Call her now.”

“Pardon?”

Mouse strode across the room to the telephone, picked up the receiver, held it out to him. “Call her now.”

“It's after six. She's liable to have left already.”

“Leave a message.”

“This isn't the kind of thing you leave a message about, poppet. There's a certain
protocol
. Anyway, I should speak with Ralph, you know, he's my partner, after all. Can't just pull the rug out from under one's partner.”

“You pulled the rug out from under me.”

“We pulled it out from under each other. Tit for tat. And you, old girl, are getting the better deal. I'll do
Wedding March
. Call Ivan and tell him it's back on.”

“It was never off,” she said.

“One of the things I adore about you is your persistence, Mouse. What were you planning on doing in the way of a groom, if I may ask?”

“I'm marrying Ivan,” she said. “When you go, please leave the key.”

23

THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT MOUSE HAD READ
Love Among Elephants
, she had called Tony. She called him again in the afternoon and again the following day. She left three messages on the answering machine. His failure to return any of her calls had given her full license to drive to Venice to see Ivan.

She hopped in the car without phoning, failing to heed one of the city's unwritten laws:
never ever
drop in. She sped down residential side streets, odd routes she'd learned from Mimi that circumvented freeways, stoplights, and signs. Routes known only to natives. Her next-up-from-the-bottom-of-the-line Toyota still seemed the height of luxury, with its plastic new-car smell, its radio with speakers in the backseat, its jet liner-like meters and dials.

Every radio station DJ seemed nostalgic that night for songs popular during the Watergate summer, the summer of Ivan, and for other love songs, too, songs about which a suspicious Shirl used to say, “My love does
what
good? Let's get
what
on? Why don't we do
what
in the road?” Songs that – when you heard
the
song,
your
song, on the car radio on the way to meet
him
– were enough to make you believe in destiny. Never mind that it played six times an hour, twenty-four hours a day.

Mouse stopped at a 7-11 for a pack of cigarettes and a Coke. It was drizzling; the air heavy with the acidic smell of wet smog. Clouds sat low on the city. She drove with the Coke clamped between her thighs. She rolled down the window and yowled at
the top of her lungs into the orange night, sailing down the wide streets, rolling through intersections after a careless glance, beating out the bass line on the steering wheel.

Love was a rose, a flame, a drug, a heat wave, an opening door, a key we must turn; you can't buy it, hurry it, keep it; it can be right or wrong, weak or strong, short or long; it don't come easy, it takes a little time, it's a game of give and take; it can break your heart, tear you apart, make you happy, make you weep.

The songs were dumb but potent. They transformed her into something dangerous: a boy-crazy sixteen-year-old with the determination and birth-control savvy – if not the wisdom – of a grown woman.
Tonight's the night!
she sang. Time to settle up, she thought.

Her wedding was off. Tony – just the sound of his name caused aftershocks of fury – Tony was history. She would have a few days or weeks with Ivan, then head back to Nairobi. Perhaps she would move into his overheated subterranean basement apartment. Perhaps, now that
Wedding March
was off, they would find another project to do together. Perhaps they would even return to Africa together.

The dim basement corridor leading to Ivan's apartment was strangely quiet. Mouse, exhilarated from the drive, was unsure how to approach this. To she of the meticulous production schedules, the superannotated date books, this felt reckless, unwise.

No one was in the laundry room, which accounted for the lack of sloshing, banging, whirring. She dragged her fingers along the stucco wall, enjoying the light tearing of her fingertips. She wore lipstick, her good-luck green silk blouse.

As she passed the laundry room, Ivan's door opened a few inches. A woman's tan bony arm reached out from inside the apartment. Dangling from her hand was the immaculate cage of the coddled guinea pig, Dostoyevsky. The hand gently placed Dostoyevsky on the floor just outside the apartment. The door closed.

Mouse would later admit to every charge Shirl and Mimi ever made about her disabled feminine instincts, for she found it more curious that Dostoyevsky was transferred from his normal place of honor atop the refrigerator to the hallway than that a woman with a slim tan arm was inside Ivan's apartment. The woman, she assumed, was a friend, a neighbor, perhaps a fellow member of the Venice Documentary Consortium. She squatted in front of Dostoyevsky, who was more interested in running in his exercise wheel than biting her finger.
Eeekk-eeekk-eeekk
, the wheel squeaked as he trotted in place.

The door opened again. This time it was Ivan, shirtless, the top button of his low riding jeans undone, a cigarette between his lips. “Doss, we can hardly record with you making all this noise – Mouse! What are you doing out there?”

She stood up. Her body pounded inside her skin like a swollen ankle bandaged too tightly. She stared at Ivan's body. She had never seen his scar. She'd never thought to look for it, assuming his alleged kidney donation to the wealthy, desperate Newport Beach couple was like all of Mimi's other exaggerations and white lies. The scar was little more than a seam, slightly puckered, white against his honey skin. It began just under his sternum, swooped down around his side, ending in the small of his back. She saw the whole of it when he turned to pull on a shirt.

It was then she also saw Tooty Brass hastily pulling up the rumpled sheets of Ivan's narrow monk's pallet, wearing one of his old T-shirts. The love song Mouse was humming to herself dropped from her mind like a stone.

When Ivan invited her in, she was too thunderstruck to protest.

“Tooty, you remember Mouse FitzHenry? Mouse, Tooty Brass.” Ivan ground out his cigarette on a bent beer can, hoisted his Nagra onto the kitchen table. He flipped back the cover, checked the tape. “We were just about to record some effects. I'm cutting
El Funeral
to broadcast length for PBS and thought
while I was at it I would remix the sound. I have always been a little ashamed of it.”