The Red Book (10 page)

Mia is distracted both by the audacity of the misdemeanor and by the man himself, whom the tabloids have reported to be Vivica’s current beau, a model named Nico Carmichael who began his career cleaning celebrity pools. “He’s not just going to leave that there on the grass, is he?” says Mia.

Both young man and dog turn around and swagger back, chest first, to the Escalade. “Yup, he is,” says Luba.

“Well that’s just unsanitary and wrong,” says Mia, fishing around in her diaper bag for one of the blue plastic Nappy Sacs that made the leap from being marketed, unscented, to owners of pets to being strategically placed, powder-scented and for twice the cost, at eye level on the shelves of Babies “R” Us. When she finds one, she marches straight into Nico’s path, forcing him to engage before he can sidle back into the car. Few things upset Mia more than those who don’t pick up after their charges. One should not be allowed to reap the psychic rewards of small creatures if one is not prepared to deal with the concomitant responsibilities of their care. It goes against everything she believes. Everything! “Here,” she says, holding up the Nappy Sac inches from Nico’s face.

“Excuse me?” says Nico, feigning ignorance.

“I thought you might be able to use it,” says Mia, waiting for Luba to back her up, but the actress-turned-lawyer has been corralled by another classmate. Zoe is rendered momentarily mute by the sight of Nico Carmichael’s face. Babies are complete suckers for symmetry. All the recent studies on physical beauty attest to this fact, but Mia wasn’t convinced herself until she saw the phenomenon in action one morning at around 3
A.M.
when
The Way We Were
popped up on Showtime as she was trying to calm Zoe. Only when Robert Redford’s angular, symmetrical mug appeared onscreen would Zoe grow instantly silent. Mia noted, with a jolt of familiar, postaudition pain, that neither the sight of Barbra Streisand’s face nor of her own slightly asymmetrical physiognomy had the same soothing effect on her child.

“For what?” says Nico.

“For the crap your dog just took over there.” The venom in Mia’s voice, the severity of the point of her outstretched finger directing the man’s gaze toward the offending pile on the green expanse, surprises even her. It’s at moments such as these when she has to admit that, no matter how hard she’s labored to break away from learned behaviors, part of her will always be her mother’s daughter.

“Jesus, okay, chill out, lady,” says the man, heading back to deal with the mess.

“I am chill!” shouts Mia.

Then, stooping to pick up the excrement with Mia’s powder-fresh sac, Nico mumbles something that sounds to Mia like “Fucking cunt,” but she can’t be sure.

“What did you just call me?” says Mia, loud enough to rouse the attention of Vivica.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” says Vivica from the backseat of the Escalade, looking up from behind a pair of giant Chanel sunglasses. “Is there a problem here?”

Ma’am?
Mia knows she’s aged since college, but is she really that unrecognizable? No. She can’t be. Luba recognized her right away. What is it with these movie stars? Every once in a while, she’ll show up on one of Jonathan’s sets, and an actress she’s met twenty times—an actress who has, in fact, supped at her table and drunk her wine—will still reach out a slender, manicured hand, as if this were their first encounter, as if Mia’s face were truly as unmemorable as she once feared it might be, and say, “So nice to meet you.” Mia doesn’t even bother to correct them anymore.

But Vivica? “Sorry, Vivsy,” says Mia, using Vivica’s college nickname. “Your friend here and I were having a small disagreement about whether it’s okay to leave dog feces on the ground, but now everything’s fine. How are you, anyway? It’s been forever!” She could have just as easily stated her name to spare Vivica the embarrassment of failed recall, but Mia enjoys the momentary disparity in power. She also knows her acting skills are still sharp enough not to reveal this.

“I know, right?” says Vivica, her smile camera ready, her brain still clearly at a loss as to Mia’s identity. “Two decades just . . . poof ! Gone. And who’s this adorable drooling creature?” She reaches her hand out to touch Zoe’s fingers as Nico whispers something into her ear that elicits an enigmatic smile before disappearing back into the car.

Good stalling, thinks Mia. Touché. “This is Zoe,” she says, and the two engage in several minutes of mother-to-mother banalities—baby age, offspring number, type of delivery, lament over extraneous abdominal skin, the inevitable do-you-still-have-hemorrhoids question (Mia yes, Vivica no, of course), breast or bottle, dramatic sighs over tits that will never be the same—until Vivica’s synapses, Mia can tell, finally hit upon the buried name.

“Mia Mandelbaum!” Vivica says, with obvious relief. “Oh my God, it’s so nice to see you again! Wait, I heard you married Jonathan Zane, right? He’s such an
amazing
director. Everyone I know is
dying
to work with him.”

Of course they are, thinks Mia. Jonathan has a knack for making rich tabloid stars out of struggling, pretty young things. Which Vivica, Mia notes with a dollop of schadenfreude that makes her feel ashamed, no longer technically is, time-frozen (botulism-smoothed) face notwithstanding. “Yup, he’s pretty great.”

People are always much nicer to Mia once they clue into her husband’s identity. It’s an inevitable if somewhat annoying by-product of their union.

“So are you acting these days?” says Vivica.

Mia wonders whether Vivica has read the reunion book and is pretending not to have done so in order to be kind, or whether she
has
read the book and is asking the question for the thrill of watching Mia squirm. “No, not anymore. I moved out to LA after graduation and tried, but, you know . . .”

“Believe me, I know. Hollywood can be
so
brutal.”

Oh, please, Mia thinks, don’t lie for my sake. We both know it’s been nothing but generous and kind to you. But she gives Vivica the benefit of the doubt. At their age, it might very well be turning brutal. She feels Vivica’s eyes straying just over her left shoulder, a not uncommon sensation when you’re the nobody wife of a somebody.

“Isn’t that your husband over there?” Vivica has had several meetings with Jonathan, Mia knows, that have gone nowhere.

Mia turns around and spots a familiar sight: Jonathan, boys in tow, offering his assistance to a couple engaged in the awkward if increasingly common postdigital-era act of self-portraiture. The couple in question, both lassoed with class of 1989 name tags, look vaguely familiar. Everyone here looks vaguely familiar, but Mia can’t place either one. Jonathan takes the camera from the woman and directs her and either her husband or an old friend, it isn’t clear what the relationship between the two is, to move farther back, closer to the Kirkland House entryway, out of the unflattering rays of direct sun. Then, shielding the lens from stray beams with an outstretched arm—Mia calls this his
Triumph of the Will
pose—he shoots off several images of the couple from different angles while the Zane boys stand uncomfortably off to the side, waiting for the interaction to be over.

It’s become a family joke, Jonathan’s incapacity to pass anyone—on the street, in front of a monument, wherever he happens to spot people holding cameras out in front of their faces—without offering to shoot the picture for them. It got to the point, when they were in Paris last summer, where Max had to physically restrain his father when they were on the Champs de Mars, in front of the Eiffel Tower. “Dad,” he said, trapping Jonathan in a wrestling choke hold and laughing, “you can’t take everyone’s pictures! We’ll never get to the top.”

“Oh, let him,” said Mia, untangling father from son. “It gives him so much pleasure.”

“Yeah, that’s my husband,” she now says to Vivica, waving to Jonathan and shaking her head, playfully, at his antics. He waves back, lifts his shoulders in a couldn’t-help-myself shrug, and blows a kiss in her direction. Vivica waves, too, but Jonathan waves back noncommittally, eyes squinched, not recognizing the starlet chatting with his wife. “Don’t be insulted,” says Mia, sensing Vivica’s deflation. “He’s blind without his glasses.”

“Oh my God, me, too, these days!” says Vivica. “It just happened. Overnight. A few days after my forty-second birthday. Boom. Blind as a bat. You, too?”

“Nope,” says Mia, secretly pleased to still have this one tiny edge over her contemporary competitors in the game of decline. “Still twenty-twenty. For now. But I just turned forty. I skipped a couple of grades when I was in elementary school, so, you know, any day now . . .”

“You’re only forty! Wow. I would have never guessed.” Vivica doesn’t intend this as an insult. Consciously.

“Oh?” says Mia, eyebrows raised in cartoon arches. “What age
would
you have guessed?”

Vivica, processing the gaffe, begins to backpedal. “No no, I just meant that back when we were in college, I had no idea! You were so . . . mature. You know,
emotionally
mature. Not physically. Not that you weren’t physically mature, too, I mean, you had boobs of course and all that, but”—Vivica looks stricken, unable to stanch the flow of awkwardness—“you know what I mean. You look great, Mia. Really great, and so . . .
young
!” Her eyes fall on Zoe. “Like a baby!”

“In the thighs, maybe,” says Mia, squeezing the ample, squishy flesh of her daughter’s dangling legs. She doesn’t have to check out the various carapaces of her female classmates to know hers has not aged as gracefully. Then again, her mother always appeared a decade older than her actual age, so Mia comes by her raisining, cratering, and thickening naturally. Forget karma, she thinks. Genetics are the real bitch.

“Oh, come on! You’re not fat,” says Vivica. “You just had a baby. Cut yourself some slack.”

After several painful seconds of silence, during which Mia mines her brain for any comeback that doesn’t sound disingenuous or bitchy, she says, simply, “Well, good to see you, Vivs. Will you be at the luau later?”

“Definitely,” says Vivica, visibly relieved to put a clamp on the conversation.

“Cool, I might see you there,” says Mia, leaving it noncommittal, because it’s too complicated to explain why she won’t be there or why (should she by some miracle make it back from the police station in time) she has no intention of exposing her fragile ego to Vivica Snow’s again anytime soon. After waving good-bye to her sons and husband a second time, and kissing each of Vivica’s Juvéderm-injected cheeks, she pivots on her feet, gripping Zoe’s little fingers just a tad too tightly, and marches her jiggling thighs up Dunster Street toward the taxi stand in Harvard Square.

“I’m looking for Addison Hunt?” Mia says to the cop manning the front desk at the police station, swaying from side to side to try to calm Zoe, whom she started feeding in the backseat of the taxi until she realized the driver was a reckless maniac. “Shh, baby, shhh. You’ll finish your dinner soon.” She’d been given only the vaguest instructions from Clover, other than to bring cash. (“How much cash?” she’d asked. “I have no idea,” said Clover, “but I guess as much as you can withdraw?”) So before jumping in a taxi, she stopped at an ATM and took out the maximum withdrawal, $800, which she figured, with whatever cash Clover and Gunner were able to scrounge up together, should more than cover Addison’s unpaid tickets.

“You mean the parking ticket lady?” says the cop, checking Mia’s ID. “She’s in the holding area. But you can join the rest of the party down the hall.” His Boston
r
s—
pah-king ticket, pah-ty
—give Mia a frisson of nostalgia. Mia is still a wicked impersonator, a lifelong student of dialect; her impression of Sarah Palin on Ecstasy was the hit of the Obama-for-president party circuit.

“The holding area?”

“Yeah,” says the cop, rolling his eyes. “It’s an area. Where we hold.”

“Can I see her?”

“Not a chance.”

“But . . . you’ll release her tonight, right?”

“Sheesh, what is it with you Harvard people?” (You
Hah-vahd
people, thinks Mia. So fantastic, that accent. It takes her full powers of concentration to keep her mouth from subconsciously forming the syllables.) “Don’t you ever watch cop shows?” (No she doesn’t watch cop shows. In fact, the bulk of what Hollywood produces, yes including some of her husband’s own films, does not interest her.) “She’s here for the night. Judge will set bail in the morning. Now, go join your friends, and tell them there’s nothing more any of you’s can do, so you can all go back to your party.” (
Yoh pah-ty
. Mia could listen to that accent all night long.)

“But I brought cash to pay the fines.” Mia pulls out the thick wad of twenty-dollar bills in an ATM envelope.

“Unless you got a hundred grand in that envelope, don’t even bother. And I wouldn’t go flashin’ that around here neither.”

“A hundred grand!?”
Even taking into consideration the exponential ballooning of compounding interest, Addison must have racked up a hell of a lot of parking tickets to owe that much money. The sheer madness of the number causes Mia to choke on gulped air.

“Actually, no. My bad. It’s only $99,436.53 to pay off the fines plus whatever fees the judge sets as bail for twenty years of nonpayment,” says the cop, reading the number off a sheet of paper in front of him. “But who’s counting?”

“Jesus.” Zoe starts to fuss anew. Mia looks around, trying to figure out where she can feed the baby. Discreet doesn’t matter, but germ-free would be nice. “Sorry,” she says. “Okay if I nurse the baby in the waiting room?”

“If you want to flash your titties to a bunch of yahoos, be my guest.”

“That depends,” says Mia, smiling. “How many yahoos are we talking about?”

“Not including your friends, let’s see . . .” The cop checks his paperwork. “We got the boyfriend of the junkie, the prostitute’s girlfriend, the shoplifter’s mother. That makes three.”

Three yahoos, Mia thinks, despite herself. The restroom she rules out as a nursing station, sight unseen. “No perverts?”