Five Fortunes (14 page)

“What about a convertible?” she had asked.

“Saab turbo,” he said, “or a Beemer. Of course you’re dead if you roll either one of them. Saab’s peppier in the high revs, and it’s engineered to be a convertible. The Beemer’s just a sedan with the top cut off.”

“I can’t afford either one,” she had said. “What about a Miata?

What kind of safety rating do they have?”

“That would be ‘closed casket.’”

“Oh,
thanks
.”

“You’d never fit in one anyway,” he pointed out. “If you put the top up, your head would be through the roof.”

103

104 / Beth Gutcheon

She’d bought this big, brown, overpowered gutbucket, which was what he’d wanted her to buy. Whoopee.

She was feeling fairly blue by the time she pulled up in front of her house in Santa Monica, coming back to real life with a bump.

She sat in the Brown Bomber and looked at her house, with its brown lawn. All the neighbors had green lawns. They had things like sprinkler systems and husbands. Her house was moldering stucco with a tile roof, in the Spanish style. She had bought it with her husband, Jerry, their first home of their own when they finished law school and came down here so Jerry could take a job with O’Melveny.

They had moved, eventually, to a fancy house they built together in the Hollywood Hills, with a great view and lots of track lighting for Jerry’s evolving art collection. They had rented the Santa Monica house to a nice young family with two little girls who kept a guinea pig farm in the backyard. Looking back, Carter thought it was probably a bad sign that they hadn’t sold it. As if they both knew that one of them was going to need a bolt-hole sooner or later. It was hard to tell which of them had bolted, when it came to it. It just made sense for her to be the one to leave. They had designed the new house together, but it was his money that had built it. Carter was putting everything she earned back into her new business at that point, and investigators don’t bill at quite as high a rate as partners at O’Melveny. Besides, as she had said at the time, her art collection was smaller. This was a joke for Jerry’s benefit, and he had appreci-ated it.

Carter was not one to get much of a hit from material possessions, especially not art that looked like pictures of the dog’s breakfast.

When the first thing Jerry did after the divorce was to buy himself an early Julian Schnabel, one of the ones with the broken kitchen plates stuck on the canvas, she knew it was sort of a joint statement, issued for them both: “Why on earth did we ever think we could live together?”

Carter, in a pensive mood, sometimes asked herself that question still. As well as she could remember, it started as a joke at Boalt Hall, with their classmates constantly pointing out that if Carter Bond married Jerry Carter, her name would be Carter Carter. It was hard to tell

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who was being teased. Carter, the giant, who had to be the first to say she almost didn’t go to law school when she learned it didn’t have a basketball team, har har har. Or Jerry, who back then was a fairly terrible-looking person. Tall, strong, quite athletic as it turned out, but with full, heavy lips and bulgy eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, and runaway eyebrows like two chunks of dark shredded wheat on his forehead.

Jerry had come to Berkeley from MIT, where he’d taken a degree in pure mathematics. He was a little short on social skills, and may have been the only person in Cambridge in 1970 not to have noticed there was a war on, or to have heard of LSD or SDS. He was not in with the in crowd in Berkeley either. But Carter had taken a Con Law class with him early on, and noticed that he was freaking brilliant. To her, sex appeal was between the ears.

Time had taken the rough edges off Jerry. He dressed beautifully now, played a savage game of tennis, and hung out with people who could green-light a sixty-million-dollar picture. His little Ukrainian parents were incredibly proud of him. Carter was too.

He had really done good, for the Frankenstein of the class of ’72.

The trappings of wealth were by now so much a part of his MO that it was hard to picture him ever living in such a modest little hovel as this one. She found she could barely remember it.

As she opened the front door and walked into her house, she found that
she
could remember living here all too vividly. There was a certain humid smell, as if someone never remembered to wring the kitchen sponges dry. It wasn’t mildew; she paid a nice young woman from El Salvador a goodly sum to be sure the place was spotless. But the house was old. It had been lived in hard. It was full of the ghosts of thousands of meals, almost none of which had been cooked by her. There had been those guinea pigs. Babies had thrown up. There had been diaper pails. She and Jerry had had an old cat with a bladder problem when they’d first lived here, though after a little while Jerry made the cat live out its natural days outside.

She draped her coat over a dining room chair and went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. The first thing she saw, when she opened

106 / Beth Gutcheon

the drawer to get out the matches, was a half carton of cigarettes.

She’d opened it a week ago and scooped out seven packs to stuff into her suitcase. There it lay, waiting to be finished. There it lay, singing quietly to her. How many thousands of times had she pulled open that drawer and cracked a new pack? How many problems solved, fresh cups of coffee drunk, cold beers opened, books read, letters written, talks on the telephone, were associated with reaching into that drawer and the spicy smell of fresh tobacco?

On the drainboard were the ashtrays that Julia had gathered from all over the house on Thursday, emptied, and scrubbed clean. The big heavy glass one from her desk, the Mexican pottery ones from the living room, the little celadon-green dish she kept beside her bed. To live in this house without those ashtrays in every favorite spot would be ending an era of her life. Imagine sitting down at the table in the morning with the paper and a mug of coffee, but no cigarettes, no matches, no ashtray.

She took the carton of cigarettes and put it in the garbage. Then she brought over the stack of mail that Julia had piled on the dining room table, along with the magazines that had gathered on the front porch and the envelopes on the floor of the vestibule where they had been pushed through the mail slot since Thursday. She stood drinking tea from her tall pottery mug, sorting the mail. She threw junk mail into the garbage. She held magazines over the can and flipped through them so that the blow-ins would fall out now, as opposed to later, into the bathtub, where she preferred to read magazines. She pulled out all the stinking perfume advertisements and tossed them. She threw in catalogues, unexamined. Garden catalogues, Tweeds clothing, expensive cookware, equine supplies…what list was she
on
, what had she bought, to make these people think she had a garden or needed a $200 saucepan? She kind of liked the equine supply one and took a minute to check it out before she pitched it. Who was it at the fat farm who’d said the secret of a great head of hair was mane and tail conditioner?

When she was done, she tied the neck of the half-full bag and carried it out to the garage. That way, if her will failed her in the middle

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of the night and she decided to backslide, she’d have to make a real ass of herself, nose down in trash cans in her nightgown, to get at the cigarettes.

Next, she sat down at the kitchen table (next to the empty drawer) with a pad and paper to check her telephone messages. Her brother, Buddy, had called to say he was going to the track; did she want to go? There was a call from her father on Tuesday. No message; she recognized the hang up. There was a call from the blood bank, wanting a deposit; there was a call from a guy she’d gone out with in March, saying he’d call again. There was an invitation to go to an industry screening with her friend Paul, whom she adored and wished wasn’t gay. There was another call from her father on Thursday, who said he was fine but wouldn’t she like to come down to La Jolla for the weekend? More hang ups. Were any of those from Harold, whom she’d broken up with two weeks ago for what might actually be the final time? A friend in the DA’s office left a message saying he’d heard some new O.J. jokes, she should call. The last call was from DeeAnne, saying welcome home.

Carter called her father and told him where she had been. He said fine, but would she be coming down for the weekend? She said she’d let him know. She called Buddy and got his machine; he was at the track, of course. She called Paul and told him where she’d been and had a good laugh with him. Paul told her the movie she missed had sucked; they made a dinner date. She called DeeAnne and got
her
answering machine; she was probably with her family in Palm Springs.

It was two in the afternoon.

Ordinarily, on a sunny Sunday, she’d have put on shorts and settled herself in the backyard with an ashtray, a cold beer, and the Sunday crossword. But she had just thrown out the cigarettes, beer was fattening, and her friends had convinced her that sun was the enemy. She was going to feel like a jerk if she went outside to sit in the sun swathed in protective clothing.

She drank a glass of bottled water and ate a tomato that Julia had left to ripen on the windowsill. It was still only 2:20.

108 / Beth Gutcheon

She could go to the Safeway and stock up on low-fat ice cream and popcorn cakes, but that wasn’t going to get her through the night. What a bummer not to be able to pop up to The Cloisters’

gym and put in some time on the treadmill, or go down to the Japanese tub and hang out with whoever happened to be in it. Then it occurred to her—she did belong to a gym. She
could
go put in some time on the treadmill. It would be different. It would be co-ed. It would not smell of eucalyptus. But it was better than sitting here reading the label on the ketchup bottle, thinking about what was at the bottom of the trash can.

She went. The gym did not smell anything like eucalyptus and the music was at a merciless volume, but she took earplugs and a book, and race-walked for forty-five minutes. Then she put herself around the weight machines in a circuit, using low weights and a lot of repetitions, causing all the muscle builders to have to reset the machines when they got onto them after her. She knew they rolled their eyes. She used the leg press last and set the weights up to 150.

She pressed two sets of 20 and left the weights set there to give the guys a surprise, and then went to the showers.

Home again, she felt full of energy. She felt, to tell the truth, better than she had in years. It was just this business of getting through the hours she used to spend eating and smoking.

One of the things she had almost chucked with the junk mail, but had not, was a colorful offering from a computer on-line service.

She was pretty sure it was the one Jill had talked about. Curious, she carried it into her office and sat down before her computer to study the contents. She was extremely skeptical. She used her computer to pay bills and keep her case files, and every time she had tried to teach it to do something new and amusing, all the old systems, which she really needed, stopped working. They refused to print, or couldn’t find abstruse files they needed in order to run, or they froze and the machine claimed to be out of memory. This usually maddened her, since it took valuable time to straighten out, but it occurred to her that at the moment, time was what she had.

She thought she had a modem, but wasn’t sure—the machine was a castoff of Jerry’s. Somewhere he had given her about eight pounds of

Five Fortunes / 109

books telling what she had and how to work it. These she found, and after a while she found a command that would get the computer to examine its own innards and tell her what was there. Among other things, it found a modem. She liked this diagnostic thing; it would go a long way toward solving the country’s health care problems if you could install them in people.

Next she discovered she needed a telephone wire and a double jack. She had a drawerful of that sort of thing—she knew her way around a telephone pretty thoroughly, given her line of work. After an edifying quarter hour crawling along the floor behind the desk, she had the modem hooked into the telephone line in the wall. Next, she poked the disk into the slot, and holding the instructions in one hand, typed the things it told her to type.

Fancy graphics appeared on the screen welcoming her to her own computer, and telling her what it was doing. It was Installing. It was Running Setup. It was adding Artwork. It was finished. The book in her hand now informed her that she had to reboot in order for the machine to adjust to the changes it had made in its brains. She did this. She then tried to start the on-line program, and got a message saying “General System Failure. Abort? Retry? Quit?”

She quit. She started the system again and tried to start her word-processing program. The same thing happened. When it happened a third time, she took a deep breath, and was glad she didn’t keep a gun in the house. Instead she went outside, walked to the next-door neighbor’s, and rang the bell.

“Hi, Carter,” said Bill, a muscley little internist who had moved in with his family a year before.

“Is Teddy home?”

“No, he’s at a soccer game. Why?”

“I’ve turned my computer into a paperweight. I need a teenager.”

Bill understood. “I don’t think he’ll be home until after dinner.”

“If I can’t figure it out by then, I’ll call him. Thanks.”

“Anytime.”

She went back to her office and spent a maddening half hour poring over manuals. She called tech support, but got a machine that said

110 / Beth Gutcheon

they were available during business hours, Monday through Friday.

The last thing she wanted was to blow business hours on a computer that had worked fine before she ruined it. On the other hand, she couldn’t pay any bills without it.

She called Jerry.

The phone rang for a long time, and when he answered, he was out of breath.