Leave It to Me (16 page)

E. T., get off the pay phone. Hi, Mom! I’m the infant you mislaid.

What had I expected to find in my mother’s museum? Harem pants and killing tools? Baby clothes and toys?

Give me a sign, Bio-Mom.

Jess’s agency occupied the upper floor of a two-story house on Clay off Presidio. The walls were painted in combinations of colors that I hadn’t crayoned with in my Crayola days in Schenectady. Puce, chartreuse, fraise, gamboge. All the sofas were shrouded in red and black kilims. The camel harnesses on the floor were meant to be sat on. Wool shawls embroidered with paisleys hung in place of blinds or drapes in the windows. All ledges, sills and tabletops were cluttered with brass gods, mirrored elephants, copper urns, lacquered boxes, sandalwood beads and stone eggs on tarnished trays. This wasn’t California. It wasn’t even America.

Jess caught my look, and reacted defensively. “Don’t judge
me
, Ms. Fresh-from-Schenectady! I
went
to Asia with a pierced nose. I was the first one to try a nose ring in Berkeley.” She strode ahead of me, a brisk, jowly, touched-up blonde in Armani pants.

“No tips in this job,” she went on. “Only egomaniacs for clients. Still want it?” She went through an archway hung with a mirrored valance into a small, interconnecting room, and I followed. “If you do, this is the HQ of the world’s best MEs.”

I took in the conventional office furniture and equipment: desks, filing cabinets, computers, a printer, a fax
machine, a copier. No organizer or dossier for the tidy storage of maternal feelings.

“We call this the Wall,” she said. The wall behind her desk was hung with head shots of celebrity authors.

Yeah? As in Loco Larry’s?

She sat at her desk, sizing me up more frankly than she had at Dahlia’s Divan.

No desk clutter of pens, paper clips, rubber bands; no family photographs; no flowers; no smiling faces doodled on scratch pads; no framed fortune-cookie-Confucian proverbs. Only one item out of place in that Office Depot decor: an antique wooden lap desk that scribes in another era on another continent must have squatted at.

She caught me being distracted by the lap desk. “From a Muslim slum in Bombay. India’s one great junkyard.”

“I know.” I am capable of micronostalgia. “A guy I used to date back east called India hot, loud, filthy, smelly, the Club Med of choice for druggies and convicts on the lam.”

“Rubbish!” Jess snapped. “A typical white male. You have to open yourself up to ancient cultures. You go to a junkyard only because you know it’s full of tossed-out treasures.”

Wha, Mom?

She pointed a pencil at the Wall, and popped her interview question. “How many clients can you identify?”

I chose the chair farthest from the wall hung with framed book jackets and autographed portraits. It reminded me of Dan’s Diner in Saratoga Springs, where you couldn’t see the wall because of signed glossies of old vaudeville stars no one knew or cared about anymore. The
Flash’s winning trick was to never let the enemy see him sweat. “I love tests,” I said. I didn’t leave my chair. In the past year I’d read three vampire novels and half of a Stephen King. I’d caught Grisham and Waller on morning shows on network TV, but that didn’t mean I’d recognize them if they were on the Wall.

“A joke, not a test. Ham doesn’t hang out with dummies.” She pulled a thick ring-binder out of a drawer, and held it out to me. She obviously did arm curls with serious weights. If I wanted to tussle with her, I’d have to pump up.

I moved to a chair across from Jess, and flipped through the binder. Mug shots of writers; press releases from their publishers.

Jess launched into the dos and don’ts of “ME-ing”:

Make sure your watch battery doesn’t die on you.

Check the map and plot your route from hotel to radio/TV stations, bookstores, et cetera, the night before.

Make nice to hotel doormen and valet parking attendants.

Keep a care basket visible in the backseat. Refill supply of bottled waters, fruits, candies, tea bags.

Hide an emergency kit of condoms, antacids, Gas-X, Ex-Lax, et cetera. Offer traveling iron, curling iron, if necessary, prior to TV interview and photo shoot.

Have quarters and dollar bills handy for tollbooths.

Ask for, and hang on to, all receipts.

Don’t yak about yourself. A ME doesn’t have personal problems. A ME doesn’t have a life. Your client’s got enough for everyone, or thinks he does.

If your author is a lech, use your head before your muscle.

Have fun. Even the shits don’t stay around longer than two days.

I played it her way.
Got it, boss!
I even improvised additions out loud to her blue-book of dos and don’ts:

Keep file cards on each client’s likes and dislikes. A ME shouldn’t have to ask, Do you take it black, straight, rare, imported, domestic? Keep your private Yellow Pages of where to buy after-hours liquor, finest-human-hair-wig-at-shortest-notice, et cetera. Practice the Heimlich maneuver. Cultivate a shrink and/or dealer for emergency requests.

“Forget the pills,” Jess snapped. She stalked off to the window to look out on caffeine-deprived San Franciscans hurrying into Middle Grounds.

“Just a joke,” I apologized, “not a business proposition.” I filed her overreaction.

Jess swung around on her designer flats. “Hilarious,” she said.

I watched and heard her take two deep breaths, and focus on serenity. Serenity has to sneak up on you, shock you. I could have taught her that, but she wasn’t ready to be a pupil. There’s only the willingness to prey or be preyed on.

“I’ll give you Stark Swann to cut your teeth on. He’ll test your sense of humor.”

“Is that a male or a female?”

“Is that another joke?” She made her way to the fax machine, which was spewing out changes in the itinerary
of an Astro Sense Publishing House author. “They’ve lined up more interviews for Ma Varuna. The New Age types have fat wallets.”

“It’s a question.” I’d never heard of either of those authors, but I was glad I was getting a client who’d press my patience button instead of faith. “Hey, give me a break, I’m a very quick study.”

“Well, study this. Go into any drugstore. Check out the book rack.
The Chartreuse Night
and
The Burglar Bliss
are out there with the beta-blockers.”

The Palest Poison
was number seven on the lists that counted, and still climbing. She frisbeed a scarlet-and-gold promo kit at me. My reflexes are sharp; she should have guessed. Stark Swann had to be one vain dude. A jock with a chiseled jaw and styled silver hair brooded on the mysteries of prefab Nature.

“Nervous?” she asked.

“Should I be?”

“Let’s get a mineral water and find out.”

Nervous only like a squadron leader going into battle. Logistics, contour maps, streets to master: San Francisco as house-to-house combat. I had buildings and parking lots to locate on the city map, shortcuts to plot.

“Okay,” I heard myself say. I wanted to say,
Hey, you’re a widow! Daddy’s dead, no fear he’ll pop up and ruin your life. We know what men who’ve shared the same woman are like, but what are women who’ve shared the same man like?
I led the way to the Middle Grounds.

There in the smart, bright, busy neighborhood hangout, with music from an FM station piped overhead and
thumbed paperbacks of Calvino and Eco on tabletops, I learned the story of one such woman. Jess presented it as her invitation to concubinely bonding; I heard it as a cautionary tale against mindless passion.

Jess had dropped out of Baba Lalji’s ashram and dropped into Asia in the late fall of 1968. She had hit all the usual hippie highs and lows in the next six years, and then it had happened. Karma, she called it. Her karma revealed itself in a village named Laxmipur. The year was 1974, Jess twenty-eight.

Where’s that? Give me a country. A quadrant. Desert or jungle. Wet or dry.

What does it matter? It happened. It happened in a season so dry the soil cracks open wide enough to swallow dying cattle and children.

All right, so Jess was twenty-eight, the war was over and back in America the bile was receding, but in a village where the wells were choked with bodies and the fields aged like bruises, yellow-brown, it was still hard to be an American and a romantic.

And how do you protest the war by doing dope on an alien continent? That didn’t make sense.

It had to Jess in her twenties; still did. It made all the sense in the world to anyone her age, Ham’s age, Fred’s age, those who had survived and owned up to what the war’d really done for them, how it’d freed them to be themselves, to curse and fuck and burn and loot, to kill or die, to feel superior while having fun. The war didn’t change you, that was Jess’s point. The war leveled the playing field for girls like her. When she talked of her
hopeless childhood out in Fresno, I thought:
Whoa! That’s Grandma and Gramps!

“Why are you always smiling?” she demanded.

“It’s so
fascinating!
” I said.

Jess’d overlanded to India shortly after she’d broken up with Ham. There, she got that out of the way. I admired her directness, and added, funny thing about Ham, wasn’t it, that he couldn’t let go of his women, he needed to hang on to every last one of them. Jess relaxed. She said, Yeah, the exes, the one-night stands, even the nut who shaved her head for him.

The one with the hat at Vito’s?

The trouble was that Ham’s wildness was Berkeley wildness. Jess sighed. A familiar wildness. The same with the Haight. A sad, shabby, funky, show-offy Look-Ma-Number-One kind of wildness. You had to leave the country, chuck logic, fuck reason, screw Enlightenment if you wanted more than that.

Translated into Fonglish, Jess was confessing to a bad case of
needs
.

Young Jess made her way through England and France, Greece and Turkey and Afghanistan, sharing rides with the world’s waifs, strays, seekers, sickos, sensualists, and stopped for a while in the Indian village of Laxmipur in a rainless month. She tossed her backpack on the blistered soil, lay down under a shade tree with brittle, wrinkled leaves, looked into a sky sheer as muslin and recited in a voice that was sure and strong.

“ ‘Zero at the bone,’ ” she said.

“Dickinson,” I exclaimed. “Isn’t it?”

“You
are
a quick study.” She ordered lattes. “They should ration such moments. One per lifetime.”

“Mr. Bullock, he was my English teacher back east, he was big on Frost too.”

Jess was back under the muslin-thin sky in Laxmipur, communing with Emily Dickinson.

“ ‘The Grass divides as with a Comb / A spotted shaft is seen,’ and wham! There was this … 
apparition!
”

She
invoked
this
thing
, this
snake-thing
. This snake-god or snake-devil, whatever it was, just rose right out of the cracks in the dry soil and rocked her in his arms.

A trip?

“You had to have been there, Devi! There’s no describing that erotic moment.”

My beginning
, I thought.
I’ve just heard my beginning
.

I heard her say, “Just no describing how erotic it was! I was a poetry-mad kid, I thought I was going to be the Emily of Fresno, can you imagine that? Poetry was my god, before that man …”

I
saw
what Jess’d
felt
. My father—her god, my devil—rocked her in his arms. I concentrated on those non-human arms. On their litheness. On their strength and meanness. On the starlight luster of his killer hands. Prince of Darkness. Prince Materializing out of Darkness. He didn’t have to touch her. I was wantonness waiting to happen.

“Meaning, he made you happy?”

Jess tuned in to my wavelength. “He made me wanton.”

That was her exact phrase. Happiness is the consolation prize. Suddenly I understood, without wanting to, why I had run away from Frankie Fong. One day soon, my god would touch down. My breathing would tighten. I would thrill to the shudder of Zero in my spine.

It turned out that I had to cut more than my teeth on Stark Swann.

Starkie Boy was first off the plane. First class; aisle seat; probably bulkhead to show off those long, smug legs in blue denim. (“
Your
writers will always be first off,” Jess’d confided. “Even if the publisher stuck them with economy, they’ll push their way to the front.”) From the way the Asian flight attendant was creaming as she smiled her “Have a happy rest of vacation, Mr. Swann,” I figured at least one of Jess’s tips would come in handy.

People at the gate—the limo drivers with Velcro signboards, escorts from hotels, businesses and universities—all took a second glance.
You’re sure you’re not mine?
He was good-looking, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t his clothes either: denim shirt, bone-and-turquoise beads, turquoise belt buckle, blue antelope-skin boots. No, it had to do with his bearing. He stood, he strode, he scanned, did all the things we do except for the autographing, but with the
solipsism
, there’s just no other word for it, of people out of
People
magazine. A celebrity
is
. The infamous have to strut to get noticed, and the evil slink away so they won’t be noticed. Swann didn’t care one way or another. He didn’t have to. He was the center of his universe.