Shopgirl (4 page)

MIRABELLE'S AMBITION IS ABOUT
one-tenth of 1 percent of what would be called normal. She has been at Neiman's almost two years without moving one inch forward. She considers herself an artist first, so her choice of jobs is immaterial. It doesn't matter to her if she is selling gloves or repainting apartments, as her real work is done in the evening with artists' crayon. Thus, she has zero ambition in these day jobs, and she tends to leave it to chance when it comes to getting and changing them. She is not aware that some people fight like alley cats for desirable situations. She presents a re´sume´, fills out an application, waits, and finally makes a call to see if she got the job. Usually, a confused secretary will answer and say that the position had been filled weeks ago. This aimlessness in presenting herself contributes to her feeling of being adrift.

She is, however, motivated to visit galleries and present her drawings to the dealer. She has established a relationship with a gallery on Melrose who will take a drawing and, six months later, sell it. But this does not produce enough outside income to set her free from being a shopgirl, and the inspiration required for a drawing exhausts her. And besides, she actually enjoys the monotony of Neiman's. In a way, when she is standing at the glove counter with her ankles crossed, she is perfect, and she likes the sense of accomplishment she gets from repetitive work.

So when she runs into Lisa at the Time Clock Cafe´, she finds herself sitting across from her exact inverse. It is as though her every thought, trait, and belief had been turned inside out and decorated with a red wig. Lisa, idly curious about Mirabelle in the same way that a cat is curious about a dust mote, invites her to sit down. But Lisa's curiosity has talons, and she knows that in her approach to the glove girl, she must appear to be as benign as Mirabelle in order to casually extract the maximum information. If Immanuel Kant had stumbled across this luncheon after his noon Beverly Hills shrink appointment, he would have quickly discerned that Lisa is all phenomena and no noumena, and that Mirabelle is all noumena and no phenomena.

Mirabelle has a knack for discussing the mundane, at length. In this sense, she is Jeremy's blood brother. She can talk about glove storage nonstop. How her own ideas of storage are much better than the current system at Neiman's, and how her supervisor had become upset when he discovered that she had resorted them by size rather than color.

Today, she talks to Lisa about the intricacies of working at Neiman's, including the personality aberrations of her many bosses. This takes a while as practically everybody at Neiman's is her boss. These comments come from Mirabelle not as criticisms but as polite observations, and Lisa is confounded because she cannot discern an ulterior motive. Tom, the regular lunchtime Mirabelle-watcher, has spotted the two of them and is having his sandwich while trying to read their lips. He has also noted that Mirabelle's legs are slightly ajar, creating a wee wedge of a sight line right up her skirt. This keeps him at the lunch table a little longer than usual, ordering a dessert loaded with calories that he cannot afford. However, the periodic shifting of her legs creates a high anticipation in Tom that generates a compensating calorie-eating adrenaline. Suddenly, Lisa takes over with a breast-jutting arch of her back, and Tom's resulting caloric burn puts him back at even.

Mirabelle tells her about the mysterious glove delivery, mistakenly bringing Lisa into her inner circle of one. Lisa keeps an amused look on her face, but inside, this story sickens her, because it happened to someone else. Lisa can only think that this man's footpath had fallen just outside her orbit. She then gives Mirabelle advice that is so foreign to her that Mirabelle actually cannot comprehend it. The advice ranges from playing aloof, to looking up his credit card information, to returning the package unopened. The topic so excites Lisa that she forgets all her careful posturing with Mirabelle and blurts out her deepest and darkest:

“When a man approaches me, I know exactly what he wants. He wants to fuck me.”

Mirabelle's back tenses and her legs reflexively close, prompting Tom to ask for his check.

“And if I like him, I fuck him a lot, until he gets addicted. Then I cut him off. That's when I've got him.”

This is the extent, depth, and limit of Lisa's philosophy of life. Mirabelle stops midsip and stares at her as though looking at the first incoming pictures of an alien life form. She maneuvers the topic elsewhere, a few exchanges are made on other subjects, allowing Lisa to land on earth, and they finally split the check.

Lisa has taken all her intelligence and intuition, which is not meager, and focused a Cyclops eye on the soap operas of four square blocks of Beverly Hills, closing off her life. Mirabelle's outward-facing intelligence is gathering information, which is still coalescing and might not gel for several years. But she has always felt that her thirties were going to be her best decade, and since she is still lingering in her twenties, there is no hurry.

The rest of the day, and the next two days, rock to a lethargic syncopation. Moving too slowly to be counted by the clicks of a metronome, time is measured by lunches and closing times and customers, broken only by an occasional surge of curiosity about the intriguing package and her memory of the man who sent it. The mornings are sometimes busy, relatively, even producing a few sales in between the browsers, who generally scan the glove department as though they were looking into a stereoscope to view some antique photo. Mirabelle's brain activity, if it could be plotted by an electroencephalogram, drops to a level that most scientists would interpret as sleep. On Thursday afternoon, she is brought back to life by an enthusiastic Japanese tourist who can't believe she has lucked upon the glove department, and who buys twelve pairs to be shipped back to Tokyo. This involves taking the address, calculating mailing costs, wrapping, and inscribing gift cards. The woman wants the Neiman's name on everything, including the gift cards, and Mirabelle calls around the store to find the old variety with the name embossed. In Mirabelle's world, this is the equivalent of running the three-minute mile and it leaves her worn out, complaining, and ready for an early night. Finally completing the last detail of the global transaction, she thanks the woman with the one foreign word that Neiman's requires its employees to know:
arigato.
The woman picks up her receipt, slips it in her shopping bag already crammed with previous purchases, cheerfully thanks Mirabelle with an engaging bow, and walks backward twelve steps until she turns and heads west toward couture. This is when Mirabelle becomes aware of a man standing to one side, who turns her with his voice. “So will you have dinner with me?” And then, because Mirabelle doesn't reply, he says, “I'm Mr. Ray Porter.”

“Oh,” she says.

“I'm sorry if I was forward,” he says, “but I'm practicing a new philosophy of life that involves being more forward.”

While Mr. Ray Porter explains his presumption in sending her the gloves, Mirabelle sizes him up. Her intuition, rusty as it is, absorbs him in one single clinch, and no alarm bells sound. He is dressed for business––though without a tie––in a sharp blue suit. In every respect, size, height, weight, he is normal. Again, she checks out his shoes, and they are good. It is then she first notes, in the split second that has passed, that he is probably fifty years old.

Mirabelle forgets all about Lisa's complicated instructions and simply asks Mr. Ray Porter who he is. He tells her he lives in Seattle, but has a place in Los Angeles because he does business here. She asks if he is married and he says he is four years divorced. She asks if he has children and he says no. The question she does not ask, but is foremost in her mind, is “why me?” As these subtle negotiations proceed, it is determined that they will meet at a Beverly Hills Italian restaurant at 8
p.m.
on Sunday. She declines to have him pick her up, and Mr. Ray Porter easily agrees. This keeps her free of all worries she might have about going to dinner with a total stranger: she can drive herself home. He has an easygoing manner that relaxes her, and they exchange exactly one semihumorous line each. Both glance around to see if anyone is watching, and he seems to be aware that employees should not be seen chatting up customers, although vice versa is common. He backs away with an aside that he will need a map to find the glove department again, then he says something about how glad he is that she is coming to dinner, then he faintly blushes and disappears around a corner.

THERE IS NOTHING TOO MYSTERIOUS
about Ray Porter, at least in the usual sense of the word. He is single, he is kind, he tries to do the right thing, and he does not understand himself, or women, or his relationships with women. But there is one truth about him that can be said of a man who asks a woman to dinner before he has ever exchanged one personal word with her. Mr. Ray Porter is on the prowl. He does not know Mirabelle, he has only seen her. He has responded to something visceral, but that visceral thing is only in
him,
not between
them.
Not yet. He only imagines the character that unites her clothes, her skin, and her body. He has imagined the pleasure of touching her, and imagined her pleasure at being touched. She is a feminine object that tweaks him at his animal best.

Extrapolating from Mirabelle's wrist, he understands the terrain of her neck, he can imagine the valley of her breasts, and he knows that he can lose himself in her. He does not know his further intent with her, but he is not trying to get what he wants at any expense. If he thinks he would harm Mirabelle, he would back away. But he does not yet understand when and how people are hurt. He doesn't understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart. It seems to him that nothing in the world of relationships proves to be generally true, that nothing follows a logical sequence, and that his search for cohesion leaves him empty of answers.

His attraction to Mirabelle is not random. He is not out and about sending gloves all over the city. His action is a very spontaneous and specific response to something in her. It may have been her stance: at twenty yards she looks off-kilter and appealing. Or maybe it was her two pinpoint eyes that made her look innocent and vulnerable. Whatever it was, it started from an extremely small place that Mr. Ray Porter never could have identified, even under torture.

His small house and furnishings in the Hollywood Hills tell one simple story; Mr. Ray Porter has money. Enough that there is never a problem, any time or any place. The giveaway is the lighting. Little hidden spotlights alternate with warm lamplight, creating a soft yellow glow that implies “decorator.” The house, being a second home used for business only, isn't strewn with personal objects. It is this anonymous quality, like being on vacation in an expensive hotel room, that makes you want to take off your clothes and start fucking. In the bedroom, there is a fireplace opposite an antique four-poster bed, with books piled high on either side, all nonfiction and all stuck with three or four bookmarks. The house focuses on the view of the city that Mirabelle is so casually denied.

Neatness, which the house displays on every coffee table and bathroom countertop, is not a characteristic of Ray Porter. Neatness is a quality that he admires, however, and therefore buys, by hiring an obsessive maid.

In the garage are two cars. One is a gray Mercedes, the other a gray Mercedes. The second gray Mercedes is used for hauling his sports equipment, so he won't have to load and unload every time he feels like a bike ride. A rack hangs incongruously on the back, and in the trunk are rollerblades and a tennis racquet. When Mr. Ray Porter tempts fate by exercising in traffic, he wears a twenty-first-century version of armor, which offers similar protection but not the romance: a beaked plastic bicycle helmet, elbow pads, and knee pads. He dons this getup whether it is winter or summer, meaning for three months out of the year he wears large black knee pads while wearing shorts. When he is astride his bicycle, tooling down a Seattle main street and sporting this outfit, the only visible difference between Ray Porter and an insect is his size.

The kitchen is the most unused part of the house. Since his divorce, the kitchen has become like a middle-American living room: for display only. Usually he eats out, alone, or tries to fill the evening with friends or a date. These dinner dates, which function mainly to fill a vacuum of loneliness between the hours of 8
p.m.
and 11
p.m.
, cause him more grief than a year of solitary confinement. For even though they look like dates and sound like dates, and sometimes result in a liaison, to him they aren't exactly dates. They are friendly evenings that sometimes end in bed. He incorrectly assumes that whatever is his understanding of the nature of one of these evenings, his date is thinking it, too, and he is deeply shocked and surprised when one or another of these women, whom he has seen over the past several months and with whom he has had several sexual encounters, actually believes they are a couple.

These experiences have caused him to think very hard about what he is doing and where he is going. And the result of all this thinking is that he now understands that he doesn't know what he is doing or where he is going. His professional life is fine, but romantically he is an adolescent, and he has begun an education in the subject that is thirty years overdue.

His interest in Mirabelle comes from the part of him that still believes he can have her without obligation. He believes he can exist with her from eight to eleven and enter a private and personal world that they will create that will cease to exist in the off hours or off days. He believes that this world will be independent of other worlds he might create on another night, in another place, and he has no intention of allowing it to affect his true quest for a mate. He believes that in this affair, what is given back and forth will be exactly even, and that they will both see the benefits they are receiving. But because he picked Mirabelle out by sight alone, he fails to see that her fragility, which he smelled and sensed and is lured by, runs deep in her heart and is part of her nature, and cannot be separated out for him to fuck.

Ray and Mirabelle have similar ideas about wardrobe. He likes a stylish look, though modified for his age. He has lots of suits in striking fabrics, and his money enables him to make mistakes and get rid of them. His closet has his L.A. clothes, which means he can travel to and from Seattle with no suitcase. The drawback to this arrangement is that he will arrive at his home, see a shirt he hasn't worn for three months because he has been out of town, and feel like he is slipping into a new look. His L.A. friends have an entirely different view. They see that he is wearing exactly the same shirt he wore last time.

His aversion to carrying luggage, eventually causing him to buy a house in L.A. so he could stock it with clothes, comes from a mildly obsessive belief in the management of his time. Standing at a baggage carousel, being jostled by passengers while scanning a hundred similar bags for a number to match his claim check, which is always misplaced, does not sit well with his logic. He has no time to be exasperated, especially if he can solve it by buying a house. This need for efficiency dictates many of his daily movements. In setting out his breakfast, he will accomplish all the tasks that occur on one side of the kitchen before starting the tasks that originate on the other side of the kitchen. He will never cross to the refrigerator for orange juice, cross back to the cabinet to get cereal, and cross back again to the refrigerator for milk. This behavior is rooted in a subterranean logic a robot programmed for efficiency might display.

Luckily, this behavior is not entirely fixed in him. It escalates during busy times and wanes during evenings and vacations. However, it translates itself into other forms so removed from the original impulse as to be unrecognizable. His attraction to Mirabelle is an abstraction of this behavior: her cleanliness and simplicity represent an economy that other women do not have.

Ray Porter parks the car and enters the house in his most efficient way. The garage door is closed by remote control while he is still in the car gathering his papers. This saves him pausing at the kitchen door to press the indoor remote. This little abbreviation is second nature to him. Once inside, he sets his papers down in the kitchen, even though they need to be in his office. He will take them later when he has to go to the office via the kitchen. There is no point taking them to the office now, as he needs to beeline to the living room to make reservations for Sunday.

He sits on the sofa, turns on the TV news, starts reading the newspaper, and simultaneously starts dialing the restaurant. He makes reservations at a small but sweet place in Beverly Hills that is on his speed dial. La Ronde, an Italian restaurant with a French name (the culinary complement to Rodeo Drive's French chateaus with Italian porticos tacked on), offers quiet and privacy to an older man who walks in with a twenty-eight-year-old who looks twenty-four. Then, after attending to the TV and browsing the newspaper until he is absolutely bored, he begins to do what he does best. He raises his head toward the view, which by now has transformed into sparkling white dots of light set in black velvet, and begins to think. What goes through his head are streams of logical chains, computer code, if-then situations, complicated mathematical structures, words, non sequiturs. Usually, these chains will unravel into loose ends or pointless conclusions; sometimes they will form something concrete, which he can sell. This ability to focus absolutely has brought him millions of dollars, and why this is so can never be explained to normal people, except to say that the source of his money is embedded deeply in a software string so fundamental that to change it now would be to reorganize the entire world. He is not filthy rich; his contribution is just a tiny line of early code that he had copyrighted, and that they had needed.

Tonight, these mental excursions get him nowhere and finally he gets on the phone to a Seattle girlfriend, or as he really thinks of it, a woman in Seattle who is a friend he is having sex with who is fully informed that they are never going to be a couple. “Hey.” “Hey,” she says back. “What're you doin'?” she says. “Staring at my knees. Nothing much. You okay?” She replies, “Yeah.” He senses she's upset over something and digs deeper. She responds by spilling out her woes––mostly work related––and he listens attentively, like John Gray in a nest of divorce´es. The conversation finally runs out of gas. “Well, this is good, this is a good talk. So I'll see you when I get back. By the way, I think I should tell you I have a date on Sunday. Thought I should let you know.” “All right, all right,” she counters, “you don't have to tell me everything, you just don't, just keep it to yourself.” “Shouldn't I tell you, though?” he replies. “Shouldn't I?”

She tries to explain, but can't. He tries to understand her, but can't. He knows this is an area where logic doesn't apply and he just listens and learns the lesson for next time.

This information, this anecdotal training in the understanding of women, gleaned from experience, books, advice, and mostly hurt feelings being hurled at him, fits in no previous compartment of his experience, and he has created a new memory bank just for housing it all. This memory bank is in a jumble. It is not coherent. Occasionally his more rational mind will venture in and try to arrange it, like a boy cleaning his room. But just when everything is in its place, the metaphor holds and two days later the room is a mess.

These encounters are probably the most formative experiences of his early fifties. He is collecting pleasures and pains, gathered from his relationships with ballerinas and librarians, decent females without the right pheromones, and nut-balls. He is like a child learning what is too hot to touch, and he hopes all this experience will coalesce into a philosophy of life, or at least a philosophy of relationships, that will transform itself into instinct. This fact-finding mission, in the guise of philandering, is necessary because as a youth he failed to observe women properly. He never sorted them into types, or catalogued their neuroses so he could spot them again from the tiniest clue. He is now taking a remedial course in fucking 101, to learn how to handle the diatribes, inexplicable antics, insults, and misunderstandings that seem to him to be the inevitable conclusion to the syllogism of sex. But he is not aware that he is on such a serious mission: he thinks he is a bachelor having a good time.

That night, he calls a restaurant that delivers and he orders an appropriate meal for a fifty-year-old. This is easier in L.A. than in Seattle, as most take-out food in any part of the country involves fat and cholesterol. In L.A., however, it's a snap to order a low-fat veggie burger, or sushi, delivered right to your door no matter how complicated the route to your house. In Los Angeles you can live in the tiniest apartment in the tiniest cul de sac with a 1⁄4 in your address and twenty minutes after placing an order a foreigner will knock on your door bearing yam fries and meatless meatloaf. And if Ray's solitary dinner at home were broadcast on satellite, the world would learn that millionaires, too, eat their dinners out of a white paper bag while standing in the kitchen. Even Mirabelle knows not to do that, as the self-prepared dinner is a great time killer for lonely people, and as much time should be spent on it as possible.

After the food arrives via the smallest car he has ever seen, Ray Porter turns on a small TV in the kitchen and begins channel flipping. At that moment he becomes Jeremy's soul mate; their two hearts beat as one as they eat from a sack and rapidly click their way through the entire broadcast range, with similar timing of the occasional paper rustle and periodic foot shift. They are nearly indistinguishable as they engage in this rite, except that one man stands in the kitchen of a two-million-dollar house overlooking the city, and the other in a one-room garage apartment that the city overlooked. If Mr. Ray Porter knew where to train his telescope, he might even have been able to peer down fifteen miles to Silverlake, right into Jeremy's window, and if Jeremy weren't in an impenetrable stupor, he might even have been able to wave back. And if three lines were drawn, joining the homes of Jeremy and Ray to Mirabelle's wobbly flat, the apex of the triangle would pinpoint the unlikely connection between these two wildly opposite men.