The Diamond Lane (32 page)

Mouse, the genius behind the bad idea, made an African dish involving green curries and an odious-looking root. It had taken six hours to prepare, not including the hours spent bumper-to-bumpering all over town just to find the ingredients. The final result had proved inedible.

They had also rented a video, suggested by Glen, that had proved unwatchable, one that was theoretically bad enough to be good. It should have elicited condescending groans, ironic comments, elitist howls. Instead, it made you feel like you were wasting your life, not something you want to be reminded of on New Year's Eve.

Ralph was sullen and preoccupied, more grumpy than usual. When they all went outside at midnight to bang pots and pans in front of the building with the Armenian neighbors, Ralph disappeared. Mimi, who had come back in to purge the pizza they had eaten in lieu of the African dish, found him in Carole's bedroom, crouching by the nightstand, talking on the phone to Elaine.

“Elaine, God! When's it due?” she heard him say. He saw Mimi out of the corner of his eye, standing in the doorway. He clamped the receiver to his chest. “Taxes,” he said, his face ashen.

Mimi told herself she didn't care, even when she heard him lie to Elaine that he was home stripping wallpaper. She even
went so far as to tell
him
she didn't care, that of course he and Elaine should be friends, and it was New Year's Eve, etc., etc., until they got into bed and he began touching her with that distracted look on his round face and something snapped inside her. She yelled and cried and accused him of leading her on, making her fat, and in general ruining her life.

Ralph was stunned. His pale eyebrows anchored themselves to the top of his forehead and didn't drift back to their normal place until she had sobbed into her pillow for nearly an hour, staining the pillowcase with mascaraed hieroglyphics. He patted her between her big bony shoulder blades and thought about
Love Among Elephants
.

Earlier in the evening, while Mouse and Mimi were in the kitchen cooking, and Glen and Carole had gone to track down the video, Tony and Ralph talked about the new draft. When Mouse or Mimi came in to offer another beer or to change the CD, by mutual, unspoken agreement, they changed the subject to sports or fell silent. Ralph had his own superstitious reasons for refusing to discuss his projects, and Tony had not yet gotten around to telling Mouse. It seemed less important that he tell her, now that the storyline had taken a
Raiders of the Lost Ark
sort of turn, and he kept putting it off and putting it off until finally he came to the conclusion that she didn't need to know at all.

Besides, Mouse had been annoyingly uncommunicative since Christmas. Conversing with her was like trying to make eye contact with someone from behind a drawn shade. He attributed it to the affair he believed she was having with Ivan. She reconfirmed his suspicions tonight.

Before Glen and Ralph arrived, while he was in the kitchen helping the girls with the hors d'oeuvres, he complained that they really should be going out to celebrate the new year. This was, after all, Los Angeles, not Nairobi. There were things to
do
here. What things, he wasn't exactly sure. There had to be a party they could crash, a club they could close in the wee hours of the morning. If he was honest with himself, however, he would have
to admit that if Los Angeles was as exciting as its reputation held, the excitement had eluded him. Life here was weighted with the vague feeling that if anything was happening, it was happening wherever one
wasn't
. Maybe that accounted for all the driving, he reasoned. Eleven million people scurrying around, trying to find the elusive exciting event that would make them feel at the center of something big. The only time he had felt that way was during meetings with V.J., at which, so far as he could tell, absolutely nothing had happened, except a lot of work for him and Ralph. And people said Africa was impenetrable.

Of course, Mouse told him, there was nothing exciting to miss. “This city is like one of those mysterious men. You know, you always say, ‘He's just quiet and seems boring, but still waters run deep –'”

“– but the reason the waters are so still is because there's like no wind, no currents –” said Mimi.

“– no fish, no
plankton
–” said Mouse.

“Sometimes a bore is just a bore.”

“Most times.”

“All right,” said Tony, “your point is made.” He opened a can of clams for the dip and overshot the bowl, dumping half the can on the floor, where Sniffy was waiting to slurp them up.

“Tony,” said Mouse.

“All right!” he said, hurling the can into the sink and stomping out of the kitchen. Where did she come off criticizing him like that? Where did she come off expounding about men. He knew she was talking about him, not Los Angeles. He, Tony, was reliable, a known entity, boring. Ivan was surly, exotic, and a better filmmaker. He threw himself on the couch and turned on the box, refusing to budge. He turned on professional wrestling. The next time he bit Mouse's earlobe he resolved to draw blood.

Beyond that, Tony was not quite sure what else to do about Mouse and Ivan. At the risk of humiliating himself again, he would dearly love to catch Mouse out, but he could not afford to split up with her. V.J. Parchman needed, for some reason, to
believe they were married. Even though it didn't seem to matter if the rest of the story was true, this part needed to be. Tony presumed it was so that when he and Mouse went on Johnny Carson after
Love Among Elephants
was a huge smash, they wouldn't destroy the credibility of the rest of the film by saying, “That part about the wedding on the mountain? We fudged a bit on that part. Actually, we just
live together
.” Perhaps after the script was approved by V.J.'s people, and he and Ralph had gotten their money, he could admit that they were only engaged. Or maybe by then they actually would be married, so then it would be all right to split up. Of course, he didn't want to split up. He loved her. He loved her, and she was making up for all those lost years with that blasted Hispanic pseudointellectual Academy Award winner.

Instead, Tony adopted what his father called the Queen Victoria tack: do nothing and wait and ninety-nine percent of your problems will solve themselves. He spent his free time, which was considerable, working on the script with Ralph. They wrote and drank and played golf. They watched old videos of last year's Lakers games up at the house in the Hollywood Hills, which Darryl and Sather and Ralph shared.

This was fine by Mouse. She needed time alone to plot and plan. She knew it would come to this. Since Ivan suggested it, she knew. It was on her mind that New Year's Eve, while the African dish flopped, while Glen lectured them about different brands of flea dip, while the excruciating video sent everyone into a morose reexamination of the past year, while Tony bent to give her a stiff peck at midnight. It was as if she was driving an amusement-park car, the kind on tracks you pretend to be steering yourself, all the while knowing if you let go of the wheel the car will still take you to the same place. In this case, the car was headed for a place she should be ashamed to go, but wasn't. Somehow,
Wedding March
was going to get made.

Mouse had known it would be necessary to try to give back the money to Shirl. There was nothing calculated in this. She
honestly wanted Shirl to take it back. If Shirl took it back Mouse and Tony would have a thousand-dollar wedding. A thousand-dollar wedding did not deserve a documentary. It was any wedding. Ivan could easily find another. If Shirl took the money back, Mouse would be saved from thinking, A modern wedding whose budget is one hundred thousand dollars
begs
to be filmed.

Mouse thought that maybe in private Shirl would see the error of her extravagance. Maybe without Auntie Barb glowering and Mimi gushing, “I'm
so
happy for you, too bad money can't buy taste,” and a sherry-sodden Tony whispering, “
Enjoy
it, poppet. Cut loose,” Mouse could talk some sense into her.

Instead, she made Shirl cry in the stationery department of Robinson's, at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, where Shirl always bought her Christmas cards for next year, on sale half-price. It was the day after Christmas.

“Why won't you let me do this for you? For twenty years you don't come home, now I want to give you a wonderful wedding and you won't take it. My youngest won't take a gift from her own mother,” she said to anyone interested, over the dull slapping of plastic boxes of cards being unearthed from a pile by exhausted shoppers, glanced at, then chucked back. “These are nice. See, you can put your own photo in. I could put in one of the wedding.”

“At least let me put half of it into… into…” Mouse racked her brain for the initials of all those modern-day financial instruments advertised on the sides of buses, “… some kind of a bank thing, a trust account or something. If we have any kids, you know, for college.”

“You're not planning on having children?” asked Shirl, wild-eyed. “Don't tell me you're not planning on having children. I can't take it. I'm still sick.” She dropped the box back on the pile, bent her head to her chest with both hands.

Mouse noticed the loose crêpey skin of her neck bunched up like a thin fallen sock. “Of course we are,” she lied. “But Mom, no wedding costs a hundred thousand dollars, even in Los Angeles.”

“You are a monster,” said Shirl. “How about this: Wishing You All Good Things Now and Throughout the Coming Year.”

Mouse surrendered herself to her fate.

Mouse was dripping when she arrived at Nita Katz's Beverly Hills office. The bad weather had forced her to drag her poncho from the bottom of her suitcase. Feeling distinctly unfashionable in its green plastic folds, she made a mental note to get a new one.

Since she had been there last Nita had gotten a secretary: a leathery-faced woman with cottony blond hair and deep-set light-gray eyes crookedly outlined in black pencil sat at a desk in the small waiting room. She was busy tying tiny gold bows on hundreds of tiny white silk boxes. The silk boxes had been packed in the lids of larger boxes, scattered around the room, on the floor and on the loveseat, balanced on its round arms. “You're too early,” the secretary said. Her voice reminded Mouse of Mimi's coffee grinder. “Britty said you wouldn't be here until three.”

“I'm here to see Nita,” said Mouse.

“You're not the messenger. I thought you were the messenger.”

The secretary made Mouse step into the hallway to remove her poncho. She was afraid a stray drop would land on one of the two-by-two-inch-square tops of one of the hundreds of white silk boxes, leaving a tiny permanent stain, infuriating Britty, the bride, whose wedding would then not be perfect. The secretary could not bear the responsibility of that. In the hallway Mouse hauled the poncho over her head. She smoothed her wet hair, forgetting about the perm, then hung upside down from the waist, trying to unsmooth it.

Mouse was suddenly very interested in the boxes, their gold bows, what was inside. It was the film, uncoiling in her mind. It was like a woman who doesn't know she is pregnant taking a sudden and mysterious interest in booties.

Mouse sometimes liked to draw, but only from photographs.
She enjoyed standup comedians on television, but only when the jokes were retold by Tony. He never told them as well, but somehow she found them funnier. She liked nature documentaries far better than nature. She liked life diluted by interpretation.

She asked the secretary what the boxes were for.

Was that traditional, then, party favors for the guests?

What was in the boxes?

Were the truffles light chocolate or dark?

What was the significance of hand-dipped?

What was inside the chocolates?

Was it real champagne or a champagne cream?

When were they flown from Switzerland?

Did they need to be flown in a special refrigerated plane?

Did every guest get one?

How much did they cost?

Could I try one?

“Get yourself invited to the wedding,” said the secretary, suspicious. They got crackpots every once in a while, people looking for the mediums next door. This could be one.

Nita did not immediately recognize Mouse. Remembering last time, Mouse had worn something casual, her black leggings and a black cotton sweater. Mimi had told her that no one ever needed to dress up in L.A. Style was the thing. You needed your own. Mouse decided that this was her style.

Nita's own style had changed. The linty sweater and ballet shoes had been replaced by a blue empire-waisted dress, spattered with tiny yellow flowers. Something about Nita's face had also changed. Strips of yellow and green bruises sat atop her cheekbones. Something with her nose, thought Mouse, whose tilt now afforded a good view of the deep maroon insides of her nostrils. She wore flat white shoes and white stockings. A thirty-seven-year-old girl out of a children's story, Mouse thought. She was mystified.

“I'm Mimi's sister,” said Mouse.

“Mimi?” said Nita blankly.

“We met several months ago about my wedding. I just got back from Africa?”

“Right. The wedding on the beach.”