The Diamond Lane (4 page)

The flakes from Solly's croissant trickled onto Mimi's shoulders as she put in calls to ICM, CAA, CBS, NBC, and a couple of ritzy farmhouses in Connecticut where clients were holed up, working on screenplays.

“Solly Stein calling for Jonathan Wild. He's in a meeting? Could you leave word?”

“Solly Stein calling for J. J. McIntosh. When is he expected back from lunch? Could you please leave word?”

“Solly Stein calling for Hillary Madison-Edelman. Is she reachable in St. Bart's? Fine. Just leave word.”

In desperation, Solly chewed faster and faster. Mimi could hear his molars clacking together inside his mouth. He swallowed a lump of croissant the size of an egg. Glunk. “Get me Lore Director at Orion, no, no Marty, get me Marty Schepsi, no, Christ, Marty's in Geneva, what time is it in Geneva? Did you send that thing out to what's his name?” He wadded up the plastic wrap the croissant came in, then between tubby thumbs and fat forefingers frantically pinched it into a teeny ball. “What about Rocky Martini?”

The phone rang. Mimi sighed. Saved!

Solly had already deposited the tiny wadded-up Saran Wrap ball at her elbow and was poised in the doorway of his office.

“Who is it?” he hissed, before the receiver had reached her ear. “Is it Wild? I need Wild.”

Mimi felt the blood pounding in her throat. She waved him to shut up. Through the earpiece, the telephone equivalent of a snowstorm. Then, “
ALLO! COLLECT PERSON
-
TO
-
PERSON FROM FRANCES FITHENRY!
”

Shit, she thought. It's Mouse. Solly's going to have my head. And collect? She has to call
collect
?

“Who
is
it, for the love of Christ?”

“It's long distance.”

Rubbing his fat dry hands together, Solly bounded into his office and hurled himself into his big black leather chair. The sound the chair made was the same as if it'd just been hit by a wrecking ball. Suddenly, he came on the line. “Mazel tov!”

“Solly, it's personal.”

“Who is this?” he bellowed.

“It's Mimi, Solly. It's a personal phone call. I've got to take it.”

Then, from through the snowstorm, a third voice. Under the static the voice was thin and faint. “Mimi?
crrrrrrrrr
Mouse!”

“Solly,” said Mimi, “get off the phone. It's my sister in Nairobi.”

“
Crrr
llo?” yelled Mouse. “Mimi?”

“Mouse! It's Mimi!”

“
Crrrrrrrrr
Kissing Gani,” yelled Mouse.

“Kissing
who
?” said Mimi.

Solly banged the phone down in Mimi's ear.

“What's going on?” said Mouse. Even through the snow she sounded uneasy and a little suspicious.

“It's Mom!” yelled Mimi. Hearing herself say “Mom,” the tears she'd been swallowing all morning filled her throat. “She has a, there's been an accident. They're doing surgery this morning, drilling some hole in her head.”

“
Crrrrrrrrr
God,” said the other end of the line. “Middle
crrrrrr crrrrrr
marriage.”

“You are?” Mimi yelled. “You must be thrilled. I remember how I felt when –”

“–
crrrrrrr
now.”

“I need Rocky Martini.” It was Solly. Mimi could smell his chocolate breath on her neck. He stood behind her, loudly fondling the change in his pockets.

“Just a second,” Mimi said to Solly. Then into the snowstorm, “It's a hematoma thing she's got. It's bad. They're drilling a hole in her head. You got to come home!”

“I need Miƚosz Benik,” said Solly, pouting. “I need Rocky Martini.”

Mimi thought she heard Mouse say okay, then the hollow far-off roar of nothing. She hung up. She hadn't talked to Mouse in over five years. And here was Shirl having, having, brain surgery. Mimi thought if she was older – she was thirty-six, practically an adult – it wouldn't be so awful. Everyone has to go sometime. But death was the easy part. If you're dead, you're dead. It's the in-between. It's the decline part, the part between
bouncing around rosy-checked healthy and some guy with cold hands dragging the sheet over your face. Not that she knew one whit about decline. But she worried she was about to find out.

She worried that Shirl wouldn't be able to do her crossword puzzles anymore. That her hands would shake so much she wouldn't be able to do her découpage. Would her hair grow back? Would she have to wear a bad wig? Mimi gingerly wiped her eyes with her ring fingers, so as not to smear her mascara or tug the extra-sensitive skin under the eyes. She felt better, glad to know that even under the most excruciating circumstances she was not one to let her looks go.

Solly glared. “If you're done –”

“My mom is dying, okay?” She wasn't technically, but she was in intensive care. Mimi stood up so fast she knocked her steno chair over. She loathed that chair. It was a slave chair. The assistants to the agents at least had chairs with arms. The agents, of course, had massive leather-upholstered thrones. Whose butt was supposed to fit on her chair, anyway?

“She was hit by a ceiling fan, okay? She's in intensive care. My sister lives in Africa, okay? We haven't talked in a jillion years. I had to talk to her. Have you ever tried to talk to Africa? It's not like calling stupid New York. So get off my fucking back for a minute all right? All right?”

“Mimi, Mimi. I. I. A ceiling fan?”

“It hit the side of her head by her right eye. She got a skull fracture and now there's, I don't know, blood leaking or something, they've got to drill a hole. They're shaving her head. What if she's a vegetable?”

“Where'd it happen?”

“Gateau on Melrose.”

“Good God, I ate there a couple weeks ago.” Solly seemed both baffled and repulsed. He had never heard such a thing. Wasn't bad luck and misery and brain surgery and estranged sisters the stuff of TV miniseries? How tasteless to drag them into real life.

He ran his hands over his balding head. There were a couple of dime-size dark-brown blotches on it. Watch your karma, Mr. Pre-Cancerous Condition, Mimi said silently to the blotches. It could happen to you. Anything can happen to anybody.

“I knew you were miserable, but I didn't think anything was wrong,” he said.

“God, Solly.” Brilliant. He should give up the film business and be a brain surgeon instead. Oh, she thought, oh, a brain surgeon. Everything suddenly seemed unfairly ironic, which was troubling. Mimi didn't believe in irony. She felt it was more a literary convention. She put it in the same category as
deus ex machina
. The tears started up again. She felt them tip over the edge of her eyes. Fuck the mascara. She resigned herself to being a mess.

“Everyone in the business is miserable,” said Alyssia. “It's all relative.”

“She's having surgery right this minute,” Mimi sobbed.

“What can I do? What can I do?” asked Solly.

“It's just so awful,” said Mimi. “I'm sorry.”

“Take some time off. Please. Take all the time you need.”

Mimi wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She stared at the framed poster over her typewriter, taking deep breaths, trying to calm herself. The poster was from a terrible movie directed by one of Solly's clients, one which Solly would defend to his death. He refused to let anyone, including himself, think that he'd made an obscene commission on a movie that should have been put out of its misery when it was still just an idea. And here he was, now, offering her time off. People were wrong when they said people in the film business had no morals.

“All the time I need?” asked Mimi.

“Well, a long lunch why don't you? But be back by three. I gotta talk to New York today. And Rocky –”

“– in a minute.”

“Fine, fine.” Solly looked at his plastic diving watch. He tapped the face nervously with his fingertips. He owned the
requisite gold Rolex but was afraid to wear it for fear it'd get dinged up, wet, or stolen.

Mimi took deep breaths. Alyssia came over and rubbed her back between her shoulder blades. Mimi suddenly felt good and calm, but kept on with the deep breathing. Steeped in misery though she was – it was
awful
, she wasn't saying she
liked
the idea of her mother getting cracked on the head with a ceiling fan – she did enjoy being someone who had something in her life which warranted deep breaths. Deep breaths were the domain of mothers in labor, actors, athletes, mystics. People at the center of Drama.

“Maybe Alyssia has some Kleenex, or, or something.” Solly waved in her direction and wandered back to his office, pulling on his lower lip. “Jesus,” he said. “Half the places in town have ceiling fans. Alyssia, get me Rocky Martini. Please.”

2.

THREE MESSAGES AWAITED MOUSE FITZHENRY IN
Kisangani: one from the Office of Native Affairs in Kinshasa, for whom she and Tony Cheatham were producing the Zairian wedding film; one from Camisha, the girl in Nairobi who was taking care of their house while they were away; one that read, simply, “Mowz FitHenry fone home.” The prefix was familiar. Either her mother or her sister had called. Besides Tony they were the only two who used her nickname.

Mouse and Tony had just spent three weeks in the lturi forest shooting a BabWani wedding ceremony, part of
Marriage Under Mobutu: Tribal Wedding Customs in Contemporary Zaire
. From there it had been two days on foot through the forest to the Catholic mission near Nia Nia, then three days from the mission by Land Rover down the rutted road to Kisangani, where they had just checked into the Hotel Superbe, a five-star hotel featuring greasy sheets, a sagging, infested mattress, and one bare bulb. Luxurious, compared to the stinky plastic tent they were used to.

They shared a shower of cold brown water, their first in nearly a month, went to American Express to pick up mail and messages, then went to the post office. It was the only place in town to make a long-distance call, requiring a written request to the operator, the necessary
matabeesh
, the bribe money, and a Jobian amount of patience. Sometimes it took forty-five minutes, sometimes four hours.

They sat on a long wooden bench and waited. They sat, sweated, and slapped flies. Despite the shower, a thin sheen of mud coated their skin. Breathing was like sucking air through a washcloth. But Mouse was grateful for the discomfort, her exhaustion. It prevented her worrying too deeply about the phone call from home. It could not have been easy to find her. Surely the news was not good.

“Perhaps they're just coming for a visit. Popping over from Egypt or something,” Tony tried to reassure her.

“My mother refuses to drive on the freeway. I kind of doubt she's in Egypt.”

“One never knows.” Tony sat scribbling in a notebook bowed from traveling in his back pocket, making notes on a screenplay he was writing in his spare time. He pinched the end of his sunburnt nose, glanced over at Mouse.
She had a mop of thick dark hair, small regular features, glass-green eyes, an unexpectedly dimpled chin
. No, too specific. Vince Parchman, the Peace Corps volunteer from whom he had taken a filmic writing seminar in Nairobi the year before, had said description should be written so any actor could play the role. Height, hair color, and the like were too limiting.
A hundred pounds of trouble
. Better.
She was an iron fist in a velvet glove
. An iron fist in an iron glove was actually the case, he thought. A cute iron glove.
An iron fist in an extremely appealing iron glove
. Yeccch. He flipped the notebook closed and slid it back in his pocket.

Vince had inoculated Maasai babies in Ngong during the week, and taught filmic writing on Tuesday nights in a quiet corner of a local bar, You'll Regret It. In addition to the usual restless expatriates, he had had a few Maasai and Kikuyu. The best script in the class had been a corning-of-age piece written by a Maasai teenager.

“Where do you think Gideon is these days? You know, the kid with that terrific circumcision script. From filmic writing.”

“You didn't hear? He's president of Warner Brothers.”

“Har, har, har.”

A gang of children with big bellies and the cottony yellow-tipped hair of the malnourished stood in a half circle around Mouse and Tony, watching. Flies buzzed in the corners of their eyes, clustered around their nostrils. A man in a limp skullcap napped against the wall by the front door. His job was to whip the children with a bamboo switch if they so much as extended one thin grubby palm.

Mouse fumbled around in her bag, extracting a bottle of pearly pink nail polish. The tiny silver ball inside clicked as she shook it. She spread her brown hand on her knee, slapped a coat of polish on her nails. Somewhere she'd picked up a fungus that had turned them greenish black. To her lasting irritation there was no cure, only cover-up.

The boldest child spread his hand next to hers. She painted his nails, as well as the nails of anyone else brave enough to approach. The children solemnly spread their hands, one by one, as though the spreading of their fingers, the resting of their hands on her kneecap was part of the ritual. She felt Tony's eyes on her.