The Diamond Lane (8 page)

“Or maybe she's getting married. The connection wasn't too good.”

Shirl stared. “My baby. I thought all this time she was into that Women's Lib.”

“She'll probably want a big wedding. There's really no other way to do it. I mean, my wedding could have gone bigger, but then I got married in the days when people didn't really get married. I was sort of a trailblazer. You know me. If I was doing it today I'd have a sit-down, four hundred guests, the whole bit. I'd have more bridesmaids.”

“Your wedding was lovely.”

They never talked about the divorce.

MOUSE AND HER
husband, boyfriend, fiancé, whatever, were flying in the same night as Bibliothèques, the third Tuesday of the month. Mimi debated. Should she cancel or not?

Bibliothèques was Mimi's book group. Someone had suggested the name at their first meeting and it stuck. They thought it meant book-lover, then one of the members assistant-edited on a film shot in France and found out it meant
library
. They had been thinking of biblio
philes
. There were ten of them, all film people, aspiring actresses, aspiring directors, and like that. Mimi was proud to be the only hyphenate, an actress-writer.

They read one difficult book a month, then met to discuss it. It had to be a book they wouldn't read on their own. This was not a problem, since most of them only read and wrote coverage. Coverage was a one-page synopsis of a screenplay. This month was Mimi's pick,
Lust for Life
. The meeting was held at the duplex she shared with Carole, which was why she was hesitant to cancel. The duplex was in West Hollywood, a great place for the price. Two big bedrooms, wood floors, high ceilings, no glitter in the stucco. The only drawback was the noise. All night, every night, disco music thumped and brayed up in the gay bars on Santa Monica Boulevard, a few blocks away. There was also the Special Police Task Force to Prevent Mimi FitzHenry From Ever Having a Good Night's Sleep. At three o'clock every morning the police helicopter patrolled the alley behind the apartment. The
whopp-whopp-whopp
of the blades and the jillion-watt searchlight sweeping through her bedroom sent her hurtling from a deep sleep into an adrenaline overdose in a matter of seconds. No wonder she was a high-strung, stressed-out basket case.

She knew it was selfish to put her book group above the arrival of Mouse, but she did have to think of herself sometimes. Who'd kept an eye on Shirl all these years while Mouse had been living it up in Nairobi? Who called all over Zah-ear? It wasn't like Mouse went out of her way for the family. Mouse had gone – supposedly for a semester – to Tunisia, on a study-abroad program through UCLA, then never came home. Who shipped her stuff over to her? Who tried to explain it to Shirl, who was still a
mess nine years after Fitzy's death and couldn't understand why her baby, her Mouse, had left them?

Not that Mimi had the foggiest idea.
Africa?
Come on. In her book that was like suicide without the commitment. Why not just the Peace Corps? Two years, good stories, great pictures. Mouse could have gotten on in one of those –ibia countries, teaching the natives how to use video cameras. But no, she had to live there.

Mimi asked her boyfriend, Ralph, what he thought. Did he think she should she cancel and pick up Mouse and her fiancé at the airport?

Ralph told her she was a patsy. He said that people were too enslaved to their families. He asked her why she should rearrange her entire life around a sister she hadn't received a genuine in-an-envelope-letter – postcards didn't count – from in sixteen years. A sister who wouldn't come to her wedding, even after she'd offered to pay her airfare. Ralph said, hypothetically, if you put one hundred strangers in a room, the six people you'd like the least would all turn out to be members of your own family.

What finally clinched it was that Mimi felt more guilty about
Lust for Life
. It had been her pick, and had turned out to be seven-hundred-something pages long.

Also, she had already cleaned the apartment.

Ralph arrived first, already whipped up and mad at the world. When he was in that state, which he was quite often, he looked like an angry baby. He had a downy bald head fringed with wispy oatmeal-colored hair, creamy skin, a simple oval face, and a mashed nose. He had full cheeks that got very flushed when he drank and not much of a chin. Mimi liked him because he made her laugh and knew the power of an unexpected flower arrangement delivered to her office in the middle of the afternoon.

He pushed past her, dumped his briefcase in the green butterfly chair by the door, hauled out a roll of photocopies of an
article in
Vanity Fair
called “They're New, They're Hot, They're Young!” about new film directors under twenty-five. Ralph obsessively searched for bad news to confirm his worst thoughts. Then he photocopied whatever he'd found and passed it out to prove how crazy the business was, as though anyone had any doubt.

“These clowns were just getting their drivers' licenses when Lennon was shot. How can they direct anything? What do they know? Would you please explain it to me. I can understand how you'd keep giving movies to jerks who'd already made you some money, but what's the appeal of
these
guys?”

“It's another mystery of the universe,” said Mimi, punching his shoulder. He was wearing her favorite shirt, the pink and green Hawaiian rayon. It had that campfire smell of brushfires burning in the hills, the sad end-of-summer smell.

Coming up the steps behind him was his almost ex-wife, Elaine. Her expensive leather-soled shoes sounded like sandpaper on the plaster stairs. Elaine hardly ever came to Bibliothéques because she was always out of town on business, selling car FAX machines to corporate raiders. She also always seemed to have read whatever book they'd picked for the month. She had her master's degree in Comparative Literature. She was a snob. “You're so lucky,” she'd say, “reading
Death on the Installment Plan
for the first time.”

Even though Ralph and Elaine were officially separated, Mimi and Ralph kept a lid on it when Elaine was around. It was too weird and cozy, otherwise, too sort of Appalachian. Mimi could never bring herself to put an arm around Ralph or steal a kiss with his not-yet-ex looking on. She wasn't sure Elaine even knew about them.

“I thought she was at a sales conf – ” Mimi whispered to Ralph.

“– she's back earl –”

“– Elaine! Hiya!” said Mimi.

“What's he yammering about now?” Elaine appeared at the
door. She had long, bowed legs, waist-length hair the color and texture of dried twigs. “Have you ever heard anyone complain like this? I hope he isn't like this in class.” Ralph was the instructor of How to Write a Blockbuster at Valley College, the class through which they had met.

“That's a great skirt,” said Mimi. “I tried on a skirt like that at the Gap but it was too big. I mean the waist was too big. I'm into minis, but not, like thigh-high. It was one thing when we were sixteen. Even though I'm thinner than I was then. Some people have knees only God should see. Not that I'm one. Not that I believe in God. I mean, I believe in an
energy
–”

“– hi Elaine,” said Carole, appearing from the hallway. Behind her, Sniffy Voyeur, Mimi's dog, swayed into the room. He was a big black and blond mutt, a remnant from her marriage. He trotted up to Elaine and stuck his long nose into her crotch.

“This dog is so needy,” said Elaine, batting Sniffy away.

“Just don't tell me these guys are getting their chance because it's the appeal of the unknown,” said Ralph. “I'm unknown. I'm as fucking unknown as you can get.”

Ralph was desperate. Desperation clung to his clothes like the smell of the brushfires. It hung in his blue-gray eyes. He had been trying to get the same movie,
Girls on Gaza
, a musical comedy about the Palestinian situation, off the ground for over twelve years.

He had done all the right things, to no avail. He went to the right parties. Made the right contacts. Wrote treatments, screenplays, teleplays. Studied classic films. Read criticism, read theory: Eisenstein and Kuleshov. Made two short films, which he funded by letting his car insurance lapse. Entered them in festivals. Applied for grants. Snuck into workshops conducted by famous directors, by infamous studio executives and agents. Re-snuck into the same workshops the following year to meet the new famous directors conducting it, the new infamous studio executives and agents. He approached the famous and the infamous, thrust
Girls on Gaza
at them, tolerating their glazed
expressions, their hardly hidden sneers.
Oh God, not another screenplay!

But Ralph persevered. Invited them for coffee. Made thin jokes about picking their brains. Picked their brains. They told him Work Hard, Hard Work. They reminded him that Sylvester Stallone wrote fifteen scripts before he came up with Rocky.

Ralph said, “I've written sixteen.”

Mimi felt sorry for him. Sure, she was a drudge by day, too, but at least she'd done that thing with Bob Hope. She'd done something. In addition, she rationalized, while she was Solly's secretary, she was not his slave.

Ralph had been with the same producer, Keddy Webb, for eight years. During that time Keddy had landed two Academy Awards, and the only change in Ralph's life was the new word-processing program Keddy bought to help Ralph catalogue his wine collection. Keddy made Ralph pick up his dry cleaning and drive an hour across town during the lunchtime rush hour in the rain to pick up sushi from Keddy's favorite restaurant. Keddy wouldn't even let Ralph do coverage.
Anyone
could do coverage. Some of Solly's producer clients had beautiful, hot-eyed Iranian assistants they'd hired because they liked the accent answering the telephone. These women, if they could read, read only Farsi, and
they
did coverage.

Mimi begged Ralph to quit, but he stayed on because Keddy held out the same old limp carrot that was dangling in front of the bent-out-of-shape nose of every drudge in town: Keddy promised to get Ralph a Deal.

And maybe someday he will, thought Mimi, begging Ralph to chill out and have a beer. Who knew? Mouse was getting married. Shirl got bopped on the head with a ceiling fan and
lived
. Something good might as well happen to Ralph.

After everyone arrived and sat down, Mimi brought out a tray of
haute
cheese and crackers. The cheese, which was runny and French, and smelled like a high school gym after a boys' basketball game, was expensive for Mimi at $14.95 a pound. She
had spent far more than she should have, considering her finances.

Carole got the drinks, flavored seltzer water and imported beers. The evening was smog-sticky and warm. It was October and there was no sign of anything resembling fall. Leaves dropped miserably off the trees like shriveled scabs. The front page of the
Los Angeles Times
kept running pictures of grandmothers in shorts fanning themselves in grocery store checkout lines with Halloween cards they were buying for their grandchildren who lived in less relentless climates.

Outside, a burst of Santa Ana wind blew the fronds of a palm tree into a telephone wire, sending off hot blue sparks and a sizzling
zitz
.

John Sather sat cross-legged on the floor, reading Ralph's photocopy. To Mimi, he looked like the quintessential Greenwich Villager. He wore his straight brown hair combed straight back, kept his jaw in five o'clock shadow. He chain-smoked and listened to jazz. No one else Mimi knew listened to anything other than what they played in aerobics or on the car radio.

“Not more about People in Film,” Sather said, folding the article into a paper airplane.

“Would you please explain it to me?” said Ralph.

“As opposed to Film People,” said Darryl D'Ambrosia. Darryl was built like a wrestler, all bulging veins and muscles and fierce black hair. Testosterone gone mad.

“Ho ho,” said Sather. “People in Film and Film People, completely different animals.”

“People in Film actually
make
movies. They actually
touch
celluloid –” said Darryl.

“– projectionists don't count –” said Sather.

“People in Film, on their income tax forms? No more than two words to describe what they do. Film Director. Screenwriter. Film Editor,” said Darryl.

“But Film People always have a lengthy explanation. ‘I'm a waiter and do some reading for Fox on the side, but I'm working
on this development deal for a two-hour miniiseries –'” said Sather.

“– TV doesn't count, this is only features –”

“– right, right –”

“You know you're a Film Person if you avoid someone at a party who's going to ask you what you do.”

“You see them coming and you run the other way.”

“Film People live in a state of perpetual humiliation. People in Film live in a state of perpetual self-congratulation.”

“Film People have been reduced –”

“– much to their chagrin –”

“–
much
to their chagrin, to making a career of trying to be a Person in Film!”

“People in Film send their children to Ivy League schools but can be reached at home in the middle of the afternoon,” said Ralph. “Film People can also be reached at home in the middle of the afternoon, but it's because they're unemployed.”