The Merchant of Venice Beach (3 page)

I’ve got a book?

Suzanna snuck out of the nook before Eric saw her. She leaned against the wall. She closed her eyes and pondered . . . how could Eric possibly be interested in a woman like that?

Not that he had said he was interested, but he did try to sell her a book. That must mean something. When Suzanna opened her eyes, she was standing toe to toe with Fernando.

“Where are my strawberries?”

“On my way! I’m on my way!”

Gentrification had shambled its way into Venice, doing battle with the old hippies and the new legal-marijuana shops. The end result was that the boardwalk was now in vogue with just about everybody. Suzanna and her co-workers had held their breath, literally, when marijuana was legalized for medical use and medical-herb shops started cropping up on the boardwalk. Luckily, the Rollicking Bun (or “the Bun,” as locals called it) was situated in an old wooden cottage on one of the less populated portions of the boardwalk. The medical-marijuana users had their section and the tea drinkers had theirs. And, as Fernando pointed out, marijuana tended to give people the munchies; sales of pastries and scones had certainly perked up since the new neighbors moved in.

People often complimented Suzanna on her foresight. Buying the place for a song and turning it into a profitable business made her seem something of a financial soothsayer. But she would be the first to admit that it was just dumb luck. She couldn’t have guessed in a million years that a bohemian landscape and a run-down teashop that had enough square footage to throw in a stuffy bookstore would somehow turn a profit. When she and her friends Fernando and Eric first set up shop, Eric thought they should call the place Plenty O’Mistakes. At the time, she thought this was funny, but now that she thought about it, it was a very insensitive remark. After all, it was Suzanna’s money—well, all right, Suzanna’s older sister’s money—that had gone into the place. Just another example of Eric’s cavalier attitude, Suzanna thought defensively. After all, at the end of the fiscal day, she had always managed to keep the doors open—and paid Fernando and Eric a salary, too!

Suzanna’s place was surrounded by other unusual little stores. Compared to her neighbors, the Bun’s inventory of teas and books was actually pretty diverse. There was a shop that sold only candles, another that was dedicated solely to prisms, and there was a kite store, to name just a few of the oddities in the immediate environment. There were also a few new restaurants popping up on the boardwalk, running the gamut from chrome monstrosities to quaint little cafés with European-looking courtyards. One of the restaurants had a pet possum, which ran around between the feet of surprised patrons. At night, Corky was often mistaken for a rat, and the relieved guests were so happy to find out they were not being menaced by a rattus domesticus that they forgot to call the health department.

In all honesty, if it were anywhere else, the shop would probably be considered an eyesore, but the Bun was chicly ramshackle. Or at least it was in Suzanna’s eyes.

The building itself was an oddity in Southern California architecture. It looked more like an old-fashioned house from the New England coast. White, weather-beaten shingles covered the entire two-story house. Suzanna’s pride and joy was the round tower tucked into one corner. That turret was the focal point of the Bun and drew people like a homing device. A wide porch stretched from one end of the structure to the other and looped enthusiastically around one side. A massive door stood at the top of five steps—the staircase could easily manage several people coming and going, all with books or pastries in their bags. The door served both the tea shop and the bookstore. It wasn’t until you were inside that you determined your destination. To the right was the tearoom, to the left, the little book nook.

The teashop was cute without being cloying. The walls of the tearoom were a very pale mountain laurel, not pink and not lavender and, while Suzanna had lots of china, none of it matched. She pretended it was a design choice, but in reality, she hadn’t had a ton of money to drop on cups and little plates. Most of her stuff came from Big Lots and Goodwill.

Suzanna was determined to put her mark on the place when she bought it, but she had no money, so decorating the Bun was a challenge. Besides having no money, the building itself presented something of a decorating challenge. The shop was oddly shaped. It had a couple of . . . well, to call them rooms would be a highly inflated statement. They were more like a couple of alcoves, which would be great if Suzanna and the guys were running a romantic little hideaway, but very few people have their smoldering tête-à-têtes in tearooms.

After much deliberation, Suzanna blew her entire decorating budget on long, slender rectangular sketches of antique-looking flowers that she found in a thrift shop. One of her tea drinkers who was very handy with calligraphy added some great swirly descriptions of the flowers. When she framed them and finally got them positioned among all the windows, Suzanna felt the whole room come together. Fernando always called them the Stations of the Carnations, which only amused Catholics, but that never seemed to stop him.

The other side of the store had a different vibe altogether. The basic atmosphere was rustic, with redwood bookcases lining the walls. Books overflowed from the shelves and more books were stacked in every corner and heaped in hemp baskets that dotted the narrow aisles. Customers probably thought there was a method to the madness, but in reality, there was only madness.

Although Suzanna owned the place, she had always been the first to admit it took the three of them to make a go of things. Fernando worked as the chef and supervisor in the tearoom (providing both the “bun” and the “scone” half of “the Epic Scone”) and Eric managed the books (providing the “epic”). Currently, Eric was studying to get a BA in business management through UCLA night courses, which might make him better with numbers, but as far as Suzanna could tell, none of his classes inspired him to thin out the rows upon rows of books.

“I’m not surprised Eric is going to business school,” Suzanna’s mother had said during one of their lengthy phone calls. “He’s always been the mature one.”

Eric had always been the most practical of them all—which wasn’t saying much—but Suzanna sometimes thought that he got stuck with the role of “the mature one” through his looks as much as his demeanor. At five-feet-ten, with perfect posture and soulful eyes, he just gave off the vibe that he could take care of things.

Suzanna sort of flitted from establishment to establishment. She referred to herself as the “ing” specialist: waitressing, hostessing, ordering or stacking books. If the word had “ing” in it, she probably was in charge of it.

Lately, Suzanna found her temper getting short with Fernando and Eric for no apparent reason. Everything the men did seemed to drive her to distraction. She chided herself when she thought about how much effort the guys had put into making the enterprise a success. Fernando was forever trying new recipes and poor Eric was like a man on a mission, attacking the mildew that was always threatening the books.

Fernando was the darling of the neighborhood and Eric breathed customer service. If she were working in the nook and a customer were looking for a particular book the store didn’t have, Suzanna would shake her head sadly and say they didn’t carry that particular tome. Eric, on the other hand, would offer to track down the title, no matter how obscure. He would jump on the computer and spend hours searching for a book that would probably turn only a dollar or two of profit. Whenever Suzanna mentioned this, Eric said that that was beside the point.

They stood shoulder to shoulder making the Bun a success.

“We stick together . . . I’ll say that much for us!” Suzanna would often say to herself. But by the end of any given day, she was totally exasperated with them. She remembered overhearing a woman telling Fernando that she was falling out of love with her husband and that she felt powerless to stop the slow ebb of affection. He wasn’t doing anything wrong or even doing anything different. There had just been some subtle shift in her feelings, and there didn’t seem to be anyway to set things back the way they had been.

“I want to stab him with a fork when I hear him chewing,” the woman almost wailed. “Everything about him drives me nuts, and it isn’t his fault.”

Suzanna had strained to hear Fernando’s response, but couldn’t make out what he said. She wanted to heed his advice, whatever it was.

Because that’s the way she was feeling about her two best friends. They were driving her nuts, and yet she couldn’t put her finger on why.

The three of them had known each other since high school, in Napa Valley. That was in the mid-nineties, when Napa was just becoming the zoo it is today.

“You know that traffic and noise pollution have gotten out of hand when you move to Los Angeles to get away from it all,” Eric would tell customers as he regaled them with story of “the three musketeers.”

The fact that Suzanna was inseparable from her two male counterparts caused some buzz, she knew. The fact that Fernando was gay didn’t seem to stop the guesswork. In fact, it probably added to it. Were Eric and Fernando a pair? Suzanna and Eric? It didn’t really bother any of them. Speculation, as Fernando would say, was probably good for business.

Suzanna and Eric always joked that they had a When Harry Met Sally relationship—only without the sex.

“We have all the good things about marriage,” Eric would say, throwing an arm around her, “without the great things about marriage.”

Haha.

After they had graduated from high school, Fernando, Eric, and Suzanna each had a vague idea that they might find their collective self in L. A. , so they just loaded up a U-Haul and moved to Southern California. None of them really envisioned the whole story, thought Suzanna. They just couldn’t imagine life without one another.

Now, whenever Suzanna did imagine life without them, she felt guilty.

She turned the DIAGNOSIS:Dance! business card over and over again, staring at it as if it were about to impart some great wisdom. Or give her permission to claim these dance classes as her own.

A little time apart will be good for all of us. . . . Besides, don’t I deserve my own space?

Suzanna looked up “character shoes” on eBay. Suzanna adored eBay and never bought anything without checking it out on the online auction site first. Fernando introduced her to it as a way of getting some great deals on stuff for the Bun’s kitchen. Eric, ever the poetic soul, at first eyed the website suspiciously, but after Fernando pointed out that you could buy leather-bound books for a veritable song, he was in. The three of them had gone through an eBay-
buying-frenzy. Suzanna feared they might need a twelve-step program to disengage, but luckily, things settled down. While the three of them now had a more sensible relationship with it, Suzanna was not about to go shoe shopping without seeing what eBay had to offer.

Both the tearoom and the bookstore were locked up for the night, but Suzanna let herself into the tiny office at the back of the bookstore half of the establishment. Eric often worked late hours even after he’d hung out his “Closed” sign, and after determining he was nowhere in sight, she jumped on the Internet and started scouting through eBay’s “clothing, shoes, and accessories” category.

Typing in the words “dance shoes,” Suzanna gasped when over twenty thousand choices appeared. Through much trial and error, she finally made her choice: a great pair of black-and-white dance shoes. She was about to bid on them when, in small print, she read, “These shoes will signal to the world that you are ready to SWING or HOP.”

Well, that’s not for me. I’m not big on signaling the world about anything I do, let alone swinging or hopping.

She narrowed her search to include the word “character” and was so absorbed in the process that she didn’t hear the boys walk in.

“Hey, want to just grab a pizza this—” Eric started to ask, but Fernando interrupted him.

“What are you looking at, Moan-a?” Fernando asked.

Suzanna bristled inwardly at the nickname. Fernando had been calling her “Moan-a” since high school because he thought Suzanna had a tendency to be a downer. Suzanna’s parents had worked relentlessly to ensure that Suzanna’s full name was never bastardized to “Suzy” or “Sue” or “Suzie-Q,” but you can’t stop nicknames, no matter how hard you try. Suzanna wished the boys would have settled on something as innocuous as a “Suzy” derivative. The only nickname that was worse than “Moan-a” was Eric’s little pet name for her. He called her “Beet” because Suzanna tended to flush easily. When they were teenagers and a bunch of the kids were hanging out, Eric would turn to Suzanna and say, “Hey, everybody, watch this: Beet, turn red.”

And then, as hard as she tried not to turn red, she would turn red.

Suzanna didn’t think the boys ever thought about the origins of these monikers, because they continued to use them affectionately.

“Nothing important,” Suzanna said.

“Come on . . . You’ve got on your eBay face,” Fernando said.

There was no denying “eBay face,” so Suzanna quickly clicked on the Health and Beauty section to throw the guys off the track. Suzanna looking on eBay for anything (but especially for beauty products that would make her look younger, thinner, sexier, shinier, or somehow more glorious) was business as usual around the Bun.