An Inconvenient Woman

by An Inconvenient Woman (retail) (epub)

  My mother was already dying when we made our last visit to Paris. The trip was hard for her, but she’d wanted us to share the city one last time and so she’d borne the pain and the exhaustion with a heroic resolution. With every cough and every wince, I’d admired her more.

  While we were there, she took me to a bakery where they made small marzipan peaches. She pointed out how the leaves on each peach were delicately veined and the flesh glowed with a faint red blush. At base the peaches were composed of a simple paste made of almonds, sugar, and water, but somehow the confectioners had made them live.

  “It’s these little touches of beauty that make life worth living, Claire,” she told me.

  When Melody was the same age, we went to Paris to visit my grandparents.

  While there, I took her to the same shop, showed her the same marzipan peaches, and repeated the same words to her that my mother had said to me.

  This is still one of the dearest of my memories, but even the most tender moments of my past now seem to have occurred in a different, far less tender world.

  I pull myself back to the present, to what I know Simon is going to do.

  “I have all the proof I need,” I tell Ava in a way that makes it clear that I want to drop the subject.

  Ava obviously prefers to drop it, too. “Anyway, the point is to make yourself available again,” she tells me.

  “Available to what?”

  She smiles. “Love, stupid.”

  I think of Phil.

  His OkCupid message was less silly than those of the men who send pictures of themselves in front of sparkling blue swimming pools, shirtless, showing off their bodies. In the world of gooney-bird courtship display, Phil kept his plumage to a minimum.

  “Claire, you’re young. You’re attractive. You’re clever. You speak French, which is probably a huge turn-on, right?”

  I look at her doubtfully.

  “At least it makes you seem romantic,” she says.

  I offer another questioning look.

  Ava waves her hand.

  “What I’m saying is that you have everything to offer. So turn the page. Open a new chapter. End of story.”

  I understand what she wants me to do, but I can’t put what I know in a bottle and toss it overboard.

  Instead I feel myself drawn back into the darkness, back to Simon on the phone.

  I glance toward the man in the sunglasses.

  He is gone.

  •

  After lunch with Ava, I have a half hour to kill before my next client. I sit in my car and read. The book is about the Muses. I like Thalia, the muse of comedy. And Clio, the muse of history. It is Mneme, the inventor of language, who touches me. The saddest of the Muses, haunted as she is by memory.

  Once more I sink back in time.

  I am in the second-floor bedroom I share with Simon. Standing at the window, looking down at the pool. Melody is thirteen. She is doing laps, her long white legs churning the water. Simon is in a lounge chair, wrapped in a white robe, his initials woven with gold thread. His hands are at his sides, but as he watches Melody from the far side of the pool, one of them crawls up his thigh and into his lap. His fingers are slipping inside his robe when he glimpses me in the window, pulls his hand away, and waves to me broadly, sporting a huge smile.

  It astonishes me that I ever believed in that smile.

  Or in his summoning wave.

  How could I have been so blind?

  How could I have sensed nothing in the furtive way his fingers inched beneath his robe?

  Nor ever guessed the perverse turn of his mind?

  Now I’m certain that at that very instant he was in the grip of an obscene pleasure. I see his creepiness in every memory of his taking Melody’s hand. I see it in the way he draped his arm over her shoulder and held her waist as he taught her to dance. The shadow of his desire darkens every recollection of them together.

  I am reliving all this when a ting alerts me to a text.

  It’s from Mehdi, who has taken six classes so far. He has sent me a picture of himself wearing a Burger King crown: See, I told you that I am the King of Persia.

  Actually he’s a florist with several high-end shops around Los Angeles. He is forty-six, divorced, with a six-year-old son. His wife cheated on him. His pride was devastated. He is working, he says, to rebuild his self-esteem. He is doing this by going to the gym. Doing upper body. Swinging on the parallel bars. He sends videos of himself doing these things. I am supposed to be impressed by his strength. Instead I see only a fly in a jar, banging against the glass.

  I return to my book. The author is trying to make his work more accessible by mentioning “modern muses.” For the modern muse of music, he chooses Yoko Ono. As I read, I find myself not caring much about her. Instead I am moved by May Pang, Lennon’s mistress. They were together for eighteen months. John never called it more than his “lost weekend.”

  How is it possible for lovers to conceive of time so differently?

  Is it the same with Simon and me?

  That while I fear I may have little time left to do what I must, he is sure he has forever to carry out his scheme?

  I read a few minutes longer, then close the book. But I can’t stop myself from looking up and down the street. I feel the corrosive nature of this impulse, this slide into seeing everything as somehow threatening. Everyone working for Simon. The people on the street. The people in their cars. That man over there, raking the yard. When he stops and looks at me, I freeze. It is almost as if I believe him to be Simon in yet another of his forms. Camouflaged in khaki, his face carefully hidden beneath a wide-brimmed hat.

  4.

  Dominic is my next client. He is sixteen. His parents feel that he will, as his father tells me, “always sink to the lowest common denominator.” Dominic is being forced to learn French as a “cultural enhancement.” He does his lessons because he has no choice. I know that his only passion is for the video game he plays, during which he kills “Entities” in paroxysms of slaughter he labors to describe to me in French.

  During these exchanges I fear the budding psychopath.

  “In French,” he once asked me, “how do you say ‘to gut’?”

  After Dominic, Mehdi is almost a relief.

  Almost.

  He smiles brightly as he opens the door. “Ah, my queen.”

  I step into his foyer, then go a few steps farther before I turn, holding my bag like a shield against my chest.

  “Please come to the dining room,” Mehdi says. “I have prepared for us a . . . repas.”

  “I’ve already eaten,” I tell him.

  “But I made it special. Food for the queen.”

  His smile flips like a small worm.

  “Or should I say la reine?”

  During our first classes, Mehdi followed the lessons well. However, over the last couple of weeks he has decided to play my life coach. He says that I need to “eat healthy,” sleep more, relax in the evening, get a massage. In long texts written at odd hours, he offers his psychological counseling. I must be strong, trust myself, and “open up to others,” as he wrote—at three a.m.—last Tuesday.

  He escorts me into the dining room, where he has arranged various pastries, along with little bowls of loose nuts and dried fruits.

  He displays these offerings like a billboard. With Mehdi, everything is a form of presenting himself in a big, bright light, like the ones that sweep the Hollywood sky on the night of a premiere. He is not only the star of his own blockbuster movie, he is the only actor in it.

  “Please,” he says as he points to a chair.

  He is a small man. A little stocky. Going bald. But there is a compact forcefulness about him. He talks aggressively. Moves in quick steps. His internal engine is always racing.

  Once again I tell him that I have already eaten.

  “Okay.” He is a bit crestfallen now. “We start.” He motions toward the table. “We can work here, yes?”

  The table
has a glass top, and I wonder if this, more than the repas, is part of his plan. A table he can see through. I take my seat, careful to arrange myself as modestly as possible. Even so, he glances at my legs as I sit down.

  “Nice. You look nice.”

  He says it gently, but in this otherwise mild compliment there is the suggestion of something tightly wound, of barely controlled impulses. I imagine him as a child, snatching candy from another kid, then forced to give it back.

  I draw a book from my bag and place it strategically on the table, blocking any view of my legs.

  “Someday I will take you to the beach at Caicos,” Mehdi says. “We will bask in the sun with chilled glasses of champagne. The sand is like white powder. Just Claire and Mehdi, eh?”

  I show no interest in this proposal and simply continue the class for the next hour.

  Mehdi says nothing more about the beautiful beaches of Caicos.

  As I am leaving, he smiles. “Maybe we could meet twice a week now?”

  I need the money, yet I buy time before deciding. “I’ll check my schedule and let you know.”

  With that, I head for my car, get in, and drive away. I am halfway to my next client when I hear the ting of a text. It is from Mehdi, a photograph of himself wearing a long Iranian robe: Perhaps you will be my queen.

  It is only a text message, but it is invasive, like an unwanted touch.

  I want to tell Mehdi to go away. I would like to say it firmly: Back off!

  But a chorus of monthly bills stops me.

  “Keep quiet,” says my rent.

  “Not so fast,” says my credit card.

  And yet each time I hesitate, I feel some small part of myself fall away, like flecks from a self-portrait—a shard of self-respect, a fleck of dignity, the vivid colors of myself peeling away or fading into a blur.

  5.

  It’s nearly nine in the evening when I get back home.

  I go into the kitchen, make a dinner of pasta and roasted vegetables. The empty chair across from me is like an accusation. Where Melody would have sat.

  Time sweeps me into the future, and I imagine her sitting with a husband at her side, a child on her lap.

  Then the flow of my mind takes me back to my own wedding day.

  It was a simple courthouse affair; Max and I were married by a local judge in his unadorned chambers.

  The lack of grand display had gone perfectly with the beautiful simplicity of the vows.

  To have and to hold.

  For better or for worse.

  For richer or poorer.

  In sickness and in health.

  From this day forward.

  Till death do us part.

  When this memory fades, another seizes me like a hand out of the dark. Simon was resplendent in his morning coat; I was gloriously enveloped in an expensive gown.

  The big church with the vaulted ceiling.

  The huge sprays of flowers perfuming the air.

  A classical quartet playing Mozart while Simon’s big-name friends strolled in and took their seats.

  Almost as a way of fleeing that ostentatious ceremony, I walk into the living room, part the curtains, and peer out into the night.

  What I am looking for?

  Simon’s accomplices?

  I tell myself that these fears are irrational, and yet when the phone rings, I startle.

  It rings again.

  Then again.

  I still don’t respond, though I know I should.

  Finally, on the fifth ring, I answer it.

  It’s Ray Patrick, the man Ava mentioned as a prospective client.

  “I’m interested in learning French,” he tells me. “Your friend Ava gave me your name.” He pauses, then adds, “I go to France quite often on business. I was hoping to get a bit more proficient in the language.”

  I ask him if he speaks French at all.

  He replies that he does not.

  “Well, I can say oui and non,” he adds.

  I give him my rate, which is $50 an hour.

  “That’s fine,” Ray Patrick says. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “Is there a Starbucks near you?”

  “I can come to the one on Beverly Drive.”

  We agree to meet there the following afternoon.

  Before I can hang up, he says, “I know you studied art. I thought you might like to take a look at my gallery. The website, I mean. It’s rpgallery.com. I’d love to know what you think.”

  “Okay, I’ll take a look.”

  I go to my computer, type in the name. Ray Patrick’s gallery is lovely and well ordered, with a surprising variety of styles. I do a virtual tour, make some notes, record a few words he might find useful when speaking to artists or gallery owners in France.

  Then I turn off the computer, glance at the clock, and quickly go to my car.

  For the last few months I have been mentoring a young woman named Destiny. She lives in an apartment a few blocks from the senior center where we meet once a week.

  She has told me little of her background, save that she is from “the sticks,” by which she means a small town in the Midwest. Predictably, there are dark suggestions of a troubled childhood but few details. She chooses to speak mostly of the future, broad dreams of owning a clothing store or a horse farm or, at our last meeting, a catering service, because she’d recently met a woman who had one, and so why not?

  Through she doesn’t like to talk about her past because it “drags her down,” I’ve learned that she has an older brother who was continually bullying her and a younger sister who was “just a little bitch.” She has never told me their names or their whereabouts and seems to have no interest in ever seeing either of them again.

  She feels pretty much the same about her parents. She has said only, “Maybe they’re dead. Maybe they’re alive. Either way, I don’t care.”

  This doesn’t strike me as a false front. She honestly appears to have no feeling for them at all.

  From various offhand remarks of hers, I’ve gathered that she was not a good student, found it difficult to overcome even the smallest obstacles, and had a tendency to take the easy way out.

  Briefly, she thought about joining the military, but the mental and physical rigors of training to be a soldier were too much for her to tackle.

  Her most harrowing story is of the time she barely escaped a man who’d picked her up, taken her to his house, then tried to rape her. She has spoken of this only once. The man was “old,” she said, old being defined as “over forty.”

  For a few weeks, Destiny was homeless. After her boyfriend disappeared, she wandered the streets, sleeping wherever she found shelter. At some point she made her way to Venice Beach, where she was spotted by a social worker.

  Beyond the sketchy and perhaps somewhat unreliable history, she remains pretty much a blank.

  She is waiting for me in a room the center provides for this purpose. Her hair is short, black, spiky. It looks as if it were cut by a weed eater. She has tattoos on her back, shoulders, and arms. She says she has them in other places as well. The visible ones are snakes and vines, along with the initials TW in satanic script. TW is Time Warp, the only name she has for her long-lost boyfriend. There are small puncture holes in her nose, ears, and lips. The metal studs that used to fill them have been removed because they “freaked people out” at 24/7, the eatery where she currently works as a waitress.

  There are occasions during my conversations with Destiny when I imagine Melody as a runaway, talking to a woman who is not her mother about a life that has gone seriously awry. Even such a future might have been redeemed. She might have passed through a rough stage but found her footing again. This is the precious gift that was taken from my daughter, simply the opportunity to have overcome whatever obstacles she encountered in order to become whatever she’d hoped to be.

  “Hi,” Destiny says with an eager wave that may or may not be entirely sincere.

  Tonight we talk about her job. I
t’s going well, she says. Except for another young woman at 24/7. This girl is named Muriel. There is no love lost between them. The issue is envy. Destiny has a good figure. Muriel is overweight. Destiny can remember who gets what when she serves. Muriel is always giving soup to someone who ordered a burger and vice versa. Destiny is regularly hit on. No one pays any attention to Muriel.

  “Muriel’s fat. How is that my fault?”

  There is a pause before she adds, “You’re awful quiet, Claire.”

  “Yeah. Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

  Destiny is forgiving of my flagging attention. She tells me she has had long days, too, so she understands.

  Then she moves with her usual speed to another subject.

  “You know what’s weird? I kinda miss my studs. I mean, when I had those studs, I was like, you know, Bad Destiny.”

  “And you liked being bad?’’ I ask.

  She considers her answer, then says, “Not bad like mean. Bad like . . . free.” She smiles. “I used to wake up on Venice Beach, and there was the sun and the ocean, and I’d walk to the pier . . . and I was, like, free.”

  She means Santa Monica Pier, so I tell her about the girl.

  “That sucks,” Destiny says, though with little understanding that she might have exchanged places with this drowned girl, be in the morgue rather than with me. Instead her mind wheels back to Muriel.

  “Last shift she reported me for having black fingernails,” she says. “She told Cal that it was disgusting, made my fingers look dirty. He made me change. So now look.”

  She displays her hands, wiggles her fingers.

  “What do you think?”

  Her fingernails are purple.

  6.

  I’m back at home by nine.

  I’ve left a few lights on, and as I pull into my driveway, I imagine that people are waiting for me inside. At first I see Max on the sofa, reading a history book but putting it down when I enter. After Max, it’s Melody at the kitchen table, doing her homework, hoping it’s correct, checking her arithmetic with Max and her English grammar with me.