Casebook

by Mona Simpson

  Eli and his mom and Hugo moved to an apartment in New Jersey. The fall. It was a mean life, he said. (Meaning the other meaning of mean, Hector interjected.) They bought everything generic. Generic soap. Generic food. After she died, Eli found a letter from her divorce lawyer. As your adviser, I cannot condone your decision to accept this settlement. She wouldn’t take money. Eli’s father had done well in the stock market. If she and her boys lived on her salary, her thinking went, he could invest the money, and in the end there’d be more for Eli and Hugo. She made the father promise that the money would all go to her sons. Not to the mistress.

  “But your childhoods were then,” the Mims said. “Once.”

  “It was her decision, sweetie.”

  The move changed Hugo. Ohio was the last place he ever had a friend. And their mother worked as a legal secretary in the city; she didn’t get home until nine or ten at night. Their dad came over sometimes in the afternoon but left before supper. The boys fended for themselves. They ate from cans. When Eli’s father did take them to restaurants, for their birthdays, their mother came. Not the mistress, who’d moved to New Jersey, too.

  The Mims asked Eli if his mother ever liked working.

  But Eli’s mother hadn’t. A partner at the law firm noticed her reading a history book once and tried to promote her to be a paralegal, but they couldn’t, because she didn’t have a college degree. So it made her proud when her sons went to better universities than the partners’ kids. Eli’s father eventually married the mistress. And Eli had to admit, he was happier then with Joyce, just better. His father kept his word, and the boys inherited his estate. By then, though, their mother was dead, and they split the money with Joyce.

  The Mims asked him if his mother had ever met anyone else. Before she died.

  She’d joined Mensa; where else could she meet people in the suburbs? Once, in the hallway of the quote unquote mean apartment, Eli passed a chemist wearing only a towel. “Maybe that wasn’t so good,” he said. But the chemist really loved her. He’d wanted to see her when she was ill. Eli was twenty-three years old when his mother died of metastasized lung cancer. His voice dropped when he said those three words. He’d been in England the year she died. Hugo had been taking care of her. When Eli flew home, she asked him to wash her housecoat. Hugo hadn’t thought to, even though he could see she wore it every day. I made a mental note. I wasn’t sure that laundry was something that just occurred to me either. I wondered why their father hadn’t helped more. My mom and dad would always help with something like that, even divorced. Hector agreed with me. For sure they would. His, too.

  Eli’s father came over to see her, and at the end of the visit, he bent down and kissed his mother, and he had a—Eli stammered, saying this—a certain smile. They had laughed a little. His mother and father. Eli remembered thinking, That’s what’s left.

  You could tell that memory was his treasure. He was probably making more of it than it was. I’d seen my parents kiss like that pretty many times. “And that turned out to be the last day my father saw my mother,” Eli said.

  “Where was Jean during all this?” the Mims asked.

  “Well, that was the question,” he said. “Where was Jean?”

  “She stayed in England?”

  He didn’t answer. He was quiet for a moment, then said that his dad had died completely unexpectedly—of a heart attack—six months later.

  When Hector heard that, he shook his head, grim, as if he was seriously concerned.

  “What?” I asked, but he wouldn’t say.

  When Eli left to go back to DC, he gave me a sideways hug, pulling me hard against him. I stood with my mom on the porch, watching him get into the taxi. Things had finally settled. I’d gotten used to the new house, the creak of the tire swing outside my window. I wanted everything to stay. And for a while longer, it did.

  44 • Friends of Dorothy

  Hector and I stayed after school for FLAGBTU and learned the phrase friend of Dorothy. I loved code. Kids talked about how their parents spied on them. One girl’s dad had a program he put in her computer to see every IM. A guy said his mom listened in on his phone conversations.

  “How?” I asked. “I mean, technically how does she? Can’t you hear her breathe?”

  He told me she’d bought a device for thirty bucks at RadioShack.

  Just then, Maude Stern broke into the meeting room and, typical her, raised her hand. “Is this FLAG?” she asked, looking around when no one called on her.

  My mom was clueless. I could so never marry Maude Stern.

  “BTU,” Hector corrected. “FLAGBTU.”

  We were running a winter clothing drive for teenage gay kids. I had grocery bags of coats in my locker. I reported the statistics on homeless gay kids compared with every other kind of kid. Maude volunteered to help. What was this about? Could Maude Stern be gay? Oh, I hoped so. I hoped so so much. I’d love to inform my mom that Maude was a lesbo. She had an older brother and he was perfect, too. They both had that bright red moppy hair like Annie and were all-star athletes in two different sports. He was at Princeton now, where he sang in a choir called the Tigertones.

  “So tell me what to do, ’kay?” She smiled at me, her mouth full of iridescent butterfly-wing-colored braces. She liked me. Maybe that was all; she was joining to get to me.

  I suggested that we start selling soup for FLAGBTU. People went for the idea. I said we’d need to take a cut. I’d have to give some percentage to Esmeralda, too.

  “That seems fair,” Maude said. We voted. Everyone was down with that.

  45 • The Hollywood Spy Shop

  Eli showed up one Thursday and took me with him to pick up Boop Two from the pound. As we waited for her in the small office, a tall man in a suede jacket and loafers dragged in a recalcitrant dog. “We can’t keep him,” he said, out of breath. “He attacked our five-year-old! He missed her eye by an eighth of an inch!”

  “Did you ever train your dog?” Eli said.

  The ponytailed guy behind the counter lifted a hand, like, Yo. Chill.

  “What did your five-year-old do to him?” Eli said.

  The tall man turned and seemed to notice us for the first time. He had a friendly, majestic air. Eli bent to pet his dog. The ponytailed guy behind the counter hopped over the swinging door to usher us out. “It’s cool. I’ll handle it. Guy’s upset. His kid almost lost an eye.”

  “We’re here to pick up my sister,” I had to say. I felt bad for Boop Two. We’d embarrassed her. We waited outside by Eli’s borrowed car. It was a cold December night.

  “Fucking North of Montana people,” Eli said, kicking a tire not even his.

  But North of Montana was where we lived. We didn’t even own a house there anymore. We rented, just to stay. What if he wanted us to move away from everyone we knew? Eli seemed less whole to me after that. I couldn’t shake that phrase, Fucking North of Montana people. He must have meant us, too.

  When we walked in the door that night, my mom looked happy and looser, the way she did around Eli, but our life didn’t feel as pure as it had been last year at this time, the way Christmas wasn’t after you learned it was just your parents, and almost nothing felt as right as at Little League when you were nine and the ball landed hard in your mitt.

  I just blurted it all out to Hector, what I’d seen or not seen in Pasadena, up to Eli yelling at the pound. Hector’s jaw literally dropped. I’d never seen that before in real life. “He doesn’t have a scar,” he finally said, and I realized that I’d been ambivalent about Eli for a while. I told Hector about the phone ringing all night and Eli calling Marge and Sare.

  “He met that Audrey Hepburn woman after he said he didn’t,” Hector said. “First he told your mom the truth, and when she was upset, he lied.”

  “He got caught. And promised never to do it again.” I’d gotten caught and said the same thing. Now I wondered if he really had touched the mathematician of light’s stomach.

  Hector just shook hi
s head. “Remember that time he had his friend’s dog? Who loans dogs? I mean, really, think about that. We’re friends. But you never borrowed Rebel.”

  Something woke in Hector; he came alive with suspicion, energized in a straight line like a dog tracking. He read about the Hollywood Spy Shop, and once he’d decided we had to go there, the best I could do was stall, saying we had to save allowances, meaning mine. He didn’t get an allowance. I was the one with money. I could memorize poems. We had to get permission from the community service woman for selling soup through the club. Finally, when he wouldn’t let me put him off any longer, we took a bus after school on a Friday—the only day of the week we didn’t have to clomp on a trail.

  People who didn’t look like us filled the bus. Mostly women. Many seemed to be holding grocery bags on their laps, housekeepers going east, home. I thought of Esmeralda, then of Eli’s mother having to work. We stood holding the pole. The address was on West Sunset. Los Angeles was big! You forgot. We passed ugly cheap hotels, the kind of nonarchitecture that gave LA a bad name. Except for the night I’d come home from Esmeralda’s Lucky supermarket, I didn’t have experience with buses. Forty minutes later, we still swayed, now holding straps from the bus ceiling on Santa Monica Boulevard, long past Santa Monica. An old-fashioned brown sign said HIGHWAY 66. “Santa Monica Boulevard is a highway?”

  “My mom grew up here,” Hector said. “Before LA got glamorous.”

  My mother grew up in Dearborn, outside Detroit, and she took classes at Wayne State during high school. She played violin. She was good at math. I’d once visited there and saw the weedy, chain-link-fenced fields she walked past every day with her violin in its violin case. She was no beach girl, ever. “Is it glamorous now? I didn’t know.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a place that puts up signs for its own old highways. What does Eli do again for work?”

  “The National Science Foundation. They give grants. Marge says he deals in prestige. And survival.”

  We rode past the address for the store and had to get off and walk back. We couldn’t find the place. Maybe it went out of business, I said. The number belonged to a brick building, with a billboard on the western side that said PAINTBALL. We went to the door, which was closed with a metal diamond-patterned grate. Inside, a sign said PAINTBALL and then, in smaller letters, HOLLYWOOD SPY SHOP, and gave the hours as eleven to five. Through the spaces in the lattice we glimpsed two rooms: the bigger one had guns, ammo, and camouflage gear; the smaller had items in glass cases I couldn’t make out. I rattled the cage. “Hey, you open?”

  A thin Asian guy came out of a back room in sneakers with the heels stepped down. “I just waxed the floor,” he said.

  “You’re s’posed to be open.” I pointed to the sign. It was only four forty.

  “I can let you in, but you can’t walk on the wet part.” He slowly unlocked. We meandered to the paintball cases, waiting for the other floor to dry. The army masks looked real. A lady minced in, holding her purse under her arm.

  “I can’t let you go in there,” the guy said.

  “He did some shit to the floor,” I said.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked her.

  She glanced at us and then looked down. “I want something that records, maybe video. I think my husband is cheating on me, and if I had it on tape, he couldn’t deny it.”

  I squatted down and touched the floor with my fingers. “Pretty dry.”

  The guy made us take off our shoes. Hector was barefoot without his flip-flops.

  They had video cams and recorders built into sunglasses. The guy opened cans that looked like real Cokes and Pringles but were actually safes.

  “What if someone threw it out?” the woman said.

  The guy shrugged.

  Everything was a fake something else. Pens that digitally recorded, also thumbsticks and an ugly tie. “I like the pen,” the woman said, stepping in carefully on the balls of her feet. “How much is it?”

  “We’re out of the pens. They’re on order.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’d buy it.”

  “Everyone wants the pen.”

  “Not much of a salesman,” Hector whispered.

  They installed security systems to keep people from breaking into your house and carried devices to help you invade other people’s lives, take their pictures, and record their conversations. And they had stuff to detect bugs. A picture of two black guys behind bars hung on the wall, with a caption that read: ONLY STUPID PEOPLE TRY STEALING FROM A SECURITY SHOP. “Racist assholes,” Hector whispered. Three additional grates were folded behind the diamond-patterned one. This was the most secure store I’d ever seen, and to paraphrase Eli, what exactly were they trying to preserve?

  “When will the pens come in?” the lady asked.

  “Two weeks. Maybe three,” the guy said. “What kind of cell phone do you have?”

  She took it out of her purse and showed him. A blue Nokia.

  “You can do it on your phone.” I looked at Hector. Some salesman all right.

  “Would the pen have a better-quality recording?” she tried.

  “Gonna be about the same.”

  Hector looked at me. Man.

  “You probably don’t need anything,” he said. “If you think your husband’s cheatin’ on you, he’s probably cheatin’.” Even we could see that that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. When she looked down, her face bent. She was pretty that way.

  I wondered if Eli really was guilty of something. Hector thought so. But of what?

  The lady tied the belt of her coat tighter and left without buying anything.

  I told the guy about the device from RadioShack that we’d heard about at FLAGBTU.

  “Sound is probably better on that. ’Cause it hooks directly into the line. These’ll pick up the area noise. But they’re camouflage. Just depends what you need.”

  Hector seemed disappointed. And we had a long way back. By the time we got home, supper was over. My mom looked like she was going to be mad, so we had to say we’d already eaten at Hector’s. A lie like Eli’s, I thought. Except he had had dinner when he said he hadn’t. We hadn’t eaten and said we had. And I was hungry.

  Then Hector and I each had a setback. FLAGBTU sponsored a doctor from Cedars-Sinai to speak about sexual preference. After his talk, Hector went up and asked him what kind of medicine he practiced.

  “I’m an endocrinologist. This isn’t my field. I’m here as Casey’s dad.” Casey was a kid I hadn’t talked to in FLAGBTU. A freshman.

  Hector said, “Well, we know someone who had brain surgery for a pituitary tumor. But he doesn’t have a scar. Is that possible? They didn’t even shave his head. He still has his hair.”

  “It’s not really brain surgery. The pituitary gland is below the brain; it’s separate. Those pituitary tumors aren’t usually dangerous.”

  “But wouldn’t they have had to shave his head?”

  “No, it’s endoscopy. They go in through the nose.”

  I had to keep myself from smiling.

  But then I got mine. After the doctor left, people stayed to sort clothes. Maude, who’d appointed herself secretary, said, “Bad news. We’re not allowed to sell anything that competes with school-licensed vendors. Only homemade food. Like a bake sale.”

  Where was Eli, anyway? I had a better feeling about him now that the scar question was settled in his favor. I wondered why it was taking him so long to move. I didn’t want him here necessarily yet, but for all the talk of wedding rings, I hadn’t seen him much this year. That night I asked the Mims if he was coming for the holidays. I was thinking of lights again. But our roof on this house wasn’t pointed. Lights wouldn’t look as good flat.

  The Mims said she didn’t know. Eli’s cat was sicker. I hadn’t remembered it was sick.

  “He has a cat?” Boop Two asked.

  “He and his wife did. The cat of the marriage. He’s in Wisconsin now, nursing it.”

  On a call I’d listened
to long ago, he’d said that the cat was the great unrequited love of his life. “Oop,” my mom had said. “And I thought I was that.” He’d answered, “I’m hoping you’ll be the great requited love, sweetie.”

  “Doesn’t he have a dog, too?” Boop One asked.

  “Why does she get to have both?” Boop Two said.

  “Well, their son lives with her, and so I suppose it’s nice for him to have his pets.”

  We were quiet then. Of course, the only pet we had was nocturnal and mine. Gal slept most of the day. This year I’d spent more time in my room, and so I knew her habits.

  46 • The Yellow Pages Detectives

  If x + y = 3 and x – y = 5, then x2 – y2 =

  A. 4