The Diamond Lane

by Karen Karbo

  Tony turned round as though Mimi was talking to someone behind him. “So he is.”

  “Let me show you where to put your junk.” Mimi led Mouse and Tony back to her bedroom at the end of the hail. “I can’t believe you made it here in one piece. I was really starting to worry. It’s such a long trip. I know how long a flight can be, just from when I flew to Miami for that Bob Hope thing.”

  “You did a film with Bob Hope?” asked Tony.

  “A credit card commercial. It aired nationally. Maybe you saw it? I was the one in the red bikini with the hot-dog buns.”

  “First time I’ve been to the States, I’m afraid,” said Tony.

  “Maybe you saw it in Kenya. Do they even have TV in Kenya? I’ll clean out a shelf for you in the medicine cabinet. And the closet. I have towels and stuff, sheets, I can get that later, I guess. It’s just so good to see you!”

  Mouse put her bag down in the corner by Mimi’s bureau. She looked around the room. Mimi had obviously spent her energy and money on the living room. The carpet was brown and threadbare. There was a double-bed box spring on the floor, a faded blue comforter covered with dog hair tossed over it, an unfinished dresser clotted with junk: jewelry, mail, a Diet Pepsi can, blow dryer, diaphragm case, an oak-framed mirror with two curling postcards tucked into the frame. The postcards were from Mouse. Two postcards in sixteen years.

  “It’s nice to be home,” said Mouse.

  “Ugh, wait’ll you’re here awhile. You’ll hate L.A. as much as everyone else,” said Mimi.

  A burst of clapping and hollering rolled down the hall. GOGOGOGO, ohhhh.

  “What’s happening?” Mimi trotted back out to the living room. “What happened?” She stood behind Ralph, massaged his shoulders.

  “Thompson –” began Ralph, leaning away from her hands.

  “– COME ON, YOU PUTZ!”

  “Who’s playing?” asked Tony. Ralph made room for him on the green wicker settee.

  “Reds and the A’s. Top of the seventh.”

  The men stared at the set in communal silence, a circle of snakes held rapt by the charmer.

  Mimi said, “I love baseball,” and returned to the kitchen.

  Mouse stood behind the settee, staring in the direction of the set but seeing nothing. She wondered whether she was really here or still on the plane imagining herself here. What time was it? What day?

  No one asked her to sit down. She marveled at how Tony had plugged right into this gang of guys like a reliable travel appliance. A beer appeared in his hand. During the commercials he regaled them with tales of Africa. He exaggerated, making the stories seem more exotic than they were, transforming them from interesting personal experiences into uproarious party chat.

  Mouse fumbled for her pack of cigarettes in the pocket of her blazer. She lit up, glanced around the room. Was it just her, or did everyone in Mimi’s bok group seem only slightly older than the Manhattan Beach Women’s Volleyball Team? Mimi in particular looked frantically teenage, her grass clippings-colored hair frozen in a permanent state of tousle, her thin lips outlined in light pink lipstick. It made Mouse nervous and shy.

  “Can I bum a cigarette?” asked the jittery redhead standing next to Mouse. Lisa, she thought her name was.

  Mouse passed her the pack. “They’re Kenyan.”

  “Mimi says you’re getting married,” said Lisa.

  “Boy, word travels fast,” said Mouse. Shirl must have telephoned Mimi the minute she and Tony left the hospital.

  “I doubt I’ll ever get married. I’m thirty-four. I want to have at least two children but the odds of that are shit. I want my life to be narrow and uninteresting, stuck at home with the kids, baking cookies. I want to be bored out of my skull. I’m bored out of my skull now anyway. I’m a sound editor,” she added as if that explained everything.

  Click-click-click, toenails on the hardwood floor. Sniffy Voyeur emerged from the hallway, swayed over to Mouse, where he stuck his graying muzzle in her crotch. She tipped his face up to look at him. He had opaque brown eyes, rimmed in black.

  “You’re no spring chicken, are you, buddy?” She rubbed the top of his head with her knuckles. He leaned against her, grinning with his pitted yellow teeth.

  “I know this might seem weird since we just met, but why should I pretend this isn’t on my mind all the time? What I’m wondering is, does Tony have any brothers? I could go to Nairobi. I’ve wanted to do a safari anyway. There’s a group in town for singles that make over seventy-five thousand a year. We do hikes, picnics, roller-skating. I’ve put personal ads in all the papers. It’s not like I haven’t exhausted the market.”

  “The market?”

  “You have to take a consumer approach.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find someone,” said Mouse. What else do you say to a desperate woman breathing smoke into your ear?

  “Everyone getting married says that.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t try so hard. Just let it go.”

  “I tried that, it doesn’t work. I say, ‘Okay, it doesn’t matter, I’ll just be in the moment and meet who I meet.’ I know I’m just bullshitting myself. Pretending you’re not trying and not trying are two completely different things. I even became a Buddhist for a while. You know that Buddhist saying, ‘If you don’t have a good time doing the dishes, nothing will make you happy’? I tried to be happy doing the dishes. All I got was depressed over not having a china pattern. It doesn’t even have to be love. I’d settle for kind of a warm feeling.”

  “Tony’s an only child. But I think he does have some cousins –”

  “Mouse! What are you doing out there!” Mimi yelled from the kitchen. “Come keep me company while I put away the food.”

  Mouse and Lisa obediently left the baseball game for the kitchen. Sniffy Voyeur stuck to Mouse’s side.

  “Sniffy Voyeur likes you,” said Mimi. She stood at the sink, flamingolike, the sole of one bare, pink-toenailed foot propped against the opposite knee.

  “You named a dog Sniffy Voyeur?”

  “Ivan named him. We got him when we were first married.”

  “HOW IS IVAN?” said Mouse. Her voice sounded too perky. She slid into the chair across the kitchen table from Mimi’s roommate, Carole. A stack of screenplays in bright colored covers sat at Carole’s elbow. Unlike Mimi and the others, Carole was not sleek and chipper. She was heavy and quiet. She had short purplish red hair and a parade of diamond studs marching up the lobe of one ear. Mouse sensed a kindred soul.

  “He’s a complete crackpot. Try some of this Saint André stuff.” Mimi brought Mouse a pale yellow slab from the refrigerator, a silver butter knife that had obviously taken a few spins in the garbage disposal, a box of fancy English water crackers.

  “This stuff costs a fortune but I’m a real cheese person. I have really refined taste.”

  “Ivan always was different,” said Mouse, slicing a bit of cheese.

  “Different! He’s way beyond different,” said Mimi. “I never see him anymore anyway. I don’t like to have regrets, but that is sure one.”

  “Who’s Ivan,” said Lisa.

  “You know Ivan,” said Mimi. “Ivan, my ex.”

  Nausea rose to meet the Saint André descending Mouse’s throat. She struggled to swallow.

  Mimi pulled on her big blue rubber gloves and lined up all the dirty glasses on the kitchen counter, squirting dishwashing soap in each one, assembly-line fashion. A bottle of soap like that would clean dishes for an entire village for a year. Mouse was about to say something but stopped. She would be accused of being too serious, too critical, oversensitive.

  The breeze blowing through the kitchen window smelled of some familiar autumn night flower Mouse couldn’t identify. Lisa and Mimi talked about what they wanted to name their children, should they have children. Lisa pointed out that Mimi was closer to having children than she was, because Mimi at least had a boyfriend, even if he was married.

  “He’s separated,” said Mimi.

/>   “That’s worse than being married,” said Lisa.

  Mimi said even if Ralph was single she wasn’t sure she’d marry him. This was a lie but she liked the way it sounded. She said she thought being married to Ralph was probably like being married to Kafka. Lisa said Kafka was better than nobody. A long conversation followed in which Mimi and Lisa thought of awful, famous men no one could pay them enough to be married to.

  Mouse lost interest. She petted Sniffy, ate cracker after cracker smeared with the rich, pale cheese. She was suddenly ravenous for something that had not been microwaved. From the living room there was the occasional crack of the bat, followed by hoots and shouts. She could not recognize Tony’s voice.

  Carole was reading screenplays and participating in the conversation at the same time. Mouse watched her read six scripts. Each one took about ten minutes. She read the first ten pages, the middle ten, the last ten. If she liked those thirty, she’d go back and read the first twenty, the middle twenty, and the last twenty. If she liked those sixty, she’d go back and read the first thirty, the middle thirty, the last thirty, which generally amounted to the entire script. Mouse was fascinated.

  “What are those for?” asked Mouse.

  “Gotta have notes on them tomorrow morning.” Carole yawned.

  “Carole reads for Allyn Meyer,” said Mimi.

  “In Nairobi Tony read for a blind coffee farmer one night a week. They were reading –”

  Mimi hooted. “Not that kind of reading. She does coverage. Allyn is a VP at Columbia.”

  “I want to go to nursing school,” said Carole.

  “Isn’t she wild?” asked Mimi. “Her Dad’s in the business and she wants to go to nursing school. I love big strong independent women like that.”

  “Do your one-second script analysis,” said Lisa.

  “The characters aren’t developed enough. You could cut the opening scenes. The idea is a good one, but it drags in the second act. It falls down in the end after a promising start. I enjoyed the humor throughout. You could have played up the love story. It needs more of a motor, also a hook and a spin. I just didn’t spark to it. I’d love to see the next draft.”

  Mouse looked at Carole blankly.

  “You can say a variation on that about every script,” said Carole.

  “Mouse does documentary,” said Mimi, by way of explaining why her sister didn’t get it. “Which reminds me. I was thinking. Mouse, you should try to get some screenings of your stuff. I mean Africa, some people might find it boring, but someplace like the LAFI should be interested.”

  “Doesn’t Dale Rooks work there?” asked Lisa.

  “He’s over at TriStar now,” said Mimi.

  “I went out with Dale a couple times. Get this. He said he had a mental block against women with red pubic hair.”

  Mouse laughed.

  “They’ll use any excuse, I’m telling you,” said Lisa.

  “What I was saying,” said Mimi, “is Solly could probably make some calls. But you got to know, even if the LAFI or some place agreed to show them, documentaries are no draw in this city. People can barely stand to watch them on television, why would they pay money to see them? Anyway, I’ll ask Solly, but don’t get your hopes up. I’m in features, which is completely different than documentaries.”

  “Did he say what color was acceptable?” said Mouse.

  “I mean look at the Oscars. During Best Documentary just about the whole audience sneaks out for a smoke. You know the people you see when the camera pans the auditorium?”

  “The thing is, he’s a redhead. His whole body’s covered with red hair.”

  “Maybe I should talk to him. You know Tony…” Mouse nodded her head toward the living room.

  Lisa screeched. Her cheeks bulged with white wine.

  “You probably think they’re big Hollywood types, the people in the audience. They’re not. They’re unemployed actors. They rent gowns and tuxes and the Academy pays them to sit in the empty seats so it doesn’t look like everybody’s beat cheeks to the lobby at the mention of the word documentary.”

  “Genug, Mimi – Jesus,” said Carole.

  “I’m just saying, I’d love to help.”

  Meanwhile, in the living room, the Reds had left the A’s in the dust, eight to three at the top of the ninth, and Tony had passed exhaustion hours ago. He was deep in the region of serious sleep deprivation, where you begin to think, “Sleep! An overrated concept! I could go on like this for days!”

  Why sleep when he was finally in Los Angeles? Why sleep when he could watch American baseball on a good box with some really terrific chaps? Why sleep when the girls were giggling in the kitchen, the beer colder and better than any he’d had since his last trip to Hong Kong to visit his parents?

  He was stupefied by his good fortune. Sather, Darryl, Ralph all worked in the film business. Ralph was right-hand man to an Academy Award-winning Scot, Keddy Webb, and taught a writing class to boot. He wondered if perhaps they knew someone called Vince Parchman.

  “There’s a V.J. Parchman,” said Ralph. “Got a deal over at Columbia.”

  “Probably him,” said Darryl. “This guy’s an Africa nut. He’s got blowguns in his office.”

  “Vince was something of a collector. It’s impossible though, isn’t it? It’s like these African blokes you’d meet. They’d have one relative in Britain, they’d never know what city. They’d ask, ‘You know my uncle Thomas? Tall black man?’ Disappointed as hell when you couldn’t help him.”

  “Keddy’d know,” said Ralph through a belch. “I think this V.J. was in the Peace Corps.”

  MOUSE COULDN’T SLEEP for thinking about Ivan – not the whole bad business with Mimi and their marriage, but before.

  She and Tony were sleeping on the living room floor. Mimi had tugged a dusty futon from her bedroom closet and dragged it to its current spot, wedged between the dining room table and the back of the green wicker settee.

  It was odd and unfair, Mouse thought, lying next to a gently snoring Tony, that your fondest memories were comprised of inconsequential images, smells, and tastes you never noticed while the memory was in the making. The Watergate hearings, the smell of formaldehyde, the cheap brand of chocolate sandwich cookies Shirl had always had on hand, the mournful love songs overplayed on the radio all that summer. It all reminded her of Ivan.

  Once, in Nairobi, she had argued long into the night with Vince Parchman about whether Richard Nixon was evil or just shady. That night she dreamed an aching dream of Ivan. She was the age she was now, but he was still eighteen.

  It was 1973. Mouse was taking her first and only filmmaking class, Beginning Super 8mm, at USC. She had just graduated from Citrus High School and was entering UCLA in the fall.

  At that time USC was still ashamed of its Cinema Department. It was several years before Star Wars would make them realize that movies could be wholesome, harmless, and a license to print money. At that time, in 1973, the only people interested in something as abstruse as film school were East Coast transplants from left-wing colleges who aspired to be a Bergman, a Godard, a DeSica. Intellectuals, obsessives, and probable communists, or oddballs like Ivan Esparza, wanted to make documentaries. The department was tiny, as cramped as a slum. It was housed – thankfully – at the edge of campus in a rat-infested clutter of green clapboard outbuildings which had been used as stables during World War II.

  There were people there, then, who took documentaries seriously, instead of as a setup for a joke.

  Because the Cinema Department was so small, and this particular section of Beginning Super 8mm was for nonmajors, the class was shunted to an air-conditionless classroom across campus in the science building, next to the biology lab. The class spent four hours three mornings a week dissecting one another’s films, while the students next door dissected frogs and brown grasshoppers the size of model airplanes.

  Ivan was from the questionable side of the tracks in a questionable suburb, El Monte or Pico Rivera, a gritty
, flat place known for light industry and carbon monoxide. To this day, even though Mouse had committed so much of Ivan to memory, she could not remember where, exactly, he was from. He had an unusual look. Even eighteen-year-old Mouse, who was not people-smart, much less boy-smart, knew that. He was Mexican and Czech, a honey-colored dark blond, with dark blue eyes, broad lips, a flat Indian nose. He was thickset, with heavily muscled shoulders and a slim waist. He had been the star welterweight on his wrestling team in high school, which didn’t prevent Mouse being his partner in Beginning Super 8mm, though it did, at first, give her cause to wonder whether or not she should kiss him.

  At Citrus High, where Mouse and Mimi had gone, wrestlers were the lowest of the low. They were always pale and sweaty. It was assumed they wrestled only because they had a peculiar need to tug on a classmate’s crotch in front of an audience. They were more unpopular than the Drill Team or the jerks who played the bagpipes in the Citrus Highlander pipe band.

  Not that Mouse had been popular, but Shirl had taught both her daughters the value of upward-mobility. Mimi did not disappoint. She’d made cheerleading finals – she was hopelessly uncoordinated; Mouse had secretly thought it was a miracle she’d even made it that far – and was on the homecoming court two years in a row.

  Mouse, on the other hand, was on par with the wrestlers. She was the Girl A-V Nerd. The A-V Nerds were in charge of the audiovisual equipment. They lugged around slide carousels and threaded movie projectors, oversaw the sound systems at pep rallies. They were generally all knockkneed boys with acne and respiratory problems, except Mouse. Even though she was small, she hauled forty-pound 16mm film projectors down the halls, ignoring the bruises they inflicted as they banged against her scrawny brown shins. She took her job seriously. Once, in Mrs. Peabody’s World History class, rather than allow a faulty projector to chew up a piece of film, she stuck her finger inside the gate to pull it out. In her haste and dedication she didn’t think to turn off the machine and it chewed off her fingertip.

  When Ivan Esparza appeared on the scene, ex-crotch-grabbing welterweight or no, Shirl had loved him. More, Mouse suspected, because he was a Boy, any Boy, than because he was Ivan, with his velvet voice and rollercoaster moods.