The Diamond Lane

by Karen Karbo

  “The New Stanley didn’t hold up very well, did it?” she asked Tony. He sat on the ottoman fiddling with the remote. He tapped the sound up, then he tapped it down. She didn’t care. Awards or no, E. Bomarito’s doc was a bore.

  Tony was waiting to go to Disneyland. He was wearing new clothes, cowboy boots and a dark shirt that brought out his freckles, his strawberry-blond hair curling dramatically over his collar. His top button was buttoned like you saw on men in fashion advertisements.

  She knew she should feel grateful Tony was marrying someone like her. Instead, she felt like she had gotten herself a cute prison warden. She knew she should discuss postponing the wedding with him but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She hated her perm. She had stopped painting her fungus-infected nails. She had to find a job. She had to find a way back to Nairobi.

  “You’re far too critical,” said Tony. “I think Stanley is quite a nice film. It has so many memories attached. Mind if I fast-forward?” He was waiting for Mimi and Carole. They were going to Disneyland with Carole’s grandparents, who visited every Christmas from Connecticut. Their mission was not family togetherness but the opportunity to call back to their friends on Christmas day and say, “Earl! Ruth! It’s eighty degrees out here! We’re wearing shorts!”

  Mouse loathed Disneyland. Even when she and Mimi were eight and nine she was suspicious of it. All those grown-ups pushing and shoving to prove they’re still kids at heart, The only thing she had liked was the Submarine Ride, which she would go on only with Fitzy.

  “Just because people seemed to get a charge out of it doesn’t mean it was any good,” she said. “You know that. Anyway, it was a sympathetic audience. They were obligated to like it.”

  “Can’t you just accept the fact that people enjoyed it and leave it at that?” Tony watched the sped-up doc, palpating his cheeks with his fingertips, feeling for whiteheads, which he squeezed between his first and second fingers, one of his less attractive habits.

  “If we could remix the sound,” said Mouse.

  “It’s done, poppet. Put it behind you, for God’s sake.”

  The phone rang. Mouse answered, thinking it might be Shirl, checking in for her usual after-the-event debriefing. It was Ivan.

  “Ivan wants to meet for a drink later,” she said to Tony, going back to the couch. It had been one of those brusk “uh-huh, uh-huh, sure, sure, okay, okay, bye” conversations. She kept it that way, professional, on the chance her voice would wobble out high and girlish.

  “Hope you took a rain check. Love to chat with him,” said Tony, tossing the remote onto the rattan coffee table and standing.

  “I think he just meant me,” she said.

  “Eow! Bloody Christ! Askin’ me fiancée out behind me back. What’s this bugger of a world comin’ to?”

  “You don’t care if I go?”

  “Do as you like.”

  “She’s as trustworthy as Sniffy Voyeur,” said Mimi, tossing a handful of tampons into her purse. “Isn’t she, Sniff-Sniff-Sniff?” Sniffy dragged himself up and ambled over for a scratch on the head. “Just be sure to take enough money to pay for both of you. Ivan’s very big on inviting people places, then conveniently forgetting his credit cards. Not that he has any to forget. He’s a thirty-four-year-old man and he’s never had a checking account.”

  IVAN HAD SUGGESTED an old place on Hollywood Boulevard, prized for its layers of grime and smoke-stained walls, three bus rides away from the apartment. Even though it was December, the restaurant was humid and stuffy. The ceiling fans whirled uselessly overhead. The faces of waiters streaming past in their limp red jackets shone with sweat. At the last minute Mouse had decided to wash her jeans but had to grab them from the dryer while they were still damp so she wouldn’t miss the bus. She stood just inside the door, waiting for Ivan, her waistband jungle wet and warm. She tried not to be nervous. She tried to summon up some clenched-jaw calm. She tried to pretend Ivan was a Nairobi BBC bureaucrat from whom she was trying to scam some equipment.

  Ivan arrived late, wearing a yellow-and-purple-striped surfer’s T-shirt Mouse recognized from sixteen years ago. Like Mouse, he wore clothes until they disintegrated and blew away. Mouse remembered that shirt, down to the holes in the armpits, from when they watched Watergate together. When he reached up to give her a brotherly clap on the shoulder, she glimpsed a tuft of dirty-blond hair peeking through a yawning seam.

  Ivan was a regular at this place. He was buddies with the maître d’, who until that moment had ignored Mouse, glancing at her from time to time making sure she wasn’t some flotsam in off the street.

  It seemed that they were having dinner, not just drinks. Menus slid into their hands, silverware was plunked down by a surly busboy. Even though Mouse was nauseated – a dinner with Ivan, love of her life! – she spread open the menu eagerly.

  “What do you recommend?” She felt like a twelve-year-old pretending she was a grown-up on a date.

  “The chicken salad is their specialty,” said Ivan.

  The waiters responded only to the kind of wave favored by marooned motorists hailing passing traffic on a foggy night. The chicken salad turned out to be an ice cream scoop full of mayonnaise studded with greenish meat, slapped on a wilted leaf of iceberg lettuce stained by a decorative circle of beets. Every bite yielded a few hidden bones, fish-hook-sharp. Ivan had steak.

  “This is really strange,” said Ivan, addressing the silverware, straightening first his knife, then his fork, then his fork, then his knife, then picking up both.

  “How so?” How so. Her throat pounded. This was hardly the Ivan she remembered, brooding and noncommittal as a spy. The chicken salad was suspiciously greasy. She told Ivan it was delicious.

  “Being together after all this time. I’m really sorry, Mouse. You know what I’m talking about?”

  She surreptitiously plucked a piece of cartilage off her tongue and laid it on the edge of her plate. She wanted to say, “You spineless creep, you broke my heart. Are all men as stupid as you, falling for someone like Mimi?” Instead she said, “We were all so young.”

  “I was a stupid prick.”

  “I wouldn’t say that!”

  “No, I was an incredible jerk. I handled it poorly.”

  “It’s understandable. My sister is, was, really attractive to men and you were just –”

  “You’re too easy on me. You were always too easy on me. It was my downfall.”

  His downfall? She shifted uncomfortably in her damp jeans. She was beginning to wonder if maybe all this was a prelude to a confession that he had undergone some kind of religious transformation. “The thing I never understood,” she said, “in that era it was sex, right? Marriage was, well, no one got married. Not like it is now. For a long time I thought Mimi was pregnant. I was never actually sure why you did it. Got married.”

  “Why are you getting married? Can I have some steak sauce?” he bellowed at a passing waiter.

  A flat loud ha rolled out of her mouth. “It’s every girl’s dream.”

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “That I don’t believe. It’s like how people say having children is complicated. Raising children is complicated, having them is embarrassingly simple. My guinea pigs do it all the time. Getting married is easy. It’s staying married that’s hard.”

  “Why did you marry my sister?”

  “To keep from murdering her.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously. I wanted to get her out of my system. That salad looks really bad. Did I tell you to order it?”

  He reached across the table, scooped up a forkful. “The least I can do is have food poisoning, too. Maybe it would help for you to know that I used to think of you a lot, when Mimi and I…” He cast his blue eyes down at his plate.

  They split a piece of carrot cake. Ivan switched from beer to vodka and soda. Mouse did too, even though her head was pounding, her stomach queasy from the heat and the convers
ation. The waiter glowered at the thought of having to add more drinks to the tab. Ivan told her horror stories about the making of El Funeral. She countered with all her nightmares from Africa. They commiserated about the lack of funding, the lack of appreciation of the documentary, they argued about cinema verité versus direct cinema. Ivan said he liked The New Stanley.

  “Well, as they say, it’s not the cure for cancer.”

  “It was great. I would tell you. You don’t gain anything by people bullshitting you. Bullshitting is easy, the truth is hard. Saying you don’t like something is impossible. I would tell you. It was fantastic.”

  “That’s what Tony says, but I think he –”

  “– Tony, Tony –”

  “My – the guy I’m marrying.”

  “Yes! Tony! What about this Tony? What about this marriage? You’re being very cagey about this. Aren’t we friends?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  She expected anything but what he said. She expected him to say, “Do you really love the guy?” She expected him to say, “Could you love me?” She did! She could! It was all so confusing. She blamed the vodka, cold enough to torture a sensitive tooth. She was on her fourth. Tony could drink a half dozen and still win a game of chess. Waves crashed behind her eyes. The lower part of her face felt as though it was suffering from an overdose of novocaine. She thought about Mimi and Tony and Carole and Carole’s grandparents twisting down the Matterhorn, and the table, still littered with dirty plates which the bus boy refused to clear, swayed beneath her.

  “I would like you to co-produce my next piece,” said Ivan. “The funding is already in place. I got a development grant from the California Committee for the Humanities. The CPB is going to kick in some, too.” He told her the amount, six times the cost of The New Stanley.

  “I’d like that very much,” she said slowly, hoping to sound businesslike.

  “Don’t be stupid, Mouse. Don’t agree before you know what I’m asking. You’ll have to give it serious thought. I don’t want you to get into it if you don’t absolutely believe in it. Working with me is not fun.”

  “You got the funding, I believe in it,” she said.

  “I want to do your wedding.”

  “My wedding?” Her brain would not accept the words, the same way the change machine at the Laundromat spit back a crinkled dollar bill. He wants to do my wedding? Plan it? Perform the ceremony?

  “We will call it Wedding March.”

  WHEN IVAN BROUGHT Mouse home she was relieved to see the apartment was dark. Her head was whirling; she bit her lips and couldn’t feel them. They had slurped down their drinks in a sort of the-night’s-still-young abandon that abruptly ended when Ivan got her to say she’d give serious thought to his proposition instead of “when do we start?” She was still drunk.

  Of course, Ivan was right. There were things she needed to do. She needed, first and foremost, to talk to Tony, although she was certain he’d jump at the opportunity to be working again. She needed to sort things out, make lists, mull and stew, plot and plan. All the things she should have been doing for her wedding she would do for the movie about her wedding.

  At the moment, however, she needed to clear her head. The tight hat of a promised hangover sat on her brow. In a stupor she made a cup of instant coffee, then poured it down the drain. Really what she needed was some air. She snapped on Sniffy Voyeur’s leash and dragged him down the stairs. This was not a particularly safe thing to do at ten o’clock in Mimi’s neighborhood, but deranged men with concealed weapons were not high on the list of Mouse’s fears. High on the list of Mouse’s fears was getting married for no reason. Love was not a reason. Money, certainly in this case, was not a reason. A movie: now that was a reason.

  Outside, a warm wind blew the lids off overstuffed garbage cans, sending crumbled balls of wrapping paper scudding down the street. Three duplexes down, a front door stood open, offering a glimpse of people Christmas partying, the women sweating in velvet, the men in red and green plaid jackets. They spoke a foreign language.

  As they walked, Sniffy Voyeur alternately straining at the leash, then stopping to mark every palm tree, lamppost, and rosebush in his path, Mouse envisioned the months ahead as they would appear on a ragged black and white work print flickering on the screen of a Moviola. Seeing it this way, her once dreaded future seemed bearable. She could tolerate – she even almost looked forward to – the upcoming weeks of trying on dresses, veils, and shoes, deciding on the cake, the flowers, the food, the formal wear for Tony, the dress for Mimi, the china, the silver, the glass. What about a priest? What about rings? What about her makeup? What about transportation? What about her period? When was that? When was the reception? Where the honeymoon? How to budget it? Why go through with it?

  Now she had the why. The wedding was now a Subject, not just a profound waste of money and an opportunity for family and friends to have an emotional binge at her expense. She laughed up into the hazy night, orange with the light from the sodium vapor street lamps. She conjured up the Escher-like image of Ivan filming the video cameraman videotaping the ceremony.

  Sniffy Voyeur may have been old and smelly, but he was not insensitive. He could tell by the way Mouse held his leash, by the way her sandals slapped on the sidewalk, that she was feeling good, which made him feel good. He trotted along the parking strip, snuffling out scents of interest: hardened turds, food wrappers, ossified oranges that had dropped from front yard trees months before. He picked up what appeared to be a short, thick, mottled chunk of branch and pranced with it down the block.

  Ivan’s proposal solved all of Mouse’s problems. Her problem of the wedding and her problem of what to do next. If she didn’t get funding for something soon she’d have to get a job. She could not imagine what she’d do here. Be an overworked secretary like Mimi? A suicidal sound editor like Lisa? Waitress? She made a mental note to ask Ivan about producers’ fees.

  Two blocks over, the apartment buildings and duplexes gave way to tiny coffee-colored stucco bungalows, bars on the windows, solar heating panels propped on tile roofs. Houses, growing up, Mouse and Mimi had been taught to look down on, whose weedy cyclone fences enclosed front lawns littered with cheap toys and car parts. White-trash houses, Shirl called them, now owned by people who drove foreign sports cars from which they were able to turn on their backyard Jacuzzis using their car phones.

  Another front door was open. Inside, Mouse saw that the bungalow had been radically redecorated. It looked oppressively cozy and Victorian. The gleaming blond wood floors were covered with floral-patterned rugs, dust ruffles hung cutely from sofas and chairs, baby-blue lamps were topped with shirred lampshades, the walls were abused by wallpaper busy with lavender roses.

  Mouse was reminded of a double bill she had once seen with Ivan. Halfway through the first movie there was a scene where the hero approached a dusty single-engine prop plane marooned in the desert. He pried open the door and, miraculously, found himself in a sleek upscale topless nightclub. The audience accepted this, feeding from their tubs of popcorn for the next several minutes before realizing that during the most perfectly matched reel change in the history of cinema, the projectionist had put up a reel from the next movie.

  On the front porch of the bungalow, four women sat on dining room chairs, drinking spiced wine and stringing popcorn from a large red bowl, yammering amiably. Through the open door behind them, Mouse could see more women carefully laying tinsel on the branches of a tall Christmas tree. Over-orchestrated Christmas carols blared from a high-powered stereo and the motherly scent of baking sugar cookies filled the air.

  Sniffy, branch still clamped in his narrow jaw, raised his head, sucking up the smell, wet nose twitching, cheeks chuffing.

  “Look at the doggie woggie,” said one of the popcorn stringers in a high, Sniffy Voyeur-pleasing voice. His bushy tail swept back and forth across Mouse’s knees.

  “I love dogs. Look at the sweet lovin wuffin. Look at the sweet fa
ce. What kind is he?”

  “Collie-shepherd, I think.”

  “Who does your eyes?” one of the women asked, then laughed.

  “Dogs are so great. They’re so loyal.”

  “They don’t care if you’re in a bad mood or can only fit into your fat clothes.”

  “What I like is how they’re always glad to see you. Always. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just been out getting a video. You come back and it’s like they haven’t seen you for a thousand years.”

  “They don’t hold you morally responsible for looking your age.”

  “You’re like the one, for a dog.”

  Sniffy wagged his hind end and whimpered, pulling at the lead.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Tony,” said Mouse.

  “Hi Tony, hi sweetie-weetie, doggie lovin wuffin puplet. Oh look at the doggie. Oh look at the sweet boy.”

  “He’s pretty wonderful,” said Mouse, patting his head.

  “Let him go, let him come say hi. He won’t run away, will he? What’s that he’s got there? A stick? Is that your stick?”

  Sniffy moaned with delight. As Mouse leaned down to unsnap his leash, she got a closer look at his “stick,” and saw it wasn’t a branch at all but a dead squirrel, stiff with rigor mortis. Sniffy had plucked him up by his board-straight tail, belly down. The mottled dull brown Mouse had mistaken for bark was the squirrel’s back.

  She enjoyed these middle-aged ladies lavishing so much love on dumb Sniffy Voyeur, so it surprised her when she ignored the squirrel and let Sniffy go. Sniffy, once freed, galloped toward the popcorn bowl. The women became giggling sorority sisters, yelping, “The popcorn! The popcorn!” Sniffy dropped the squirrel just as one of the women bent down to scoop the bowl up in her arms. She saw the stick was a squirrel. She saw the soft squirrel belly, the tight little claws pulled up to its chest. They all saw it. They rocketed to their feet, the popcorn spilling, kernels bouncing around their feet like hail. Sniffy vacuumed them up with his tongue. “Ugh, God! Get that disgusting dog out of here!”