The Diamond Lane

by Karen Karbo

  “Elaine, God! When’s it due?” she heard him say. He saw Mimi out of the corner of his eye, standing in the doorway. He clamped the receiver to his chest. “Taxes,” he said, his face ashen.

  Mimi told herself she didn’t care, even when she heard him lie to Elaine that he was home stripping wallpaper. She even went so far as to tell him she didn’t care, that of course he and Elaine should be friends, and it was New Year’s Eve, etc., etc., until they got into bed and he began touching her with that distracted look on his round face and something snapped inside her. She yelled and cried and accused him of leading her on, making her fat, and in general ruining her life.

  Ralph was stunned. His pale eyebrows anchored themselves to the top of his forehead and didn’t drift back to their normal place until she had sobbed into her pillow for nearly an hour, staining the pillowcase with mascaraed hieroglyphics. He patted her between her big bony shoulder blades and thought about Love Among Elephants.

  Earlier in the evening, while Mouse and Mimi were in the kitchen cooking, and Glen and Carole had gone to track down the video, Tony and Ralph talked about the new draft. When Mouse or Mimi came in to offer another beer or to change the CD, by mutual, unspoken agreement, they changed the subject to sports or fell silent. Ralph had his own superstitious reasons for refusing to discuss his projects, and Tony had not yet gotten around to telling Mouse. It seemed less important that he tell her, now that the storyline had taken a Raiders of the Lost Ark sort of turn, and he kept putting it off and putting it off until finally he came to the conclusion that she didn’t need to know at all.

  Besides, Mouse had been annoyingly uncommunicative since Christmas. Conversing with her was like trying to make eye contact with someone from behind a drawn shade. He attributed it to the affair he believed she was having with Ivan. She reconfirmed his suspicions tonight.

  Before Glen and Ralph arrived, while he was in the kitchen helping the girls with the hors d’oeuvres, he complained that they really should be going out to celebrate the new year. This was, after all, Los Angeles, not Nairobi. There were things to do here. What things, he wasn’t exactly sure. There had to be a party they could crash, a club they could close in the wee hours of the morning. If he was honest with himself, however, he would have to admit that if Los Angeles was as exciting as its reputation held, the excitement had eluded him. Life here was weighted with the vague feeling that if anything was happening, it was happening wherever one wasn’t. Maybe that accounted for all the driving, he reasoned. Eleven million people scurrying around, trying to find the elusive exciting event that would make them feel at the center of something big. The only time he had felt that way was during meetings with V.J., at which, so far as he could tell, absolutely nothing had happened, except a lot of work for him and Ralph. And people said Africa was impenetrable.

  Of course, Mouse told him, there was nothing exciting to miss. “This city is like one of those mysterious men. You know, you always say, ‘He’s just quiet and seems boring, but still waters run deep –’”

  “– but the reason the waters are so still is because there’s like no wind, no currents –” said Mimi.

  “– no fish, no plankton –” said Mouse.

  “Sometimes a bore is just a bore.”

  “Most times.”

  “All right,” said Tony, “your point is made.” He opened a can of clams for the dip and overshot the bowl, dumping half the can on the floor, where Sniffy was waiting to slurp them up.

  “Tony,” said Mouse.

  “All right!” he said, hurling the can into the sink and stomping out of the kitchen. Where did she come off criticizing him like that? Where did she come off expounding about men. He knew she was talking about him, not Los Angeles. He, Tony, was reliable, a known entity, boring. Ivan was surly, exotic, and a better filmmaker. He threw himself on the couch and turned on the box, refusing to budge. He turned on professional wrestling. The next time he bit Mouse’s earlobe he resolved to draw blood.

  Beyond that, Tony was not quite sure what else to do about Mouse and Ivan. At the risk of humiliating himself again, he would dearly love to catch Mouse out, but he could not afford to split up with her. V.J. Parchman needed, for some reason, to believe they were married. Even though it didn’t seem to matter if the rest of the story was true, this part needed to be. Tony presumed it was so that when he and Mouse went on Johnny Carson after Love Among Elephants was a huge smash, they wouldn’t destroy the credibility of the rest of the film by saying, “That part about the wedding on the mountain? We fudged a bit on that part. Actually, we just live together.” Perhaps after the script was approved by V.J.’s people, and he and Ralph had gotten their money, he could admit that they were only engaged. Or maybe by then they actually would be married, so then it would be all right to split up. Of course, he didn’t want to split up. He loved her. He loved her, and she was making up for all those lost years with that blasted Hispanic pseudointellectual Academy Award winner.

  Instead, Tony adopted what his father called the Queen Victoria tack: do nothing and wait and ninety-nine percent of your problems will solve themselves. He spent his free time, which was considerable, working on the script with Ralph. They wrote and drank and played golf. They watched old videos of last year’s Lakers games up at the house in the Hollywood Hills, which Darryl and Sather and Ralph shared.

  This was fine by Mouse. She needed time alone to plot and plan. She knew it would come to this. Since Ivan suggested it, she knew. It was on her mind that New Year’s Eve, while the African dish flopped, while Glen lectured them about different brands of flea dip, while the excruciating video sent everyone into a morose reexamination of the past year, while Tony bent to give her a stiff peck at midnight. It was as if she was driving an amusement-park car, the kind on tracks you pretend to be steering yourself, all the while knowing if you let go of the wheel the car will still take you to the same place. In this case, the car was headed for a place she should be ashamed to go, but wasn’t. Somehow, Wedding March was going to get made.

  Mouse had known it would be necessary to try to give back the money to Shirl. There was nothing calculated in this. She honestly wanted Shirl to take it back. If Shirl took it back Mouse and Tony would have a thousand-dollar wedding. A thousand-dollar wedding did not deserve a documentary. It was any wedding. Ivan could easily find another. If Shirl took the money back, Mouse would be saved from thinking, A modern wedding whose budget is one hundred thousand dollars begs to be filmed.

  Mouse thought that maybe in private Shirl would see the error of her extravagance. Maybe without Auntie Barb glowering and Mimi gushing, “I’m so happy for you, too bad money can’t buy taste,” and a sherry-sodden Tony whispering, “Enjoy it, poppet. Cut loose,” Mouse could talk some sense into her.

  Instead, she made Shirl cry in the stationery department of Robinson’s, at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, where Shirl always bought her Christmas cards for next year, on sale half-price. It was the day after Christmas.

  “Why won’t you let me do this for you? For twenty years you don’t come home, now I want to give you a wonderful wedding and you won’t take it. My youngest won’t take a gift from her own mother,” she said to anyone interested, over the dull slapping of plastic boxes of cards being unearthed from a pile by exhausted shoppers, glanced at, then chucked back. “These are nice. See, you can put your own photo in. I could put in one of the wedding.”

  “At least let me put half of it into… into…” Mouse racked her brain for the initials of all those modern-day financial instruments advertised on the sides of buses, “… some kind of a bank thing, a trust account or something. If we have any kids, you know, for college.”

  “You’re not planning on having children?” asked Shirl, wild-eyed. “Don’t tell me you’re not planning on having children. I can’t take it. I’m still sick.” She dropped the box back on the pile, bent her head to her chest with both hands.

  Mouse noticed the loose crêpey skin of her neck bunched
up like a thin fallen sock. “Of course we are,” she lied. “But Mom, no wedding costs a hundred thousand dollars, even in Los Angeles.”

  “You are a monster,” said Shirl. “How about this: Wishing You All Good Things Now and Throughout the Coming Year.”

  Mouse surrendered herself to her fate.

  Mouse was dripping when she arrived at Nita Katz’s Beverly Hills office. The bad weather had forced her to drag her poncho from the bottom of her suitcase. Feeling distinctly unfashionable in its green plastic folds, she made a mental note to get a new one.

  Since she had been there last Nita had gotten a secretary: a leathery-faced woman with cottony blond hair and deep-set light-gray eyes crookedly outlined in black pencil sat at a desk in the small waiting room. She was busy tying tiny gold bows on hundreds of tiny white silk boxes. The silk boxes had been packed in the lids of larger boxes, scattered around the room, on the floor and on the loveseat, balanced on its round arms. “You’re too early,” the secretary said. Her voice reminded Mouse of Mimi’s coffee grinder. “Britty said you wouldn’t be here until three.”

  “I’m here to see Nita,” said Mouse.

  “You’re not the messenger. I thought you were the messenger.”

  The secretary made Mouse step into the hallway to remove her poncho. She was afraid a stray drop would land on one of the two-by-two-inch-square tops of one of the hundreds of white silk boxes, leaving a tiny permanent stain, infuriating Britty, the bride, whose wedding would then not be perfect. The secretary could not bear the responsibility of that. In the hallway Mouse hauled the poncho over her head. She smoothed her wet hair, forgetting about the perm, then hung upside down from the waist, trying to unsmooth it.

  Mouse was suddenly very interested in the boxes, their gold bows, what was inside. It was the film, uncoiling in her mind. It was like a woman who doesn’t know she is pregnant taking a sudden and mysterious interest in booties.

  Mouse sometimes liked to draw, but only from photographs. She enjoyed standup comedians on television, but only when the jokes were retold by Tony. He never told them as well, but somehow she found them funnier. She liked nature documentaries far better than nature. She liked life diluted by interpretation.

  She asked the secretary what the boxes were for.

  Was that traditional, then, party favors for the guests?

  What was in the boxes?

  Were the truffles light chocolate or dark?

  What was the significance of hand-dipped?

  What was inside the chocolates?

  Was it real champagne or a champagne cream?

  When were they flown from Switzerland?

  Did they need to be flown in a special refrigerated plane?

  Did every guest get one?

  How much did they cost?

  Could I try one?

  “Get yourself invited to the wedding,” said the secretary, suspicious. They got crackpots every once in a while, people looking for the mediums next door. This could be one.

  Nita did not immediately recognize Mouse. Remembering last time, Mouse had worn something casual, her black leggings and a black cotton sweater. Mimi had told her that no one ever needed to dress up in L.A. Style was the thing. You needed your own. Mouse decided that this was her style.

  Nita’s own style had changed. The linty sweater and ballet shoes had been replaced by a blue empire-waisted dress, spattered with tiny yellow flowers. Something about Nita’s face had also changed. Strips of yellow and green bruises sat atop her cheekbones. Something with her nose, thought Mouse, whose tilt now afforded a good view of the deep maroon insides of her nostrils. She wore flat white shoes and white stockings. A thirty-seven-year-old girl out of a children’s story, Mouse thought. She was mystified.

  “I’m Mimi’s sister,” said Mouse.

  “Mimi?” said Nita blankly.

  “We met several months ago about my wedding. I just got back from Africa?”

  “Right. The wedding on the beach.”

  She caught Mouse staring at her nose, tapped the end of it lightly with her knuckle. “Business was booming, so I splurged. An early fortieth-birthday present.”

  A forty-year-old girl in a children’s story.

  “We’ve changed our minds about the wedding,” said Mouse, once again snuggled in the mooshy mauve sofa, the manhole-sized white saucer balanced on her knee, the heat from the bowl of cappuccino warming her chin.

  Nita closed the door from her desk with the same kind of gadget Shirl used to open the garage door from her car. They both watched, transfixed, while the door inched shut over the thick white carpet. Mouse explained more than she needed to: about the accident, about Mr. Edmonton, about the out-of-court insurance settlement. She felt it was important to lay this groundwork so that Nita would understand immediately that she was serious. So that Nita would not require proof, in the form of a phone call to Mimi, or to Tony, or even to Shirl.

  Occasionally Nita touched a finger to either side of her nose and sniffed daintily. She took two phone calls, one from someone she was meeting for lunch.

  “… they settled out of court for about three hundred fifty thousand, a hundred she’s given to me for the wedding. It’s sort of outgrown the beach, the wedding. I was thinking, I have no ideas actually. I’d love to have a formal big-city wedding. Whatever is typical is what I want.”

  “So what can I do for you?” asked Nita. She ran a silver letter opener idly under her nails, now shorter, now painted pearly pink. Mouse could see the toe of her white flat tapping impatiently under her desk.

  Mouse was thrown. Perhaps Nita ran into hundred-thousand-dollar wedding budgets all the time. Perhaps a hundred-thousand-dollar wedding financed her secretary, her office door opener, her new nose. Perhaps she was already booked, or had a two-hundred-thousand-dollar wedding coming in. This could not be true. In Pakistan the average annual income was one hundred and twenty-seven dollars. Mouse felt like a scuba diver diving at night without a flashlight.

  “I’d like you to do it. The wedding.”

  “I’m sorry about your mother’s accident. I am. And I’m flattered you’re so anxious to work together, but, as I think I mentioned, I do work on commission, and an extra hundred dollars from –”

  “– hundred thousand.”

  “Hundred thousand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dollars?”

  “From the insurance settlement.”

  “That’s considerably different.”

  “I thought it was. But I’ve been in Africa.”

  “Have you talked to anyone else about this?”

  “No,” said Mouse, after a long second. “Not yet.”

  Nita became very quiet. Not a continuation of the quiet she was before. Not the polite quiet of someone forced to listen but actually trying to figure out how to squeeze in a trip to the dry cleaners. She was predator quiet. She was strolling through the forest and came upon something big and delicious without expecting it and now did not want to scare it off. Mouse knew this quiet from Africa. She didn’t mind it. Nita would be in the movie, too.

  “There’s something else we need to talk about,” said Mouse.

  “None of this is going for the honeymoon, is it? Honeymoon expenses, the sky’s the limit. Brides come in here, say they have X-amount to spend on their wedding, not realizing they can blow half of it on a honeymoon.”

  “We’re looking into the possibility of a documentary. A ‘the making of’ kind of thing.”

  “A documentary?”

  “Like for a dramatic film, a feature, sometimes they’ll make a documentary on the making of a film.”

  Nita laughed. “Like the way, in the ladies’ john, always at department stores. There are two opposing mirrors, you can see the reflection of you looking at your reflection looking at your reflection looking at – not that I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Have you heard of Ivan Esparza?”

  “Your fiancé –”

  “– no, no,
that’s Tony. If anyone is known for documentary, Ivan is. He did a doc on baptism, Total Immersion, that won an Oscar. He would like to film this, my wedding. Rites of passage are his specialties. It’s all just in the talk stages right now. Nothing is firmed up.”

  Nita dabbed the end of her nose thoughtfully. “I would be in it, then? I’m a very private person.”

  “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Of course not.”

  “– I’m just so private. Could we at least wait until the swelling goes down? I’m also getting a new rug in the waiting room.”

  “Nothing’s firmed up yet.”

  “Thank you. You’re being honest. We have to be honest with each other if this is going to work. If I suggest rubrum lilies for your bouquet and you have your heart set on orchids, you have to tell me. I assume you’ll want a sit-down dinner. I also have in mind the perfect person to do the cake. A local artist whose métier is food art. None of this is going toward funding the documentary is it? The money. Movies aren’t cheap, you know. Of course you know.”

  “No, the funding is already in place.” To say those words! The funding is already in place. Mouse had never said those words in her entire life. Before it was always, “I have some grants out” (along with sixty thousand other people all applying for the same five hundred dollars) or “It’s funded primarily by private individuals” (the major private individual being herself). “The funding is not a problem.” Those words she had never said. The funding had always been a problem.

  Nita bowed her head in thought, resting her puffy lips against her hands, held together as though in prayer. Could Mouse give her one minute, just one minute to take care of a few things? Then they would begin. She would be Mouse’s from that moment until the honeymoon. She already had ideas.

  The Bel Air Hotel, for example. Rent the whole place for a weekend for the wedding party and out-of-town guests. The string section of the L.A. Philharmonic for the reception. The designer who used to do the gowns for Dynasty for the dress. These were all just ideas. This was presuming Mouse did not want to do a theme wedding. Theme weddings could be fun. A Victorian- Christmas wedding with snow and reindeer. A South Seas Island wedding with a Fijian Feast. These were all just off the top of her head. She would, of course, do whatever Mouse wanted.