The Diamond Lane

by Karen Karbo

  “… there isn’t going to be any shower! There isn’t going to be any wedding!”

  “Enough! Silly girl! Off with dress. Salty tears ruin taffeta. You want to ruin dress you wait until wedding day.” Ludvica began unbuttoning the dress. “Did I mention the twenty-five cloth-covered buttons and thread loops closing up the back?”

  Mouse stood still, her chest silently heaving, while Ludvica’s blunt fingers fiddled at her back. Since she came home she always seemed to be stuck on the wrong side of what she wanted. It was funny, actually. She sniffed, wiped her nose on the back of her hand. She laughed.

  “Poor thing’s exhausted,” said Nita, handing her a Kleenex from a tiny pack in her purse. “This is so typical.”

  “Only hormones,” said Ludvica. “Not to worry.”

  “I was much worse than this, wasn’t I, Shirl? You were in Africa, Mouse, so you didn’t see me.”

  MOUSE WONDERED: IF the brain was such a phenomenal organ, why could it handle only one facet of a problem at a time? All those folds that allegedly held knowledge. She thought alternately of losing Tony and all that meant, calling off the wedding and all that meant, stopping production on Wedding March and all that meant, but she could not seem to grasp all of these things at once. And if she could not do that, how could she make a decision about what to do? Maybe, she reasoned, there was only one fold per subject, only one fold, for example, dedicated to thoughts of marriage. If this was true, her fold was overflowing. That’s why she was freaking out. Love- and marriage-related problems were being relegated to the fold designated for remembering how to change the battery in the smoke alarm. Just the fact she was contemplating this did not speak well for the brain, she thought.

  For the past week she had been unable to sleep. Instead, she lay on the couch, chin on her chest, watching late-night TV, remoting around the stations impatiently. Sometimes she didn’t even drag out the futon. She slept like that, in her clothes, the unpleasant orange sodium-vapor streetlight shining down on her from outside. Sniffy Voyeur was distraught by the change. He stood beside the couch for hours, his long pointed head resting on her chest.

  Every day she resolved to do something. Call the wedding off, or call Tony and beg him to come back, and every day she did nothing. The most peculiar show, to which she found herself increasingly addicted, was a bingo game in the nether regions of the dial. It came on at two and featured an unattractive shiny-faced Southern couple in evening wear pulling foam golf balls out of what appeared to be a giant popcorn popper. Each ball had a number on it. “Number seventeen B, Brandy, seventeen B.”

  “That’s one-seven, seventeen B, Chet? One-seven, seventeen B. I like that number, seventeen, Chet, don’t you?”

  “Yes, and B, why your name begins with a B, doesn’t it, Brandy?”

  “Yes, Chet, that’s seventeen B. One-seven B for our viewers at home.”

  It went on like this until the morning news. They never told where or how you got a bingo card, or what to do if you won, or what you won if you won.

  Sometimes Carole, who was an insomniac, sat up and watched the bingo show, too. She did most of her script reading after midnight. She sat at the kitchen table in her robe and sweatsocks, drinking oversteeped cups of Earl Grey and eating rice cakes smeared with peanut butter.

  One night Mouse told Carole about her theories on the brain. Carole fingered the gold rings in her ears and listened, nodding her head slowly. She had a habit unknown in Los Angeles. She listened to what you said, thought about what you said, then she responded. Carole felt sorry for the brain. “All that potential, and what do people use it for? Screenplays.”

  “What are you two still doing up?” asked Mimi. She stumbled in around one-thirty, red-cheeked and tousled. Mouse didn’t ask. Since the morning Tony moved out three weeks earlier, the morning when Mouse had told Mimi about Elaine, Mimi had been moody and secretive. She had been staying late at work to use the computer to write on her blockbuster, then meeting Eliot Bomarito for a late bite. Mouse could not believe she was dating the odoriferous Eliot. What had happened to Ralph?

  “Is it love?” asked Carole, rolling a sheet of paper into her typewriter.

  “I don’t know,” said Mimi, opening the refrigerator. “He’s just very very nice. He’s really a good filmmaker, too. He did a great piece on this blind guy who does tattoos in East L.A.”

  “It’s awful,” said Mouse. “Remember? We watched it together.”

  “It’s brilliant!” said Mimi, slamming the refrigerator.

  “We watched it together,” said Mouse, “you thought it was terrible.”

  “God, would it kill you to let someone else do something?” She stomped out of the room.

  Mouse and Carole traded glances.

  “What was that?” asked Mouse.

  Carole laughed. “You should see the fights I have with my sister.”

  “That was not a fight. We never fight. Shirl brags about it to her friends at the craft shop. I don’t know how you can stand living with her, frankly.”

  “She pays the rent on time, cleans up after herself. We have talks. She’s not threatened by me, though.”

  “She’s threatened by me?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  The way Carole said it, with a shrug and a wave of her beringed hand, it had to be true. This had never occurred to Mouse. Not that it made any difference. In her experience, this kind of insight was like the free bonus glass Shirl used to get with a fill-up at the gas station. The glass had nothing to do with the quality or the cost of the gas, and it ended up rolling around the backseat until it broke or was thrown out. Regardless of whether Mimi was threatened by her, she was still unbearable, and Mouse could figure no way to make her bearable. She sighed and fished a rice cake out of the bag lying open on the table.

  “I meant to tell you, I read Tony’s script,” said Carole.

  The rice cake turned to dust in Mouse’s mouth. She tried to chew. “Oom rem Ony’s scimmp?” Tony’s script! She’d forgotten about it. Her bloodshot eyes filled with tears. It was like unexpectedly coming upon one of his shirts among her laundry.

  “For Allyn, V.J. Parchman thought she’d spark to it since she’s looking for an Africa project.”

  “How is it?”

  “It’s on the couch,” said Carole. “No worse than anything else I read. I mean that as a compliment. At least he’s hip to apostrophes. You should probably look at this first. I don’t know if you know what he’s done. It’s ‘freely adapted from a true story.’” Carole slid a sheet of paper across the table. “Don’t take the bad stuff seriously. I’m supposed to be harsh. It’s part of the job.”

  Screenplay: 119 pgs.

  Story Analyst: Carole Poe

  Submitted to: Allyn Meyer

  Submitted by: V.J. Parchman

  LOVE AMONG ELEPHANTS

  by

  T. N. Cheatham

  and

  Ralph Holladay

  TYPE: Action/Thriller/Love Story

  LOCALE & TIME: East Africa. The Present

  SYNOPSIS:

  MOUSE and TONY are two young Americans. Each one heads a different anti-elephant-poaching unit, one organized by the Kenyan government, the other by an international wildlife watch group. MOUSE, who came to Nairobi to model swimsuits for Sports Illustrated, was moved by the plight of the elephants and never went home, is “soft, sexy, and sweet” but a whiz with an AK-47. TONY, a former Rhodes Scholar, is “rugged, decisive, and energetic.” They meet when their two anti-poaching units ambush one another by mistake. Mouse is accidentally shot, but Tony nurses her back to health. They make love while a herd of elephants, with whom Mouse has “a mystical connection” (she was an elephant in a past life) look on with approval.

  Tony’s UNCLE NIGEL, a bigwig exporter of African objets d’art offers Mouse a job while she is recuperating. Through her work, she learns that he is in collusion with BOAZ, the most ruthless poacher in the country, exporting tons of tusks to Korea. She tells Tony
, and they go to the head of the Kenyan Wildlife Federation, MR. STANLEY. Stanley tells them Nigel has been under suspicion for some time, but not to worry, it is all under control. Meanwhile, Tony’s unit rounds up Boaz and holds him captive in the bush, thereby cutting off Nigel’s supply of tusks. Nigel, unaware that it is Tony’s patrol who apprehended Boaz, sets his henchmen, THOMAS and STEPHEN, out to find and kill them. Mouse overhears this one night when Nigel thinks she has already gone home and sets out to warn Tony.

  Before Mouse can find him, she is captured by Boaz’s confederates. They are going to kill her but, at a nearby game reserve lodge, some models from Vogue are doing a safari spread. Mouse, using her old Sports Illustrated connections, promises to get them into the photo shoot if they will let her go. She runs into Nigel and Mr. Stanley there, cavorting with the models. She confronts Nigel, who realizes his awful mistake. He had no intention of murdering his beloved nephew. Together, Nigel and Mouse set out to find Thomas and Stephen before they can find Tony. They catch up with the two henchmen just as they are arriving in the village where Tony’s unit is based. They arrive to find all of Tony’s men decapitated, their bodies unrecognizable. Mr. Stanley’s henchmen have been there first.

  That night, Mouse and Ni console each other. They make love. Mouse leaves their bed and goes into the bush to commune with the elephants. She rides one nude through the mist, her AK-47 slung over her shoulder. The elephant takes her to where Tony is hiding out. Tony says he saw her with Uncle Nigel and is leaving for the States as soon as he can get a flight out.

  PRODUCTION VALUE: Good

  RECOMMENDATION: Yes____ No____ Maybe XXX

  COMMENTS:

  Idea is important, topical, potentially interesting, lends itself to a prestige, big-star vehicle. Characters are by and large believable, although it is difficult to believe Mouse would console Nigel (who is still, as far as we know, an exporter of illegal ivory) by sleeping with him. Also, although it’s understandable that the world of high fashion modeling would be fascinating to a band of bloodthirsty elephant poachers, I don’t believe the promise of watching a Vogue photo shoot would be a strong bargaining chip in this situation. Everything else about this script is predictable, confused, and sometimes downright unbelievable. The plotting is feeble at worst, shopworn at best. Despite the exotic arena it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. The end feels tacked on. With the exception of the abrupt resolution of the relationship between the principals, everything else is left hanging. What happens to Nigel? To Mr. Stanley?

  If a major star was interested in this it might be worth doing a page-one rewrite, if only because of the subject matter, and its “freely adapted from a true story” appeal. I know you want to write off your upcoming Kenyan honeymoon, Allyn, but if I were you, I’d PASS.

  CAROLE

  MOUSE READ THIS with the same luscious horror with which she’d once read a medical book on African diseases, complete with full-page color photographs of every swollen, withered, rotting piece of human anatomy imaginable; the way she’d read and reread the newspaper accounts of Fitzy’s death; the way she read the coroner’s report she’d found one day in a file in the bottom drawer of Shirl’s desk.

  She was not angry. Being angry implied that one day she would cool down. It implied a door was still open, even if only a crack. When she got angry, the door slammed. It locked. Then the locks were changed. She had been angry like this only once before. Then she had moved to Africa.

  Sometime during the script’s second act, when “Mouse” is trying to escape her captors, the confederates of the evil Boaz (who, she noticed, bore a striking physical resemblance to a friend in Nairobi who taught film criticism at the University), Carole slipped off to bed.

  Sometime later the police helicopter whopp-whopp-whopped by overhead. Sniffy slept a few feet away from her, his paw crooked around his black nose, ferreting out dream scents. She lit a cigarette, then forgot about it while it ate itself up in ash, then crumbled onto a pile of slick magazines on the coffee table.

  She found some comfort in the fact that Love Among Elephants was dreck. Also, perversely, in the fact that underneath Tony’s upstanding demeanor lay a sleazy, scheming creep. She always thought he was too good to be true; here was the physical evidence.

  It was after four o’clock when she hauled out the futon. She made it up with clean sheets, taking pride in her hospital corners. She slept soundly for the first time since Tony moved out.

  22

  IT WAS THE BEGINNING OF MARCH WHEN TONY TOOK over Ralph’s old bedroom at the back of the Big House, high up in the Hollywood Hills. It took him several weeks to realize just how high up this was.

  His room had cheap dark wood paneling and hundreds of wire hangers jammed into the empty closet, whose sliding door was permanently off its track. The window over the bed was broken. At night it was cold. Tony slept in a sleeping bag and hooded sweatshirt borrowed from Sather. Because the air was also dry, he often awoke with a nosebleed. He gently tucked wads of toilet paper into his nostrils and tried to go back to sleep. The mourning doves roosting in the jacaranda by the side of the house woke him up before it was light.

  When he finally pulled himself out of bed, the house was empty, Pop-Tart wrappers strewn across the kitchen counter, a half gallon of milk left on the table, the sports page missing, crumbs everywhere. Sather and Darryl were sound-editing a low-budget feature, which meant working eighty to a hundred hours a week. They left before six and got home after eleven. They thought the post-production supervisor might need someone else the last week of the schedule and promised to try to get Tony on. He tried not to count the days.

  Instead, he busied himself watching videotapes of past Lakers games. He read all the magazines in the house, sitting on a kitchen chair on the deck overlooking the smog-engulfed city. He took his skateboard out once, but the streets were far too narrow and steep. Anyway, he had lost interest. He tried to get his closet door back on track but only succeeded in pulling it off.

  Mouse had kept the Toyota. Tony felt it was only fair, since her mother had paid for it. He may be a heel, but a bastard he was not.

  Until he got a job and could afford a car, he was on foot or forced to take the bus. The nearest bus stop was three miles away, at the bottom of the hill, next to a little café Tony was convinced was owned by a surgeon specializing in bypass surgery. Even the pancakes glistened with fat.

  One day, he hiked down to the café to nurse a cup of coffee over the want ads. Streets rambled all over the hill: dead ends, driveways, apparent wrong turns. To get down, for a short time you had to go up. Darryl had drawn him a map. Tony sat in the little café until the waitress tired of refilling his cup, then walked the three miles back up to the house. The next day his legs were so sore he could barely take a step.

  The phone never rang. He tried not to feel anxious. When he ran out of Lakers videotapes he found solace in the all-sports cable station.

  V.J. had had the script for over two weeks. He had assured Tony and Ralph that the executives had put it on their weekend reading lists, which meant only that it would not take them three months to get to it. There was the possibility that they’d already read it and hated it: in Hollywood, no news was no news, also bad news. He did pull-ups on a bar installed across the kitchen until his biceps burned.

  He tried not to dwell on his wretched performance at the fundraiser. Standing in front of the city’s rich and powerful, mouthing off about elephant carvings, when what they’d been interested in was elephant poaching. He consoled himself with the fact that he didn’t know much about poaching anyway. Nothing that Michael Brass didn’t know, in any case, so the mixup was probably for the best. He came off as an endearing (he hoped) drunk rather than an ill-informed poseur. His host came off looking like a naturalist on par with Richard Leakey. Tony tried to reassure himself that whatever he had done, he hadn’t been such an ass as to cause V.J. to lose interest in the script.

  Still, Tony heard nothing. Hollywood had
the same sense of time as an iceberg, he told himself. Not to worry. Days passed. His biceps grew. Not a peep from anyone.

  If he wanted something to eat, and it wasn’t in the house, he had to wait for Darryl or Sather to come home so he could borrow a car. One day the only thing around was oatmeal. He wasn’t feeling quite so low then and was sufficiently inspired to attempt the cookie recipe on the back of the box. Because the muscles in the backs of his calves forbade another three-mile walk down to the little store next to the little café at the bottom of the hill, he was forced to scrimp on butter.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon pitching the suitable-for-trapshooting cookies at the sparrows that alighted on the fat spines of prickly pear that grew by the acre off the deck, trying to find a reason to ring up Mouse. He wished he’d had the foresight to leave something behind at the apartment.

  Now that he’d cooled off, he was appalled at the way he’d gone off his bean. He couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said, but he distinctly remembered something along the lines of “I don’t love you.” He wished he’d been a bit more vague. “Just don’t feel ready for marriage, poppet. Me feet are getting a bit of a chill.” After all, he did want to marry her, he just didn’t want a bloody movie made about it. Now, even that didn’t seem so bad. It was not the movie that was objectionable, he realized, but that pint-sized, bedroom-eyed Oscar-winner. It was Ivan he wanted out of the picture.

  “Well, she deserved it!” he said. He tipped the tray off the rail, dumping the rest of the cookies onto the field of dusty green cactus twenty feet below. Here they were entering into holy matrimony and she had deceived him! With her old boyfriend, no less! He had a right to be furious! He tried to whip himself up into his old rage, but it wouldn’t work. He cursed his fuse, which burned quickly and bright. He missed her, damn it.