Shining City

by Seth Greenland

  Chapter 7

  Jan sat behind the cash register of Ripcord, saying good-bye to Marcus, who had called to inform her of this encouraging turn of events. Although she was pleased by the excitement in his voice, she wondered at the strangeness of his news and what it actually boded for their family. What if this new business turned out to be a reliable source of income? The novelty of running a boutique had worn off after the first few months, and the ongoing struggle to keep it afloat was a source of constant low-level tension. Jan eyed a young woman, with cropped, zebra-striped hair and a lip ring, fingering a rack of Lycra bustiers, and reflected that it was unlikely this person would purchase anything. She hated worrying about it. The idea of dry cleaning may not have quickened her heartbeat, but at least it was popular. The doors opened, the customers arrived. You could get accustomed to that.

  Plum was standing at the front of the store, contemplating the window display, devouring another fruit and nut bar. After a moment she stepped into the window and made a slight adjustment to a mannequin’s head. Satisfied, she swallowed the remainder of her snack and sauntered toward the cash register. Jan told her the news.

  “He’s going to be a dry cleaner?” she said. Her tone was slightly patronizing.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, nothing. It’s just kind of, I don’t know, incredibly boring?” Jan let the remark just hang there. Plum gave a little laugh. “Who would have thought I’d marry a lawyer and you’d hook up with a dry cleaner? Weren’t you hoping things would be a little jazzier?”

  “If the choice is between having a husband who’s unemployed and one who’s a dry cleaner …” Jan didn’t bother to finish the point. She was annoyed by Plum’s attitude and was about to tell her that if this new venture succeeded, she intended to bail out of Ripcord. But before she could, Plum said “I sent an e-mail to Crystal last night, and she answered me this morning.”

  “Crystal?”

  “My egg donor, remember?” Jan had only been half-listening, as had become her habit, during that monologue. “I had to get in line to meet with this girl—she probably does this a lot. Anyway, before I get started …” here she offered a little half-smile meant to suggest an impish insouciance “… I need to ask you one thing. The procedure costs nearly nine thousand dollars, and that’s just for one cycle, closer to sixteen for three.” She paused for a breath, as if she was exhausted by the effort of imparting the previous information. Taking advantage of the halt in Plum’s spiel, Jan jumped in.

  “I wish I could lend you the money, but we’re broke.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask you to lend me money,” Plum said. Jan wondered if she had actually planned on doing exactly that. “But I’d like your eggs.”

  “My eggs?” This request was alarmingly personal, and Jan’s hand reflexively flew to her abdomen. “Really? Plum! Oooo, this is weird …”

  “I know, I know … but mine are all messed up and we’re close and … you know … it’s a good cause. This project is going to be amazing.”

  “Whose sperm are you going to use? Because I thought you said …”

  “I found some on eBay.”

  Jan ran her fingers along the countertop, the touch of something solid allowing her to believe she was still in the known world. She began to shake her head.

  “Online sperm? Really? What do you know about the donor?”

  “He’s a college graduate.”

  Jan pointed out that he could just as easily be an ex-con with a family history of mental illness and a symphony of STDs as yet undiscovered.

  This was Plum’s response: “I won’t videotape the part where I get the eggs implanted if you don’t want. I’m taping everything else for the piece. I told you that. Didn’t I? Of course I did. You said it was a home movie. At least think about it.”

  Jan was not a confrontational person under normal circumstances and knew the quickest way to change the subject was to agree to consider the request.

  Plum was too overjoyed to divine the timbre of Jan’s answer. Had she done so, she would have understood that what her friend had meant to say was please don’t ask me such a bizarre thing again. But having heard what she wanted to hear, Plum said good-bye, telling Jan she was going on a lunch break. Jan wondered how she was going to inform Plum that under no circumstances would she willingly pry a single egg from her precious ovary, given the stated purpose of the request.

  Shining City Dry Cleaner was at the corner of Melrose and Gehenna, near several overpriced purveyors of trendy fashion and grooming ephemera favored by the young and feckless. Marcus parked his Honda Civic on a side street, and, as he emerged on Melrose, walked past a small theater emblazoned with a banner for its current show, The Boys of Northanger Abbey, a musical adaptation of the Jane Austen novel.

  Everyone on this West Hollywood sidewalk was slim, youthful, and attractive. The women obviously paid a great deal of attention to their physical presentation, and the men were either gay or undeclared. There was nary a stroller in sight, only disposable income as far as the eye could see. The locals wore the kind of two-hundred-dollar ripped jeans that required dry cleaning. Marcus was nearly salivating at his prospects as he opened the glass door and walked into a new life.

  Velour curtains obscured the windows and rendered the interior more shadowy than the usual Melrose establishment. Several cheap oil paintings done in lurid colors lined the walls, all with religious themes. There was a robed St. Augustine chockablock with Moses holding a staff above his head, adjacent to a multi-armed Vishnu, looking at a reclining Buddha resting on the opposite wall. What was this religious iconography doing here? Marcus surmised that it belonged to whoever had owned the business before Julian.

  Behind the Formica counter hovered a motorized rack on which a profusion of plastic-encased garments hung like swollen fruit waiting to be picked. Along with the religious art were framed and autographed glossies of entertainment personalities Marcus had never heard of who, he assumed, had brought their clothes to be freshened on the premises. Perhaps Julian gave these people discounts in the hope that the presence of their signed likenesses would impress the hoi polloi and thus increase business. Marcus made a mental note to learn about marketing in the dry cleaning world. But why was the place not open? Where were the customers? He looked into the shadowy depths and saw a door.

  Flipping on the light, Marcus found himself gazing upon a room furnished with two chairs and a desk with a telephone and a laptop computer. Everything appeared utterly ordinary, and this baffled him. What had Julian meant in leaving Shining City to Marcus? Was it a gesture of goodwill from the depths of a life marked by its total absence? An apology for the thoughtless manner he had treated his mother, father, and brother? Was it a plaintive plea for forgiveness from beyond the grave? Marcus couldn’t divine Julian’s intention, but he felt grateful for what his brother had done. Ultimately, the reason didn’t matter, and he had given up trying to fathom Julian years earlier anyway.

  So Marcus made plans. A coffeemaker would allow him to spend the days well caffeinated and present an upbeat face to his new customers, whose loyalty he would earn with the crackerjack service he intended to provide. Perhaps he would offer favored customers free coffee. He would have cups made with SHINING CITY emblazoned on the side so they would see the name of his business when they took their coffee on the road and be reminded of his friendliness and generosity. He would purchase a sound system and have music playing, nothing too jangly and off-putting, but nothing that implied New Age soft-headedness either. Maybe Chet Baker.

  Marcus was navigating his way through the files on the laptop (mostly pornography and gambling) when a someone walked in and said “Who are you?” in a European accent whose exact geographical origins he couldn’t place but sensed was an area of whimsical castles, bad food, and a tortured relationship with Russia. Looking up from a card-counting program, Marcus saw a tall, slender woman with shoulder-length platinum blonde hair just beginning to go dar
k at the roots. She wore tight jeans, a ribbed forest-green sweater, and blue cowboy boots. A red purse hung from her shoulder, and she was holding a large cup of coffee with a lipstick smudge on the rim. Her skin was pale, and as she removed her sunglasses, Marcus guessed she was around thirty. He sensed that she hadn’t slept much the previous night.

  He got up from the desk and introduced himself. Then he extended his hand, which she shook perfunctorily. Her skin felt cool, and he wondered if she was one of those people with below-normal body temperatures.

  “Where is Juice?” Juice? Was that Julian’s nickname?

  “You haven’t heard?” Marcus was suddenly dreading the remainder of this exchange. She could be someone to whom Julian was close—a girlfriend perhaps, or, worse, an ex-wife. “He’s dead— heart attack.”

  Looking away from Marcus for a moment to absorb this information, she nodded her head, conveying that it was not entirely unexpected. Greatly relieved that no histrionics had ensued, Marcus asked the woman her name.

  “Amstel.” She told him she was sorry for his loss. Then she said “Are you taking over business?”

  “Yes.”

  “So this is for you.” She removed an envelope from her purse and handed it to him. The envelope was unsealed and, looking in it, Marcus saw a wad of cash. He was nonplussed for a moment. He took out the money and quickly counted eighteen hundred dollars, in twenties, fifties, and hundreds. Was she a delivery person for Shining City? It occurred to him that collecting payment at the time of delivery was not the most efficient way to run a dry cleaning business. “How many people does Julian have working for him?”

  “About twenty, maybe,” Amstel said.

  Now Marcus was genuinely confused. Unless there was a volume of business that the relatively modest-seeming operation did not seem able to support, he had no idea how it could sustain a workforce that size.

  He found himself involuntarily nodding his head, as if to say Twenty! Of course! But what he said was “Really?” which didn’t do much to hide his surprise.

  “It varies. Girls take time off … go … come back. Okay I smoke?”

  “Sure.” Marcus hated cigarette smoke, couldn’t be around it. But, too intrigued to care, he gestured to the Naugahyde chair opposite the desk. Had she just described the workforce as entirely female? The girls take time off? The delivery drivers, the cashiers, the people who did the actual cleaning—all women? Perhaps that was Julian’s gimmick, although Marcus couldn’t imagine it was much of a selling point in the dry cleaning industry. He dimly recalled hearing about a topless gas station out in the desert a few years earlier, but Shining City did not appear to be that kind of operation.

  Amstel seemed happy to take the weight off her feet as she settled into the chair. She rummaged in her purse, pulled out a pack of clove cigarettes and a lighter, placed one to her lips, and lit it. Drawing deeply, she exhaled the smoke and said “You seem kind of normal for someone related to a guy like Juice.”

  “How so?”

  “He was a freak.” Marcus liked her accent, which reminded him of a cheesy sixties spy movie. He imagined it emanating in sultry tones from a trenchcoat-clad lady Communist who secretly wanted to tumble with the American hero. She crossed her slender legs, one thigh over another. “So, Marcus …” Amstel continued in her spy movie accent. “Anything for me tonight?” This was what he was dreading: having to reveal the extent of his ignorance. He knew enough about running a company to recognize that workforce motivation depended on making workers believe in management’s essential grasp of how the business functioned. That meant a familiarity with each worker’s job, and an understanding of the essential role played by that employee within the larger organization. What then, he wondered, was Amstel’s responsibility?

  “Any …?” He said this in hopes of getting her to provide the information he lacked. But either she did not pick up on his total absence of expertise or chose to ignore it, because she took this moment to examine the fingernails of her right hand, which were covered with metallic blue polish. Marcus’s own hands, which had been resting on his lap, moved away from his body. His elbows remained slightly bent, and his palms turned up as if to say help me out, please.

  Amstel noticed this gesture and, turning her attention from her manicure, she said “Dates, Marcus. I have SUV to pay off. Some guy who likes Greek would be good. Juice told you that costs double, right? Triple if he’s Arab.”

  At that moment, Marcus realized that he had misheard Dominic Festa when he’d said Julian was a pip.

  Chapter 8

  It was a disorientating sensation, as if he’d been exploring a Pacific atoll and had come upon a production of Porgy and Bess being performed by a cast of house cats. Several seconds passed before Marcus realized that his jaw had dropped open. Amstel was blowing smoke rings. He hoped she hadn’t noticed. Marcus could have asked her to leave, then departed himself, locking the door behind him permanently. Could have gone home to Van Nuys and resumed his search for a more conventional way to salvage his professional life and so continue to bear the burden of his responsibilities. He could have tried to help Jan turn Ripcord into a sustainable business. He could have packed his family up and moved them to a new, less expensive place to live, undergone retraining in another field and remained in mainstream society. But he did none of these things. Instead, he remained in his chair and looked at Amstel. She had an oval face with a pert nose and large blue eyes he wanted to luxuriate in. Her mouth curled upward in a look of bemusement, her delicately glossed lips full. She seemed in no hurry.

  Marcus was not certain whether he had ever been in such close proximity to a prostitute before. Certainly, he had seen them on the street, on the eastern reaches of Sunset Boulevard and in the shabbier parts of Hollywood, wearing impossibly short skirts, tight jackets, and fuck-me shoes. But those were streetwalkers, something the woman in front of him was not. Occasionally, he glanced at the ads in the back of the local alternative weekly. These contained a constantly regenerating fantasia of women and men who, for a fee, were available to perform acts unimaginable to him. In the rare instances Marcus looked at them, it was only to marvel at the army of people operating in this below-the-radar world and wonder what they told their families they did for a living. He noticed a paperback book peeking out of Amstel’s purse. “What are you reading?” he asked, unable to think of anything else to say.

  “Short stories,” she said, and mentioned a female writer with a foreign-sounding name Marcus had never heard. “So far I’m not liking them much. Too minimalist.” (When she said it, it came out “meenamalist”.) Marcus’s eyebrows lifted. Too minimalist? Clearly Amstel was not what he had in mind when he thought about women in her line of work. “So, Marcus …”—she let a jet of smoke stream out of her mouth—“What’s going on later?” Later was “lay-toor,” a sound he found strangely alluring.

  He thought for a moment, or at least he pretended to be thinking (the realization of her sexual availability was causing his brain to momentarily function like a third world power grid). Then he said: “I’m not sure.” He had to say something. It wasn’t as if he could just keep sitting across from her, attempting to appear enigmatic. The room, which was not well ventilated, was starting to fill with the cancerous effluvia of Amstel’s lungs. He didn’t want to alienate the woman by requesting that she extinguish her cigarette, so he was greatly relieved when she took another drag and then, removing the top of her coffee cup, sent the butt to a wet Colombian death. Marcus usually found that disgusting, but today he was too distracted to mind.

  So what he said was this: “Amstel, as you can imagine, I’m still pretty upset about Julian.”

  “Me too.”

  That was encouraging. Heartened, he pressed on. “See, he was my only sibling and I haven’t really processed his, uhh … you know … umm … death. So …” Then he searched his mind for a plan because he had none, other than somehow finding a new and reliable revenue stream with which he could support his
family and attend to their needs. “Can this wait until tomorrow?”

  As he uttered these words, another young woman came into the office. After greeting Amstel and learning Marcus’s identity, she introduced herself as Cortina and handed him an envelope stuffed with cash. Then the two women gave him their beeper numbers and left.

  Marcus retrieved Dominic Festa’s card from his wallet and immediately dialed his cell phone number. The lawyer picked up on the third ring.

  “Does the dry cleaner actually do business as a dry cleaner?” Marcus asked, not bothering to say hello.

  “It’s a dry cleaner.”

  “So it does business as a dry cleaner.”

  “That, my friend, is not what I said. What I said was ‘it’s a dry cleaner.’ ”

  “I know what you said, but that’s not what I’m asking.”

  “Is it a dry cleaner, per se? That would depend.”

  “On what?”

  “On what the owner of the business wanted to do with it.”

  “Did my brother run it as a dry cleaner?”

  “Let me just say this: As far as I know, his tax return said that yes he was in the dry cleaning business. As far as whether or not any individual actually got their clothes dry cleaned on those premises, I can’t speak to that.”

  During the conversation with Festa, Marcus had the sensation that he’d tumbled off a promontory, one from which he’d been happily surveying the abundant land below. Now he was falling through blackness and picking up speed. When Marcus hung up after thanking the lawyer for clarifying the situation, he remembered that he had Julian’s cell phone in his pocket, and it took on new significance now that his brother’s life was coming into sharper focus. Marcus had read enough accounts of crime in the popular press to know that cell phones of various criminals contained information that those who worked in law enforcement found extremely helpful. They often contained a record not only of outgoing calls but of incoming ones as well. Marcus realized that he could begin to ascertain the salient details of Julian’s world if he could unlock the labyrinthine secrets therein.