Shining City

by Seth Greenland

  “It doesn’t have to be about worshipping a traditional god, Marcus. It’s really more about doing the right thing.”

  He was going to tell her he knew this, but then something took hold of him. “But who’s to say what the right thing is? Just because most people think something is right, does that make it so? Maybe it’s just a collective delusion that people decide to agree on. Maybe the whole idea of God is a delusion.” Marcus regretted getting caught up in this kind of undergraduate discussion but he could not stop himself.

  “God can be what you want it to be.”

  “Like an imaginary friend?” He smiled to show he was kidding.

  She looked at him inquisitively. This was not the kind of exchange she generally had with the father of a bar mitzvah student. “I don’t know if God exists. Does that surprise you?”

  “Everyone has to make a living.”

  “But I think it’s important that we act like he does exist. If you want to talk some more about this, my door is open.”

  Marcus thanked her and left the office. He didn’t know what had come over him, but vowed to keep whatever theological differences he may have had with the rabbi, or anyone else for that matter, to himself. No one needed to know what he thought about anything.

  As he walked to the car, he noticed that his back was no longer hurting.

  Upon their return home, they were greeted by the discordant whine of a power tool. Following the noise to Lenore’s room, Marcus looked in and saw her standing on a chair, drilling a hole in the ceiling. She was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that read GOT POLE?

  “What are you doing?”

  Lenore stopped drilling and regarded her son-in-law with unmitigated pleasure. “I’m installing my pole.” With a toss of her head, she indicated the cylindrical piece of stainless steel resting on her bed. “I could use a hand.”

  For the next twenty minutes, Marcus and Lenore fiddled with the floor pad and the ceiling mount until they were confident it could bear her small frame. They summoned Nathan and Jan, and when the entire family was assembled Lenore hit a button on her boom box, lately the exclusive haunt of folk rock artists of a certain age. The hip-hop thump that now emerged heralded a changing of the guard. In front of three sets of disbelieving eyes, Lenore leapt onto the pole and executed a routine involving scissor kicks, spins, and hanging upside down, legs akimbo. With great panache, she finally hauled herself upright and dropped to the floor with a lightness that belied her years. Her face was aglow.

  For a moment, all anyone could do was exchange speechless glances. Then Nathan began to applaud, followed quickly by his parents. It was agreed that pole dancing was empowering for seniors.

  Later that evening, Marcus and Jan were lying in bed, having just turned the lights off. Since deciding to take an active role in the operation, Jan had been examining it from various angles. Marcus had the personnel situation under control, and the money was flowing, so Jan decided, in the interest of increasing revenues and remaining below the radar, to reposition the business, aiming for an exclusive clientele, the theory being that by upgrading the trade, they could decrease the actual number of customers, thereby lowering the risk exponentially. Jan guessed that the market was willing to pay a premium for perceived distinctiveness, and this would make up for the anticipated decline in clients.

  Jan wanted to re-launch the business with a name befitting the new identity, but so far had been unable to come up with one that conveyed the right degree of sangfroid.

  “What are the qualities a guy looks for when he’s at a hotel and he wants to hire a date?” She preferred the euphemisms, as they made it easier for her to process the entirety of the situation.

  “The ability to perform the service requested.”

  “That’s not what I mean. What qualities, you know—personal things? Sense of humor, stuff like that.”

  “I think they’re into hair color and body type, nice butt, breast size …” He began to caress her thigh. She was wearing a fresh thong and a silk T-shirt several sizes too small. Marcus wondered what had happened to the usual bedtime burka.

  “What do you think about geishas?”

  “Who doesn’t like a geisha?” Marcus ran his fingertips along her hip and across the top of her thigh.

  “Or the courtesans in France?”

  “I like them too,” he said, locating her clitoris as he wondered if his wife had spent the afternoon in the library.

  “They were trained in the conversational arts.”

  “Did you get that from a brochure?”

  “No …” she said, now moaning slightly. “It was on a Web site. I was thinking maybe guys liked the idea of a human being coming to see them, instead of just a sex machine.”

  “Maybe.” Marcus was kissing her neck.

  “The geishas were exclusive, which I like for what we’re doing, because the more upscale you are, the less likely it is that the police are going to care about you.” He took her hand and placed it between his legs. She began to caress him absentmindedly. “Some of these geishas were really impressive. They were educated, well-traveled … they knew how to get guys to pay for them.”

  “They were smart.”

  Smart?

  She climbed on him now, grinding her pelvis down, and proceeded to ride him in an undulating rhythm. Marcus moved his hips up and down, thrusting, his hands playing on her thighs, his breathing shallow and warm. As he ran his fingertips along her soft shoulders and closed his eyes, she said: “SMART TARTS!” Then she fell forward, pressing her breasts to his chest, and kissed him long and hard, her tongue probing his mouth, their breath intermingling.

  The next morning, Jan drove down to the now-shuttered Ripcord and liberated several of the boxes she and Plum had recently packed. Loading them in the minivan, she drove to Corinne Vandeveer’s house in Coldwater Canyon. The place was gated, and Jan followed the instructions on a sign next to a keypad mounted on a pillar of glazed bricks. She pressed the code and waited. After a moment, the wide gate swung open. The Vandeveers’ house was a sprawling Italianate mansion that looked as if it had been airlifted intact from a Tuscan hillside. In the center of the circular driveway was an impressive three-tiered fountain crowned by the nearly life-sized copper figure of a Tibetan monk. Water gushed from a spout in his forehead and filled a waist-high begging bowl in which a blue jay was currently bathing, before cascading to the orchid-strewn koi pool below. The walkways radiating from the house were inlaid with Travertine tiles of varying hue that glowed in the morning sun. A maroon Bentley was parked nearby.

  Jan rang the bell, and a moment later a young Hispanic woman in a black maid’s uniform opened the large oak door.

  “I’m meeting Mrs. Vandeveer,” Jan said. But before the woman could answer, Corinne floated into view and beckoned Jan in. A Bluetooth headset was wrapped around her ear. The maid silently withdrew. She was wearing black leggings and a loose men’s white shirt.

  “If we take the jet to Montana,” Corinne said to the person at the other end of the line, “I don’t see why we can’t just keep it there for a few days before we go to Spain. I understand that we’re sharing it …” Jan looked around. The dining room table reminded her of one she’d seen on a long-ago visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The vast living room at the opposite side of the foyer featured several large canvases she recognized as the work of Ed Ruscha and Cy Twombly. They were standing on a rug from Istanbul which, in its exquisite and complex beauty, silently requested that she take her scuffed sandals and go somewhere else. “But I still don’t see … fine. Okay. Someone’s here. I’ll call you later.” Now Corinne was addressing Jan. “Planning vacations has gotten to be such a hassle, I don’t know why we bother to go anywhere.”

  “Oh, I know,” Jan said. Her empathy was convincing. “The clothes are in the car. Should we unload them?”

  Corinne adjusted her wireless device and said “Araceli, would you and Ramon … excuse me.” Corinne never broke eye contact
, so Jan had the unsettling sensation of not being certain to whom she was speaking. Then, to Jan: “Are they in boxes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you and Ramon unload the boxes from Mrs. Ripps’s car and put them in the garage with the others, please?”

  Five minutes later, Jan and Corinne were seated on stools at an island in the vast kitchen. The room was an orgy of marble countertops and large-scale stainless steel appliances that looked as if they’d never been used. The women were nibbling crab canapés as they sipped iced tea from cut-glass goblets.

  “I hope you don’t mind leftovers,” Corinne said. “But we had this fund-raiser for Instant Karma last night. They’re this organization that sends Buddhist monks into the jails to work with the inmate population.”

  “That’s a good cause.” Jan wasn’t sure what else to say to Corinne, so she went with the obvious. People like Corinne generally didn’t care what Jan thought anyway. At least she better understood the water-spouting copper monk in front of the house.

  “I’ll put you on the list for the next one.”

  Jan gazed toward the backyard, titillated by Corinne’s perception of her as a member of the donor class. She noticed a swimming pool that looked as if it had been hewn from rock, surrounded by an acre of blindingly green lawn ornamented with life-sized topiary elephants.

  “I like the elephants,” Jan offered.

  “They’re modeled on the ones we saw on a trip to India. I’m getting kind of tired of them,” Corinne said. “We were in France last summer at this chateau, and they had a maze, you know, like a labyrinth? I’m thinking about putting one of those in.”

  Jan nodded. The air was thin at Corinne’s elevation. They chatted about their children, the math program at Winthrop Hall, and the annual giving campaign. Then Corinne said “So … what does your husband do?”

  “Investments.” Jan had no idea why she lied. Or, rather, why she told that specific lie. She could have told Corinne he was in the dry cleaning business. Perhaps she had been thrown off by the dense reek of money, or by Corinne’s friendliness, which she had not expected. But her answer appeared to please the hostess. “What about yours?”

  “He’s an arbitrageur, which means he buys in one market and sells in another, but for a lot more money. Sorry, I know you know that, but some people don’t so I always say it anyway. We’ll have the two of you over.”

  “That would be delightful,” Jan said. Delightful? From what cobwebbed Victorian recess had she extracted that bon mot? Had she ever used the word in her life? Jan felt a tiny heart palpitation. How many glasses of iced tea had she consumed? She had forgotten there was caffeine in it. Now she looked at her watch. “I would love to stay and chat…”

  “Don’t apologize,” Corinne said. “My Reiki person gets here in five minutes. I was going to kick you out anyway.”

  Jan drove toward West Hollywood, ruminating on her encounter. Corinne ruled Winthrop Hall: queen of committees, hostess of the parent potlucks, organizer of the annual book fair. She was a lioness and, as such, not the kind of woman to whom Jan ordinarily gravitated. But she was affable and treated Jan as if they might be members of the same club, one that used linen tablecloths, high-quality silver, and social assassination as a means of protocol enforcement. The advantage of a friend like that could not be underestimated.

  The rest of the day was spent setting up a makeshift photography studio in the back of the dry cleaner. Jan hung a white backdrop from two coat racks and covered a chaise longue (purchased for the purpose at a furniture store on La Brea) with gold satin sheets, turning the farthest reaches of the space into an approximation of a boudoir. Later that week, she used the digital camera that six months ago had been Nathan’s twelfth birthday present, and photographed the newly-christened Smart Tarts workforce in various states of dishabille. She designed the Web site, registered the domain, arranged for a Web host and suddenly the 9.0 version of the business was available on the Internet. As Jan scrolled through the site in the home office (her new world headquarters), she was infused with an energy unseen since the halcyon days of Ripcord when its success seemed a foregone conclusion and her future on Van Nuys Boulevard a medley of ripe possibilities. Then she took out the Yellow Pages and turned to the Bs in search of Brazilian bikini wax.

  Discreet ads were placed in local publications announcing the business which, along with their presence on the Web, caused a slight increase in bookings. The real surge arrived when she decided to invest in the wider market. Los Angeles was a global financial hub, so Jan persuaded Marcus to purchase ad space in glossy business magazines in New York, London, and Tokyo. She wrote the copy herself, and since the more august publications would not accept advertising from a business called Smart Tarts, Jan decided the organization would have another identity for these markets—International Friendship Guides. These ads were accepted with a wink, and bookings jumped again.

  Several weeks into her new role, Jan called Corinne Vandeveer and asked if she was still collecting money for the victims of the Guatemalan earthquake. When Corinne answered in the affirmative, Jan informed her she and Marcus were donating five thousand dollars to the fund. After Corinne thanked her, an invitation was extended to a dinner party Saturday night. Jan accepted. When she told Marcus they were going, he was informed that their hosts believed him to be an “investor.” Marcus, now accustomed to dissembling, took this in stride.

  Marcus bought a Hugo Boss jacket and Jan an Armani sheath, so they were slightly overdressed for what turned out to be a backyard barbecue. Still, they were happy to be included. Six couples sat around a long table on the capacious patio overlooking the vast lawn and gardens bursting with pink, white, and yellow roses. A sad-eyed Mexican woman wearing a chef’s toque manned the grill, and a white-jacketed young waiter with red hair and freckles hovered obsequiously nearby. Corinne’s husband Dewey sat at the head of the table. He was a handsome man in his early forties with graying, slightly unkempt hair and a heedless manner. In faded Levis and an untucked white button-front shirt, he radiated money. The other guests included a snack tycoon and his overweight wife, a parking lot magnate and spouse number three (she had formerly been his masseuse), and the owner of a large vineyard in Napa and his wife, who had been a movie star in the eighties and now devoted herself to animal rescue and drinking. Finally, there was an exquisitely beautiful young woman who claimed to be an interior designer. Her husband, at least thirty years her senior, and with a noticeable face-lift, was a partner of Dewey’s. The pinot noir flowed, the conversation was convivial, and Marcus and Jan learned that, by bending the truth in a barely perceptible way, they were able to present themselves as just another well-heeled Los Angeles couple who gave to charity and worried about the world they were leaving to the next generation.

  Jan ate the pecan pie served for dessert with great enjoyment, slipping her foot out of the black calfskin pump she had purchased that afternoon at a Galleria store she had wanted to shop in for years, and rubbed Marcus’s ankle. The woman with the much older husband told a long story about a problem with the renovation of their house on Ibiza, one of five they owned. She was granted the indulgence of beauty and no one interrupted. When she finally found herself at the end of the numbing tale, there was a momentary lull in the conversation.

  “So, Marcus,” Dewey said, pivoting the spotlight. “Corinne tells me you’re in investments. What kind?”

  “Oh …” Marcus said, stalling for a moment. He’d been staring at the elephant topiary standing sentinel nearby. “You know. The usual. Gold, some timber …” Jan glanced at him, and held her breath. Was he about to tumble from the tightrope? Gold? Timber? “And, of course, dry cleaning.”

  “Certificates? Gold bars?” Dewey wanted to know.

  “I like to hold gold, feel that weight,” Marcus said. He was slightly buzzed from the wine and feeling expansive. “Sometimes I go to the bank and I fondle a brick…”

  The other guests laughed. Jan tried not to stare in
disbelief. Marcus awaited a follow-up question but was saved when the parking lot magnate said “You can never go wrong with gold” and proceeded to tell a long story involving the conquistadores and their search for the precious metal, before veering off into an exegesis about how gold could be recovered from sea water. Jan struggled to pay attention. A return invitation required that she be a good guest.

  Marcus was whistling a movement from a Bach cantata as he pulled out of the Vandeveers’ driveway and turned right onto Coldwater. Jan had enjoyed herself and hoped the music Marcus was making reflected his own take on the experience.

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “I know you like socializing with these people,” he said. “So I’m happy to go along.”

  “Is it all right if I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sometimes I like to fondle a brick? Why did you say that?”

  “What was I supposed to say?”

  “You could have just been vague.”

  “Did you listen to that woman talk about the problems she was having with the house in Ibiza? Are you sure you want to be friends with these people?”

  “I like them.”

  When they crested the hill, neither of them had spoken for over a minute. Marcus eased the car into a curve as the Valley lights winked below. “What do you think of buying a new house?”

  “You want to move?”

  “It’s not like I want a fancy place, but, it’s just, you know … now that we might be able to afford something a little better …”

  “I think this might be a bubble market,” she told him, the gentle haze of the wine crystallizing into something harder, as she calculated how to rein him in before he began to apply this logic in a more systemic fashion. Jan may have been attracted to the world of the Vandeveers, but she wasn’t going to get carried away. “It’s crazy to trade up. And besides, if we move and take on a big mortgage, then we’re locked into making this kind of money.”