Leave It to Me

by Bharati Mukherjee

  On Waller the driver of the VW bug had given up honking. I watched him sit on the sidewalk and do what looked like yoga breathing exercises.

  A tall, bald man came in, wheeling a bike. He had the shaved legs of a competitive bicyclist. He didn’t go to the counter and order an herbal tea as I’d expected. He came straight to my table. “No fun when you make it easy.” He grinned at the rose on my face. “Fred,” he said, “Fred Pointer. Let’s get started.” The grin didn’t lighten up the harrowed blue of his eyes.

  “Get you a tea?”

  “How about we walk around some and you fill me in. I’m not saying yes yet. As Ham told you, I don’t take missing-persons cases.”

  “It’s a mission, not a case,” I shot back.

  He gave me a strange look. “Maybe you need a shrink more than you need me.”

  “Ready?” I left my dirty dishes on the table, and led the man from Vulture out of the café.

  We walked; I talked. Of Mama and Pappy, of Celia, of Wyatt, of Mr. Bullock and his silly assignments. I kept talking. I couldn’t stop talking. It became as easy as breathing. I described the smell of lye in an outhouse, the furry touch of spiders crawling over my legs, the pooling of sap-white blood of roaches I swatted dead, I tasted stony grit in orphanage gruel, I felt panic as fingers closed around my throat. I hadn’t remembered any of it, not until that moment. We kept walking. Away from the Haight.

  Fred Pointer dug fast and dug deep. He called me back in less than a week. “What I have isn’t necessarily pretty.”

  I arranged for him to meet me at Steep Steps as I came off my Friday-night-Saturday-morning shift. “Want to call off the dogs?” And when I didn’t say yes or no, he added, “No guarantees except that it’ll be expensive.”

  I said I wanted to know what he knew before I decided whether to stay in or quit.

  We went in our separate cars to an all-night diner in the Tenderloin. There was only one other patron, a slick fifty-something Eurasian man in leather pants and Elvis hair on a stool at the counter. The man was sipping water out of a highball glass. It may have been gin or vodka in the glass. A khaki duffel bag and cheap vinyl carry-on were on the floor by his booted feet. He was chatting up the waiter, probably Vietnamese, in some Asian language and making the stool seat spin half turns. The waiter kept his head down and wet-mopped around the bags.

  Fred picked his way to the table farthest from the counter. “Can we get some service?”

  The waiter looked up but didn’t stop mopping. “Yeah?” he said.

  Fred Pointer ordered hot water and a slice of lemon. “What’ll you have?” he asked me. “You’re paying.”

  I ordered a Coke. “So lay the good news/bad news on me,” I begged.

  “Pepsi,” the waiter said.

  “Okay, Pepsi.”

  Fred said, “You’re pretty special, Devi.”

  “I knew that,” I snapped.

  The waiter propped the handle of the wet mop against the table next to ours, and went off for the Pepsi.

  “No, I mean different special.”

  “How different?”

  “Two continents went into your making. That means you’re one up on Kurtz, Devi.”

  Kurtz was probably a mixed-race local rock star. I’d ask Ham to get me a freebie to a Kurtz concert. “Well, not that special,” I countered. “There’s the late Klaus Nomi, and—”

  Fred said, “Shut up, okay. Let me do the talking.”

  “Go ahead,” I pouted.

  “I’ve exchanged a couple of faxes with a fellow in Bombay. I worked on a case with this fellow must have been five years ago. He didn’t recognize the name you gave, but he said he remembered there’d been juicy stuff in all the papers about a sex-guru serial killer and his harem of white hippies, he thought way back in the seventies. He’s checking it out.”

  “How do you know this man’s reliable? Have you met him?”

  “Who? Rajeev Raj? He’d kill if he had to. When we had him work on the case I mentioned, it was the usual post-custody-hearing kidnapping thing, he tracked the kid and his dad down to a beachfront hotel in Goa, broke into the room, beat up the dad and kidnapped back the kid. He’s efficient.”

  “So what’re you saying? There’s a possibility that my mother was in that harem?”

  “The years fit. The region fits. Who knows, maybe you have half brothers and sisters roaming the world. He’s supposed to have fucked all the members of his happy hippie family. A lot of those gals didn’t make it back. White slave traffic, Saudi sheikhs, jaundice, cholera, want me to go on?”

  “My mother came back to California.” Pappy’d paid her airfare back, but I didn’t get into the money angle.

  “You don’t know it was your mother, do you? That’s why I say, it could get expensive.”

  “Males too?”

  “He’d fuck a cockroach if it were big enough, that’s his rep. What we used to call polymorphous perverse.”

  Fred made that phrase sound a fun type to be. Even if I owed my existence to two of those sex-cult bozos, I didn’t have to out-polymorphous-perverse them; in fact I didn’t have to believe Fred and his Mr. Raj. “How do I know you aren’t kidding?”

  “What do you want from me, jokes?” He parted his lips slightly, and moved his lower jaw laterally a couple of times. “Hear it pop?” he asked. “It’s tensing up. I could use some jokes myself. You know, loosen up.”

  “What else did your man in Bombay fax?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He pummeled lemon pulp with the back of his teaspoon. “That you want me to give the green light to Rajeev? He won’t come cheap.”

  What choice does an orphan have? Ignorance is no choice.

  “You want to sleep on it, and call me tomorrow?”

  “Get me what you can find, Fred.”

  “I’ll get you what there is to be found, period.” He stood, a tall man with a tortured face. The top of his bald head glowed in the diner’s silver-blue light. That’s the way a fed’s head must look to Loco Larry. “I’m the goddamn best there is.” He checked his watch. “What you do with the stuff, I don’t need to know. Goodnight.”

  “What time’s it in Bombay?” I asked Fred’s long-waisted back.

  “Thirteen and a half hours into tomorrow. Goodnight.”

  Leatherpants on the bar stool said something that sounded dirty. He was looking at me, but speaking in loud Vietnamese to the waiter, who’d vanished into a storeroom for my cola. Putting together the two and two of my drama with Fred and getting it wrong, I assumed.

  I took two dollar bills out of my wallet for Fred’s hot water with lemon wedge, but didn’t leave the diner with him.

  The waiter came back with my Pepsi in a glass.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I said.

  “You can’t change your mind now,” the waiter said. “Too late. You ordered a Pepsi. I brought you a Pepsi. Drink or no drink it, that’s your problem.”

  I started to walk out of the waiter’s arm range. The waiter made a halfhearted show of blocking my path with his mop. Leatherpants slid off the stool and gave his duffel bag a quick, vicious kick. The duffel caught me in the left ankle before I could get to the door. My ankle felt as if it’d been clubbed, but I wasn’t about to give Leatherpants the satisfaction of a howl or yelp. I stepped over the duffel bag, and hissed, “The INS is on its way, mister.”

  The man on the stool hooted. “And fuck you too, doll!”

  “Hey!” I heard the waiter’s voice behind me. “Hey, you owe for Pepsi!” But he chose not to chase me. The wet mop was still going swish-swish and the man on the stool was still laughing when I left the diner.

  The other day a man driving home from work on I-80 was shot by a sniper near Davis. The man usually stopped for a beer, but that day his son was pitching Little League, and nothing, he’d promised, would keep him away. He was the third red Honda Civic with bumper stickers to pass under the bridge between five and five twenty-five, fulfilling all five preconditio
ns set by his anonymous executioner for moral target practice.

  The other night in Oakland, the proud owner of an Asian-run market closed early for his daughter’s wedding. While celebratory firecrackers were being set off in Orinda, an elderly neighborhood woman was knocking on the store’s shuttered door looking for her usual small bag of scented kitty litter. The woman could have waited—the cat didn’t care—but she loved her cat Melba, named after an aunt, and so she embarked on a trek to the supermarket three long blocks away. She stepped off the curb without looking and was run over by a thirteen-year-old who’d stolen the car from in front of a 7-Eleven where the car’s owner was counting out enough change to pay for a Snickers bar and a quart of skim milk.

  The other week a refugee, just arrived in San Jose from Banja Luka by way of camps and detention centers, was stepping out of the third-floor offices of a relief organization with his care package of groceries, old clothes and used blankets when a shoot-out erupted between two just-formed girl gangs, the Pretenders and the Prissies, in the hallway, and a shot from a. 30-gauge Chinese-made pistol ricocheted off the elevator into his skull.

  The other month two high school dropouts from Stockton, hired for three grand by a cheated-upon wife to do a beat-to-a-pulp job on her pharmacist husband, were driving north on I-5 towards the drugstore when a highway patrolman stopped them for seat-belt and open-container violations. The pharmacist’s still dispensing pills and trying to work things out with his wife.

  We don’t paint the lines on our palms, says Madame Kezarina aka Linda Szymborska-Wakamatsu. My take is different. Convergence is coincidence.

  A daughter bumps into her runaway mother, what coincidence could be more natural?

  All the same, I call Fred Pointer at his office. He’s out of town, his tape tells the caller, but the caller may leave a brief message. “Give it to me fast, Fred,” I whisper into the tape, “and fuck the cost!”

  I first encountered Ham’s old flame Jess in an upscale clothing store on Fillmore near Sacramento. Ham and I’d taken in a matinee at the Clay, and were ambling south towards Japantown for a bowl of soba. By then we’d slept together—“pleasured each other” was his phrase—a total of seven times.

  If Ham’s beat-up Triumph hadn’t been in the garage, if I hadn’t been leery of riding a bus or taxi that afternoon, neither of us would have thought of dashing into Dahlia’s Divan and trying on pricey silk caftans and harem pants and making nice to the designer, Dahlia Metz, who happened to be one of Ham’s many exes. Keeping the history of Ham’s bawdy relationships straight was tough. Dahlia struck me as a wider-bodied Rosearme in stretch-velvet tunic and pants. She’d discovered her talent, she explained, in a women’s prison in Afghanistan way back when everyone who was anyone put in time in Turkish or Afghan prisons. I wasn’t sure if Dahlia’s talent-discovery experience had come before or after her marriage with Ham. She pulled a layered dress off a rack, and held it against my chest. “Perfect,” she said to Ham’s mirrored reflection. “I call it the Seven Veils Dance, so watch out, Ham!”

  I grabbed the wispy end of the outermost layer, and twisted it around a forearm. “Bodacious bodywear for audacious amateurs …” I caught myself before I’d said, And Frankie, now your turn!

  Dahlia experimented on me the many ways of wrapping or draping the Seven Veils dress.

  Ham came through. He didn’t have quite the Fong flair, but for a novice he wasn’t at all bad. He said, “After debauched days and delectable nights, the veiled Virgin of Varanasi whipped out a scimitar and whacked off the ponytailed pate of the perpetrator.”

  “The maharani,” I shouted, “and the maidservant make out on a mustard-hued mattress while pesky pachyderms pirouette …”

  “Meanwhile the cuckolded codger carries his carbine and takes cracks at crocodiles and cranes, and his cantankerous councillors commit … What do they commit, for chrissake?”

  “… commit calumny with calamitous consequences,” I finished for Ham.

  Dahlia pulled the wispiest layer over my head and let it cover my nose and chin.

  “Hold it!” Ham shouted at Dahlia. “Do it again!”

  “What, Ham?”

  “Does she remind you of Hedy Lamarr or what?”

  He crooked his fingers, making a perfect box, and framed my face. Like Frankie, he was seeing possibilities in me at the most inappropriate, passionate moments. I tried to rescue the Fong word game. “Heedful Hedy hides her head in a hole hollowed out of …”

  That’s when a hard-bodied, graying blonde in a tight silk T-shirt and linen shorts barged in on us from behind a rack of caftans. “Let me guess, Ham! A long-lost daughter come to collect support money?” Then she hooked her elbow around Ham’s neck, and dragged his face close enough to hers to kiss. Ham did. Long and hard. I didn’t check for tongue positions before announcing, “Hi, I’m Devi. Ham’s friend.”

  Ham flinched, then let go his hold. The woman didn’t step away from him. I took Ham’s arm in an undaughterly way. The woman flicked blond bangs off her sun-aged face and, smiling, seized Ham’s free arm. “Aren’t you going to introduce an old flame to Devi?” she said.

  I knew not to let her snideness rile me, but I did envy her overmuscled biceps and self-confidence.

  Ham introduced the woman as Jess DuPree, the Jess of media escort agency Leave It to Me, didn’t I remember him calling her that first time I stopped by his office? Wasn’t she the one who always came through for him?

  “ME,” Jess said. “Media Escort, get the pun?” She gestured towards the fitting room. “Benita Farias, the mystery writer. Needs a softer look. TV’s cruel.”

  I didn’t need Madame K’s computerized crystal ball to figure out that Jess and Ham had had—probably still had—a heavy thing going. For a fiftyish woman, Jess could still turn heads. She dismissed me as the newest on Ham’s arm. I knew that because she said to Ham, “I think you’re ready for a red Miata.”

  Over soba and fishcakes in Japantown I got the Jess & Ham Story, Abbreviated Edition. Yes, they’d been lovers in Berkeley. They’d co-protested McNamara’s Vietnam, they’d co-organized a takeover of Sproul Hall, they’d co-lobbed rotting fruit at a motorcade that should have been escorting President YankeeStooge NguyenSlime, and for a while they’d cohabited in a commune. The commune living on Derby Street must have been as far back as in the fall of 1967, because by the spring of 1968 they’d moved on to Napa and coworshiped at Baba Lalji’s feet.

  Baba Lalji?

  Oh, he was a guru guy who set himself up in an ashram before going on to bigger things.

  Like what, Ham? Like sex, drugs and prison time?

  No, more like gunrunning and Cold War politics. Ham filled me in on Hesse and Hinduism and Holymen with funny names like God-ji and Rishi-ji who came over on tourist visas and when the visas expired founded ashrams.

  Ashram?

  Ham could have made a living as a teacher or a preacher. He was most inspired when he was explaining. “Devi,” he said, “think of Baba Lalji’s Napa ashram as a B and B in wine country. Pure air, great meditating, tantric fucking, holistic healing, the works, and all of it gratis!” He said he’d lost track of Jess after her abortion.

  “Love and abortion in a Napa B and B?”

  Ham ignored the dig. “Think Vietnam, Devi. Think big Uncle Sam fucking over bandy-legged little VCs. Think McNamara fucking over bennied-out grunts. Rent the Apocalypse Now video if you can’t think. You made your life one continuous flying fuck or you didn’t survive the times.”

  “Jess had an abortion?” I was thinking, in spite of everything, I was glad Bio-Mom hadn’t.

  Ham changed the subject. “You’re a cheap date,” he said. “That must be why I’ve fallen for you. The one woman who keeps me solvent.” He pulled a fistful of crumpled twenties out of a pants pocket and paid for our fishcakes and noodles with two bills and waited for change. “Got to be back at ShoeString right away, a call’s coming in from Bangkok,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride home.�
�

  “I’m not going home.” That part was true. “I’m meeting a friend.”

  “I’ll drop you where you need to be. No trouble.”

  “I don’t mind taking MUNI.”

  “If you don’t want the person you’re meeting to run into me, say so.” He grabbed my wrist, and twisted it, but not hard enough to hurt. “Be straight with me, hon. Otherwise there’s no relationship.”

  Relationship sounded so dated. “It’s nobody you’d be interested in, Ham.”

  “Let me be the judge.”

  “It’s nobody you’d want to meet. This guy’s weird, really weird. He lives in my building. Loco Larry.” My plan was to barge into the Vulture office and check out the latest fax.

  “Loco as in ‘crazy’?”

  “Hates immigrants, hates feds. Hangs an I ‘HEART’ MY ARSENAL on his door.”

  “Is that the guy in army surplus on your stoop?”

  “Not surplus. He’s shown off knife slits and old blood.”

  “Poor fucker! Guys like him had their brains fried.”

  “Was it your baby? Did you love Jess, Ham?”

  “What baby?”

  “The abortion. You said something about an abortion …” Abortion, abandonment, adoption: all options in Bio-Mom’s era had begun with the letter a.

  The waitress came back with Ham’s change, but didn’t stick around for the tip.

  “You mean the fetus?” He made expense account notes on the back of the receipt. “I’m no chauvinist, that’s too easy. You can’t be that lazy.”

  Embarrassed, I backed off. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  I showed my gratitude by asking for a new favor. Ham liked being asked, so we were trading favors. “Get me together with Jess? It’ll bring me one step closer to your Berkeley times.”

  “Just be yourself and she’ll come to you,” he said. But he looked pleased. “How’s Thursday night? Vito’s, after nine.” He made a note of it on the restaurant receipt.