Leave It to Me

by Bharati Mukherjee

  People at the gate—the limo drivers with Velcro signboards, escorts from hotels, businesses and universities—all took a second glance. You’re sure you’re not mine? He was good-looking, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t his clothes either: denim shirt, bone-and-turquoise beads, turquoise belt buckle, blue antelope-skin boots. No, it had to do with his bearing. He stood, he strode, he scanned, did all the things we do except for the autographing, but with the solipsism, there’s just no other word for it, of people out of People magazine. A celebrity is. The infamous have to strut to get noticed, and the evil slink away so they won’t be noticed. Swann didn’t care one way or another. He didn’t have to. He was the center of his universe.

  I held up my promo copy of The Palest Poison high above the heads of his groupies. “Hi,” I shouted, “I’m Devi Dee. How was the flight?”

  He pen-wielded his way to me. The pen was a top-of-the-line Mont Blanc. “You want me to write in your name, Miss Gorgeous Smile? I’m in a fab mood, take advantage of me.”

  “Devi from Leave It to Me.” I pulled his three-page itinerary from inside my promo copy.

  “Where’s Jess? She always meets me. What’s this, I don’t rate her anymore?”

  When I angled for the agency job, it was just so I could bloodhound Bio-Mom. Expanding my knowledge of human psychology was a bonus. “You’ll have to take that up with her,” I said. “Meanwhile, I thought we could first drive to your hotel, then have a bite if you’re hungry, stop by some bookstores if you’re not too tired or do whatever else you’d rather do before your print interviews this afternoon—all the TV stuff’s tomorrow, as you know from the itinerary—and then leave around six for the bookstore in Marin. Only if all this sounds okay to you, of course.” I held my hand out for his laptop in its Targus case. The laptop was lighter than the other two carry-ons. “I should have thought of having a cart handy. Sorry.”

  Swann thrust his garment bag at me instead. “Nobody but moi touches my moody machine.” Then he turned silky on me. “I’ll need a little sewing and pressing done right away. When’s the first interview? I don’t think there’s enough time for housekeeping to take care of it. Would you mind? And did you book Hideo-san for my shiatsu?”

  I left Stark Swann meditating in the lotus position on the floor of his suite at the Stanford Court. The lotus position was his fail-safe cure for jet lag. To me, he looked just like another cowboy with hemorrhoids. While he meditated, I ordered flowers to be delivered to the suite in Jess’s name and forged a personal note, made the appointment with the masseur named Hideo, dashed down to where the Corolla was valet parked for the emergency kit that included needle, thread and buttons, steamed wrinkles out of his jacket and my skirt, checked in for changes in itinerary, confirmed the afternoon’s print interview and still had time left to flirt with Ham over a double espresso.

  “Oh, boy!” Ham laughed. “Why am I thinking All About Eve all of a sudden? If I were Jess, I’d be scared.”

  He read me wrong. I didn’t want to be read at all. “If I screw up in the job, I’d be letting you down. Jess hired me because of you.” Oh, I was good.

  Ham was satisfied; why burden him with truth? Jess was a stand-in, nothing more. He made me wanton. Only this time, sitting in a coffeehouse in North Beach, I heard her words as a plea. It wasn’t my fault, he was a natural force, a calamity, an act of God. A typhoon had touched down, blasted the body and flattened the soul. I got what I needed from the memory. Some are born wanton; others are born weak and made wanton. I am wanton. I kissed Ham lightly on the lips. Poor Ham.

  The journalist from Bay Style/Bay View was a punctual woman in pastels. I ordered a macrobiotic salad and Evian for Starkie Boy, black coffee for her, nothing for me from room service, then shrunk into myself on the love seat to recoup.

  The journalist had a mean streak. As her first question, she asked, “Why do you write these romances? Just for the money?”

  “Excuse me?” The romance writer didn’t have an answer ready, but I don’t think it a ME’s job to come to his rescue.

  “Mind you, I’m not against you making money.” The journalist tapped her tape recorder. It was working. “Not if you give some of it away. I was in the Peace Corps way back when Americans cared about the world. You want to know where I was? In Brazil. No Carnival where I was. You see these hands? Kids starved to death in them.” She held up her hands.

  They were moisturized and manicured. I’d never have connected those hands with Brazilian street kids. You never know. Things are out there, like land mines. Even in an expensive suite at a hotel like the Stanford Court.

  Starkie Boy surprised me. “You didn’t have to go to Brazil.” His voice was sad, soft, forgiving. He strode across the room on those splendid antelope-skin boots. “You should have come to the Swann shack instead.” He painted a central Florida childhood of hunger and beatings. His father must have been a nasty drunk. Some days he was so starved he’d gorged himself on live bait, knowing he’d be belted for not bringing a catch home. The romances he wrote as a tribute to his mother, to all the brave women like her who deserved better, who deserved the happy, fulfilled lives he gave his heroines. Hacks wrote for fat advances. He wrote to make reparations for what men did to women.

  I’d read his promo kit. He hadn’t made up the Florida childhood. He’d grown up in Stark. And he’d gone back to Florida—to Gainesville and Orlando—for a couple of visiting-writer stints. There was nothing about abusive dads and worm diets in the publicity material, nothing about damage and despair. I warmed to him, in spite of his beads and his spray-stiffened coiffure. I saw the journalist out the door with a crisp “And when will it appear in Bay Style/Bay View?”

  Swann shouldn’t have soured these feelings. I closed the door, and he said, “Frustrated lez bitch! She needs a hot-beef injection. If she hadn’t been a dawg, I’d have administered it, too.”

  Zip it up, Starkie Boy!

  That night in a packed bookstore in Marin, Stark Swann read from the first chapter of his new novel. On the microphone, his voice took on a low-decibel roughness and sincerity. It made you picture red barns, cornfields, grazing Herefords. I saw the weathered planks as he read, felt splinters sting a naked toe. Oh, Clint Eastwood, you should have been there. To the audience, you already were. I forced myself to stop listening, and count heads in that crowded store. The head count was part of a ME’s job. The bookstore would report on the number of units sold.

  Sometimes, like when Fate’s croupier fixes the throw, and the suety slob in the white suit pockets your dice, and Lawman Lance weighs in with low blows, and the burned-out bimbo you saved from rape runs off with the finicky florist from Sacramento, there’s only one way to go: just suck it in and spur your tired mare on on the hot, dusty, cruel trail home, ’cos there’s a sweet, sad-eyed woman waitin’ for you by the kitchen stove, a loving woman who knows you and cares for you, a real woman who understands you so well she doesn’t shackle your ankles to the bedpost but gives her blissful womanhood to you of her own accord and for as long as you need and want her to, and who senses when to step aside, and lets you go without tears, and weeps only after the dust’s blown …

  That’s when I stopped the head count. Swann groupies writhed in their seats. I was witnessing a feeding frenzy. I was hearing a refrain: He made me wanton. I understood the apparition Jess’d confessed to at the Middle Grounds. A romance writer, like Starkie Boy, had inspired Jess’s tropical fantasy about a sweaty night of love with an alien god. Emily Dickinson had been an excuse. Bio-Mom had scripted her life—and mine—on a romance novel off a rack. I hated Starkie Boy for not telling the whole tale, the part about what happens after the dust clears, and the child is strangled. I need the world to connect Starkie Boy with vultures tearing flesh off a corpse’s bruised throat.

  My voice; I suddenly understood, the sexy nun’s voice, graveled by scar tissue.

  That’s why I agreed to the glass of wine in his room. He said, “Come in for a drink? Help me unwi
nd? I hate hotels, they’re so sterile.” It didn’t qualify as a hitting-on-me situation. Let’s just say he facilitated what I planned to do.

  I accepted the invitation. I went with him to the bar and sipped a Chardonnay because I wanted to. Then I rode the elevator to his floor, led the way into his suite, let him pour minibar brandy into two snifters, let him undress me before I undressed him. That night, nobody made me do anything I didn’t want to do. I slow-paraded my nakedness and watched him twitch and harden. Enthrallment is an exquisite instrument of pain. When it comes to enthralling, I am a natural. Which was why he didn’t see me shake too much Mandrax (thanks, Larry!) into his snifter, didn’t taste it on his greedy tongue, and after a while didn’t feel me pleasure him. And just before he passed out, I had him roll over and lie on his stomach, and when he was out so cold he wouldn’t feel the tickle of the K-bar knifepoint (thanks again, Larry!), I nicked an endearment on his left buttock: cw. My homage to my neighborhood graffitiste, Cee-Double-You. Because that’s what the women who give of their blissful selves of their own accord and for as long as you want them to, the real women, do.

  The night I was practicing K-bar calligraphy on Starkie Boy, Fred Pointer was jogging to his death. I imagine connections everywhere; more of them are nooses than bridges.

  Fred’s life changed after our last meeting at Steep Steps. He became accident-prone, pulled a pectoral on a bench press, sprained his ankle on a golf swing, burned his hand on the car radiator. Things. There are things out there waiting to zap you. Unguardedness may prove fatal. In Fred’s case it did. A woman walking her black Lab in Land’s End by the Sutro Baths found a badly charred body under a cypress tree. Like Rajeev Raj, like Madame Kezarina, I find signs all around me. The papers called it an accident, but Fred committed suttee. Fred’s despair burned as brightly as a funeral pyre.

  Fred made better than the obit page in the local papers. The way he died made him news. Accident or Homicide? Two national tabloids picked up the death. I read Bay Area Private Eye Slain by Viet Gang of San Jose at Wal-greens, and San Francisco Gumshoe Molested by Aliens from Outer Space at Safeway.

  The coroner’s report was later leaked to the press by a lab assistant with a cash-flow problem. Fred’s blood showed an alcohol level of. 072 and the presence of an unidentified vegetal poison that was being sent outside the United States for more tests.

  Why do I dream of Fred’s corpse instead of Fred the way he was at Vito’s or Steep Steps or the Boss Bean? The corpse floats in the shallow pool of rainwater in the sad ruins. No face, a thing: bloated, naked, rock-scraped.

  Through Fred’s death, I learned something new about Berkeley. Not about Berkeley the scuzzy city north of Oakland in the East Bay, menaced by fault lines every which way—a West Coast Troy or Rensselaer, if you like, though with many more sari shops and satay houses; and with many, many more panhandlers, street vendors, pistol-whippers, performance artists and prophets in drag; with fancier mansions in fire-prone hills and, in the lower flats, tackier adobe holding pens—but about the space that Ham and his friends inhabited.

  Berkeley, I began to understand at the wake Ham held for Fred on Last Chance, was a kind of fraternity, a marine unit, all-for-one, one-for-all, teammates-for-life bonding experience, it was the you-had-to-have-been-there, you-had-to-have-seen-it place, something I was too young for, too late for, and would never appreciate. It was the only place in America where it could be taken for granted that everyone over thirty, say, had slept with everyone else over thirty. But that Berkeley was no more, gone the way people back east talked of old Manhattan. That Berkeley was as much a time as a site: it was a time of dark possibility, discovery and forgiveness.

  Ham was Mr. Berkeley, that Berkeley. He was its center. And because of his Berkeley training, he got along with street people like the Stoop Man and the Duvet Man and Devi the Waif, and still lived on a houseboat in Sausalito and picked up women half his age. Because he was Berkeley, he took people in, gave panhandlers five-dollar bills, served AIDS lunches, boycotted more kinds of food than I’d ever eaten. He, Jess and Fred had marched for peace, for civil rights, for women, gays, migrants, had gone to jail, signed petitions, run for city councils, run radical campaigns. And now they also drove big cars, lived large lives, flew business class, ate at the best restaurants, drank the best wines, took massages, ski trips, private cruises. They climbed together, deep-sea dove and white-water rafted together. It was their community-hedonist thing. Food, revolution, sex, art, ecology, drugs, music, books, writers, films. Epicures, sensualists. They cozied with movie stars, politicians, best-selling writers under fatwa, but it wasn’t a big deal to them. Berkeley might be the Harvard of the West Coast, but it didn’t empower them to assume arrogance. They kept a low profile. Harvard taught its graduates that the rest of the world was inept and waiting for them to take over; Berkeley taught that the world was a cool place and shouldn’t be disturbed.

  Ham took charge and produced the wake as a little folk, a little punk, a little gospel-rock catharsis extravaganza. The music: Peter, Paul and Mary; Pete Seeger. The flowers: Lilies in mourners’ hair. Cremation: Blessed and switched on by a Buddhist priest named Steve Lama. Scattering of ashes: After a two-hour hike and off a Point Reyes promontory.

  The powdered corpse played with seals and sea lions.

  Vietnam wasn’t a war; it was a divide. On one side, the self-involved idealists; on the other, we the napalm-scarred kids. In between, a country that elected leaders, who got boys like Larry to pull the triggers.

  After the hike, the select few, among them the ex-lover who’d shaved her head—Ham kept A and B lists—ended up on his houseboat in Sausalito. The way they grieved wasn’t familiar. Where I wept, got drunk and started songs I didn’t know the words to, they hugged, they smoked, they groped, they melted into an intimacy that was physical. One image that stays with me from that evening: the Hairless Hat-Wearer, wearing the wispy dress I’d clowned in in Dahlia’s shop the first time I’d run into Jess, danced the Seven Veils in the galley kitchen, and when she finished, she grabbed a pasta-serving platter and asked Ham to deliver her his head. Ham couldn’t console the hatless woman just then, because he was consoling Jess. I was sober enough not to confuse hugs and pats with grabs and gropes. The soft scrape of lips, the shucking off of loafers, the peeling off of sticky shirts: I heard the sweet, low moans of invitation and acceptance.

  I didn’t exist. I might as well have never existed. That snake-thing had been a Dickinson wanna-be’s fantasy.

  Ham pushed open the door to the lavatory, guided Jess in, then kicked the door to shut it behind them. The door didn’t swing back all the way. I could have closed it; I should have walked away. I didn’t have to watch my mother and my lover make love in the cramped loo of a houseboat in Marin. I saw her legs straight out, a flash of Ham’s blue Jockeys. Mother Steals Daughter’s Boyfriend belongs on The Jenny Jones Show.

  I stayed rooted; I stared; I envied.

  This has to be serenity.

  Jess and Ham inhabited space where all actions were guiltless, all feelings natural.

  And when I couldn’t stand watching my lover and my mother go at it any longer, I fuzz-busted all the way from Sausalito to Beulah Street, stole a parking space from a tourist’s Beamer, rushed to Loco Larry’s apartment.

  “What freaked you out, doll?” His bulked-up torso blocked the I MY ARSENAL sign on the opened door. He had a beer in his hand. Empties lined up along the sides of the futon. Drunk enough to hope his luck had changed. “A beer? Grass? Nookie?”

  “I’m not a couch potato. The evening deserves better.”

  He took it as we’ll-fuck-later. “No problema, señorita.” He grinned. “No fucking problema. We’ll get in the Larry-mobile and drive around a bit.” He checked the pockets of his fatigues for the keys to his truck.

  The keys had to be in the left pocket of the windbreaker hanging from a peg just inside the front door—I could make out a lumpy sag that looked car-keys size—bu
t hanging with Larry meant accommodating the macho locked inside the loco.

  “If you’re in the mood, let’s go do some serious gardening.” He clicked his crepe-soled heels and let me in. “Let’s fucking garden till we drop.”

  I hadn’t figured Larry as a green thumb. There were no potted plants on his windowsills, not even marijuana under artificial lighting in his closet.

  He stripped off the fatigues he had on, down to his plaid boxer shorts, no explanations, then pulled on fatigues exactly like the ones he’d just taken off. “Help yourself to a beer,” he ordered. He opened the apartment door, and swaggered off to the bathroom in the hall. I followed, because he didn’t say no. The top shelf of the bathroom cabinet held the greasepaint he was looking for. I watched him daub on battle-ready black.

  “Great gardener look,” I joked.

  We ambled back to his apartment. One of the Somali kids stuck his head in the open door. “Scoot!” Larry barked, but he tossed the kid a half-used-up roll of Certs. When we were finally ready for the road, he had on a camouflage helmet and jackboots. Any guy who’d poop-scooped shredded buddy-flesh in paddy fields on the other side of the moon was entitled. Larry looked wired; I felt it.

  “The bulbs for planting are in the truck.” He grinned. “When apocalypse hits, we dig up what we sowed. That’s the plan.”

  Whatever the plan, I didn’t get it. “Sweets, put yourself in Robinson Crusoe’s shoes.”

  “Crusoe lost his shoes when his ship went down.”

  Larry tried again, a good sport. “What’s the one must-have item on a desert island?”

  “A sun-powered TV?”

  He thumped my arm, buddy fashion. “An arsenal in weatherproof storage underground.” He pulled a dolly out of a cluttered corner of the kitchen alcove, and started to pile up crates, canisters, cache tubes. “Yours truly’s partial to AK-47S and Colt AR15HBARS.”