Leave It to Me

by Bharati Mukherjee

  Late that exhilarating afternoon, I dialed her number. “Jess, tell me what I can do.”

  “You’ve done enough,” she snapped. “You show up and three friends are dead! ‘Dying! Dying in the night! / Won’t somebody bring in the light / So I can see which way to go / Into the everlasting snow?’ ”

  One of Emily’s, I assumed. When I made the call, I hadn’t been thinking Suicide Hot Line.

  “You don’t get it, Devi. I loved Fred.”

  “I’m coming over, Jess. Don’t do anything stupid before I get there.”

  “Someone has me in his crosshairs,” she said. Her voice was mean and guarded this time. “Call him off, Devi.”

  “I would if I could, Jess. I want to.”

  “I’ve still got friends, you know. I’ll be staying at Ham’s, Fred expected it could happen, he was in the business, he said one day he’d turn over the wrong rock … but Beth’s and Sandy’s murders, I can’t get over …”

  So that was the gloomy woman’s name. Sandy. Death finally demystified her.

  “It’s the end of something. We never expected to die.”

  I waited for more. It wasn’t jealousy. A tsunami of envy rushed me forward. Envy of whatever made possible Jess’s eternity of makeovers.

  “Ham and I’ve been friends a long time, you know,” she finished. And when I still didn’t absolve her, she added, “Over twenty years. We even brought up them word.”

  I know about the abortion. You didn’t want a daughter.

  “Can you picture me in the burbs? Orinda?” She laughed.

  I sensed her uneasiness. The laugh sputtered into a smoker’s hacking cough.

  “You’ve started smoking, Jess?”

  “No. I’ve gone back.”

  I know about your leaps off the Bay Bridge, Jess. I said, “That won’t bring Fred back.”

  “No.” She must not have covered the mouthpiece as she turned her head away and coughed again. “But it’ll drive the ghost away.”

  “Did you say ghost, Jess?” I couldn’t see Jess barefoot and pregnant in a Marin kitchen, but I could picture Fred’s ghost fluttering above our heads at his own wake.

  “The sins of my youth have come back to haunt me big time,” she said.

  I know about the blackmailer; Jess. “You are the fox, my love for you the bloodhound.” Fred knew, too; now Fred’s dead.

  “Devi, there actually is one favor you could do for me.”

  “I was serious when I said I wanted to help.”

  “Take over my authors for the rest of the week?” The boss begging her employee to work overtime, while she hits on the employee’s lover, without overtime pay.

  Why should I mind? We go back a long way, Jess and I, in the rejection business. I’ve bench-pressed disappointment. “No problema,” I assured her. “Just leave it to me.”

  I hung up on Jess, and rode the 43 Masonic to Clay Street. Then I strolled around the block that the Leave It to Me office was on. Five times I circled that block. Five times felt reasonable, downright biblical, because I was following Loco Larry and Beth Hendon, holding hands, laughing and walking just ahead of me. Whatever animosity there had been between them that night in Lafayette, they’d made up. No misunderstanding that couldn’t be straightened out, Beth. No problema that can’t be solved, Larry. In that generous mood, I ceased my pacing.

  The “nobody’s in right now to take your call …” tape was rolling as I entered the agency office. Then a cheery male voice came on. “You can flee, but you can’t hide, ma chère. See you in Sausalito. À bientôt!”

  Loco Larry’d prepared me for just this. Things were out there, he’d warned, ordinary things, harmless everyday things, but they were going to get me. They were stalking and baiting me. I didn’t have Larry’s night-vision implants, but I was starting to sense them, smell them, feel their damp heavy breath on my skin.

  The voice on the answering machine left me alone. I updated the itineraries of Jess’s authors for the week—she had a Random House novelist, a retired politician with a Simon & Schuster memoir and a New Age nutritionist with a MindWorks Press best-seller—faxed off the changes to the publicists, gave up the idea of a decaf and avocado-and-sprouts sandwich at Middle Grounds for another walk around the block, heard a Chihuahua bark insults at me and disclosed a phantom handgun to scare it, watched a tree weep leaves, then locked the office door against more things.

  Two more messages from Jess’s tormentor were on the tape. “You put me through hell, but I forgive you.” And “Don’t call me, I’ll call you. That’s a promise, ma chère.”

  I was about to call Jess when I remembered that she was with Ham in Sausalito, probably bunked down and in a consoling mode. The second-last time I was on Ham’s houseboat, I made a baked-goat-cheese salad, Ham uncorked a bottle of Merlot, and for dessert we invented pleasures that women in their fifties, even buff ones like Jess, might find uncomfortable. Those good times hadn’t receded far enough. I put the phone back on its cradle and speed-read two hundred and thirty-one pages of the Random House novel. If I got it right, terrorists from outer space kidnap the first lady and plan to clone her in the millions. When I got home to Beulah Street, past Stoop Man and the others, outer space didn’t feel all that far away.

  That night the Somali family invited me for dinner. It was more feast than dinner, and they didn’t exactly invite me, I just hung around the microwave with my Weight Watcher’s cabbage rolls in the kitchen we shared, and made an inspired monologue on the multicultural riches of San Francisco while the youngest of the Somali women stewed goat meat in sneezy-hot spices, then asked me to reach for a heavy platter on the top shelf to serve the bread topped with stew. They ate with their fingers, out of that one dish. Family bonding over a communal platter at the kitchen table. Take heart, battered crusaders for family values!

  I let Emad—that was the med student’s name—and his family get a decent start on the food, then joined in, tearing off bits of the soft, lacy, crepe-flat bread. Dunk in stew and chew. It was an act of good-neighborliness.

  The family observed its own strict version of table manners. The man talked; the women and children listened. Everybody scarfed, fingers darting from platter to jaw with the quick daintiness of lizards’ tongues. I kept pace with Emad’s mother, and only half listened to Emad pontificate on newsworthy national events. His take on the city, the country, the world, came from some alternative information bank. In his world, the aliens had already landed and their kids were going to college. America’s whole energy, its entire national military and economic output, was directed like a laser against Somalia for the killing of American marines. The press attacks on pious medical practitioners and their adolescent female patients were the clearest evidence. Just by positioning himself at the head of the dinette table, Emad had metamorphosed from the shy, smiling immigrant who avoided me in the hallway into the spellbinding oracle of Western civilization’s end.

  I had my own quarrels about the way that love and wealth were distributed in my immediate orbit, but this Somalian was so way off base that I couldn’t dismiss it as comic relief from my agony over what my mother might be doing with Ham in Ham’s bathroom or bed.

  “For those without faith,” Emad pronounced, in English so I wouldn’t feel left out, “the end is now.” His children stared at my painted-on tattoos. The women smiled at me, and demonstrated elegant finger-licking methods to keep the yellow-brown gravy from dripping onto the table. Someone down the hall was playing Buzz Cocks, very loud. I tried to figure out who, because I didn’t want to have to listen to Emad keep shouting, “For you Westerners, it is code blue!” He had no right to target me for his apocalyptic harangue. “Before we’ve finished our supper,” Emad went on, “the orderlies of the Holy War will be wheeling the West’s corpse out of ICU!” He turned to the children. “What is ICU? Please define for our American guest.”

  Quiz and catechism.

  The older of the two kids spoke for the first time at the table. �
�ICU equals ‘Intensive Care Unit.’ It is a place where the infidel die. The faithful are saved so that they can do good.”

  Father knows best.

  “The infidel will pay!” Emad pledged. “You know what the Immigration people did to my wife at Heathrow? They took her away. They dragged her off to a room and they strip-searched her. They shoved their filthy fingers into my wife, my wife …”

  I glanced at the women. They kept their heads lowered. I tasted shame as well as goat meat in the stew.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. I was. But I could have said, I envy you, I envy the clarity of your hate. That, too, would have been true. I might’ve been questioned rudely, but not strip-searched, at Heathrow.

  My apology cut short Emad’s demagoguery. “How you like the food?” he asked me. Norman Rockwell’s ghost floated in through a closed, grimy window. An immigrant family in an American kitchen sharing its bounty with a guest who has less than they do. Thanksgiving on the Lower Haight. “My wife,” he beamed at the young woman whom I’d watched stirring and stewing, “she is a very good cook, yes?”

  “I thought she was your sister,” I countered.

  “Wife number one,” Emad bragged. The cook smiled at me from across the table.

  I smiled back. “Three stars, I’m a Guide Michelin scout.”

  Emad should have left the introductions at that. But he was in a good mood, maybe even a patriotic mood. “Wife number two,” he continued, pointing to the second-youngest woman. “She is the children’s mother.”

  Two wives? A bigamist on Beulah? Maybe the guests on shock shows on TV were more in touch with American reality than Ham and Jess were. I was living a tabloid life.

  Emad gestured at the women I’d assumed were his mother and aunt. “Number three and number four.” He counted off four on the notches of his fingers. “My grandfather could afford three, my father only two. I work harder, I earn dollars, I’m a family man.”

  He seemed to be eyeing me. I excused myself, holding my greasy hand high.

  We were all tourists from outer space, passing through Earth. I locked myself in my room, changed into the T-shirt I wore to bed, stuck one of Larry’s handguns under my pillow and finished the Random House novel.

  Before it burned down last week, on Ellis between Larkin and Hyde in the Tenderloin, there was a bar with a green and yellow neon sign that read SNOW WHITE, ALL GLASSES GUARANTEED STERILIZED. That’s where I ended up with Pete Cuvo, the Random House author, the night he read at Borders in Union Square. We started out with a late dinner at Moose’s, browsed awhile at City Lights Bookstore, where Cuvo thrillers were prominently displayed, stopped for brandy-laced coffees at Tosca’s but didn’t run into Ham and Jess as I’d both hoped for and dreaded, watched transvestites shimmy at Motherlode, out-Diana Rossed with my Baby Love at the Mint and then went on to Snow White because around 2:00 a.m. Pete remembered his ex-marine buddy, Chuck aka Stanko; who’d gone through a couple of mail-order marriages before finding happiness as a roving bouncer in the Tenderloin. Chuck’s last-known job, Pete thought, had been at a Vietnamese bar with a Disney name.

  A good media escort is one who thinks fast on her feet. I looked for possibles in the Yellow Pages. Clarabell. Donald. Mickey. Minnie. Mother Goose. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. We took my tired Corolla to a Snow White I found on Ellis, and bingo! there was Pete’s former buddy from his marine days, exercising unnecessary roughness on a bounced patron. Face pinned to the sidewalk by Chuck’s boot, the drunk made invisible snow angels. Pete and I stepped over flailing arms and legs.

  “Don’t kill him, Stanko. Where’s the fun in killing a neighborhood fuckface?”

  Chuck took his boot off the pulpy, bleeding face. “Holy shit! Crazee Cuvo? Mad Dog of Moravia Cuvo? You Saved My Ass Cuvo? Tell me you ain’t a ghost!”

  Pete responded with a banshee shriek and howl.

  Chuck turned his attention on me next. “Who’s the beaut?” He poked me in the arm as he asked the question, putting me through his version of a ghost-check. Strip-search, Tenderloin style, lingering hands, probing fingers. I karate chopped Chuck. Flash had eliminated a border guard with one chop in The Sadist of San Diego. Flash’s chop had broken the sadist’s neck. I hurt my palm on Stanko’s chest.

  Some nights destiny puts up detour signs. Such nights all you can hope is that when the road’s been repaved, it’ll take you where you have to go faster, smoother, safer. I resigned myself to a long night of macho anecdotes. Pete and Stanko would go head to head burning hooches, hunting water buffalo with M-16s, startling Charlie out of his cover and upping the pussycount, which was what they’d fought the war for. For me detours were times to meditate. On bitter Emad, on Loco Larry, on things. Soon, very soon, a grand act of propitiation would be called for. I drank hot water with lemon, and stayed wired for clues.

  In place of clues, Larry appeared. I stuck my finger in Larry’s chest; my finger went through. He slid into the cramped, empty space between my bar stool and Pete’s, and asked me, “Et tu?” And when I told him that I had to, he said, “You was my buddy,” then he rocked my elbow into Pete’s, knocking Pete’s glass off the counter to the floor. Jack Daniel’s splashed my dress. The stain unfurled like a flag as I squirmed off my stool. “Beat it, Larry!” I screamed. But he stalked me into the ladies’ room, he forced me down into a crouch—Charlie as POW in an interrogation room—placed my chin on the clammy rim of the toilet bowl, stuck a finger deep, deeper, still deeper, into my throat and kept his finger there until I retched blood, guilt and shame all over the floor.

  According to Jess’s agency rules, a ME doesn’t run out on her author. The night at Snow White, I broke Jess’s rule. I left the bar by a back exit. I didn’t bother with the courtesies of “Goodnight” and “Would you like a ride back to the hotel?” I didn’t give a damn that my author was falling-down drunk and mugging-prone by that time. “No problema,” Larry counseled, “you got plenty problema of your own.” He stalked me safely to my apartment door.

  “Look, let’s be honest, Devi,” Jess said on the phone to me at the agency office. “It isn’t working out.”

  “I’ll have to call you back, I’m on the line with Santa Monica about the Slater tour. Are you at home?”

  “No. Devi, put Santa Monica on hold. This is urgent. It’s eating me up. I can’t handle what you must think of me. I hate not being straight with people. We didn’t plan it this way. Neither of us did. I don’t know how seriously involved you were with Ham. I mean, we need desperately to talk about the situation.”

  “Are you at Ham’s?”

  “It just happened, there’s no explaining it or apologizing for it. I mean, I’m not asking you to leave or anything. It just seems so awkward …”

  “I’ll have to call you back, Jess, the Slater development sounds messy.”

  “You’re not listening, Devi.”

  “You feel guilty, deal with it. Ciao!”

  The cyber-politician, Cindah Slater, didn’t get to promote her memoir, I Keep Going Home, in San Francisco. She was too unpopular as a spokesperson to ever be elected to any one post, in any one city. She’d found her niche by moving beyond any issue. “It’s not drugs, it’s dealing with the effects of drugs,” she’d say. Or “We live in a postrace society,” or “I don’t give a rat’s ass about Medicare and balanced budgets. I’m looking to the real balance in this country …” She was accustomed to cheers, and when the cheers weren’t loud enough for her as-told-to memoir in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Iowa City … she had her breakdown; she slashed her wrist in a hotel bathtub. The media stayed with the breakdown-and-suicide-attempt story. A television “newsmagazine” interviewed the limo driver who had chauffeured her the evening of the Breakdown. The limo driver was a middle-aged man, with a middleweight fighter’s broken face and a spreading belly tucked into dark suit pants. He said, “You hire a limo, you get a bar, you get a TV, a cell phone, a fax machine, but no tissues to weep into. When you arrive at the limo sta
ge, tears is verboten. So, I offered the lady my handkerchief. A personal gesture. She needed it, too, I can tell you.”

  I later saw the limo driver on Ricki Lake and Jenny Jones. He wore Armani suits on both. He talked of his childhood in Romania. “You need to have spent time in hell,” he informed the studio audience, “to really appreciate heaven.”

  Pragmatic advice for all readers of the imaginary syndicated column “Dear Devi.” Use your ingenuity, hustle being at the right place at the right time to turn your two-bit anonymous life into cash-cow celebrity.

  FOR GUILT-STRICKEN IN SAUSALITO: Please expect a personal response to your request.

  The West Coast publicity office of Cindah Slater’s publisher’d been on the line, its fifth call, when Jess was angling for absolution. On the sixth call, the publicity people decided to cancel the rest of the Slater book tour because they couldn’t make the suicide-attempt story work to sell $24. 95 hardcovers. I spent half an office day canceling the memoirist’s Bay Area appointments. “Due to unforeseen developments …”: that was the line with the media, and with managers of bookstores.