by Dianne Emley
An aftershock rumbled through. It started with a gentle nudge, which grew more insistent until the building’s joints creaked and the broken china and crystal tinkled. Iris braced herself against the kitchen counter until it stopped.
“Three point…two, three point three,” she announced.
She wandered to the dining room windows, the only ones that hadn’t broken, and looked out. The buildings on her street had sustained heavy damage in the initial shaker, but one street over, there was hardly any damage at all. Even within Iris’s street, a building that had been hardly touched stood next to one that had been red-tagged. It just happened that way.
The tags were notebook-sized pieces of construction paper, color coded according to the level of damage, affixed by officials who were surveying all the buildings in the city. A green tag meant the building was safe. Yellow meant significant repairs were required. Red meant it was unsafe—damaged beyond repair.
The tags had a psychological effect upon the city’s residents. Green made people feel confident and happy. Yellow was sad but still hopeful. People gaped at red-tagged buildings like one might rubberneck at a traffic fatality—horrified but unable to look away.
Across the street from Iris’s green-tagged building, a butane lantern glowed in a tent set up on a building’s front lawn where some of the residents preferred to sleep, at least until the aftershocks subsided. There had been several the previous night, which had jolted her from an already light sleep. She wondered if this was what it was like to live in a war zone. Misfortune could come crashing down at any moment, rest was fleeting, yet life went on.
She showered, dressed, and drove to the office. She left much earlier than normal, which was okay since traffic had been so goosey with the Ten being down. At the corner, she passed an abandoned, red-tagged condo complex that had shifted off its foundation, the walls tilting precariously to one side. Someone had spray-painted a message across the front: THE FAT LADY HAS SUNG.
Finally arriving downtown, she took the elevator to the twelfth floor. She pulled open the heavy glass doors of the McKinney Alitzer suite and strode across the thick mauve carpet. She was early and the investment counselors’ cubicles were mostly empty. She glanced toward Herb Dexter’s office, as she always did whenever she walked into the sales department. He sat behind his desk, studying a report, his elbows on the desk, his long fingers pressed against each temple.
He looked up just then, the fluorescent light reflecting from his round, tortoiseshell-framed glasses, and somewhat regally called her to his office with a wave of his bony, fragile-looking hand. People unfamiliar with Dexter sometimes made the mistake of assuming that his nerdy appearance implied weakness. But Iris had seen Dexter eat those types for breakfast with cutlery so sharp that it took them a moment to realize their entrails had been severed and presented to them on a fine china plate. It wasn’t a side he revealed often, but then he didn’t need to.
“Iris, you’re here bright and early.”
She stood inside his doorway. “The aftershocks gave me an early wake-up call this morning.”
Dexter knowingly raised his eyebrows. “My wife and I are both eager to load up the moving van and head east. Between the riots and the fires and the earthquakes, not to mention the economy, the immigration issue…”
Iris regarded him with fatigue.
Dexter adjusted his glasses. “Well, I’m sure things will straighten out eventually. I just got off the phone with Garland Hughes. We’re anticipating announcing your promotion first thing next week. I’m delighted that you want to jump into this. It’s a good opportunity for you and an excellent move for the company.”
“I’m pleased as well. Thank you.”
She looked at the replicas of Remington sculptures that cluttered his office. The cowboys on their trusty steeds mastering the frontier created an aura of macho activity that was dichotomous with Dexter’s quiet mental churnings.
“The firm still has some concerns about promoting someone to manager within the same office. But if you feel confident you can handle any fallout from your former peers, we’ll trust your judgment.”
“I’m confident I can.”
“Good. L.A. can use a manager who not only understands this marketplace but this office as well. The manager’s training class starts in New York in three weeks. I’ll be staying on until you finish your training and get your feet wet in your new position.” He stood. “Of course, this is all confidential, although I’m told that rumors about my returning to New York have been circulating.”
“I’ve heard some water-cooler gossip,” she conceded without revealing the source, knowing that Dexter would have the grace not to ask.
“I’d hoped to keep the news between us until I could make a formal announcement, but I guess the slightest hint of change sets tongues to wagging.”
“Change makes people nervous.”
He extended his hand.
When she took it, he grasped her hand more firmly than usual and smiled into her eyes. This was different. She was one of them now. She left his office and virtually bounced across the suite to her own. Warren Gray, Sean Bliss, and Kyle Tucker had arrived and were in their cubicles. Amber was walking in. They had been shooting glances at her while she was in Dexter’s office, trying to catch a snatch of conversation. She unlocked her office door and mulled over what they might be thinking.
“Who cares?” she said aloud.
None of it mattered. The time of trying to encourage their friendship had passed. Now her job was to earn their respect.
She turned on her calculator and busied herself in her favorite time-waster—counting her money. She calculated how much more she’d net after her raise and how much her cut of the office’s sales would bring her, especially after she started to put the squeeze on her sales staff. She then played with different distribution scenarios between stocks, bonds, and cash, and between retirement and current funds. This was great. This was better than sex. This was what she wanted, what she had worked for all those years and shoveled all that excrement to attain. She was loving life.
Her phone rang. The display indicated it was an outside call. She answered, “Iris Thorne,” using a low-modulated but assertive tone, tasting the sound of her own name, which was now worth more, which now carried more weight in the world. She was the manager of the L.A. McKinney Alitzer office, the only female manager of one of the firm’s major metropolitan offices. She was important.
“Good morning, Iris. It’s Thomas Gaytan DeLacey.”
“Hi, Thomas! Good to hear from you.” She was effervescent.
“I know this is short notice, but I so enjoyed seeing you the other day, even though the circumstances were unpleasant. I wondered if we could get together for dinner tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow?” Iris loudly turned the pages of her Day Timer, even though she knew she didn’t have any plans. “Let’s see…Umm…Tomorrow looks great.”
“Terrific. If it’s okay with you, why don’t you head out to my side of town. I’d like to show you my campaign office and I know a lovely place in Pasadena where we can have dinner.”
“Sounds wonderful.”
“Great. By the way, I wanted to let you know that your dad sent a nice spray of flowers to my mother’s funeral. I hear that you and your sister’s relationship with him has been strained since he remarried.”
“To put it mildly.”
“He’s distanced himself from my family as well. I’ve always wondered why.” He fell silent.
Iris also remained silent until she suspected that this was her cue to speak. “I have no idea. My father is an enigma to me. He never seemed happy with what he had or where he was.” “I just wanted you to know that even though he didn’t come to the funeral, he did acknowledge my mother. It was very kind.”
“Thanks for letting me know.”
They finished planning the time and location of their date. She hung up, grabbed her mug, and went into the lunchroom. Amber Ambrose
, Warren Gray, and Kyle Tucker were huddled in a tight group, talking. They stopped when they saw her.
“Hi,” Iris said cheerily. She poured coffee into her mug.
After a few painful beats, Warren awkwardly resumed talking. “Could you believe it when he blew that free throw?”
“I know,” Kyle commiserated. “It was all over.”
“Totally,” Amber said.
Iris turned to face them. Amber and Warren were watching her. Kyle seemed ill at ease and looked at the floor.
“Amber!” Iris exclaimed with surprise. “I didn’t know you were a basketball fan.”
“I’m not really but occasionally I see something to watch that I find interesting.” She gazed at Iris haughtily.
Warren and Kyle shot alarmed glances at Amber.
Iris quizzically looked from one to the next. “What’s going on with you guys?”
“Nothing’s going on,” Amber said. “We’re just talking about the game.”
“Oh-kay.” Iris left the lunchroom, feeling their eyes on her back. They’re not ruining my good mood. The hell with ‘em.
Iris worked hard all afternoon with renewed vigor, spending time following up on sales leads that she would soon be able to turn over to her subordinates and tying up a few loose ends before she left to meet Paula. She flipped through her Rolodex and found Gil Alvarez’s number. After punching the number into her telephone keypad, she spun her chair to face her western window as she waited for the ringing phone to be answered. The days continued to be unseasonably hot and the sky had lightened to a pale blue-white as the afternoon peaked.
The secretary with the soothing voice answered and explained that he was out of the office.
“Please let him know that I’ve looked through his holdings and would like to sit down with him and share my ideas.”
She distractedly flipped through her Rolodex as she spoke, lighting on the card with her father’s number. The paper had attained a yellow hue with age. She’d written that card when she first got the Rolodex after starting her job with McKinney Alitzer. She’d put in his number though it had been years since she’d spoken with him even then. Each year, she purged old cards and each year she pulled this one out and looked at it. First, she’d feel angry and toy with throwing the card away. Then the anger would transform into something less easily borne—hurt— and then, worse still, remorse. Finally, a ray of hope would glimmer and she’d slide the card back into its spot under the T’s for Thorne, having long ago moved it from the D’s for Dad. But she still put it back. It was a slender connection, but it was something.
She left her name and number with Gil Alvarez’s secretary and pressed the button that disconnected the call. She immediately started dialing again. She had to do it now. She couldn’t stop to think about it. After four rings, the phone was answered by a young voice. Iris couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. She heard children yelping in the background.
“Is Les there?”
“Yeah. Just a minute.” The phone was clumsily put down. “Dad!”
The word startled her.
“Dad, some lady wants you on the phone.”
Suddenly, her eyes grew hot and her chest felt empty. She grew short of breath.
The phone was picked up. “Yellow,” Les said in his countrified way.
Iris hung up.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Iris negotiated the maze of intersecting freeways in downtown L.A. known as the cloverleaf until she managed to get on the 101 north, which led into Hollywood. She thought about the last time she’d seen Paula. She’d been a freshman at UCLA and living in a dormitory. Paula would occasionally appear on her doorstep, sometimes with some guy, sometimes alone. The last time, Paula had arrived alone.
They had gone out that night. John Somers, Iris’s then boyfriend, drove them around in his beat-up MG with the brakes that were almost gone. John had worn his college uniform of Levi’s button-front shrink-to-fit jeans, a Levi’s work shirt, and Adidas tennis shoes. His hair was thick, wavy, red and reached well past his shoulders. His beard was full and roan-hued. The abundance of hair made him look imposing, even dangerous, like a wild man who had crawled out from the foothills. The hair added substance to his already large frame and, perhaps intentionally, obscured his more delicate, almost fragile features—his Cupid’s bow lips and sensitive green-flecked hazel eyes.
Iris and Paula had crowded into the MG’s single passenger seat and took turns pulling the emergency brake to stop the car. The three of them were having fun, the kind of fun that came from being old enough to have a little money and transportation and to know where the action was, but young enough not to dwell on any consequences. Paula, of course, was a catalyst.
She had got them into the Whisky on the Sunset Strip even though they were under age, because she knew the band. She turned heads as she walked through the club and she relished the attention. She was exotically beautiful with her mother’s lush lips and dark coloring and her father’s height, which she accentuated with platform shoes. Her skin-tight bell-bottoms had hodgepodge patches stitched over threadbare spots in the rear and knees. Her braless breasts peek-a-booed through the open weave of her crocheted top, a tease which she accentuated by flipping her hair over her chest. Several slender gold S-link chains glittered against her deeply tanned skin. A charm dangled from each chain: a crooked Italian horn, the word SEXY, and a tiny, long-handled spoon used for dipping cocaine from vials.
Paula was an intoxicating cocktail of glamour and urbanity with a splash of jadedness. Iris was in awe of her. Paula seemed to know something about everything and seemed to have something on everyone, even if she didn’t. Her charms weren’t lost on John Somers, who was amazed that she and Iris were friends. Paula was so unlike Iris’s other friends.
Cocaine was just making inroads as the new glamour drug and Paula had been singing its praises. “It’s like champagne. There’s nothing like doing some lines then fucking.” She gave them a knowing small smile, which she focused a shade too long on John.
He was enthralled. “Can we score some?”
“Sure,” Paula responded. “Got any dough?”
After many promises to pay her back, John and Paula got Iris to dip into the cash that she’d set aside to buy textbooks. Paula procured the coke, as promised. They went to John’s apartment, where Iris refused to partake.
“C’mon, Iris,” John chided. “Stop being so straight. It won’t kill you.”
“One strawberry daiquiri is her limit,” Paula teased.
After watching them get high, which Iris found an almost clinical experience, she went into John’s bedroom and fell asleep in her clothes. It was still dark when she woke sometime during the night. Small noises emanated from the living room and the soft light of candles flickered. Iris tiptoed toward the living room, fearful of what she might see but having to see anyway.
Paula saw Iris first, but not immediately. John didn’t notice. He was engaged in a passion that was hungry and brutal and so different from anything he had shown Iris that she barely recognized him. She was both horrified and fascinated as she watched his broad, straining, sweat-covered body and his contorted face. All of a sudden, as if he’d been shaken from a spell, he noticed her. He didn’t say a word, but his delicate eyes and mouth peeping through his hair betrayed him. He was sorry and his expression seemed to acknowledge that he recognized it didn’t matter.
Paula also said nothing but predictably, her gaze was arrogant, as if to say, “It’s your fault.”
Iris quickly got her shoes and walked home alone in the dead of night. The next day, Paula returned to Iris’s room to get her things and Iris told her she never wanted to see her again.
Paula snapped, “No problem,” and left.
Later, Iris discovered that the rest of her textbook money was missing.
The Last Call was on a street off Hollywood Boulevard near Vine, an intersection that wore its faded glamour like a forgotten ornament clinging to a discar
ded Christmas tree. The cops and the City Council had done an admirable job of moving the party girls, bun boys, and drug dealers away from the main strip. The tourists, in bright shorts, Hawaiian shirts and cameras, could now travel the Walk of Fame, pointing at their favorites among the brass-trimmed, pink granite stars, and try their feet and hands in the cement imprints in front of the Chinese theater with a false sense of security.
Iris parked across the street in front of the bar and expected never to see the Triumph again. A couple of teenage boys sat on the back of a bus stop bench nearby. They had the street-wise, tightly coiled attitude of runaways, as if they were perennially waiting for something —friends, enemies, or for the life that they had run away for to start. They barely glanced at Iris, who must have seemed to them to be nothing but a predictable, monied adult, but they lavished covetous attention on the shiny, fire-engine-red Triumph.
Iris walked up to them. “You guys want to earn ten bucks?”
“To do what?” one of them said unenthusiastically, apparently having been approached to do things for money before.
“Watch my car? I’ll give you five now and five when I come out.”
“Twenty,” the other said.
“Fifteen,” Iris responded. “Five now and ten when I come out.”
“Deal.”
Iris fished a five from her purse, gave it to one of the boys, and walked across the street, carrying the brown paper bag that Bill DeLacey had given her. She noticed the faded midnight blue Oldsmobile parked on the street near the bar.
The Last Call was in the middle of a row of single-story shops with a fortuneteller on one side and a Thai restaurant on the other. All the shops had black metal security bars across their doors and windows. Some of the bars were molded into swirls and twists in the manufacturer’s valiant effort to make them appear decorative. Others with no such pretensions had finished the tips of their bars with vicious spear-like appendages. Just keep the hell out.
