by Leah McLaren
“For what?”
“For having babies later in life. At my age. Not operations, I mean, but procedures. New technologies, drugs and that sort of thing. So sad old hags like me can have a hope—”
Meredith felt Swain’s rib cage release beneath the layers of velvet. She hoped that Swain was not about to cry, because if she did, she would have to have her makeup redone. The actress straightened her back and looked in the mirror. She was, Meredith saw now, very controlled. Swain breathed out with a whoosh and patted her face, then grimaced, remembering something.
“Good Lord, what am I going to do?”
“About what?”
“About the wardrobe stylist. I can’t get into these horrendous things on my own, and I don’t suppose we can convince her to come back after I burned her with my curling iron, can we?”
Meredith hid her smile in the folds of Swain’s bustle. She stood up and smoothed down the back of her dress.
Swain was moaning, “Oh God, oh God, what am I going to do?”
Meredith had an idea. She felt her face brighten. “Actually, Ms. Swain, I may have just the woman for the job.”
The actress raised one eyebrow, intrigued. “Is she American?”
“Almost,” Meredith said. “She’s Canadian.”
“Close enough,” Swain winked. “She’s hired.”
7
Mish arrived in London the following day. Meredith had arranged to meet her at a new sushi lounge in Knightsbridge, kitty-corner from Harrods on a tiny street called Raphael. The place was one of those sprawling subterranean London nightspots that gave Meredith the feeling the city might be a grim facade built overtop a buzzing underworld populated by demons. The very young and the very rich mingled around the bar, balancing jewel-toned saketinis between their thumbs and middle fingers. Despite her best efforts to look bored, Meredith could hardly breathe. She had never seen such people—dusky and decadent. Men in dark suits sliced from such fine silk Meredith felt soothed just looking at it. The women were like fancy desserts—skin and hair polished in glossy shades, fine bones weighted with crocodile, gemstones, precious metals and swatches of sheared sable. In addition to Arabic, Meredith heard snippets of French, German, Russian and Italian in the air as she made her way through the throng and scanned the human layers for Mish.
Slate trays of raw eel, squid, tuna and sea bass slid by with waitresses in orange coveralls and black stilettos. Watching them, Meredith noted her own simple outfit—sleeveless black sweater and jeans. She worked behind the camera for a reason.
“Mere bear!” Mish enveloped her in a mango-conditioner-scented embrace.
Bangles clattered in her ears. Mish drew back and clapped Meredith’s grinning face between her hands.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you! Can you believe I’m even here? I mean, can you actually? And we get to work together again? In London? I mean: How. Fucking. Great. Is. That? Eh?” Mish squeezed Meredith’s face vertically for emphasis.
“Get this girl a dragon-fruit saketini on the double! Extra poppy seeds! Make that two doubles!” Mish bullhorned across the bar to no one in particular. She was wearing a lace-up lavender bustier over a pair of glitter-flecked leggings and thigh-high white vinyl go-go boots. Meredith noticed she had lost weight. Under normal circumstances she would have said so.
“Do I not look completely fucking awesome?” Mish passed over a brimming glass with a twig and berries sticking out of it and kissed Meredith on the forehead. “Can you believe this shit?”
“It’s so great to see you.”
“Is this town even aware? Does it even know what it is in for? Have you even warned these people?” Mish waved an elbow-length kid glove around the room and leaned in to Meredith’s hair. “We are going to tear it up, sister. You and me. Tear it to pieces and eat it raw.” She threw back her head and honked like a goose.
They clinked and began to fill in the gaps of the past couple of weeks. Mish told her the story of the party clown she had met at Elle’s. She had ended up having what she deemed a “highly therapeutic eight-and-a-half-night make-out session” with him, which had started the day Meredith had seen her last and ended shortly before she got the call to come work on the Crouch movie as Kathleen Swain’s personal wardrobe stylist.
“So the thing is,” Mish was saying, “I’ve finally realized what I was put on this earth to do.” Her eyes gleamed. “It’s to amuse myself. Completely, fully, ad nauseum and without guilt. What do you think? It’s my new trip.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Meredith said.
“Done.”
Three rounds later, Meredith was sloshed and feeling guilty. She still hadn’t told Mish about the Quest. And she wasn’t quite sure how this new, improved and biologically defiant Mish would take it.
“Oh, and Shane,” Mish went on, “did I even tell you? What he did? Do you even know what he did the day he, you know, heard? He went out and bought a pug puppy—another one! And guess what we called it? Junior! I mean, isn’t that the sickest thing you’ve ever heard? He came in a giant Tiffany box with a hole cut in the top and the little farter’s head poking through with a ribbon on it. Oh my God, the box stank so badly when I took the lid off, I nearly fucking died. It was the cutest thing in the whole history of cute things ever. That guy.” She reached over and squeezed Meredith’s arm. “So what about you? What’s up? How goes the London head-trip thus far?”
Meredith bit her lip and looked at the ceiling. There was an equatorial constellation painted on a dome. “Well, let’s see,” she began. “My mother just broke up with a man half her age, I’m completely single and working all the time on a set that’s being funded by the Wizard of Oz and supervised by a teenage vampire. It rains constantly and everything costs twice as much and the men smell funny. Other than that, I can’t really complain.”
Mish cocked her head and made a sympathetic face. “Is it really that bad? I mean like bad-bad?”
“Not bad-bad, more bad-weird.”
“If it’s any consolation, everyone in Toronto is saying how great it is that you told Felsted to go fuck himself. And apparently the studio is threatening to withdraw his postproduction funding because he went so insanely overbudget on the shoot.”
Meredith managed a detached smile. She waited for a rush of pleasure, but felt nothing. Felsted, Toronto, her whole life at home—it was all an emotional galaxy away.
“Listen, Mish, I have to tell you something. The reason I really came here.”
Mish narrowed her eyes. “You’re in love.”
“No, not that. Completely not.”
“In lust.”
“Sadly, no.”
“You’ve had your heart broken by a famous married guy you couldn’t tell me about because his lawyers swore you to secrecy. Don’t worry, I totally understand.”
Meredith blinked.
“So what, then?”
She opened her mouth, but Mish shushed her.
“No, wait, I want to guess. Now, let’s see...what else makes a girl drop everything and fly away—and then call her best friend for transatlantic backup? I don’t geddit”—she clapped a sake-soaked glove over her mouth. Her next words were muffled. “Oh—you caaan’t be.” She patted her stomach meaningfully. “With whose?”
“Jesus, Mish, no! Would you just let me talk for two seconds?”
Mish shoved her hands under her bum like a child trying to behave. “You are.”
“I’m not,” Meredith said slowly. “Not yet. But I want to be. I intend to be. And by the right man. I just figured I had to expand my pool, you know, in order to broaden the search. For the perfect one.”
“Oh, I get it—” Mish’s face darkened. “Big Daddy.”
“The donor of my dreams.”
“Prince Charming in a tadpole suit.”
“Exactly.”
Above her smile, Mish’s eyes were glassy and far away.
“Are you okay with this?” asked Meredith. “I didn’t want to tell you. I was
afraid it would make you sad.”
“Why would it make me sad?” A tear slid down the bridge of her nose and hung quivering at the tip. “Seriously. I’m beyond that baby shit at this point. I’m done with it. I want you to have one so I can corrupt it with cigarettes and beer.”
“So you’re okay?” Meredith looked at her carefully.
“I’m fine. It’s just coming off the hormones.” Mish blew her nose on a cocktail napkin.
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No, honey, I think you’re brilliant.” Mish grabbed her knee and squeezed it tight. “Absofuckinglutely brilliant. Oh!” She remembered something and began digging in her handbag like a crazed terrier. “In that case I have a present for you...I’m sure it’s still in here...ha!” She stiffened, her hand still deep in the bag, and made Meredith close her eyes.
“Why?”
“It’s a surprise, for Chrissake. Now, hold still. You’re so squirmy.”
Meredith flinched as something cold poked her ear.
“What are you doing?”
“Just keep your eyes closed, okay? Just a second.” Beeping sounded in her ear. “Okay, open!” In Mish’s hand was a small device that appeared to be an electric toothbrush without the bristle. She flipped it over and revealed a small digital screen with numbers on it.
Meredith took the device from Mish’s hand and brought the screen close to her face.
“Amazing thing—takes your temperature and tells you exactly where you are in your cycle. Cool, eh? Have it. It’s yours.”
Meredith examined the cylindrical appliance and imagined herself as an ovum, a gelatinous microscopic dot floating through the dark tunnel of her Fallopian tube to—where? To meet a force who had not yet revealed himself. The elusive biological stand-up artist. How many blind dates had been made and broken? How many eggs had showed up on time, checked the reservation, taken a table, ordered a glass of champagne and waited...fifteen minutes, twenty, half an hour, staring at the bread basket, wishing they had brought a magazine, toying with their cell phone, avoiding the pitying glance of the waiter, until finally skulking out, burning with shame and rejection at the hands of a lover they had never met.
Meredith thanked Mish, then placed the ovulation measuring device in her handbag and snapped it shut.
“More libations, please!” Mish shouted.
Meredith excused herself.
The bathroom was a world of frosted glass urinals (for women!) and a mossy waterfall down one wall for handwashing. In the powder room, half a dozen Arabian Hilton-sisters look-alikes sprawled on love seats playing with one another’s hair and reapplying makeup. Meredith did something she never did sober: she looked in the mirror. Not just for a quick check to make sure her clothes weren’t on inside out, but for a close and critical personal inspection.
Standing before her was a slight young woman, eyes peeking out from under dark bangs. She pushed her hair from her forehead and looked more carefully at the face—small, heart-shaped, with a straight nose and clear, if pale, skin. The chin, with its witchy prominence, kept her from being typically pretty. But Meredith had never minded. Pretty girls, she had noticed at school, tended to be much more unhappy and markedly less sane than almost-pretty girls. The world had a way of raising the expectations of the pretty perilously high and, in the vast majority of cases, dashing them on the rocks. She did not envy the Cleopatras, the Princess Dianas or the Marilyn Monroes. Much safer to be the girl with the pointy chin whom Misery (that shameless social climber) snobbishly overlooks. Satisfied, she removed a tube of clear gloss from her handbag and applied a modest daub to her lips.
When she returned, Mish was deep in conversation with a yellow-haired man in a sleeveless leather vest whom Meredith automatically took to be gay. He said something and Mish slapped his chest and erupted into one of her noisy, throat-pumping honks.
“Mere! C’mere!” Mish grabbed her hand and squashed it between her palms. She turned to the leather vest and grinned. “I want you to meet my very best girl—Meredith Moore. She’s doing continuity on the new Osmond Crouch picture and she got me a job too.”
On top of the vest was a head. Not a bad head, either. Possibly a little over-gooped in the hair department, but even-featured and straight-toothed.
“Charming to meet you both. Gunther,” said the head.
He had a faint German inflection on top of his London accent that made him sound slightly formal. Meredith liked it.
“I hope you don’t mind my being so forward, but when I saw your friend here at the bar I could not resist the opportunity to bother her.”
Mish slapped his chest again and laughed. “What a load of cack—he was asking about you the whole time.”
“Me?” Meredith asked.
“Who me?” Mish teased. She turned to Gunther. “Isn’t she adorable?”
Gunther turned his well-made features to face Meredith and slid his eyes over the whole of her in a way that made her cheeks burn. “Indeed.” He paused, took a deep breath and broke out of his trance only at the sound of his own voice. “Listen, I was wondering if you two would like to join my friends and me for dinner. We have a private room in the back and there is more than enough food and drink to go round. I expect you will find it a...unique experience, if nothing else.”
Meredith winced apologetically and began to explain about the problem of their catching the last tube home and tomorrow morning’s seven a.m. call to set. But it was funny, because none of her words seemed to come out, or if they did, they were drowned beneath the sound of Mish’s cries of acquiescence.
In a blink, they were squeezed together on a love seat in a back room, making slurry small talk with a group of four tall blond men in black business suits. Gunther introduced the men as his “patrons.” More trays of drinks appeared, and one of the men—a tall, hawk-faced banker named Benedict—stood up and raised his glass.
“To our good friend Gunther, on the cusp of his great success. Cheers to a true artist among all the other contemporary rubbish. Hah!”
The men banged glasses and shouted things in German. Gunther went around the room slapping shoulders, heads and buttocks like an American football coach.
Meredith glanced at Mish, hoping to share a quizzical look, but her friend was already deep in conversation with a pair of black lapels to her left.
“In Canada, we don’t have castles,” Mish was saying, popping the tip of a Silk Cut into the corner of her mouth. “We have cottages instead.”
“And where exactly are these cottages located?” The man produced a gold lighter and offered her the flame.
“On lakes, or sometimes islands. In Georgian Bay, for instance, you can buy an entire island for like less than fifty grand.”
“A whole island you can purchase? With trees on it as well? For the price of a used car?”
“Oh, yes, plenty of trees. And bushes. And rocks. And everything.”
Meredith felt a nudge. Gunther appeared on the love seat beside her. He inclined his head and smiled like a bashful boy.
“I apologize for my friends. Men in money are inexcusably boorish. But they are mandatory, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?”
“That they are a necessary evil.”
“I understand, but for what?”
“For art.”
Meredith thought this over. “I guess in another era you’d be having an affair with some duchess or other.”
“Stealing in the servant’s entrance and ravishing her on the drawing room sofa when the duke is away. This I would prefer.”
“She would expect you to compose works in her honour.”
“Which I would, most dutifully. Pay homage to her everlasting beauty, despite the fact that she is fat and old.”
“And bald.”
“Yes, that too.”
There was a loud collective whoop from the bankers that made Meredith and Gunther look up. A Japanese girl in a blue kimono, who looked to be only slightly older
than a child, had entered the room. She did not smile, but bowed and took her place beside a potted bamboo tree in the corner. Soon a waitress followed, bearing a large platter of sushi, and another after her, who cleared the glasses and ashtrays from the low glass table in the center. The kimonoed girl bowed again and in one practiced and elaborate motion untied her sash and let her garment drop to the floor. She was naked and in perfect minuscule proportion, pubic hair trimmed into a tidy little Valentine’s heart. The song on the sound system was that big hit by Coldplay. An odd choice for a stripper, Meredith thought, waiting rigidly for the girl to begin grinding her hips in the familiar pot-stirring peeler fashion. But instead of dancing, the naked girl took two steps forward, arched her back and draped herself backward over the glass table, stomach to the ceiling, feet and head dangling over the side, her throat exposed and quivering slightly. She lay there like a flank steak on a butcher’s block. The room was silent as the waitresses began to arrange fish in fans and swirls over the girl’s flesh. Hamachi sashimi around the left nipple, unagimaki around the right, raw lobster in between the collarbones, a knob of green wasabi in the belly button, pickled ginger palate-cleanser in each smooth armpit.
“The super deluxe,” Gunther whispered into the nape of Meredith’s neck. “A popular delicacy in Japan. I hope you will forgive my friends’ political incorrectness. I understand you Americans can be a bit...unamused by such spectacle.”
Meredith and Mish exchanged uncertain, bug-eyed smiles. One of the waitresses began passing around ivory chopsticks. The men laughed and elbowed one another, making cracks in German. They spread their napkins on their laps. The naked girl giggled, and goose bumps rose up under their food.
There was a pause. And it became clear that, for all of their noisy jostling, none of the men was willing to be first.
