At home again, in the room he called a study despite the toys in it—treadmill, golf clubs, small weights—Jack called Stetson.
“If you’re so worried, Dad, why don’t you call her?” For his part, Stetson was sorry for whatever legal tangle Mimi was in with Arnie Fine’s children—children decades older than Mimi. “The man’s dead. Call her for condolences at least.”
“Oh, Mimi,” Jack said when he called his daughter and listened for as long as he could to what she had done and what she had yet to do. The reading of the will? An auction? Jack Deminthe didn’t understand any of it. “Mimi, whatever were you thinking?”
“Nothing I’ve done so far would suggest I’m very bright, Dad.”
“The eyes should be just about here,” Arnie said, and he pointed: two tiny frown crescents above his cheeks. If his cheeks were red, he would have looked like a sad elf, but Arnie’s skin was a sallow yellow, dingy where he shaved, and he shaved poorly, so he looked like an ill-intentioned elf with black bristles and acne scars, fat creases serving as a neck. A face hard to touch much less kiss, and he knew it. He didn’t care, had never cared, or maybe didn’t care anymore, what was the difference? He was rich, he was funny. His face was funny. The bowling-ball shape of his head was classically funny. Also, the baldness helped. Was there ever a fat comedian with a lot of hair? Probably, but the ones that came to mind who looked like him, the Don Rickleses of the world, had withering hairlines. Fine was more of a bawdy comic—he wasn’t unkind. He loved women and bemoaned his bad luck with them.
And his wife? He had always loved Ruthie no matter what anyone said, but celebrity and money had made him more attractive to women at sixty than at any other time in his life. Bimbos, starlets, yeah, sure, breasts solid as hams with anuses no bigger than his pinkie, but … fuck-all—a girl underage for fucking sure on a frigid night in Minnesota found at the back door with a spiral notebook and a crumby pen: it dried out just as he was signing. “This fucking cold,” he said and saw her tears—from him or from the cold? “Ever been in a limousine?” he asked. “Want to take a ride and warm up with me? I’ve a driver,” he said. “You can show me what to see.” He was tired after that tour, bone-tired, deep-tired, something … Must have been around that time Mimi Deminthe found him. He wasn’t exactly looking but Mimi Deminthe liked him. “Do you feel safe with me?” he asked. “Of course,” she said, “You know who my father is, don’t you?” So he took advantage of the moment and the money he had made, money enough to have a famous house and a fast car, and time on his hands to let a young woman, who loved to drive, drive anywhere. If he had reasons to suspect his heart was clogged, he overlooked them. Let her drive fast. Let her try her hand at whatever might make her happy.
Arnie Fine was gone and in his place stood his son Donald with look-alike cheeks buckshot from acne, a sad inheritance, but not so Mimi’s. On good days she could see her mother’s face in hers. (Today, with the lawyers and auctioneers at the Piro house, her face was entirely her own and crooked.) And Arnie’s daughter? Mimi figured Patricia Fine for an updated Ruthie, the late great long-sufferer who had shoved Arnie Fine through the 1980s, made him famous if not sober. Ruth Gabel Fine, with her frizzy red hair, small eyes, mother to the lumpen twosome, had led Donald Fine to believe he was charming. Upon their meeting, he had put his heavy hands on Mimi’s shoulders and looked at her approvingly, saying, “Now I get it.” He said, “No wonder we never met before.” He said, “How old are you?” and he winked to let her in on—what? At least Patricia Fine ignored her. Patricia Fine had come to the Piro house for a painting.
“The Diebenkorn, Patty? Really? Since when did you even notice it?”
“Don’t call me Patty.”
“I mean you’ve never expressed interest in Dad’s art before. Do you even know what it’s called? Okay,” he said, but his sister kept her back to him unyielding.
“Patricia,” he said, and then emphatically, “Patricia?”
In the Piro house and ever alert for cover, Mimi had a foot on the stair for the guest bedroom and the gully between the bed and the wall, the curtain, the window from which vantage she had spied on the gardener, the gardener she could not pay. He had waited at the door. The gardener, indistinguishable, blending against the shedding eucalyptus in its dead bowl of shaggy bark, she missed him and all the easy days she was married.
“Miss?”
“Deminthe,” she said, “but I’m still the widow.”
“Yes,” he said, “I’m aware.” This man with his hand on her arm, a man not family but employed, maybe an overseer, a caretaker, a lawyer, a guard, an auctioneer, gestured toward the herding warmth of the Fines—a pack of them, old cousins with old children, an ancient uncle with a menacing walker.
Mimi pointed up the stairs—her intent.
“It’s a viewing,” he said. “First floor only.”
“But I’m not interested in anything,” she said.
“No one’s to go upstairs,” he said.
“My room’s upstairs.” She said, “I’m not entirely moved out.”
“I’m sorry, miss.”
“I’m the wife,” she said. “I’m the fucking widow.”
“I’m sorry.”
She veered away from Mr. Security and walked toward a corner, out of the way. What was it she had said to Stetson about the Piro house? Priceless? Last week it had seemed invulnerable in all the ways Arnie had said it was—none of the fires ever came close. An important house, one of its kind, like great classic cars, Maserati, Ferrari, Mustang, it was a work of art, irreplaceable. Inside the important house was another matter. The tubular furniture—a lot of it unfriendly—was gone, but its absence hardly enlarged the downstairs spaces crowded with inheritors shoving in to see the art and counting up play money. Patricia Fine circled the Diebenkorn, flicked a notebook, looked elsewhere, looked out the sliding glass windows to the terrace and the pool where her father had died.
Mimi had found him, Arnie, facedown in the water; no chance for a funny last line—”This is no way to live.”
Had Arnie known he had so little time left, he might have spent it differently. As it was, his wife was dead and he didn’t particularly like his children, so he married Mimi and followed her whims. He had stood in front of Mimi, his hands lightly appraising her. This old man at the end of his career and this young woman at the start of her—what? Could she call herself an actress? Please God, more than a celebrity’s child. Whatever were they doing together? Mimi got it, she understood why people wondered. But the magic hat the old comedian put on: how he made her laugh—at herself mostly. Her silly, selfish ways: her habit of eating all the nuts from the ice cream. All the swirls of caramel too. He made her look into the carton at the gouged mound, and asked, “Does this look appetizing to you, sweetheart? Anything like me?” She only had to be herself with Arnie and he was delighted. “You’re allowed,” he said. “Be your sweet, strange, selfish self.”
Arnie Fine had her driven to the studio when she was in the pilot that did not get picked up. He didn’t live to learn that the studio bumped it, but if Arnie were around he would say, “They didn’t see you coming, doll.” He said, “They’re not ready for what you’ve got.”
Now she walked out the sliding glass door and sat in the shallow end of the emptied pool. Some firm in charge—maybe the gang inside?—had set up folding chairs and a couple of card tables—and she watched as the aggressive old man maneuvered his walker to sit up close. She was glad the house was sealed, glad not to hear the noise inside until Donald came out to the terrace and said, “You’re wanted.”
After the house was dismantled, Donald Fine asked what she planned to do with the Mustang Arnie had left her buffed and ready at a downtown garage.
“Drive it?”
First date with Arnie they went from dipping sauces and luau-like drinks to the Dead Horse parking lot in Topanga Canyon where she played his Mustang. Oh, she had known from the start what an old gnome given to chuckling would lik
e—a silly show-off who liked to make tight turns in empty lots. Tight as my ass. Arnie, he was fun. How was it he had had such dull children? Blame Ruthie? A mother cannot be held accountable for all the children’s failings, for ignorance and bad taste. Donald Fine drove a chrome-heavy car he must have thought hot.
“I could use a drink,” Donald said. And for some stupid reason—oh, vodka at Ricky’s—she said yes, she could use a drink too and she canceled the car that was to take her to the hillside rental she’d found and buckled into Donald’s car for the short drive to Ricky’s. A vodka at Ricky’s, yes, but as soon as the glacial-looking pool of clear fuel was set before her, Mimi knew she had made another bad decision. She saw the dusk ahead: on and on and so forth and then there was that time when … Donald told her how Arnie had left him at a party for some choice tail. Donald said he grew up on fumes of pussy. His father, that miserable fuck, funnyman, Arnie Fine … You should know, he said, but she didn’t know and she didn’t know and over two hours were junked until it came to this: she didn’t know old movies, which made Donald really angry—”You never saw Dinner at Eight? I don’t get you.”
“You’re not alone,” she said, but all this to-do about an actress in a movie she hadn’t seen?
“I’m saying …” Donald started.
“Quiet,” she said. “I’m trying to hear what they’re saying.” A woman in the booth behind them, just a voice, said rather loudly, “How’s she doing? She’s a lot better. She’s well enough to say her daughter’s an asshole.” There was more, but it was lost with Donald’s blurted business, waving the bill, saying, “Will you look at this?”
Outside the restaurant, he said, “I mean, why go for a drink with someone if you’re not going to talk?”
They said nothing more to each other until they were in the car, when Donald moaned how he couldn’t take this sick shit.
“What did you and my dad ever have in common?”
“He didn’t really like his kids and neither do I.”
Despite the theatrical thunderhead rising above the mountains, Mimi drove toward it, drove into the desert with the top down at speeds equally dramatic. She wore cat’s-eye sunglasses and a tied-on straw bonnet, the rim of which blatted in the wind. Desert-driving in a convertible! All of my cars have been convertibles—in her mother’s voice—if only she could hear it, but Mimi’s memory for any part of her mother was dismally approximate. To see the house again might help, but how to find it? A lot of people had cactus gardens. What made her think theirs was special? She passed through towns no bigger than beads and in between drove over eighty miles an hour. The clouds advanced in electric air. She looked up and felt the first large, sloppy drops of rain. The rain fell faster and she slowed up the car, pumped the brake, then braked hard and slewed onto the shoulder. She got the top up but not before it wet the dash; yet for all the water that fell from the sky—first the pockety sound, puffs of dust, then a downpour—the desert floor only steamed when it was over, hardly wet.
For her mother the desert was home. Sabine Agard—her mother’s real name and no one in Hollywood had ever suggested she change it—was born in Algiers. Her first language was French and her accented English came out haltingly and often sounded like a small cry. She was very tiny; she wore a size four and a half shoe and size zero clothes. It didn’t take a lot to kill her. Mimi thought if she could find the house, Sabine’s troubled spirit might talk to her without talking to her as when they watched the dramas of fiery clouds dissipate in the desert sky, and Sabine warned Mimi in the very way she watched that men were dangerous.
Mimi bought water at the gas station and held the bottle against her face and considered the journey: how many hours out of LA, and here already. Now what? She bought a map and studied it—Culp, Canyon, Sweetbush—in hopes she might find the street. Then find the house, commune with Sabine, figure out the future. It didn’t surprise her then that a man should step up to ask what she was looking for and might he help? His name was Zorn; he was from LA but he had a home in the desert. An attractive woman waited in the front seat of a Mercedes convertible although Mimi’s Mustang was better.
Mimi said she was looking for a house she had lived in a long time ago. She couldn’t remember the street, but the house was unusual, at least to her, then, a girl not quite twelve. The house she remembered didn’t look like a house but like a pile of rusted salvage welded together. The cactus garden was dressed in stone.
He couldn’t help her there, he said, and he was sorry and so was she.
The Indian who sold her the map at the convenience store didn’t know the area either. He hauled up words in his heavy accent—was everyone in the desert from somewhere else?—and dropped them at her feet until, tired, he simply ceased to speak. At the Best Western the man at the front desk told Mimi the house had probably been swallowed up by the Bottlebrush development, and he showed her the way. She got herself a room, then drove out to find Bottlebrush and off Bottlebrush, an unpaved road. She remembered that much. No other houses nearby, but now how strange it was to see house after house of what she sort of remembered and the same stone cactus gardens, some with corroded ornaments, tin roadrunners and jack-rabbits and sunflowers—the sunflowers especially out of place. They had a pool, she remembered, ordinary, small. Once a photographer got access to the desert house and took photos of their mother stepping into the pool. In the photograph, her breasts were blurred. Her mother’s former publicist and friend, Estelle, had given Mimi this photo, and others, at the memorial service, saying, “You may not want to look at these now.” And for a long time Mimi didn’t look; for a long time, she was angry at her mother.
At the end of a washboard road, Mimi found a house that seemed alike enough although its remembered welded quality had been altered somehow, whitewashed or stuccoed—something. A garage as charmless as a storage shed was now attached to the house, if this was the house, and she thought it was or it might be, given that it was the last house at the end of a long, rough road. The bucket chairs were gone, also the cacti. The desert looked the same from any angle, but the garden was just stone now, a terrible white in the light that had followed the storm. Mimi knocked at the front door but no one answered. She looked through a window and saw a churning gray as if the house were filled with water. She was about to knock again when a rattling car pulled roughly into the drive and nosed the garage. A woman in a sleeveless jean jacket opened the door. The woman’s long arms were loose, all the fat tented near the elbow. She wore white tennis shoes; her legs were greenly varicosed. “I hope you’re not here about my son.”
“No”
“I’ve told the authorities all I know. I don’t know where he is.”
“No,” Mimi said. “I’m here because I think I used to live here.” This already seemed impossible.
“I doubt it, sweetie,” the woman said, and Mimi was on the verge of agreeing.
“It would have been in the mid-nineties?”
The woman regarded her house with an appraising expression as if someone had offered her a lot of money for it. “Whyn’t you come in and see?” She took out two bags of groceries from the backseat and Mimi followed her into the house. “Look familiar?” the woman asked. Her name, she told Mimi, was Dora Wozack. She was putting big cans of tomato juice into the kitchen cupboard. “Recognize anything?”
“No,” Mimi said. “Not really.” Already she had forgotten the woman’s name.
“You looking up all the old places?”
Mimi knew this was not the house but once the jug of Stoli was out of the bag, she didn’t want to leave. People came to the desert to dry out or drink, smoke or get spiritual, and this woman had the shape of a drinker. They drank from crystal quilted jars from when the woman, whose name Mimi still could not remember, made and sold prickly-pear jelly. “I had me quite a business for a while,” she said, “then my husband died and Dean, that’s my son, got crazier.” Mimi waited for her to say more, but she didn’t; instead, the woman asked about Mim
i’s car, how old it was and when she got it. Learning the car was a gift, she said, “Someone sure liked you.”
“My husband,” Mimi said.
“You look too young to be married.”
“Well, I was. He died.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Accident?”
“Heart attack,” Mimi said. “He was older.”
“God, girl, I hope he was really old.”
“Sixty-nine.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“My son’s age,” the woman said; “Dean,” and just as she said his name, the son, the mean Dean, slammed his way into the kitchen with a gun and shot his mother in the face. Then he saw or seemed to see Mimi. He looked at her with no expression and what thoughts she couldn’t even guess at though she made no effort to move or to speak before he turned the gun on himself. That fast. Mimi sat mute, witness to the immediate deflation of the body—the bodies—shapeless in clothes on the instant turned loose in a kind of flesh melt. Brain and bone and blood splatter on her shirt, the table, the floor, the window, her shoes in a puddle.
This was the house all right.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Mimi held out the dustpan full of potsherds and let her brother pass into what she had found for herself, more charm than room, which he approved of, an artist’s studio or a gardener’s shed on a larger property in the hills.
“So it’s small,” Stetson said, “but give me that,” and he took the dustpan and told her to get dressed: “It’s afternoon.”
“Who knew?” Mimi said, and she left Stetson looking around for a counter or a kitchen and walking slowly through the heart of the shed, as she called it, with its illusion of space: high ceilings and tiny furniture meant for children—and Mimi looked like a child when she emerged from around a corner dressed.
“Cute outfit,” he said. “But can we put the pieces in a bag?”
“You really think Crazy Glue will do it?”
Pure Hollywood Page 2
