Pure Hollywood

by Christine Schutt

  Mimi weaved among the opened and unopened boxes on her way to the kitchen along the wall. From under the sink, looking for a bag, she admitted the pot was not the first thing she had broken since yesterday. “I’m undone,” she said, and she vowed never to be in the middle of a move again if she could help it. Forget being wrenched from the Piro house itself, the movers had flayed her. Tough, dismissive, they plastic-wrapped objects senseless—the movers swung tape guns over box flaps with a flourish. They sounded like butchers rending flesh. “I was meant to oversee—red dots go to Donald, yellow to Patricia—but I couldn’t stand to watch the rooms emptied. I felt sorry for the furniture.” She said, “You know what makes me sad? Tossed-out sofas, sofas left on the curb for collection. Ours on Cochran, remember? We put it out after the yard sale and in the middle of the night someone hacked off her legs.”

  Was it really only bad luck that Mimi had found Dora Wozack in a house she thought was once their own?

  “I did think it was and then I didn’t,” Mimi said, and, “Now I’m here and I’m glad you’ve come.” She led her brother around the house. Dora Wozack’s house was certainly bigger. Dora Wozack in the kitchen, yukking over a quilted jar of vodka, took off her baseball cap and her hair was hardly there, more a gray reflective surface like brittlebush in summer, and Dora Wozack, like the shrub, waiting it out in the oven of old age. “My breasts are still my own,” she had said, and they swayed, those big jolly breasts, when she leaned over to refill Mimi’s glass. It’s the other parts that’re trouble.

  “Mother’s house was at the end of a different road entirely,” Stetson said.

  “Am I surprised,” Mimi said. “I can go only so close to what happened.”

  “You never talk about the son.”

  “Mean Dean,” she said. She opened a kitchen drawer to nothing and saw the boxes around the kitchen island. Saltines on the counter, but why? She found a knife and a hard, discolored lime. This was the start of the sober life: slow and strange for being attended to until she forgot what she was after. “What did I mean to do?”

  “Come in here and sit down,” Stetson said. “I’m not thirsty. I don’t need anything to drink. We’ll unpack together, but first sit down. Talk to me.”

  “Dean,” she said. What did she know about him but through the gummy sieve of social media and search engine hits on his part for what? She guessed guns, pussy, older pussy, cum shot, green crack. Dean was not attractive. He came with his mouth open—too many teeth and breathing through his nose, his head unnaturally narrow as if it had been caught in a vise.

  He came with his hard birth and nasty childhood, the frogs he shot with a BB gun, the cats he blew up with explosives. Several men stood in for fathers, one of them abused him with a hanger for which Dean blamed his mother. You bitch! Police statements, nursing records, court documents, he came with catalogs of officialese for a disturbed young man with a gun, a man dressed in gun colors, dark tattoos, and the blare of angry men on the radio, the TV, the street—Mimi could mash the killers together, all scars, bullying piercings, and bad breath.

  But Dean can’t shut his mouth!

  Still he comes on at night some nights. He comes on bellowing, bellowing to his mother. “Hard to forget,” Mimi said, then fell back against the couch relieved to have lived through it. “Thank God, you’re here” she said.

  Stetson leaned against her, bumped shoulders before he fell back into the couch. He talked about a time when he was still living in the Hills with their father and whoever else was taking care of him then—he was eleven—and he got into an aluminum foil fix. He took rolls of foil from the kitchen and no one ever complained or asked why, what was he doing with it, but they bought more. He was making an army. His stash took up half his closet—forts, figures, knives. He used most of the foil to make ammunition, aluminum bullets the size of golf balls he liked to whap off the upstairs porch at night, batting his threats with a badminton racket into the dark canyon, whooping and hoping to startle. Some dumb idea of fun when their father was away and the staff were in their quarters and quiet.

  “Forget about that crazy Dean,” Stetson said, and shoved himself off the couch, then pulled Mimi to her feet, helped her unpack. He used a box cutter on boxes she had walked around for days, and when she asked him about the box cutter, he explained he was leaving it with her. He’d brought her an essential toolkit, a householder’s helper—hammers, nails, that sort of shit. “I was pretty sure you wouldn’t have much more than scissors.” He said, “I’ve made you smile.”

  He made her easy was how she thought of it. He enabled her to hear the satisfying thump of a well-made drawer sliding shut.

  In the midst of Mimi’s quaint kind-of scrapbook life, taking her old dog’s ashes with her from place to place didn’t seem so odd. And the small house suited Mimi; at least that is what Stetson told her. He took up the water she offered.

  “In Jane Austen, first cousins marry, did you know that?” And when he didn’t answer, she said, “I’d like to find someone like you.”

  “Or someone like Arnie.”

  “Or like Arnie,” she said. “Made my life larger. Like living with a pet very comfortably, which isn’t to say the pet wouldn’t growl—he did. He bit or he nipped and he had his way on every outing: where we went, how we ordered, if he thought we deserved dessert. “‘The force of his will could turn a slab of sidewalk into a gravestone.’ That’s not my line,” she said.

  “I didn’t think it was.”

  “Arnie could be intense. He was dark.”

  “Our father thought so.”

  “But why can’t Dad admit I might have been happy most of the time?”

  “A friend of a friend of a friend—all gossip, whatever he heard.”

  And maybe her father was right about Arnie’s interests—the rumors were out there. Besides, so many cliches about comedians prove true. The lonely childhood, for instance, and the solace found in movies. Family poverty that made Arnie laugh: the fire escape in their Brooklyn apartment was a rope tied to a radiator, and they often ate shoes for dinner. Gedempte brust his mother called it—a bad cut of meat roasted unrecognizable unless the eyelets of a dead man’s shoes from Goodwill got stuck in your teeth. “Ma,” Arnie said. The indomitable woman who hated her brother and famously served his family—all seven of them—a bag of chips still in the bag, a large bottle of soda and Dixie cups, the kind the dentists use. Help yourself! Dig in!

  “Ma! How could she be so mean and me so nice, huh?”

  Two o’clock sun when they lay together on the bleached teak chairs, and Arnie reached out and lightly touched her shoulder. A puffed sound, relief, a laugh, and then her name, “Mimi.” After a while he said, “I’ve got a driver for you for tomorrow’s shoot.”

  And so he did, and early the next morning, in the muddy in-between hour reserved for crises, Mimi Deminthe eased into the town car that took her to Paramount Studios where she played a ditzy girl on set who said such things as “What does insufficient funds mean?”

  Later, on the way home, she slept in the backseat of the town car while the driver took the jolts of traffic to the famous house. And not until early evening did she walk through it to the back and the glass sliding door, beyond which were the pool and Arnie. The heart attack had happened around one, but the coroner’s report, more exact, was a sour reminder that no one in this life is so twinned as to feel the other’s exit. No heart-pinch burn for her in the moment when Arnie died. When Arnie’s heart clenched, Mimi was shaking max-energy mix-max into a smoothie on stage 30 at Paramount.

  Only the day before, poolside in the afternoon, her hand over Arnie’s warm hand, so deeply ridged and knuckled her fingers fit between—only the day before. Why had she walked distractedly through it? Why hadn’t they stayed in the bleached teak chairs laughing?

  “One Jewish pirate says to another, ‘You know how much they’re charging for sailcloth these days? I can’t afford to pillage and rape anymore.’”

 
Jokes—his own or someone else’s.

  More than once he said, “I’m sorry about my kids—they were loyal to Ruthie and right to be loyal.”

  In one of the obituaries, Arnie was described as stunned “by his implausible good fortune.”

  Was she, Mimi Deminthe, a part of that good fortune?

  “You forgot who you were for a while,” Stetson said, “living in that abstract painting. The name makes it sound famous, but the Piro house was bereft of life, Mimi, it was barren … rusty water, old pipes, old tiles.”

  “I wanted to go up in smoke in it, get on the pyre with Arnie.”

  “I love the way you throw yourself into everything.” He smiled at her. “Little sister, when did you start wearing baby doll dresses with blue jeans?”

  “Since I decided to act my age.”

  A friend of Stetson’s made beautiful clay pots that were glazed to look like pewter, and Stetson encouraged Mimi to replace the broken pot with another, maybe one from Wyatt’s studio.

  “My brother said you made beautiful pots and that I might find something.”

  The next time she saw Stetson she was still at a loss. “I haven’t had a drink since … oh, last week?” She said, “I see Dora Wozack dying every day.” She said, “I remember I wanted a shirt like hers, cowboy cut with snap buttons. Dora said she loved an afternoon vodka and then sleep. Fuck dinner. The problem was, she said, she got up after midnight and rummaged through the kitchen for crap to eat. M&M’s with peanuts. Somehow that was funny: I was laughing. Dora Wozack said, ‘My son’s troubled,’ or maybe, ‘My son’s trouble.’ It could have been ‘in trouble.’”

  “You’ve got to get out of the house,” Stetson told her.

  “I am,” she said. “I do,” she said. “But why should I?” Their mother’s mother lived in a wet cottage that smelled of cheese; she rarely left it, which accounted for the smell or so their mother thought. And their mother?—she never went beyond the cactus garden in the desert house, whereas they had gone far and wide. More than once, Stetson and Mimi had wandered into the cholla forest and played at being lost.

  “I got us out of the desert,” Mimi said.

  “That time the police came to the door?” Stetson asked though he knew the answer already—they had come for Sabine Agard, dead at thirty-nine. And Mimi had nothing to do with that greasy guy with the rubber nose and clown shoes, impatient, bored, come to make them laugh on Mother’s birthday, last birthday. Their father sent the comedian.

  The man who came to their mother’s house with the pool hose and sucked up the dead squirrels was expected.

  “He used a net, Mimi!”

  “Really?”

  But their father that time was a surprise. He came to the house when the sky was an uplifting blue. He came with a gift of jewel-shoes so minuscule their mother’s glass foot just fit them. Then the breakage at night: glasses, plates, windows, bottles of expensive perfume. Pure Hollywood! In the morning, he was gone, and not long after, their mother, forever.

  Mimi said. “Let’s find another topic, please.”

  He rapped his knuckles against his forehead. “Okay,” he said. “I remember where I am now,” and he stood up, rocked his shoulders, leaned back, stretched.

  Just to watch him felt good, and then she was tugged by the hand off the couch and taking small steps after her brother out of the shed and into the just-right night of Los Angeles in …? Let’s say it was May in the first decade of the hardly promising twenty-first century, and a white stucco wall, corsaged in bougainvillea and lit up by the moon, enticed them downhill a long way past gated properties to a wider road, then down that road and across it on the other side to the lookout onto the sparkle that was the city and what lay before them at the liftoff of another beginning, which feeling they would experience again, until decades shrank to pieces of colored stone, mosaics unexpected and unfitted yet shellacked together and made to glow alike in recollection so that all she had known of love and the end of love could be summoned and summed up in a ceiling pinked in sulfurous light.

  The Hedges

  The woman who had just been identified as attached to Dick Hedge looked pained by the clotted, green sound of her little boy’s breathing, an unwell honk that did not blend in with the sashaying plants and beachy-wet breeze of the island. “Jonathan,” she said, and she spoke into the little boy’s ear and made sounds to soothe him, though he would not be soothed. The little boy twisted in her arms to be released. He leaned as far back and away from her as he could, which the mother said hurt. “Don’t!” she said. “I can’t hold you. Jonathan!” She said, “Will you please hold still?” Luckily for her, she had a husband. Dick Hedge helped his wife into the waiting golf cart, then took his place on the other side of Jonathan who, surprised or tired, sat very still for the ride.

  Probably, they did not want to miss the sunset, for they were not long in their cabana. Of course, Lolly Hedge had seen plenty of these sunsets before; she had been to many islands actually. Aruba, Curaçao, Saint John, Saint Thomas, Saint Croix, Little Cayman. Her uncle owned a lot of land in Little Cayman, so the vacation there had been the best trip of them all; like visiting the family compound—everything was free. The best trip, yes. “Except for this one,” she said in an obligatory voice or a sad voice or a tired voice—it was hard for anyone listening in to tell. The voice—small, but husky—how to describe it? Lolly’s voice was Lolly’s most distinguished feature. The woman in front of her smiled, beguiled (no doubt by the voice), and told Lolly that the black beans were very piquant and that she, Lolly, should try them. Dick stood just behind his wife holding Jonathan and explaining the food to the boy although the difference between pineapple and mango did not seem to interest Jonathan. Besides, the poor little chap was on this pink medicine, this viscid antibiotic that he often gagged on and which left him sleepy and without an appetite. “Jonathan has been sick for weeks,” Lolly said to the woman in front of her. “One of the reasons we decided to come here was to get well.”

  Lolly was right about the medicine’s irritating side effects; Jonathan fussed at dinner and could be mollified only with apple juice, which he drank in a sore slump in the corner of a basket seat. Sometimes Jonathan wagged the bottle by the nipple held between his teeth. He watched his father eat, but whenever he looked at his mother, he whimpered. “Jonathan,” she said, sounding exhausted again or sad. “Jonathan, please. Let Mommy be.”

  The Hedges did not stay for dessert. By then, the sun had set, and the night sky’s show was blinking on quickly. A greater darkness amid the foliage squeaked notes, very pretty. In his father’s arms again, Jonathan cried and leaned out toward his mother to carry him, but the way was too steep. Lolly did not look at the boy, and she did not speak to him. His father, carrying him, was silent while Jonathan cried against Dick’s shoulder and looked back at his trailing mother and never once looked to the nest of cabanas where they were going up and up a hillside of jutting verandas in thin shrubbery.

  Lolly must have cribbed the boy in pillows on the bed and slept to one side of him because the next morning Dick was at the front desk arranging for the rental of a crib; there were no other children in sight, and the hotel was not prepared for them.

  “At the beach,” the concierge said. “Everybody.”

  Yes, yes, yes, Dick had a wife already there. She was watching from under the palms as her little boy threw sand. Sand gritted his mouth and his bubbly nose. Even the juice in his bottle looked silted. “I give up,” Lolly said to her husband, but her husband walked right past her toward Jonathan, making noises of surprise to see him. Dick dropped on his knees in front of the boy and used the long hem of his shirt to clean Jonathan’s face, saying, “Hold still,” but the boy kept tossing his head until what his father was doing hurt Jonathan, and he cried.

  “Oh, God!” The parents sighed to see Jonathan crab his way to the water.

  “Oh, God.” This time it was Lolly speaking. “Damn it, Dick—” and she made as if to lift
herself out of the web chair as Dick hopped over the already hot sand toward Jonathan.

  “Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch,” he clowned, and when he caught up to Jonathan he urged the little boy toward the water, but Jonathan did not want to get wet now and held back, frightened. “I’m going,” his father said; nevertheless, when he let go of Jonathan’s hand, the little boy cried out, “No!” His voice carried, or so it seemed to his mother as she looked down the beach to where the other early risers lay, and Lolly thought she saw them grimace in her direction. “Dick,” she called, “carry him.”

  Dick reacted slowly and calmly or it might have been that he was simply tired, but he did not rush. He tossed his shirt in the direction of his wife and picked up the crying child and carried him into the water, taking care to keep Jonathan out of the water, putting his own wet hands on the boy’s knees and moving his mouth against the boy’s face and trying, it seemed, very patiently trying, to get the boy used to it, but Jonathan kept whimpering and holding out his arms for his mother, so Dick said, “All right,” and he plunged with the boy into the unfurling wave. He paddled backward into the foam. “Oh!” Any one of them said that. “Oh!” Dick was laughing and his wife was scolding from afar, “What are you …” and the little boy was crying and coughing up water.

  “It’s too cold, Dick!” Lolly stood in the water now with her arms outstretched. “Give him to me.” But Dick kept hold of the little boy and bobbed and laughed and seemed smoothly confident he could jolly his son into ease. Lolly, at the shore, kept calling, “Mommy’s going to get you,” and when she did at last take hold of Jonathan, the small cage of bones that was his chest heaved, so that his mother held him closely and let the boy use her as a bib to rub himself warm against and to clean his face of slaver.

  “Someone will be tired,” Lolly said as they walked off the beach, but in the end Jonathan’s vexations did not make him tired. No mid-morning nap for this boy and not much of a nap after lunch. Usually the medicine made him sleepy, but on their first day at the resort Jonathan stood in the rickety crib the management had found for the family and shook its bars. That was how Lolly described the rout of naptime. She had tried to go on reading on the terrace. She did not look behind her at the swelling curtains; she did not respond to the tuneless xylophone of his bottle banged against the crib slats. Let him rattle, let him cry. Who was there near enough to hear him? They were farther up the mountain in a suite more exclusively pitched. Of course they had paid more. But who wanted to know how much more? They didn’t have the most expensive. They didn’t have the version with the private lap pool. But the cost of things did not interest Lolly. What she wanted to know was how long did motherhood last? After the noisy beginning of his nap, Jonathan had plumped down onto the mattress. He was making little bubble sounds, and it seemed he was falling asleep, so. So? What was it that made him stand up and cry?