“If enough of us speak out, maybe we can stop them. There are lots of us, believe me. I’ll call you soon.”
“Great,” I agreed. Anyway, I was too tired to do anything else. The process of transforming me from worm to butterfly (or maybe just an exalted moth) had taken about six and a half hours, and I was too exhausted to take my new face and hair any place but home to bed. Luckily the kids were with Steve’s parents that weekend, so I wouldn’t have to face their exacting scrutiny. I was stricken by the thought of washing off two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of makeup before anyone other than Eleanor could see it, but I didn’t think that stopping off at the deli to pick up a dinner salad exactly qualified as a grand unveiling.
Eleanor was fishing in her purse for the keys to her Land Cruiser. She looked up. “Maybe we could have lunch some time.”
“Sure,” I said, trying not to sound too encouraging. A moment later, a wave of guilt swept over me. She must be very lonely. I didn’t have to ask myself how I knew that.
We stepped out into the street. It was a typical La Jolla summer night, which meant that the fog was already coming in. I smiled. “That would be nice,” I said more heartily. I touched her arm. “Eleanor?”
“Yes?”
“You really do look fantastic.”
“Thanks.” She gave me a tiny wave and opened the car door. I shivered a little in the damp air. “I’ll be in touch,” she said.
I never saw her again.
2
One of the things I was going to have to figure out was how to transform myself into a career woman at the age of forty. It was true enough, as Eleanor had said, that I was a writer, but I was hardly one of the approximately eleven people nationwide who make a real living that way. I was a few steps beyond all those guests at cocktail parties who, José Cuervo Gold in hand and gazing mistily out over the Pacific, would tell you that they were thinking of writing a book, if only they could find the time. Actually, most people in La Jolla, if they weren’t living off their trust funds, were probably connected to real estate in some fashion or other, but they all seemed to fantasize about being writers. Now that the boom had gone bust in California, their dreams of retiring to the garret with the PC would apparently have to be deferred.
My own modest output consisted of some travel articles, a novel about Henry VIII, a sequel on Elizabeth I, and a couple of Regency romances. These last, written under a pseudonym, fell into the category of guilty pleasures. All that passion suppressed and restrained under a cloak of propriety and elevated language is an acquired taste. You either get off on sentences like “Time had done more to expand her waistline than her horizons” or you don’t. I had always thought Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy generated a lot of wattage beneath all those elegant manners, but perfectly intelligent people have found Pride and Prejudice dull because nothing happens in it.
The trouble is, even if you concede the pleasure of that kind of writing, there isn’t any money in it. And it’s not like you’re really writing literary masterpieces that everyone will still be reading in fifty years, either. On the other hand, you can’t quietly chuckle and say you’ve “sold out” for commercial reasons, since a less commercial sort of genre doesn’t exist. Mostly you just don’t say anything.
All this was all right, or even better than all right, when we were living on Steve’s income. My schedule was “flexible,” I was home a lot with Jason and Megan, and I was available at a moment’s notice for whipping up a dinner party or spending a weekend in the Napa Valley. Besides, the historical novels got good reviews—though no one read those, either—and people in the firm dutifully went down to Windsor’s bookstore during the books’ (more or less) three-week shelf life and purchased a copy. Steve even found it rather charming, though not, of course, significant. His income paid for the trips that made the research and the travel articles possible, and whatever I earned from my writing I could keep for myself.
With a divorce in the offing, however, the charm had worn thin. Well, marriage keeps changing, too: One morning you wake up next to your husband and listen to his gentle snoring, and you think, “How precious!”; another time you can barely refrain from smothering him with the pillow. The problem with divorce is, it takes all the worst moments and carves them in stone. Nowadays, every conversation I had with my husband was about how I was going to make some “real” money to support myself and the kids. I would have an as-yet-unspecified settlement and a closet full of a wardrobe for occasions I no longer attended (clothes which, I now knew, were inappropriate anyway). What I didn’t have was a career.
Even so, I wasn’t about to make one out of taking on the legal establishment à la Eleanor Hampton. The box she had UPSed me waited like a coiled rattler next to my desk. It was brown and square, like an ordinary box, but I could almost feel the venom oozing from it. So far I lacked the courage either to open it or just throw it away.
“Oh, Missy James, what about that box?” Maria, the maid, asked me when it had lain bristling and defiant in its spot for two weeks. Dust refused to settle on it, but it offended Maria’s sense of order. I hadn’t yet had the courage to tell her that soon I would no longer be able to afford domestic help, but she had been so fierce in her attacks on the house’s apparent squalor that she must have figured it out.
She had been coming once a week since the children were little, and she supported a mother and two sisters in a village near Oaxaca. Her husband had disappeared into el Norte some years before she crossed the border to join him. As far as I know, she had never found him, and she didn’t like to talk about it. Steve and I had hoped that Jason and Megan would learn Spanish from her, and they did—until the day they figured out, despite our best egalitarian efforts, that Spanish was “Maria talk” and not the language of power and affluence. Mexico was only twenty minutes away, and the furthest they ever got was hamburguesa, por favor. Now I was going to be putting her family in jeopardy. Clearly I would have to find her another job, and soon.
“Just leave it,” I said, sighing. “Mrs. Hampton sent it over, and I haven’t had the chance to look at it yet.”
She rolled her eyes and shrugged. I knew what that meant. Maria’s cousin worked for Eleanor as a gardener, and the Hamptons did not enjoy their professional approval. Eleanor was messy. Eleanor yelled at the help. Eleanor swam in her pool in the nude and did not care if Manuel could see. Fortunately, Manuel was precluded from having to hear the story of the Hampton divorce by the fact that he couldn’t speak English. Whether or not he could really appreciate the extent of this extraordinary good fortune, I didn’t know.
The box was still unopened a few days later when my neighbor, Rob Holland, knocked at the door. My son, Jason, 16, had just prepared a postprandial snack of gargantuan proportions and taken it up to his room to eat while he finished Catcher in the Rye. It was one of the few books he had really enjoyed reading at school, especially because he had heard from last year’s juniors that the word “fuck” appeared at least six times. Now he was apparently busy making sure he didn’t miss a single occurrence. One day he would probably be able to turn it into a master’s thesis.
Megan, 14, and the real student of the two, was at a soccer game. Typical La Jolla school night.
Rob was not exactly grinning, but he wore an enigmatic smile. “Have you heard the news?”
“Apparently not,” I said, opening the door wider so he could come in. Rob was discreetly gay, very smart, and an inveterate gossip. His lover was a younger stepbrother acquired when his mother married for the third time. Rob had made a minor pile in real estate and was a shade unscrupulous, but he was very amusing.
“Guess who turned up dead this afternoon?” he asked cheerfully, settling himself on my living room couch.
Melmoth, the cat, eyed his Dockers and the silk couch with equal longing, assessing the risk, and finally compromised on a safer position at Rob’s feet.
“Jesse Helms,” I ventured.
He snickered. “No such luck.
Try a little closer to home. Eleanor Hampton.”
I set down the coffee cup I had been holding with a clatter. “What?”
“The very same. The Lilith of La Jolla popped a few too many pills with a bottle of Bâtard-Montrachet ’85 and drowned in her hot tub. Kenny”—Rob’s lover and a San Diego policeman—“said Barclay’s housekeeper was bringing their boys back to Eleanor’s this afternoon and found the body then.”
“How—how terrible,” I managed to croak, trying to take it all in.
“Yes, I gather it wasn’t a very pretty sight. She’d been in there the whole night, apparently. All that boiled and mottled flesh, and not a stitch on to cover it. Why Eleanor of all people should have felt it appropriate to disport in the nude, I can’t imagine. It shows the most dreadful lack of foresight.”
“Kenny seems to have been remarkably forthcoming about the details,” I remarked.
He grinned. “It made a big impression,” he said. “And anyway, I have my ways of making him talk. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t supposed to divulge the particulars, like what kind of wine she was drinking or that she had left a pair of those hideous hairy pink bedroom slippers right by the edge of the tub, so don’t spread it around.” He bent down and ran his hand along Melmoth’s chin, which vibrated with delight. “It’s funny,” he said meditatively, ruffling the cat’s fur. “I always pictured a really dramatic and bizarre ending for Eleanor. Like getting dorked by an amorous dolphin and drowning in the cetacean petting pool at Waikoloa. Or getting poisoned when she barbecued hot dogs on an oleander branch by mistake…”
“Rob!” I protested, a little shocked by his callousness.
“What?” He looked at me expectantly, sighed, and folded his arms. “Oh, you’re not going to turn hypocritical on me, are you? You know you disliked her as much as I did. The woman put me through the torments of Hell when she and Barclay were trying to sell their house.”
“You mean when Barclay was trying to sell it out from under her,” I reminded him. One of the things that most enraged Eleanor was Barclay’s attempt to get a “four-hour notice,” which, with court permission but against her will, would have forced her to accept a pending offer on the house. He’d failed, but Eleanor had never forgiven him for it and had withdrawn the house from the market altogether.
“Oh, come on, Caroline. I spent weeks, and I mean weeks, trying to find her a buyer at her price. I warned her she was asking too much, but you couldn’t tell her anything. When I finally found someone who came in just five thousand dollars below her asking price, she refused to even consider it. Five thousand dollars! That’s nothing! It was perfectly obvious that she did it just to annoy Barclay, and I don’t blame him a bit for trying to force the issue. That house was much too big for her, and it’s costing him a fortune in upkeep.”
“You sound like Steve,” I told him.
He made a face. “Don’t get paranoid. But don’t expect me to shed any tears over Eleanor Hampton, either. I would rather have had my nipple pierced with a safety pin—a rusty safety pin—than do any more deals with her. Maybe she was pathetic, but she was a vindictive harpy, and I’m not sorry she’s gone. And you didn’t like her, either, so don’t give me any lectures.”
I had to smile. “I won’t. But you’re not exactly unbiased. Real estate agents always say their clients are unreasonable if they won’t cut a deal. And anyway, I saw Eleanor lately, and I did feel sorry for her, in spite of everything. She seemed lonely.”
“So are vampires. Probably for the same reason.” He stood up, causing Melmoth to glance at him reproachfully. “I have to go. I just wanted to be the bearer of good tidings. It will probably be all over the papers tomorrow anyway: ‘La Jolla Bain-Marie Steams Socialite.’”
I bit my lip. “You’re awful,” I told him.
He put his arm around me. “I know,” he said sympathetically. “That reminds me. Let me at least partially redeem myself in your hypercritical eyes by making a suggestion.”
“I’m all attention,” I told him.
“You remember I told you about that investment course I’m taking at UCSD?” he asked.
“Not the one where they talk about being ‘wealth impaired’ and everybody sits around complaining about how hard it is to have all that money?”
He laughed. “Not that one, no. That was my mother. Anyway, that was a seminar, not a course. And believe it or not, there are some problems with having lots of money. You just don’t get any sympathy for them.”
“Apparently not,” I murmured. Rob’s mother was seriously impaired with old money. Her search for sympathy had so far necessitated the acquisition of four husbands, and number four was reputedly on shaky ground. Rob’s father, husband number one, was the CEO of an oil company, and he lived like a pasha courtesy of his shareholders. But living on somebody else’s money was not the same as having heaps of your own.
“Anyway, this is really a good course. We have a different speaker every week.”
“Rob—” I was about to tell him that Steve handled all our investments when I caught myself up short. I would have my own stocks and investments now, and I didn’t have a clue what to do with them. I didn’t much care for the idea of letting Steve continue to manage my money for me, but I wasn’t very comfortable with my own judgment either. I sighed.
“I want you to come with me next week. You don’t have to commit yourself or anything like that,” Rob said with amused understanding, “but if you’re interested, you could sign up for it next semester. Besides, the guy who’s speaking next week is a friend of my brother’s.”
“Kenny?” I asked incredulously.
“Certainly not,” he said with a smile. “My real brother—Ben—went to business school with this guy. His name’s David something or other, and he’s a short. You know what that means, don’t you?”
I nodded. “Sort of. They make money betting on the stock prices to go down, right? But Steve always said that was risky,” I added apologetically.
“It is risky. Everything’s risky nowadays. But Ben says this guy’s fund made money all through ninety-one, when all the other shorts took it on the chin. Anyway, there’s a lot more to it than that. Why don’t you just come and hear him talk? It won’t cost you anything, and you really ought to know more about this stuff. Besides, he’s supposed to be quite a hunk.”
I winced. “I hate that term. And I thought you were supposed to be happily monogamous.”
“That, my dear, is an oxymoron. Anyway, I don’t believe he’s of my persuasion. I was thinking of you.”
“Rob,” I said, horrified, “you’re not trying to fix me up?”
“Take it easy. Do I look like somebody’s maiden aunt? If I want to fix people up, I’ll get a turban and diamond earrings and advertise ‘Discreet Introductions’ in the La Jolla Light.”
“They wouldn’t take your ad,” I told him.
“The Union-Tribune, then. Whatever. There’s no point in going to all that trouble unless you’re going to make money at it. Look, I know the financial world isn’t your strong point, and I thought that if the guy looked good it might make the subject matter more attractive.”
“Stimulate the brain through the hormones, is that it?”
“It’s one of the proven tenets of learning theory,” he said smoothly. “And don’t look at me as if I’ve insinuated that you were some air-head cheerleader. If you don’t want me to introduce you to attractive, eligible men, I won’t. It’s your funeral. Speaking of which, I’ll be your date for Eleanor’s, if you don’t go with Steve.” I must have looked dubious, because he added, “I promise to wear deepest mourning and make only appropriately reverent remarks.”
“It isn’t that. I was thinking that under the circumstances, if I were the family I’d want a very private service.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Want to bet? Well, time will tell. You’ll probably hear before I do, so keep me informed. I don’t expect anyone will think to call me, so I’m relying on you.”
When he had gone, I stood for a moment studying my empty coffee cup for inspiration. Then I went into the kitchen and accelerated as I headed toward the phone, which was, wonder of wonders, apparently unoccupied. As I reached for it, I almost collided with Megan, who was coming in the back door clutching a bundle of her soccer clothes. It was a warm night, and her hair was spiky and damp with sweat. “Good practice?” I asked her, simultaneously leaning out the door to wave a greeting at Janine Carson, whose Ford Explorer was backing out of our driveway. The soccer moms’ carpool required an organizational structure NASA might have envied, and it was utterly reliable. The full-page schedule was posted on the bulletin board by the phone.
She shrugged. “Yeah, but we had to wait to use the field, so it took twice as long as it should have.”
Megan’s coach was a fanatic who kept the kids for hours after school, despite a number of parental protests. Only her genuine horror of my interference, and her promise that sports would not interfere with her schoolwork, kept me from pulling her off the team, but I was still appalled. “I’m beat,” she said wearily. “I think I’ll take a shower and go to bed.”
“Homework?” I queried, as gently as I could.
She gave me a long-suffering look of resignation. “I finished it before I left. I told you.”
“Just checking,” I said lightly. “Sleep well.”
“Susan,” I said when she had picked up the phone after a dozen rings, “when’s the funeral?”
Susan Goldman was my best friend, a transplanted New Yorker who managed Eastman, Bartels, and Steed’s paralegals and clerical staff. She regarded California and Californians with a New Yorker’s jaundiced eye, but she had moved here after a broken engagement and was determined to be a good sport. My separation from Steve occasionally put a strain on our relationship, but I still managed to talk to her at least once a week.
“I see you’ve heard the news,” she said, with just a trace of the outer boroughs remaining in her speech. She thought she sounded like a native Californian, an accent she described as “newscaster nasal.” She didn’t.
Making Waves Page 3
