All Is Vanity (21 page)

“A foyer,” Letty breathed into my ear, as we stepped into the coolness. The house had been shut against the sun, and Peri flitted around, roughly tugging open the Roman shades.

Tiny gray veins and sketchy corners had been painted on the rose-tinted entryway walls to suggest marble blocks. To the left was the living room, really too small and with a ceiling too low to do justice to the two squat columns that had been erected with artistic randomness in the space.

I kissed Ivy’s soft head to keep from smiling, but kept my eyes on Letty, waiting for a private moment, when we could exchange
sardonic glances. Who could possibly want this house? But Letty was trying to fold back a corner of white carpeting with the toe of her sneaker. “Do you know what kind of flooring is under here?” she asked.

Peri frowned and flipped the pages of her specification sheets. “I’ll ask,” she said. Skillfully, she drew our attention to the French doors that opened onto a tiny side patio, draped in pink bougainvillea and furnished with an iron bistro table and two chairs. “Isn’t this precious? I would have my coffee out here every day. You know, after the kids have left for school, when the house is quiet?”

Letty had been encouraging the bougainvillea in her yard for years, but the dogs kept digging it up.

We passed back through the living room into an awkward, poky room on the other side of the entry. “Formal dining room,” Peri said, “and then here,” she announced, with a grand, Carol Merrill sweep of the arm, “is the kitchen. Completely renovated.”

The kitchen, with its shiny black counters and shiny black floor, resembled the lobby of the Daniel Hotel. Letty opened an oven door. “Double ovens,” Peri said. “And, of course, the Sub-Zero and the Miele are included.”

Ivy pressed a sticky palm against the refrigerator door. Her fingers made a squeaky sound as I pulled her hand away.

“What’s a mee-lee?” I whispered in her ear and she laughed at the feel of my breath.

“This kitchen can almost cook for you,” Peri said. “And look, around here is a breakfast nook.”

I scrubbed at Ivy’s prints with my shirtsleeve, but they only smeared.

Letty tapped an experimental finger on the door between the
kitchen and the laundry room. Finally, she looked at me. “Hollow,” she mouthed.

I felt more relaxed then as we went upstairs and tried not to look too closely at the wedding photos of the strangers who, presumably, had only hours before dragged themselves out from under the chocolate brown duvet in the dark master suite. Letty exclaimed over the double sink and the Jacuzzi tub and the slate-walled shower, but I knew she was only being polite.

“You have to see the grounds,” Peri said, herding us down the stairs. She ushered us along a back hall and out the door into what was, as I’d suspected, only a yard. “Great possibilities, don’t you think? I’d put a terra-cotta patio here,” she said, pacing the area directly behind the house. “And then … well, I don’t know how you feel about pools.” She looked expectantly at Letty.

“A pool would be nice,” Letty admitted.

“I have to warn you, it can be a detriment when it comes to resale. But I say, why live in southern California if you don’t have a pool? I had one put in and use it every day. Sometimes twice. I figure it’s already paid for itself, since I don’t have to keep up a gym membership anymore. Of course, we still belong to the club, but that’s more for social reasons and the tennis. Plus, we’d already paid the initiation fee, which is really the killer, isn’t it?” She looked at us as if we understood.

“That’s how they get you,” I ventured, which turned out to be an appropriate response, because she lifted her eyebrows and nodded.

Even I could imagine the “grounds” as Peri saw them: the four children, plus a friend or two, frolicking wholesomely in the water, the littlest ones encircled in life rings or water wings, or whatever floating aid children used now; multiethnic adults, freshly showered, stylishly attired, the women pedicured, the men in sandals, all spread
on lounge chairs beside the gas barbecue and sipping from sweating highball glasses in fun, garish colors. If one had a pool, one would have the kind of friends who knew how to choose wines and grill swordfish.

My father understood neither. “Who invented fire?” he grumbled from the concrete strip that stretched between the back door and the garage, while he pumped a miniature set of bellows ineffectually over the coals. “It was a bad idea.”

Inside the house, my father was content to sit before the ubiquitous southern California gas-fed fire that spurted festively around a ceramic log at varying heights in response to the turn of a dimmer switch, but when cooking outside, he believed it was important to use “real coals.” “Otherwise, what’s the point?” he would say. Of course, in his quest for authenticity and mesquite flavor, he often failed to make food edible, which some might argue was the larger point.

I was chopping garlic, waiting for the first possible moment when Ted and I could leave for Burbank to pick Warren up at the airport.

“Honey, are you sure you want to waste time with that chopping? I’ve got the powdered stuff somewhere in here.” My mother, who was enamored of time-saving substitutions, began rummaging through the junk drawer that also served as her spice cabinet.

In the far corner of the kitchen, Ted was scuffling with the blender. My parents, apparently needing to define Ted for themselves in reassuring ways, had years ago arbitrarily decided that he knew how to mix drinks. He may once have offered to open a bottle of wine.

“What are you making?” I asked.

“Something your mother found in a magazine.” He slid a
soggy
McCall’s
toward me along the counter with one elbow. Ted was always embarrassed to call my mother’s discoveries, which usually included ingredients like grenadine and coconut cream, by their names. “When did you say Warren was coming?”

When Warren arrived, we would outnumber them.

“We’re off to get Warren,” I said, holding the screen door open for Ted with my back. My parents had dragged the plastic patio chairs over to the grill and were both just sitting, staring at the flames, as if the driveway were a ski lodge.

“Mmmm, thank you.” My mother reached for the pink-filled glass Ted held out to her. “Isn’t it early yet? Why don’t you two have one of these?”

“You try them,” I said. “If you’re still alive when we get back, we’ll have another with you.” I set the guacamole I’d made on the arm of my mother’s chair and a basket of tortilla chips on the arm of my father’s. “Isn’t there something about a watched grill?”

“That’s only pots,” my father answered, taking a tentative sip from his glass.

“We thought we’d take a little drive first,” Ted said. “Take a look at downtown Glendale and Burbank. See if there’s anything new.”

My parents nodded and smiled. They’d also decided that Ted adored driving. “Take the Skylark,” my father said, shifting in his chair to dig the keys from his pocket. “It’s zippy.”

We drove aimlessly for a while, picking out houses we’d like for ourselves. I told Ted about the places Letty and I had once constructed out of cardboard boxes and filled with cardboard furniture.

“We made half-inch boxes of Kleenex,” I said, “with little Kleenexes inside. And tiny rolls of toilet paper. When Letty’s parents were building a guest room over their garage, we also tried to
make miniature furniture out of scraps of wood. I probably spent three weeks filing away at one chair leg, trying to make it perfect.”

“How did the chair turn out?”

“All right,” I said. “A little wobbly. It was a Louis XIV. I upholstered it with blue polyester from the hem of my mother’s bathrobe.” I looked out the window at the ficus trees with their huge, sidewalk-buckling roots. I’d never lied to Ted like that before. Yes, I’d told him I was making progress on days when I’d not even opened the computer, but that wasn’t lying so much as reassuring. On other days, the book was truly moving forward, and my subconscious, I reasoned, was constantly refining it. Those were vague, indeterminate lies. What did “going all right” mean, after all? Maybe it
was
“going all right”; maybe this halting slog was the way all novels got written. But I’d never finished that chair.

Neither of us had. We’d sat on Letty’s back stoop day after day, filing and sanding, sometimes making tiny nicks with a saw, each working away at a single, two-inch leg. We talked the whole time, of course, about other things, about kids in our class and episodes of
The Partridge Family
. We had fun. But we couldn’t make those chairs. Somehow, that summer, we’d become too old for the suggestion of reality that would have satisfied us before. We were using real materials, after all, real wood and real tools, not cardboard and tape. It had to be right. It had to look real, and try as we would, we were not skilled enough for that.

What scared me now was remembering how well I’d envisioned that chair when I’d held the stump of wood in my hands. I’d imagined, in fact, whole roomfuls of furniture fashioned from those plywood bits. Nevertheless, I hadn’t been able to make them appear. Thinking of that chair, I realized I’d believed that I could fashion a novel, too, simply because I could envision its existence.
But like my chair, though I whittled and sanded and scraped, the novel refused to chut. Scenes that were fluid and vibrant in my head clunked stolidly on the page. And just as Letty and I would have had no idea how to attach the legs to a base and the base to a back, had we ever constructed such essential chair elements, I now had no notion of how to attach bits of story together, even were I able to write them in any way close to the way I experienced them in my mind.

I doubt Ted would have drawn such a connection. But I felt a new reluctance to admit even to trivial failure, even with him. Serious failure seemed all too close at hand.

“Let’s go to the airport,” I said. “We might as well meet Warren at the gate.” And so we drove on with a purpose, which in itself made me feel somewhat more optimistic. Perhaps I was too close to the novel. When we returned to New York, after I had stood back from it and gained some perspective, it would go better.

It was easy enough to push the novel from my own mind, but harder to steer my family from it.

Warren always sat in the back because traffic made him nervous. “So how’s the book coming?” he asked, leaning into the space created by the elbow rest between the two front seats. We weren’t even out of the parking lot yet. “Are you about halfway done now?”

“In a sense,” I said.

“Because you said you’d be done in a year,” he pressed on. “So I figure you should be about halfway done now, give or take a few chapters.”

“Give or take a few chapters.” This may have been true, if you
counted notes and vague plans and general intentions. It was certainly not true, if you counted pages. “Why didn’t Missy come down?” I countered, turning on my brother in a manner more reminiscent of a cornered rat than a wounded gazelle.

Missy had been Warren’s girlfriend for nine years. It was unclear which of them was in charge of permanently postponing marriage, but their relationship was one of the few areas in Warren’s life akin to an unfinished novel. Otherwise, he had exhibited extraordinary life-planning skills, the various aspects of which my parents rolled in like dogs in manure. But who could blame them for being proud? I, too, was proud of my brother’s galling success. If we’d ever had any extra money, I would without hesitation have given it to my little brother to invest.

Warren, unlike Brooke, had become an investment banker, not only that, but he did so purely because the market fascinated him. He might have become an economics professor, but he modestly claimed he was not smart enough, so he was instead well on his way toward becoming inconceivably rich as a portfolio manager in a small San Francisco firm.

“Nice work with those midcap funds,” my father said, pouring wine—opened by Ted—into Warrens glass. He often spoke as if his close connection with Warren made him an expert on the market, as well, even though before my brother had this job, my parents both used the word “portfolio” only to refer to two-pocket folders made of stiff, colored paper.

“Mmm, yeah, I think we might sell,” Warren said, mounding his mashed potatoes along the rim of his plate away from the fish. Warren didn’t like his foods to touch one another. He looked worriedly at the rivulets of chutney, which refused to be contained.

“Really?” my father said.

“Al, if he wants to sell, let him sell. Warren knows what he’s doing,” my mother said.

“I know he knows what he’s doing. Hasn’t he quadrupled our portfolio in five years? And that Genslen you had us buy. Whoo-ee!”

“What is that?” I asked. “My friend Brooke was talking about it, too.”

“Oh, it’s a biotech stock,” Warren said. “The product’s done really well in clinical trials so far and it’s got potential, if they can get it on the market.”

“It’s a fat pill!” my father announced gleefully. “It’s going to sell like hotcakes!”

“The thing is they’re not targeting it just toward the morbidly obese. Doctors could prescribe this to almost anyone who wants to drop a few pounds, so the market should be sizable,” Warren said. He looked up from his plate to see if any of us had registered his joke.