All Is Vanity (34 page)

Originally, I thought Ramon and I would do the landscaping work ourselves. (Of course, I couldn’t fire Ramon. He’s very excited about the plans, by the way, and has excellent ideas about where to place plants. He does know the yard intimately—its patterns of light and shade, dryness and comparative damp—and claims the former owners stifled his creativity.) But what with the hill and the hole, it just seemed like too much. Building a hill involves equipment. And it should be done right. And, as you say, we want to be able to enjoy the space in our lifetime
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At the moment, there is much lifting and shifting of dirt with back-hoes or front-end loaders, or whatever those large, loud, usually yellow pieces of equipment are called. This activity seems to my eye as aimless and make-worky as the stuff you see a road crew doing, but is, according to Hazel (the landscape architect), actual hill-building work. She says
when it’s done, we’ll put in drought-resistant plantings to heighten the “oasis effect.” She also wants us to build a garden wall to suggest secret spaces in Marrakech or Babylon, along which we’ll plant the ten fruit trees we’ve already purchased. We thought of doing four, one per child, but that seemed to be asking for trouble. What if one didn’t take? And then, when we got to the nursery, those little saplings looked, well, so little. I mean, they won’t bear fruit for years! So what’s the point? Again, this is when we’re living here; this is when the kids are young and should be able to enjoy picking the fruit—I don’t want Ivy coming back from college to harvest her first lemon—so we decided to go with bigger ones, practically full-grown trees. This way we can also take advantage of the fact that we have three guys with hole-digging equipment hanging around our yard all day eating our taco chips
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We’ve also ordered twenty-four-inch terra-cotta squares for the patio from a family of potters in Guadalajara, who promise to make them all slightly irregular to emphasize that they are hand-formed. They should arrive by mid-August, in plenty of time to be installed by Labor Day, if we put in floodlights and pay overtime for night labor. The neighbors, of course, will have to be plied with expensive champagne, given free parking passes for the Otis, and invited to the party
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Long discussion yesterday on how said party will be funded. Even though Michael could get museum money for it—it’s for museum people, after all, and for people museum people want to entertain and impress—we’re leaning toward being more classy by just putting the whole thing on ourselves. As you say, it would be sort of an investment in good feeling. I wouldn’t do anything too complicated—finger foods, a nice wine, that kind of thing. It’s going to be outdoors, after all
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Speaking of parties, can you believe $600 to attend a benefit dinner for Marlo’s school? Well, we could get in for $300 a couple, but that
wouldn’t put us on the “patrons list,” which will be printed in the program. We have to be on the list, don’t we? I mean, we don’t want people to think our daughter’s education isn’t important to us. Especially, since, as Michael pointed out, a lot of the other parents will know we’re putting all this money into the house right now. Anyway, it is important to us. Otherwise, why would we be spending so much money to send her to school?

L

I gave all of Letty’s landscaping and terracing to Lexie, whose landscape designer is named Hazel Nutley. I thought this a clever, Dickensian touch. I also gave her a little Moroccan-tile fountain to cover the traffic noise, nearly ubiquitous in Los Angeles.

M
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No, you’re absolutely right. No point in getting second-rate or even aesthetically unpleasing appliances when we’re spending 99% of our waking hours in the kitchen. Not to mention the energy efficiency of the better models. I think we’ll go with the German dishwasher. Also, a fountain! What a great idea! Thank you!

L

Margaret asked a lot of questions about the house. She wanted to know every detail of my plans. I thought she was just being nice, a real friend, expressing an interest in my concerns, although her interest seemed at times to encourage what I considered my baser,
or at least my more frivolous, instincts. Did we really need, for instance, to outfit our bathroom with antique-like porcelain fixtures?

Margaret had always been different from everyone else, but no longer. Now her voice seemed to join a chorus that resonated exhilaratingly through me. At the same time, however, I found myself more than once uneasily recalling a passage from
Confessions
I’d translated years before. It seemed that to Westwood I had come, where there sang all around me a cauldron of unholy loves.

And yet, even fixtures that looked like they belonged in a cheap motel cost far more than we wanted to spend, so it was not so hard to justify investing more in something we really liked. After all, as Margaret reminded me, this house would be the place our grown children would remember when they looked back on our lives as a family.

“Margaret!”

“Letty?” For an instant, I had the disconcerting feeling that I was talking to my character, rather than my friend. It was six-thirty in the morning, extremely early for a call from the West Coast. Early even for a call from the East Coast. I’d had to scramble out of bed for it. There was a breathy sound on the other end of the line.

“Letty, what’s wrong? Are you kidnapped?” I’d been woken from a sound sleep.

“No! I’m trying …” The phone dropped to the floor. “Oh, crumb!” It was certainly Letty. It would not occur to anyone else I knew to say “crumb.”

“Letty, what’s going on?”

“It’s all right now,” she said in a more normal, although still quiet voice. “I’m in the addition. It’s just really dark over here.”

I could not imagine any scenario other than an ax murderer in the main part of the house that would force her into the addition at three-thirty in the morning. I was now standing at the kitchen sink, inexplicably turning the tap on and off in my nervousness. “Should I call the police?”

“The police? No. Why?”

“Why are you in the addition?!”

“I really don’t want Michael to hear this.”

Disgustingly, a tiny part of me thrilled to the idea that as soon as I could get the computer turned on Lexie would be having an affair.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“It’s terrible. Really, really, terrible. I don’t know what to do.”

I waited quietly.

“Are you there?”

“Yes! Tell me what’s going on!”

“I found the folder with the lists yesterday.”

“Lists?”

“You know, what’s in which box.”

“Oh,” I said, “great.” I glanced through the bedroom door at Ted sleeping undisturbed beside the mass of comforter and smashed pillow that marked where I had been. I was overwhelmed suddenly with a sense of loneliness so powerful it brought tears to my eyes.

“Margaret.” The urgency in Letty’s voice made me forget myself and return to her. “Along with the lists, there were bills.” She said this as if it were a wondrous event. “I guess I put them in there when we were moving and forgot about them.” She stopped, breathed
deeply, and went on. “There are others, too. I keep finding these piles of paper and envelopes—some of them aren’t even opened! There was a bunch in a box of videotapes, and there are some at the bottom of my purse. And last night, when I went to call my cousin Jane for her birthday, I found three major credit card statements in my address book. Honestly, I don’t remember ever seeing half of these before. I mean, I knew about the ones in my purse—at least I know I kept dropping them in there, thinking I’d look at them later—but these others … it’s like they’re self-generating. I’m afraid to keep opening boxes. There might be more.”

“Where were they in the address book?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Which letter were they under?”

“They weren’t under any letter. They were inside the front cover. What difference does it make?”

“I was just,” I faltered, “wondering if you’d put them under ‘B’ for bills.” Why had I asked this? Was I fishing for details, trying to find out how to write the scene in which Lexie discovered her misplaced and forgotten bills so that it would read as if it were truly happening? I shook my head, trying to push Lexie out of it, to concentrate on my real friend.

“Letty,” I said, “I really can’t believe this is so bad. So you’re a little late with a couple payments.”

“I’m not worried about being late with payments. I’ve been late with payments a lot; believe me, I know it’s not the end of the world. In fact, after you pay the penalty, they usually just give you more credit. But this …” She groaned.

“Breathe slowly,” I said. Letty had had a habit of hyperventilating when we were young. I’d carried a folded paper lunch bag in my back pocket just in case.

“I can’t even make myself add these up. I started and then, honestly, I thought there was something wrong with the calculator, the numbers got so high, so fast. I thought I was going to pass out. I just pushed them all under the futon.”

“But I don’t understand how this could have happened.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t understand it either. I mean, Michael is making so much now that we should be able to live like … well, at least like Zoe and Brad! I’m wondering if I forgot to deposit some checks or something. This just doesn’t make any sense to me.” Before I could respond, she went on.

“If only Duncan would hurry up and raise Michael’s salary like he promised. I keep telling Michael he should ask about that, but he doesn’t want to seem pushy or ungrateful for what he’s already gotten from the museum. I can understand that.” She sighed. “You know, when I couldn’t sleep I wrote down everything we’ve bought this year; everything I could remember, anyway. It’s kind of disgusting—the sheer quantity of material goods. But, really, it’s just the standard stuff everybody else has. We didn’t even have cable until this year. It’s not like we put in a home theater.”

“At least you didn’t buy a DVD player.”

“We did, though.” She laughed, a small, pitiful sound. “I just haven’t unpacked it yet. In fact, I’m not sure where it is right now.”

Again, looking back, I would not be honest if I didn’t admit that I saw, with at least one of my eyes, and certainly with my heart, exactly what should be done at this juncture. Scissor blades should bite firmly into plastic, the octagonal table should skedaddle back to the showroom, the best should be made of the really quite decent Westwood public school system, perhaps with the help of a supplemental reading list I could supply. With my other
eye, however, I gazed at the growing pile of pages beside my laptop. The increased tension of Letty’s (soon to be Lexie’s) situation seemed almost to make them quiver. What harm could it do to go a little further? In a few weeks, Michael’s salary would rise and would cover the most pressing bills. Why could Letty not endure a little discomfort, perhaps dodge a few creditors’ calls, and so continue to feed my novel until then?

Still, even once Michael’s salary was refreshed, it was clear to me, the spouse of one who recorded even the purchase of chewing gum, that the MacMillans would continue to be in debt. As a trusted and consistently bossy friend, I should, I knew, eschew self-interest and urge frugality and a sweeping reevaluation of priorities. The previous year, before my grasp had fallen short of my reach so often that I had become fearful of holding out my hand, back when I was a person of infinite resources and possibility, I would certainly have done so.

But now the novel whose title I’d just amended to
The Rise and Fall of Lexie Langtree Smith
was the only chance I had to save myself. Did I have to give that up, just because Letty and Michael didn’t know how to manage their money? It was too much to ask.

I began anew. “Look, Letty,” I said reassuringly, “this is not the end of the world. So you have to pay interest for a while. These are special circumstances. You’ve just bought a new house; you’re going to have to accept some debt.”

“I can’t even pay all the minimum balances. We have twelve credit cards.”

“Twelve!” This shocked even Lexie.

“Or fourteen. There might be some in my other purse, although I’m not sure how much I’ve used them. And that’s not counting
credit lines at individual stores.” Fourteen credit cards. I wrote the number on my legal pad.

“I suppose I could return some things,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Maybe some patio furniture. Michael just found two chaises very reasonably priced in this sort of retro/modern place on La Brea. You have to see them. They’re Italian with a brushed metal finish on the frame and these gorgeous colored bands—pinks and oranges and lime green. And they’re super light. Ivy could fold them up and carry them off. And there’s teak stuff, too. Armchairs and little cocktail tables.”

I hesitated; the sense that I was betraying Letty squeezed my throat closed. I swallowed. “But what about your party?”

“Party?”

“The museum party. Labor Day. What are people going to sit on?”