All Is Vanity (44 page)

And that is the only way I can explain why I did not call Jeanette nor the museum to inform them that a large amount of money would in fact not be required until February 14. Instead, I took that money, as easily as I’d taken the previous sums. I wrote a check to the Commedia della Luna in erasable ink, and once Jeanette had signed it, I paid it to the order of me. Of course, I knew it was dishonest. The interest on that money belonged to the museum, or perhaps to Jeanette, if she could convince the museum to see it that way. That interest, however, was all I ever intended to deprive them of. I believed I had arranged for the museum to grant me only a short-term loan. Long before February 14, Margaret would have sent me her advance and I would replace the money as secretly as I’d taken it.

WE WERE SAVED
. As soon as I had deposited the check Jeanette had signed into my account, I began writing checks of my own. I’d brought the bills with me to the bank in a tidy sheaf, together with several books of stamps commemorating our nation’s wildflowers, and I stood at one of the little ledges with a pen attached and paid them. Our most frightful creditors—the bank, the schools, the utility companies—and those with faces—Hazel and Ramon and Mr. Nakasoni, the contractor, the dentist, the vet—I paid in full. I also paid the library (we’d lost books in the move). To the credit card companies, I threw sops to buy us another month. It was a relief just to touch the cool vinyl of the checkbook cover and know that I could open it, that I had recorded a figure in the register
from which I could subtract. I pulled each check slowly from the book, taking pleasure in the meaty sound of the tear. I savored the sweet adhesive as I licked each envelope’s flap.

Over the past months, I’d forgotten I am a tall woman. I straightened my shoulders now as I left the bank and lifted my chin. My jaw felt so loose I wanted to yawn. I tucked three singles into the cup the man beside the ATM machine held out to me.

Being saved is a lightening, a stretching, a lifting. Now that we were saved, I was euphoric at the sight of the palm fronds that arched over the Wells Fargo sign, so lovely were they, etched against the blue sky, playfully trying to scratch the drivers off their stagecoach. Though I was in Westwood, five miles from the ocean, I could feel its cool breath. And what matter if I only imagined the smell, the whisper of brine under the blare of car exhaust and the bleat of onions from Tommy’s chili burgers? The scent was in my nose, whether it came from the Pacific or from my own head.

I was distinctly aware that I owed the museum and Jeanette for our salvation, and would continue to owe them for the next couple of weeks, until Margaret received her advance and sent it on to me. While I waited for Margaret, I vowed I would redouble my efforts for the event, so that the Otis would get its money’s worth and more.

When Heather Mendelson Blake didn’t call by January 10, I wasn’t worried. I reasoned that she’d barely had a chance to unpack; there’d be piled-up paperwork to attend to; possibly ornaments and wreaths to return to their storage boxes, depending on whether her
family was more Mendelson or Blake. In fact, even the Mendelsons were likely to have a tree to dispose of. I had to allow her time. By January 15, however, I was becoming nervous, and on January 17, I took my shoes to be reheeled, had an extra key cut for the apartment, purchased a single croissant and then returned for a second pastry, in four separate trips that brought me, legitimately, within half a block of the offices of the Hope Perdue Agency. On January 20, I discovered twelve pages from chapter sixteen under the dictionary. Were they part of the earlier draft I’d dropped down the air shaft? I stuck my head out the window. By now, the once-white pages had grayed and begun to disintegrate, settling into their bed of cigarette packets and pigeon feathers and a slick of snow. Were the pages missing from the manuscript I’d delivered to Heather Mendelson Blake?

“This particular scene,” I said to Ted, “is crucial for the plot. Do you think I should call and make sure she has these pages?”

Ted obligingly shuffled through the papers I held out to him. “I can’t believe,” he said, “that she’d turn down a book because it was missing twelve pages.”

“But this is where Lexie tries to return the carpet,” I said, pointing to a passage. “It’s the beginning of her desperate period. I’m not sure that what comes afterward makes sense without it.”

“Let me guess,” Ted said. “She gets more desperate.”

“So you don’t think I should call?”

“I think that if Heather Mendelson Blake thinks that she can’t make a decision without those pages, she’ll call you.” He turned back to his work, practical and confident.

I took the phone into the bedroom and closed the door.

“Hello?”

I wished I knew the name of the brown-haired girl. “This is
Margaret Snyder,” I said. “May I please speak to Heather Mendelson Blake?”

“She’s in a meeting right now. Would you like to leave a message?”

“I’m afraid the manuscript I gave her might be missing some pages. Twelve pages, actually It may not be. They may belong to the manuscript in the air shaft, but I can’t check since we’re on the sixth floor. I’m not sure, actually, if I could even check if we were on the first floor. I suppose I could ask the people in that apartment if I could crawl out their window, although I would hope it’s still pretty far off the ground, because the stuff down there really shouldn’t be close to human habitation. For sanitary reasons. Well, you can imagine the kind of stuff people throw out their bathroom windows. Anyway,” I finished, “if she needs those pages, I could bring them right over.”

“Twelve pages. Meg Snyder. I’ll leave her the message,” she said.

On January 25, Letty called. We talked for some minutes about how visible downtown Los Angeles was from the freeway that day and the fact that the clementines had been sour all season. About nothing, in other words, that mattered.

“No,” I said, finally.

“Oh,” she said. “I thought mid-January”

“I know. I’m sure she’ll call any day now. Probably she’ll call tomorrow.”

“But this is just the agent you’re waiting for, right? I was hoping that by now it would be out to editors. Isn’t that how it works?”

I experienced an unpleasant prickle of defensive irritation. She was right. I had assumed my novel would be in publishing houses by now, if not already sold, then nearly so. I did not like Letty, the one whom I had wronged, pointing out that I’d not yet righted
matters. That she did not intend to point this out (since she did not, in fact, realize I’d wronged her) somehow made me feel worse. “That’s how it works,” I said, “but she had to go to London.”

“Over Christmas.”

We were both well aware that Christmas, even if you stretched it to the New Year, had been over for three weeks.

“It probably takes a while to get revved up again,” Letty said. “After the holidays.”

“I know you need the money soon.”

She was suddenly sobbing.

“Letty, shh,” I said. “Shh.” But I was crying now, too.

“God, Margaret, I can’t stand this. Taking money from you. I just … I don’t know what else to do.”

“This,” I said. “This is what you should do. Listen, I’ll talk to her today. I’ll tell her we have to get going on this. Time is of the essence! When do you absolutely need a check?”

“The fourteenth. The fourteenth of February. Well, really before that would be better, but that’s the latest. That’s the very outside.”

“Why? Is it the bank, the house?”

“Really it’s everything. Everything comes due then, and it’s important I pay on time,” she said in a decisive tone she rarely used and one that did not encourage me to question her further.

It didn’t seem fair for me to worry Margaret with how desperately I needed money by February 14. That was my doing, after all. My
problem. When I hung up I went into the laundry room, where the spin cycle covered the sound of my emotion, a weak, exhausted wailing that had recently begun to escape from me in periodic spurts.

The relief I’d felt writing those checks had evaporated as the event approached and the space of time, like an artery, squeezed more tightly shut with each day’s relentless passing. Don’t think about it, I told myself, helplessly, illogically, closing my eyes for seconds at a time, even on the freeway. Since thinking about the situation did me no good, I convinced myself that not thinking about it would work some magic. Margaret would call with encouraging news, I told myself, only when I was engrossed in other plans, not while I was slapping the cell phone against the car seat, trying to pound a ring out of it. To this end, I focused on the benefit with an intensity that made me ball my hands into fists and dig the shredded remains of my nails into my palms. I attended animal training meetings to find out how to keep the greyhounds from mixing it up with the peacocks and the falcons and how to keep all three species from snatching miniature sausage tarts off the guests’ plates. I arranged access to secret rooms on the museums upper floors, so that the lighting designers could make the massive, widely spaced, sand-colored buildings suggest the crowded streets of medieval Florence. I auditioned children to play ring-around-the-rosy to create a haunting reminder of the Black Death, and mediated a feud between the a cappella singers and the recorder group. Surprisingly, for whole hours at a time, I entirely forgot that the end of the world was at hand.

On February 5, beginning at nine a.m., I strolled casually up and down the street in front of the Hope Perdue Agency. Most agents, I figured, would not start until ten-thirty or so, but I couldn’t risk missing Heather Mendelson Blake. In fact, I couldn’t risk missing anyone who went into the building, since I had no idea what H.M.B. looked like.

At nine forty-five, I stopped the first woman who’d approached the door. She had regal gray hair and carried over her shoulder a satchel made of Tibetan fabric. “Ms. Mendelson Blake?” I said, hopefully, blocking her access to the building. She looked like someone who could represent all of the Alices and the Anns besides.

She stepped back, startled. “No,” she said quickly, shaking her head. “No, no.”

At ten, I tried a short woman in a camel-and-black hounds-tooth pea coat. “Heather won’t be in until at least eleven,” she said impatiently. She made a tiny jump to resettle the enormous black leather knapsack on her back before she started up the stairs.

At ten-thirty, my bottom lip had begun to bleed where I’d been fretfully chewing at it. My fingers had numbed and I could no longer feel my toes. I went across the street for a hot chocolate to go, but kept my eyes on the door. The brown-haired receptionist and two men went in while I waited in the shelter of the café for my drink.

At eleven-fifteen I’d been back at my post for forty minutes, when a girl in black stretch, low-slung trousers and a short, black, belted trenchcoat came toward me. Her hair streamed around her face in long waves and she was carrying an oversized cardboard
cup. No, I did not dismiss her as far too young. I had come to expect such things.

“Ms. Mendelson Blake?”

She cocked her head, puzzled. “Yes?”

“I’m Margaret Snyder,” I said, thrusting my hand toward her. She shifted her cup to her left hand, and shook my right, politely. “Yes?” she said again. “Have we met?”

“You have my manuscript,” I said.
“The Rise and Fall of Lexie Langtree Smith?
I’m not wedded to that title.”

She frowned. “God, things have been so busy. The holidays, you know.”

“And you had to go to London,” I added.

She looked surprised. “That’s right. How did you know that?”

“You told me. We’ve spoken on the phone. You loved my opening. The grass?” I prompted. “Possibly you’re missing twelve pages.”

She continued to frown, her eyes watering in the wind. With one finger she hooked a lock of hair from between her lips where a sudden gust had blown it.

“The thing is,” I said, going boldly on. “I really need to get this show on the road.” Why was I talking in clichés? Why did I sound like Warren? “You see, a good friend of mine, my best friend, actually—we’ve known each other since infancy—is really counting on whatever I can get as an advance. She needs it ASAP,” Warren finished for me.

She smiled, her teeth perfect and white between her glossed lips. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll call you,” she said. She turned away from me to go into the building.

I had taken enough. The time had come, for Letty’s sake and for my own, to assert myself. I did not step squarely in front of
her—I am not a threatening person—but I did move forward. I did hold one palm, if not exactly on the door, then at least in a gesture that indicated I did not want her to open it just yet. I spoke quietly but firmly. “I don’t think you understand,” I said. “My friend needs this money and she needs it now. If you would jimmy a few hours into your overcommitted schedule to read my manuscript you would see that it speaks eloquently to our age and so has a great deal of commercial potential, something I would think, if you are any kind of agent at all, would interest you as much as it interests me and my friend.”