All Is Vanity (45 page)

Her eyes widened as I spoke and she reeled back a step. Then she pushed past me through the door. “You’ll hear from me,” she said.

I did not.

I heard from Letty, however, in phone calls that became increasingly frequent and incoherent. We tried to talk about other subjects, but our anecdotes and petty concerns could not hold our attention. “But you’ll be sure to call, right?” she said, at the end of each conversation. “As soon as you know when you’ll be getting the money?”

It’s funny the way you can convince yourself of an eventuality you long for: the house you’re searching for will be the next one you
view, the bus you’re waiting for will come in the next two minutes, the next man you date will become your husband. So vividly can you picture the event in your mind, that even if it would not have happened spontaneously, the power of your envisioning it seems sure to make it so. This is the way I was with Margaret’s call. I was sure one day that she’d leave a message on our answering machine between two and four, so I went to the market deliberately then to give her a chance to do so. Other times, I was certain I’d heard the cell phone ring and pushed talk, only to hear a dial tone. You would think these failures of my premonition would make me doubt myself, but, in fact, the opposite was true; my convictions grew more vivid. Since she had not yet called, I thought, it was all the more likely that she’d call today or perhaps tomorrow. There was, after all, very little time left.

I stopped sleeping on February 7. I had not been sleeping well before then, but that night I stopped altogether. Which was all right for the first few hours. While Michael slept beside me, I ate a Rice Krispies treat that I’d found in Hunter’s lunchbox and watched Tom Snyder chat amusingly with Bonnie Hunt about the bratwurst he ate in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1952. Then I watched the ABC late-night news show. While the anchors, knowing no one important could be watching at that hour, traded their comfortingly informal comments, I wondered what Hunter had traded for the treat. I hadn’t been packing anything that I would have considered tradable for months.

As long as Thalia Assuras was up, sporting her nifty glasses, it seemed all right to be awake. But after that, since our cable had been cut off a month ago, I was faced with jowly men and frighteningly tanned women talking with false and forceful cheer about exercise equipment and kitchen devices, and the fellow who
insists you can make a fortune by placing classified ads. I turned off the television and shut my eyes. Why hadn’t Hunter eaten the treat, if he’d traded for it? What if he’d found it? Had some child killer laced it with poison and left it on the playground?

I turned the television on again. An elderly nun with a black patch over one eye was hawking an enamel crucifix from the right side of her mouth, while the nerveless left side drooped disapprovingly. Down the street a car door slammed and an engine started. Birds began their restless morning hubbub. At nine I would call Peri. Maybe the Huebner wunderkind was still looking. Maybe someone else was. Another car started on its commute. But to sell a house took longer than a week.

At six I got up and went out to the garage. Margaret would call at eight, I thought, scooping puffed wheat out of its industrial-sized sack with a coffee can. There was a time not so long ago when I did not buy coffee in cans, but in bags from its own special store. Probably, we should have given up coffee altogether.

I stopped eating on February 10. Not altogether. I still began meals with a few swallows, as if I meant to go on, but then I somehow couldn’t. Worry had tightened my stomach into a golf ball.

Since, obviously, I would have made a nuisance of myself had I called the Hope Perdue Agency every time Letty called me, I allowed myself only one call a day and varied the time, in the hope of getting someone other than Brown Hair, which occasionally worked. I kept my messages pleasant and brief. I suspected I may
have gone a bit far that day on the sidewalk, and I didn’t want to make things worse.

“Just checking,” I would say. “Just wondering if she’s gotten to it yet.” Once, however, I lost my temper. “I gave it to her before Christmas,” I said. “How long does it usually take?”

“Well, you know she’s very busy,” the woman on the other end said. “After the holidays and all.”

I was supposed to report to the museum at dawn on February 14 to prepare for the event, but by the time the pirate nun was rasping on about the merits of an amber rosary, I felt legitimately ill and one of my eyes had begun to twitch.

“I can’t,” I whispered into the phone to Jeanette, so as not to wake Michael. “I’m very sorry, but I just can’t. I’m too sick.”

“But this is the fun part!” Jeanette exclaimed. “You must at least come tonight. Have Michael carry you here on a stretcher. You cannot miss this. This is going to be the event of a lifetime.”

All day the phone lay quiet—no, that’s not true—there were calls, a friend of Marlo’s, my mother, the
L.A. Times
trying to renew our subscription, but not the call from Margaret. It was too late for money. The Commedia would not be paid that night. But if Margaret called I could at least promise that payment would be swift. I could blame a short delay on the bank, a computer glitch, a transferring error. I could have misplaced the company checkbook. It wouldn’t make perfect sense, but it would be far better than the truth.

I called her, nine, ten times before I lost count and began to hit redial compulsively. I stopped leaving messages after the sixth call. I could think of nothing more to say.

I couldn’t sit still nor could I concentrate on a single task but careened like a pinball from one activity to the next. I laundered; I scoured sinks; I creamed butter and sugar for cookies; I disassembled the stove. I flattened the end of the toothpaste tube and rolled it neatly. With the toothbrush, I begin to work on the grout between the tiles on the bathroom floor. I Windexed; I vacuumed; I recapped markers and Play-Doh; I stripped the beds. I sprinkled yeast on water for pizza crust. I sorted Legos by size into plastic containers.

Michael got out of bed in time to prepare for the party. I perched on the rounded corner of our extralong tub, still one of the best features of our house, and watched him shave. “You’re sure you can’t go?” he said, wincing against the pain of the razor. He used plain soap now, instead of special, soothing emollients. “I’d rather not go without you.”

I worried they would corner Michael. His back would be pressed against the railing that keeps visitors from diving into the canyon. “Didn’t she say anything to you?” the acrobats would ask. They’d swipe a torch through the air near his throat. “Didn’t she give you a check?” But he would be innocent and ignorant. He would explain about my illness. Perhaps by that hour a vessel would have burst in my head. Perhaps the museum would have crumbled in an earthquake.

“Come home early,” I said.

Ofelia arrived. I’d forgotten to cancel her. It didn’t seem fair to send her home without paying her and, under the circumstances, it didn’t feel right to pay her without asking her to work. “Stay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

I had no idea where to go, but it was a relief to be on the move, to be pushing the accelerator with my foot and feeling the cool winter darkness on my face. I drove Jeanette’s car west on Sunset, winding through the eucalyptus groves of Bel Air, past the private school campuses of Brentwood, under the clean sky of Pacific Palisades. Without traffic, Sunset is fast; the lanes are narrow; the curves can be tight. In the right lane, branches from untrimmed hedges scratched at my windows; in the left, lights from oncoming cars made me blink. It’s a good road, if you want to keep your mind on the driving and away from other, more dangerous subjects.

When Sunset emptied into the Pacific Coast Highway, I turned right and drove up the coast, my phone mute on the seat beside me, like a sullen passenger. I bought gas in Malibu, so that I would be prepared if I decided never to turn back. Soon after Point Dume, the stoplights ended and for long stretches, mine was the only car on the road, and my world was reduced to a few yards of gray pavement and painted lines studded with reflectors. On my right, the hills were dark. On my left, the ocean was black. It was difficult to keep my foot from pressing harder and harder on the accelerator as I hurled myself into this vacuum, into space itself. But space is limited here. In half an hour or so, civilization would begin again. I’d be in Oxnard, then Ventura, then Santa Barbara, each successive community more like the one I’d escaped.

I toyed with disaster. I imagined driving up one of the canyons and over the edge, but even as I envisioned the winding climb, the wrench of the wheel, the free fall, I knew this would never be more than a comforting thought. I couldn’t leave my children. And after I’d stolen from Jeanette, it hardly seemed fair to total her car, too.

It was the thought of my children that made me U-turn, cautiously, at Point Mugu. They, at least Marlo and possibly Hunter,
would find out soon enough that their mother was a thief, but at least she would be a thief who took responsibility.

I wasn’t dressed for a party. My hair, unwashed for days, pressed close to my head and I had only my teeth to give my lips color. When I got out of the car, I slipped the cell phone into my sweater pocket and covered it with my palm to warm it, to coax it to spring to life. It was late in New York, but not too late for Margaret to call.

Jeanette, I saw, had a genius for party planning. Although I’d chased down most of the evenings elements and had even come up with the idea for several of them, I’d not have guessed that the whole would be so magical. The museum’s plaza was transformed. Thanks to the lighting designer and several strategically draped lengths of painted fabric, the monolithic, desert-hued surfaces of the museums buildings somehow did suggest a clutch of two- and three-story wooden dwellings huddled against one another at the center of a medieval town. Torches, the only light source actually visible, crackled with real fire at intervals along the “streets,” wide paths Jeanette and I had marked out with wattle in the pattern of a maze to encourage and inhibit traffic flow at critical junctures. (One of Jeanette’s specialities was keeping people from getting jammed up near the food.) The torches created the effect of a low-tech strobe: guests appeared brightly lit on one side, shadowed on the other, for seconds at a time, and then disappeared in the surrounding darkness. If the museum burned would the performers still have to be paid?

On the walls and on special kiosks, enlarged reproductions of details from the museums medieval collection hung: three hunters stalked a deer under an archway, a lady-in-waiting sidled along one wall, a burgher slapped another on the back just beyond the door
to the gift shop. The recorder group was playing as I arrived, their notes at once plaintive and sprightly. The air smelled of wood smoke.

A greyhound daintily mouthed a meat tart from my hand. “No feeding the animals,” scolded a man in a smock and leggings. The dog was discreetly leashed and lay down when it had finished its snack in a soft, gray ring on the rush-strewn stone floor. Near the fountain, a peacock spread its tail. Waiters in white smocks and waitresses in muslin aprons carried food about on trays the weight of which was relieved by coarse leather straps around their necks. Across the plaza, I saw Michael laughing—laughing—with a squat man I’d not seen before. He caught my eye and motioned me over, but I turned away, as if I didn’t understand his gesture. I had to concentrate on willing the phone to ring and then on my confession. I could spare no resources for chat about plankton.

I helped myself to a handful of blushing yellow Queen Anne cherries, conscious of their grotesque expense and wanting to be sure I got my share. I lifted a heavy tumbler from a waiters tray. The expensive wine we’d purchased was mulled with spices according to the abbot of Kent’s fourteenth-century recipe I’d found in the UCLA library. We weren’t able to duplicate every flavor, but the final taste was sweet and sharp at once, strange enough at least to seem authentic. We’d also brewed a hard cider. I looked around for a tray of that.

I was surprised I’d not noticed the Commedia della Luna performers before because suddenly they were everywhere, tumbling through the air and walking on their hands, wearing long-beaked and snouted masks, ebony feathers and white ruffs, capes and short jackets and tights striped scarlet and violet, indigo and goldenrod. Some rippled their legs and torsos like looped ribbon; one juggled
bones. In several cases two had clamped on to one another in an unnatural configuration more Bosch than Brueghel in which feet grew from ears and hands stretched between legs.

I found a tray of cider. As I reached for a pewter tankardful, a contortionist crab-walked face upward on all fours with roachlike speed between me and the waiter. How much had the tankards cost the museum? I couldn’t even remember that check.

With my right hand, I raised the cider to my lips, while I slid my left into my pocket to be sure the cell, quiet as a stone, had not slipped out.