All Is Vanity (46 page)

In front of me, a raven in crimson tights gulped globes of yellow fire. When he saw me staring, he held out the torch. “Try some, miss?” His voice was rough, his accent unplaceable. He wore shoes with claws. I shook my head and backed toward the garden, where the children I’d hired were trampling the plantings and plucking the petals. Every few minutes they gathered in a circle and recited, as they’d been instructed, tumbling to the ground with the final line. Jeanette’s makeup artist had rendered the kids I’d seen in the studio on Santa Monica Boulevard unrecognizable. Those had been manifestly healthy, twentieth-century Americans—with gleaming teeth, shiny hair, and straight limbs. These children were different. They seemed stunted somehow and their hair was dull and ragged. They smelled of garlic and grease, even yards away. One of them limped on a clubfoot. How had Jeanette managed that?

I wandered into the crowd, and the recorders gave way to a chant ensemble in monks’ robes, their faces deep in their cowls.

“Alms, miss?” I felt it thrusting against my shoulder before I turned, the stump of an arm in a bandage caked with blood and
dirt. The man leaned on a stick wrapped in rags. “Alms?” he said again, exposing his empty gums. Who was the makeup artist and why hadn’t we discussed these actors? Jeanette obviously had not shared all the secrets of her business with me. I dropped a precious cherry in the beggar’s cup. “Eight dollars a pound,” I said.

He scowled and spit on the floor deliberately on a spot where there were no rushes to hide it.

“Ring around the rosy.” The children’s piping voices overlaid the chant.

A small animal scuttled through a patch of torchlight. It was certainly not a dog or a peacock. Had Jeanette added cats? Where was its trainer and its leash?

Where was Michael? We should not have been here. We had to go home. We had to pack; we had to sell. I hurried along the paths, pushing my way past a woman who’d turned herself into a hoop. A trick of architecture made the children’s voices louder, although I was moving away from them. “A pocket full of posies.” The maze dead-ended against a guardrail, and the dark canyon gaped before me. In the distance, well beyond my grasp, the city lights mocked me with their spangle. At my feet, a bold rat feasted on a chicken wing. “Ashes. Ashes.”

It was over. I knew suddenly and with certainty that Margaret was not going to call and it was over. We would not be saved. And then my cell phone rang. Or rather it emitted the theme from
The Lone Ranger
in a high, mechanical tone.

“Letty?” Jeanette said. “Are you here? Can you come help me? This woman insists we still owe the Commedia.”

I could hardly hear her over the voices of the strange, stunted children: “We all fall down.”

I was balling socks, remnants of my laundry binge the day before, when the police arrived the next afternoon. They did not let me finish.

The envelope I received from the Hope Perdue Agency in March was so light and flimsy that it might not even have contained a sheet of paper. Heather Mendelson Blake was sorry, but she just didn’t have the passion necessary to give my work fair representation. If I would send money for postage, she’d be happy to return my manuscript.

Dear Judge Brandt
,

It’s kind of you to take an interest, especially considering that you already favored Letty and me with so much of your time at the hearing. I got the impression that you were slightly exasperated with my testimony. I seem to recall your saying that one’s day in court should not extend to a week, and, then, when you concluded that my involvement had no legal bearing on the case, I thought—well, perhaps the chafing of some other judicial matters was responsible for your irritation. I do see now that, as you said, bringing every quiver of my conscience to the attention of the court may have been more tedious than enlightening This is the sort of lesson I have learned in the painful aftermath of the State of California v. Letitia MacMillan
.

The Otis, as I understand it, was generous with Letty. To avoid public embarrassment, it paid the Commedia and allowed the MacMillans to return the money in small installments at a low rate of interest. Michael was fired, but that could hardly be otherwise
.

No, you will not soon be able to purchase a copy of
The Rise and Fall of
Lexie Langtree Smith.
Lexie is gone. I dropped the disks in the public trash can on the corner of Greenwich and Sixth, deleted all chapters from my hard drive, and left my laptop on the curb. I wish luck to whoever picks it up. After Heather Mendelson Blake demurred, I sent my manuscript to several other agents, still hoping to make the money to help Letty pay her debts. Apparently, however, the publishing community is running low on passion these days. I put it this way to show you I have not lost my sense of humor. What I mean is that I am a failure. Despite the early evidence to the contrary, it turns out that I am merely a dull penny in the cash drawer of life. And it turns out this is not the worst thing a person can realize about herself
.

Recognizing New York’s invidious effect on me, Ted accepted a job in Columbus, at some cost to his own career. He now leads a research group funded by Ohio State that specializes in the problems of Appalachia. I found work here monitoring subjects in a sleep study lab. Mainly, I attach electrodes to people’s heads and collate the pages that spew from the machines all night. I also bring people juice, if they want it. Ted says I should audit some psych classes and learn to read the data. He thinks I could run the lab, if I wanted, in a couple of years. But I’m through with ambition
.

Relieved as I was for Letty when you sentenced her to community service rather than to prison, your comment about her friendship with me being punishment enough hurt me deeply. I did not set out, after all, to do her harm. These past months watching people sleep, however, have afforded me a great deal of time for refection. I understand now that I have never been the friend to Letty that Letty was to me. It was not that I did not love her. I did love her. I do. But I never gave her my full attention. I never thought of her without being distracted by me. Encouraging her debt was my most egregious betrayal of her, certainly, but it was not the first time I’d plundered her story to advance my own. I would be happy now to be dull, and I wouldn’t mind having failed, if I could be a true friend to Letty. But it’s far too late for that
.

I send her checks, a portion of my pay every month. So far, none of them has been cashed. It is, in any case, a comfort to me to write her name on the line and then again on the envelope, to know that this paper at least will enter her house
.

For details about the MacMillans, I’m afraid you will have to apply to them directly in Winnemucca, Nevada, where, according to my mother, Michael is teaching at a junior college. This past Christmas, I sent Letty a card, nothing sentimental, just a snow scene. When we were young in winterless Glendale, we used to wonder what such coldness would feel like. She has not yet written me back
.

Yours sincerely
,

Peggy Snyder

Dear Judge Brandt
,

I appreciate your attempt to intercede for the sake of “a lifelong friendship,” as you call it, but I’m afraid Margaret’s testimony spoiled all that. Fancying herself a Svengali! That’s Margaret all over. You were absolutely right to point out that she had no power over me, that my desires and decisions were ultimately my own
.

You ask me to consider whether it was the prospect of living in Margaret’s reflected glimmer, and thereby taking on my own glow, that attracted me from the start. If I am honest, I must admit there is some truth in that. Still, it is certainly not her failure, as you suggest, that makes me turn from her now
.

That in her mind she will always be Robinson Crusoe and I will always be Friday, I can forgive. Who is not, after all, the heroine of her own life? But that she cared for the worlds regard more than she cared for me, how can I forgive that?

We live now in a rented, prefabricated house on a country road outside of town. Margaret sends me checks here, small ones, drawn from an
account in Ohio. On the memo line, after the printed word “For,” she writes “redemption.” I keep the checks, along with her Christmas card, in a small canary yellow accordion file. They are a tie to her, however tenuous, and so I cannot bear to cash them
.

Yours sincerely
,

Letitia MacMillan

Caitlin Flanagan and Christina Schwarz have been friends for more than ten years and have been critiquing each others writing for nearly as long Caitlin is a contributing editor at
The Atlantic Monthly,
in which her review essays on domestic life appear regularly. Her book on the perils and pleasures of the modern housewife
—Housewife Heaven—
will be published by Little, Brown in 2004
.

Caitlin Flanagan:
Tina, we always said that once we were published writers we would tell people about “the seminar.” This is our chance.

Christina Schwarz:
We began as part of a writing group, the other members of which dropped out as they decided they had much better things to do than write and discuss and rewrite pages of what to any reasonable person were obviously never-to-be-finished novels and short stories. Caitlin and I, however, stubbornly kept at it. Year after year—yes, year after year—we met every week for two or three hours or so, either in my wind-buffeted, freezing apartment on hard wooden chairs or in her stuffy apartment on a comfy sofa, painstakingly going over the notes we’d marked on each other’s pages, dissecting characters, plotting plots, and laughing; pacing, moaning, and laughing (me); drawing up to-do lists, highlighting passages, and laughing (Caitlin). There was also much snacking.

People often ask whether I recommend joining a writing group.
Yes, but only if you find someone to work with who believes in you so strongly that they’re willing to tell you the bad as well as the good, and whose opinions about writing you respect. The combination is tough to come by. Caitlin and I have had that in each other, plus, as a bonus, unfettered hilarity. I honestly wrote a lot of
All Is Vanity
simply to make Caitlin laugh, and she’s the real comedian of the two of us, so if you find the novel at all amusing, imagine the sort of entertainment I’m treated to.

“The seminar” has been without question the best aspect of my writing career, and, ironically, we’ve met far less often since we’ve become published writers. In large part, this is because we’ve been living on opposite coasts, but sadly, I fear it may also be because now that we’re writing “seriously”—in other words, for money—we feel that less of our work time can be devoted to laughing and snacking.