“But what if you are in love with him?” asked a woman in a cocktail hat with a veil. She was smoking a cigarette through the veil.
“If you fall in love, you’ve only yourself to blame.”
“Listen to Maya,” Deirdre Michael said sweetly to Clio as she handed her a glass of champagne. “She’s the Scheherazade of Holmby Hills.”
Maya lifted an eyebrow, unsure if this were a compliment. “Sherry who?”
“Maya was married to Mort,” Mimi whispered to Clio as if she would understand. “Second wife.”
“I always keep a garter belt or just one black stocking, in my purse,” Maya said. “I pretend I’m looking for my compact and I pull out the garter belt as if by mistake and I say, ‘Oh, jeez, what can this be doing here?’ ” She smiled. “It helps if you can blush a little. It makes him anxious. Which is just how you want him. Anxious all the time. It’s what keeps him hot.”
“It works for Maya, but it never works for me,” Deirdre Michael said quietly to Clio.
“Too bad for you,” Mimi said under her breath.
“What, Mimi?” Deirdre asked. “Did you get some champagne?”
“I wouldn’t be very good at it, either,” Clio said to Deirdre. “I’m the one who is anxious.”
Mimi took a silver cigarette box from a table and looked at it closely. “ ‘To one son-of-a-bitch from the rest of the son-of-a-bitches,’ ” Mimi said, reading the inscription on the box. “Is that grammatically correct?” she asked Clio. She made Clio nervous.
“I love your shoes, Mimi,” Deirdre said.
A maid announced that luncheon was served.
“I’m dying to see the dining room,” a woman said, pulling down her skirt. She straightened her legs and there was the sliding sound of silk as her stockings rubbed together.
“Oh, me too,” Deirdre said happily as she rose to lead the way.
Mimi turned to make a face at Clio, mouthing the words, “ ‘Me too’?” as they followed the chattering, lovely women into lunch.
Mimi often came back to Malibu after the day’s adventure. She and Clio sat on the brown suede sofas, surrounded by shopping bags and European fashion magazines, and drank tequila while they waited for Tommy to come home from the studio.
They were too lazy to turn on the lamps, and the room slowly darkened around them. They were like sleepy animals lying in a cave, eyes glazed, flanks outstretched—high and a little bored, but not unhappy. There was a fragrance of Russian olive and casuarina from the hills, and the fields behind the house were red with the light of the setting sun.
“Was it a terrible shock when you found out that you were a girl?” Clio asked Mimi one warm evening.
“Excuse me?”
“When you first understood that the rules aren’t quite the same for us as they are for boys.”
Mimi leaned forward to pour more tequila into their glasses. “You mean, when they wouldn’t let me shag balls in the outfield unless I paid them?”
“Yes.”
“Not a shock, exactly.”
“I’m afraid to ask what they wanted in payment.”
“Something only I could give them.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought.”
Mimi lay her head back against the arm of the sofa and exercised her ankles. “To tell you the truth, I was absolutely thrilled I had something boys wanted,” she said gravely. “I still am.”
“I’ve thought about this quite a bit,” Clio said. “Trying to understand. It was a tremendous thing for me, discovering that being a girl was going to be held against me.”
“Well, Clio, honey, it depends.”
“I make a special case of myself, and I
don’t
make it, if you see, but there was something in the way that I grew up—in the country, in the ocean—that made me take the news particularly hard. I also had the news rather late. In the city or the suburbs there are sports—organized games and teams like Little League—but for an island girl there is just nature. Nature doesn’t pick teams. I could swim and climb trees and jump off the big rock as well as any boy. There was nothing a boy could do that I couldn’t do, except piss standing up, of course, and I was happy to give him that. It was only when I went to school that I discovered that I was not going to be treated the same, not be allowed to play by their rules.” She paused. “The funny thing is that I was embarrassed. For them. For all of us.”
“You are very upset about this,” Mimi said in amusement.
“Oh, I know being a tomboy at least gave me a kind of physical confidence and courage, and I’m grateful, but it isn’t enough. It’s only a slight advantage, not being frightened of mice.”
“You make a very good girl, Clio. Much better than I do.”
“Do I?” Clio asked, thinking about it. “That’s the irony. That is just what it means to be an island girl, oddly enough. Resourceful, courageous, uncomplaining. But the very fact of one’s competence is what makes it so difficult when you discover that competence, if you’re a girl, only counts on the lacrosse team.”
“I’d rather fuck the lacrosse team than be on it.”
“Well, of course you would. But I’m not talking about now.”
“Then, too.”
“Well,” Clio said, “I suppose the ideal would be to play on the lacrosse team
and
fuck them.”
“I don’t need to play,” Mimi said. “I leave that to you, island girl.”
“I used to wonder why the women in my family didn’t prepare me for this discovery. Of course, the women in my family
were
men. They ran ranches and sugar plantations and built schools.”
“Funny you should say so. The women in my family, too,” Mimi said, sitting up in excitement. “My grandmother was a butcher.”
“Gosh,” said Clio, very impressed.
“I mean a real butcher. Sausages and lamb chops.”
“Oh,” said Clio, a little disappointed.
The front door opened and Tommy came in with his driver and exercise trainer and his friends, and the boys turned on all of the lights and the big-screen television and
noisily lifted the shopping bags over the backs of the sofas and dropped them onto the Mexican tile floor. Talking and laughing, they slapped the dust from their boots, and Clio smiled drowsily. She felt as if she’d been awakened by the sudden arrival of a gang of friendly cowboys.
One of the few things that her mother Kitty had taught Clio was the importance of being ready for your man when he came in from work. Clio knew that in Kitty’s case, work would have meant exercising a polo pony or grafting an orchid, but Clio held on to this advice as the only intimacy she’d ever had from her mother. She always rose happily to greet Tommy when he came home.
She kissed him on the cheek and went to the kitchen to get him a beer and a lime. She knew that there had been someone to give him a kiss and a drink for some time, ever since he played Wild Bill Hickok in his first hit movie, and she knew that he didn’t really care who met him at the door, so long as she didn’t want something.
She’d once started to tell him about an outbreak of wood fungus in the sauna, but he had interrupted her to say, “Not now, babe.” There was not much of anything that he wanted to hear, but out of some hopefulness, and some foolish tribute to her mother, whom men adored, she still jumped up when she heard him come in the door.
One night Mimi and Clio sat with Tommy during the halftime of a basketball game on television. He had an early call the next morning and his friends had been sent home after a big Sunday night dinner of tuna tamales and whole-wheat enchiladas. Now and then the wind blew hard against the chain-link fence and it sounded to Clio like music played on a saw.
Mimi, who was wearing a beauty mask she’d made from
egg whites and some aloe vera that grew at the bottom of the driveway, idly asked Tommy the name of the last book he’d read. She was wearing one of her favorite costumes, a khaki girl-scout uniform she’d found in a thrift shop. It was very short and very tight. She wore it with brown oxfords and short white socks. It was what she put on, she told Clio, when she had to seduce someone. She was having cocktails later that evening with the director Billy Michael.
Clio certainly knew, and perhaps Judy, who was working late, knew, that it was an ironic question, but Tommy, without glancing away from the halftime entertainment, a free-shooting contest with Viet Nam veterans in wheelchairs, asked, “All the way through? Easy.
Sacajawea, Bird Woman
. Tenth grade.”
“Tommy, you bullshitter.” Mimi tried to speak without moving her mouth.
“On my mother’s grave,” he said, surprised.
“Your mother’s not dead,” Judy said, making a stack of eight-by-ten photographs of Tommy on a palomino. She was answering fan mail.
“Okay. But it’s still true about the book.”
Clio had asked him on the plane from Honolulu what his parents would think about their sudden marriage and he had said, turning the pages of the airline magazine, “To all intensive purposes, I don’t have family.” So Clio was very curious about this mother, dead or alive. Far more curious about her, in fact, than the possibility that Tommy had not read a book since he was sixteen years old.
“I never knew you even had a mother,” she said. Despite herself, she had begun to watch the men in wheelchairs spinning around the basketball court.
“Everyone has a mother,” Tommy said in mock amazement.
“Where is she?” Clio asked, turning reluctantly from the television to look at him. “I’m interested in mothers.”
“What?” he asked.
Judy looked up, a pair of scissors in her hand. The conversation, with its possibility of intimacy, was beginning to make her nervous.
“Your mother,” Clio said.
“Did I say I had a mother? Did anyone hear me say I had a mother?” He slid his eyes from the big screen to look around slowly, daring them to claim that he had said he had a mother.
“My mother died when I was born,” Mimi said. “In Puerto Rico.”
“I was in Puerto Rico for
Jupiter’s Run
,” Tommy said, gazing at her absently.
“What about your father?” Clio asked.
Mimi started to laugh and quickly put her hands to her face as pieces of the mask fell into her lap. Clio blushed.
“My dad’s never been out of the United States,” Tommy said. “Maybe once to Canada. He sort of doesn’t believe in it.” He turned back to the television.
“He must be one of those people they make those commercials for, the ones about American goods. I always wondered.” Mimi pretended to be relieved to have figured it out at last.
“Wondered what?” Tommy asked.
Mimi collected pieces of dried egg white from her lap and held them carefully in one hand. “Who those commercials were made for.”
“You don’t care about those things? You like to see America sold down the fucking river?”
Clio jumped up and stood on the sofa, moving her arms in slow circles. “Look! Sacajawea!”
Judy laughed and flicked one of Tommy’s photographs at her. Clio tried to catch it.
“Can I have that?” Mimi asked as Clio dropped into a corner of the sofa to look at the photograph.
“
May
I have it, you mean,” Clio said, holding it out of reach.
“No,” Tommy said.
They turned to stare at him.
“You can’t have it,” he said.
“Maybe you could buy it from him,” Clio said to Mimi. She was behaving a bit recklessly and it excited her.
“Forty-eight cents,” Judy said. “At cost.”
Tommy grabbed the remote-control box and held down the button until the sound was very loud.
“Who’s winning the game?” Judy asked Tommy. Tommy made her nervous when he was in a bad mood. Clio had told Mimi that it would be very hard for her to be frightened of someone for whom she had to buy a box of Tucks sanitary wipes every day, but that was Clio’s carelessness.
“All I wanted to do was watch the basketball game in fucking peace,” he said sorrowfully. “Just a quiet evening at home. Not too much to ask.”
“I wanted to know about your mother,” Clio said. “I was interested.”
He looked at her.
“You know, the Bird Woman,” Mimi said.
He slammed the remote-control box down on a table.
Judy, sitting on the floor cross-legged, jumped in place, like a cat.
“I hope you’re satisfied,” he shouted as he pushed past Clio and went up the stairs to the bedroom.
“I knew it,” Judy said with melancholy superiority.
“Now we can watch ‘Star Search,’ ” Mimi said as she picked up the remote-control box with her toes.
“What about his mother?” Clio asked, but Judy was busy signing Tommy’s name and greeting (“Yo, pardner”) on the photographs.
“This time you guys really went too far,” she said.
“I could have gone further. How about you?” Clio asked Mimi.
“Well, a little further, I think.”
Clio sighed and looked at the ceiling. She knew that she would have to go upstairs in a few minutes to make sure that he was all right.
“You guys,” Judy sighed, shaking her head. “You’re going to get in trouble. Really.”
Tommy invited Clio to visit him on the set. She sat in the director’s chair, sateen crew jacket over her shoulders, and watched the filming. Tommy introduced her to the director, Billy Michael, and to his makeup woman and his double, and Clio had lunch with him in his trailer drawn onto the sound stage like an unhitched wagon before a campfire. She didn’t expect or require Tommy to amuse her, but she could see that he was distracted and ill at ease, and she did not visit him again.
One afternoon by the pool, Mimi told Clio that she thought Clio should go to the set more often. Mimi was naked except for a USC baseball cap and a pair of ankle weights. It was very hot and the sky, cloudless and bright, looked like blue Mexican glass.
“He hasn’t invited me again.”
“Well, I just think it’s time to make another appearance, that’s all. Some of those bims don’t know he’s married and I just think they should get a look at you.” She lay on her back and moved one leg in a circle, counting to herself.
Clio noticed that Mimi’s pretty breasts did not fall to the side when she lay on her back, as did her own. “I don’t think he likes my being on the set,” she said.
“Oh, God, Clio, what do you care? Just come with me. I’ll take you.”
“Not if he doesn’t want me there. You go and you tell them he’s married.”