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.”
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.
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.