Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (41 page)

Florence came in late, squeaking on the tiles. Northern California agreed with her. She’d cut her hair, which now swung just below her shoulders.

“You look like a giraffe, like a beautiful doctor giraffe,” Laura said.

“Thanks, I think,” Florence said, letting herself be embraced by her mother.

“How was the drive?” Laura pulled back so that she could look at Florence better.

“Not bad. How about
you
, Mom? Happy birthday!”

“Ms. Lamont?” It was one of the catering staff, waiting patiently behind Florence with one arm wrapped around a giant bouquet.

“Yes, that’s me,” Laura said, and moved to take the flowers out of his hand.

The caterer nodded and turned back to polishing the silverware.

“Who are they from?” Florence asked, peering into the papery cone.

“Oh, lilies,” Laura said. “I love lilies.” There was a small white card pinned to the paper, and Laura plucked it off. “Hold these, will you?”

Florence took the flowers in her arm and waited for her mother to open the card.

Dear Laura,
the card read.
Yours were always my favorite films to
make, and I would like to make more. I will always regret the way things ended with Irving. Please call. Yours, Louis Gardner.

“Well, who are they from?” Florence tapped her foot, impatient.

Laura tucked the note back into its envelope, and then slipped the card into her pocket. Ginger wouldn’t notice another bouquet of flowers, or want to know where they’d come from. Laura would ask one of the staff to put them in water, and they would blend in with all the rest. “They’re from Louis Gardner,” Laura said. Her eyes were wet. She couldn’t go back to Gardner Brothers, couldn’t and wouldn’t. How could she walk down those streets, watching younger women fall in and out of love? She had already had her chance, and it had worked like a charm. Laura put her arm around Florence’s waist and walked back into the party as if she were walking on a frozen lake, each step lighter than the last. She would have a piece of cake as big as Clara’s, and spend the whole day smiling at anyone who dared look her way. No one could tell Laura Lamont what to do; she was too old for that. Let them come and look at her, let them try to swallow her up into their old-fashioned story lines. Laura was going to sew herself into the shape of happiness all on her own.

T
he shop was busiest on Saturdays, but the women with the most money came in during the week. Laura sharpened her pencils quietly while Edna spoke with a pair of women who needed bridesmaid dresses for a wedding. Edna looked at the clock and then hurried the women along, her tiny foot tapping as they prattled on about sea foam versus peach. When they were gone, Laura said, “Are you in a hurry, Edna?” But then the doorbell rang, and before Laura even had a chance to reapply her lipstick, Peggy Bates was standing in front of her, handing over her purse.

Laura tried to do the math but couldn’t. The last time she’d seen Peggy in person, they were both under contract at Gardner Brothers, and Irving was still alive, and Peggy was one of the studio’s perma-teenagers, a woman who couldn’t look thirty if she’d worn a gray wig and a pair of granny glasses. The rest she knew from the trades: drugs, a handful of marriages, and then a miraculous second life on the small screen. For the last five years, Peggy had played Pixie, the titular character on
Pixie’s People
, a half-hour sitcom about a magical fairy who lived with a normal family in the San Fernando Valley. Pixie was famous for sprinkling fairy dust over someone’s head and then whispering, “They’ll never know the difference!” Laura was shocked to see Peggy dressed in normal clothes, instead of Pixie’s regulation chiffon.

“Peggy!” Laura said, too surprised to pretend to be otherwise.

“Laura Lamont?” Peggy said, and withdrew her handbag. The women hugged awkwardly, Peggy’s leather satchel wedged between their bellies. “What are you doing here? I haven’t seen you in
ages
.”

Laura cleared her throat and gave her jacket a little tug. “Actually, I work here, with Edna. I work here.” It happened every so often, the awkward encounter with someone from her past life. Customers recognized her all the time, almost every day, but that she was used to. It was her peers who threw Laura off, the actresses.

Peggy opened her mouth so wide that Laura could see the white spots on her tongue, bad breath waiting to happen. “You don’t say!” She smacked her purse against Laura’s hip. “Laura Lamont the shopgirl!”

Edna hurried over and stepped between them, kissing Peggy on both cheeks. Edna’s trademark dark glasses and severe haircut were exactly the same as they had been at Gardner Brothers. It was both reassuring and alarming to be in the presence of a woman who was immune to change. “All right, all right, all right,” Edna said, removing
Peggy’s coat. “Enough of that. We’re doing the dress for the gala today. I already have the fabric pulled. Come look.” She passed Peggy’s coat to Laura, who hung it up and then tried to vanish into thin air.

“Laura? Can you come take notes as we talk?” Edna was already unrolling a bolt of crimson silk.

“Sure, of course,” Laura said, and grabbed her notepad. She wrote down everything both women said for an hour, her fingers moving quickly so that her brain didn’t have to.

When Peggy had her coat on again and was walking out the door, she turned around and said over her shoulder, “You know, Laura, it was really good to see you.” Laura agreed that it was, and shut the door gently behind her. After the sound of Peggy’s heels on the stairs was gone, Edna crossed her arms over her chest and said, through the pins in her teeth, “Fuck her.”

J
immy called the bungalow on Monday night to say that there’d been an offer—a Japanese perfume company wanted to fly Laura over to shoot a commercial.

“A commercial? As in, an advertisement?” Commercials were for the blond and the buxom, for those who could credibly pass for young mothers with a new mop, a frozen chicken, a kissable pout. “Do they know what I look like?”

“They want to fly you there, Mom. They’ll pay for everything. It’s just one ad, and no one you know will ever see it.”

Laura was sitting in the living room. She could hear Junior’s stereo playing softly in his bedroom. It was one of the bands she didn’t understand, with fifteen-minute-long songs and no discernible melody. She thought that Irving and Junior might have talked for hours about
music, about jazz and psychedelic rock and roll, and the Elvis Junior had loved as a teenager. They would have locked themselves in a room full of records and needed to come out only for meals.

“Will they pay for Junior to come too?”

L
aura had never learned to enjoy flying, and she felt jittery as soon as she buckled herself into her seat.

“Honey, would you get me a drink from the stewardess? I just need to use the ladies’ room.”

“We’re about to take off, Mom. I don’t think you’re allowed to go yet.” Junior didn’t look up from his book, but he did place his left hand on his mother’s wrist, holding it flat against their shared armrest. “It’s going to be okay.”

Laura exhaled loudly. She should have said no. No to this commercial, no to everyone but her children. Edna had given her the week off, but the whole thing felt like a fever dream, like she had fallen asleep and woken up in a different place in her own life. She should have stayed in Irving’s house forever, until the weeds grew up to the roof and the police had to knock the door down. She should have had pets—why had none of the children ever gotten a puppy for Christmas? It seemed an oversight of the highest magnitude, only a smidgen behind total neglect on the scale of abuses. The flight to Tokyo was just over ten hours long. The Japanese stewardesses bowed and cooed over Laura just as they bowed and cooed over everyone else in first class, but they stared at her longer, were more solicitous of her strained smile. Laura’s glass of whiskey wasn’t empty until she fell asleep, her face pressed against her son’s bony shoulder.

An escort from the perfume company met them at the airport, holding a handwritten sign that said
LAMONT
in large capital letters,
with something written in Japanese beneath it, as though Laura might be likely to recognize her name in another language. The man bowed at Laura, and again at Junior, and they both bowed back at him, confused by the daylight outside the terminal building.

The set of the commercial was simple: Laura stood in the middle of an empty stage. She sprayed her neck and wrists with the perfume—Hollywood. Then, behind her, dancing girls appeared, kicking their legs like the Rockettes. The director, a Japanese man only slightly older than Junior, stood beside the camera. The dancing girls wore sequins and top hats as they made their way across the stage, and Laura had to look into the lens and say, “Smells like Hollywood.” All Laura could smell was the alcohol in the perfume, the hair spray in her hair. Junior was somewhere in the room, but she couldn’t see past the bright lights pointing in her direction. It seemed so implausible that her career would flame out so spectacularly. Even if what Jimmy said was true, and no one she knew ever saw the ad, Laura would still know it was out there, floating around in the ether. They’d dressed her in a beaded evening gown and elbow-length white gloves, fancier even than most of the dresses that Edna made, and the heavy fabric felt like an anchor around her throat.

It was all done in a few hours, the length of time it would take to shoot a single complicated scene. Laura tried to think of the commercial as a scene from a film, but she couldn’t imagine the part she was supposed to be playing—every possibility was more depressing than the last. She was a nightclub owner, a has-been actress, a madam in a whorehouse. The makeup was thick on her face, and every time Laura reached up, bits of her foundation rubbed off on her white gloves. Someone snapped a number of photographs of Laura with the dancing Japanese girls, with the director, with the executives from the perfume company, and then the escort took her and Junior back to the hotel.

A woman at the front desk waved Laura down and handed her a message, which read:

Laura bowed in thanks, and quickly turned toward the elevator. Junior chuckled at his mother’s obvious mortification. He read the note and said, “I thought she was supposed to be one of the nice ones.”

“She is. I mean, she was. I guess she is? Oh, I don’t know,” Laura said. “It was generous of her to think of me.” They walked into the elevator and leaned against the far wall.

“
How much
did they pay you for that?” Junior asked.

“Fifty thousand dollars.”

“For
that
?”

“Yes, my love.” Laura turned the notes in her hand, watching the light reflect off the paper. “When we get home,” she said, “I’m going back to Edna’s. It’s better to be normal, I think.”