The Diamond Lane (25 page)

Six days later Shirl took Mouse to the airport.

Nine months later Mouse phoned from Tunis to say she wasn't coming home.

Mouse lurched to the sink. She cranked on the rusty faucet. First there was no water, then the pipes coughed and hawked out a brown stream that ricocheted off the drain and up the side of the basin, drenching the bottom of her sweater. “Shit,” she moaned.

“You all right in there?” E. Bomarito bellowed through the door.

“Yes!” Mouse called gaily. She wrung out the bottom of the sweater, tried to pat it back into shape. She plucked at the curls of her hopeless permanent, pinched her overly tan cheeks for color.

When she emerged she saw through the low wide window of the booth that her favorite part of the film was up, an interview with Stanley in his neighborhood off River Road. He was doing his daily pull-ups on an exposed pipe in a half-finished building, alongside Clint Eastwood, a silver-furred vervet monkey whom Stanley treated like a son. Stanley counted aloud in Swahili.
Moja. Mbili. Tatu
. Clint Eastwood dangled by one arm, swatted at Stanley's heaving sweaty torso.

“Do the people in your village know where you get your knowledge of the
mzungu
, the white man?” Mouse asks him from somewhere offscreen.

“They know. I read to my people from the books.”

“Do they know you steal the books?”

“They know the books are not offered to me. They know also that the
mzungu
does not miss his book.”

“You don't think someone is upset when he finds out his journal is missing?”

“I see this many times. The
mzungu
looks in his bag. The
book is not there. The
mzungu
claps his hand to his forehead, like so. ‘At least I still have my wallet!' he says. ‘Thank God!' Many many times I see this. So long as the
mzungu
still has his wallet he does not miss the book of his life.”

The scene elicited an appreciative smile from Ivan. “This is phenomenal, Mouse. Really very very good stuff.” He shook his head without turning to look at her.

“I debated. I put it in and took it out.” She noticed she said “I,” not we.

“No, you were right. Sometimes a scene deserves to live, irrespective of its place in the piece. There are, of course, two schools of thought. One says if a scene is too good it should be cut. I say good scenes, really memorable ones, are so rare they should be used. Someday I will do a compilation film of all my best scenes with only title cards in between saying what film they're from.”

“Cool,” said E. Bomarito.

“If only Harris thought so. Harris is my distributor,” he said to Mouse.

“Well, nice seeing you,” said Mouse abruptly.

She stumbled out of the booth and back to her chair, where she perched for less than a minute before tripping to her feet, out of her seat, out of the room.

Mimi had seen Ivan's face through the window in the booth. She had heard E. Bomarito call out, “You all right in there?” She saw Mouse return to her seat, then leave.

Outside, Mouse stood shivering on the lawn by the crèche, kicking at a tuft of grass with the toe of her tennis shoe, smoking a cigarette. Even though it was nearly Christmas, which meant it should have been about eighty-seven degrees, it was drizzling and cold. The air smelled gloomy and stale.

“Somewhere I read that clouds have the same PH as battery acid,” said Mimi, staring up at the dirty cotton sky.

“That's impossible.”

“No, I read it in the
New Yorker
. It's called acid fog.”

“Clouds do not have the same PH as battery acid.”

“Not
all
clouds. Only the clouds in L.A.”

“You said clouds.”

“The clouds in L.A., I meant.”

“Ivan's here –” Mouse started.

“I know. Shirl called him. I think this whole thing, the operation and everything, has made her half a bubble off plumb. Isn't that great? It's construction worker lingo. I heard it from the guy at work putting in the new false ceiling.”

“I go to the bathroom and there he is. In the projection booth.”

“Was that him? He looks like everyone else with that dumb ponytail.”

Mouse swore one of Mimi's great satisfactions in life was dismissing everything that she considered interesting or important as beneath talking about, much less thinking about. She couldn't help remembering the afternoon of her discovery at the Academy Library. She had hurried back to the apartment to find Mimi doing yoga on the living room floor.

“Why didn't you tell me Ivan was doing documentary! He's won an Oscar, for Godsakes.”

“That was a jillion years ago.” Mimi exhaled deeply. “Sit on my ankles, would you?”

Now, although Mouse was bursting to say, “Thanks for telling me!” she was loath to give Mimi yet another juicy opportunity to shrug and drawl, “I meant to. Guess I forgot.” Instead she took a marking pen out of her purse and added the missing
e
to the
AFRICAN MOVIS
sign.

“Shirl got his number from the phone book,” Mimi continued. “I told her she could have called me. She told him you were back, you know, that you were having this little screening. He's probably hanging out in the booth because it'd be too like weird and painful. Seeing me – us – and everything. He really went off the deep end after we split. Half a bubble off plumb. You never really knew him –”

‘'I knew him –”

“You knew him, you knew him, but you didn't know him. He sold one of his kidneys to finance a
movie
.”

“He did not.”

“He did.”

“The woman most full of it,” said Ivan, appearing suddenly at the top of the basement stairs. He dug in the chest pocket of his T-shirt for a joint, which he lit nonchalantly.

“I can't believe you still
smoke
,” said Mimi. “Mouse, can you believe he still smokes? How do you get anything
done
?”

Mouse just stared, jaw slack in disbelief, thick brows furrowed. It was hard to believe. The sisters FitzHenry and Ivan Esparza together again. He offered the roach to her. She shook her head.

“I'll have some,” said Mimi before he replugged the roach between his lips, “How do you like Mouse's movies? Aren't they great?
The New Stanley
is my favorite, then
Allah on the Rocks
. They're showing that next.”

“I'm afraid it'll have to be another time. Got a sound mix.”

“When did you see
Allah
?” Mouse asked Mimi.

“A sound mix at this hour? Don't tell me. You've broken into a sound studio and are holding the guard hostage.”

“When did you see
Allah on the Rocks
?”

“I haven't. I mean, I saw some clips. Tony showed me. Ivan, did you meet Tony? Tony is Mouse's fiancé. He's tall and English, like somebody out of
The Avengers
.”

“He is not like somebody out of
The Avengers
,” Mouse said hotly.

She looked down at her toes, embarrassed. “He's not my fiancé –”

“He is too –”

“Yes, yes, he's my, my – I'm getting married, but I don't think of him like that. I mean, we're partners. We make, we used to make films together. We made those films together.” She
waved her hand almost dismissively in the direction of the basement.

“When are you getting married?” Ivan asked. He batted the smoke away from his broad inscrutable face. “I am very interested in weddings,” he said.

“You and every single woman in this city between fifteen and eighty,” said Mimi. “Except me. Once was enough for me.”

Ivan ignored the remark, choosing instead to ask Mouse where she was living and if he could have her phone number.

He reached over, ground out the roach on a cheek of one of the plaster wise men, then replaced it in his pocket.

12.

“
SIX MONTHS LATER
,
SILVERMAN WAS IN CHARGE OF
business affairs; three years later he found himself running the studio.” Ralph read aloud from an article he'd clipped from the newspaper.

“
He found himself
running the studio? Gimme a break. They talk like the guy's a sleepwalker just woke up. I want to know, those three years, what
happened
. That's what every successful schmuck keeps a secret. They bore you till your teeth rot about their coke problem, but try to get them to talk about those three years. What, was he just sitting in business affairs jacking off, then one day the memo comes saying ‘congratulations, you're now one of the most powerful people in Hollywood'?”

Wednesday night, How to Write a Blockbuster. Ralph and Mimi walked through Valley College to class. Ralph waved the article in front of his face like an irate anarchist.

In anticipation of Christmas vacation, which began next week, most of the night classes had been canceled. The halls echoed in semidesertion. As they passed a row of snack machines, Mimi glanced over to make sure they had her favorite oatmeal cookies.

“Guess how old he is?” said Ralph.

“Forty,” said Mimi. She wasn't really listening. She wanted to tell him she hadn't had a chance to do her homework, in order to avoid the humiliation of confessing it in front of the whole class.

“Forty,” he scoffed.

“Twelve.”

“C'mon, c'mon.”

“I don't know. Younger than us.”

“Twenty-nine. Twenty-fucking-nine. I want some statistics, I want a
graph
. I want to see exactly how much your chances of making it decrease as your age increases. How old do I look to you?” He tipped his baseball cap off his head, smoothed his thin, dust-colored hair, ran a finger over each fair eyebrow.

“Twenty-nine, sweet cheeks.” Mimi slid her hand in the back pocket of his jeans.

“Really? I really look twenty-nine?”

She wanted to say, You look three days old. “At the most.”

Sometimes she felt as though being with Ralph she had all the disadvantages of wifehood but none of the advantages. Not that she really wanted to break up with him. Despite his ravings, he was better than nothing. She just wished he'd get a divorce. Not that she wanted to marry him. Anyway, she knew the divorce issue was a financial one. Although, when she was feeling insecure and bad about herself, she wondered. Last week, for example, she called his almost ex-wife, Elaine the Pain, to tell her that Bibliothèques had been rescheduled, and Ralph answered the phone. He said he was fixing her oven. As far as Mimi knew, Ralph was about as handy around the house as a debutante. Not that he shouldn't still be friendly with Elaine. They had been married ten years, after all. She sometimes wished she could be friends with Ivan, if only to make Ralph as jealous as Elaine made her.

“Ralph, I didn't get a chance to do my dust-jacket copy. You know, with the screening and, it's not easy to work with house guests around. I wish they'd get their own place. Maybe if your thing with V.J. happens.”

In fact, Mimi liked having Mouse and Tony around the apartment. She didn't mind the strange hairs curling around the shower drain, clean glasses put away in the wrong cupboard,
crumbs on the coffee table from someone eating toast in front of the tube. It was nice at night: the TV on but no one watching. Somewhere in a back room, the tinny noise of a radio left on. Shoes left, toe to heel, under the dining room table. People dropped by, an unheard-of thing before Mouse and Tony arrived. Lisa stopped in one day on her way home from work. Carole was at the kitchen table writing a screenplay synopsis on her portable typewriter. They smoked some ancient pot Mimi found in a baggie in the junk drawer and passed around one of those jillion-ounce plastic bottles of Pepsi, their knees propped against the edge of the table.

The kitchen sink was clogged. They watched and laughed while Tony, who looked to be above such things, attacked it with the Drano, reading instructions aloud in his
Masterpiece Theater
voice. Mimi made everyone grilled cheese sandwiches, then, still hungry, they sent out for a pizza. They talked for a long time about the greenhouse effect instead of the film business. It was the pot. It made them nostalgic for being aware of something beside their own nonexistent film careers, their nonexistent marriages and children.

“No one'll drop the Bomb,” said Lisa. “Even the Arabs are too smart for that. It's pollution.”

“The world will die of thirst, there'll be no water to drink, there'll be no air to breathe,” said Carole.

“– our brains will he crushed under the weight of worldwide cultural mediocrity,” said Tony. “If water boils out of drain, immediately add another cup of
COLD
water.”

Mimi's attitude was, if you can't have a family, you might as well have it like college.

How to Write a Blockbuster was in its fifth week. There were eleven students, evenly divided between the young and entrepreneurial and the old and entrepreneurial. Most of them were there because they believed there was more money to be made in writing a blockbuster and selling it to television than in writing an original screenplay. One eighteen-year-old prodigy
of modern life was taking the class because it was cheaper than buying screenplay software. Mimi was there because she believed in self-improvement; also, she wanted to write a blockbuster so she could quit her job at Talent and Artists and take acting classes. After she'd brushed up on the Method and perhaps had some of her facial lines removed, she would get back in touch with Bob Hope.