by Lily Brett
Either Mick Jagger or L’Wren Scott must have had an interest in the ballet or the library or whatever cause this fundraising was supporting to be here tonight, Lola thought. She wished she could remember what the cause was.
Phyllis-Elissa came over to Lola. ‘I want you to meet Mick Jagger,’ she said, taking Lola by the hand and leading her to where Mick Jagger was standing. ‘Mick, I want you to meet Lola Bensky, the wonderful, very talented author of the international bestseller Schlomo in SoHo,’ Phyllis-Elissa said.
‘Hi,’ said Mick Jagger, and shook Lola’s hand. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘Schlomo in SoHo was a sensation in Europe,’ Phyllis-Elissa said.
‘Not really Europe,’ Lola said. ‘Just Germany, Austria and Switzerland.’
‘That’s Europe,’ said Phyllis-Elissa.
New Yorkers had a tendency to use superlatives when introducing people, as though the greatness of the guest or friend or acquaintance added to their own lustre. Phyllis-Elissa, with her Picassos and Matisses, didn’t really need any more lustre, Lola thought, especially not lustre added by Lola or Schlomo. ‘Germany, Austria and Switzerland is definitely Europe,’ Mick Jagger said.
‘It’s part of Europe,’ said Lola, and wished she had been more gracious, or at least less pedantic.
‘Lola lives in a fabulous loft in SoHo with her painter husband, whose work you can see in our apartment,’ Phyllis-Elissa said.
‘It’s not really a fabulous loft,’ said Lola. ‘It’s a nice loft. We were lucky, we bought it over twenty years ago.’ Why was she downgrading her loft, Lola thought. Did she not want to appear rich? Mick Jagger’s fortune, she had heard, was estimated to be over three-hundred-million dollars. Why was she embarrassed at owning a loft in SoHo, which they had bought when SoHo was nowhere near as chic or choked with designer labels.
Mick Jagger looked at Lola carefully and a faint frown appeared on his face. Lola thought it was probably because he’d never heard of Schlomo in SoHo and could have been puzzled by who or what Schlomo was.
‘Are you Australian?’ Mick Jagger said to Lola.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I’ve lived here for over twenty years.’
‘She’s very well known in Australia, too,’ Phyllis-Elissa said. Phyllis-Elissa, Lola thought, was worse than Edek. Edek, who had been living in New York for more than a decade, told everyone he met that his daughter was a famous writer. If the person looked blank when he mentioned Lola’s name, Edek decided that they were stupid.
Edek, who was ninety-three, still lived on his own, in an apartment on the Lower East Side. He loved his apartment, he loved New York and New York hot dogs and hot chocolate. And he was happy. Edek was happier than Lola had ever known him to be. He was almost always in a good mood and when Lola asked him how he was, he always replied, ‘As good as gold.’
Lola and Edek met two or three times a week at Caffe Dante on MacDougal Street. Lola had a chamomile tea with lemon and Edek had two scoops of chocolate gelato and two cups of hot chocolate.
Lola didn’t understand where Edek’s calm had come from. It had appeared when he was about eighty-five. Lola was glad that Edek had lived long enough to feel peaceful. And happy. She wondered if Renia, if she’d lived to eighty-five, would have also started to calm down. Lola didn’t think so. Lola couldn’t imagine Renia being eighty-five. She couldn’t imagine Renia without her high heels, her firm thighs, her strapless bras and mascara’d lashes. She certainly couldn’t imagine Renia calm. Calm, Renia would have been someone else. She wouldn’t have been Renia.
‘You grew up in Australia, did you?’ Mick Jagger said to Lola.
‘I lived there from the time I was two to when I was forty-two,’ she said.
‘You’re giving your age away,’ Phyllis-Elissa said.
‘I’m sixty-three,’ said Lola.
‘I’m even older than that,’ said Mick Jagger.
‘You look fabulous,’ Phyllis-Elissa said to Mick Jagger.
Mick Jagger, Lola thought, still looked as though something was bothering him. He was probably still puzzled about Schlomo, she thought. He couldn’t possibly have recognised Lola, or remembered meeting her. He must have met thousands of people in his life. Besides which Lola was half the size and three times the age she had been then. Phyllis-Elissa took Mick Jagger’s arm. ‘You must read Schlomo in SoHo,’ Lola heard her saying as she led him away.
Lola’s mobile phone beeped. She took it out of her bag. It was a text message from Edek. I did buy you sunglasses. They are very good. Dad. Lola dreaded seeing the sunglasses. She knew that Edek would only have bought them if they were an extraordinary bargain. Like two pairs for a dollar. Edek loved a bargain.
Less than a minute later another text message from Edek appeared. I did buy one pair for myself. Edek could text, email and Skype. He could send attachments, print photographs and find information online. This sometimes drove Lola mad. He would forward get-rich-quick schemes to her and text, sometimes daily, to ask her about book sales.
The Internet, with all its possibilities, excited Edek as much as the magicians, hypnotists, comedians and strippers at the Tivoli Theatre in Melbourne used to. The fact that Edek could misspell words and still be understood by his computer thrilled him to his core. He had recently, flushed with excitement, told Lola that he thought Skype was a true miracle. Lola had no idea who Edek was Skyping. She was just glad it wasn’t her.
Three years ago, Lola had taken Edek to Germany with her on her second book tour there. In Germany Edek had sent her text messages from his US cell phone whenever they’d been apart for more than half an hour. More often than not the texts said things like, Wurst very good. He had sent the text messages from the room of his hotel when she was in the room next door and text messages from the lobby of the hotel to ask her if she was coming down for breakfast. The bill for all this international texting had been exorbitant.
Still, Lola had been pleased to get all the texts. She had worried about Edek being in Germany. The last time he’d been in Germany, over five decades ago, he had been a ragged and frayed human remnant of a death camp, living in a displaced persons’ camp.
On the first day of Lola’s book tour, Edek had developed a stomach-ache. Edek never got stomach-aches. He had a cast-iron constitution. He could eat cornflakes and smoked mackerel and sausages for breakfast, with no ill effect. Or two slices of cheesecake followed by a piece of chocolate cake and a cappuccino. Lola discovered it was the sound of German being spoken in the streets that gave Edek the stomach-ache. ‘In the Lager if you did hear German you did try to look invisible,’ he had said to Lola.
Before they’d left New York, Lola had explained to Edek that things had changed in Germany. The people speaking German were not the same Germans. Lola had seen from her first book tour of Germany that she and the Germans born after the war were tied together by the same small piece of history. They shared a bond, the children of the victims and the children of the perpetrators. They had so much in common. They grew up with a past that was omnipresent. And incomprehensible. So much of that past didn’t make sense. Much of it was hidden, half-told, hinted at. Knotted and cramped, garbled, scattered articles and particles of sentences and pronouns that slipped out of someone’s mouth.
The children of the perpetrators grew up not knowing, half-suspecting, half-imagining, half-horrified and half-terrified. They felt the same fear and the same guilt as the children of the victims. Lola had talked to many Germans her own age and younger. She recognised their guilt. And she recognised their shame.
Edek had calmed down and his stomach-ache had abated. He chatted, in German, to cab drivers and hotel doormen and told anyone sitting next to him at the book readings that Lola was his daughter and was making a very good living from her books, even though she knew nothing at all about private detectives.
Lola looked around for Mr Someone Else. She saw that he was being introduced to Mick Jagger. She wondered what he would think of Mick Jagger. It was hard not
to like Mick Jagger. He didn’t do anything unlikable. He seemed very even-keeled. As though he never exploded and was never out of control. He looked as though he kept a firm grip on every aspect of his life and the empire that was The Rolling Stones. Lola had heard that Mick Jagger kept a close eye on all financial matters relating to The Rolling Stones and understood and oversaw every detail of their concert tours, from the lighting to the backdrops to the way the curtains would go down and hit the floor.
It made Lola surprisingly happy to see Mick Jagger looking so good. He looked healthy and fit. He probably ate whatever he wanted to – or maybe he was still not eating much meat and avoiding milk and a lot of starchy foods, like potatoes. Mick Jagger’s metabolism was probably wired to be thin, Lola thought. She wondered whether she was right in thinking that Jews were predisposed to being fat. There didn’t seem to be a lot of angular, Jewish long-distance runners.
Lola knew that Mick Jagger worked out strenuously. He had to be in shape for the concert tours The Rolling Stones were still doing. They were still filling arenas all around the world. The tours were very lucrative. Lola had heard that even when Mick Jagger wasn’t touring, he worked out for forty minutes every other day. Lola worked out, too. Six mornings a week she huffed and puffed her way through one hour and seven minutes, at 3.6 miles an hour on an incline of nine per cent, on a treadmill. She didn’t understand why she’d chosen to make it one hour and seven minutes, but she was rigid about the one hour and the seven minutes.
She was so rigid that she wouldn’t get off the treadmill ten seconds earlier than the full one hour and seven minutes. She couldn’t get off earlier, even if she had a good idea for something Schlomo or Harry could do or say. She couldn’t get off the treadmill even if she had a ream of dialogue coming out of Pimp’s mouth. She would try to memorise the ideas or the dialogue. She would repeat them over and over again in her head until the one hour and seven minutes were up.
Lola had started exercising when she moved to New York. She had bought a Nordic Track, a machine that simulated cross-country skiing, and in her loft in SoHo she cross-country skied to ‘Dancing in the Street’. Twenty repetitions of ‘Dancing in the Street’ took approximately one hour. It took Lola years to realise that she preferred to ski in silence.
Mr Someone Else was now talking to L’Wren Scott. L’Wren Scott made everyone else look short. Mr Someone Else, who was six feet tall, looked almost squat next to the statuesque Ms Scott. Lola wondered how Renia would feel about a daughter who was six-foot-three. Renia had thought that Lola, at five-foot-nine, was way too tall. When Lola was at high school everyone wanted to be petite or at least average. Now everyone wanted to be tall. Women who were not naturally blessed with height were walking around on eight-inch heels. Lola admired L’Wren Scott. She didn’t slouch like a lot of tall women. She had very good posture. And was very graceful.
Lola’s posture was not bearing up. She wanted to sit down. She had spent all day with Pimp and Schlomo. Lola had been working on her new book, the third in the series. When Lola had left Pimp, Pimp was screaming into the phone, ‘Petrushka, Petrushka. Not Patricia, not Leticia, not Pamela – Petrushka.’ Schlomo had had his hands over his ears. Since he’d taken up yoga, he couldn’t stand loud noise. And Pimp was loud. ‘Petrushka Inge Maria Pagenstecker,’ she shouted. She spelled Pagenstecker out with an exaggerated and laborious emphasis on each letter, ‘P-A-G-E-N-S-T-E-C-K-E-R. If you can say Häagen Dazs,’ Pimp screamed, ‘you can say Pagenstecker.’ Lola thought that Pimp had confused the issue. Häagen Dazs had nothing to do with Pagenstecker.
‘Can you please not shout,’ Schlomo had said to Pimp.
‘Since you’ve taken up yoga you think that you are on a higher plane than the rest of us, like a rabbi or a priest,’ said Pimp. ‘You’re not. You’re a private detective who spends too much time standing on his head.’
‘A headstand is very good for the heart,’ Schlomo said. ‘It gives the heart a rest. The heart has to work against gravity all day.’
‘You believe in God, Schlomo,’ Pimp said. ‘If God thought the heart couldn’t cope with gravity, we’d all be walking around, upside down, on our hands.’
Schlomo’s newly developed devotion to yoga bothered Pimp. It had taken her by surprise. An overweight, untidy Orthodox Jew wasn’t the sort of person you would think of as likely to become a yoga fanatic. Schlomo went to yoga classes three times a week. Before his first class, he’d asked the women in his class if they wouldn’t mind dressing modestly, with no low-cut necklines and no high-cut shorts. All eight of the women had agreed.
Schlomo was very popular with his fellow yoga students. One of the women in the class had become a client of the Ultra-Private Detective Agency. The woman suspected that her husband, a pilot, had another wife, and another family, somewhere in America.
‘There are too many things that don’t make sense in our lives,’ the woman had said to Schlomo. ‘And I’ve been too scared to find out what they might mean.’
‘Leave it to me,’ Schlomo had said to her. ‘We run a very private and a very ultra detective agency.’ He had said this even though Pimp had explained to him, more than once, that ‘ultra’ was a prefix and couldn’t be used without an adjective.
Harry was doing the initial research on the pilot from their East Village office. So far, Harry had uncovered another wife in Houston who had three children, and a wife in New Orleans who was six months’ pregnant.
‘I think your friend is going to need more than yoga when we get to the bottom of this investigation,’ Harry said to Schlomo. ‘There is a lot that is still missing. Like how is he doing this on a pilot’s salary?’
Schlomo decided not to say anything to his friend at the yoga class until a few more details had emerged and they could all meet at the office when Pimp was there. Pimp was surprisingly good at helping clients receive bad news. Other people’s bad news soothed Pimp. She stopped screaming. And was very clear-headed and comforting.
Schlomo was sure that yoga would help his friend, the pilot’s wife, whatever the outcome of the investigation. Yoga had definitely helped him. He couldn’t explain exactly how it had helped him, but he knew it had helped. He did yoga at home every night. He stood on his head, with his yarmulke fixed firmly in place with four clips. He also did shoulder stands and arm balances, which he felt strengthened his connection to his intuition. Schlomo’s intuition, however, hadn’t developed enough to intuit the weather. He still scrutinised the weather forecasts. He studied the beach and ocean temperatures and knew odd things like that, on the whole, the water would be ten to fifteen degrees cooler than the surrounding land.
Lola wished she could rid Schlomo of his obsession with tides and the weather, but she couldn’t. Schlomo’s wife aided and abetted him. She called him, often at inopportune moments, to warn him about any imminent bad weather. She had called him this morning to talk about a squall in Nevada when Schlomo had had to hang up. Harry had needed to talk to him.
‘We’ve made progress on the husband of your yoga friend,’ Harry had said. ‘I’ve found ten bank accounts he has opened, in different states. They are all in his own name. And they are all flush with cash.’
‘Something is going on,’ said Schlomo.
‘We’re going to have to tail the pilot if his wife wants to find out any more,’ Pimp had said to Schlomo.
‘Tail him across America?’ said Schlomo.
‘Yes,’ said Pimp. There are kosher hotels everywhere. You’ll be fine. And don’t even think of bringing up the fact that you’ll miss your yoga classes.’
Patrice Pritchard had called Lola in the middle of these developments. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ Patrice Pritchard had said to Lola, ‘but we really need to decide the title of the new book. We want to include it in the list of our upcoming Fall publications.’
‘I think I’m going to call it Petrushka Inge Maria Pagenstecker,’ said Lola. ‘It’s either that or Schlomo’s Poses.’
‘I think
Schlomo’s Poses is a better title,’ said Patrice Pritchard.
‘I think I prefer Petrushka Inge Maria Pagenstecker,’ Lola said.
‘Let’s see what the people in the office think,’ said Patrice, ‘and I’ll get back to you.’
‘I have another question,’ Lola said. ‘There’s a line in the middle of the publishing information in the front pages of the other two books. It gives the author’s year of birth and then there’s a dash. The space after the dash always looks ominous. It’s a blank date of death space. And looks as though it’s sitting there waiting for someone to fill it in. Do I have to have that line?’
‘I’ll look into it,’ said Patrice. ‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.’
‘Thank you,’ said Lola.
Lola had done a little more work before she’d had to stop and get ready for Phyllis-Elissa and Elwood Earlwood’s fundraising dinner. Lola had left Pimp in the office with a bad headache and Schlomo boarding a flight to Wyoming with a yoga mat in his luggage.
The guests were about to be seated. Phyllis-Elissa and Elwood were urging people to take their seats. Lola hoped she wouldn’t be seated too far from Mr Someone Else. She could sometimes lose herself in a crowd of strangers. When she was with Mr Someone Else, it was easier for her to remember who she was.
Lola looked at Mick Jagger. He was talking animatedly to L’Wren Scott. They had a natural ease between them. They looked like two people who enjoyed each other’s company. L’Wren Scott, it seemed to Lola, was clearly her own person. She wasn’t known as Mick Jagger’s girlfriend. She was known as a talented and very successful fashion designer whose clothes were admired for their flawless construction, sensual silhouettes and sumptuous fabrics. Madonna, Michelle Obama, Angelina Jolie and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy had all been seen wearing L’Wren Scott’s designs.