All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  A party for the museum people is a brilliant idea. Something outdoors, obviously, since the kitchen is still just a shell and Michael and I will be sleeping in the living room (where, as I’ve mentioned, I also make toast) at least until Christmas. We just have to put in a terrace and some plants, which we were going to do anyway. Scheduling a party will give us a firm deadline, so we’ll avoid the trap that lots of people seem to fall into, letting projects like this go on and on.

  Right now I’m thinking an aged brick—you can get bricks that they’ve buried underground or in ash or acid or something—or possibly large terra-cotta tiles, arranged maybe in a fan shape radiating from the French doors we’re installing in the living room. I’ve always wanted a barn-wood deck, but I think I relinquished that dream when we bought a Spanish-style house. I’ve also seen a sort of green slate that would be lovely, but I’m not sure how much weight it can take.

  Digging currently under way for the pool. It’ll take up a good portion of the yard, but it’ll be great for the kids. Marlo and Hunter are both on swim teams and could really improve their times with some extra practice. Hunter’s already talking about water polo. Plus, I like the idea that they’ll eventually want to invite their friends over to our house for pool parties, where I can supervise.

  L

  “The rich are no longer different from you and me,” Lexie says to Miles, as they sit in a candlelit restaurant sipping champagne.

  No, that was going too far. Letty, or rather Lexie, was not exactly rich. Certainly not as Fitzgerald had meant it. Her wealth had only caught up to her social class. She and Miles were now, they felt, where they ought to be, spending what they ought to be able to spend, given their talents and educations. No champagne for them, except on the most special of occasions, but instead a nice California merlot, only three times more expensive ordered in the restaurant than purchased off the discount liquor store shelf. But also three times more delicious in the former setting.

  Lexie and Miles, perhaps not seated at the best table in the restaurant everyone was breathless about, but certainly not seated at the table near the restrooms, where a couple of tourists obviously from somewhere like Iowa or Wisconsin had been shunted, gaze at each other with renewed love over their caramelized calamari and seckle pear appetizers. “Here,” each thought, with a sense of relief and pride, “is a person of taste and sophistication. A person who understands that as long as one must have things in life, they might as well be things of beauty and history, things that will enrich the senses even as they provide a comfortable seat and a surface on which to set a glass of chardonnay.”

  M—

  The kitchen is finished! Well, not finished, exactly, but done enough so that I could spend the day arranging the dishes in the new—made to look old—birch headboard cupboards, and stocking the refrigerator—half of one wall is taken up by shiny, stainless-steel doors, in anticipation of the kids becoming teenagers. The distorting mirror effect they create will also promote weight loss—I can’t stand to open those doors once I’ve seen myself in them.

  I’m sure you’re right about this renovation saving us money in the end. The freezer has cubic feet enough to preserve a whole cow, if the various cuts are properly configured (this was actually demonstrated to us when we bought the appliance), so I can prepare meals late at night and store them—no more running out for expensive takeout. And then, as you say, we can entertain easily now, so we won’t be wasting such ghastly amounts in restaurants. In fact, one could argue that we have a restaurant right here, what with the size of this oven, in which I am, even as I write, preparing a toastless meal.

  Do you really think I should have them do the flooring over in pine? Jeanette’s does look wonderful—it’s so gorgeously scrubbed and worn—very Maine-coasty. And they do have all their equipment here right now. It seems a shame after so much time and money not to get it right. And I could donate the tiles to a school or a shelter and write off the mistake.

  Michael just came in grumbling about having to put the top up on the car and affix “The Club” to the steering wheel—the garage hasn’t had room for cars since the armoires were delivered. “Armoires?” you ask. Indeed. Who can live without an armoire these days? Seriously, we plan to really “live” in our living room, as I think I may have said, but not having a TV room means we need some other way to hide our association with that vulgar appliance. Hence, the first armoire.

  To counter the fact that this decorating technique will not be peculiar to our home and may make our living room resemble an upscale hotel, we thought we’d buy from a boutique and maybe come up with something a little bit special. Ha! All of the Westside has the same notion of how to ensure their furnishings will be unique. (Buying a “unique” armoire turns out to be akin to naming one’s child Hunter.) Do not shop at that country French place on Montana on a Saturday; it’s like trying to fight your way through a Van Gogh in Arles show. We did find one that charmed us, though, made of 100% reclaimed antique French wood, although the piece itself was hammered together by a company in North Carolina last year. They offered to do us a deal on a second piece—French Canadian (both wood and construction) 20% off—which Michael figured was too good to pass up, since we’ll need something to house the TV in the bedroom. Once we have a bedroom.

  I know we’re getting ripped off, buying from a store on the trendiest, classiest shopping street in Santa Monica instead of finding these things in the loft of someone’s barn in Quebec, but at least this way we avoid shipping. Anyway, what with these, plus the bed, the bookcases, the dressers, and the Indonesian temple door we’re converting into a desk, the garage is pretty full.

  This morning a strange man parked his pickup in the driveway and mowed the front yard. It turns out that he comes with the house. At least, if I want to stick to my “no gardener—I’ll do all the work myself” plan, I will have to fire Ramon, who says he’s been working here for seven years—not, in one sense, the most persuasive argument, since I don’t like what he’s done with the place.

  L

  While Letty and Michael, and Lexie and Miles, lolled in their success, I met only with further humiliation. Throughout my month of drudgery at In Your Dreams, I’d been looking forward to June 30, when the second intern was due to begin work.

  “I think you’ll really like her,” Simon had told me. “She’s young—I mean, she just graduated from college in May—but she has a very mature sensibility. And she’s a terrific writer. I think you two will really get along.”

  In generous anticipation the evening before, I stopped at a store on Sixth Avenue and splurged on a celadon-colored coffee mug free of kitschy sentiments to present to my fellow intern as a welcome gift. I was, in fact, actually seated in her cubicle, trying to compose a clever accompanying note, when I heard Simon’s voice behind me.

  “You get your own workstation,” he was saying, “or, as some of us refer to it, a desk.”

  I turned and rose, mug outstretched, to greet my new colleague.

  “Ms. Snyder?”

  The mug bounced slightly when it hit the soiled carpeting.

  “Ashleigh?”

  “You two know each other?” This was from Simon, the only one whose face did not reflect some measure of horror.

  “OhmyGod! Ms. Snyder! It’s so great to see you!”

  Her initial dismay at coming face-to-face with a former teacher in the place where, I assumed, she’d been planning to make her first mark as an adult was almost instantly replaced by delight. I had, as I may have mentioned, been well liked in the classroom. And I had liked Ashleigh Cohen, whose hair, once slicked back into a girlish ponytail, was now mussed in a fashionable way, and who was wearing the de rigueur metropolitan black pants that made my outdated sundress look particularly jejeune. I remembered as we embraced that she’d been sweetly eager, impressively bright, but also charmingly deferential. Yes, I had liked her very much as a student. Still, it was highly disturbing, not to mention loathsome, that she seemed t
o have become my equal.

  Or worse, my better.

  “Ashleigh’s only going to be with us full-time for a couple of months,” Simon said, as I knelt to retrieve the mug that had ended up under the desk. “She’s going to start her MFA at Columbia in the fall.” He turned to her. “And what happened with your story?”

  “They took it!” she squealed.

  On my feet again, I looked at them both, head slightly cocked, feigning what I hoped was a perky, quizzical expression. “Who took your story?”

  “The Paris Review?” she said, as if I were obviously so far removed from the world of literary publications that I’d probably not heard of it.

  “It was really brilliant, Margaret,” Simon said. “Ashleigh sent it to me as part of her application and I knew they’d want it. I submitted it for her. With Ashleigh’s permission, of course.” He smiled at his protégée.

  Honestly, how was I expected to live after this sort of news? But, unfortunately, although the word “mortification” suggests death, it does not actually cause it. Rather than spontaneously burst into flames or melt in a greasy puddle at Ashleigh’s feet, I had to show her the Xerox machine and explain the idiosyncrasies of the fax and the filing system. We spent the rest of the morning Xeroxing the magazine’s standard rejection letter, several copies of which fit easily onto a page, and then cutting the pages into pitifully narrow rejection ribbons: “sorry … not right for our pages … please try us again.” I cringed with empathy every time I dropped one of these into a “self-addressed stamped envelope” to return a manuscript, envisioning the recipient poring over those final four words, weighing their encouraging invitation against the discouraging fact that we were obviously unwilling to spend even a full sheet of paper on our reply.

  Ashleigh, already among the chosen, Ashleigh, who’d not even had to supply the self-defeating SASE to land her work in some of the most sought-after publications in the country, prattled on about various members of her high school class with whom she’d kept up and her boyfriend who was taking her out to lunch at one o’clock. I ate a peanut butter and banana sandwich at my desk and, driven purely by my envy of a twenty-two-year-old girl, added several paragraphs to Lexie’s story.

  Until Ashleigh appeared at In My Dreams, I’d had lingering qualms about Lexieing Letty. Whenever my pages had surged ahead, infused with Letty’s reactions, even sometimes with her own words, I’d reminded myself that this was only an exercise, a means of teaching myself how to create a character, a skill I would then apply to a far different character in far other circumstances. My reunion with my former student, however, wiped away all such niceties. A novel must be produced. Quickly. And this one was clearly well under way.

  In fact, it occurred to me that it might even be a very good novel. The story that was emerging from Letty’s e-mails was a parable of American consumerism. Like Madame Bovary, Lexie was attempting to conjure for herself the elusive life she thought she glimpsed through other people’s French doors by copying their furnishings down to the doors themselves. It was a simple notion, really, but had it not led, at least once before, to a masterpiece? That it had led also to the agonizing demise of its protagonist was a detail I somehow managed to overlook.

  Margaret,

  It turns out we can’t have a pool after all. We’ve been informed that no matter where they put it in the yard, the heating mechanism will somehow interfere with our plumbing system, and it’s way too expensive to redo the plumbing. This was only discovered after the pool pit had been dug—no surprises there. Everything is for the best, however, since our landscape designer says we must build a hill “to take charge of the runoff,” and the pit and its displaced dirt will apparently come in handy in this process.

  The kids and I now spend most of our days in what was once a lush green backyard and is now only an ill-defined space erupting in mounds of soil. The boys and Ivy insist it should remain this way, a giant, filthy sandbox, indefinitely.

  Originally, I thought Ramon and I would do the landscaping work ourselves. (Of course, I couldn’t fire Ramon. He’s very excited about the plans, by the way, and has excellent ideas about where to place plants. He does know the yard intimately—its patterns of light and shade, dryness and comparative damp—and claims the former owners stifled his creativity.) But what with the hill and the hole, it just seemed like too much. Building a hill involves equipment. And it should be done right. And, as you say, we want to be able to enjoy the space in our lifetime.

  At the moment, there is much lifting and shifting of dirt with back-hoes or front-end loaders, or whatever those large, loud, usually yellow pieces of equipment are called. This activity seems to my eye as aimless and make-worky as the stuff you see a road crew doing, but is, according to Hazel (the landscape architect), actual hill-building work. She says when it’s done, we’ll put in drought-resistant plantings to heighten the “oasis effect.” She also wants us to build a garden wall to suggest secret spaces in Marrakech or Babylon, along which we’ll plant the ten fruit trees we’ve already purchased. We thought of doing four, one per child, but that seemed to be asking for trouble. What if one didn’t take? And then, when we got to the nursery, those little saplings looked, well, so little. I mean, they won’t bear fruit for years! So what’s the point? Again, this is when we’re living here; this is when the kids are young and should be able to enjoy picking the fruit—I don’t want Ivy coming back from college to harvest her first lemon—so we decided to go with bigger ones, practically full-grown trees. This way we can also take advantage of the fact that we have three guys with hole-digging equipment hanging around our yard all day eating our taco chips.

  We’ve also ordered twenty-four-inch terra-cotta squares for the patio from a family of potters in Guadalajara, who promise to make them all slightly irregular to emphasize that they are hand-formed. They should arrive by mid-August, in plenty of time to be installed by Labor Day, if we put in floodlights and pay overtime for night labor. The neighbors, of course, will have to be plied with expensive champagne, given free parking passes for the Otis, and invited to the party.

  Long discussion yesterday on how said party will be funded. Even though Michael could get museum money for it—it’s for museum people, after all, and for people museum people want to entertain and impress—we’re leaning toward being more classy by just putting the whole thing on ourselves. As you say, it would be sort of an investment in good feeling. I wouldn’t do anything too complicated—finger foods, a nice wine, that kind of thing. It’s going to be outdoors, after all.

  Speaking of parties, can you believe $600 to attend a benefit dinner for Marlo’s school? Well, we could get in for $300 a couple, but that wouldn’t put us on the “patrons list,” which will be printed in the program. We have to be on the list, don’t we? I mean, we don’t want people to think our daughter’s education isn’t important to us. Especially, since, as Michael pointed out, a lot of the other parents will know we’re putting all this money into the house right now. Anyway, it is important to us. Otherwise, why would we be spending so much money to send her to school?

  L

  I gave all of Letty’s landscaping and terracing to Lexie, whose landscape designer is named Hazel Nutley. I thought this a clever, Dickensian touch. I also gave her a little Moroccan-tile fountain to cover the traffic noise, nearly ubiquitous in Los Angeles.

  M—

  No, you’re absolutely right. No point in getting second-rate or even aesthetically unpleasing appliances when we’re spending 99% of our waking hours in the kitchen. Not to mention the energy efficiency of the better models. I think we’ll go with the German dishwasher. Also, a fountain! What a great idea! Thank you!

  L

  Letty

  Margaret asked a lot of questions about the house. She wanted to know every detail of my plans. I thought she was just being nice, a real friend, expressing an interest in my concerns, although her interest seemed at times to encourage what I considered my baser, or at least m
y more frivolous, instincts. Did we really need, for instance, to outfit our bathroom with antique-like porcelain fixtures?

  Margaret had always been different from everyone else, but no longer. Now her voice seemed to join a chorus that resonated exhilaratingly through me. At the same time, however, I found myself more than once uneasily recalling a passage from Confessions I’d translated years before. It seemed that to Westwood I had come, where there sang all around me a cauldron of unholy loves.

  And yet, even fixtures that looked like they belonged in a cheap motel cost far more than we wanted to spend, so it was not so hard to justify investing more in something we really liked. After all, as Margaret reminded me, this house would be the place our grown children would remember when they looked back on our lives as a family.

  CHAPTER 15

  Margaret

  “Margaret!”

  “Letty?” For an instant, I had the disconcerting feeling that I was talking to my character, rather than my friend. It was six-thirty in the morning, extremely early for a call from the West Coast. Early even for a call from the East Coast. I’d had to scramble out of bed for it. There was a breathy sound on the other end of the line.

  “Letty, what’s wrong? Are you kidnapped?” I’d been woken from a sound sleep.

  “No! I’m trying …” The phone dropped to the floor. “Oh, crumb!” It was certainly Letty. It would not occur to anyone else I knew to say “crumb.”

  “Letty, what’s going on?”

  “It’s all right now,” she said in a more normal, although still quiet voice. “I’m in the addition. It’s just really dark over here.”

  I could not imagine any scenario other than an ax murderer in the main part of the house that would force her into the addition at three-thirty in the morning. I was now standing at the kitchen sink, inexplicably turning the tap on and off in my nervousness. “Should I call the police?”