All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  She had not told me. This omission hurt, although I deserved it for the part I’d played in the Genslen debacle, a subject we both seemed to be avoiding. “So now you’re a professional party thrower?” I meant it as a joke but not an altogether kind one. Letty, however, was always generously slow to take offense.

  “Associate events consultant, with a concentration in the philanthropic sector. I’m not exactly sure what that is yet, but it sounds like something an interesting person might be, doesn’t it? Essentially, I now have a career, because Jeanette liked my party. She said that I, and I quote, ‘provided an environment of heightened awareness and pleasure.’ ”

  “Sounds risqué.”

  “It’s apparently a prerequisite for the successful associate events consultant. Also, she just got a contract with the Otis to do this big medieval-themed Valentine’s Day benefit for the illuminated manuscript collection, and she said it would be helpful to have someone connected with the museum—even by marriage—on her team. Mostly I’m running errands so far, which, I have to say, is one of my most practiced skills. This morning I had to be at the flower market at five and now I’m making the rounds of a bunch of fabric stores to collect swatches, so Jeanette can choose one for the indoor tent she’s planning for the Center for Democratic Change’s Christmas Kickoff. Oh, and here’s an irony you’ll enjoy—I’m keeping the books. Apparently, Jeanette remembers that I was a whiz at budgeting when we shared an apartment,” Her laugh had a bitter edge I tried to ignore.

  “Were you?”

  “Sure. So much for a shower curtain. So much for the communal half-and-half. It was easy back when we thought we were clever and chic for using a flowered sheet as a tablecloth. This kind of budget, though, is entirely different. You’d be shocked at how much these people spend on things like nasturtiums for salads. It’s kind of sickening. Meanwhile, we’re going to miss a house payment next week,” she said with false brightness. “That’s how well I’m doing with my own budget.”

  Genslen could be avoided no longer.

  “Letty,” I said, “I’m so sorry about the stock. It was a really dumb idea.”

  I’d intended to say much more. My words could not replace her money, but I’d hoped we could at least talk the incident through, chew it down, until we felt comfortable with each other again. Her call waiting, however, muscled between my sentences and my call waiting leapt in between “dumb” and “idea.”

  “Margaret, I have to go. That’s probably Jeanette. She hates it when she gets voice mail.” She severed our connection without waiting for my response.

  My call was from Simon. This time he wasn’t even bothering to visit my cubicle.

  “So is the Donaldson OK?”

  The Donaldson? I stirred the papers on my desk with my free hand. I’d not looked at the piece since the day he’d given it to me nor searched other magazines to see if it had been published before, as he’d asked, but Simon would certainly be annoyed if I said I needed more time. I’d already been late in faxing edited manuscripts to authors and mailing checks, and I knew my tardiness was becoming exasperating.

  “I haven’t seen anything like it,” I said, truthfully, vowing to make a thorough check that evening.

  “Great! Then we’ll run it.” And he, too, hung up without saying goodbye.

  Late that night, Letty began communicating with me again, for which I was grateful.

  Margaret,

  This job, I assume, will eventually pay fairly well, although we haven’t, as yet, discussed firm figures. But for the first few months, it turns out I’ll have to spend money to do it. People tell me this is normal. Meeting with clients, for instance, requires a whole new wardrobe. Jeanette hasn’t quite said this in so many words, but she’s offered to spend a day shopping with me. Also, I’ll have to get a full-time sitter for Ivy, someone with a driver’s license who can pick Noah up from preschool at noon and Hunter at 2:30 and Marlo at 4:00, unless she plays soccer, in which case, 5:30. Maybe I should get a chauffeur and a sitter. Tomorrow, I’m interviewing Jeanette’s nanny’s sister, Ofelia. Jeanette supplies Carmelina with a car. As she says, “Then I know she’s not driving around in some clunker without seat belts that’s ready to break down at every intersection.” Actually, she said “some old Tercel”—I’m pretty sure this was just coincidence though.

  Last night Noah’s school held a benefit auction, a little treat to amuse us after the dessert and coffee portion of a three-hundred-dollar benefit dinner. (We figure that’s fifty bucks for the espresso—but, as I reminded Michael, that coffee only comes to four cents a day over the course of thirty years.) Michael and I managed to sit coolly smiling through the restaurant meals and the light plane rides and the special screenings and the bottles of wine, pretending we were waiting for the next lovely item, or, toward the end, that we’d bought early. But there was no resisting Noah’s own handprint, or “fingerpaint fingers on copier paper,” as Michael put it. Every child had made one. (“Made” is stretching it. I’m the first to laud my children’s art, but it took them all of five seconds to slap their palms in the paint and then onto the paper for this project.) Every set of parents, needless to say, met the outrageously high opening bid when their offspring’s handiwork hit the auction block (and thank God, although not surprisingly, no one bid against us). Yes, we all have fifty more just like them or better at home, not to mention the original hands themselves, but who could bear to give the impression that they did not want their own child’s little print? Whoever came up with this idea is a genius and should use her power for good! I feel sorry for the parents of twins.

  I’m trying to talk myself into believing that taking this job with Jeanette is a really good idea. I did enjoy planning that party, and it was a success. Maybe this is my calling—-providing opportunities for the rich and famous to mingle “in an environment of heightened awareness and pleasure.” After all, someone has to do it. Mostly, though, I’m afraid I’m just weary of the sort of social chagrin I described in my last e-mail. Could that possibly be a good reason?

  Certainly, I would have to consider that a good reason, seeing as how I’d sacrificed the last year of my life attempting to vault beyond the reach of social chagrin. But while our goal seemed uncomfortably superficial when presented that starkly, we were really striving for the world’s respect, and this, I knew, was far more than a party trick.

  Of course, I don’t blame you for the Genslen. I know it was your idea, but it was my decision, my money. That’s the nature of the stock market. You win some; you lose some, right? If you happen to talk to Michael, though, don’t say anything about it yet, OK?

  L

  She did blame me, of course. And I blamed myself. Not precisely for Genslen’s fall—I couldn’t have predicted that—but for my despicable sense of excitement now that it had happened. I tried to bury this reaction in my anxiety for Letty, which I also felt quite acutely, but it remained, tingling like the pins and needles of blood rushing to circulate in a limb folded too long. As a novelist—yes, that is how I saw myself now—I even yearned to open the vein of tension she’d exposed in her admonition not to tell Michael. What would happen if the ante were upped, just a bit? If there were, for instance, a bit of a scene between husband and wife, revealing old wounds, deep-seated disappointments, betrayal, and shock?

  Lexie, whose very life had the advantage, like my parents’ stock gains, of being “all on paper,” had also been hard hit when the drug in which she’d bought shares exhibited a disturbing tendency to make the bald gain weight. So far, she, too, had not confessed to her husband the full extent of their financial slide.

  Lexie accepted a position with a company called Have a Ball. Ten pages and three days of neglected work at In Your Dreams later, she’d purchased the wardrobe—heavy on silk blouses—and handed the keys to her Range Rover to a whiz-bang Salvadoran nanny, Miss Carmel, who was willing to drill Spanish verb conjugations with Allie and Sas during the ride to and from school. She had also begun to
shop for a sportier, but still substantial, car for her own daily use. Perhaps a Passat. At that point, my manuscript, like an old Tercel, stalled once again. Without Letty’s dispatches about Jeanette, for instance, I couldn’t get a handle on Lexie’s employer, Janet.

  Luckily, for me and Lexie, things continued to happen to Letty.

  M—

  We are rotten at the core. The rug, in fact, the very floor, has been chewed out from under us.

  “Mom, what’s this?” Marlo asked. This was three days ago. We were about to paint her new bedroom (we were forced to choose a designer color for this since none of the less expensive brands produce quite the right shade) and she had volunteered—volunteered!—to wash the trim.

  “What’s what?” I was pulling packing boxes away from the wall.

  “All these little holes. Is it a special kind of wood?”

  “I didn’t do it!” Hunter said.

  Marlo was right. The windowsills, all of them in her room, and, as it turned out, most of them in the house, were pitted with tiny holes. The effect was lovely—lacy like Indonesian carving—and horrifying. Uncle Frank, it seems, does not know a termite infestation when he sees one.

  And it’s not just the window frames, which would be bad enough. It’s everything, beams and underpinnings, floorboards and rafters. Studs. Half the wood in the house needs to be replaced or it will all collapse in a rain of sawdust when we least expect it. Or when we most expect it. Our expectations, in fact, have nothing to do with it. Such repairs, needless to say, are expensive.

  I have begun to hide the children’s books, in hopes of discouraging their college matriculation. It’s too late for Marlo. She’s already mastered long division and the basic elements of five Native American cultures. But maybe Ivy, at least, will be content to be apprenticed to a paper hanger.

  I have, in truth, borrowed a bit from the children’s college funds, but we’ll put it back by spring. Still, this probably means we shouldn’t have bought that table or at least ought to have forgone the club chairs. It’s hard, though, to return things once you’ve moved them in. Impossible, actually, in the case of the table—they won’t take it back. Also, Miss Wiggins has used one of the club chairs as a makeshift litterbox. Apparently, she’s not completely sanguine about the move. Anyway, if I returned the chairs, we’d have nothing to sit on. I’ve gotten rid of all the old wicker and foam.

  L

  CHAPTER 17

  Margaret

  M—

  It’s two in the morning and Michael isn’t home. I haven’t heard from him all day, not since eight-fifteen a.m. when he asked why my coffee was always so bitter. It isn’t. I mean, it was this morning for some reason, probably the pot wasn’t clean or the water was “off” or something—you know how sometimes it just is bitter, but it’s not like it’s always bitter. Usually I make very good coffee. I get the beans from that place in Venice. (Venice, California. I’m not that extravagant.) And, really, what I wanted to say to Michael was “make your own coffee!” Especially now that I have a job, too. In fact, I’d already been to the flower market and back by the time he got up, so I’d already had my coffee. Which maybe was why it was bitter, since, now that I think of it, I didn’t really make him coffee. I just microwaved a cup of the stuff I’d brewed in the dark, hours before.

  Wait … is that the car? No. It’s the Infiniti next door.

  All day I ran on anger, but now my fury is down to fumes, and he’s still not home.

  Michael wasn’t really upset about the coffee, of course. He was angry about what happened last night, which, as far as I’m concerned, started way before last night, but yesterday I was particularly tense, what with the Genslen fiasco and then Marlo getting another C on a math test. I know this is not important. She’s only in fourth grade, for Gods sake. But Marlo and I spent two hours studying for that quiz and it seemed to me that we understood the concept of common denominators perfectly well! Was she not paying attention? Doesn’t she realize that she’ll never get into Stanford without a clear understanding of fourth-grade math? Or, failing that, an A. Also, Barkis chewed the heel of one of the shoes I bought for this new job so thoroughly that it’s now a mule, and clearly I erred in correcting him, since when I try to get him to chew the other one to match, he just whines and runs into the other room. And it turns out they misrouted the pipes to the en suite bathroom when I made the switch from plastic to copper, but nobody noticed the problem until yesterday when they installed the shower in the wrong place. Even now they’re pretending it’s not a problem. “If you change your mind, Mrs. Letty,” Hector says, “we move it.” I have not changed my mind! I never wanted to have to stand behind the toilet to use the sink, which this configuration forces one to do. (It’s difficult to explain, but it’s obviously wrong.) But somehow, because I did change my mind about the piping material, we’re going to have to pay for the rerouting and rearranging and replumbing.

  So last night all of this was weighing on me, while I lay there on the futon that smells like dog, which is not entirely unpleasant, but is still not the way one would like one’s bed to smell, waiting for Michael to sandwich himself between the covers so that we could get this day over with so as to be ready to start another one in a few hours, and I could actually hear the crinkle of all those damned unfillable envelopes under my shoulder. Michael was standing in his underwear and his socks, neatly creasing his pants preparatory to neatly hanging them over the back of a club chair for the night, and suddenly I just felt so angry with him. I wanted to snatch those trousers from his hands, crush them into a ball, and hurl them at his head.

  “Michael!” I said.

  My feelings must have been clear in my tone, because he jumped. “What?” He looked right and left wildly, as if I were alerting him to the proximity of a black widow.

  “What about that money?”

  “I know,” he said miserably. He covered his eyes with one hand and kneaded his forehead with his fingers. You know how long his fingers are? They’re freakish! A child could snap them in half.

  “Honey.” I punched the pillows so I could sit up. I punched them hard. “That money was one of the reasons we decided you should take this job. Maybe the main reason. I’m not sure it’s worth all the time and effort, all the disruption of our lives, without that.” I carefully skirted the main issue, which was that if he didn’t hurry up and get this salary increase our lives would really be disrupted, what with the bankruptcy court and all.

  He looked around nervously, trapped between a nagging wife and several heaps of items that belonged in a bedroom that seemed likely never to exist.

  “Honey,” I tried again, “I know you don’t want to make unreasonable demands, but it’s not unreasonable to demand what you’ve been promised.”

  “Well, last week, Duncan was saying—” he began.

  Duncan! I loathe Duncan! And his wife with her tented, celebrity-fawning, far-from-democratic change!

  “Michael,” I interrupted, icy-smooth as vodka, provided at a full bar, paid for by me, “have you ever heard the expression ‘talk is cheap’?”

  And, after that, it only gets worse. I shamed him, Margaret. I told him he was an irresponsible father and a coward. I told him he was weak. “Duncan,” I concluded, “may like you, but he can’t possibly respect you.”

  It worked. Oh, yes, I got what I wanted. Thoroughly browbeaten, Michael swore he would confront Duncan today, or what was today until two hours ago when it became yesterday. I’ve been trying for the last eight hours to pretend that I didn’t say all those things flat out, or, at least, that my saying them was for his own good. The truth, untwisted by frustration and panic, is that Duncan overlooks his promises to Michael because Michael makes it easy for him to do so. Michael is not the sort of person who cares only about the bottom line and what’s in it for him. He is a generous, modest man, who doesn’t know his own worth. But that, I’m afraid, is not what I said. I’m afraid this money, when he gets it, will be tainted with
my insults and demands and will no longer be something to celebrate.

  But, tainted or no, it will be money. First, I will pay the bills. Then, I will fix our marriage.

  Car. Yes, a familiar Saab.

  Letty

  I wanted to take them each by a hand and explain one to the other. Michael, I was sure, would forgive Letty her desperate accusations were he to know what lay under her shoulders every night. After all, they had spent the money together; they should work together to pay their debts, as well. But while I felt a steady pulse of empathetic unhappiness for them both, I could not help but recognize that what Letty had done—provoked a fight and yet held back the truth to maintain the tension—would be a remarkably effective plot device. Once again, I was dependent on Letty and her remarkable talent for living her life—at least the last six months of it—in a novelistically interesting way. It was far too early to call Los Angeles, so I assured Letty via e-mail that she was not a monster, but only driven beyond the limits of human endurance by fear. Perfectly understandable. Not to mention (as, of course, I did not) ideal for exploring the uncharacteristically manipulative behavior an otherwise sympathetic character might exhibit in a state of panic. I was all for giving credit where credit was due: I took a break from the novel and set to work on a draft of my acknowledgments, expressing my thanks to Letty.

  Although I was selfishly pleased about their fight, I was also reassured to discover myself relieved that, thanks to Letty’s exasperated prodding, they’d finally be getting the money they’d been promised and their serious financial worries would be over. Necessary as Letty’s suffering was to my novel, I didn’t think she could stand much more nor could I bear to watch. I was fairly well satisfied with my book anyway at this point. My characters had careened to the brink of bankruptcy; they had looked deep into their souls and discovered heretofore unacknowledged weaknesses; but I had no desire to write a tragedy and suspected readers would have no heart for it either. The strength of Lexie and Miles’s relationship would prevail, I decided, and for this they deserved a happy ending. They would recognize where they’d gone wrong, promise never to be tempted by Mammon again, and squeak by in the eleventh hour to live more simply ever after.