All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  Giddy, I wandered down Sixth Avenue, feeling as if a cocoon that had grayed and muffled my days had fallen away, leaving my vision clear and my skin tender and new. I plunged through the gourmet groceries, Balducci’s and Jefferson Market, and bought a pomegranate, three limes, and a wedge of Parmesan for their colors alone. I stood on the corner of Eighth Street and breathed in the incense. In the drugstore, I spread a ginger-scented lotion on my hands. I wanted to exult in all of it, to dunk myself in these few blocks, to claim them. My fancy foodstores, my overpriced pharmacy, my quaint hardware store, my city. I may even have hummed a few bars of “New York, New York.” After gulping an achingly sweet hot chocolate at a window table in a corner restaurant, I skipped across the street to the library, just to sit again at the table where I’d worked the summer before. I stroked the woodgrained Formica gently with my fingertips. I was a different person now.

  Letty

  Michael and I were both paid the week after I diverted the funds for the rushes to Steve Carlson and, as I’d promised myself, I sent Wang Ho a check from our own account. It was difficult to part with that money, however. The next semester’s tuition installment was due January 1 along with another house payment. Housing and education were obviously more important than medieval floor covering. Also, Ofelia clearly deserved a Christmas bonus. I told Jeanette that I was troubled by the idea of the museum crowd stuffing its collective faces with special fungi, while my nanny had had to borrow from loan sharks when her daughter fell off a slide and broke her arm.

  “But, Letty,” Jeanette said, “you’re not seeing the bigger picture. This is a benefit, a charity event. With the money it’ll raise, the museum will be able to display pieces that people otherwise would never see and enjoy. This event is going to enrich the city in a way that’s almost incalculable. I mean, how do you measure the effect of a work of art on a child? Yes, access to medical care is important, but if your nanny’s daughter spends an afternoon with a Delacroix or a Frank Stella, who knows how it’ll inspire her, how it will change her very way of looking at the world around her?” She took a sip of her macchiato and shook her head. “That’s what I love about this job. We’re helping to make the world a better place.”

  That afternoon, with the erasable pen, I changed a payment for cocktail napkins printed with scenes from the unicorn tapestry to cash and presented the bills to Ofelia in an envelope I helped the kids decorate by cutting designs in raw potatoes and inking them on stamp pads purchased for event consultant purposes by J. Peabody and Associates.

  Then, for a period of several days around Christmas, I was granted a respite from what had become relentless calls and letters from contractors who hinted at Mafia connections, credit card companies who helpfully suggested that I borrow from other credit card companies, and Hazel Green, the landscape architect, who wept.

  We bought the children Christmas gifts. It seemed too cruel and strange, too much an admission that nothing was as we had expected, to ask them to do without. Whatever ground I’d gained with my economies—withdrawing Ivy from Toning for Tots, filling Jeanette’s tank with regular gas, using baking soda to brush our teeth—was sucked away in the vacuum of the holidays.

  The Christmas reprieve ended on January 2, when the world seemed resolved to collect what was owed. The banks foreclosure notice arrived that day, as did a request for “outstanding payment” from Marlo’s school. “Perhaps,” they diplomatically suggested, we’d “misplaced” the most recent balance statement in the “holiday chaos.” They were “happy” to enclose a duplicate. They were also willing, they said, to “work with us to meet this obligation.” I asked to meet with the headmistress.

  “Mrs. MacMillan,” Mrs. Drake said, coming around her desk with her hand outstretched. I was ashamed of the vanity of clear nail polish—even though it was only a brand available in drugstores and I’d applied it myself—when I took that large competent hand. Its masculine nails were clipped, not even filed.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” I said, when I was seated in the visitor’s chair, “about this.” I took the letter from my purse and held it out to her.

  She didn’t bother to read it. She knew our case. “We’re so pleased,” she said, “to have Marlo as a student. She’s just the sort of girl, I believe,” she looked at me significantly here, knowing that what she thought mattered to me, “will truly benefit from the creative vision we offer here at Wheatley.”

  They did not like to lose students once the year was under way. They counted on our tuition.

  “I believe so, too,” I said fervently “We’ve been very happy so far.”

  “We were not made aware of any financial difficulty when you applied to us.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have been. I mean, there wasn’t any then. It’s just …” I paused. As had been the case so many times in the past few months, I had no explanation for why we could not pay a bill that we seemed obviously able to afford. Was it because we’d purchased the more mature fruit trees? Or was it because we’d installed a retro showerhead and a pedestal sink? Or was it because we’d given too many bottles of wine with attractive labels and recognizable names to those who’d vouched for Michael’s expertise to the museum’s hiring committee? Yes, all of these expenditures were extravagant, but none seemed particularly over-the-top. We had not, for instance, given Dom Pérignon, wired an outdoor sound system, or lined the shower with slate. Michael drove a Saab, not a Mercedes. We’d not even bought jewelry, aside from my engagement ring, which, honestly, was embarrassingly overdue and sported only a very modest sapphire. Unless the light was right, you could barely see it.

  “Your husband is still at the Otis?” Mrs. Drake asked.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. I hoped we could address this,” I gestured subtly toward the folded letter that now lay on the desk between us, “creatively.”

  “Certainly.” Mrs. Drake nodded and opened her palms upward, expansively, as if inviting me to lay my idea in them. “You know, we always encourage our students to think outside the box.”

  “Let’s hope it rubs off on the parents.” My response wasn’t particularly amusing but I may have giggled. The headmistress merely waited, a technique she must have found useful in working with preadolescents. I continued, soberly, “I have, actually, recently become an events consultant. I work with J. Peabody and Associates. I’m one of the associates.”

  Margaret had laughed at this, but Mrs. Drake did not. Perhaps I’d mistimed my delivery. “Anyway, I thought we could do some kind of event for Wheatley at cost. I’m sure the Otis would donate their plaza. I’ve told the new director quite a bit about you—although, of course, he knows Wheatley by reputation. He has a daughter in sixth grade. In D.C. So they’d be looking for an appropriate school.” I had done no such thing. I didn’t even know if the director had children of any age.

  The headmistress nodded. “Well, thank you. We’d be quite interested in a project like that. We do expect our parents to help out around here to the best of their abilities. Tuition doesn’t cover nearly as much of the cost of running a school as people think.”

  “Oh, I know. I know,” I said sympathetically. “And I know we’d have to work out the details, but, in principle, you would consider something like that in lieu of, say, a semester’s tuition?”

  “In lieu of tuition? No.” Mrs. Drake sat back in her chair and laced her fingers together so that her hands formed a meaty ball on the desk. “No, I’m afraid we couldn’t do that.” She rose, signaling the end of our meeting. “We can only accept a donation such as the type you’re suggesting if it comes strictly from the heart,” she said, placing a hand on her chest, “with no strings attached. Otherwise, you know, it wouldn’t be fair to the others who can’t afford to be so generous.”

  I stood on cue. I’d been out of the box long enough for one day.

  “We would certainly be interested in an event like the one you proposed, however,” she said brightly, opening the door. She handed
me the dunning letter I’d left on her desk. “You need to keep a copy of this,” she said. “Perhaps a payment plan would be helpful. Shall I ask Christie to set up a meeting for you with our business office?”

  I drove by the bank on my way home, but bankers, I knew, would not accept a party in place of a house payment.

  The school and the house were not the only things that did not truly belong to us. On January 12, the contractor threatened to pull our kitchen cupboards out. “I’d sooner use ’em in my own place,” he said, “than let you keep ‘em. Even though that glass is for idiots. Ever heard of earthquakes, lady?” “It’s Letty,” I said. Although I understood his frustration, I did not appreciate that tone from a man for whom I’d squeezed blood oranges for midmorning refreshment. “And take the damn cupboards,” I said. He did not want the cupboards. He wanted cash.

  The demands came incessantly now, from all directions. “Don’t answer it!” Michael shouted and clamped a pillow over his head whenever the phone rang. I’d started to grind my teeth in my sleep and woke every morning with a headache. We ate only puffed rice now for breakfast, purchased from a wholesale company in plastic bags so large they had to be stored in the garage. When Noah complained that he missed his Tom and Jerry bowl, I made him eat his cereal dry

  The calls grew more angry, the weeping, both Hazel’s and mine, more hysterical. With Margaret’s advance in mind, I assured everyone that by the end of the month I could pay them all, but they all said, “Too late,” even Ramon, who stood outside our kitchen window one morning cursing us in Spanish. That was the day Jeanette called to announce triumphantly that she’d secured the Commedia della Luna to entertain at the museum party. “A private party is not something they normally do, which is the best part,” she said. “They’re only doing it for us because my college roommates husband is their business manager. And the other best part is that it’s not going to be formal or on a stage or anything. I mean, they’ll have their tent with the trapeze and all that, but they’ll also mingle with the guests, while they’re eating fire and doing those great contortionist tricks and standing on each other’s heads. It’ll be fantastic! Very Brueghel.”

  “Is that medieval?” I asked.

  “Oh, those dates are fluid—late Middle Ages, Renaissance, early Modern, who’s to say when one period ends and another begins? Listen, though. We’ve got to pay them everything up front, and this is going to be a little more than the museum wanted to spend on entertainment. I want you to talk them into it.”

  “Jeanette, I can’t—” She cut me off.

  “Listen, Letty, they really like you over there and they trust your judgment. If you approach them, they’ll understand that we’re suggesting this to help them, to give them an event everyone’ll be gushing over for years. Right now, their image is a little stodgy. You can remind them of that, but they know it. People feel they have money, but they don’t know how to spend it. You know what I mean? Tell them that something like this could really change that impression.”

  I quailed at the responsibility. I was an errand runner, a check writer, an occasional mushroom-taster. I had no experience in sales. “But why don’t you tell them? Listen to yourself—you’re very convincing.”

  “If I go to them about this, they’ll just think I’m after publicity for my company, and, whoa, guilty as charged over here. I mean, think how this is going to sound in L.A. Magazine. Think of the pictures! The masks! The saturated colors! Maybe we could get Vanity Fair to cover it. Anyway, they’re much more likely to believe you’re looking out for them, because of your connection to Michael. It’s not going to be difficult, Letty. People are dying to be told that it’s in their interest to spend money.”

  As Jeanette had predicted, it wasn’t difficult to convince the Otis’s event planning committee that this was the best use of even more money than they’d originally intended to pay. Especially when I mentioned the Brueghelness of it all. They wired forty thousand dollars to J. Peabody and Associates’ entertainment account the following day.

  It was indeed a large sum. Enough to make one question one’s choice of career, no matter what one was doing, as long as it wasn’t swallowing swords. Not enough, of course, to pay everything we owed, but more than enough to pay all those who were clamoring for signs of good faith.

  I called the Commedia contact to arrange to transfer the funds to them. Jeanette, it turned out, had been misinformed. For an entity as trustworthy as the Otis, the group would accept a small deposit and collect the remainder on the night of the party.

  I was dialing Jeanette to clear up the confusion and ask whether we should return the Otis’s money until it was needed, when the call-waiting blips sounded on the line.

  “I have some people who want to look at your house,” Peri said. “Can I show it tomorrow? They’re not expecting any of the work to be finished,” she added, “but you might want to pick up a little.”

  “Tomorrow?” Children’s books were strewn like colorful paving stone’s across the living room floor. I collected them as I listened to Peri.

  “It’s a young couple from Chicago,” she was saying. “She’s very up-and-coming with Huebner—you know, ‘Get Drunk on Life.’ ” She hummed a few notes of the jingle. Huebner had created a stylish, edgy ad campaign for bottled water, famous for featuring real homeless people from Santa Monica. “They want her out here yesterday, so they’re prepared to move fast. You’re not going to get your price, though. Don’t expect it.”

  I felt dizzy, as if I were hyperventilating, though my breathing was slow. I walked around the room with a fistful of Madelines and Curious Georges. There were no bookcases on which to shelve them. “Tomorrow?” I said again. The humiliation of admitting that we didn’t belong in this house made my tongue thick. Others were up-and-coming. We were down-and-going. Why hadn’t Michael or I turned out to be the sort of people Huebner wanted here yesterday?

  Although, obviously, selling the house, slipping out of the onerous monthly payments and the improvements suspended at stages that made daily life miserable, would be a relief, it was, I recognized now that it seemed possible, the last thing I wanted to do. This house, its neighborhood, even the renovations we’d begun, the paint colors we’d chosen, and the bathroom fixtures we’d installed, made us the people I wanted us to be. With these accoutrements, we had clearly succeeded in life. Without them, we had failed. It was as simple as that. When we sold this house, everyone—Brad and Zoe, Duncan and Hollis, my parents, Jeanette, Lottie, even Ofelia—would know that we were not the sort of people we were supposed to be.

  “I’m sorry, Peri,” I said. “I should have called you. I’ve changed my mind.”

  “You mean you don’t want to sell?” She sounded slightly exasperated.

  “No. I mean, yes, we don’t want to. Not just now.”

  Peri blew her breath out loudly to make clear to me that her work was hard and I was not making it any easier. “Well, I wish you’d called,” she said. “But I have to say, I think you’re doing the right thing. I’d hate to see you lose money.”

  I have never been a gambler. Michael and I once spent a weekend in Las Vegas; we won three hundred dollars and I hated it, hated the actual winning. It felt wrong, like cheating. The very sensation that delighted everyone else—getting away with something—appalled me. Honestly, before we desperately needed the money, were I to have won the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, I would have wanted to give it back. Why should I have what others did not? Why should I get lucky?

  But I didn’t believe our being in this house was a matter of luck at all. We were smart; we were sophisticated; we were tolerant of other cultures; and, especially now that the Explorer had been repossessed, we trod lightly on the earth. Michael, it was true, had smoked, but only for a couple of years in college. I wasn’t flashy. I didn’t demand or even desire luxury. But I did want what was appropriate for our station in life. We didn’t belong in a two-bedroom apartment in Palms, with lipstick ground into the
carpeting and hollow closet doors that fell off their tracks and freeway noise through the aluminum frame windows. We didn’t belong in a split-level way off in the Valley with do-it-yourself kitchen cupboards from a building supply warehouse chain store. And we didn’t belong in a ranch in Glendale with a cement patio. I didn’t look down on people who lived in those places. I was sure they were perfectly nice, decent human beings. I had been one of them for years. But I wanted more. I believed, sincerely believed, we deserved more.

  And that is the only way I can explain why I did not call Jeanette nor the museum to inform them that a large amount of money would in fact not be required until February 14. Instead, I took that money, as easily as I’d taken the previous sums. I wrote a check to the Commedia della Luna in erasable ink, and once Jeanette had signed it, I paid it to the order of me. Of course, I knew it was dishonest. The interest on that money belonged to the museum, or perhaps to Jeanette, if she could convince the museum to see it that way. That interest, however, was all I ever intended to deprive them of. I believed I had arranged for the museum to grant me only a short-term loan. Long before February 14, Margaret would have sent me her advance and I would replace the money as secretly as I’d taken it.

  CHAPTER 20

  Letty

  WE WERE SAVED. As soon as I had deposited the check Jeanette had signed into my account, I began writing checks of my own. I’d brought the bills with me to the bank in a tidy sheaf, together with several books of stamps commemorating our nation’s wildflowers, and I stood at one of the little ledges with a pen attached and paid them. Our most frightful creditors—the bank, the schools, the utility companies—and those with faces—Hazel and Ramon and Mr. Nakasoni, the contractor, the dentist, the vet—I paid in full. I also paid the library (we’d lost books in the move). To the credit card companies, I threw sops to buy us another month. It was a relief just to touch the cool vinyl of the checkbook cover and know that I could open it, that I had recorded a figure in the register from which I could subtract. I pulled each check slowly from the book, taking pleasure in the meaty sound of the tear. I savored the sweet adhesive as I licked each envelope’s flap.