All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  I couldn’t sit still nor could I concentrate on a single task but careened like a pinball from one activity to the next. I laundered; I scoured sinks; I creamed butter and sugar for cookies; I disassembled the stove. I flattened the end of the toothpaste tube and rolled it neatly. With the toothbrush, I begin to work on the grout between the tiles on the bathroom floor. I Windexed; I vacuumed; I recapped markers and Play-Doh; I stripped the beds. I sprinkled yeast on water for pizza crust. I sorted Legos by size into plastic containers.

  Michael got out of bed in time to prepare for the party. I perched on the rounded corner of our extralong tub, still one of the best features of our house, and watched him shave. “You’re sure you can’t go?” he said, wincing against the pain of the razor. He used plain soap now, instead of special, soothing emollients. “I’d rather not go without you.”

  I worried they would corner Michael. His back would be pressed against the railing that keeps visitors from diving into the canyon. “Didn’t she say anything to you?” the acrobats would ask. They’d swipe a torch through the air near his throat. “Didn’t she give you a check?” But he would be innocent and ignorant. He would explain about my illness. Perhaps by that hour a vessel would have burst in my head. Perhaps the museum would have crumbled in an earthquake.

  “Come home early,” I said.

  Ofelia arrived. I’d forgotten to cancel her. It didn’t seem fair to send her home without paying her and, under the circumstances, it didn’t feel right to pay her without asking her to work. “Stay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  I had no idea where to go, but it was a relief to be on the move, to be pushing the accelerator with my foot and feeling the cool winter darkness on my face. I drove Jeanette’s car west on Sunset, winding through the eucalyptus groves of Bel Air, past the private school campuses of Brentwood, under the clean sky of Pacific Palisades. Without traffic, Sunset is fast; the lanes are narrow; the curves can be tight. In the right lane, branches from untrimmed hedges scratched at my windows; in the left, lights from oncoming cars made me blink. It’s a good road, if you want to keep your mind on the driving and away from other, more dangerous subjects.

  When Sunset emptied into the Pacific Coast Highway, I turned right and drove up the coast, my phone mute on the seat beside me, like a sullen passenger. I bought gas in Malibu, so that I would be prepared if I decided never to turn back. Soon after Point Dume, the stoplights ended and for long stretches, mine was the only car on the road, and my world was reduced to a few yards of gray pavement and painted lines studded with reflectors. On my right, the hills were dark. On my left, the ocean was black. It was difficult to keep my foot from pressing harder and harder on the accelerator as I hurled myself into this vacuum, into space itself. But space is limited here. In half an hour or so, civilization would begin again. I’d be in Oxnard, then Ventura, then Santa Barbara, each successive community more like the one I’d escaped.

  I toyed with disaster. I imagined driving up one of the canyons and over the edge, but even as I envisioned the winding climb, the wrench of the wheel, the free fall, I knew this would never be more than a comforting thought. I couldn’t leave my children. And after I’d stolen from Jeanette, it hardly seemed fair to total her car, too.

  It was the thought of my children that made me U-turn, cautiously, at Point Mugu. They, at least Marlo and possibly Hunter, would find out soon enough that their mother was a thief, but at least she would be a thief who took responsibility.

  I wasn’t dressed for a party. My hair, unwashed for days, pressed close to my head and I had only my teeth to give my lips color. When I got out of the car, I slipped the cell phone into my sweater pocket and covered it with my palm to warm it, to coax it to spring to life. It was late in New York, but not too late for Margaret to call.

  Jeanette, I saw, had a genius for party planning. Although I’d chased down most of the evenings elements and had even come up with the idea for several of them, I’d not have guessed that the whole would be so magical. The museum’s plaza was transformed. Thanks to the lighting designer and several strategically draped lengths of painted fabric, the monolithic, desert-hued surfaces of the museums buildings somehow did suggest a clutch of two- and three-story wooden dwellings huddled against one another at the center of a medieval town. Torches, the only light source actually visible, crackled with real fire at intervals along the “streets,” wide paths Jeanette and I had marked out with wattle in the pattern of a maze to encourage and inhibit traffic flow at critical junctures. (One of Jeanette’s specialities was keeping people from getting jammed up near the food.) The torches created the effect of a low-tech strobe: guests appeared brightly lit on one side, shadowed on the other, for seconds at a time, and then disappeared in the surrounding darkness. If the museum burned would the performers still have to be paid?

  On the walls and on special kiosks, enlarged reproductions of details from the museums medieval collection hung: three hunters stalked a deer under an archway, a lady-in-waiting sidled along one wall, a burgher slapped another on the back just beyond the door to the gift shop. The recorder group was playing as I arrived, their notes at once plaintive and sprightly. The air smelled of wood smoke.

  A greyhound daintily mouthed a meat tart from my hand. “No feeding the animals,” scolded a man in a smock and leggings. The dog was discreetly leashed and lay down when it had finished its snack in a soft, gray ring on the rush-strewn stone floor. Near the fountain, a peacock spread its tail. Waiters in white smocks and waitresses in muslin aprons carried food about on trays the weight of which was relieved by coarse leather straps around their necks. Across the plaza, I saw Michael laughing—laughing—with a squat man I’d not seen before. He caught my eye and motioned me over, but I turned away, as if I didn’t understand his gesture. I had to concentrate on willing the phone to ring and then on my confession. I could spare no resources for chat about plankton.

  I helped myself to a handful of blushing yellow Queen Anne cherries, conscious of their grotesque expense and wanting to be sure I got my share. I lifted a heavy tumbler from a waiters tray. The expensive wine we’d purchased was mulled with spices according to the abbot of Kent’s fourteenth-century recipe I’d found in the UCLA library. We weren’t able to duplicate every flavor, but the final taste was sweet and sharp at once, strange enough at least to seem authentic. We’d also brewed a hard cider. I looked around for a tray of that.

  I was surprised I’d not noticed the Commedia della Luna performers before because suddenly they were everywhere, tumbling through the air and walking on their hands, wearing long-beaked and snouted masks, ebony feathers and white ruffs, capes and short jackets and tights striped scarlet and violet, indigo and goldenrod. Some rippled their legs and torsos like looped ribbon; one juggled bones. In several cases two had clamped on to one another in an unnatural configuration more Bosch than Brueghel in which feet grew from ears and hands stretched between legs.

  I found a tray of cider. As I reached for a pewter tankardful, a contortionist crab-walked face upward on all fours with roachlike speed between me and the waiter. How much had the tankards cost the museum? I couldn’t even remember that check.

  With my right hand, I raised the cider to my lips, while I slid my left into my pocket to be sure the cell, quiet as a stone, had not slipped out.

  In front of me, a raven in crimson tights gulped globes of yellow fire. When he saw me staring, he held out the torch. “Try some, miss?” His voice was rough, his accent unplaceable. He wore shoes with claws. I shook my head and backed toward the garden, where the children I’d hired were trampling the plantings and plucking the petals. Every few minutes they gathered in a circle and recited, as they’d been instructed, tumbling to the ground with the final line. Jeanette’s makeup artist had rendered the kids I’d seen in the studio on Santa Monica Boulevard unrecognizable. Those had been manifestly healthy, twentieth-century Americans—with gleaming teeth, shiny hair, and straight limbs. These children were different. They
seemed stunted somehow and their hair was dull and ragged. They smelled of garlic and grease, even yards away. One of them limped on a clubfoot. How had Jeanette managed that?

  I wandered into the crowd, and the recorders gave way to a chant ensemble in monks’ robes, their faces deep in their cowls.

  “Alms, miss?” I felt it thrusting against my shoulder before I turned, the stump of an arm in a bandage caked with blood and dirt. The man leaned on a stick wrapped in rags. “Alms?” he said again, exposing his empty gums. Who was the makeup artist and why hadn’t we discussed these actors? Jeanette obviously had not shared all the secrets of her business with me. I dropped a precious cherry in the beggar’s cup. “Eight dollars a pound,” I said.

  He scowled and spit on the floor deliberately on a spot where there were no rushes to hide it.

  “Ring around the rosy.” The children’s piping voices overlaid the chant.

  A small animal scuttled through a patch of torchlight. It was certainly not a dog or a peacock. Had Jeanette added cats? Where was its trainer and its leash?

  Where was Michael? We should not have been here. We had to go home. We had to pack; we had to sell. I hurried along the paths, pushing my way past a woman who’d turned herself into a hoop. A trick of architecture made the children’s voices louder, although I was moving away from them. “A pocket full of posies.” The maze dead-ended against a guardrail, and the dark canyon gaped before me. In the distance, well beyond my grasp, the city lights mocked me with their spangle. At my feet, a bold rat feasted on a chicken wing. “Ashes. Ashes.”

  It was over. I knew suddenly and with certainty that Margaret was not going to call and it was over. We would not be saved. And then my cell phone rang. Or rather it emitted the theme from The Lone Ranger in a high, mechanical tone.

  “Letty?” Jeanette said. “Are you here? Can you come help me? This woman insists we still owe the Commedia.”

  I could hardly hear her over the voices of the strange, stunted children: “We all fall down.”

  I was balling socks, remnants of my laundry binge the day before, when the police arrived the next afternoon. They did not let me finish.

  Margaret

  The envelope I received from the Hope Perdue Agency in March was so light and flimsy that it might not even have contained a sheet of paper. Heather Mendelson Blake was sorry, but she just didn’t have the passion necessary to give my work fair representation. If I would send money for postage, she’d be happy to return my manuscript.

  AFTERWORD

  Dear Judge Brandt,

  It’s kind of you to take an interest, especially considering that you already favored Letty and me with so much of your time at the hearing. I got the impression that you were slightly exasperated with my testimony. I seem to recall your saying that one’s day in court should not extend to a week, and, then, when you concluded that my involvement had no legal bearing on the case, I thought—well, perhaps the chafing of some other judicial matters was responsible for your irritation. I do see now that, as you said, bringing every quiver of my conscience to the attention of the court may have been more tedious than enlightening This is the sort of lesson I have learned in the painful aftermath of the State of California v. Letitia MacMillan.

  The Otis, as I understand it, was generous with Letty. To avoid public embarrassment, it paid the Commedia and allowed the MacMillans to return the money in small installments at a low rate of interest. Michael was fired, but that could hardly be otherwise.

  No, you will not soon be able to purchase a copy of The Rise and Fall of Lexie Langtree Smith. Lexie is gone. I dropped the disks in the public trash can on the corner of Greenwich and Sixth, deleted all chapters from my hard drive, and left my laptop on the curb. I wish luck to whoever picks it up. After Heather Mendelson Blake demurred, I sent my manuscript to several other agents, still hoping to make the money to help Letty pay her debts. Apparently, however, the publishing community is running low on passion these days. I put it this way to show you I have not lost my sense of humor. What I mean is that I am a failure. Despite the early evidence to the contrary, it turns out that I am merely a dull penny in the cash drawer of life. And it turns out this is not the worst thing a person can realize about herself.

  Recognizing New York’s invidious effect on me, Ted accepted a job in Columbus, at some cost to his own career. He now leads a research group funded by Ohio State that specializes in the problems of Appalachia. I found work here monitoring subjects in a sleep study lab. Mainly, I attach electrodes to people’s heads and collate the pages that spew from the machines all night. I also bring people juice, if they want it. Ted says I should audit some psych classes and learn to read the data. He thinks I could run the lab, if I wanted, in a couple of years. But I’m through with ambition.

  Relieved as I was for Letty when you sentenced her to community service rather than to prison, your comment about her friendship with me being punishment enough hurt me deeply. I did not set out, after all, to do her harm. These past months watching people sleep, however, have afforded me a great deal of time for refection. I understand now that I have never been the friend to Letty that Letty was to me. It was not that I did not love her. I did love her. I do. But I never gave her my full attention. I never thought of her without being distracted by me. Encouraging her debt was my most egregious betrayal of her, certainly, but it was not the first time I’d plundered her story to advance my own. I would be happy now to be dull, and I wouldn’t mind having failed, if I could be a true friend to Letty. But it’s far too late for that.

  I send her checks, a portion of my pay every month. So far, none of them has been cashed. It is, in any case, a comfort to me to write her name on the line and then again on the envelope, to know that this paper at least will enter her house.

  For details about the MacMillans, I’m afraid you will have to apply to them directly in Winnemucca, Nevada, where, according to my mother, Michael is teaching at a junior college. This past Christmas, I sent Letty a card, nothing sentimental, just a snow scene. When we were young in winterless Glendale, we used to wonder what such coldness would feel like. She has not yet written me back.

  Yours sincerely,

  Peggy Snyder

  Dear Judge Brandt,

  I appreciate your attempt to intercede for the sake of “a lifelong friendship,” as you call it, but I’m afraid Margaret’s testimony spoiled all that. Fancying herself a Svengali! That’s Margaret all over. You were absolutely right to point out that she had no power over me, that my desires and decisions were ultimately my own.

  You ask me to consider whether it was the prospect of living in Margaret’s reflected glimmer, and thereby taking on my own glow, that attracted me from the start. If I am honest, I must admit there is some truth in that. Still, it is certainly not her failure, as you suggest, that makes me turn from her now.

  That in her mind she will always be Robinson Crusoe and I will always be Friday, I can forgive. Who is not, after all, the heroine of her own life? But that she cared for the worlds regard more than she cared for me, how can I forgive that?

  We live now in a rented, prefabricated house on a country road outside of town. Margaret sends me checks here, small ones, drawn from an account in Ohio. On the memo line, after the printed word “For,” she writes “redemption.” I keep the checks, along with her Christmas card, in a small canary yellow accordion file. They are a tie to her, however tenuous, and so I cannot bear to cash them.

  Yours sincerely,

  Letitia MacMillan

  All

  Is Vanity

  CHRISTINA SCHWARZ

  A READER’S GUIDE

  A Conversation with

  Christina Schwarz

  Caitlin Flanagan and Christina Schwarz have been friends for more than ten years and have been critiquing each others writing for nearly as long Caitlin is a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly, in which her review essays on domestic life appear regularly. Her book on the perils and plea
sures of the modern housewife—Housewife Heaven—will be published by Little, Brown in 2004.

  Caitlin Flanagan: Tina, we always said that once we were published writers we would tell people about “the seminar.” This is our chance.

  Christina Schwarz: We began as part of a writing group, the other members of which dropped out as they decided they had much better things to do than write and discuss and rewrite pages of what to any reasonable person were obviously never-to-be-finished novels and short stories. Caitlin and I, however, stubbornly kept at it. Year after year—yes, year after year—we met every week for two or three hours or so, either in my wind-buffeted, freezing apartment on hard wooden chairs or in her stuffy apartment on a comfy sofa, painstakingly going over the notes we’d marked on each other’s pages, dissecting characters, plotting plots, and laughing; pacing, moaning, and laughing (me); drawing up to-do lists, highlighting passages, and laughing (Caitlin). There was also much snacking.

  People often ask whether I recommend joining a writing group. Yes, but only if you find someone to work with who believes in you so strongly that they’re willing to tell you the bad as well as the good, and whose opinions about writing you respect. The combination is tough to come by. Caitlin and I have had that in each other, plus, as a bonus, unfettered hilarity. I honestly wrote a lot of All Is Vanity simply to make Caitlin laugh, and she’s the real comedian of the two of us, so if you find the novel at all amusing, imagine the sort of entertainment I’m treated to.

  “The seminar” has been without question the best aspect of my writing career, and, ironically, we’ve met far less often since we’ve become published writers. In large part, this is because we’ve been living on opposite coasts, but sadly, I fear it may also be because now that we’re writing “seriously”—in other words, for money—we feel that less of our work time can be devoted to laughing and snacking.