by Mona Simpson
“I believe you,” Hector said. But I could tell when he was just being loyal. Eli said to my mom once, I don’t lie to you. That way when I say something’s okay, you can know it really is.
“I lost seventeen pounds,” Marge announced at dinner. She did look a little different. Still, she wasn’t thin. “Next I’m going to have to find a trainer.” She looked straight at me, saying that.
“Oh, don’t.” Philip groaned. “Waste of money. I’ll get you running with Miles and Hector. You won’t have to pay anything.” I saw her looking at me and thinking she wanted more results.
“I’ll give it a try. If it works, I could spend the money instead on a personal shopper.”
“Didn’t the lady in that store think Eli was your personal shopper?” I asked the Mims. This year, I didn’t hear anything about gifts for Eli, but my mom sent presents to the kid that I still worried would end up in my room. She bought it a rainbow maker and two baseball gloves, a father-and-son set.
That night, we got a tree, an eight-footer. Once we cut the ropes, its fronds sprang out to cover a good portion of our living room, touching chairs. We’d always bought big trees for our other house. Our rooms smelled uplifting, even though we had to press against the wall to get out the front door.
47 • Scraps of Paper in the Dresser Drawer
Our dad took us to Hawaii that year and it rained for four days out of five. On the pad of paper next to the telephone, he kept calculating the room bill. One day, we went to the most depressing JCPenney’s in the world, and in the diner, he said, “This cup of coffee is costing me two thousand dollars,” and that became a running joke. Later, he told me it wasn’t really the money. He’d been terrified that his one vacation with us was going to be a bust. No beachside dinners near torch-lit waves, no smoothies by the pool, and no lobby life, either, because everyone had fled to the mall just for something to do. So he was worried about that and thought he was wasting thousands of dollars. Boop One didn’t care about the weather. She hung on our dad’s arm the whole time. Boop Two roamed outside looking for sea turtles that came up on the rocks, also not minding the rain. For me, it was just fine. I didn’t like the beach much anyway. We had one at home. Inside I could watch movies, and since it was vacation, I watched them from the bathtub.
We flew home a day early. My dad came for dinner Christmas Eve.
Nobody even mentioned lights.
Philip had their car packed up outside our house—he was driving Hector and Jules to Canada through the night. Marge and the Mims packed them sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. My dad went home first. Marge and my mom cleaned the kitchen, swilling champagne and listening to what Hector had called angel music. Eli didn’t make it for Christmas—because of the sick cat—but he sent gifts: sweaters for my sisters and, for me, a pen and a book called How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. I planned to pass that along to Hector.
Christmas morning, the Boops hung rainbow makers from their stockings. They really did bounce colored arcs all over the walls. At noon, there was a knock at the door: two guys with a clipboard. “Delivery,” one said. “You’re working on Christmas!” the Mims said. I figured somebody had sent us flowers. My dad, probably. He was the only flower-sender we knew. But they came up the front yard, hauling in a sofa. We had to move Sare’s futon couch to fit it in the living room. “It’s from Eli,” the Mims whispered. She sounded shocked. “We saw it once in a store.” I ran back to my room to find the receipt.
The Alvar sofa. The paperwork they left matched the receipt. So there was no house in Pasadena! Only a store called Moderne. We wouldn’t move. But why had it taken so long to come? Eli had bought the sofa on August 19, according to the small paper. The Boops and my mom were already sitting on it. Happiness really may be just a form of relief, I thought.
I had to remember to tell Hector.
The Audreys returned five days after school started.
“I didn’t factor in a blizzard,” Philip told my mom. I could tell she was appalled.
On their trip, Hector had found a book in a cardboard box at a library sale in Idaho about the guy who’d invented criminal profiling. “He’s better than Holmes,” he said. From a corpse, he could tell the age of the killer, that he lived with his parents and had a stutter. “A lot of murderers have speech impediments, it turns out.”
“Eli stammers,” I admitted, because Hector already knew. He was beginning to make me nervous. Sometimes I wished I hadn’t told him all this; Hector got so into things. In kindergarten he’d eaten bugs with an insane relish. Right away, this minute, he wanted to haul the RadioShack machine up from the basement and hear what it’d recorded.
From two hours of listening, our ears to the tiny speaker, all we learned was that Eli had returned the father-son mitts my mom had sent for Christmas. “I could never use leather mitts,” he said. The animals! Of course. “Keep them for the twins. But Timmy really likes that rainbow maker.” We still hadn’t met his kid.
“Does he know it’s from me?” she asked.
“I tell him it’s from my friend Irene.”
They talked about his sick cat, its medicine, and his trips to the veterinarian.
I kept reminding Hector, he’d bought us a whole sofa. It was expensive.
“So on our trip,” Hector said, “I learned to drive.”
“Cool,” I said.
“If you consider a frozen highway cool. My dad miscalculated where the hotel would be. If it weren’t for the food your mom and Marge packed, we would have starved to death. There was nowhere to stop. One night, he skidded on ice and almost killed a moose. That was when he taught me to steer.”
“But he was right next to you, right?”
“When he wasn’t asleep. Can we go to your basement?”
I didn’t want to reattach the wires in the dark; I reminded him that the line came in in a corner.
“Can I wash my clothes, though?”
“Oh. Sure.” I didn’t ask why. But I went to my dresser and opened the bottom drawer. He took some sweats and a pullover and changed in the bathroom. My clothes were enormous on him. Then he pulled a bunch of crumpled-up underwear and T-shirts from his backpack. He never wore socks. I didn’t ask about the washer/dryer at his house. It must have been broken. I didn’t ask that night or the next time it happened. It became a thing we didn’t talk about. I knew how to do laundry, thanks to Eli, but just as I was about to show him, Hector started setting the knobs. He sprinkled on detergent. All that year Hector brought over his clothes and washed them in our basement.
The next Friday, Hector wanted to check the Mims’s drawer. He found scraps of paper mixed in with her treasures: my sisters’ baby teeth and my childhood suspenders. By now I recognized Eli’s penmanship.
I want to get you a tattoo, administered by a hip lesbian, with your metric.
I have known you, Irene Adler.
Yours is the last face I’ll see.
I was glad to see she’d kept my suspenders; they hadn’t gone to the little Lee.
Timothy, its name was. Timothy Roy Lee.
“But did she get a tattoo?”
“What do you think? You’ve seen my mom.”
“Maybe it’s somewhere private.”
My stomach lurched, an involuntary gulp. I didn’t want to even go there. “No,” I said. That would be like branding a person. It would hurt. Why would she endure that? I was pretty sure she wasn’t branded. I hoped not. The worst feelings I knew at that time came from momentary glimpses of humiliation in my parents.
“He doesn’t have a scar,” Hector said, “and she doesn’t have a tattoo.”
“Enough about the scar. You heard that doctor. They go in through the nose!”
“But aren’t you worried about her?” Hector asked. All of a sudden, I saw again: he loved her. He always had. I pitied him, because my mom loved Hector, I mean she loved Hector, he was her favorite Rabbit, but it was nothing like the way it was for me.
The Mims must have found
some obscure guy in rural Canada who made 100 percent leather-free baseball mitts. I was sure they were also 100 percent more expensive than Wilson and Rawlings, but she must have ordered them anyway because they arrived in a box on our porch one day. She sent them off to DC. And that time they didn’t come back.
48 • An Open Laptop
Hector wanted to call the PI again, but the sofa, large and so clean-angled that it made the room look modern, satisfied me. The house seemed intelligent now, the way a face could change with the right pair of eyeglasses. Before the couch, I’d never noticed our windows; they were square-paned, cased in dark metal. Often, when I walked in, a book lay tented on the sofa with a laptop open. I caught Hector reading on the Mims’s screen.
I really do love you, Eli had keyboarded, on January 11.
And from her:
I want to be married by the time I’m forty-five.
She’d told me she wanted to be married again someday. She’d said that barefoot in the driver’s seat, holding her knees. Her music—I’ve got secondhand blues, I’ve got secondhand blues—on the CD player. “She turns forty-five this summer,” I said. Marriage again. I supposed that was when people bought presents like couches.
“He can’t be after money,” Hector said. “Does she have anything else? Like something she invented?”
I shrugged. “No. Marge is the one with all the patents.”
Then Hector told me that his mom had gone to Baja with Surferdude and come back with a ring. It was an old ring, but it wasn’t Surferdude’s mother’s or anything. He’d bought it used in a shop on Via De La Paz. So it probably came from the finger of somebody dead or divorced, he said. I wondered again what had happened to my mom’s ring. One day when she was out, I’d have to check her jewelry drawer to see if it was still there. I didn’t want to do it now, in front of Hector.
Those months of the New Year, I was happy. This house seemed like our house now. The Mims and Eli might have been talking about marriage, but that still seemed far in the future. Hector stayed over more. He slept in my beanbag chair. We were getting to be like a couple when it came to money. I paid for everything, and I was the one who worried. Hector could be frivolous. I noticed, though, that he seemed always hungry. After dinner at our house, he sometimes stood with the refrigerator door open just looking at the food. My grades needed help. I made him slow down and show me his Latin declensions and the steps of his math. It was a patient time. He read his book about criminal profiling while I copied his homework. After school, we worked at FLAGBTU, where I was becoming the de facto leader. Once, the doorbell rang and flowers arrived for the Mims—not from Eli, though, from my dad.
All that time, Hector wanted to call Ben Orion but I staved him off. The couch had tamped down my doubts. I couldn’t get why Hector was still antsy. Nothing new had happened. Eli wasn’t even around because of his cat. But Hector called the guy again anyway. He couldn’t help himself. This time, the PI said that he worked at home, and we could come there a week from Friday. When Hector told me all this, we had our first real fight. I felt like I’d end up having to pay. I always did. The PI was supposed to be my Christmas gift, but Hector didn’t have any money. I didn’t blame him for that, but he had to be more realistic. We fought for a long time in my room. I was winning. He had no logic. Then finally he said, “You don’t think your mom seems depressed?”
And that was like the sound of a distant bell ringing. He told me she didn’t seem herself anymore. It rained the next day, and the Mims went outside for a walk. I glanced at her tying on her scarf, knotting the triangle under her chin. Her face looked wrong.
So that Friday we rode bikes to the PI’s house, Hector on mine, me on my sister’s Sting-Ray, standing-up pedaling, pulling the wobbles into a straight line. Ben Orion lived in our neighborhood. That seemed weird because by now I understood what male work resulted in which LA zip code (sorry, Mom, wherever you are, I know you hate me saying it, but it’s true, it actually is), and our neighborhood, near the beach, backed by mountains, was the geographic consequence of the Industry. Our old house stood on a street all Industry or family money. Where we lived now had younger people. Our pediatrician had moved in two streets over. Ben Orion’s address belonged to a wooden condominium, a block below our main street. His unit was on the ground floor. By his door, he had a wooden box planted with neat rows of lettuces and a thin-branched, white-flowering tree.
He showed us into his living room and offered Cokes. This was exactly the way I wanted my house to be when I grew up: a tight couch, a coffee table, and two chairs. It felt male. I heard wind in chimes somewhere we couldn’t see.
Is he gay? Hector mouthed.
Ben returned with our Cokes in glass glasses, each with a straw, the paper scrunched on top, like in a restaurant.
“So your office is here?” Hector said. “On the Internet, it gives an address on Montana.”
“That’s just a mailbox,” he said. “My car’s my office.”
“I like your place,” Hector said. “How do you make so much money?”
Only Hector could get away with saying that. I flashed on his laundry. This house was better than his.
Ben Orion grinned. “More than half my business is background checks for reality TV shows.”
“They want the real people to be actually real?” I said.
“No actors, no liars. No one who’s going to embarrass them.”
“Do they pay a lot for that?” Hector asked.
“Depends on what they need. If it’s The Bachelorette and they’re marrying him, they need more than a show where they’re just competing for money. Some just need to know that they’re not criminals. But figure it’s two hundred ninety-five times a year, three hundred eighty dollars to six hundred a pop. Adds up.”
“Do you get to go to the shows?” I asked.
“I’ve gone to a couple over the years. When we started with Big Brother, we used to be on the set.”
“Do you have a partner?” I asked, since he kept saying we. Hector kicked me. He thought I was asking was he gay. But I didn’t mean partner-partner; I meant for work.
“My sister. She lives in the Valley. She does most of the background stuff from home, on the computer. And then I hire part-timers when I need them.”
Maybe he’d hire us. Then we wouldn’t have to pay him.
The PI took out a notebook. His front teeth overlapped in a handsome way.
“So, what can I do for you?”
Hector talked this time. He talked about how Eli hadn’t been here for months because of a sick cat. Hector said he hadn’t been calling as much either. I hadn’t thought of that, but when he said it, it was true.
“Animals are his thing,” I said. “He says they’re what he cares about most.”
Even as I was saying that, though, I thought, If his cat is dying and he loves his cat that much, why doesn’t he call all the time about it?
“So, Eli Lee is his name,” the PI said, writing it down. “Do you know his birthday? Or his middle name? And how about the ex-wife?”
I knew Eli’s birthday. November 10. I said I could find out his middle name. (I knew the initial was J.) Though my mom hadn’t remembered where he was from, I did. Lakewood. The ex-wife’s name was Jean. Jean Lee. I’d listened to some talk once about her having taken Eli’s name because she was making airline reservations and realized how much easier it would be with one name, not two. The Mims had snorted.
She and Sare had both kept their original names.
“Do you know what state they divorced in? I can run that check pretty simple. Course, all that’ll tell us is when he divorced. Not if he’s some kind of womanizer.”
He sure didn’t look like a womanizer. Wouldn’t you have to be taller for that? I told them I’d overheard Eli asking if he kissed her okay, after he kissed her for the first time. It was like what I would do. If I ever kissed someone.
Ben Orion said, “That doesn’t square with his having had an affair. Didn’
t you tell me he’d cheated on the wife?”
I hadn’t thought of that. It didn’t square exactly. But Eli was a nerd! I remembered him in a turtleneck and her in her math-teacher clothes, caroling. The word womanizer didn’t square with that activity either.
“Maybe you guys ought to trust your mom to handle this.”
“Do you ever find out people are innocent?” I was remembering the guy with the young girlfriend, who went out to dinner with her girlfriends.
“Lot of the time,” he said. “We have a client, a celebrity, lives out in Malibu. A gay man. Around fifty.” I looked at Hector. A gay man wouldn’t say a gay man. “There’s a woman dentist in Glendale who thinks he’s the father of her kids. And these kids are one hundred percent Asian.”
“The Malibu guy’s not?”
“Jewish,” he said.
“So she’s cuckoo bananas,” Hector said.
“Well, about this one thing. She’s a successful dentist, on the faculty of USC dental school.”
A breeze swept through. I felt calm in this room. “Did she ever go out with the guy? Like, before?”
“She’s never met him. We’ve tailed her; she doesn’t drive west of the 405. I’ve told him that. But she e-mails him three a.m., four a.m.”
“And he pays you?” I said.
“Jeez, we’ve got an actress who was in an abusive relationship with a guy nineteen years ago. He went to jail in Arizona for a drug charge. When he got out, he stayed there and started a construction business. He married, had kids. But she’s scared he’ll come back looking for her. So we fly out three times a year. We’re watching his kids grow up. They’re teenagers now.”
“Do you think he’s on the up-and-up?” Hector asked.
“Oh, yeah, this guy is clean, we pull his taxes, everything. He turned his life around. Every year, I ask her, Do you really want to keep doing this? I don’t like to take her money. Sending people out there, putting them up in hotels, it’s expensive. Three hundred an hour per car. Two cars. We gotta rent the cars. Two shifts a day.”