by Karen Karbo
“She was hit by a ceiling fan, okay? She’s in intensive care. My sister lives in Africa, okay? We haven’t talked in a jillion years. I had to talk to her. Have you ever tried to talk to Africa? It’s not like calling stupid New York. So get off my fucking back for a minute all right? All right?”
“Mimi, Mimi. I. I. A ceiling fan?”
“It hit the side of her head by her right eye. She got a skull fracture and now there’s, I don’t know, blood leaking or something, they’ve got to drill a hole. They’re shaving her head. What if she’s a vegetable?”
“Where’d it happen?”
“Gateau on Melrose.”
“Good God, I ate there a couple weeks ago.” Solly seemed both baffled and repulsed. He had never heard such a thing. Wasn’t bad luck and misery and brain surgery and estranged sisters the stuff of TV miniseries? How tasteless to drag them into real life.
He ran his hands over his balding head. There were a couple of dime-size dark-brown blotches on it. Watch your karma, Mr. Pre-Cancerous Condition, Mimi said silently to the blotches. It could happen to you. Anything can happen to anybody.
“I knew you were miserable, but I didn’t think anything was wrong,” he said.
“God, Solly.” Brilliant. He should give up the film business and be a brain surgeon instead. Oh, she thought, oh, a brain surgeon. Everything suddenly seemed unfairly ironic, which was troubling. Mimi didn’t believe in irony. She felt it was more a literary convention. She put it in the same category as deus ex machina. The tears started up again. She felt them tip over the edge of her eyes. Fuck the mascara. She resigned herself to being a mess.
“Everyone in the business is miserable,” said Alyssia. “It’s all relative.”
“She’s having surgery right this minute,” Mimi sobbed.
“What can I do? What can I do?” asked Solly.
“It’s just so awful,” said Mimi. “I’m sorry.”
“Take some time off. Please. Take all the time you need.”
Mimi wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She stared at the framed poster over her typewriter, taking deep breaths, trying to calm herself. The poster was from a terrible movie directed by one of Solly’s clients, one which Solly would defend to his death. He refused to let anyone, including himself, think that he’d made an obscene commission on a movie that should have been put out of its misery when it was still just an idea. And here he was, now, offering her time off. People were wrong when they said people in the film business had no morals.
“All the time I need?” asked Mimi.
“Well, a long lunch why don’t you? But be back by three. I gotta talk to New York today. And Rocky –”
“– in a minute.”
“Fine, fine.” Solly looked at his plastic diving watch. He tapped the face nervously with his fingertips. He owned the requisite gold Rolex but was afraid to wear it for fear it’d get dinged up, wet, or stolen.
Mimi took deep breaths. Alyssia came over and rubbed her back between her shoulder blades. Mimi suddenly felt good and calm, but kept on with the deep breathing. Steeped in misery though she was – it was awful, she wasn’t saying she liked the idea of her mother getting cracked on the head with a ceiling fan – she did enjoy being someone who had something in her life which warranted deep breaths. Deep breaths were the domain of mothers in labor, actors, athletes, mystics. People at the center of Drama.
“Maybe Alyssia has some Kleenex, or, or something.” Solly waved in her direction and wandered back to his office, pulling on his lower lip. “Jesus,” he said. “Half the places in town have ceiling fans. Alyssia, get me Rocky Martini. Please.”
2.
THREE MESSAGES AWAITED MOUSE FITZHENRY IN Kisangani: one from the Office of Native Affairs in Kinshasa, for whom she and Tony Cheatham were producing the Zairian wedding film; one from Camisha, the girl in Nairobi who was taking care of their house while they were away; one that read, simply, “Mowz FitHenry fone home.” The prefix was familiar. Either her mother or her sister had called. Besides Tony they were the only two who used her nickname.
Mouse and Tony had just spent three weeks in the lturi forest shooting a BabWani wedding ceremony, part of Marriage Under Mobutu: Tribal Wedding Customs in Contemporary Zaire. From there it had been two days on foot through the forest to the Catholic mission near Nia Nia, then three days from the mission by Land Rover down the rutted road to Kisangani, where they had just checked into the Hotel Superbe, a five-star hotel featuring greasy sheets, a sagging, infested mattress, and one bare bulb. Luxurious, compared to the stinky plastic tent they were used to.
They shared a shower of cold brown water, their first in nearly a month, went to American Express to pick up mail and messages, then went to the post office. It was the only place in town to make a long-distance call, requiring a written request to the operator, the necessary matabeesh, the bribe money, and a Jobian amount of patience. Sometimes it took forty-five minutes, sometimes four hours.
They sat on a long wooden bench and waited. They sat, sweated, and slapped flies. Despite the shower, a thin sheen of mud coated their skin. Breathing was like sucking air through a washcloth. But Mouse was grateful for the discomfort, her exhaustion. It prevented her worrying too deeply about the phone call from home. It could not have been easy to find her. Surely the news was not good.
“Perhaps they’re just coming for a visit. Popping over from Egypt or something,” Tony tried to reassure her.
“My mother refuses to drive on the freeway. I kind of doubt she’s in Egypt.”
“One never knows.” Tony sat scribbling in a notebook bowed from traveling in his back pocket, making notes on a screenplay he was writing in his spare time. He pinched the end of his sunburnt nose, glanced over at Mouse. She had a mop of thick dark hair, small regular features, glass-green eyes, an unexpectedly dimpled chin. No, too specific. Vince Parchman, the Peace Corps volunteer from whom he had taken a filmic writing seminar in Nairobi the year before, had said description should be written so any actor could play the role. Height, hair color, and the like were too limiting. A hundred pounds of trouble. Better. She was an iron fist in a velvet glove. An iron fist in an iron glove was actually the case, he thought. A cute iron glove. An iron fist in an extremely appealing iron glove. Yeccch. He flipped the notebook closed and slid it back in his pocket.
Vince had inoculated Maasai babies in Ngong during the week, and taught filmic writing on Tuesday nights in a quiet corner of a local bar, You’ll Regret It. In addition to the usual restless expatriates, he had had a few Maasai and Kikuyu. The best script in the class had been a corning-of-age piece written by a Maasai teenager.
“Where do you think Gideon is these days? You know, the kid with that terrific circumcision script. From filmic writing.”
“You didn’t hear? He’s president of Warner Brothers.”
“Har, har, har.”
A gang of children with big bellies and the cottony yellow-tipped hair of the malnourished stood in a half circle around Mouse and Tony, watching. Flies buzzed in the corners of their eyes, clustered around their nostrils. A man in a limp skullcap napped against the wall by the front door. His job was to whip the children with a bamboo switch if they so much as extended one thin grubby palm.
Mouse fumbled around in her bag, extracting a bottle of pearly pink nail polish. The tiny silver ball inside clicked as she shook it. She spread her brown hand on her knee, slapped a coat of polish on her nails. Somewhere she’d picked up a fungus that had turned them greenish black. To her lasting irritation there was no cure, only cover-up.
The boldest child spread his hand next to hers. She painted his nails, as well as the nails of anyone else brave enough to approach. The children solemnly spread their hands, one by one, as though the spreading of their fingers, the resting of their hands on her kneecap was part of the ritual. She felt Tony’s eyes on her.
“Now don’t go putting this in your bloody screenplay,” she said, smiling, twisting the bottle shut.
“Sorry, poppet, going to be the opening scene. A lyrical moment ’tween a girl and her nail polish.”
“I’ll sue.”
“On what grounds?”
“Emotional stress caused by the revelation of all my beauty secrets.”
“Is that a threat?”
“A promise, bwana.”
Mouse was opposed to fiction of any kind. She was against many things that documentarians did all the time to get the damn thing shot and over with. She was against going back and filming reaction shots. She was against staging events, against editing a sequence dramatically and passing it off as reality, against scripting people’s lines. She was a purist. Tony teased her about it all the time.
It made her job and her life difficult. For example, the recent BabWani wedding shoot. An hour before the wedding, the bride had backed out.
Marie-Claire was only twelve years old. She’d sat huddled against the mud wall of her mother’s hut, her skinny legs pulled up to her chest, her chin thrust between kneecaps as bony as elbows. Everything was wrong. First her hair. Then her face. In truth, the groom.
“Ayyyyyy-ayyyyyy-ayyyyy …” Terese, the bride’s mother, moaned. She stood over her daughter, slapping her shoulder with the backs of her wrinkled fingers. Get with it! the slap said. You should feel lucky anyone wants a skinny girl like you!
Marie-Claire said the groom was a drunk and a glutton. She said it was well known in the village that he was cruel to his other wives. He beat them silly. He poked their buttocks with the sharp quills of porcupines, which he was supposed to sell, but would instead drag into the forest and eat all by himself.
All this was told to the translator, Ovumi Obrumba, who turned and translated it into English for Mouse and Tony.
As a single woman who thought marriage was dicey under the most ideal circumstances, Mouse couldn’t blame Marie-Claire for not wanting to spend the rest of her life yoked to some palm wine-guzzling sadist twice her age; however, as a documentary film producer who had spent the better part of a year trying to get this shoot off the ground, Mouse wanted to strangle her.
“So the wedding’s off?” asked Mouse, instantly regretting her words. It hadn’t come to that yet. Perhaps this was just part of the BabWani wedding experience. Perhaps all BabWani girls went through this. She didn’t want to give anyone any ideas. “What’s going on?” she amended.
“The man not good,” sniffed Ovumi. “He have pygmie wives also.” The BabWani, who shared the Ituri forest with the Bambuti pygmies, thought the pygmies were stupid and odd. They had pygmie jokes like Americans had Polack jokes.
“We don’t want to interfere, but we need to know. We’re leaving tomorrow, tell her. Nous partirons demain. So if the wedding’s off…”
Mouse tried not to think of the money they’d spent just to get this far, but she couldn’t keep herself from the cash register in her mind. It was huge, an ominous old-fashioned cash register, the kind which exists in the mind of every documentary film producer.
Travel expenses. Ca-ching! Food. Ca-ching! Ovumi, who received a salary and expenses. Ca-ching! The BabWani guide, Tanisa, who’d brought them through the forest from the Catholic mission. Ca-ching! In addition to the cigarettes and clock-radio, Tanisa was receiving a daily wage out of petty cash. Ca-ching! The matabeesh, to secure a reliable Land Rover from the Office des Routes, the highway department, to get to the Catholic mission. Ca-ching! The film stock. Ca-ching! The audio tape. Ca-ching! A new magazine for the camera. Ca-ching!
Ca-ching! Ca-ching! Ca-ching!
Thousands of dollars, hundreds of days, dozens of arguments. Mouse saw the production flash in front of her eyes. She told herself: Get a grip. It can still work out. Never forget that hardship filmmaking is your specialty.
Mouse and Tony, who was rolling sound, and Ovumi, the interpreter, stood in a circle around the stubborn bride and her keening mother. Between them, on the floor, at Marie-Claire’s feet, stood an avocado-green enamel fondue pot, bottom scorched, handle missing. The fondue pot held a handful of maroon powder, which the bride was supposed to apply to her upper face and scalp. It was made from the dried blood and hair of the groom. The powder was sacred. The fondue pot had been culled from the rubbish at the mission, obviously brought to Father Vanderboom, the Catholic missionary, from some cuisine-savvy American trader. Mouse stared down at the pot, trying to collect her thoughts.
Terese’s hut was low-ceilinged and dank. It had the cockeyed look of a structure that had barely survived an earthquake. The mud walls all leaned in one direction, like handwriting. The thatched roof stopped several inches short of the top of one wall, admitting a shaft of green forest light. The BabWani were not known for their architectural prowess.
What they were known for, among anthropologists, among the government officials in the Office of Native Affairs in Kinshasa who’d commissioned Marriage Under Mobutu, was their unusual wedding ceremony. Despite the persistent influence of the Church and the kitchen-utensil-toting Westerners who were lunatic enough to venture this far into the forest, it had remained unchanged since Mary and Joseph of Nazareth had tied the knot centuries before.
“What Mouse is trying to get at,” said Tony, “is whether it’s off or off off.”
“Off?” said Ovumi. “Off off?” He sounded like someone at a cocktail party doing an imitation of a barking dog.
“You know, whether it’s officially off, or the bride’s just saying she can’t go through with it, when in fact it’s only a case of cold feet.”
Ovumi, confused, stared down at Marie-Claire’s wide dusty toes.
“You see, Ovumi, we’re in rather desperate straits here,” said Tony.
“It’s important to show the world how her people live,” said Mouse. “Tell her we’ve got a Bantu ceremony and a Pitishi ceremony.
“Certainly she wants the BabWani represented among their countrymen,” said Tony.
Female giggles. Mouse and Tony turned to see a gang of old women peeking in the doorway. All morning they had been pounding manioc for the wedding feast. They wore dull cotton wraparound skirts. A few wore T-shirts. The university of this or that, the ubiquitous Harvard and UCLA.
Mouse looked up at Tony, imagining how he looked to them, imagining what they saw or heard to make them laugh. Beyond, of course, the obvious hilarity of being white.
The BabWani, like the pygmies, were small people. Discreet. Mouse could move around them with ease. But Tony seemed extraordinary, as colorful as a parrot. An orange-spotted giant with red skin and orange hair. Eyes a color only a few of them had ever seen, a blue that didn’t exist in their green and brown world, but only in pictures of a thing called an ocean, which Father Vanderboom had hanging on the wall at the mission.
White women found Tony extraordinary, too. Mouse had watched them eye him in Nairobi. Embassy wives, giggling Peace Corps girls, the stray, mooning professional researcher, all bowled over by his strawberry-blond curls, six-foot-plus frame, imperious nose, and Oxbridge accent.
“…tell her it’s imperative that we film this ceremony –” Tony smiled. Even in the greenish gloom, Mouse could tell it was sardonic. He shook his head. “– Christ. This is no good.”
“Wedding dead,” said Ovumi impatiently. Ovumi had had it with this women’s business. Besides Tony, who didn’t count, he was the only man around for miles. Following the BabWani tradition, the groom had been spirited away by the men of the village for a few days of drinking and hunting. After the ceremony, which only the women attended, the men would return, and the groom would join his new wife.
Ovumi had been forced on Mouse and Tony by the Office of Native Affairs. Some Byzantine initiative having to do with getting tribal men in the cities back to work. They had no idea where he picked up his English. He was a dandy. They called him Ovumi Wilde. He had two identical changes of clothes. Brown flared slacks, black plastic ankle boots, white dress shirt, and gold cuff links. He sported a thin black eyepatch held on to his head with a san
itary-napkin belt. Mouse admired his ingenuity. Another example of the African ability to make absolutely anything do.
Ovumi fiddled with the cuff links of one sleeve, then the other, like an impresario.
“Did they say that, or is it your interpretation?” asked Tony.
Ovumi shrugged. “Wedding dead.”
“It’s just marital jitters,” said Tony, bailing water on the Titanic. “Quite typical. Tell her. Tell her she’ll get used to him. It’ll all come right in the end. She’s just gone off her head a bit. It’s all the excitement.”
“Let it go,” sighed Mouse, picking up the camera, which had been resting against her shins. “The guy’s a wife beater anyway.”
“I don’t know,” said Tony. “A few pokes in the bum with a porcupine quill doesn’t sound like wife beating to me. All brides go through this anyway. It’s a universal thing. Like smiling.”
“All brides do not go through this,” said Mouse.
“So says noted marriage expert Mouse FitzHenry.”
“Let it go,” said Mouse through clenched teeth.
In the past four years Tony had proposed marriage twice. Twice Mouse had refused him. It worried her that he kept asking. She thought marriage was something a couple resorted to only after they’d run out of other things to do.
MOUSE SAT ON a dead rubber tree and stewed. At her feet ran a tributary of the Congo, whose sunlit banks were choked with deep-red poinsettia blooms and white lilies.
It was five-thirty. In half an hour the abrupt equatorial night would drop on them like a theater curtain. There would be no chance of filming anything now, even supposing Marie-Claire suddenly changed her mind. Then tomorrow they would leave. Two days overland to the mission. Three days from the mission down the rutted road by Land Rover to Kisangani. A day by air to Nairobi. An apologetic phone call to the Office of Native Affairs in Kinshasa. The wedding was off. Nobody’s fault.