by Karen Karbo
Tony pinched the end of his nose, then tucked his hands under his thighs. Mouse had once tenderly advised him that this was not a particularly becoming habit. He tried to remember if he had ever met a Michael Brass. Someone in Bibliothèques? A friend of Sather and Darryl’s?
“– Tony Cheatharn, old friend from Nairobi, personally involved with the Kenyan Wildlife Federation’s crackdown on poaching – lovely, yes – let me put you on the speaker.”
V.J. pressed a bar at the bottom of his phone console, releasing a booming disembodied voice. “Tony Cheatham, do I know you?”
“He and Ralph Holladay, you remember Ralph, had that Girls on Gaza project –”
“The Script That Wouldn’t Die? Sure, I remember.”
Ralph smiled to hide his wince.
“– they’ve got this terrific project Love Among Gorillas. At any rate, don’t want to bore you with that now. We heard SAI was having a fundraiser after the first of the year –”
“Ten thousand dollars a head. You got ten thousand dollars, I’ll see you there. How’d the operation go, Tony? Was on a fact-finding mission myself a couple of months ago with…” He proceeded to name three or four of the most famous movie stars in the world. “We thought the situation looked terrible, just terrible.”
“Yes, quite,” said Tony helplessly.
“Considering the magnitude of the problem, some good was done,” said Ralph. He shrugged at Tony. Make it up.
“We were able to confiscate a ton, several tons of ivory,” Tony tried. “We also captured a few of the more vicious poachers in the –”
“– Tony was shot during one of the raids,” V.J. contributed, waving the script in the air as though to acknowledge he’d read the new draft and approved of this addition.
“– Jesus Christ,” said Brass. “Tony, tell you what, you got five thousand dollars you come on by, my guest.”
“Michael, the man just got back from Kenya. He’s been shot. Maybe he could give a speech, a little update on how the battle is going, a view from the trenches.”
“Sure. Why not?” With that, Brass hung up.
V.J. replaced the receiver, looking as satisfied as Hannibal the day he crossed the Alps. He took off his greasy-lensed glasses, huffed them against his chest. “We did it, old chaps.”
Tony found himself nodding his head. “Right-o.” This must be how people are converted to bizarre religions, he thought.
Ralph said, “So. The script.”
V.J. steered his glasses onto his face, pulled his lank hair back into a tight ponytail. On the corner of his desk sat a handwoven basket full of red and green jelly beans. He tossed a few into his mouth, “You guys know I love this script.”
“– we think the ending needs to be stronger,” Tony said. “Right now it ends with the wedding on the mountain. We were thinking we should go more Romeo and Juliet. Take out the wedding, the Tony character dies, then the Mouse character finds him and kills herself.”
“The wedding is the most powerful scene in the script. It’s the Happily Ever After part. Besides, this is a true-life story. Although I do see your point, something is missing. The script is perfect, but lacking, isn’t it?”
“That’s just a thought,” said Ralph. “It’s not engraved in paper.”
“What we have here is just a nice love story, isn’t it?”
“I was under the impression that’s what attracted you to it,” said Tony, “the sort of classical feel –”
“What are your thoughts?” Ralph asked V.J.
V.J. tipped back in his chair, held his hands together against his lips, pondering. Minutes passed. Tony could hear a woman talking on the phone through the other side of the wall. “Good, what’s good?” he thought he heard her say. He tried to think back to V.J.’s filmic writing seminar. Was V.J., then Vince, as loony then as he was now? Mouse would say that teaching semi-illiterate tribesmen how to translate the stuff of their lives into a screenplay said it all. He could just imagine the “told you so” look on her cute little face. So V.J. was crazy. Visionaries often were. Mouse’s old boyfriend Ivan was crazy, also stupid. He made documentaries. At least V.J. did things like Lethal Red Attraction or whatever the bloody hell it was. Tony rubbed the sides of his temples. He was having trouble following his own train of thought.
“Let me just toss this out. Feel free to disagree. What about heightening the elephant-poaching angle?”
“You want more about the documentaries they’re working on?” said Tony in disbelief. That could only slow things down. “Wouldn’t that be a bit boring?”
“My point exactly. Movies about movies are boring. They never do well. So let’s make Tony and Mouse part of the wildlife team battling the poachers.”
“Interesting,” said Ralph.
“I thought you wanted a true-life story.”
“We do,” said V.J. “Though certainly you must agree that we can be a bit flexible in our interpretation of it. When you get down to it, what’s the difference between making a movie about the struggle against poaching and joining the struggle itself?”
“There’s a considerable –”
“– let’s not split hairs. What about, Tony and Mouse are working undercover! That could be it. Working undercover – or no, no, no! This is it! I got it!” He dug his hand into the basket, stuffed a fistful of jelly beans into his mouth. The sound of candy and dental work clashing filled the otherwise silent room.
Tony and Ralph waited politely.
“Tony is working with the wildlife department and Mouse is working with some other group undercover, only he thinks she’s an ivory smuggler. That could work very nicely –”
“– yeah!” said Ralph, leaping to his feet, “and what it is, she shoots him. Accidentally. Or here! Wait!” Ralph helped himself to the jelly beans, a few bouncing to the floor. “She’s in with this group of poachers and she’s scared shitless because maybe they suspect she’s undercover, and so, to prove she’s on their side, she shoots Tony, she wings him, then sneaks into his camp later and cuts the bullet –”
“– good, good, good,” said V.J. “Woman wounds Man, then heals him –”
“I know how that is,” said Ralph. “We should be writing this down. Tony, write this down.”
“Terrific,” said Tony, “smashing. One minor suggestion. Since it’s no longer a true story, I would prefer not using our real names.”
“What are you –?” V.J. sputtered, then turned to Ralph. “What is – how is this not a true story?”
Tony looked at him blankly. “How is this not a true story? It’s not a true story because it never happened.”
“Howz about we say not ‘this is a true story’ before the title credit, but ‘based on a true story’?” suggested Ralph.
“I’ll have to run that by my people,” said V.J.
“You still have to run the bleeding script by your people,” said Tony. “Can’t you run it all by at the same time?”
“Did I mention Redford?” said V.J.
“He’s interested?” asked Ralph.
“First, we need to make Love Among Gorillas as perfect as we can,” said V.J. He reached for more jelly beans, scrabbled around the bottom of the empty basket.
“Maybe we should change the title to Love Among Elephants,” said Ralph.
“Brilliant,” said V.J. He wagged the basket in the air over his desk. “Tony, old chap, could you? There’s a big bag of jellies in Emily’s closet out there. Dreadful for you, but ’tis the season.”
Tony rose slowly. He could not believe this. Had he, by broaching a perfectly reasonable objection, been reduced to the role of hostess? He took the basket stiffly from V.J.’s hand. He walked slowly out to Emily’s office. He felt their eyes on his back.
The closet was out of V.J.’s line of vision. Tony leaned his forehead against the closet door. He stared down at the toes of his cowboy boots, listening to the roaring tale of evil ivory smugglers, noble elephants, automatic weapons, laundered money,
and juicy sex being effortlessly spun in V.J.’s office.
He could leave right now. He could catch a bus back to the apartment. He could come clean to Mouse. They could find something to produce together. He could put Love Among the Gorillas at the bottom of his suitcase. Better, he could burn it.
As he set the basket on the edge of Emily’s cluttered desk, his eye happened on a check sitting on top of her in-box. It was made out to V.J. Parchman for ninety-seven thousand dollars, written on the account of a production company Ralph had mentioned once in passing. It was dated the week before, no clue as to what it might be for, just a check, tossed there as though it was any niggling piece of paperwork. Under the check was a copy of the latest Variety. The lead story was about a twenty-two-year-old film school graduate who had just sold his second script for several million.
Tony filled the basket with jelly beans and returned to V.J.’s office.
As Ralph would remind him later, at a dead stop in the diamond lane, this was probably not going to happen anyway. It was rush hour. Pairs of red taillights marched into the dusk.
“If it’s not going to happen,” shouted Tony, “why are we doing it! Why are we wasting our time!”
“Same reason people don’t want their brain-dead loved one taken off life support! Same reason my father had four bypass operations! The reason we open our mail and brush our teeth! The reason we get up in the morning!”
“There’s hope, in other words,” said Tony, “you’re saying there’s hope.”
“To the extent that there’s no hope, there’s hope, is what I’m saying. You ever read The Plague?”
“Yes.”
“Read The Plague, you’ll see what I’m saying.”
14
MOUSE THOUGHT THE ACCIDENT HAD CHANGED SHIRL, just as Dr. Klingston predicted. Her evidence was their driving over the hill to the Valley six-thirty Christmas morning to open presents with Shirl and Auntie Barb.
Shirl demanded that Mimi, Mouse, and Tony come over in bathrobes and pajamas. Any attempt to dissuade her produced a fit of rage or sulking. Mouse and Mimi pleaded. Couldn’t we have Christmas at the apartment, then shower and dress and…? Couldn’t we at least dress? We’ll bring over our presents and we can open everything together….
Shirl, backed by Auntie Barb, who accused Mimi and Mouse of willfully making Shirl’s already tough life hell, insisted they go straight from bed to bucket seat without stopping to comb their hair or rinse the sour night taste from their mouths. She wanted them no later than six-thirty, the better to duplicate the inhumane hour Mouse and Mimi used to awaken her and Fitzy, then just her, on the innocent and greedy mornings of Christmas past.
“She’s always been a Christmas Nazi,” said Mimi as they jounced over Laurel Canyon. “I don’t see anything different this year. It’s always one thing or another. She was always after Ivan to dress up like Santa. You can imagine Ivan as Santa.” No way was she, Mimi, going to drive anywhere in her highly unreliable Datsun in a bathrobe. She wouldn’t even take the garbage out in her Ugly Pants, the brown Stretch Levi’s for Gals Shirl had saddled her with last Christmas. This morning, after her run and a Merry Christmas wakeup call to Ralph, she put on paint-speckled gray sweats and a T-shirt. She put on makeup – only enough to look normal, not beautiful – and brushed her teeth. She still had a warrant for her arrest out on account of all her parking tickets, and was not about to get pulled over by a cute cop, then hauled off to jail in a patrol car, Clearasil dotting her face, her rotting coffee-stained robe flapping open as she was marched up the courthouse steps. Shirl would just have to be unhappy. She, Mimi, would just have to suffer being accused of ruining Shirl’s day. She would be anyway. After all, it was Christmas.
There was no traffic, save a few hyperoutfitted, tortured bicyclists with stringy overworked flanks pumping up the hill. The air was tinged with the smell of ponderosa pine, the sky white with dry desert cold. Later, it would be as warm as any late spring day.
Unlike Mimi, Mouse liked Christmas. It was the one day a year when she didn’t feel compelled to think up ways to raise money for her documentaries. It was a true holiday. She dangled her arm out the window, hand patting the breeze. The day she bought her new green silk blouse she also splurged on a lavish purple terrycloth bathrobe with a hood.
Tony wore a brown-and-gold silk dressing gown his mother had sent him from Hong Kong. He sat wedged in the backseat, his knees thrust under his chin, next to two shopping bags full of packages whose elaborate bows were getting flatter and flatter by the minute. The temperature between Mouse and Tony made the chilly morning seem Saharan by comparison.
“This is the kind of Christmas we’d try to sneak in a swim. We’d take off our black patent-leather shoes and our anklets – remember those anklets with the little lace trim? We’d stand on the first step in the shallow end of the lagoon, remember?” asked Mouse.
“We’d yell inside to Shirl and Fitzy, ‘It’s really warm,’” said Mimi.
“‘I’ll bet it is.’ Fitzy would say, ‘I’ll bet it is.’ Then we’d say, ‘No, really. It’s really, really warm.’ We’d yell, ‘Would you be mad if we accidentally fell in?’”
“We never yelled it,” said Mimi. “I just did it. One time I pretended you pushed me.”
“We never did it,” said Mouse, “we only threatened.”
“I did it,” said Mimi. “It was the year we had the twin dresses.”
“We always had twin dresses,” said Mouse.
“Yeah, with lots of lace. I looked like the Incredible Hulk, and Mouse was all cute and girly.”
“I was never girly,” said Mouse, pleased to be thought so.
“Sounds like I missed a smashing time,” said Tony.
“It was a smashing time,” said Mouse. “You don’t have to be sarcastic.”
“I wasn’t being sarcastic.”
Even in Africa, Christmas had always reminded Mouse of Fitzy. Every year the memory seemed more pleasant and less tinged with pain, which in turn made Mouse sad that he had been dead so long.
When Mouse was small, it was tradition to go to work with Fitzy on Christmas afternoon. He was owner and sole proprietor of Fitzy’s, a bar on then tawdry Ventura Boulevard. It was egg-yolk yellow on the outside, with no windows and had a gaudy green neon sign screaming FITZY’S, a blinking shamrock dotting the i. Mimi never went with Fitzy to work, Christmas afternoon or any other time. Mimi said Fitzy’s looked like a place you’d go if you wanted to get knifed.
Fitzy’s had catered to salesmen who sold vacuum cleaner attachments or World Book Encyclopedias out of their cars and to unhappy husbands, Irish five generations back, who’d stop in on their way home to their over-air conditioned tract houses in Van Nuys. The Valley was still the sticks, then, in 1962, hot, dull, and dusty. People living in houses that had since been demolished to make way for a minimall raised chickens in their backyards and sold pomegranates and avocados from their own trees to local markets.
Shirl had been ashamed of Fitzy’s. So had Mimi. In grade school all Mimi’s friends’ fathers were businessmen who conducted mysterious, inexplicable “business” all day long in dress-up clothes. Fitzy wore no-iron golf shirts and was proud of the fact he cleaned the Gents’ and the Ladies’ with his own angry-pink dishpan hands. He hired losers who often robbed him.
The family always seemed to have money in the summer, during hot spells, around St. Patrick’s Day, and at Christmas. In February they were always poor, a fallout from Fitzy’s best customers’ New Year’s resolutions. His business was seasonal, Mouse insisted when her mother and sister complained, a word she used before she was quite sure what it meant.
Fitzy’s opened at four o’clock on Christmas. Mouse would sit under the bar on the brass footrail, reading the old Atlas he kept in the drawer of his desk under the phone books and drinking Shirley Temples with two cherries.
One Christmas, one of the sad vacuum-cleaner-attachment salesmen, a regular who’d had a turkey carving-related argu
ment with his wife and needed a drink, asked her what she was doing down there.
“Hiding from Mommy and Mimi,” she said. The salesmen said he was hiding from Mommy, too. He gave her a tiny candy cane from his pocket, sticky with fine blue lint.
Fitzy roared with laughter and slapped his stomach. Mouse recognized what he called his hail-fellow-well-met laugh. It was a special laugh for the bar. At home he was quiet and read history books with yellow pages and tiny print.
“’This poor child! She’s the different one, she is. Her sister and mother – you know how most women are – why say something in ten words when you can use a hundred?”
“When you can use a thousand!” said Mouse.
“When you can use a million!” said Fitzy.
“When you can use a katrillion-willion!” said Mouse.
“She exaggerates, just like her old man.” Fitzy laughed until he nearly choked.
“I never ever ’zaggerate,” said Mouse.
“Poor child.” Fitzy shook his head.
Now, as Mimi pulled into Shirl’s driveway, Mouse worried, as she did from time to time, that this fond memory was a myth, something she’d unknowingly invented on a date, at a cocktail party, in the bush, chattering idly to pass a long equatorial night, a careless half-truth fused with a harmless embellishment to create the last clear memory of her father.
Inside, a fire was roaring. It was traditional to have a fire on Christmas regardless of the weather. Mistletoe shriveling from the past week of heat was taped to the center of every doorway. Silver garlands festooned the mantle crowded with angels, elves and Santas fashioned from every conceivable material: pine cones, pantyhose, knitting yarn, magazines folded a clever way taught only in Girl Scouts, then spray-painted gold. Displayed on either end table was Shirl’s collection of music boxes and snowstorms-in-a-ball. Tiny blinking lights were strung around the ceiling. Cards hung from two wide red satin ribbons flanking either side of the dining room. There was a crocheted Santa toilet paper cover in the bathroom, snowball guest soap, and candy-cane hand towels.
There were stockings for each of them. The sisters had their own red felt ones, with “Mimi” and “Mouse” written on them in green glitter, most of which had been rubbed off. Shirl had made a green felt stocking for Tony, his name sparkling in red. A plate of cheese danish sat on the coffee table along with a five-pound box of mixed chocolates someone had sent and a ceramic Santa teapot and four matching ceramic Santa mugs. Lorne Greene crooned “Merry Christmas Neighbor” on the stereo. Lorne Greene had been Fitzy’s most famous customer.