by Karen Karbo
Tony sat in his room. In his shorts, in the dark, on the edge of his bed, he sat. There were things he hadn’t taken into consideration. For one, that climbing out the window was impossible. His bedroom was on the same side as the deck; stretching away twenty feet below it was the steep hill dense with cactus. For another, that in this wretched, stifling heat he would actually need to pee. After ascertaining that relieving himself out his bedroom window was impossible without a chair or the joints of a contortionist, he stood by the door, listening for a moment when the coast might be clear and he might make a run for it.
He made the mistake of opening the door – silently he opened it! Just a crack he opened it! – to peer out, just as Mimi was walking by.
“Tony? Is that you?” She opened the door, switched on the blasted overhead light. “God, is it stuffy in here.”
“Hallo, Mimi. How – how’s the party?” He tugged self-consciously at the end of his nose, held his legs together. In view of the state of his bladder, he really didn’t have time for a chat. “I’d join you, y’know but … You’re not going to believe this. We sold our script, Ralph and I.”
“No! Are you serious?”
“Quite.”
“Does Ralph know? Ralph doesn’t know. I just saw him at class. Oh God, congratulations! Let me –” She reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck. “You’re so nice and tall. Do you want to hear one of the truths of the world? The short girls always get the tall guys and the tall girls always the short guys. Why do you think that is?”
“Nature’s way of producing only so many jockeys and basketball stars, I imagine.”
“You are so funny and smart. I mean that as a compliment.”
She looked in his Pacific Ocean eyes, ground her bony hips against his. There was nothing between them but his paltry gym shorts, the thin linen of her skirt. He always suspected Mimi was something of a goer. Suddenly he forgot why he even opened his door, much less had to go to the loo.
“Allyn Meyer says it’s going to be a thousand screens at Christmas – the movie, I mean.”
“You feel nice,” said Mimi.
He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them he saw Mouse rooted in the doorway, arms crossed. Face pale and furrowed with shock and displeasure. “Mouse,” he croaked.
“No, honey, it’s Mimi,” purred Mimi.
“What is going on?”
“Mousie Mouse! We were just talking!” Mimi leaped from Tony’s arms, scrunching her hair wildly.
The bloody hell we were, thought Tony, cursing the sudden tightness in his shorts. Biology conspired with truth to make men lousy liars. “I don’t see it’s any of your business anyway,” he said.
“I don’t believe this,” said Mouse.
“Tony sold his script. We were just talking.”
“You were not talking.”
“So what if we bloody weren’t?” said Tony. “The future Mrs. Ivan Esparza. Mimi was congratulating me.”
“You always overreact,” said Mimi. “Doesn’t she, Tony?”
“Don’t I know it.”
“You were not just talking. I know what talking is. You were not just talking. You were not just congratulating him. Congratulations is a handshake.”
“You take things so seriously, Mousie Mouse. It’s sweet. No one in L.A. takes anything seriously.”
“Don’t say it’s sweet. You know you don’t think it’s sweet.”
“I do think it’s sweet, Mousie Mouse.”
“Don’t call me Mousie Mouse, don’t say it’s sweet. What were you doing in here?”
“It’s NBD,” said Mimi confidently to Tony. “Nervous Bride Disorder. I never had it this bad, though. When Ivan and I were engaged –”
“Stop it.”
“– I’m just saying I know how you feel.”
“You do not know how I feel.”
“You don’t have to yell. She doesn’t have to yell.”
“I do have to yell! Stop for one second! Will you? Can you? You were in here making the moves on Tony. Just admit it.”
“I was just congratulating him, all right? Anyway, you dumped him, so I don’t see you have any right –”
“The split was mutual,” said Tony.
“So you’re going to start sleeping with him.”
“I don’t know. We don’t know, do we, Tony? Things happen. I don’t know how, but they do.”
“You don’t know? Try all that wriggling around! Batting those big brown eyes! That soft little voice you put on! It’s an insult to men, is what it is, thinking they all just find you naturally irresistible.”
“You’re just jealous because men don’t find you irresistible, because Ivan didn’t find you irresistible.”
‘’What Ivan found irresistible was you topless sunbathing in the full view of him and me and the Rosenthals next door. Let’s just be honest about that much. If we can.” Mouse vanished from the doorway.
Mimi stomped out after her, back down the hallway, following Mouse through the living room and out onto the deck.
“This is not my fault. You’re marrying him now, anyway, so why are you making such a big deal out of this?”
“We’re trying to work on our film and you’re lying there in broad daylight with quarters on your nipples.”
“What, was I supposed to tiptoe around and not live my life because you were kissing up to Mom and going to summer school?”
At first people thought this was a joke. Or they didn’t think it was a joke, but feared if they acknowledged it was serious they might somehow be found unhip. Instead, they stood around grinning sheepishly over their wineglasses. They hoped it was just some new interactive wedding-shower party game.
Ivan, however, smelling good material, stood up abruptly in the middle of his interview. Yvonne was asking him something about subjectivity versus objectivity in documentary. Eliot took this opportunity to take a break. He put the camera down and went inside to get a piece of cake. The camera sat beside the deck chair. Ivan hoisted it inexpertly to his shoulder, asked Yvonne if one of her men could roll sound. He was not used to shooting, not used to balancing the forty-pound camera on his shoulder. He threaded his way along the railing until he reached the table loaded with presents, where Mouse and Mimi stood hurling insults. Mouse turned to Shirl, who was drawn from the kitchen, where she was chatting with the caterer, by the sound of her daughters’ upraised voices, a bee seduced by the piquant odor of a family fight.
“Girls, girls, what’s all the fuss?” asked Shirl.
“The instant she heard your car pull out of the driveway she threw on her bathing suit bottoms and ran out to the pool. Ivan and I would be doing storyboards on the patio table and Mimi would come out, ‘Oh hi, didn’t know you guys were here.’” Mouse glanced over and saw the expressionless black glass eye of the camera trained on her. “Ivan, not now.”
“You could have taken your top off! I don’t see what you’re getting on me for. You’re the one getting married. You’re the one that’s gone to Africa and had all this fun.”
“You knew how I felt about him. You asked him to rub suntan lotion on your back while I sat there watching.”
“Can I help it if I burn easily? If I need suntan lotion?”
“She always wanted to play strip poker with me and Ivan. Then she’d lose on purpose.”
“Of course I lost on purpose. That’s the whole point. Mom, would you tell her?”
“You knew how I felt,” said Mouse. “Ivan, stop. Now.”
Mouse tried to put her hand over the lens, but Ivan danced away, back toward the railing.
“How you felt? Who cares how you felt?” demanded Shirl. “You’ve always been the one with everything! The brains, the looks, and determination. Your father’s daughter with my good luck! You’ve had all those wonderful experiences abroad. You’ve made all those movies, had two marriage proposals. I don’t know what happened with you and that wonderful Tony, you threw him on the rubbish heap God knows why. If a l
ong time ago Mimi won a boy on account of whatever few charms she has, just let her have that, would you? Maybe you should just go on back to Ethiopia or wherever the hell you were. You wound up with the boy of your dreams, now be a little charitable to those less fortunate than you. Don’t you listen to her, honey.” Shirl put her arm around Mimi’s shoulders.
“I’m a big nothing, rub it in!” Mimi sobbed into her hands.
“Ivan, as co-producer, I’m telling you. Turn off the camera,” said Mouse.
Ivan leaned out over the railing, angling to get the full view of Mimi’s teary face. “I didn’t say you were a nothing. How could I say you were a nothing? You’re my oldest and boldest! You’ve got all these things happening with Bob Hope and this new agent person Lex-whatever-his –”
“Nothing is happening. Nothing ever happens to me. She gets to go have adventures and I have to stay home and be a stupid secretary.”
“No one made you stay home, honey.”
“Fitzy always used to take her to the bar. Did he ever ask me? Never.”
“You didn’t want to go. You were too good for it,” said Mouse.
“He made you those special Shirley Temples. In the big milkshake glass. With two cherries. He never made one of those for me. Never, not once.”
“He wanted to. You were always on a diet.”
“Are you saying, are you saying, I’m … fat?” Mimi’s eyes widened. Her sobs vanished like a bad case of hiccups cured by shock.
“No. You were always on a diet or something.”
“But I’m not fat. I’m wide, but I’m not fat. I watch my weight. Don’t I watch my weight?”
“She does watch her weight,” said Shirl.
“If you could call it that,” said Mouse.
“What do you mean?” said Shirl. “She’s always watching what she eats.”
“I hear her in the bathroom. All the time. Throwing up.”
Crack! In an instant Mouse’s sentence was knocked clean from her mind. A vibrating wall of silver tinsel dropped before her eyes. Her cheek pounded with bruise and blood. She thought there must have been an earthquake. She must have fallen, hitting her cheekbone on the railing. Then she heard Shirl’s voice: “Mimi, put that rolling pin down!” Through the tinsel she made out Mimi, by the present table, a long, cylindrical package in her hand, tied at both ends with curly white ribbons like a giant piece of taffy.
And behind Mimi, backing up, backing up, filming it all was Ivan, Ivan behind the expressionless black glass eye. “Yes,” he said. “Perfect.”
Mouse, her own glass-green eye already swollen shut, reached out to cover the lens with her hand, but he twisted out of her reach.
He stumbled back against the railing, smacking the spot where one of his kidneys should have been. But the kidney was gone. His balance deserted him. Backwards he plunged over the railing, onto the forest of dusty prickly pear, twenty feet below.
26
HAD IVAN NOT WON AN OSCAR, THE STORY MIGHT NEVER have made the news. Instead, all afternoon the next day blond anchorwomen crooned a single sentence between commercials: “Academy Award-winning director dead at thirty-four,” knowing everyone who heard this would try to compute the age of Steven Spielberg.
Mouse wondered, not for the first time, how people survived surviving. How they survived witnessing something like this, then went home and flossed their teeth.
Ivan lurched over the railing, his fall only partially broken by the thick ping-pong paddle arms of the prickly pear below. His head stopped, but his spinal cord kept going, crushing his brainstem, killing him before his heels hit the ground. There were no other head injuries, and only one long rip on the side of his face, that looked as though it was inflicted by an ice pick, not the flimsy spine of a cactus.
Every time Mouse closed her eyes she saw him, heard the uneventful-sounding smack of his back against the railing, saw the elaborate red and black pattern on the bottom of one running shoe, the strip of honey-colored skin as his T-shirt came untucked before he disappeared from view. She heard the sound he made, a mildly annoyed “hun,” the kind people made when they tripped over bedroom slippers in the dark.
That night, Mimi pulled out the futon for her, wrapped some ice cubes in a washcloth for her cheek, pressed a glass of herbal ice tea into her hand. Mouse understood that The Pink Fiend was half right. Mimi did love her, as she loved Mimi, which did not mean they were above going at each other armed with cruel truths and rolling pins.
Mouse went to bed, fully expecting never to wake up. Things she took for granted were suddenly profoundly unreliable. Gravity seemed untrustworthy. At any minute her heart, bored with its lot in life, might suddenly quit beating. Sniffy Voyeur slept with his head on Tony’s old pillow, snoring like an asthmatic.
But Mouse did wake up, late in the morning, the Los Angeles sky as dull as a plastic shower curtain encrusted with soap and dirt. She ate a bowl of cereal and put in a load of laundry.
Mimi dusted.
Academy Award-winning director dead at thirty-four. People thought maybe it was the guy who did Batman. L.A. Today had managed to catch the last few seconds before the uneventful-sounding smack, and the competing networks offered to pay handsomely for it: a thousand dollars a second. The film in Ivan’s camera revealed no secrets, but registered the jolt, then, like the point of view of someone traveling backward on a ferris wheel, the flash of the floodlight bolted under the eaves of the roof, the blank Los Angeles night sky, the smear of lights, the downhill neighbors’ pool hanging upside down and slightly out-of-focus from the top of the frame. The network was delighted to have it; they said it reflected the banality of death, the chaos of a great filmmaker’s last moments. This was what the production assistant told Jana and Raoul Esparza, Ivan’s parents, from whom she had to acquire the footage. Mouse cringed when she heard this. It sounded like something she might have once said, like something Ivan might have said. The network paid Jana and Raoul fifty dollars.
Jana and Raoul Esparza had no money for a funeral. They had money saved to send their youngest to a state university, but no money for the burial plot of their oldest, no money for a wake. Mouse wanted to pay for it with some of the wedding money. Jana and Raoul were moved by her gesture, and allowed her to spring for the casket.
They were surprised to hear that Ivan and Mouse were planning on marrying, but found comfort in the realization that their son had found someone who’d made him happy before God recalled him. This was how Jana talked. She was a devout Catholic and consumer affairs advocate.
Jana and Raoul were confused when they learned that Mouse was Mimi’s sister. Mouse did not even mention Wedding March.
Mouse and Mimi met Jana at Ivan’s apartment. They needed to find some appropriate clothes to bury him in. They met on the Venice Beach Boardwalk in front of Ivan’s building. The landlord had already let Jana in. She stood waiting for Mouse and Mimi, the ocean breeze blowing her skirt against her still shapely old legs, Ivan’s hairbrush clutched to her chest, threads of his dishwater-blond hair snaking through the bristles.
Inside, Dostoyevsky trotted in his exercise wheel. The phone company had already somehow gotten wind of what happened and the phone had been disconnected. Mimi was good about producing boxes and bags for shoes and shirts, about boxing up his reams of papers and books for Mouse, with Jana’s permission, to sort through at a later time. Jana, who had never been to her son’s apartment, was pleased that he almost had an ocean view. She took Dostoyevsky home to give to her youngest, still in high school.
Academy Award-winning director dead at thirty-four. They led the news with this sentence, then didn’t pay it off until after a report on the unveiling of a new men’s cologne created by a white collar criminal recently released from the upscale penitentiary where rich people did time. The report on Ivan’s death featured clips from El Funeral (which the anchor mistakenly identified as images from Ivan’s own funeral, which had not yet occurred), a brief comment from a very famous documentary
filmmaker whom Ivan had met once briefly at a film festival in Bilbao, who said the world had lost a pure and uncompromising visionary, and the reaction of Mouse, whose “films on Africa have won wide acclaim.”
Mouse admitted Ivan was once the best friend she ever had, a person she knew from long ago. Mouse was interviewed by Yvonne, the L.A. Today producer, and fonted as Mouse FitzHenry, girlfriend of victim. Mouse called the station to complain that Ivan was a victim only of his own stubbornness and voyeuristic nature, also that while she was his fiancée she was hardly his girlfriend. Yvonne’s response was to ask Mouse if she could interview her in depth for the L.A. Today profile of Ivan, which would be aired early to take full advantage of the timeliness of the topic.
After the wake, held at Jana and Raoul’s house in Pico Rivera, Shirl invited Mouse and Mimi back to the house on Cantaloupe Avenue. Shirl was anxious to invite Tony back to the house as well, but he made the mistake of bringing a date to the funeral, Lisa. For once Mouse and Mimi agreed with Auntie Barb, who found this in exceedingly poor taste. Lisa, who barely knew Ivan, wept inconsolably onto Tony’s shoulder. Mouse and Mimi decided over a package of late-night chocolate-covered Oreo cookies that Tony looked embarrassed, as well he should.
Mouse told Mimi about Ivan and Tooty Brass. She told her about the day she discovered Tooty and Ivan together in his apartment; about how she tried to call Tooty the night of the accident so the poor woman wouldn’t have to hear about it on TV; about how Tooty’s housekeeper said Mrs. Brass was just outside bidding goodnight to some guests, and could Mrs. Brass call her back?, then never did; about how she didn’t come to the funeral, even to stand discreetly behind the other mourners at the graveside; about how Mouse, angered, tossed her stupid one-carat diamond set in platinum into Ivan’s grave. She didn’t care how many documentaries she could fund with that bloody diamond. For once, Mimi was speechless.
That night Mimi and Mouse slept in their old beds. Mouse stayed on the next night and the next and the next. Since it appeared that Mouse was moving home and that Shirl had recovered, Auntie Barb, who was loath to spend the summer in evil California, left for Boring, Oregon, where she would arrive just in time to watch her rhododendrons bloom.