“Marcus …?” The sudden honey of her tone shot through him like a burst of sweet music. Had she experienced a change of heart? Had she recognized the incipient despair in her husband’s voice? Did her witnessing the vulnerability in the act of stepping unclothed into his pajamas, the slight loss of balance he experienced as he stuck one foot through the pajama leg while standing flamingo-like on the other, re-kindle her love in some way about to be made physically manifest? “Can I ask you a question?”
He hitched the pajamas up and turned to face her, smiling now. “Sure. What?”
“Do you think you might be able to get my mother on your health insurance?” That question spelled the end of his evening. He told her he would try. Then he willed himself to go to sleep and was only able to accomplish this when he realized that he should first unclench his fists.
Chapter 3
Marcus had a morning routine. He rose around six thirty, usually a half hour before anyone else, and brewed coffee. Then he would pick up the Los Angeles Times from the mottled front lawn, prepare a bowl of high-fiber cereal into which he would slice a banana, and, sitting at the kitchen table, work his way through the paper.
Early Monday, Marcus sat in the kitchen waiting for his coffee to brew. He was in the middle of an article about prostate maintenance when Lenore walked in. She was dressed in a turquoise tracksuit and cross-trainers.
“I’m going to get another job,” she said, skipping the small talk.
“Lenore, you don’t have to get a job.”
She began to do stretches, bending at the waist and touching her toes. Although Marcus knew that Lenore had aspired to a career as a dancer in her early years and remained in reasonably good shape, he nonetheless hoped she wouldn’t snap a tendon. “Want me to make you an omelet?” she asked, her nose nearly brushing her knees. Marcus politely declined her offer. He liked that Lenore wanted to pitch in. She insisted on contributing to the grocery bills, so the loss of the JackMart position was particularly onerous to her. “Maybe I’ll get Jan to hire me at the boutique,” Lenore said, now reaching for the ceiling, first with one hand then the other.
“I don’t think she’s making enough money at the store to hire anyone.” Jan’s boutique had become a sore point for him. After two years of operation, it was still in the red. Lenore said good-bye and left for her morning speed walk with Bertrand Russell. Marcus was worried about her eyes but didn’t want to say anything. He hoped she didn’t fall into a manhole.
Because Jan liked to sleep in, Marcus would usually wake Nathan, give him breakfast, make his lunch, and then drive him to school. They hadn’t been in the ten-year-old maroon Honda Civic a minute when Nathan said “Dad, about my bar mitzvah. I know we don’t have that much money and all?” This was phrased like a question, almost as if he was hoping Marcus would contradict him and say something like “No, no, we’re rich!” When Marcus did not respond but merely lifted an eyebrow inquisitively, Nathan continued “So … uh … I just want you to know, whatever you want to do? It’s fine. I mean, I want a big party and everything, but … you know … if we can’t afford one?”
“Don’t worry, Nato. We can afford a party.”
Nathan was a sweet boy who worked hard at school and tried to please his parents. When he was eight he had been diagnosed with ADD, and a doctor had put him on a drug to control it. Reluctantly taking the pill each morning, he would eat nothing for the next twelve hours and when, in six months, he hadn’t gained any weight, his parents decided to let him try to succeed without it. This he did by summoning forth a supreme effort and willing himself to pay attention. Once he got to middle school, however, he began to back-slide. He stared out the window during class, failed tests he should’ve passed. The school recommended he see an educational therapist, someone whose job it was to teach a child how to learn, and now he was being tutored in every academic subject. Eventually he asked to go back on the meds, a sign of maturity that impressed his parents greatly. Although Nathan had not had an easy time, the boy continued to try as hard as he could to excel, and his father admired him all the more for his efforts.
But now Marcus was thinking: My sweet nonexistent Lord! Where did the kid get the idea we couldn’t pay for a party? He wondered if he was letting his own financial anxiety show more than he realized. And if so, what else of his hidden inner life had his son begun to discern?
“We’re not poor, okay? I don’t want you to think we’re poor.”
“I know we’re not poor. Lenore’s poor.” Nathan’s grandmother insisted he call her by her first name because she thought all the derivatives of Grandmother made her sound superannuated and did not take into consideration the fine shape she was in, if one could ignore her impending blindness.
“Lenore told you she was poor?”
“She wants to get a job as a hostess at Applebee’s.”
“We can take care of her, Nate. She won’t have to work at Applebee’s.”
Marcus drove through the imposing stone gates of Winthrop Hall and up the road that wound through the tree-lined campus. Oxonian by local standards, the school had been founded in the 1930s. Mock-Tudor buildings evoked millennia passing. Closing your eyes, it was easy to imagine Rupert Brooke, a book of verse cradled under his thin arm, strolling languidly beneath the boughs a short distance from where a sixth-grader was selling his Ritalin to a high school sophomore. The campus was a former country club (restricted, of course) and exuded an old-money flavor the ruling class could taste by paying the annual twenty-five-thousand-dollar tuition fees. This was significantly beyond the financial wherewithal of the Ripps family, so it was no surprise that Nathan was receiving financial aid. This was not an issue for him, as boys were mostly unconcerned with such things, but it made it difficult for his parents when they found themselves in social contact at school events with the parents of his classmates. The parent body of Winthrop Hall, a type-A hothouse of ambition, overachievement, and large investment portfolios was not a demographic into which Marcus and Jan Ripps comfortably fit. But Roon Primus was on the board, and when he suggested to Marcus that he might be able to swing a scholarship package for Nathan, the Ripps family leaped at the chance to extract their son from the dysfunctional miasma of the California public school system and present him with a gold-plated education.
When Nathan got out of the car, Marcus said “Nato, don’t worry about your party, okay?”
The love in the boy’s smile when he said “Okay” back to his father made Marcus feel for a moment that his struggles were not without purpose. Nathan reached into the car to get his backpack and clarinet case. At that moment Marcus noticed a woman wearing spiked-heel boots, torn fishnet stockings, a miniskirt that stopped an eyelash below her vulva, and a ribbed T-shirt that hugged her high breasts like liquid polymer. When her face broke into a smile, he could see her braces. She was twelve.
Marcus drove away wondering how Nathan managed, at his tender age, to navigate this nexus of treasure and hormones.
The Wazoo Toys factory was in an industrial corner of North Hollywood. Flanked by an auto-salvage lot that broke down old cars and sold their parts to repair shops, and a beer distributorship, the factory occupied an old brick building surrounded by a chain-link fence.
Although Wazoo had manufactured a wide variety of toys over the years, their most consistently successful item was a line of Presidential action figures. Though they were originally called Play Presidents, the always-prescient Roon had seen the future. Now reconfigured and christened Praying Presidents, the dolls were rendered in devotional poses and fitted with a button on the shoulder that, when pushed, made them declaim quotes from the Bible. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt model (with accompanying wheelchair at no extra cost) said in an elegant accent that today would be called elitist: “I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” The Abraham Lincoln doll proclaimed: “For they have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind�
�� in a voice that sounded suspiciously like that of a black man. The grits-and-butter intonation of Jimmy Carter (the poorest selling of all the dolls) said: “All things are possible to him that believeth.” The John F. Kennedy one, in his unmistakable New England honk, advised: “Be not righteous overmuch.” But the model that was outperforming all of the other former presidents combined was the Ronald Reagan doll, which, in a voice redolent of optimism, intoned: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
Marcus drove onto the factory grounds and pulled into his reserved parking place near the front entrance. It was one of his few perks, and he relished it since more impressive ones did not exist in the environs of the factory. His office was on the second level of the two-story building and overlooked the factory floor where the Central American workforce of forty-two fashioned the Presidential dolls. Settling himself behind his metal desk, Marcus turned on his computer. As the screen hummed to life, he gazed through the interior window and observed the workers industriously engaged in their labors. Each Praying President was handcrafted with the same care the artisans’ ancestors displayed in the hazy, pre-syphilis-and-Christianity past when these peoples, who had had no indication their traditional way of life was about to be sucked into the maelstrom of progress, spent long tropical days creating religious objects out of native materials. Marcus was impressed by the care that went into the construction of each polyurethane President, and the irony of these craftspeople using their age-old skills, passed down through the dexterous fingers of countless generations, to manufacture the idols of their oppressors was not lost on him. But Roon paid a working wage and it enabled the employees to look after their families so, unless he was in a bad mood about the world, Marcus had given up bothering himself about the historical/political implications of his job.
Marcus sipped coffee from a green ceramic mug on which the letters D-A-D had been painted in a child’s hand and regarded the two framed photographs on his desk. One was of Nathan when he was around five. He was wearing his first baseball uniform and smiling at the camera. Marcus was one of the coaches that year. The players had elected to call the team the Fire Dragons. Several of them, including Nathan, ran to third base when they hit the ball, but it had been a lot of fun for Marcus, who hardly knew where the interceding six years had gone. His son would be out of the house in a blink. Marcus didn’t like contemplating how quickly time passed because it had the unfortunate side effect of reminding him of how little he had done with his life.
The other framed picture on his desk was one of Jan, taken on a trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains. They had just come back from a long hike in the high-altitude autumn air, and her face was flushed. A stray lock of chestnut hair fell against her cheek, and her smile was exhausted but glad. There was a familiarity to the pictures, so, like furniture, he usually didn’t notice them. But something this morning made him take them in, and in doing so he realized two things: how old Nathan had become, that he was no longer the little boy in the picture, and that he had not seen that expression on his wife’s face in a long time, one that suggested something resembling contentment.
As he went back and forth between verifying orders, making sure deliveries were running smoothly, ensuring that the correct amounts of raw materials were being purchased, and checking the status of his negotiations with a maker of corrugated boxes from whom he hoped to extract more favorable terms, he considered how best to approach Roon about getting Lenore on the health plan.
Marcus kept several books in his desk, and he would browse through them occasionally, as a way of both keeping his mind nimble and reminding himself that he had one. There was a copy of Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and Machiavelli’s The Prince. For particularly dire occasions there was a well-thumbed copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a book he’d treasured since his sophomore year in college despite never having had the courage to live by its bold precepts. Occasionally, when dealing with a business quandary, he would dip into one of these texts, not to find answers, but to focus his mind.
Now he reached for the Aristotle and began flipping through the dog-eared pages. He noticed that he had underlined this passage: The magnanimous man, since he deserves most, must be good in the highest degree; for the better man always deserves more and the best man most. Therefore the truly magnanimous man must be good. Marcus was wondering whether Roon was either good or magnanimous when he noticed Clara Ortiz standing in his doorway. A heavyset woman in her fifties, she worked as a supervisor.
“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Ripps. My grandson is sick and my daughter, she can’t pick him up at school since she works in Riverside. Is it okay if I go get him?”
This was not a good day for her to leave, since they were training two new workers and Marcus wanted Clara there in case there were any difficulties. But he told her it was all right. His willingness to do things like this made him a popular boss. He checked that everything was running smoothly on the factory floor, then went out to lunch at the taco stand, where he ate two enchiladas and fantasized about the dark-skinned Guatemalan woman who worked behind the counter.
The boutique Jan co-owned was called Ripcord. It sat on the west side of Van Nuys Boulevard, a broad street slicing across the San Fernando Valley. As the road ran north toward the mountains it became increasingly Hispanic, and it was in this neighborhood that Ripcord was located. Given the excitable nature of the Los Angeles real estate market, those of a more optimistic nature hoped the area would become another Silver Lake, a neighborhood where non-chain coffeehouses, music clubs, and other indicators of bohemian rhapsody bloomed and thrived. Right now there was a pupuserie on one side of Ripcord, and on the other a place that cashed checks. The pace of gentrification on which Jan and her partner Plum Le Fevre had been banking was agonizingly slow.
The two women had met in the early nineties at the Los Angeles School of Visual Studies, where Plum was enrolled in the fine arts program and Jan was honing her skills as a fashion designer. Plum’s career as a painter stalled out after a few group shows in east side storefront galleries, and Jan’s designer dreams were eventually crushed like so much tulle beneath the heel of a buttery leather boot. Ripcord was a life raft, a place that would utilize their creative interests in a commercially viable way. The store was meant to be a combination gallery/retail space, and to that end several of Plum’s canvases (abstract smudges borrowing heavily from Mark Rothko) were on display. The place had been open two years, and Plum was still the only artist they had showed. When it became clear that no one was buying her work, it was tacitly agreed that the paintings would become part of the permanent décor.
The two women liked being on the west side of the street. Sunlight streamed through the plate glass window for much of the day and filled the place with a warm light that made it easier to be optimistic about their prospects. This sleepy Monday, Jan was changing the window display while Plum sat behind the counter nibbling on a fruit-and-nut bar which would have been healthful were it not her fourth one of the day, and perusing the Art Forum Web site on her laptop. Plum had done nude modeling for life drawing classes in art school and had been justifiably proud of her figure, which, while never svelte, had a pleasing suppleness. But now a sweet tooth combined with low-level depression had turned her into a Cézanne pear. None of the fad diets and sporadic workout regimens in which she habitually engaged could coax her body back into shape, because she lacked the will to stick with any of them for more than a few hours. She always told herself (and Jan) she could lose the weight if she had to. I have will power, she’d say, I just don’t like to use it.
When Jan worked on the window displays, it allowed her to ignore Plum while doing something she actually liked. Dressing the mannequins and arranging them in aesthetically pleasing ways was the only professional outlet she had left for her considerable creative urges. Today, Jan was arranging two female mannequins, each of which was wearing a sweater and pants of
vaguely military aspect, into appropriately war-like poses. The first one stood and aimed a large squirt gun at an unseen target in the Vietnamese nail salon across the street. The second crouched and peered through binoculars at an enemy encampment in a nearby tire store.
“How did that bitch get a show at a major New York gallery?” Plum was looking at a computer image of a life-sized Tyrannosaurus rex a young Welsh artist had crafted from kipper cans. Anyone with a gallery show was a personal bête noire. “Sometimes I think I should just give up. Here’s this girl building model dinosaurs out of her recycling bin, and …” The thought was too horrible for Plum to finish.
“The art world is like anything else. It’s about what people are willing to pay for,” Jan said as she adjusted the gun in the mannequin’s hand. “Dead sharks and floating basketballs in fish tanks and golden Michael Jacksons—it’s all kitsch. It’s about money, like everything else.”
“That’s kind of cynical.”
“I’m not cynical. It just is what it is.”
“I’ve been thinking about a video project,” Plum said, as she clicked the mouse with greater force than was necessary, closing the Web site.
“Really?” Jan continued to fuss with the angle of the mannequin’s gun. Plum’s narration of her internal process was usually a signal for Jan to stop paying attention. It was like listening to someone giving a detailed description of their dreams. Unless they were going to pay you three hundred dollars an hour while you sat there and wrote them a prescription, what was the point?
“But I need to have a baby to do it.”
“What?”
“I think I want to have a baby.”
Shining City Page 3