Leave It to Me

by Bharati Mukherjee

The rest of my work that week was routine. I took messages, updated itineraries, tidied up Jess’s files and alphabetized clients’ books, starting with Ariana Ash, This Age of Decadence, and finishing with Herman Yanofsky, I Winked, the Stars Wobbled. I tried reading Ash’s novel, set in Manhattan. East Side, not Nicole’s or Angie’s West Village Manhattan. The back cover described Ash as “the Edith Wharton for the nineties,” but the thirty pages I scanned read like Martha Stewart hints on the care and feeding of East Side male availables. I tucked Ash back in her new niche on the top shelf, and pulled Yanofsky out of his cramped slot on the bottom. You didn’t have to know zilch about astronomy to fall for this astronomer. Yanofsky was into the tragedy of heroic, dying stars, the comedy of parasitical planets, the wackiness of comets, the adolescence of the solar system. He played hide-and-seek with a billion galaxies I had known nothing about in high school. He walked on “dark matter” swirling between galaxies, and I followed. The universe was a cosmic aspic embedded with worlds instead of Mama’s fruit salad.

  Jess’s tormentor called twice before I got to the end of Yanofsky’s chapter “The Manifest and the Un-Manifest.” The tormentor wasn’t put off when I told him that Jess wasn’t in the office. “The message is her friend called, called again, that is. Tell her, please, that the call was local, which is to say that the friend is in the vicinity.” The voice was, strange to say, Frankie-like; I began to panic that it was meant for me. I mean, a filtered accent, something hugely foreign squeezed through the grate of English. The second time, I didn’t give the blackmailer a chance to speak. He started with a Peter Lorre laugh when he heard my “Hello, Leave It to Me.” I hung up before he’d brought that laugh to a sinister finish.

  The MindWorks publicist, Mikki, faxed from New York to remind me that Ma Varuna would be traveling with her pet monkey and might need the services of a veterinarian, and then a second time notifying me of a change in M. V.’s flight schedule. Ma Varuna, formerly Bette Ann Krutch of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and her simian companion were originally scheduled to arrive on a morning flight from Portland. The second fax, addressed to me, not Jess, was handwritten on a sheet that had the elaborate Mind-Works Press logo—the serene face of Buddha with two Buddha-profiles sticking out of it in place of ears—but the fax ID at the top read Fax Central instead of MindWorks. Due to the generosity of her nature, MV has given of her aura unstintingly to her legion psycho-nutrient-deprived admirers. In order to restore the healthfulness of a senior citizens’ group in Multnomah County, she has decided to conduct an unscheduled lecture and levitation demonstration in the morning, and arrive in time for her first print interview in the Bay Area. I got the publicist’s message. Her author was exhausted, and wanted to sleep in. Portland was the eleventh city in her twelve-city promo tour. Get M. V. in and out of San Francisco before she has her collapse.

  I faxed Mikki back. Our agency delivers what it promises. Leave it to us, and relax. I added a smiley face. Jess always personalized her faxes with smiley faces and exclamation points.

  Then I looked up the names and phone numbers of three vets who specialized in exotic pets, wondered if, but didn’t verify that, Purina sold monkey chow and finally locked up at the office and headed home to Beulah Street, speculating all the way back on how I could get my own celebrity-making sound bite by snitching on Emad the closet terrorist. But to whom? To the FBI? The INS? The IRS? I wished I could share my insight on Emad with Larry … I missed Larry. I’d had no clue I’d miss him so much.

  Questions I never wanted answered: Was Ma Varuna a person or a high concept? Does the supply of mystics create the demand for metaphysical healthfulness? Did Bette Ann Krutch of Delaware find true happiness when she changed her name to Ma Varuna (translated in the kit as “Mother Wind-Goddess”)? Do wind-goddesses give birth to typhoons, tornadoes and hurricanes?

  I sat with a frozen yogurt and a sack of bananas in an uncrowded gate at SFO and went over the promo kit Mikki had couriered. Vitality!—Ma Varuna’s third hardcover—was a tough read for nonbelievers. Not that I count myself among them. Still, I’m not a believer. The believer is a different animal from the gullible. The gullible grabs at quick fixes, turns how-to books like Vitality! into national best-sellers. I buy on impulse, but I mail in the warranty. Yield to hope, contain the betrayal.

  I gave the book a chance. It had a pretty cover. Cheetahs lunged at lotuses in green-blue space that was either a forest or an ocean. I admired the art design, then the page that listed “Other Books by Ma Varuna,” and after that the title page, and the acknowledgments page, but I didn’t get past the two “poetic pensées” quoted as epigraphs. The word pensée was translated as “philosophical thought” in a footnote.

  The first pensée, “Wisdom,” was printed in italicized, gilt letters.

  The sage stands silent on one leg

  on the snowcapped peak of Mount Everest;

  Master springs from bough to leafy bough

  Lassoing fruit and heaven with furry tail.

  The sage seeks but does not find,

  Master does not seek but tail-pulls in

  True wisdom, which is but emptiness.

  The second pensée’s title must have been a printer’s error. “Nuclear Fusion” didn’t make sense for the two-line riddle:

  Mother’s milk; cobra’s venom.

  Equal delicacies when tasted in heaven.

  That one I got in the gut. Deadly today, lifesaving tomorrow. I called Ham’s houseboat from the gate area on my cell phone. Jess’s voice on his tape. “We are working on the new and improved edition of the Kamasutra. Please leave your name and number. We’ll get back to you when we come down from heaven.”

  I returned to Ma Varuna’s promotional material.

  The kit included a detachable chart of a human body, divided and labeled like cuts of meat in a chart on a butcher’s wall. In place of cuts like chuck, rib, rump, flank, shank, sirloin, the nutritionist’s chart listed body sites for negative aptitudes, such as sloth, loutishness, mordancy, indecisiveness, narcissism, wrath. On the back of the chart was a recipe for “Ma’s Bitter Melon and Fenugreek Casserole.”

  The only publicity photo I found in the kit was that of a Mexican spider monkey. The monkey had a name: Master. The monkey’s tiny eyes were glazed with an appealing desperate dreaminess. Were there on-line chat rooms for a wind-goddess’s pets and spiritual daughters?

  The monkey found me before I found the author. Master ignored the bananas, went for the chocolate-flavored frozen yogurt. One moment I was coddling a cone, my tongue was caressing sweet, creamy swirls; the next, my neck was lassoed by a skinny tail, and a spider monkey no bigger than a cat was licking yogurt-drip off the ridged sides of the cone.

  “Low fat, I hope?”

  I heard the Bacall-deep voice behind me, I breathed in the spicy sandalwood cologne, I succumbed—like Jess?—to the beauty and spell of a god or a devil. Among the slicker-clad passengers getting off the plane, Ma Varuna, in her gauzy silk tunic, her satin pants, her rich velvet cape and her silver-heeled T-strap dancing shoes, was more an apparition than a touring author in her attention-getting travel clothes.

  Two factoids to pass on to Jess:

  1. Deities don’t glow

  2. The devil’s horns are retractable

  Message to Mr. Bullock, may he burn in hell: You didn’t have a clue about what made my poem a poem, but you started all this.

  There may be some connection between energy level and levitation. Or Ma Varuna was on amphetamines. Her hands and feet led fidgety lives of their own. Her tongue raged, a flood-swollen stream, bearing me between mud-black banks on cruel waves.

  “Your name, you say, is Devi?”

  I sensed a trap.

  “You know what your name means? Do you have the right to such a name?”

  “As much as you have to yours.”

  “Mine was picked out of a directory of cult leaders and crooks.” Ma Varuna laughed. “How about yours?”

  “This is a fr
ee country.” I kept my defensiveness flippant. “You can give yourself any name you want. There’s a kid on my block who had his name changed officially last week. From Ralph Rinzoni to Anytime Anyhoo.”

  Not. Ralph Rinzoni was the name of the paramedic who mouth-to-mouthed the Stoop Man. I sat on the curb and watched the paramedics wheel him into the ambulance. The Stoop Man, spiritual guide to the Haight, was dead even as they carried him away. I knew he was dead, the paramedics knew he was dead, maybe the Stoop Man wired to intergalactical times and spaces knew his time had come, but he couldn’t be declared dead until an emergency-room doctor scribbled DOA. I asked the paramedic who’d handed me the Stoop Man’s Queen of Sheba tiara what his name was. “Mine?” He said he’d worked as a paramedic in three different states, he was good, efficient, didn’t steal rings or watches, didn’t go through pockets, had no license, just liked to be in on death and nobody had asked him that question. I needed to know. Grief would be easier for me to bear if I could say, Tom, Scott, Dan, Chris, whoever, lifted my neighborhood friend into the ambulance. “Ralph,” the man said, “Ralph Rinzoni. No jokes about Rice-A-Roni, almost didn’t come here because of it. You can call me Anytime Any … Do you feel okay? You don’t look so good.”

  Ma Varuna was a holistic nutritionist, not a psychic. She couldn’t divine my pain at the passing of the Stoop Man. “Ralph to Anytime is a matter of a legal change,” she lectured. “Devi is not a name to find and choose. It has to find you.”

  I didn’t have to believe her. Except that the Spider Veloce with the vanities had found me.

  “Devi is the female gender of Deva,” Ma Varuna went on.

  “Thanks for the explanation,” I said.

  “But you are trailing no aura of light. For you Devi is a wrong name, the worst name. ‘Deva’ comes from the Sanskrit word ‘shine.’ You are not a shiny woman.”

  I hit the brake harder than I needed to at the next light. The monkey leaped off Ma Varuna’s lap and hid in a pile of Fuji apples in the care basket in the backseat. “Master should be strapped into a child’s car seat,” I scolded.

  “Master is my mother. Master is my father.”

  “It’s a monkey.”

  “We see what we are capable of seeing. You see a monkey. I see a guide.”

  “Where’s your monkey going to guide you? Back to a forest in Mexico?”

  “Master’s going to free me from the throes of bliss and pain.”

  For the remainder of the ride to her hotel, Ma Varuna concentrated on noisy breathing exercises.

  Ma Varuna took in her first interviewer in gauzy black see-through tunic and harem pants and a brocaded scarlet vest. I hadn’t expected nutrition alone to produce such abs and pecs. Jock Rice, the owner-editor of Astro Sense, an East Bay weekly, must not have either. From the way Jocko squared his shoulders inside his Eddie Bauer flannel shirt and puffed out his chest, anyone could tell that he was turned on. He squirmed in his chair. He couldn’t make embarrassment work for him. He couldn’t finesse his way out of anything coming to him, anything Ma V wanted to dish out. His Adam’s apple bobbed and swelled. A sad little sinner with an Adam’s apple is at a tragic disadvantage. Jocko, I sensed, was going down.

  He fumbled in his backpack, but Master was on him, batting away his clumsy fingers and dragging the whole backpack to the center of the interview table and spilling its contents. Out came a tape recorder, cassettes, extra batteries, a pack of tissues, spearmint breath fresheners, herbal nasal spray, condoms packaged like a lollipop, a small papaya and a bottle of Odwalla’s apple-ginseng juice.

  Ma Varuna patted her lap, and the monkey sprinted towards her. She scooped the tiny monkey off the carpet, tossed it in the air, caught it and crushed its quivery face against her vest.

  Jocko had some trouble with our watching him put his things back in the bag. I practice the Stoop Man Variation on the conventional wisdom that a woman should leave home wearing clean underwear in case she’s destined later that day to be carried by a paramedic into an ambulance. Stoop Man chose his daily headgear with apocalypse in mind. Anonymity governs what goes into my pocketbook as I step out of the Beulah Street boardinghouse every morning.

  Ma Varuna waited until Jocko had put away all items except the tape recorder. Then she sucker-punched him with advice. “Ejaculation is an unhealthy phenomenon. Such wastage of sperm is an offence to the Lord of Creation. The virile worship the lingarm, but have no need of condom.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The afternoon wasn’t heading for a confrontation on Larry’s loco scale, but I was beginning to enjoy myself. I owed it to the agency, though, to make sure the tape wasn’t running.

  “What’s a nice Jewish woman of a certain age …”

  Ma Varuna cut Jocko off by hurling Master at him. “Your question wants to know nothing. It wants only to reveal a bile-poisoned self. I do not answer narcissistic questions.”

  The monkey straddled Jocko’s shoulder, leaned its face into the man’s and twisted the wiry hair of his eyebrows into unsightly clumps. Of the many descriptions of Ma Varuna that come to mind, “nice Jewish woman” was one of the more remote. If anything, she looked like some kind of ballet star, male or female I couldn’t tell.

  Ma Varuna clutched a handful of her tunic’s hem, and arranged it like a veil over her head, then dragged it across her nose and lips in one silky, sinister movement. “The truth is that which the heart spits out over the tongue’s barricade,” she announced through the flimsy veil.

  Jocko was planning to work through his virility hangups on my beat. As a temp, which I define as a worker freed of professional pride and of corporate loyalty, I wasn’t about to let that happen on my ME beat. If the man had been tormented by kinkier sins, if, for instance, he’d been a seer of invisible malice, if he could detect auras the way Larry could or if he’d eavesdropped on inaudible threats from alien galaxies, I might not have called time-out with a patronizing query like “Room service, anyone?”

  “I have the brew that Mr. Legume needs.” Ma Varuna glided off the hotel sofa with the Flash’s kick-boxing speed and strength. “Room service doesn’t.”

  “Rice,” I corrected. “Jock Rice.”

  “Get the kettle,” Ma V barked. “Top shelf, hall closet. You’ll find the cup and saucer in their traveling case right next to the kettle.” She cheetah-walked across the suite and disappeared into the bathroom but didn’t close the door. I asked myself what a woman from Delaware was doing reminding me of Frankie Fong.

  The electric kettle wasn’t the whistling aluminum kind Mama boiled water in for her midmorning instant Folger’s. Ma V’s was a sleek, foreign, ceramic appliance in its own vinyl traveling case, wedged between a carry-on and a satchel-sized pocketbook.

  “Just get the kettle down,” Ma called from inside the bathroom. The water was running in the sink. “I’ll brew our friend my health special. You’ll be a changed man, Mr. Jack.”

  I lifted the compact kettle and the cup-and-saucer set out of their cases and brought them into the bathroom. Ma V had a small Tupperware container of what looked like tea leaves open on the counter and the hot water faucet going full force. “Just leave the stuff there, I’ll take care of it,” she said. If I were making tea for myself I’d have started with cold water, but I filled the appliance just enough for a cup, unplugged the hairdryer and plugged it in. She pulled on a pair of disposable plastic gloves, the kind that you buy in pharmacies, not supermarkets, and measured four pinchfuls of the dried leaves into the cup. “I’ll take care of it,” she repeated.

  I went back out into the sitting area where Jocko was sulking and Master climbing the drapes. “I guess I’ll get some kind of story out of this,” Jocko muttered. “What’s she concocting? Something the FDA doesn’t know about?” But when Ma Varuna emerged from the bathroom with the steamy cup, he changed his mood and mind. “What’s in the brew, ma’am? A new Asian anti-oxidizing agent?” He’d already begun to line up great new body, effortless good times, romantic
dates.

  There’s something to be said for the California epidemic of despair-deficit disorder.

  “A bile eliminator.” Ma Varuna, still wearing gloves, placed the cup and saucer on an end table close to Jocko. “Bottoms up!”

  I liked the amber color of the infusion, but not the aroma. Master scrambled down the drapes and scooted into Jocko’s lap. Monkey piss probably smelled as weird.

  “Cheers!” Jocko upended the glass and downed the herbal broth in one breath-held-in draft, the way expendable cowboys do on TNT oldies just as the saloon doors swing open and the bowlegged Bad Guy struts in.

  He went down faster, heavier, clumsier than any Hollywood extra or stunt person I’ve ever seen.

  In reel time, dying cowboys hit the saloon floor, but in the twitchy, gory moment of going down, they don’t crush to death cute spider monkeys. It’s Master’s accidental death that I still mourn. My sweetest dreams dissolve on Master’s panicky screech.

  “One down, and more to go.” Ma Varuna punctured Jocko’s forehead with the sharp heel of a silver sandal. Blood seeped and rimmed the edges of the small puncture wound.

  “Why?” Reason, logic, the homey decencies of Schenectady: Were they delusions?

  “I’m doing the fool a favor.” She said that without a snicker. “Every soul needs a door.”

  “Why?”

  “The body is a temporary home. The soul can’t exit without a proper exit-hole.”

  If Ma V was right, if Devi is a name you can’t earn or be given, if it’s a branding iron that blisters cool, smooth flesh with a hot, metallic howl, I was branded “Devi” the moment that Ma V’s slipper bored deep through a dead man’s anemic skin and let out an unprepared soul.

  The next few hours took Ma V and me places that didn’t show up on the MindWorks Press itinerary. Maybe because Mikki, the MindWorks publicist, was destined to learn the Dee Law of Perturbation. In which case, Ma V’s will cooperated with Mikki’s destiny. Only the self-centered blame themselves for perturbation’s damaging aftershocks. We survivors stay loose, we take small lateral steps out of the nasty reach of things, we dodge, we feint and, only when apocalypse opens up, do we deliver our knockout punch. The rigid, like Mikki, resist. Mikki now rests on a cot on the most secured floor of Creedmoor, doped into a serenity beyond misery and bliss.