“Thank you,” I told her, “but my condo can be reached only by foot. The parking garage is quite a distance from where I live, so there wouldn’t be any point in driving through.”
“In that case, why don’t you have your husband walk you—and your daughter, too—to the car for the next week or so? Just to be on the safe side. Lock your doors at night and close your drapes, but I don’t think you need to take any unusual precautions.”
“Okay,” I said wearily.
“Oh, and be sure to call us if you receive any more threats.”
I said I would.
The world marches two by two. If you don’t believe me, go into a restaurant by yourself and watch the hostess overlook you until it becomes unbearably clear that you are not just waiting for your husband to come in from the parking lot. Watch the salesclerk at the hardware store make furtive glances just above your shoulder line for the male figure who must certainly be just around the corner. Don’t even try to buy a car.
Everybody assumes. Even the police sergeant, who presumably encounters a wide range of domestic aberrations and ought to know better. I do it myself.
The trouble is, the whole concept of “widow” reinforces the idea; it’s defined by what is lacking: the other half, the communal past, the future together. The husband. Widowhood is the stage between losing one partner and finding another, or, failing that, between loss and death.
My husband Michael’s death made me a pioneer. He was forty-five, too young to die; everybody said so. His heart faltered, revived, struggled, and finally stopped. A genetic anomaly, they said. So rare. So young. So I was too young, too, to sit in the hospital room day after day, to make the funeral arrangements, to break the news to Andrea, then a vulnerable thirteen, that her father would not last the night. It was a quantum leap to the next life level, the one generally associated with stasis and decline.
Well-meaning people were always trying to reorganize the untidy circumstances of my life. Older widows, my mother’s age, wanted to include me in their book clubs or movie groups. Colleagues suggested therapies and self-help books. Friends wanted to “fix me up.”
Occasionally—very occasionally—I went on the fix-ups; it seemed politer, and easier than fending off “My God, Ellen, it’s been two years” (or three years, or four…). But my heart wasn’t in it. I was a listless date. Most of the men were divorced and wanted to talk about how their ex-wives had “taken them to the cleaners” or wouldn’t let them see their children because their support payments were late. What could I say to that? I didn’t even have a decent horror story to contribute. Some of them talked about their mothers, which was worse.
My widowed status also seemed to cast a pall over any sexual importunings, which was fine by me. Maybe nobody wanted to climb into bed with a trio, especially when one of the three was a ghost. My body functioned normally after the initial six months or so of grief and exhaustion; it was my mind that rebelled (except once, and that was a momentary madness). Maybe I had too much unfinished business, the baggage of the past. Maybe I had the (not unrealistic) fear of being seen in the altogether by someone who hadn’t known me when my thighs were firm and my breasts were taut, and who was therefore less susceptible to nostalgia. Maybe it was just that the habit of fidelity, so long cultivated and enjoyed, was hard to break.
There was something else, too. When someone you’ve been married to for the better part of two decades dies, the person you were dies, too. The gap in my life made me almost ashamed. What was I, without Michael? I’d told the prosecutor I didn’t want to get married a second time. The truth, or some of the truth, anyway, is that I didn’t want to give away that much of myself to someone else. I couldn’t love anybody like that again. It wasn’t safe.
Andrea was incredulous. “You want me to do what?”
“It’s not forever,” I assured her, “just for a couple of days.”
We stood on either side of the pass-through bar; the kitchen was a little too cramped for two normal-sized females, even when one was very slender, like my daughter. When the refrigerator door was open, it barely cleared the opposite counter.
“Mom,” said my daughter with exaggerated patience, “I am not going to stay in for a couple of days just because some dork in baggy pants made a threatening phone call. I have my life to live.” She made it sound as if I were suggesting a lengthy term in Biosphere.
I suppose I should have been glad she was so adamant about living her life. For a long time after Michael’s death, she clung to me like a barnacle. She got anxious if I was out of her sight for more than a few hours. She called me from school during lunch. She refused to consider going away to college till it was too late to apply. Like her father, she could be stubborn beyond belief.
The truth is, I wondered if I didn’t secretly encourage her in her dependence, even as I heard my voice urging her outward. I needed her, too, and I understood only too well the fear that drove her to tug constantly on the cords that bound us, testing, not how far they would stretch, but whether they were holding. I didn’t mind that she needed my presence for comfort. I’d wanted comfort myself.
Just now, though, I could have rejoiced in a little more dependence. Just a touch, nothing excessive. “What if it’s a dork with baggy pants and an Uzi?” I asked her. “What if it’s ‘revenge of the dorks’? What if it isn’t just an idle threat?”
She rolled her eyes. “Really, Mom. I’m not saying it’s funny or anything like that, but I don’t think we can hide out for the rest of our lives because someone said something awful to you on the phone. Did the police tell you we had to stay inside?”
“No, but—”
“Well, see, even they don’t think it’s that serious, then,” she said with maddening reasonableness. “If it makes you feel any better, I promise to look into the backseat before I get into the car.”
I shuddered. “Don’t even joke like that,” I told her.
“Look, Mom, you’re probably just tired and upset. Was it really awful?”
“I guess it must have been more awful than I thought. At the time, I was sure I was doing the right thing, so I didn’t feel a lot of regret. I still think I did right, but after that call, I can’t stop brooding about it.”
She shrugged, with the casual hardness of extreme youth. “Well, if he did it, he deserves to get punished, doesn’t he? Don’t waste your sympathy.”
I marshaled my forces for a final assault. “Andy?”
“Yes, Mom?”
“Won’t you even consider staying close for just a couple of days? Just till any dangerous hostility has a chance to die down?”
“Mother, I have an English paper due on Thursday, and I haven’t started it yet,” she said. “What am I supposed to do, stay here and use the Encyclopaedia Britannica to write it?”
She might have gotten away with it in the community college she was attending, but I wasn’t about to say so. My daughter, though perfectly bright, was no student. The academic raptures that her father and I had felt had not communicated themselves to our genetic offspring. Andy had Michael’s dark hair and brown eyes, but it was the athletic field that lured her, not the classroom. She was mad about sports—all of them, from soccer to archery. It was my biggest lesson in accepting that your children are not little clones, that you have to face the fact that just because you swooned over Absalom, Absalom doesn’t mean your child won’t prefer watching Beavis and Butt-head. She didn’t even like to read very much, despite every blandishment I could think of from the time she was sentient. Maybe that was why.
What I did say was, “You know perfectly well there hasn’t been such a thing in the house since you learned to use the library. Besides, I thought you were supposed to be able to use the Internet for research now. You don’t even have to leave your room.”
She smiled pityingly. “Good try, Mom.” She didn’t even attempt to argue, so I knew I had lost. “What if we just agree that I’ll be careful, okay?”
“I’ll sett
le for very careful,” I told her.
She leaned over and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “Deal. And you, too. Get Mark to go with you if you go out to the parking area at night. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”
“Ha. He’d be so busy running his cellulite check he’d never notice a little thing like a weapon. As long as the assassin was thin, he might even approve.”
She paused. “You could do worse, Mom.”
“For a bodyguard?”
“You know what I mean.”
I did, too. She’d just started a campaign to get me to see other men. It was a good sign, I suppose. “It doesn’t have to be a date,” she’d say, “but shouldn’t you have some kind of social life?”
“I do,” I’d tell her, defensively. “I have lots of friends.”
“Oh, friends.”
“Don’t knock it. I’m okay, really.” I sensed she was worried about what would happen to me when she was gone from the house and the dailiness of my life.
“It’s been five years, Mom. You’re only forty-four. Dad wouldn’t want you to be alone for the rest of your life.”
“Don’t start,” I said.
But she already had.
4
Rolling Hills is a distant suburb of Los Angeles, as far from the dark dangers of the surly downtown as it is possible to get. The other Hills—Beverly—gets a lot more attention, but Rolling Hills has the highest per capita income of any independent incorporated town in California, and one of the highest in the United States. It sits on a magnificently beautiful section of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, so pristine and well-regulated it never even makes the news. The residents are not A-list party types. The houses do not mushroom into unsightly French château wannabes. In fact, they do not mushroom at all. They don’t even sprawl. They are just big, in a one-story, manicured sort of way.
Not that you get to see them in the ordinary way of things. Even squinting through the foliage down the carpets of lawn isn’t possible unless you can get through the community entrance gates. There are no surprise visitors in Rolling Hills.
I drove up the hill from Redondo Beach (checking the backseat before I got into the car), ascending through ever-increasing levels of affluence as I went, like Dante in reverse. It was June, so the brilliant bougainvillea blossoms—hot pink and orange—blew like leaves across the road. A few riders cantered along the horse trails. The ocean was cerulean.
The gatekeeper had my name on a clipboard and waved me through. An older couple in a white Mercedes and a single man in a Jaguar got enthusiastic “Good Mornings!” and greetings by name as they whizzed by. I got a nod, but it was a friendly one.
I had been to the house twice before, the first time when Jordan Jensen’s secretary had arranged for me to see it when it was being “renovated.” In post–Proposition 13 “taxpayer revolution” days, that meant that one exterior wall was left standing while you gutted the rest of the house. This is a perfectly legal scam to avoid paying the property tax on the total increased value of your property. And they wonder why the schools don’t have any money.
Mira and Jordan were newlyweds—her first; his second, or maybe third. The house met all the art-jury specifications on the outside, but inside it was alarmingly minimalist. The decorator, an affected Vlad the Impaler look-alike named Valentin, had furnished everything in pale gray and eggshell. Other than that, there were no colors. It was hard to tell one room from the next.
Building a love nest in such arctic surroundings would seem to be a daunting task. The kitchen was so sleek and bare that even a morsel of celery would have seemed wildly untidy, not to mention riotously colorful. The bedroom was dominated by a giant white bed, the cover too straight and taut for sitting, much less lying down. You expected someone in a nurse’s uniform to round the corner any minute. Even the plants were sort of white, which was some trick.
Maybe the acres of eggshell walls had served as an inspiration, because the Jensens had decided to become Collectors. At least that’s what Jordan had told me, his voice breathless with the significance of it all. He had made a large pile of money in some venture capital deal in Brazil and now he wanted to acquire some art. Along the way he had acquired Mira as well, and that was the problem.
Mira opened the door before I could ring the bell, which was fortunate, since my hands were full. Ignoring my dilemma, she extended a slender hand and waited while I put down the projector and slides and sheaf of materials and took it. “Hello, Ellen,” she said.
Every cliché you have ever heard about trophy wives came out of hiding for Mira Jensen. She was drop-dead gorgeous. Stunning. Sensual. Slender. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer in the brains department, but not an embarrassment, either. She was dressed all in black, except for the silver concho belt accentuating her tiny waist—a stagy, if admittedly impressive, effect against the blanched interior. Her streaked blond hair might have made Catherine Deneuve look twice. She wasn’t a day over thirty, if that.
“Valentin isn’t here yet,” she announced. “Come into the living room and have some tea while you wait.” She led me past a full-length mirror with frosted, beveled edges. I caught sight of my reflection: I looked severe and unadorned in my navy blue St. John suit, like a Congresswoman on a fact-finding junket. Buttoned up and pared down. Though perfectly correct, it was not, as I had previously believed, a case of Less is More. Surrounded by so much white, it was like seeing yourself inside the refrigerator, without the food.
Standing there in the ice palace, I wondered whether I hadn’t been overdoing the ascetic approach to dressing, never mind to life. Sometimes More is More, too. You just have to know when.
“The house looks lovely,” I said, giving Mira an Amway Distributor smile. I might have been feeling cranky about my buttoned-up life, but I wasn’t about to let on that I found the architectural equivalent of snow camping anything but delightful. I looked around; there wasn’t a book anywhere in sight. Not even a magazine. Not a single object reflected the taste or interests of its owners; the effect was as impersonal as the doctor’s office, and about as welcoming. “Charming,” I reiterated. It gave new meaning to the term “white lie.”
I’m a practiced deceiver. In my business you have to be, when you see what kinds of things people pick out as art. Mira smiled graciously. “Thank you,” she murmured.
Jordan might have been interested in becoming a collector (with secret visions of the Jordan and Mira Jensen Wing at L.A. County Museum of Art, if he made it really big), but Mira was more interested in art as decoration. She even called it “choosing accessories,” before Jordan corrected her in a pained tone.
She’d told me, over a lovely glass of Cambria Chardonnay, that she and Valentin the Awful had visited galleries all over L.A. for six days in a row without finding anything she liked. That’s how I got the job of finding something that would satisfy both Mira’s desire for a nonconfrontational but tasteful commodity to fill the wall space as well as Jordan’s fantasy to become the Norton Simon of the suburbs. So far, aesthetic appreciation hadn’t entered into the equation, but I was used to that.
“I hope,” said Mira, delicately sipping her passion fruit tea, “that we’ll be able to find something soon. We’d like to have something up for the party we’re giving at the end of the month. Even if it has to go back afterward.”
A lot of art consultants don’t want to do this kind of work. In the eighties, when all the money lying around loose fueled a huge surge in the art market, people could afford to be choosier about their clients. In the best of all possible worlds, the consultant acts as an intermediary between museums and artists, artists and collectors, collectors and dealers, and between different organizations and individuals. You might originate the contacts for a sale or exhibition, advise on acquisitions, define or reshape an art collection, and, if you move in the rarified upper echelons, direct the preparation of catalogues.
What you really do is try to make your clients look good, which means keeping quiet
after the acquisition so that they can get all the credit for being knowledgeable. And sometimes, although the top people in the profession would never willingly admit it, you’re just a glorified interior decorator. When you walk into a gallery and the assistant greets you with “Small, medium, or large?” it’s hard to draw any other conclusion.
Gallery owners are sometimes unwilling to educate the untutored buyer, and I admit it can get tedious to try to explain exactly why the figure’s breast looks like it’s growing out of the side of her neck, but negotiating the terrain of cultivated tastes and exalted prices can be intimidating. Besides, all the aesthetic posturing is sometimes just an advanced form of one-upmanship, in which if you don’t profess to admire mounted lengths of twine or a twelve-by-twelve-foot square of glass balls on the floor, you are somehow lacking in sophistication. If you doubt the power of such fears to move people to idiotic departures from common sense, remember “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” If Hans Christian Andersen were writing today, the Emperor would be walking through a Jeff Koons exhibition, pontificating on the urinals.
Still, even with a more tolerant view of aesthetic apostasy, Mira was going to present a bit of a challenge.
“Tell me about the party,” I told her.
She shrugged. “Just a few dozen of our closest friends,” she said without irony. “Everyone’s been asking to see what we’ve done to the house, so we thought this would be the easiest way.” She put down her teacup. “I know I told you there was no hurry, but, naturally, we hoped that the art…”
Her voice trailed off naturally. She was being nice about putting the squeeze on me, but I was used to that from clients, too. Once, I “furnished” an entire suite of offices over a weekend, because the representatives from the head office in Japan were due in town on Monday morning.
Staying Cool Page 4