“Their specialty,” he said.
Elizabeth ordered one, too. She never drank during the day, but she was still reeling with embarrassment from her Fogg confusion. My Fogg fog, she thought. Ha ha. Maybe the alcohol would help.
“So, about the demographics . . .” Elizabeth said, wanting to sound serious, to make the lunch worth his while.
“Did you ever read Henry James on Madame Bovary?” Volfmann said. “He hated Flaubert. Too graphic. Too vulgar. Imagine what he’d make of movies.”
The waiter appeared with two enormous margaritas and waited to take their order. Elizabeth stared longingly at the menu, at the lobster. Always the most expensive dish, though there were no prices on this menu. Should she indulge? Her mother had taught her it was impolite to order the most expensive item on a menu when someone else was paying. It had been a long time since she’d had lobster. Maine lobster. It sounded so good. But, with only the slightest hesitation, she ordered chicken.
“Lobster for me,” Volfmann said.
Elizabeth looked out the window at the mountains.
“So, okay, rubbing elbows with celebrity,” he said. “Have you ever rubbed elbows with celebrity, Elizabeth?”
“With you?” she said.
He laughed. “You’re getting good. Your, you know, people skills. Not as good as that Daisy, God knows. But, now, any minute people are going to be saying, ‘Yeah, she’s good in the room. Just get her in the room.’”
Elizabeth could not help smiling when he praised her. She concentrated on her drink. Soon, another drink appeared. She wondered how she would drive home.
“Now,” Volfmann continued, “before you fuck this idea up and give me some condescending satirical piece of crap . . .”
“But I’m the one who had the idea to —”
“To write some condescending satirical piece of crap to expose celebrity, right? God, you people. Go write an editorial. Ten years ago, how about. This is a movie. Emma Bovary suffered. She made a lot of people suffer. Your fucking characters have to fucking suffer. You, young lady, have to figure out one thing before you can hope to get this right.”
Elizabeth drank from the large glass. This man is disturbing my warm sense of well-being, she thought.
“You have to figure out how to be . . .”
What? she thought. Ahead of the curve? Original? Formulaic? Edgy? Fresh? Ironic? Commercial?
“Earnest,” he said.
Elizabeth stared at him. Earnest? “Why did you hire me if you think I’m such a fool? I still can’t figure that out.”
“You’re not a fool, that’s the problem.”
Her glass was empty except for melting ice cubes.
“It’s hard to be earnest and not be a fool,” Volfmann said. “You’re not a fool, so it’s hard to be earnest, isn’t it?”
Elizabeth nodded, feebly, as if he were her shrink, as if he’d said, You liked being breast-fed, didn’t you? Yes, she nodded. All right, yes, I admit it.
“You can’t worry about being a fool,” said Volfmann.
Elizabeth looked at him, at his dog face as he raised his glass and gently touched her glass with it. Maybe he wanted to sleep with her.
God, I hope so, she thought.
She sucked on an ice cube. Too much hospital, too much cancer, too much tequila.
“Emma Bovary was a fool,” Volfmann was saying. “Her husband was a fool.”
He put his hand on hers. Manicure, sure as shit, she noticed. He smiled at her. She smiled back.
“Everyone is a fool, Elizabeth,” he said. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Lotte had been in the hospital for two weeks. Greta visited on the days when she had the strength. The sight of her mother, bandaged and disoriented like a shell-shocked doughboy, was a jolt.
“Mama, Mama,” she said, kissing Lotte lightly on the forehead.
“The rain,” Lotte said sadly. “The rain, the rain, the rain.”
Greta saw less of Elizabeth and Josh during that time. They were always at the hospital guarding Lotte from hallucinated Hasidim and real nurses with real orange-mesh vests. No time left for me, Greta thought. Poor little me. I have cancer, too, people! She laughed when she thought this, but she meant it, too. After years of pleasant independent privacy, Greta had come, so quickly, to expect and to enjoy her children near her, fighting, asking for food, leaving coffee cups in the living room.
When Greta spoke to Elizabeth on those days they didn’t see each other, she was careful to be brave. But don’t sound brave, she reminded herself. Sound normal. You don’t want to burden Elizabeth. Any more than you already have. Sometimes she went outside and tried to garden, scratching at the soil a little, plucking a dried leaf, watching the sprinklers. She had so little energy. The metallic taste in her mouth was so strong she wondered why she couldn’t see it. She spent the nights on the couch. She tried the bed, but Tony seemed larger than ever. His legs strayed to her side, proprietary and intrusive. She wanted to scream at him, to chase his body from her bed with a broom, a shrew shooing a stray cat. Instead, she went into the living room. On the couch, she pulled a green afghan over her, one her mother had crocheted years ago.
She considered calling Daisy Piperno. I’m so bored, she thought. Maybe Daisy would cheer me up. Tim stopped by after visiting his mother next door, which was very sweet of him. He’d always been her favorite of Josh’s friends. And Laurie, an antique dealer who found most of her pieces abandoned on the street, came by the next day with a rocking chair she’d picked up on Beverly Glen and a footstool from Studio City. Then on Friday afternoon, Tony took the afternoon off, as always, but instead of playing golf, he drove Greta to the hospital and she sat by Lotte’s bed for an hour while Lotte slept.
That night, she went on the Internet to order books. She ordered a book about California wildflowers that she already owned. She had it sent to Daisy Piperno. Daisy lived in Silver Lake. Greta knew her address from the phone book. “It occurred to me that you might enjoy this,” she typed into the computer in the space marked “Personal Message.” Not a very personal Personal Message, she thought. Then she lay back down on her couch, pushed her feet beneath the afghan and the purring cat, and felt the room swirl deliriously around her, as if she were dancing, waltzing, round and round a ballroom.
Harry kneeled in the dirt. His face was pressed against the slats of the fence. His hands gripping the wood, he peered seriously at the walkway.
When did the word “lifestyle” first occur? Elizabeth wondered. Fairly recently, she was sure. Emma Bovary wanted a lifestyle before lifestyles existed.
Harry had not moved. His concentration was somehow touching, full of hope. He was waiting. Elizabeth wondered how long he would wait like that. She wondered what he was waiting for.
“What’s out there?” she asked, staying back on the steps, though. In case he didn’t want anyone around. He sometimes looked up from his playing and sent Elizabeth and Brett packing. “I’m busy right now,” he would say, politely.
“Garbage trucks,” he said.
“You want to go look out back at the alley? That’s where the cars and trucks go. This road is only for people.”
“And dogs?”
“Right. Dogs, too.”
“And cats,” Harry said, louder. His face was getting red beneath the dirt. “And garbage trucks!” he yelled.
He sat down and began digging a hole with a spoon.
In the age of industrialization, there was the cliché. Flaubert was obsessed with cliché. But what, in the age of lifestyle, do we have that has the same relationship to lifestyle that the cliché had to the age of industrialization and the rising middle class? Brand names. That was what her article in Tikkun had been about. Branding, like God, named the universe, divided the wheat from the chaff, and didn’t even have to rest on Sunday. Better yet, branding, like the clichés Emma Bovary devoured in her romance novels, was for everyone. Brand names grasped the unusual, the exotic, the romantic, the world available
to the privileged few and held these treasures out, in a gesture of democratic largesse, to the rest of us.
But now what? Elizabeth thought. How would she clothe this fancy-pants idea in flesh and blood and dialogue?
“Need help?” Elizabeth said.
Harry had her hold an empty clay flowerpot while he spooned soil into it. He told her about a cat wearing a bell. He had seen it in the yard yesterday.
“That’s so the birds will know it’s coming,” he said.
Elizabeth watched him dig. Children were so patient. No wonder they put them to work in factories. Inside, Brett was doing push-ups. She could hear him counting them out. Which was more boring? Push-ups or spooning dirt into a flowerpot? The parrots who lived in the tree next door sat on the telephone wires above and screeched. Harry pointed at them, excited. Then, suddenly, he rolled over into her lap. He grabbed his dirty pacifier from the ground and put it in his mouth. Elizabeth put her arms around him and they sat like that for a long time, shaded by the tall daylilies behind them, listening to the muffled sounds of other people in their houses. A little red propeller plane flew in circles overhead.
“What are you two waiting for out there?” Brett called from the steps.
“Trucks,” Harry said.
Brett picked Harry up and Elizabeth followed them inside. It was almost nine, and still light outside. She gave Harry a bath and handed him a washcloth to hold over his eyes while she washed his hair. He sputtered and cried, then began to play in the water again as if nothing had happened.
“I can’t sleep,” he said as soon as he got into bed. She sat down on the edge of the bed. He popped in the pacifier and watched her, warily, like an opponent in a chess game, to see what her next move would be. She wanted to lie down next to him. But she had to get to the hospital by ten o’clock or they wouldn’t let her in. She unconsciously shifted, slightly, as if to stand. Before she had fully registered her own movement, she saw the flicker of understanding in Harry’s eyes, saw the parting of his lips as his mouth began to shape itself into a howl, and she quickly calculated the delay entailed in telling Harry a story or singing a lullaby compared to the delay caused by a full-blown, sobbing, hiccuping tantrum, as, simultaneously, she reversed her shifting movement and resettled herself on the bed.
Harry’s face slackened into peaceful relief. I feel the same way, she thought. Peace. Relief. Harry needed her, and his need protected her. No one could object to a mother comforting a child. No one else could call her away. Not Brett. Not Volfmann or Daisy. Not even her mother or grandmother. The demands of a child on a mother—natural, nearly sacred—won out over the demands of a mother on a child, and certainly of a grandmother. Didn’t they? Or had her mother and her grandmother become her children?
“Mommy,” Harry said, putting his arms out, reaching for her, and the demands of the world were immediately, thoroughly eclipsed. She was safe. For these few moments, on this little bed, she was safe.
“Thank you,” she said, lying down, settling herself next to him.
He furrowed his brow for a second, thinking, then nodded.
“You’re welcome.”
Her mother had been disoriented and in the hospital for almost three weeks when Greta arrived there one morning with Josh to discover that Lotte had returned to reality.
“Mama, how are you feeling? What an ordeal you’ve had,” Greta said.
“Status quo,” Lotte said. “Status quo with a bandage. But those men in the black coats and their filthy fur hats—and in this heat! They must be out of their minds! Hideous, the imagination. Just hideous.”
Then she asked how Greta was. “Do you still have that dirty rotten flu?”
Greta wondered what to say. The next day was chemo day. She would not have the strength to come back again to see her mother for days.
“No,” she said at last. “Of course not.”
The next day, she did manage to call the hospital, but Elizabeth picked up and told her Lotte was being bathed, then manned the phone like a telegraph operator, tapping out their messages.
“Tell Grandma to watch the ice-skating on TV tonight,” Greta said. “She likes that.”
“Grandma? Mom says to watch the ice-skating.”
“Thank your mommy, darling. But I don’t have the strength for that bastard of a television, with all their filthy violence.”
“Mom? Grandma says —”
“I heard. For Christ’s sake, this is skating. Tell her. Skating. Not violence. What violence?”
“I don’t know, Mom. I’m just telling you what —”
“Tell Mommy about the little girl, you know, the kidnapping. Eyewitness News —”
“Kidnapping? Elizabeth! She watches the local news, but not ice-skating? No wonder she’s hallucinating.”
“Tell her, Elizabeth! What this world is coming to . . .”
After a while, Greta sent a kiss to her mother and her daughter, and replaced the receiver feeling even farther away from both of them than she had before the call.
“Charles is a plastic surgeon,” Elizabeth said. She had allocated an hour for this lunch meeting. Then she had to go back to the hospital. “Chuck, I should say. So, not a chiropractor, but a plastic surgeon. Okay? But Chuck prefers treating emergency burn victims at the hospital instead of proper, private cosmetic-enhancement surgery patients. You see how that works?”
Daisy had an unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth. Elizabeth wondered if the director had started smoking Camels as a teenager, lured by the now-outlawed cartoon camel.
“Does it work?” Elizabeth said.
“Crude,” Daisy said, nodding her head thoughtfully. “But clear.”
Elizabeth let her pay the check.
“Is he a good plastic surgeon?” Daisy asked.
Elizabeth hadn’t thought of that. In the novel, Charles Bovary was a poorly trained, mediocre doctor pushed by his ambitious wife to do work beyond his limited capabilities. Patients under his care went from slight limps to amputated legs.
Elizabeth watched Daisy sign the bill. She noticed Daisy was left-handed. “It’s a public hospital,” Elizabeth said finally.
Daisy used the butter knife as a mirror as she put lipstick on. “In Compton?” she said, nodding an affirmative answer to her own question.
Every afternoon, Greta would make the journey to the mailbox. Down the twisting stone steps, through the garden, through the mist of the sprinklers. She pulled open the door of the mailbox with such eagerness. Often an enormous spiderweb stretched from the mailbox to the top of the gate. Greta walked through it once or twice, her face just registering the filmy strands. Now, whenever she approached, she tilted her head until she saw the delicate silver threads catch the light. Then she brushed the lace and hard work away with her hand. No time to be sentimental, she thought. I’m in a hurry.
There were spiders in the mailbox itself, too, on the day Greta realized what it was she had been waiting for, why she was in a hurry, the reason she had swatted at spiderwebs every afternoon at precisely four o’clock.
It was dark in the mailbox. She reached in. Dangling spiders sucked themselves up their silk and hid. Junk mail fell out onto the front walk, as well as The New Yorker, which had, as usual, arrived in her mailbox at the end of the week instead of the beginning. She picked up the spilled magazine and catalogs. She pulled the rest of the mail out toward her, her nails against the aluminum reminding her of the metallic taste of chemotherapy. She rested the letters on top of the catalogs cradled in her arm. She loved catalogs, though she never ordered anything from them, and was happy to see so many. She flipped through the letters.
When she got to the third envelope, she suddenly understood.
No, she thought. Not me.
No, no, no, she thought.
Isn’t it bad enough that I have cancer? she thought. Is this some kind of joke?
The envelope was addressed to her in messy, heavy print. The return address said “Daisy Piperno.” Greta held it, st
ared at it. She had the impression of uninterrupted time, of all the time in the world, of a perpetual stillness, and the tug of breathless urgency. Her hands shook. She walked up the steps quickly, with difficulty.
Shit, Greta, she thought. Don’t do this.
In her bedroom, she closed the door tight, although no one was home. She sat on the floor beneath the window, her back against the wall. The light was rich and yellow. Leafy shadows trembled on her outstretched legs, on the envelope in her hand.
Don’t even open it, Greta.
But it’s what I’ve been waiting for. I see that now.
Don’t you have enough problems? You’re sick as a dog.
It’s just a letter, for Christ’s sake. A little thank-you note.
Yes, yes, but it’s what you’ve been waiting for. You said so yourself.
Nothing is going to happen.
Ah, but, Greta, you will make sure something will happen, won’t you?
“Yes,” Greta said out loud, opening the envelope. “I will.”
The clouds made the sky look low. Slate gray. Los Angeles squatted beneath it in a heavy rain.
“I’m going to play golf,” Tony said.
“In the rain?” Elizabeth said.
“I need to play golf.”
Greta was sitting in a chair in the living room staring at nothing. Tony paced the way he did the day they found out about Greta’s cancer. He bumped his shin on the coffee table in the same way. Elizabeth looked at the clouds and thought, Sometimes you have to wonder why another person seeks you out. For example, Volfmann. He could have hired a real screenwriter. He could have lunch with a real Hollywood person. With Barbra Streisand or Robert Altman. Lassie. Flipper. Rip Torn.
Maybe he likes you, Brett had said.
And Elizabeth had thought, but had not said, Maybe I like him.
“I’m going out of my mind,” Tony said. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
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