by Dana Spiotta
“If you hear from him, can you tell him to call Bill at 1-800-627-1818, extension 24, reference numberpas in Peter, dash 4590?”
“You’re an old friend?”
“Yes.”
Mina stood holding the phone. She listened to the dial tone. She was late, but it was difficult to get going.
Mina’s mother left Jack long before he “disappeared.” She, her mother, rubber-banded all her credit cards together, placed them on the dresser, and left.
Mina had last seen her father on her one and only visit to Ojai. She had left Jack standing outside the Krotona Library in the Ojai village. Krotona was the name of a Southern California fin de siècle utopia. Jack told her the Krotonians read auras, didn’t wear clothing, and spoke only Esperanto. Mina said good-bye to him, he hugged her, and as they pulled apart he winked at her, a gesture so long lost and utterly familiar it held her dumb and shaken. She felt a hot rush of childhood affection, a kind of swell that closed in her throat. She stared at him beneath the Krotona sign, tan in his strange sandals, and she had to turn away fast, hot tight tears and walking, walking. Fast. She walked past the Krishnamurti Library. She sobbed now in hate of this place, she hated this place, hated being here. Mina walked so fast she didn’t notice the sun-haloed fire poppies, the buckwheat in swatches, or the gray-green thickets of shrubby oaks. She waited for her bus, unaware of the nearby citrus trees edged by low stone walls, not thinking of each stone fitted and balanced against the others by some person, slowly, some long, long time ago.
The drone of the dial tone was replaced by a wincingly highpitched whistle and a voice urging her to hang up. This was followed by the usual staccato high-volume beeps, designed to make even the most dreamy of girls pull the receiver away from her ear and return the phone to its cradle.
Pleasure Model Enterprises
Lorene paced, narrating her feelings to herself. “I am feeling anger. I am angry,” she said. This didn’t help. She practiced her breathing at the bar. She tried to focus on her diaphragm, her inhalations and exhalations. Mina was hours late. Officially, one hour and twenty minutes late. Lorene had said seven, be here at seven to go over the bar construction plans, and to allow Lorene to make it to an eight-thirty Pilates class, followed by a massage and reflexology session at the St. John Spirit Gym, conveniently located four blocks from her nearly completed restaurant, Vanity and Vexation. Lorene breathed and consumed gulp after gulp of distilled water. She kept rubber bands around her water bottle. She started with ten. Her bottle held eight ounces. Each time she drained it and refilled it, she removed a rubber band. This ensured she would consume at least eighty ounces of water throughout the day, the minimum for optimal hydration, flushing of toxins, and clear urinary and colon function. She should consume up to one hundred ounces, allowing an extra eight ounces per ten cigarettes she smoked in a day. The extra water plus supplementation of vitamin C (one thousand milligrams every six hours, time-released, since C was water-soluble and not fat-soluble and would be expelled in her body fluids if not used) ensured some protection against the ravages of nicotine on her system, if not mitigating in any way the carcinogenic effects, which was certainly a losing battle, but not unsolvable, she was convinced, not impossible, but in any case a whole other supplement story, the cancer-fighting vitamins, herbs, and minerals contained in St. John Laboratories If YouMust Smoke for women, fifty-milligram tablets, $29.50 a bottle to Spirit Gym members. Mina’s extreme inconsiderateness had increased Lorene’s biostress to such a point that her system would probably render all supplements useless, anyway. The whole day a wash. And no exercise meant Lorene wouldn’t be able to eat anything tonight except for a small piece of skinless organic chicken that she would swallow in approximately four and one half minutes, and a balsamic-vinegar-drenched wild green salad that she wouldn’t finish at all. Lorene lit a cigarette and did what she wasn’t supposed to do, which was phone Mina’s house. David answered and she hung up, and tapped a new cigarette on the zinc-inlaid service bar from where she surveyed the progress of the workers.
At eight-fifteen, when Mina walked into the newly installed sixteen-foot trefoil-shaped oak double doors to Vanity and Vexation, transported from the remains of Lorene’s previous establishment, the highly successful Dead Animals and Single Malts, it was apparent Mina’s tardiness was not going to come up, Lorene merely nodding at her and then looking hard at her nearly finished bar/club room, mid-distance staring and inhaling. Lorene had been highly specific in her vision of her latest high-con restaurant/bar: a shiny, titanium-ceilinged narrow arcade, inlaid fret-patterned mosaic floors (what she described as Moroccan Neo Art Deco) with a line of low Eastern-style lacquered tables, unadorned save the exquisite but unidentical ashtrays arranged at intervals down the center. Lorene’s response to the newest round of Draconian smoking laws was a defiant smoking-themed bar; a private club with the scandalous allure of the illegal vice, with a name from Ecclesiastes and a millennial affection for decadence, it was a sort of smoking speakeasy. So it was crucial to get all the trappings of the vice, such as theashtrays, absolutely correct. Mina had been suggesting drop-bottom built-in ashtrays that could be emptied unseen and unfelt from a distance at the press of a button, or automatically at preset intervals. The question was still discussed at length between them, in the usual manner of Lorene’s listening and biting her lower lip throughout, and then proffering — almost coyly — her meticulous and conclusive analysis of the issue. “Possibly,” she said, nearly inaudibly. She sat on the floor at one of the tables. She waved Mina over.
“Consider this: the best smoking experience of your life, I mean the times you really loved it, really felt sexy and satisfied doing it,” she said to Mina.
“I don’t really smoke anymore,” Mina said.
“Okay, listen.” Lorene put her hand in front of Mina’s eyes. “The lights are low, indirect, faintly warm — the room is crowded — but! You have a table. And you have a drink — a perfect Manhattan, let’s say — and the light catches the red, it glows. And you have cigarettes and you have — what?”
“An ashtray. I thought we knew this already.”
“Yes, an ashtray, but. Do you want to reach over to the center of the table and sort of toss your ash in? No, you do not. You want your own private lovely crystal or enamel ashtray that you can drag to the end of the table, to your right or to your left, so you don’t have to concern yourself with dropped ashes, or horror of horrors, determining which resting cigarette is yours or the next person’s.” Lorene made a dramatic shuddering motion with her shoulders.
“I see your point, but then the ashtrays have to be constantly attended, because nothing is more revolting to a smoker than an ashtray full of spent butts. Then you have servers annoyingly changing ashtrays all the time, sort of remindingpeople how much they smoke, making them feel sheepish and ashamed. So the automatic ones work better, because smoking is private and shameful, so the key to comfort, the comfortenabling environment, as you call it, is discretion, is it not, Lorene? And this outweighs the object-fetish factor, no matter how quaint, of a movable individual ashtray, not to mention the pilferage factor, which—”
“Ah-ha!” she enjoined, and now she actually removed her molded-celluloid blue-tinted vintage sunglasses to reveal and flash her enormous blue eyes at Mina. How long, Mina wondered, does it take to do your eyes like that? She kept glasses of one kind or another on for approximately seventy-five percent of the day. So she had her eyes perfectly made up so that when the occasion occurred wherein she needed to whip off her glasses in some grand eureka move (such as this moment about the ashtrays), the witness to the gesture — the revelation of these eyes — nearly said “Ah-ha!” right back, and was sort of nearly won before she even started talking to you.
“Ah-ha!” She started to wag a finger at Mina. “I want them to pilfer. I want to have beautiful expensive ashtrays that are distinctly of this place and I want them to be coveted and stolen. I want rich, sophisticated grown men to sneakil
y put them in their pockets. I want movie stars to stuff them into silk bags, scattering ashes all over pockets and purses. I want to give them the exotic thrill of a purloined thing. In fact, we won’t sell them, at no price. People want them, they have to pilfer, they have to sweat. They’ll become the most impressive objects on people’s coffee tables. We won’t say anything, neither discourage or encourage, but simply let them play out their own self-dramas.”
Mina had to admit, Lorene was sort of a genius about people’s desires. Secret ones. She was on constant reconnaissancefrom behind the blue shades, watching everyday gestures closely, seeing the longing that creates protocol and the need to break protocol. And this made her disdainful, manipulative, and very successful.
“Wait, here, take one of these,” and Lorene offered her an obnoxious American cigarette, self-consciously retro in its packaging. Mina sniffed at the offered cigarette. “Look, don’t raise your eyebrows, doll, they were out of my usual,” she said and put the cigarette in Mina’s mouth. Lorene occasionally called Mina “doll,” which Mina found she enjoyed, oddly enough, quite a bit.
“So here you are, ready to smoke your cigarette. You put it in your mouth. I light it for you, you nod at me. Great. Having a cigarette lit for you is pleasant,” she said.
“Not if you are chain-smoking,” Mina said.
“Exactly, doll, which is why we need to have service people who are attentive but not overly so. What I mean is, the first cigarette must be lit for the customer without fail, but not the others unless it appears the customer is waiting at all for such behavior.”
“I’m with you on that,” Mina said, now taking a long drag.
“Take notes,” Lorene said. The winding smoke gave Lorene a George Hurrel Hollywood perfection.
“Right, go ahead,” Mina said, unmoving.
“It also follows that the ashtrays should be dumped by a server, not automatically, because people like to be waited on, just as they like to have their cigarette lit, et cetera. That’s why they came in, let us not forget, to be waited upon. However, there is the shame at smoking so often and the customer wants to indulge unnoticed and there is the embarrassment of the service person constantly coming by and changing the tray andthe horrible moment when our poor, shamed customer apologizes to the server for the bother his addiction and weakness is causing her.”
“Awful,” Mina shuddered, “so?”
“Well, Mina, we don’t change the ashtrays until there are two butts, which is against my service rules, but since we are talking serious smokers here, and that rule was designed to cut out any judgment call on behalf of the server about the relative dirtiness of ashtrays and avoiding the long slide into casual grotesque nonstandard service, that uncrossable slippery-slope line that in this case we alter slightly, and then—”
“Yes, yes.”
“We choose the most quietly subservient and inoffensive but highly attentive and observant servers, ones that are nearly invisible in their comforting perfection, angelic and flawless and gloriously impersonal.”
“You mean beautiful Japanese women.”
“Precisely.”
Vanity and Vexation was the fourth establishment in Lorene’s high-con restaurant group, Pleasure Model Enterprises. The first was Food Baroque (originally called EAT/NOT EAT, but didn’t catch on until given its less prosaic moniker— Mina herself wanted it called Food Fascism, or “Eating,” but that was a little tootoo,even for Pleasure Model), which initially might seem to be a sort of health food restaurant, but Lorene called it an eccentric-diet-tolerant eating environment, a gourmet restaurant that would adapt to virtually any dietary restriction; in fact, Food Baroque would plan a delicious four-course meal complete with a recommended selection from its extensive wine cellar, consisting largely of high-priced and famous older-vintage Bordeaux and Burgundies, a few sort ofmammoth, macho Rhône wines, and the odd excellent, highly allocated, and difficult-to-find California boutique wines. Since the wine was matched so specifically to their personal menu, most people gratefully went along with the selection. This was where Pleasure Model made its profits, and that margin allowed Lorene to reserve only two seatings a night, so the kitchen could actually adapt to the many different menus. Mina spent her first year working for Lorene tirelessly and meticulously entering the highly specific and esoteric dietary restrictions into the computer (all extremely confidential) and creating client histories so regulars would only have to make a reservation and Mina would see their complete restrictive history listed before her. She developed the current Food Baroque system: Producer and Young Wife call for reservation, two weeks in advance minimum, and confirmed on Amex (at a charge of $50 a person if the reservation was canceled with less than a week’s notice). Producer specifies no red meat, low cholesterol, under twenty percent saturated fat (entered as XRM, — C, <20%sF). Wife is 600k, — CB, XS, +O3 (no more than six hundred calories, low carbohydrates, no sugar, and high omega-three oils). Or any combination thereof. The clients were devoted and, Mina realized, quite unpleasant people, alternately deeply paranoid (constant rumors surfaced after Food Baroque was a sensation that they ignored the restrictions altogether, and in fact the food tasted so good because the chef put a stick of butter in everything), and deeply grateful, with young starlets weeping with joy and holding Mina’s hand, as at long last they could have their cake and not have to purge it as well. Her excellent management of FB earned Lorene’s loyalty forever, and certainly gave Mina license now, in the wake of their success, occasionally to be hours late, or be there but notbe there, and Lorene accommodated Mina’s eccentricities as Mina accommodated the eccentricities of Food Baroque customers. Mina had grown to hate FB, and had fantasies about the days when the fundamental thing about food was taste, finito. It was in fact essential to Lorene and Mina’s success to remember that every success had to be contradicted and revised in order to maintain itself, each extreme had to contain its own contradiction, each virtue its vice, each style its own mannered counterstyle. Lorene realized, in another eureka moment, that certain loyal customers used to sneak in the back alley for a cigarette between courses of guiltless, organic “lite” cuisine. She created a downstairs “private” smoking room, a secret lounge with elegant banquettes and beautiful service persons wherein a customer could bum a cigarette (even call in his favorite brand with his dietary restrictions) and smoke in privacy, and only in view of other guilty smokers. Only smokers knew of the room, so spouses could be fooled about the reformation of smokers, and the clients could enjoy their weakness with no shame. Phillipe Stark disposable toothbrushes were even provided in the secret room’s secret bathroom, so the telltale breath could be eliminated before returning to the main dining room. So chic and popular this little room became that many notorious power deals were struck there, and some ambitious mongering types even cynically feigned being smokers just to get in, until Lorene had to pick and choose the “right” smokers. She spun this secret room into its own place, Dead Animals and Single Malts (with the added attraction of wild exotic-game meat such as buffalo filet mignon, New Zealand ostrich prosciutto, and free-range alligator carpaccio), and as successful as that was, and well ahead of the current macho scotch, cigar, and “meat” craze, it never had the cachet of the Room at Food Baroque, thesassy defiance of the secret cigarette. It closed after the recent smoking laws went into effect. Mina saw Vanity and Vexation as another attempt to recapture the Room, and didn’t disguise her indifference, although undoubtedly it would have great success.
Mina’s favorite establishment of Lorene’s and the true gem and heart of Pleasure Model Enterprises, at least in Mina’s view, was the Gentleman’s Club, which opened a year and a half after Food Baroque. It was the place both of them spent most of their time, Mina working the floor nearly every night the first year, and Lorene nearly always starting or ending her days there. The place was conceived, initially, as a men’s club, a forties serviceman’s-style club, though ersatz even as such: a serviceman’s club but as imagin
ed in fifties movies about wartime serviceman’s clubs. Gentlemanly recreation with the opposite gender — that sort of thing. The idea was hire pretty girls and dress them in slightly undersized forties vintage dresses. Give them names like Shirley and Annette. Lorene required them to be about fifteen pounds over the standard L.A. beauty — she wanted hips and curves, retro bodies. Initially it worked that way, only men allowed, and lots of girls to wait on them and have bright conversation, ordering them sidecars and Manhattans and old-fashioneds, Harvey Wallbangers and salty dogs. No boutique bourbons or single-batch tequilas or single malts. It was quite a successful place, but Lorene had to compromise and allow women customers, finally. Women, then, ironically, became the most loyal customers (or, actually, members— everyone who entered had to join for ten dollars to enjoy the recreation and refreshments of the club — this also allowed Lorene to skirt the smoking laws, as it was a private club, and members could smoke and eat and talk in peace). Womenloved to chat up the “girls”—this had a quaint, faintly outré sort of kink to it, women as fifties-stylized forties servicemen, missing the company of the sweet and lovely chubby woman. Thus the Gentleman’s Club sprung its own cooler opposite, as “Gentleman’s Club,” with more women members than men. It was there they were to meet, the following evening, at the long bar, when Mina again turned up several hours late.
Lorene was waiting, smoking at the bar. Mina sat on the stool next to her. The bar was packed, and Lorene shook her head.
“I thought you only saw Scott one weekend a month.”
“Well, Scott, yes. Sorry.”
“David did call and I did cover for you.”
“Great. Cover. You’re top shelf,” Mina said. “Drink?”
“Ray.” Lorene gestured at Ray (real name Brandon, or Brendan, or was it Branden? — but Lorene couldn’t have that).