26
There is a concept in Buddhism of “No birth; no death.” That all living things continue on in some form. A seed grows into a stem with leaves, then flowers, and dies only to become mulch for new plants in the spring. A cycle of birth and death; everything on the chain continuing, no stopping.
But the Buddhist retreat that I was supposed to go on next week has been stopped. I got a message on my answering machine—after another hang-up—that the Jesuit priest who was going to run it had a medical emergency, so it’s been postponed until they aren’t sure when. I really could have used the break from everyday life after Suzanne’s wedding last weekend, but the Catholic imperative to be forgiving, plus the Buddhist practice of nonattachment are making me feel guilty for my attitude, so I remind myself that the retreat will happen at the time when it will be best.
I have strong faith in Buddhism; I just wish Lizzie played by their rule of continuing. Lizzie probably has not died, but her store, I am sickened to discover, is undeniably, irrevocably kaput. I am standing on a sidewalk under the hot August sun staring at the Closed sign in the door of her store. The empty darkness of the windows is hard to comprehend, so I keep looking up the street and back at them, as if this vision I am having will suddenly change.
“Goddamn you, Lizzie.” I glance around to see if anyone heard me, a woman railing at an empty storefront. I don’t know why I believe that bellowing her name will somehow make her hear my anger. She is not God, able to divine my thoughts; she is human—closer to Beelzebub, frankly—and skipped out on me without paying and with my jewelry besides.
I get in my truck, start it up, and throw it into gear too quickly, causing it to lurch forward and die. I sit for a moment wondering what birth will arise from this death, but all I feel is anger. The five stages of grief flash in my mind like cards dealt during a magic trick. The joker turns up last and has Lizzie’s face on it.
For the first time, I find my way through the Venice streets easily, as if the neighborhood is escorting me out, as if it knows I have no need to go there again. As I get on the 10 freeway heading east to go home, I wonder where Lizzie has disappeared to. In what part of this vast area called Los Angeles is she conjuring a new life. I imagine a trail of fake eyeglasses and packets of red hair dye left in her wake as she discards her store-owner disguise.
And where is my jewelry that was in Lizzie’s store? Is she wearing the pieces? Sold them cheap to a friend or maybe gave them to a relative as a seemingly extravagant gift? I want to slap her and wake up from this bad dream. The jewelry is completely lost, gone, given to her with nothing received back except an invoice—a lot of good that will do—and no idea where she or it went. When my pieces in Rox were sold, I didn’t know who bought them, but I’d already been given a check for the merchandise, the reciprocal evidence that what I delivered had not disappeared into the ether like a scream never heard.
I had thought Lizzie was permanent, one of those people who will always be right where they are. No change in their life, no growth. One nonmoving thing to count on that will always be in the same spot decades from now. Boy, was I wrong. Lizzie is no longer. Just gone, gone, gone. My father did that once, but he didn’t have my jewelry, just my heart. Goddamn him, too.
“It’s your father being absent so long, honey,” Reggie says during our telephonic breakfast this morning after I tell him about yet another scream dream last night. “You feel unsafe in the world, that’s pretty clear.”
“It’s not because of him.” It’s too hot this morning for oatmeal and I can hear Reggie sipping on a straw. In an effort to lose weight, he is only drinking protein smoothies for breakfast, he told me, and the rest of his meals are as rigidly mapped out. He’s been thrilled for the last month ever since I broke up with Michael, and maybe that euphoria has fueled him to resist his normal fare of sausage, toast, and eggs. “Anyway, I just want the screams to end—it’s been six months. Enough already.”
“Have you ever thought about finding him?”
“Who?”
“Paul, your father.”
“Oh. No, I haven’t. Once I did. Years ago when I was still in Mississippi after that dreadful Cousin Elsie woman called, I had daydreams about stealing Momma’s car and running away to Florida and somehow connecting with him there, as if our mutual DNA would illuminate my way to him like radar, but I never did. Not only wasn’t it realistic, but even if I had miraculously found him, I guess I didn’t want to see how he’d respond. Or wouldn’t. Sometimes it’s better not knowing.” I make a point of turning on the water in the kitchen sink. “Can we change the subject, please?”
“I just don’t want you waking up screaming anymore.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t, either.” We listen to each other breathe for a moment. I can tell he isn’t saying anything in case I want to talk about this some more, which I know he thinks I should, but I don’t. “So, what are you up to today?”
Reggie distracts me with tales of his current job. Since I have stopped seeing Michael, my conversations with Reggie have felt more complete, because there is no longer an entire area that I have to leave out. Hanging up the phone, I wonder if or when he will ever start seeing someone.
With Lizzie’s shop no longer selling my jewelry—or even in existence, damn her—the solution is to get into another store, a real one that pays on time. And after Suzanne’s wedding I began thinking of working with pearls.
As I drive through my neighborhood in the September heat to get downtown, I hear the whir of a small engine growing louder with each block. My stomach instinctively tightens against what I fear the noise is, and I immediately begin praying that it isn’t, but I turn the corner and almost run into it. A large truck with a high-sided bed is double-parked in the street and a group of three men wearing straw cowboy hats and long-sleeved shirts despite the heat are the bandits blocking my way. The whirring has become thunderous, like a jetliner taking off, competing only in volume with a radio playing Spanish music that is audible when the buzzsaw one of them is toting isn’t cutting, brutalizing, and massacreing a huge California cypress tree.
Trees in Los Angeles are clipped and groomed like a porn star’s bush. When I first moved here, I thought the bare branches and small sizes were the trees’ reaction to the hot, dry environment, but eventually I understood that that had nothing to do it—people don’t let them grow. Drive along Sunset Boulevard or any street in a supposedly well-to-do neighborhood, and the trees are just nubs with small desperate clusters of leaves trying vainly to get some sun. Supposedly it all started with rogue bands that were hired by billboard companies to illegally and under cover of night cut the branches on trees lining commercial streets, so no one will miss an advertisement of yet another terrible movie we all have to see. Then I guess the idiots who move here and buy homes got the impression that that was the L.A. style, and God forbid they not be in on that, so street after street is nothing but brutal, decapitated sticks. Trees, the one thing that would cool down and shade this Saharan land, are desecrated and reduced to nothing. I have never seen anything like it in my life. I want to make everyone in Los Angeles fly en masse to the South and say, “See? This is how a tree is supposed to look, you fucking idiot. Now just leave them alone.”
As I drive around the murderers, I have to squelch my impulse to crash into their truck. I know it’s not their fault, that they were just hired to do a job, but all I can think about is trying to stop them somehow. I hit the number on my cell phone that automatically dials Reggie. He’s already at the editing room, but I can leave him a message about it. He’s from Kansas; he understands. At least the tree outside my living room window still looks like one.
The showroom of Vivid Pearls and Gems Company, Importers and Wholesalers, is on the fifth floor of the International Jewelry Center at 550 South Hill Street in downtown. A sad row of tall, sickly palm trees, each trunk barely supporting the fronds, lines the sidewalk in front of the building, which is a large, modern, hulking affair. White horizontal slabs alternate with rows of windows giving the opposite impression of a building you can see into. Transparency and ease of access are not what jewelry vendors want in their place of business. Especially not when the building faces Pershing Square, an elegantly named plaza that holds a few groups of overly pruned trees, but is mostly a small city block of concrete with some permanently installed benches, tables, and chairs that the homeless are periodically roused out of in an effort to show the jewelry businesses that the cops really are doing something about it.
I arrive right on time for my appointment with May Tsou, the owner of Vivid Pearls and Gems, and I have a feeling it is noted and appreciated by her. She buzzes me into the first security door, and I wait inside the chamber for it to click shut behind me, then the inner door is buzzed open, and I push through it into the showroom. May is a small Chinese woman whose easy smile and unlined face hides two decades of her age and her steely-eyed business sense. I have heard stories about her. She gets the best South Sea pearls because her family has been in the business in Asia for generations, so the quality is guaranteed and that makes it worth the hoops one must jump through to buy from her. This is our second appointment. She wanted time to run a credit check on me and, I think, to talk to other wholesalers about dealing with me. When she called the other day to say come down on Thursday, I knew I was in.
She leads me into a small inner room with light dove-gray carpet, walls, and chairs. A dark, sleek table takes up most of the space in front of a doorway that leads to yet another inner room. May walks around the table and into the back room as I sit down in the chair facing her. She soon returns with long, flat black boxes that she stacks on the table. A high-powered lamp, magnifying glass, and scale are already in place. I feel like I am about to buy heroin. Not that I ever have, and I know the normal place of business for that kind of sale is not like this, but my heart is racing as if what I’m about to look at will change my life, or at least how I feel.
Which it does the minute May opens the first box. Lying inside in three segregated chambers and resting on black felt are dozens of gleaming, lustrous, shimmering pearls. Round and full and rich as if the oysters offered not a covered-up glossed-over irritant, but their own wombs. In the midst of this bedazzlement, I realize that May is looking at me with a small smile on her face.
“Beautiful, huh? Tahitian.” With a pair of very long tweezers, she picks up a perfect pearl, then holds it to the light under the magnifying glass for me to see. Her deftness with the tool makes me think of her using chopsticks, whereas when I hold tweezers to examine gems, my proficiency is thanks to eyebrow maintenance.
She puts the pearl back on the felt, hands me the tweezers, and lets me look at it for myself. It is a stunning specimen with a peacock-green luster and a pearly glow underneath; large, round, and heavy, it must be fifteen or sixteen millimeters. Without even asking the price, I know it is out of my league, and I have a feeling that May knows that as well, but is showing it to me anyway because she knows the joy that can bring. And wants me to know what is possible if my business keeps growing.
The pearls I am able to buy are a few removed from that first grand one, but still they are beautiful. “Department stores buy regular pearls; dye them. These color real,” May says as I put together a group of the ones I will buy in naturally occurring colors of gray, green, pink, and deep brown.
I am in love with them. Each pearl, because of the price range I need to stay in, has a tiny dimple or pit in it, which I wasn’t planning on when I sketched the jewelry I will make with them, but as I sit at the table while May totals up my order and writes out an invoice, I start envisioning how to hide that in the designs.
The remains of breakfast lie on the table before us. Or mine does. Reggie is two months into his diet and going strong. I can see a difference in him, but he says all that matters is how great he feels, though I have a feeling he is counting pounds. As we get up to leave, the bagel shop starts filling up. A yoga class has let out from the studio up the street and a serene swarm of stretch fabric clamors into line.
We turn left on the sidewalk, walking down Larchmont toward Reggie’s car in the warm morning sun, but he stops us in front of Han’s optical shop. “I need some new sunglasses. Wanna help me select?”
Hundreds of frames are on display in the mirrored and dark wood cases of the store. Eyeglasses are folded up like butterfly wings, ready to elongate and light upon a face. Reggie and I quickly set into a rhythm: I find a pair, hand them to him; he tries them on, puts them away. Again and again and again.
A woman dressed casually yet elegantly in Saturday attire enters the store and heads straight to the register. Reggie is peering at himself in a mirror wearing an aggressively hip pair of sunglasses.
“Maybe,” I say, trying to imagine them in life every day, then I hand him a very classic frame. “But try these.” The glasses emphasize the best parts of Reggie’s face. “I think those are great on you.”
“Really?” Reggie is doing an odd squinting thing I’ve never seen him do before.
“Yeah, I like them.”
He moves closer to the mirror. “You don’t think they…I don’t know.” He takes them off and replaces the hip frames on his face.
“Okay, but these are great frames.” I pick them up, admiring the precision of balance and the craftsmanship. “And they were amazing on you.”
“They were.”
Reggie and I both turn around to see who said this and if it was to us. The woman in the store has stepped closer, appraising Reggie via the mirrors on every wall.
“They’re retro, but subtle,” she continues. “And on him, you barely notice.”
Reggie looks at me for a moment, then takes off the hip pair, so I hand the other frames back to him. The woman moves next to me, and we watch as his face is complemented when he puts the glasses on.
“Yeah, I really like them.”
Reggie says nothing and turns around to look in the mirror, then starts turning his head side to side and up and down.
“Those are great pins.”
It takes me a second to realize what she is talking about. In the rush to meet Reggie for breakfast, I had pulled on the top I was wearing last night with two of my pins still affixed near the neckline.
“Oh, thanks.” I glance down to see which ones they are. “Actually, I made them.”
“Really? Do you have a line?”
“Yeah, Broussard’s Bijoux,” I say as I open my bag and pull out a card for her. “I’m in one store, Rox on Beverly, and I sell privately.”
“We should talk.” She reaches into her Hermès bag and proffers a business card. “I’m in New York all next week, but call my assistant to set up an appointment—I’d be interested to see your line.”
And with that she turns and heads out the door. As she passes in front of the shop’s window, her effortlessly sleek appearance stands out amid the yoga-pants and jeans crowd. I look down at the card in my hand, astonished at what I see.
“Reggie, you’ll never believe who that woman was.” I join him at the register where a salesclerk, who has a hint of a German accent, as if he inherited it not from his motherland but from the store, is asking for his credit card.
“Who?” Reggie puts a worn card down.
“Linda Beckman, head jewelry buyer for Greeley’s department store. She wants to see my stuff—I could die.”
“That’s great, honey. Good thing I needed new sunglasses, huh?”
“Yeah, right? So which ones are you…” I stop when I see the hip pair on the counter; the other frames are nowhere in sight. “Well, those looked good, too.”
I am sitting on my couch at ten to three in the morning—having been kept awake for the last hour from a scream dream—staring into the tree outside my living room window and thinking about everything I need to do. I called Roxanne to see if she wanted more pieces, but she said check back in January, which is okay because I don’t want to show her the new line until after Linda Beckman sees it and has first dibs. My appointment with her at Greeley’s is next week and the samples for the new line of jewelry have come out even better than I imagined they would when I took the sketches to Dipen. The pearls shimmer and glow against the braided gold, and the tourmaline, citrine, and peridot that surround them complement and contrast with their natural luminescence. Even Dipen was impressed.
But thinking about this is making me more revved up, not less, so I turn on the television for some barbiturate channel-surfing. If anything will put me to sleep, it’s dead-of-night TV. I flip past eighties sitcoms, cable access shows, a John Wayne film my father loved, cop shows, stand-up comics, and…
“Well, there he is.” The words came out automatically as if they were too large to be contained. On the screen is Andrew. Full color, gorgeous, and close-up. In a classic, quintessential seventies film he did that defined many things, socially and in the movie industry. As I sit watching his face in my living room, with me but not real, like the dreams I’ve been having, I realize that when he made this movie, he was just a few years older than I am right now. Seeing what he looked like then, it is as if the image of him from back then is reaching toward me now where our difference in age is so much less. His body is moving, walking in his slow panther strides, the same way he walked me to his bedroom all those times. I breathe in and wait for the dull pain in my gut to appear. But it does not. I watch more of the movie, and still the throbbing of anguish doesn’t come.
Okay, this is a first. Maybe I’m really done. Maybe seeing him at the theater and all those memories of him were exactly what I needed to get rid of him because here I am watching him, loving how he looks, remembering him gazing at me that very same way, his hand on me that way, smiling at me that way, and no big reaction is coming up. I’m just—okay.
Wow, I am clearly so completely over this man. But in a nice way, like seeing a picture of my favorite teddy bear when I was kid, the one I was sure I could never live without, definitely could not sleep without. Teddy was his name. He was purple and gold, which is a curious choice for a bear, and had only one eye. I loved Teddy. What I loved the most was that in the depths of his softness there was this really hard, solid object. And it would move, so I’d have to search for it in his down each time I held him just to find it. This secret inner core, totally belied by his countenance, that only I knew about. Eventually I realized it was the detached mechanism for a music box. He had been a wind-up toy, and the key must’ve broken off years before I was even born when my sister had him. But I still knew about his real inner core and no one else did, and what mattered was what he was, not his past, and I was the only one willing to find that part each time.
I pull the tapestry from the back of the couch over me as Andrew’s voice moves through my living room surrounding my body, resting in my ears, floating in my head. I fall asleep with his face near, the light behind it illuminating my dreams.