“Deal. Go get your yoga pants on.”
She hung up before her husband could refuse her. Gotta love that woman.
It had all started with the avocado tree.
The first thing it did wrong was make fruit in June instead of September. I hadn’t known about off-bloom years, when a tree just went apeshit a few months early. I’d come back from a losing series in New York to find my front yard had turned into a minefield of squirrel-chewed fruit. That gave me the first inkling that the thirty-foot tree would be a major encroachment on my routine.
I called the same guys I always called to come harvest the fruit. They thanked me and hauled away ten bags, leaving me one I tossed around on the plane the next time we traveled.
That could have been nothing. Really. But I knew it wasn’t. I carried around a kind of discomfort I didn’t have the will to release. Like a tiny rock in a lace-up boot. You figure it’s not so bad, not bad enough to warrant the unlacing and relacing of the entire boot.
Not until a pipe under the house broke and I found out it was the avocado tree roots pushing on the foundation did I know why the off-bloom had bugged me. The tree was going to be a major pain in my ass. So I had it cut down. Had the stump ground out. Roots dug out as far as they could be without sending my house down the hill.
Then my patio was too sunny. The front of the house wasn’t on the street. It faced south, right into the giant eyeball rising and setting over the east and west sides of the horizon. I was home half the summer, and I spent it trying to manage the shade in my front yard.
I was in a tucked-away enclave in the Oaks section of the Hollywood Hills. I’d bought it for the view and kept it for the quiet. I was easily distracted by anything sensory. Everything found a way into my eyes and ears. Even a strange taste could distract me. A shirt seam half undone and rubbing my skin could drive me nuts. So the ambient noise of the city was great until a truck was a little too loud or the neighbors two blocks away let their smoke detector battery go dead and I was assaulted by chirping every thirty seconds.
In my house, I controlled my distractions. I could have as much sensory input as I needed to work out or run my business. No one watched me up in the hills. One side of my house faced the cliff and Los Angeles. One faced the narrow street. The back faced the neighbor, a movie director and his wife who were home half the year, and the other side faced an acre of nothing.
But the avocado tree had been a sort of good luck charm, and that off-bloom, and the crushing roots on the foundation, had fucked everything else.
The girl I fucked in New York found a boyfriend. The one I fucked in St. Louis tried to get me to commit to I-don’t-know-what. Mary in Oakland was fine, but we only played the A’s once a year unless they got in the playoffs, which was unlikely. So I went without * for too much of the summer, and the bad luck built up.
I made an error in game three of the playoffs.
I didn’t think of things as going to hell. None of those individual craptastications spun together to make a shitstorm.
At Christmas, my mother had announced she was selling the house and moving into an apartment with her boyfriend. I was happy for her but felt unmoored.
Still, I could juggle all the little things. I’d work it out.
Not until I looked under the table and saw my glove was gone did I put it all together. Things were going wrong. General things. Every piece on the board had shifted, from my personal to my professional life and everything that linked them.
I needed to put it all back.
I backtracked. The tree. Well, there wasn’t much I could do there that wouldn’t take eighty years to fix. But I planted a fig tree and hoped for the best. I’d find new women where I needed them, and I bought the house I grew up in. My mother still left it to live in town, but the house? I had that.
Then Daria’s pin.
Losing the stupid insult of a pin reminded me that I hadn’t fixed a thing. All I’d done was plaster over the leak. I needed Daria’s pin. I couldn’t play without it. Not successfully. I didn’t know where the leak in my charmed life was, but I knew the luck was seeping through it.
Going to the Petersen and seducing a school librarian was exactly what I needed to keep my mind off everything. An easily achievable goal that would fill the well of shitty circumstances.
Vivian the librarian.
Vivian with a bowl of apples on her desk for the kids.
Vivian with a neck like a lotus stem.
She’d do nicely.
seven
Vivian
Jim opened the door of his green Saturn to let me in. He was a gentleman’s gentleman, looking into my eyes when he spoke despite the low-cut liquid silk of the dress, complimenting me chastely, and keeping the conversation light.