At eight minutes after seven, she hits the Bentley Gallery on Robertson where she is to meet Loki and Del Rey. The joint is not jumping but at least it has enough people in it so everyone is forced to raise his voice, giving the impression of an event. Mirabelle wears her tight maroon knee-length skirt over low heels and a smart white sweater that sets off her blunt-cut nut-brown hair. Loki and Del Rey aren’t there yet, and Mirabelle has the annoying thought that they might not show. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d left her stranded. As Mirabelle never shows her distress, it is assumed she is fine in all circumstances and Loki and Del Rey never figure that their failure to show is really a thoughtless ditching. She gets a plastic cup of wine and does the thing she always does at these openings, something so odd that it sets her apart from all the others. She looks at the paintings. It is a perfect disguise. Holding the wine dictates her posture so she doesn’t have to think about where to put her hands, and the pictures on the walls give her something to focus on while she stands sentry for Loki and Del Rey.
Twenty minutes later, the two women appear, snag Mirabelle, and head two blocks up to Fire, an avant-garde gallery––or at least one that thinks it is. This opening has more of the party atmosphere that everyone is looking for, and some of the revelers have even spilled out onto the street. For Loki and Del Rey, this is the warm-up party for their final landing spot, the Reynaldo Gallery. The Reynaldo Gallery, representing the big money artists, is set in the heart of Beverly Hills and needs the prettiest girls and the most relevant people to populate its openings. After getting enough alcohol at the Fire Gallery to hold them––they know the bar at Reynaldo’s will be impossible––they drive into Beverly Hills, park and lock, and cross Santa Monica Boulevard to the gallery. They push their way in and finally slink through the crowd and into the heart of the matter. The party needs a volume control but there isn’t one, and everyone would be straining to hear each other except they are all talking simultaneously. Loki and Del Rey decide to brave the tumult at the bar, and at first Mirabelle hangs loosely by them, but eventually the chaos separates them and she finds herself in the vacant narrow rim that circles the room between the crowd and the paintings. Only this time she is less intent on the pictures and more intent on who and what is going on in the room. In a sea of black dresses, she is the only one wearing any color, and she is the only one wearing almost no makeup, including the men. Her eyes scan the room and spot several celebrities dressed in the latest nomad/wanderer fashion and several very handsome men who have learned to give off the seductive impression that they would be consummate fathers.
One in particular attracts her, one who looks as though he does not know he is handsome, who looks slightly lost and like an actual working artist, whom she dubs the Artist/Hero. She sees him notice her staring, so she skillfully moves her eyes away, where she sees the absolute opposite of his pleasure-giving radiance. It is Lisa. Lisa is one of the cosmetics girls at Neiman’s, and Mirabelle can’t help but recoil. What is she doing here? This girl does not belong at an art opening. She is on Mirabelle’s turf, where an eked-out high school diploma is just not enough. But Lisa holds her own, and here’s why. Lisa, thirty-two, can be counted among the very beautiful. She has pale red hair that hangs in soft ringlets against skin that has never seen the sun. She is slender and oval faced, with shapely legs that pin themselves into a pair of provocative high heels. Her breasts, though augmented, rise above the line of her dress and seem to beckon, successfully keeping the secret of their artificiality. She appears sunny, a quality that Mirabelle can call upon only for special occasions.
Lisa wears high heels even to lunch. In fact, she over-dresses for every occasion, because without the splash that her wardrobe makes, she believes that no man will like her. She fools herself by thinking that in some way she is pursuing a career by making important contacts with successful men, and that the sex is tangential. The men play along, too. They think that she likes them, that her hand jobs aren’t bought. These men allow her to feel interesting. After all, aren’t they listening to every word? She believes that only in her body’s perfection can she be loved, and her diet focuses on five imaginary pounds that keep her from perfection. This weight anxiety is not negotiable. No convincing makes it otherwise, even from the most sincere of her lovers. Lisa’s idea of fun is going to bars and taunting college men by making them believe she is available. A good time is measured by the abandon she can muster; the more people who are crammed into a Mercedes heading to a party in the hills, the more valid the proof that she is having fun. At thirty-two, Lisa does not know about forty, and she is unprepared for the time when she will actually have to know something in order to have people listen to her. Her penalty is that the men she attracts with her current package see her only from a primitive part of their brains, the childish part that likes shiny objects that make noise when rattled. Older men looking for playthings and callow boys driven by hormones access these areas more easily than the clear-thinking wife seekers of their late twenties and early thirties.
There is a third category of men who like Lisa. These are the men whose relationship to women is driven by obsession and possession, and she will be the ugly target of more than one such man in her lifetime. To Mirabelle, the idea of being an object of obsession is alluring and represents a powerful love. She fails to understand, however, that men become obsessive over beautiful women because they want no one else to have them, but they fall in love with women like Mirabelle because they want a certain, specific part of them.
Mirabelle turns away, refusing to be intimidated by this crimson Marilyn. She is staring at the surface of a picture when she overhears voices in conversation next to her. Two men are trying to remember the name of the artist who uses words in his paintings. She quickly discounts the New York artist Roy Lichtenstein as the conversation is on the wrong coast.
“Are you thinking of Ed Ruscha?” says Mirabelle.
Both men snap their fingers and begin a conversation with her. After two sentences, she realizes that one of them is the impossibly perfect, lost-looking Artist/Hero that she had spotted only minutes earlier. This provokes a certain eloquence in Mirabelle, at least in terms of L.A. art, which she keeps up on through gallery visits and reviews, and she presents herself to the Artist/Hero as formidable and worthwhile and smart. So Mirabelle doesn’t flinch when Lisa walks over, and she accepts her into the group, giving Lisa a generous benefit of the doubt. She isn’t really aware that Lisa has already taken over the conversation with her flashing eyes and pointed laughter, and has slipped in between the cracks of the Artist/Hero’s brain with the subliminal suggestion that she likes him, and likes him a lot. By appealing to his absolute worst side, Lisa eventually dominates him, and later the Artist/Hero is seen taking her phone number. Mirabelle is not affected by a man’s failure to approach her, as her own self-deprecating attitude never allows the idea that he would in the first place.
Mirabelle does not understand that Lisa’s maneuvering is not directed at the Artist/Hero, but at her. She does not see that she has been defeated by an opponent who wants to see the glove girl in retreat. In Lisa’s mind, she has once again established the superiority of the cosmetics department over the glove department, and by association, the couture department itself.
Mirabelle participates in several other good conversations throughout the rest of the evening. The thoughtful nature of these exchanges makes her feel that this is exactly what she should be doing and that she couldn’t be doing anything better. After being dropped off by Loki and Del Rey at gallery number one to get her car, she drives home, her head filled with recapitulations of the evening’s finest arguments in order to find out whom she agrees with most.
She slides into bed at exactly midnight, after amusing herself by feeding her cats with a bowl that says “good dog.” She closes her eyes and taps her finger on the lamp switch. A few moments later, as she lies quiescent in her bed, she feels something terrible enter her brain, stay for a flee
ting second, then disappear. She does not know what it is, only that she doesn’t like it.
Tuesday
IT IS NOW THE MIDDLE of November, and the smell of Thanksgiving is in the air, which means that Christmas is waiting in the oven. The increasing number of browsers forces Mirabelle to forgo her favorite position of leaning over the counter on her elbows, something she can get away with only when there are absolutely no customers in sight.
She skips lunch because she has to visit Dr. Tracy to renew her Serzone. He asks her several questions that she correctly answers, and he writes out the prescription. She feels relieved, as her supply seems dangerously low, and is glad to have the prescription overlap by several weeks instead of four days. She worries about unforeseen events like the doctor suddenly having to be out of town, leaving her short. She also renews her prescription for birth control pills, which she takes not especially for birth control but more for her period, which in the past has been uncomfortably nonperiodic.
The rest of the day at Neiman’s seems like purgatory as tonight there is no Art Walk to look forward to; there is nothing. Her plan is to read, perhaps draw, or find an old movie on the classics channel. Maybe she can put together a phone call between herself and Loki. By the end of the day, her lower back aches and her soles burn. She prepares the register a full half hour before closing, knowing there are to be no more customers. All she has to do when six o’clock strikes is press one button and the register is closed. She is satisfyingly out minutes early, and in her car.
The streets of Los Angeles are starting to crowd regularly now in anticipation of the holidays. Even the shortcuts are clogging up, and Mirabelle uses the time in her car to plan the coming months. From Christmas Day to New Year’s Day she will be in Vermont visiting her parents and brother. She already has the airplane ticket, bought months earlier at a phenomenally low price. Thanksgiving is still open, and she knows it needs to be filled. To be alone on Thanksgiving is a kind of death sentence. The year before it had been commuted at the last minute by a visiting uncle who happened to be in town and who invited her to a small gathering at a restaurant, and then hit on her. This had been a particularly grim evening as the dinner company had also been lousy. They were a stuffy group who were having steaks and cigarettes, who were united by a rare quality on this day: they were thankless. The seldom-seen uncle on the mother’s side then drove her home, high as a kite, and under the pretense of fingering her pretty necklace, laid the back of his hand on her blouse, then asked if he could come in. Mirabelle looked at him dead in the eye and said, “I’ll tell Mom.” The uncle feigned ignorance, drunkenly walked her to the door, returned to his car, put it in reverse when he intended drive, and fled.
Mirabelle suddenly finds herself home, having no recollection of any detail of the drive from Neiman’s. She parks her car in the spot reserved for her in the clapboard garage. She lugs a bag of groceries, her purse, and an empty cardboard box up the two short flights to her insular apartment, which hangs in the air over the city of Los Angeles. At the top of the steps, she fumbles for her key, and as she sets the bag down to get it from her purse, she sees a package propped against her front door. It is wrapped in brown paper, sent parcel post, and sealed with wide packing tape. It is the size of a shoebox.
Mirabelle uses her shoulder to jar open the front door, which has been sticking slightly from the week’s rain. She puts the package on the kitchen table, double dips some dry cat food into a bowl, and checks her messages. She has none. She sits at the kitchen table and with a pair of scissors cuts off the package’s dull outer wrapping. Inside is a pale red gift box, wrapped in an expensive white bow. She cuts the ribbon, opens the box, and sees a layer of tissue paper. There is a small note card on top, sealed in an envelope. She holds it up and studies the front, then turns it over and looks at the back. There are no revealing marks or brand names.
She parts the tissue, and inside is the pair of silver satin Dior gloves that she sold last Friday. She opens the note and reads, “I would like to have dinner with you.” The bottom of the note is signed, Mr. Ray Porter.
She leaves the box on the kitchen table in a disarray of tissue. She backs out of the room and circulates nervously through the apartment, returning several times to the vicinity of the box. She doesn’t touch it for the rest of the night, and she is afraid to move it because she does not understand it.
Monotony
MIRABELLE’S AMBITION IS ABOUT one-tenth of 1 percent of what would be called normal. She has been at Neiman’s almost two years without moving one inch forward. She considers herself an artist first, so her choice of jobs is immaterial. It doesn’t matter to her if she is selling gloves or repainting apartments, as her real work is done in the evening with artists’ crayon. Thus, she has zero ambition in these day jobs, and she tends to leave it to chance when it comes to getting and changing them. She is not aware that some people fight like alley cats for desirable situations. She presents a re´sume´, fills out an application, waits, and finally makes a call to see if she got the job. Usually, a confused secretary will answer and say that the position had been filled weeks ago. This aimlessness in presenting herself contributes to her feeling of being adrift.
She is, however, motivated to visit galleries and present her drawings to the dealer. She has established a relationship with a gallery on Melrose who will take a drawing and, six months later, sell it. But this does not produce enough outside income to set her free from being a shopgirl, and the inspiration required for a drawing exhausts her. And besides, she actually enjoys the monotony of Neiman’s. In a way, when she is standing at the glove counter with her ankles crossed, she is perfect, and she likes the sense of accomplishment she gets from repetitive work.
So when she runs into Lisa at the Time Clock Cafe´, she finds herself sitting across from her exact inverse. It is as though her every thought, trait, and belief had been turned inside out and decorated with a red wig. Lisa, idly curious about Mirabelle in the same way that a cat is curious about a dust mote, invites her to sit down. But Lisa’s curiosity has talons, and she knows that in her approach to the glove girl, she must appear to be as benign as Mirabelle in order to casually extract the maximum information. If Immanuel Kant had stumbled across this luncheon after his noon Beverly Hills shrink appointment, he would have quickly discerned that Lisa is all phenomena and no noumena, and that Mirabelle is all noumena and no phenomena.
Mirabelle has a knack for discussing the mundane, at length. In this sense, she is Jeremy’s blood brother. She can talk about glove storage nonstop. How her own ideas of storage are much better than the current system at Neiman’s, and how her supervisor had become upset when he discovered that she had resorted them by size rather than color.
Today, she talks to Lisa about the intricacies of working at Neiman’s, including the personality aberrations of her many bosses. This takes a while as practically everybody at Neiman’s is her boss. These comments come from Mirabelle not as criticisms but as polite observations, and Lisa is confounded because she cannot discern an ulterior motive. Tom, the regular lunchtime Mirabelle-watcher, has spotted the two of them and is having his sandwich while trying to read their lips. He has also noted that Mirabelle’s legs are slightly ajar, creating a wee wedge of a sight line right up her skirt. This keeps him at the lunch table a little longer than usual, ordering a dessert loaded with calories that he cannot afford. However, the periodic shifting of her legs creates a high anticipation in Tom that generates a compensating calorie-eating adrenaline. Suddenly, Lisa takes over with a breast-jutting arch of her back, and Tom’s resulting caloric burn puts him back at even.
Mirabelle tells her about the mysterious glove delivery, mistakenly bringing Lisa into her inner circle of one. Lisa keeps an amused look on her face, but inside, this story sickens her, because it happened to someone else. Lisa can only think that this man’s footpath had fallen just outside her orbit. She then gives Mirabelle advice that is so foreign to her that Mirabelle actu
ally cannot comprehend it. The advice ranges from playing aloof, to looking up his credit card information, to returning the package unopened. The topic so excites Lisa that she forgets all her careful posturing with Mirabelle and blurts out her deepest and darkest:
“When a man approaches me, I know exactly what he wants. He wants to fuck me.”
Mirabelle’s back tenses and her legs reflexively close, prompting Tom to ask for his check.
“And if I like him, I fuck him a lot, until he gets addicted. Then I cut him off. That’s when I’ve got him.”
This is the extent, depth, and limit of Lisa’s philosophy of life. Mirabelle stops midsip and stares at her as though looking at the first incoming pictures of an alien life form. She maneuvers the topic elsewhere, a few exchanges are made on other subjects, allowing Lisa to land on earth, and they finally split the check.
Lisa has taken all her intelligence and intuition, which is not meager, and focused a Cyclops eye on the soap operas of four square blocks of Beverly Hills, closing off her life. Mirabelle’s outward-facing intelligence is gathering information, which is still coalescing and might not gel for several years. But she has always felt that her thirties were going to be her best decade, and since she is still lingering in her twenties, there is no hurry.
The rest of the day, and the next two days, rock to a lethargic syncopation. Moving too slowly to be counted by the clicks of a metronome, time is measured by lunches and closing times and customers, broken only by an occasional surge of curiosity about the intriguing package and her memory of the man who sent it. The mornings are sometimes busy, relatively, even producing a few sales in between the browsers, who generally scan the glove department as though they were looking into a stereoscope to view some antique photo. Mirabelle’s brain activity, if it could be plotted by an electroencephalogram, drops to a level that most scientists would interpret as sleep. On Thursday afternoon, she is brought back to life by an enthusiastic Japanese tourist who can’t believe she has lucked upon the glove department, and who buys twelve pairs to be shipped back to Tokyo. This involves taking the address, calculating mailing costs, wrapping, and inscribing gift cards. The woman wants the Neiman’s name on everything, including the gift cards, and Mirabelle calls around the store to find the old variety with the name embossed. In Mirabelle’s world, this is the equivalent of running the three-minute mile and it leaves her worn out, complaining, and ready for an early night. Finally completing the last detail of the global transaction, she thanks the woman with the one foreign word that Neiman’s requires its employees to know: arigato. The woman picks up her receipt, slips it in her shopping bag already crammed with previous purchases, cheerfully thanks Mirabelle with an engaging bow, and walks backward twelve steps until she turns and heads west toward couture. This is when Mirabelle becomes aware of a man standing to one side, who turns her with his voice. “So will you have dinner with me?” And then, because Mirabelle doesn’t reply, he says, “I’m Mr. Ray Porter.”