She Is Me (17 page)

“Elizabeth!” Lotte cried. She received her granddaughter’s embrace. “You brought Greta.” She eyed Greta attentively. “You look pale.”

“You look great, Mother,” Greta said, laughing, kissing the good side of her face.

Lotte nodded, as if to say, What did you expect? She grabbed Greta’s hands and kissed them. “Your health, your health,” she murmured.

“Okay, okay,” Elizabeth said. “We’re all here, aren’t we?”

“Did you hear the news?” Lotte said.

“You had a bowel movement?” Greta said.

“No!”

“You didn’t have a bowel movement?”

“Of course I did.”

“Well then,” Elizabeth said.

“The news is that Kougi is going to Japan.”

Elizabeth thought she might throw up. “No,” she said. “No, no, no.”

She sat down on the couch and flung her head back, hitting the wall with a thud. She rubbed the back of her head. She could feel the egg already.

Her mother went into the kitchen.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” Lotte drew out the word “God” as if it were elastic.

“Grandma, it’s okay.”

Kougi came in with a tray of green tea in tiny Japanese cups.

“She bumped her head, Kougi!”

“Perhaps she has great inner strength, like you,” Kougi said.

Lotte thought this idea over and liked it.

“Thank God, thank God. That’s all I can say,” Lotte said. “With the world the way it is, full of dirty rotten bastards, they should rot in hell.”

Greta appeared with a plastic bag of ice. “You’re going to Japan?” she said to Kougi, her voice weary. She put the bag on Elizabeth’s head.

He nodded.

“And he’s taking me with him!” Lotte said.
If you want to know who we are,
she sang out suddenly,
we are gentlemen of Japan . . .

On many a vase and jar,
sang Kougi.
On many a screen and fan . . .

Elizabeth’s mother took the bag of ice back and put it over her eyes.

“There, there, Mommy,” Elizabeth said.

We figure in lively paint . . .
Lotte sang.

Our attitude’s queer and quaint,
the two sang together.
You’re wrong if you think it ain’t . . .

Elizabeth spent the afternoon helping Lotte with her bills while Greta napped on her mother’s bed.

“She works too hard,” Lotte said. “You all work too hard.”

Kougi was not going to Japan for another year, and if Lotte was still alive in a year, then why shouldn’t she go to Japan? And why shouldn’t she be alive in a year, for that matter? She seemed so much better. Kougi, it turned out, could not only sing Gilbert and Sullivan, but also make Cream of Wheat with the best of them. He massaged Lotte’s feet. He even tamed her depressing houseplants. The plants had first arrived in the house when Lotte began to get sick, cheerful gifts from well-wishers welcoming Lotte home from each hospital visit. Another tumor, another begonia. Lotte had never had any patience for plants before. Plants grew in dirt and were, therefore, dirty. But the gift plants lingered, collecting dust and mites, sprawling in ugly neglected tangles. Until Kougi arrived and made them beautiful again. If that were possible, why couldn’t Grandma Lotte live into next year and make her journey to Japan?

Elizabeth watched her grandmother sort through her bills.

“I
am
meticulous,” Lotte said.

She took out her checkbook. It was held closed by a rubber band. Scraps of paper with phone numbers and notes were stuffed inside. Lotte laboriously wrote out each check.

“I used to have an exquisite signature,” she said.

“I’ll do it for you, Grandma,” Elizabeth said, more than once. “That’s why I came, isn’t it?”

“I’m not dead yet,” Lotte said. She concentrated on her signature. Slowly, the pen made the familiar loops. Elizabeth watched them unfold, wobbly, but still recognizable as the handwriting of so many birthday checks. Her grandmother’s hands were huge. They were pale and bony with arthritis. They labored over their task, leaving behind their old-fashioned penmanship. Lotte Franke. Elizabeth stared at the name, at the passion and ardor and diligence.

“Damn hands,” Lotte said, throwing the pen on the table and shaking out her cramped fingers.

“Damn
arthritis,
” Kougi said. “
Brave
hands.”

“Brave hands,” Elizabeth repeated.

Lotte fanned her hands out in front of her eyes and looked at them tenderly.

“The bastards,” she said.

From the side of the pool of Greta and Tony’s house, which sat high up on a terraced hill, Greta could see her neighbors, two women and two huskies in the driveway below. She wondered if the two dogs in the French chateau-style house next door dreamed at night of pulling sleds. But if there were any sleds in Santa Monica, she was sure the sleds would have been engaged by the doting owners to pull the dogs. Pet talk drifted up from the neighbors’ driveway. “Come here, little sweet baby dog puppy, come to Mommy who loves you, little prettiest girl-girl . . .”

For the first time it occurred to Greta that the women were lesbians. She watched the women fuss over the two big dogs.

“I want a dog,” she said, startling herself.

“You
do?
” Tony said.

“Do I?” Greta said, looking around at the others for help.

Tony stared at her, then gathered up his towel. He swatted an insect away. “Golf,” he said, and left.

“Those women treat their dogs like children,” Brett said.

“Should they treat them like adults?” Greta said.

She felt suddenly protective of her neighbors, although when she overheard them cooing at the dogs before she’d found them excessive and saccharine.

“Mom, do you really want a dog?” Elizabeth said. Greta saw she was thinking of the dog as possibly therapeutic, like ice tea.

“You have a grandchild,” Brett said.

“I’m not a dog,” Harry said.

“Of course not,” said Elizabeth.

“I have no doubt they send their dogs off to doggie day care,” Brett said. “Why do people get a dog if they have no time to spend with it?”

“Don’t you want Harry to go to preschool?” Elizabeth asked Brett, alarmed.

I don’t want my children to hate me, Greta thought. It’s as simple as that. And they will hate me. They would be well within their rights to hate me. I will hate me. I will be hateful, the scarlet woman, the selfish and self-indulgent midlife crisis who betrayed their father.

“Elizabeth! Harry’s not a dog! That’s my whole point,” Brett said.

They all looked at Harry, who was digging holes in the grass and burying Cheerios.

And what about their father? What about Tony? Greta thought. She watched the neighbors as they successfully loaded the dogs into the backseat of their Mercedes SUV, strapping the two huskies in with special seat belts. A decent, no, a wonderful man who has always been loyal and kind and loving. She couldn’t go on with this. It was wrong. It was cruel. It was impossible.

“A dog and an SUV,” she said. That would have to be enough.

“You have an SUV,” Elizabeth said.

“I’m a dog!” Harry said, rolling in the grass. He barked several times, then sat at the edge of the pool and splashed with his feet.

Greta watched the two women get in the car and drive off. Brett had turned irritably away from the neighbors. It suddenly bothered Greta that neither of the women was terribly attractive.

Elizabeth got up and took Harry into the water.

Greta looked at Brett. There was a smear of sunscreen on the lens of his sunglasses.

“It must be hard not to have children,” he said.

Greta thought, What will you say about me, Brett?

Nothing. Because you will never know.

“I mean, it’s what life is all about,” Brett said.

“Don’t be smug,” Elizabeth said from the pool.

A dog, Greta thought. A secret lesbian dog. For a secret lesbian.

She still wasn’t sure what that meant. That she was in love with Daisy? That in the few days since that kiss in the bar, as she and Daisy plotted to get together, Greta had not stopped thinking of her? That she noticed women wherever she went, even the nurses at the doctor’s office, the lines of their undergarments showing through slippery nylon uniforms? She had spent so long being Tony’s wife and Elizabeth and Josh’s mother. Had she been a lesbian all this time? All the time she’d been married and in love with Tony? Because she
had
been in love with Tony. She had looked into his eyes and felt her heart beat wildly, felt her knees weaken.

“What do they
do?
” Lotte would invariably ask when any mention of homosexuality was made. “That’s my question. That’s what I want to bring out. What do they
do?
”

What do they do? Greta thought. She smiled. She closed her eyes.

“Mom, don’t you think that’s smug?” Elizabeth was saying from the pool.

“Don’t be smug, Brett,” Greta murmured obediently. But her eyes remained closed, the hint of a smile, lingering and coy, on her slightly parted lips.

In the pool, Elizabeth bobbed up and down holding Harry. His arms were around her neck. Don’t be smug, she told herself. She had noticed, off and on, that the happier Brett got, the more self-satisfied he got. Was that a normal progression? A natural chemical reaction, like ice melting into water and water boiling into steam? Perhaps, at this very moment, as Brett was lounging by the pool, he was imagining himself buckling his son into a Mercedes SUV. The little boy would be just as important an element in that fantasy picture of successful adulthood as the SUV: no less, certainly, but no more.

“Harry’s not a symbol,” she said. “He’s not a trophy of functioning adulthood.”

Brett did not hear her.

“I told you, I’m a dog,” Harry said.

Elizabeth wondered if she should give Barbie Bovaine a dog instead of a daughter. Indifference to one’s child, even cruelty to children, had become old hat in movies. Whereas no one, ever, could bear to see an animal neglected. Except Brett.

She pondered the phrase “old hat” for a while, letting etymology distract her from an uncomfortable feeling of annoyance at Brett, which rhymes with
pet,
she concluded finally, in illogical triumph.

“Old hat,” she said, letting the words roll around in her mouth.

“I have an old hat,” Harry said.

“Life is full of surprises,” Greta said suddenly. “Why is that always so surprising?”

In Lotte’s dream, her mother had just brought home the beautiful brown silk dress for the dance. Her father chewed his cigar on the porch. A handsome young man appeared, his eyes blue and alive. It was Morris. He took her to the dance at the college. They danced one dance, two, a thousand dances. No one was allowed to cut in. It was just Lotte and Morris. He was as good a dancer as she was. Around and around they went. She was dizzy. And in love.

It wasn’t a dream. It was a memory. It was real. It had happened sixty years ago. It had happened while she slept last night. They had never been apart after they’d been married. He had died on a trip they took together to Arizona, that hideous gray desert. And now she should go to Japan? The last trip with Morris was her last trip, period. She liked to humor Kougi, he was so polite, so gentlemanly, but why would she want to travel without Morris? And pay for a hotel? She already paid rent! No, Lotte was not one to travel anymore, foreigners being what they were, all of them so very foreign, and the food salty and vile.

seven

Wolf leads Barbie by the hand toward a beautifully landscaped pool, showing her the property. He opens his arms, as if to encompass the whole fabulous ranch.

WOLF

Like it?

BARBIE

I like it.

He pulls her, suddenly, against him . . .

EXTREME CLOSE-UP of Wolf’s hands, strong and manicured, on Barbie’s waist, fingers gripping her body . . .

Their clothes drop away . . . they slip into the pool . . .

BARBIE (cont.) (breathless)

I like it . . .

MONTAGE Wolf fucks her in the pool . . . he fucks her in his

Porsche . . . he fucks her in the barn . . .

Elizabeth stared at the computer screen and wondered if Volfmann would like the scene. She could see his face. It moved toward her, its mouth open, yelling, its eyes narrowed in anger and disgust. It moved closer. And closer. The eyes closed. The mouth was pressed against hers.

Oh, God, she thought. Not this again. She had been thinking of Volfmann far too much.

She stood up, a little wobbly. She walked downstairs reminding herself of how loud Volfmann was, how rude. But Volfmann’s hands, strong and manicured, kept grabbing her waist. Like it? he asked. I like it, she said. His words were kind and brilliant. His mouth was sad and sensuous.

She tried watching old movies on television. But every movie was
Madame Bovary,
just as Volfmann had said.
Dodsworth, Niagara, Thelma and Louise
were all
Madame Bovary. The Postman Always Rings Twice
was
Madame Bovary. Move Over, Darling
was
Madame Bovary.
Madame Bovary c’est moi,
Flaubert had said. She is me, too, Elizabeth thought.

She tried to work again, then tried television again, then reminded herself of Volfmann ranting and stamping his feet. But it didn’t help. Movies she had always dismissed as trivial and hackneyed seemed like towering achievements compared to her own efforts. Every frame she watched was a rebuke: You didn’t write this scene; you can’t write this scene; you can’t write any scene half as good as this scene; you can’t write any scene at all.

She went outside. It was gray and cool. She sat on her steps and stared at the garden and wondered what sitting on the front steps looking at the garden would have made her feel if, like Greta, she were a gardener. Would she be thinking, I ought to be digging a hole, I should be planning a herbaceous border. She remembered Volfmann digging a hole in the sand with Harry when they visited his house in Malibu. She pushed the thought away. She wondered how her mother was doing. Greta had said she was going out to meet an old college friend that night and wanted to rest up, so Elizabeth hadn’t gone over.

I should go to Grandma’s then, Elizabeth thought.

This was an absurd way to spend a morning. Feeling guilty and imagining new ways to feel guilty? She tried to stop. Then she wondered if having an affair would make her feel guilty. In Volfmann’s office, there was a back staircase that had once been used to sneak starlets in to service the studio head. I could use that staircase, she thought. Volfmann could throw me down on the desk the way he threw down the copy of
Tikkun.
She laughed. Then she felt sick.

Of course, I would feel guilty toward Brett, she thought. I already feel guilty toward Brett just contemplating adultery.

She got up and picked some daylilies.

Would adultery also make me feel guilty about my unfinished screenplay about adultery?

The sun came out and she blinked. She watched the eighty-year-old twins next door in their
SKIDMORE BASKETBALL
caps watering their roses. Did they commit adultery? The two graduate students in architecture who rented the house on the other side of her came out onto their front steps. Elizabeth waved hello. Did they have any weight hanging over them, a guilty daydream of sleeping with someone unsuitable, say, or a mother with cancer? It seemed impossible. They looked so light and free, so young and unencumbered. She offered them the daylilies.

Edie, the shorter blond one, took the flowers inside the tiny cottage. The other girl, whose name was Sophie, leaned over the fence. “We’re going to Fred Segal,” she said, “to do research.” They were designing a shopping mall for their thesis and did research every weekend, coming back loaded with shopping bags. “Do you have any research to do?”

Elizabeth wondered why she hadn’t thought of this before. Fred Segal was an overpriced paradise. Who could withstand the call of a morning at Fred Segal? Not Elizabeth. And certainly not Barbie Bovaine. When you got right down to it, what did a woman like Barbie Bovaine do if not shop?

Elizabeth sat in the backseat of Edie’s car, happy not to be the one determining whether to take surface streets or freeways. How luxurious to let someone else make a decision. Let these cheerful girls, who were not that much younger than she was, take charge. For these few minutes, Elizabeth could be free. She was anonymous. Not the mother, the daughter, the sister, or the unmarried wife. Not the granddaughter. Not the professor or the screenwriter. Just the neighbor. She had no role to play, no duties to perform. No one required her services.

The girls were planning to divide their shopping mall into areas determined by lifestyles rather than brands. Where would Barbie Bovaine shop? In the Social Climbing Section? The Adultery Boutique? The Naive Romantic Department? The Slut Shop?

Elizabeth browsed, trying on things she thought Barbie might consider essential. A pair of sunglasses in a neoaviator style, the lenses graduated shades of pink, which she bought for herself. A pair of silk pants, bright red, embroidered with gold dragons, not really capri length, not pedal-pusher length, not clam-digger length, but some new essential length that made those other lengths look frumpy, which she decided Barbie would wait to buy until they were on sale. A sun hat was too silly, a bag too big. But several T-shirts were just right for Barbie, and Elizabeth bought them along with a chartreuse bikini. Barbie would wear the bikini. In the pool. With Wolf.

At one of the jewelry counters, she asked to see several tourmaline rings. She put two on each hand and held them up in front of her. Rose gold. Elizabeth loved rose gold. Barbie would not go for these, she thought. She would prefer a more gaudy and expensive gemstone. But these are just right for me. She admired the stones sparkling on her hand until, through her outstretched fingers, she saw the familiar face of Daisy Piperno.

Elizabeth expected to see Daisy at her parents’ house—she was always turning up there, and that was fine, nice for Greta, convenient for Elizabeth. But she did not like seeing Daisy popping up here, where Elizabeth was posing as the anonymous neighbor. It was like being stalked. Soon she would see Daisy everywhere, around every corner, like an apparition, a ghoul in a horror movie.

Daisy caught sight of her and blushed, a bright obvious red against her normally pale skin.

Why did I make her blush? Elizabeth wondered.

Daisy grabbed a small package from the saleswoman and stuffed it into her bag. She bit her lip and seemed to will the blush to recede, then looked back at Elizabeth.

“Small town,” Elizabeth said. No it isn’t, she thought. It’s a gigantic sprawling city. Why are Daisy and I always in the same corner? Didn’t Daisy have anything else to do? Daisy swimming in the pool, drinking ice tea, bringing flowers. She seemed to think up excuses to drop by . . .

“Aren’t you supposed to be working?” Daisy said, composed now, back to her distant, curious manner.

“Research,” Elizabeth said.

Edie and Sophie came up to them, their arms loaded with packages. Daisy introduced herself while Elizabeth stood stupidly twisting the tourmaline rings on her fingers.

Daisy is into women, Elizabeth thought.

“Research is good,” Daisy was saying. She smiled at Elizabeth. Elizabeth remembered Daisy telling her what a great smile she had when she mopped up the spilled Pepsi. She heard Daisy’s voice calling her Cookie. She saw the hooded eyes, felt the appraisal in the glance.

Is she
interested
in me? Elizabeth wondered. It seemed ridiculous. But why? I
am
a woman, she thought.

“Up to a point,” Daisy said.

“Up to a point?” Elizabeth was the one blushing now. What point?

“Bye, babe,” Daisy said. She leaned toward her, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, then put her fingers to her own lips, then touched Elizabeth’s lips.

“Oh,” Elizabeth said. She was flustered. She said, “See you later?” She had meant to say, See you later, meaning, Good-bye. But she had said, See you later? Meaning, Can I see you later? She was lost in the confusion of her own embarrassment. She stared at Daisy without really seeing her.

Daisy tousled Elizabeth’s hair. “Not tonight,” she said. “I got me a hot date tonight.”

Elizabeth mumbled something. Then she turned and hurried away.

She heard a baby cry. She heard a saleswoman call, “Miss!” She heard someone yell, “Security!” She heard a man say, “How the hell should I know?” A slender girl spritzed her with perfume. A uniformed man appeared at Elizabeth’s side and took her arm.

“Excuse me, sir,” Elizabeth said, “you’re squeezing my arm.”

But the man said nothing as he led her back to the jewelry counter.

“That’s the one!” said the saleswoman.

People were gathering, staring at her. The saleswoman was pointing at Elizabeth’s hand, at four tourmaline rings set in rose gold.

Ah, Elizabeth thought.

She pulled the rings off with some difficulty, having to suck on one finger and lick another. She dropped the rings gently on the counter. “How incredibly stupid. I just wasn’t thinking . . .”

As the saleswoman waved the security officer away and sternly told Elizabeth to watch her step in the future, Daisy, who had been observing the whole episode with a puzzled smile, picked up one of the rings and held it to the light.

“Pretty,” she said.

Elizabeth stared at the floor, humiliated.

“It was a
mistake,
” she said.

“Yes, it was,” Daisy said. “They’re definitely not you, Elizabeth.”

Not me? Elizabeth sat irritably in the backseat surrounded by parcels and wondered, all the way home, why not.

When she got home, she opened a can of Diet Pepsi, watched Harry as he made potions while standing on a chair at the kitchen sink, and thought of Daisy tousling her hair and calling her Cookie. And what was with the finger on the lips?

The phone was ringing.

“It’s for you,” Brett yelled from upstairs. “Volfmann.”

She imagined Volfmann on the phone, his head tilted back, his eyes closed. Then leaning across the desk and grabbing her hand. She put the cold can of Pepsi against her cheek and picked up the receiver.

“I saw Daisy at Fred Segal’s,” she said.

“I see how you two spend your days.”

“I was doing research,” she said. “I just bumped into her. Or she bumped into me.”

She watched Harry pour and stir, pour and stir. He made a growling, grinding sound, then said, “Coffee.”

“Was she doing research, too?” Volfmann said.

Elizabeth was afraid Volfmann had called to scream at her. Or as she had once heard him describe the process when it referred to someone else who had failed him, to ream her a new asshole. Or worse, to fire her. She tried to put off the inevitable.

“So, she doesn’t have a partner or whatever they call it? A lover?”

“Why, Elizabeth, you intrigue me,” he said.

You intrigue me, too, she thought, but no words came out of her mouth.

“Daisy is quite the girl about town,” Volfmann was saying.

How about you? she thought. What is your status about town?

“Look, we have to talk, Elizabeth.”

We do? Yes, we do, she thought. She could see him so clearly, the phone crammed between his ear and his shoulder, his elbows on his desk, his body leaning forward, his face like a serious, intelligent dog’s.

How was it that she had never noticed the hoarse, deep timbre of his voice before?

“Come and meet me for a drink, okay?” he said.

She read to Harry before bedtime. She kept skipping pages and he kept noticing. He told her he wanted to be a gardener when he grew up.

“Like Grandma,” she said.

“No,” he said. “A gardener with a leaf blower.” And he fell asleep holding her hand.

Then she drove to meet Volfmann at Shutters, a place she had never been. It was on the beach, close to her, on Volfmann’s way to Malibu. It seemed an unlikely place to meet someone to fire them. It seemed an unlikely place to scream at her. It seemed more the kind of place where you use your power and status to get someone to sleep with you, she thought. She smiled.

She reminded herself that she had never been unfaithful to Brett. He was so calm and even tempered and smug and self-satisfied that it didn’t seem possible, really. Even now. When it seemed possible. Still, you never know. Adultery is wildly exciting, a powerful, intoxicating temptation. I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere.

But only if you’re married, she reassured herself.

And remember, too, that adultery is messy, filled with lies and heartbreak.

If
you’re married.

Adultery is ludicrous as well, a series of embarrassing comic predicaments, locked doors, naked men on balconies, girls in the closet.

If you’re married, if you’re married, if you’re married.

So, Elizabeth thought, it is marriage, ultimately, that causes adultery. It is marriage that is to blame.

Out the window, she saw her mother driving much too fast. On her way to her dinner date, no doubt. Elizabeth waved. But Greta did not notice her, and Elizabeth thought that perhaps, all things considered, it was just as well.

Greta was meeting Daisy at a hotel. They couldn’t go to Greta’s house, obviously, and Daisy’s sister had come to the house in Silver Lake for a visit, so the Ritz-Carlton in Marina Del Rey was chosen, as unfashionable a place as they could think of. It was unlikely that anyone they knew would show up there, but even if someone did see them, Greta could say she had bumped into Daisy unexpectedly, that she’d gone to the hotel to meet the old college friend. And then, she’d say, Daisy and I thought we’d have a drink while I waited. A drink. Getting a drink sounded awfully good to her as she entered the lobby. She could get a drink for real, quickly, before Daisy arrived, and then she could go home.