Chapter Ten
Dorina decided to call Jacy Rayner in the afternoon following. She had been given a business card with a home and work number that were one and the same. Her method was to put her earpiece in, flick the microphone with her fingertip and tap out the number on her numerical keypad the way a concert flautist might work the shiny valves during a solo. The line would ring, the party would answer, and she would launch into smooth, practiced patter. At the other end however, the phone rang four times, then five and Dorina thought that the answering system would click on. Six rings.
Someone answered.
There was a couple of clunks and the short clink of a bell. The way she remembered phones sounding when she was in grade school and people occasionally still had boxy, awkward phones leased from Ma Bell, some with rotary dials on them. Another two beats followed, and then a voice came on the line: “Hello?” somehow managing to stretch a two syllable word to four syllables and makes it sound like an intense inquiry.
Dorina’s words caught in her throat. “Hi,” she said. “This is Dorina Pettit from Spectrum. I was hoping to reach Ms. Jacy Rayner.” She cringed inside, imagining that she must sound like a terrified high-school cheerleader, her voice screeching at the high notes.
“Yes?” Another pause that look a beat too long for Dorina’s comfort. “I can help you?”
The pause and the strange wording of the question again threw her off. “I hope I have caught you at a good time. Possibly my editor Victor DeGraffenried has been in contact. We wanted to get your thoughts and impressions about a piece we were considering for an upcoming issue.”
Another pause. “What did you have in mind?” The voice was velvety and disarming and caused her to forget she was in the middle of a busy editorial office, computer keys and muffled conversation filling the air around her. Okay, she wondered, is she wanting me to spill what kinds of questions I’m going to ask during my interview or is she asking what day is convenient?
“I think Victor was hoping we could meet Thursday,” Dorina said.
“ThursdayThursday...” came the murmur from the other end of the line. “Tell me Miss Pettit, do you have any plant allergies?”
Dorina shook her head. “Huh? Excuse me?”
Jacy Rayner spoke slowly, in measured tones. “To pollen, ragweed, various types of grasses. Do you have any allergies?”
“Well, no.”
“Good. Then we can meet in my garden. Is three-fifteen all right?”
“Yes. Fine.” And Jacy finished their conversation by giving her exhaustively detailed directions that contained references to streetlight landmarks and esoteric house styles. When the line disconnected, Dorina stared at her keyboard for a moment. She thought, what am I getting myself into?
Two more days till the meeting. Dorina spent the rest of that afternoon checking her email accounts and renewed ad copy for the online and the print versions of Spectrum. Dues, kid, as Victor kept on saying. She tore through the mind numbing data entry work and routine phone calls with machine-like precision, causing her to think of something strange she’d once heard in a college lecture. “You are often best suited for careers you are not in love with,” someone said. “Where you can distance yourself from the products of your efforts.”
There was no doubt she was good at all the number crunching for ad renewals and the schmoozing of contracts. What she really wanted to do was write compelling features. appointment with Jacy Rayner was at three o’clock on Thursday but she had asked for the entire afternoon off anyway. Victor complied. This left her two hours to find her house after lunch. Mitch had offered to meet her for lunch but Dorina gave him an excuse about not having enough time during the afternoon. Most days she was meeting someone well known that she would interview, the entire afternoon would belong to that person. It may have been mostly superstition, but Dorina felt that discussing an interviewee with someone else immediately before she arrived was jinxing things somehow. So she ate Chinese alone, taking extra care to avoid anything that contained garlic or too many onions.
In the past she had spoken with journalists who had interviewed celebrities including Larry Hagman, Jaclyn Smith and Lee Majors. When it all came down to it, they said, people were people and no matter how glamorous or powerful. They put their pants on one leg at a time, itched in the same places she did, and did the same things in the bathroom that she did. When she slipped behind the wheel of Susie Blue she knew she was starting a new adventure..
It was another glorious day yet Dorina kept the top in place. She had spent an extra few minutes in the bathroom rearranging and spraying her hair and didn’t want to wind to blow even a lock of it askew. Usually on a sunny and warm day she would play one of her tapes, blasting the volume in the aftermarket stereo: something rowdy like one of the old Van Halen offerings or Aerosmith. Yet she knew that listening to music like that at any kind of volume might affect her. Smooth jazz might put her into too laid back of a mood, so she switched to an all-news format station she occasionally listened to. The gravelly voiced newscaster was droning on and on about the Russians buying up more high-priced real estate, with hopes of putting up skyscrapers. “Shit,” she said out loud, before reaching down to punch the off button, “pretty soon they’re gonna make us all learn Russian and start writing the alphabet backwards.”
She had killed an hour over a languid lunch at the restaurant with tea, and about another hour switching from the interstate, to the freeway, to the Boulevard, to the exclusive west Los Angeles neighborhood that was Jacy Rayner’s home. The dashboard clock read 2:10. It was way too early to just show up at her doorstep. Maybe three o’clock wouldn’t be bad. Ever since high school everything she’d either heard about, read, or been taught seemed to say that it was best to arrive fifteen minutes early for an interview. Maybe that was why Ms. Rayner had scheduled it for three-fifteen.
But that still left the problem of what to do with the extra 45 minutes and change. She decided to stop at a city park and walk around for awhile. It might help her dissipate the keyed-up feeling she had and it would get her used to the elements. Jacy Rayner had asked her if she had any allergies. Maybe she was planning to conduct the interview outside, on a patio beside a few flagrant flowering bushes.
It was a small city park, one that had probably been cordoned and groomed to help the beauty of the boulevard. She was glad she chose it because of all the lush vegetation, at least by California standards. Too much of the west, she had often experienced, was drab, dry, and very often just plain dead. Back home in Indiana there were lush forests that bloomed spectacularly every spring and lit up the landscape with fiery reds and vivid yellows during the fall.
After Dorina parked, she took her notepad with her and left the purse in the car as she set out for the walk path. That day she’d worn her tasteful, patterned navy blue skirted suit with the white lapel accents and she’d curled her hair so that it fell about her shoulders in bouncy waves. The first person she met on the walkway was a guy in full slacker regalia with torn jeans that were too big and an oversize bomber jacket that hung almost to his knees. He was way overdressed especially since the temperature was well into the seventies and it was sunny. When she approached him she also saw that tattoos had been scrawled on his neck and his eyebrows and nose had been pierced. It brought to mind a comic that she’d seen in a club remarking about the ubiquitous trend of body piercing. He said “It looks they got into a fight with a bait and tackle shop.”
The guy, who seemed to be in his late teens or early twenties, looked her up and down as she neared him, his eyes widening. “Wow, looking good, babe,” he said. Well, she figured, as she glanced back over her shoulder at him, smiling, at least he had good taste.
At the other side of the park a man was standing, his back to a palm tree, holding a microphone and speaking while another man video graphed him. Though the camera must have been rolling, both of the men stopped to wave at her when she walked by. She had also wondered how she would stack up i
n the land of eternal youth and beauty, where there were more models and movie stars per square mile than any other city in the country. As a teenager she’d felt slightly gawky and even in her mid-twenties she still saw some of the old awkwardness in snapshots or video clips of herself.
When she had walked the circuit around the park twice she decided that she’d better get back to the cool, shaded car if for no other reason than to keep from sweating and ruining her suit or muddying her makeup. She found out that her mid day jaunt in the park had burned up another thirty five minutes and Jacy Rayner’s neighborhood was only a couple of streets away. Her arms suddenly felt tense, the way they always did when she got nervous and she rubbed her wrists before settling on the sure remedy to calm her: a couple of raucous Van Halen tunes.
After the crashing guitar and high energy vocals of “Pound Cake,” Dorina felt mentally ready to get to her appointment. She circled back through Jacy’s neighborhood, passing a couple of police cars on the way. They probably patrolled often at the insistence of the extreme upscale community members. Within minutes she found the house and was surprised to find it so ordinary. It was a Cape Cod two story with a rounded, barn style roof and lots of large windows. While most of the other houses had been set off a distance from the street with arcing u-shaped driveways, her house contained a simple, straight driveway leading to a two car garage. She had been told that it was okay to pull the car all the way forward into the drive and while she did so, she wondered if anyone was watching her. The house seemed too small to have a butler or any kind of staff but she still felt conspicuous.
Just before shutting off her engine, she looked down at the dashboard clock. Five minutes after three. She again would keep her backpack style purse in the car; it was much too cumbersome to sling over her shoulder and take with her, especially when she was wearing her best business clothes. Before pushing open her door, she stopped for a moment of silence and said a short prayer she remembered from childhood: “Divine light of the highest order under the protection of the Archangel Michael.” She repeated the sentence two more times, barely above a whisper. As a pre-teen in Catholic education class a teacher had once told her that reciting the words would bring one’s guardian angel and the guardian angels of everyone she encountered together for a peaceful understanding.
In this case she hoped it would keep her from feeling too intimidated.
The walkway to the front door had been fashioned out of large circles of conglomerate which her heels clicked on pleasantly as she stepped on them. All the flowering shrubbery and rhododendrons had been thoroughly and painstakingly trimmed and separated, making Dorina wonder if Jacy Rayner had ever been visited by Good Housekeeping. The front door had been shrouded by a recessed porch filled with vibrant potted tropical plants. Dorina breathed in, enjoying their essence and even sensing the extra oxygen given off by them. She reached forward and rang the bell, feeling an odd sense of foreboding, not necessarily unpleasant, that she was about to begin another chapter of her life.
Seconds passed. She turned, watching a racing green, low-slung jaguar slink past on the road past the driveway. A slight breeze lifted a few strands of her hair, brushing them against her face. Surely they knew they had company coming, she thought. Just before she was going to reach forward and ring the doorbell a second time, she heard muffled thumping and footsteps from beyond the sturdy-looking wooden door. The knob turned with squeaks and clicks from the other side and Dorina felt herself straightening up, gathering herself. The door cracked open gradually, and she took a deep breath.
Dorina’s first thought was that her Supra had somehow become a Delorean and that she had tripped the flux capacitor to go back in time. The young woman standing in the doorway was startlingly beautiful. She was casually dressed in faded jeans that accentuated her long legs and clung to the door while regarding her, wearing an ecru lace crop top that flattered her warmly tanned complexion. Dorina had seen the high cheekbones and elegantly arched eyebrows before, one of them raised quizzically in appraising her. Her lush, layered brunette locks had swept to one side, the ends brushing gracefully against her breast. Disoriented, she asked “Miss Jacy Rayner?”
The woman glanced at her, looking down then up giving what would have been called the “once-over” in another era. “Yes?” Dorina was about to respond, but the woman at the door said “I mean I’m her daughter, Josette. Something I can help you with?”
“Well, my name is Dorina Pettit. I’m from Spectrum magazine,” she said. “Your mother and I have an appointment in a few minutes. Maybe she told you?”
Josette regarded her for another long moment, silently appraising her before stepping aside, gesturing for her to come in. When Dorina stepped onto the foyer, at the same level with her, she realized that Josette had also inherited height from her mother.
“Thank you,” she said, when she was completely inside and Josette shut the door behind them. Calmed slightly, Dorina was first aware of lots of polished wood in the hallway, including an ornately lathed frame for a mirror on the wall.
“Mother’s on the deck out back,” Josette said. “I’ll let her know you’re here.” She turned to walk down the hallway to a bright kitchen apparently leading to a screened room.
When Dorina looked beside herself into the living room, she noticed a small Hispanic woman dusting carved sculptures and bookends in there. A large, yawning fireplace that appeared to be made of granite formed the centerpiece of the room, jutted against the corner. Beside it there was an old fashioned wrought iron stand corralling a poker, a whisk broom and a compact bellows with gold accents.
From the other side of the house, Dorina heard a door open and shut and the muffled voices of two women talking. Then the door opened and she could hear Josette say “Do you want me to do it or not?”
A pause, then the same musical alto she’d heard on the phone two days earlier. “Just handle it, darling, and call me later with the details.”
Then Jacy Rayner appeared from around the doorway, backlit by the high afternoon sunlight emanating from the windows at the back of the house. Dorina’s first thought on seeing her was that she looked like the tallest China woman she had ever seen. She wore Capri denims, an embroidered chambray smock, and a dainty, wide-brimmed straw hat with a black ribbon sash. In one hand she held pruning shears. “Hello there,” she said as she glided toward her extending her free hand, “you must be Miss Pettit.”
Dorina reached out to shake her hand, surprised by the delicate smoothness of it, noticing in that brief instant that it contained a few age spots. “Yes ma’am, Dorina Pettit.”
Jacy was smiling joyously at her, with full lips and a twinkling in her eye. She was about to say something else but they were interrupted by Josette: “Mother, I’m going to have to take the Lincoln. She’s parked in back of Molly.”
Jacy turned her attention back to Dorina. “Our Mercedes,” she explained. “My daughter’s pet name for it.” Then to Josette: “You know where the key is. Oh, and don’t forget to put some fuel in it. Especially if you go anywhere else.”
Dorina wasn’t sure, but from the door leading to the garage, she thought she heard Josette say “Aye, aye, captain.”
Then Jacy turned her attention to Dorina. She gazed at Dorina’s suit thoughtfully for a moment and then said “Oh dear, you’re going to need a smock, aren’t you? Not to worry, I think I’ve got one that should fit you just fine.”
Flustered, Dorina said “I don’t understand, what are we going to be doing? I thought we had an appointment for three-fifteen.” She followed Jacy, who had already started walking back toward the kitchen, turned a corner and headed to a study toward the rear of the house.
“On long afternoons like this I like to garden,” Jacy said, over her shoulder. “Don’t you worry; I’m not going to have you groveling on your knees, digging up weeds with a trowel. I just thought you’d like to protect that beautiful suit from any...how shall I say, mishaps out there.”
Jacy Ray
ner’s study was the most personal room Dorina had seen in the house so far. Barrister’s bookshelves lined the wall, lined with antique volumes. A lighted curio cabinet with exotic oriental statues. A large, carved oak desk with a black leather chair behind it, illuminated with a dainty Parisian lamp. A fluffy white cat with small brown markings on its back lie atop the blotter on the desk. Jacy saw the cat and started to coo: “Luna, my beautiful little frou-frou. How are we doing today?” She reached down to pet the animal on the top of its head and the feline closed its eyes, rolling its neck, burrowing into the tall lady owner’s touch. “Mommy has a visitor now. She’ll be back later to give you a little treat.” Dorina looked down and noticed that they were walking on a beautiful floral Persian rug, black with muted peach and rose flowers on it.
Jacy turned her attention away from the cat and reached for the closet door beside one of the bookshelves. When she opened it, Dorina was surprised to see a rack of chambray smocks. Straw hats had been stacked on the high shelf and various types of footwear, including sandals and athletic shoes had been neatly arranged in cubbyholes at the bottom. While her interview subject had her back to her, Dorina noticed her hair. It had been dyed ash blond and styled in a fashionable bob that stopped just above her chin. She remembered reading a quote from an aging actress who may have been one of Jacy Rayner’s contemporaries, who said: “You don’t get older. Just blonder.”
Jacy lifted a hanger holding a smock out of the closet and presented it to Dorina. “There, this one should do nicely,” she said. It was a chambray tunic smock; similar to the one Jacy was wearing, sporting embroidered birds and flowers near the shoulder.
“Okay,” Dorina said, receiving the smock. She set down her notepad and tried the garment on, pleasantly surprised that it fit very nicely over the suit but at the same time feeling slightly sheepish. In college or in her early journalism career she thought she remembered reading that a journalist should control the environment of the interview. At this point it seemed that Miss Rayner was calling all the shots.
“Follow me,” she said. They retraced their steps out of the study down the hallway to the kitchen where Jacy opened a door and ushered her out onto the wooden deck in the back yard. On the way out, Dorina noticed a flash of copper cookware hanging over a kitchen island but when she cleared the threshold into the back yard she was in awe. The entire lot had been lovingly planted with brilliant rhododendron, begonias, and nasturtiums and Dorina also thought she recognized an orange tree. The grass was lush green and lovingly tended. The lovely mix of fauna gave off a wonderful bouquet of an invigorating floral scent. Dorina guessed it was the essence of several of the flowers out there, and she allowed herself to pause for a moment to enjoy the sensation.
When she finished, she realized that Jacy had been watching her, smiling proudly.
“I was just trimming some of the begonias just before you arrived,” she said. “I’ll carry on while you and I have our little chat.”
“This is the most beautiful backyard garden I have ever seen,” Dorina said. “Did you do all this yourself?”
Jacy had already started gazing at the begonias, inspecting them for weak or wilted leaves. She paused for a moment to glance briefly into Dorina’s eyes. “Pardon me, dear, did I do what?”
“The flowers,” Dorina said, indicating them. “And the lawn. It’s very beautiful. Did you do it all yourself?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “One of my life’s great joys. My raison d’être you might say.”
Dorina glanced around the yard again and then wondered how she was going to segue into the true purpose for her visit that day. She decided on an all-purpose interview icebreaker: “Miss Rayner, is there anything in particular that you’d rather we didn’t discuss today?”
“Jacy.” She snipped at a begonia stem with the shears.
Dorina was thrown off balance by the remark. For a moment she pictured the word “Jacy” in her mind and pictured lollipops, snickers bars, and marshmallow Easter peeps.
She said “I’m sorry?”
“My name. Please feel free darling.”
“Oh yes. Well, Jacy, is there anything that you would prefer not to discuss?”
She was lifting and separating flower petals between her fingers, leaning back to gaze at their arrangement critically. In the distance the low beats of a helicopter distracted Dorina’s concentration and she was almost ready to rephrase her question when Jacy spoke. “You seem like a sensible young woman. I’m sure you’ll keep our little tete a tete within polite and tasteful bounds.”
Dorina bit her lip, to quell the urge to laugh nervously. She decided that the best approach was a direct one. “What are your feelings about the urban myth surrounding your appearance on the Galaxian show during the 1960's?”
Jacy leaned away from the begonias, tilted her head to look at them one last time and then turned her attention to Dorina. “I’ve heard of the myth, yes,” she said softly.
Dorina found the woman’s gaze riveting, soulful, and almost intimidating. “The myth claims that when your performance aired on a television screen in a hospital room where a child lay in a coma, the child awakened from the coma the following morning. Several cases were reported. It seems kind of fantastic, somewhat supernatural. What are your feelings and thoughts about that?”
Jacy dropped the pruning shears into a pocket of her smock, which made Dorina feel better. She said “It’s wonderful that those dear children recovered.”
Damn it, she wasn’t taking the bait, Dorina thought. “Well, the myth implies that there was something about your performance that somehow got through to these children and helped them out of their coma. How do you react to that?”
Jacy casually shrugged. “Anything is possible, I suppose.”
Dorina was starting to get flabbergasted. She wondered if the whole thing was a setup. Victor had sent her out on the assignment, alone, knowing that Jacy Rayner was going to be somewhat obstinate, even spacey. Shoot, he may have even included Jacy in on it, as a roundabout way of testing her mettle. Dorina was going to open her mouth and say “But...” only she couldn’t quite figure out yet what to say after that.
“Dorina, I know you’re very well educated. Somewhere in your academic career you have possibly encountered Carl Jung?”
“Yes. I took a psychology elective. Synchronicity. I couldn’t really tell you how the theory works but he seemed to think it was a universal pattern behind what appear to be just cause and affect relationships.”
“Smart man, he was,” Jacy said. She let her words trail off into the air and widened her eyes while looking at Dorina.
Dorina didn’t know where she was going with that comment, so she asked “Are you saying that those children awakening were just a coincidence?”
Jacy was going to respond, but the stillness was broken by the Hispanic maid, calling out to them from the back door. “Missy Jacy! Telephone for you senora. Is Miss Josie. She say very important.”
Jacy looked at Dorina. “Come inside with me for a moment,” she said.
When they entered the kitchen, Jacy took the handset from the maid. She spoke to her daughter while Dorina stood nearby. “Yes darling?” Dorina watched her listen intently to the voice on the other end of the line. Her lips parted and her gaze narrowed while she focused on her daughter. “Whoa, whoa, you’re going too quickly for me there. You’re practically hyperventilating. Breathe, woman. Slow down. In and out.” She twirled her free hand through the air in a graceful flourish and bent downward at her knees in a variation of a plie. “It’s going to be okay. Tell them I’m on my way.” Another pause and Dorina thought she could hear Jacy’s frantic daughter speaking from the other end. “Make up some kind of excuse. Charm them. Put them in handcuffs. Just keep them there for a few more minutes and I’ll be right there to straighten things out.”
Jacy finished up the conversation by telling her daughter that she loved her. When she hung up the phone she turned to Dorina. “Well, I’m afraid
we’ll have to cut our interview short, Miss Dorina. I have to go put out a fire. Metaphorically speaking of course.” She explained that she and her daughter managed real estate holdings and there was a problem at one of the properties. In the study she helped Dorina out of the smock. Showing her to the front door Jacy again apologized for the brief nature of their meeting. Her last words as Dorina took the first few steps to her car were somewhat unsettling: “One thing I’ve learned from the Dalai Lama is that not getting what you want can be an incredible stroke of good luck. Ciao!”