“Really?” she asked meekly, trying to look serious but making a total mess of it.
“I know you’ve noticed it, Renee. Name me one nice dwarf in a fairy tale.”
After a moment of serious pondering, she screwed up her face and said: “Dopey?”
If there had been beer in my mouth, I would have spewed it at her. “Dopey?”
“Well, I don’t…”
“Good, Renee. Dopey. Good answer.”
She stared at me, slack-mouthed, apparently wondering how badly she’d fucked up.
“That’ll look fabulous on the poster,” I said, retaining my acid tone. “CADENCE ROTH IS DOPEY.” I knelt on my pillow and imagined a review for her. “‘Not since Linda Hunt’s Grumpy has there been such an Oscar-caliber performance.’”
When Renee finally realized I wasn’t mad, she giggled in relief and bounced once or twice on the sofa. “I didn’t know we were talking about a role for you.”
“Since when are we not talking about a role for me?”
“Well, I don’t see why Dopey is any sillier than Rumpelstiltskin.”
“It is. Trust me. It’s myth versus kitsch.”
I’d lost her completely.
“It doesn’t matter,” I added hastily. “It’s all just speculation.”
“Did you talk to Leonard about it?”
“About what?”
“Rumpelstiltskin.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I said. “There isn’t even a script. It’s just a concept.”
“Oh.” She rose and headed for the kitchen, stopping in the doorway. “Want some popcorn?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
“Is it on your diet?”
“If I don’t have butter.”
“Oh.”
“Butter it,” I said.
She giggled and ducked into the kitchen.
“I need my animal fats,” I yelled after her. “I’ve been working too hard.”
After we finished the popcorn, Renee offered me a foot rub, which I accepted without protest. I lay on my pillow on the living room floor, stomach down and feet toward the ceiling, while she sat next to me with a squeeze bottle full of pink lotion. It was sheer heaven. (If you’d like some inkling of this experience yourself, start by imagining a massage from someone whose hands can engulf your entire foot.)
During the rub, Renee kept up a running commentary on Lorrie Hasselmeyer, a new employee at The Fabric Barn. As near as I can make out, Ms. Hasselmeyer is the only woman at the store who outdoes Renee in the doormat department—romantically speaking—which, presumably, is why Renee can’t stop talking about her.
“She’s just so desperate,” she told me.
“Mmm.” I was a little more involved in the massage than in the anecdote.
“When the guy didn’t call, she went over to his house and left a note on his Harley.”
“No.”
“She did. I swear.”
“God.”
“She was bragging about it, Cady. She thought she was being really cool.” Renee let go of my foot for a moment to replenish the lotion on her hands. When she squeezed the bottle, it made a noise like a baby with the runs. My foot felt unexplainably deserted and naked, awaiting her there in midair. When her hands finally returned, all sweet-smelling and slippery, they fit me like a glass slipper. “Too cold?” she asked.
“No. ’S great.”
“You’d tell me if I got like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Like what?”
“Like Lorrie Hasselmeyer.”
“Oh, God, yes.”
“I don’t think any guy’s worth begging for.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
Renee turned her attention to my other foot and was quiet for a while. Her thoughts hung heavy in the air, endearingly obvious, like the scent of the lotion. I swear to you I knew exactly, almost to the word, what she would say next:
“Has Neil ever…said anything about me?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know,” she said.
I hesitated, considering several routes, then said: “He’s only seen you twice, Renee.”
“Three times.”
“Whatever.”
“So what did he say?”
“He said you seemed nice.”
Her fingers stopped. “Is that all?”
“Well…he said you had great tits.”
“You’re kidding!”
I chuckled. “Yes, I’m kidding.”
“Gah, Cady, that’s not very nice.”
“Sorry.”
She began to work my toes again. “I just thought he might’ve said something.”
“No,” I said evenly. “Not really.” This sounded too hard, so I added: “Mostly we just talk about work.”
She seemed to drift away for a moment. “He’s real smart, isn’t he?”
“I suppose.” Let’s put it this way: Neil is a genius by Renee’s standards. I soft-pedaled it, though, because I know she’s in the process of fixating on him, and I’m not sure he’s ever given a moment’s thought to her. It seems like one more quick way for Renee to get her feelings hurt.
6
RENEE WAS A NAVY BRAT, BORN AND RAISED IN SAN DIEGO. Brat status is something we share, in fact, since my dad was a drill sergeant at Fort Irwin, down the road from Barstow. This was half the reason I was named Cadence; the other half had to do with Mom teaching piano. Cadence, apparently, was the only thing my parents had in common. Plus the Cady Mountains were right there, flanking the bleakest stretch of the interstate, so my nickname came ready-made. Mom had a long, boring rap about this, which she rattled off at every audition, come hell or high water.
Renee’s mom was the military parent—a Wave, I guess you call it. Her dad had some sort of civilian job on the naval base. They were always entering her in beautiful-child contests; she had baby lipsticks and her own batons by the time she was five. When she was a teenager, she ran for Miss San Diego but didn’t get into the finals. Her parents divorced the same year, and Renee, who was a guilt-bearer even then, felt chiefly to blame. One more beauty crown, especially that one, would have saved their marriage, she claims. She moved to L.A. after high school with a guy she met while working at Arby’s. He walked out on her only days after they found an apartment in Reseda. I have no idea what the problem was. Renee almost never talks about him.
Things Renee likes
Water slides
The color pink
The gum that squirts when you bite into it
Extra mayonnaise
Stories about Michael Landon’s cancer
Angora
Me
Things I like about Renee
Her loyalty
Her flawless skin
Her sense of color (except in regard to pink)
Her rice pudding
The way she has a name for her car without knowing where her battery is
Her smell after she’s come out of the shower
Renee talks in her sleep, though she won’t admit it. You can hear her all the way through the door—a sort of ladylike drone, completely unintelligible, that seems somehow intended for an audience. There’s something so formal and melancholy about it, so redolent of loss, that I think of it privately as her Miss San Diego acceptance speech.
I can’t help wondering if the guys in her life hear the same monologue, and if they’re freaked out by it. Or does she have different dreams when she’s sleeping in other bedrooms?
I’m afraid I’m making her sound tragic, like Delta Dawn or something, and that’s not the way it is at all. She’s a great person, really. I’m lucky to have her.
7
TODAY, ACCORDING TO THE PAPERS, L.A. HAD ITS LAST TOTAL solar eclipse of the millennium. About three thousand people mobbed the Griffith Observatory for the occasion, but I watched it from a house in Pasadena, where we were working a bat mitzvah. Just before it happened, while I still had the attention of my audience, I sang “Lucky Old Sun??
? and “Moon River.” Our clients, the Morrises, provided their guests with welders’ masks, cleverly upgraded with gold glitter, so they could watch that eerie ebony fingernail as it slid across the surface of the sun.
Since they weren’t watching us, Neil and I slipped off for a breather to a quiet corner of the garden. I sat on a patch of grass under the trees. Plopping down next to me, Neil dug a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his coveralls. “Did you get a good look at it?”
I told him I had, that one of the old ladies had lent me her welder’s mask and that, frankly, I wasn’t sure it had warranted all the fuss. The traffic was living hell this morning, and there were serious madmen everywhere.
Neil wanted to know which old lady.
“With red hair and wobbly teeth.”
“Oh, yeah.”
I told him that when I gave the mask back to her, she said: “Isn’t it amazing? It makes you feel so small.”
Neil chuckled, then shook a cigarette out of the pack, lighting it with his Bic. “What did you say?”
“I agreed.”
That made him laugh. “I thought it would get a lot darker. You know, this great shadow across the land.” He swept the air with the hand holding the cigarette.
“Oh, well. It was better than the Harmonic Convergence.”
“Shit. I forgot about that.”
“Well, there you go.”
“What was supposed to happen then?”
“Who knows? The harmonies converged. The harmonicas. Something.”
Another chuckle.
“At least there was something to look at this time.”
“True,” he said as he stretched out his legs. Then he leaned back on his elbows and tilted his head toward the sun, which you couldn’t really see for the branches. A lacy, dappled light fell across his face. He was like a beautiful mountain range, I thought. “How long is it supposed to last?”
I told him another fifteen minutes or so.
He was quiet for a moment, then said: “You were incredible out there.”
“Thanks.”
“Especially on ‘Moon River.’”
“Good.”
“I liked your patter too.”
I’d done a bit for the crowd about how the sun and moon were siblings, and how rare it was for Sister Moon to have any chance at all to upstage her loudmouthed big brother. I know it looks dumb on paper, but it worked swell for a bat mitzvah in Pasadena during an eclipse.
“You know what?” said Neil.
“What?”
“I think you should make a video.”
My heart leapt at the thought, even as I archly discounted it. “That ought not to cost much.”
“Well,” he said, “I know somebody.”
“With money?”
“No, but she wants to make a video.”
I gave him a jaded look. “A girlfriend or something?”
“Hell, no.” He smiled at some private vision of this woman. “Just this person I know. She’s a student at the American Film Institute. She has to make a short film for one of her classes.”
“Oh.”
“If you’re not interested…”
“No…I could be.”
He sat up energetically and crossed his legs, Indian style. “She’d give it style, Cady, I know that. She’s got good taste. Some of her ideas about it are pretty interesting.”
“You’ve already talked to her about it?”
He looked a little sheepish. “Some.”
I assured him I wasn’t offended.
“She wants to do it in black and white, with long shadows and a simple set, a sort of Lotte Lenya thing. Haunting and beautiful. She’s got access to a studio, and I could play the synthesizer. We could do it for almost nothing.”
I thought about it for a moment, gazing up at the trees. “What would I sing?”
“I was thinking of ‘If.’”
“The old Bread song?”
“Yeah. I think it would work with your voice.”
“Really?” I couldn’t quite take in the idea that he’d spent time thinking about me and my potential. No one’s really done that since Mom died. I could feel an awful weight lifting that I didn’t even know had been there.
“It’s a poignant song,” Neil said, “and nobody’s heard it for ages.”
“Except in elevators.”
“But you’d give it a new dignity.”
“I suppose.”
“It would work, Cady, I know. And with you singing it…it would rip their hearts out.”
I felt a tiny alarm go off. “Is that what we wanna do?”
He shrugged.
“I’m not a poster child, Neil.”
“I know that.”
“If your friend wants that…”
“She doesn’t. I told her all about you—what a great person you were, what a strong and beautiful spirit. She gets it, Cady, she really does.”
Neil had never said anything like this to me directly, so I felt myself reddening on the spot.
“Maybe I’m out of line,” he added.
“No. I see what you’re after.”
“You do?”
I nodded.
“You could sing something more upbeat, I guess.”
“Fuck that. I want hearts ripped out.”
He laughed; we both laughed.
“We’d have a good time doing it,” he said. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”
“I hear you.”
“You’ll do it, then?”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Great.”
“OK.”
His gorgeous brown eyes settled on me for a moment, then seemed to turn nervous, darting away distractedly. “Think we’ve played hooky too long?”
I smiled at him. “You’re the boss. Who’s gonna rap your knuckles?”
“Yeah, but…”
“What’s the matter? You leave Tread in charge?”
“You got it.”
“He can handle it,” I said.
“Yeah, but we don’t know what happens to him during an eclipse.”
We both thought this was hilarious. We were laughing our asses off, in fact, when the object of our amusement came loping around the corner, big red whiskers akimbo. “Oh, hi, guys. Been lookin’ for you.”
We greeted him in unison, looking guilty as hell.
“Mrs. Morris wants you. There’s a big toast or somethin’ coming up.”
“Oh…well.” Neil gave me a wry, conspiratorial look, then hopped to his feet and brushed dead grass off his butt. A round of muted applause—more solar worship, no doubt—rolled toward us from the house. I rose and shook the wrinkles out of my Pierrette outfit, feeling somehow that an idyll had passed.
Tread was predictably stoked about the eclipse—what a mystical, primal, humanizing thing it was—and proceeded to tell us about how he’d taken special care to align his crystals for this morning of mornings. Neil was sweet and kept a straight face throughout, though his smile seemed just on the verge of bolting for freedom like a herd of white horses. I didn’t dare catch his eye. Tread’s a real bran flake sometimes, but there’s no point in hurting his feelings. The fact that Neil understands this—and knows that I know he does—makes me like him even more.
“Look at the ground,” Tread said, as the three of us headed back to the festivities. “The best show is down there.”
I looked and saw nothing.
“What do you mean?” asked Neil.
“I think you have to smoke something,” I said.
“Now wait a minute,” said Tread. “Just look.”
“I’m looking.”
“See all the little crescents?”
I did see them. What I’d accepted as the usual variegation of light and shadow was, in fact, thousands of tiny half-moons—half-suns, if you prefer—scattered across the ground like the hairpins of an untidy goddess.
“They’re photographs,” Tread explained. “Under the trees here the leaves filt
er the light, so it actually takes a picture of the eclipse.”
“Amazing,” murmured Neil.
“Yeah,” I said, genuinely impressed. “Good one.”
Tread gave me a big, crooked, metaphysical grin—about as close as he ever comes to saying I told you so. “You should look down more often.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Sure. There’s good stuff everywhere.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” I said.
It’s dark now and I’m in my bedroom, looking out at the same moon that caused all that commotion this morning. Renee is in the living room, painting snowy peaks with her secret television lover. The world is back to normal again, they tell us, but I can’t help feeling expectant, on the brink of something truly significant. Neil says his video friend, whose name is Janet Glidden, will want to get started right away. That’s fine with me, though I’m not nearly as thin as I’d like to be. Oh, well. I’ll wrap myself in something dark and get the makeup right and do it all under a three-watt blue bulb. The voice is what counts, anyway.
Jeff called earlier this evening to say he’d recognized my legs in that cellulite infomercial. We had a good laugh about it. I asked him, proceeding carefully, if he’d heard from his friend in the park. He said no, without elaborating, so I let the subject drop. I think his pride’s a little hurt. As near as I can make out, guys usually call Jeff back.
A moment ago Aunt Edie called from Baker to inquire about my well-being and express her belated dismay over Merv Griffin. She had just seen an old Globe at the beauty parlor. “Did you know he was that way?” she asked.
I told her pretty much everybody did.
“Poor Eva Gabor,” she said.
8
THERE’S SOME BIG STUFF TO TELL YOU, BUT I’LL START WITH THE morning and how I got my butt sniffed on Rodeo Drive.
Since Renee is off work for a week, we dolled ourselves up and drove into Beverly Hills for what Renee is fond of calling “an elegant day.” We were standing outside Bijan, window-shopping and looking as tastefully blasé as we knew how, when this big, ugly dog appeared out of nowhere and, without so much as a howdy-ma’am, stuck his big, wet nose up my dress. Renee shooed him off several times, to no avail. He’d caught his first whiff of condensed woman and could not be contained.