Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [45]
In the nightmare I could ease only with Loco Larry’s barbiturates, Jess’s ghost stole my lithe, living body, then coaxed it to dive off the bridge and drown itself. In life, I was the ghost; I’d already haunted a whole village.
Deforested hills can be replanted. Vision is will. I quit the club job before my shift was over so I could focus on Getting Jess.
The next morning I worked on Ham. He invited me on a two-day location shoot somewhere in the redwoods. Up there in the Sierras, I sprung my politically correct scheme on him; once Berkeley, always Berkeley. “It must be the mountains, but it’s just dawned on me. I’m taking work away from aliens. You don’t have to speak English to wait tables at the club.”
He closed his eyes, inhaled the wholesome woodsy smells, and went through a list of people with businesses other than restaurants and nightclubs who owed him big. Jess DuPree wasn’t on that list. I pushed my case as a safe driver with mucho charm and muy mucho personality. Jess’s agency, I reminded him, was always looking for drivers at short notice.
“But what do you know about escorting authors?”
“They’re writers, not authors, Ham! They’re meat puppets with autographing pens. Escorting’s a simple pickup and delivery system.”
“Don’t tell Jess you’re planning to model yourself on the UPS lady.”
Ham called Jess on his cell phone. I was hired before I got back to the city.
E. T., get off the pay phone. Hi, Mom! I’m the infant you mislaid.
What had I expected to find in my mother’s museum? Harem pants and killing tools? Baby clothes and toys?
Give me a sign, Bio-Mom.
Jess’s agency occupied the upper floor of a two-story house on Clay off Presidio. The walls were painted in combinations of colors that I hadn’t crayoned with in my Crayola days in Schenectady. Puce, chartreuse, fraise, gamboge. All the sofas were shrouded in red and black kilims. The camel harnesses on the floor were meant to be sat on. Wool shawls embroidered with paisleys hung in place of blinds or drapes in the windows. All ledges, sills and tabletops were cluttered with brass gods, mirrored elephants, copper urns, lacquered boxes, sandalwood beads and stone eggs on tarnished trays. This wasn’t California. It wasn’t even America.
Jess caught my look, and reacted defensively. “Don’t judge me, Ms. Fresh-from-Schenectady! I went to Asia with a pierced nose. I was the first one to try a nose ring in Berkeley.” She strode ahead of me, a brisk, jowly, touched-up blonde in Armani pants.
“No tips in this job,” she went on. “Only egomaniacs for clients. Still want it?” She went through an archway hung with a mirrored valance into a small, interconnecting room, and I followed. “If you do, this is the HQ of the world’s best MEs.”
I took in the conventional office furniture and equipment: desks, filing cabinets, computers, a printer, a fax machine, a copier. No organizer or dossier for the tidy storage of maternal feelings.
“We call this the Wall,” she said. The wall behind her desk was hung with head shots of celebrity authors.
Yeah? As in Loco Larry’s?
She sat at her desk, sizing me up more frankly than she had at Dahlia’s Divan.
No desk clutter of pens, paper clips, rubber bands; no family photographs; no flowers; no smiling faces doodled on scratch pads; no framed fortune-cookie-Confucian proverbs. Only one item out of place in that Office Depot decor: an antique wooden lap desk that scribes in another era on another continent must have squatted at.
She caught me being distracted by the lap desk. “From a Muslim slum in Bombay. India’s one great junkyard.”
“I know.” I am capable of micronostalgia. “A guy I used to date back east called India hot, loud, filthy, smelly, the Club Med of choice for druggies and convicts on the lam.”
“Rubbish!” Jess snapped. “A typical white male. You have to open yourself up to ancient cultures.