She had the weekly staff meeting today at Gentleman’s Club. Billie Jean, Nancy, Roxanne, Annette (not their real names) were instructed in the rules of service by Lorene as Mina looked on, nodding. The same things over and over like a prayer, tiny, seemingly insignificant details that architected Lorene’s vision of pleasure. She was so confident in her vision, it hardly mattered whether it was right or not. Itwasright. Then Lorene went over the schedule, with all of the girls’ astrological charts in hand. No earth signs on the floor with fire signs. The planets dictated these combinations, and that, along with the audition demands of the actress/servers, made the schedule challenging. Mina was left to the task of reconciling all this: the back of the house, the front of the house, the sun, the moon, the pilot season. After she finished and discharged the girls to the evening shift, she had a look at the reservation book. A hopelessly overbooked seven o’clock seating. A wishful booking at nine for a two-hour turn. Not likely. She left the impending disasters of the half-hour waits at the bar and the nearly threatening, polite assertiveness of rich beautiful people who “didn’t want to wait a moment longer, please” to the night manager, Billie Jean, and said she would be at home if needed.
On the way, she had to squeeze in Max, briefly. The walk home separated things.
She again stood outside, staring at the house she lived in, aMildred Pierce-y sort of bungalow, its stucco walls surrounded by palm trees. Palm trees, palm trees. Dr. Seuss, branchless, Betty Boop, shadeless, wind-bent, transplanted palm “trees.” No matter how long she had lived here, no matter how many summers she had spent here as a child, she never failed to become momentarily unnerved by palm trees. They seemed to say, This isn’t a real place where things count, this is exotic, this is tropical, this is a vacation! And she got a kind of thrill from it, living here was a sort of faux living, it’s what gave her so much license with time. Southern California ambivalence that was too bright to be ennui. Too palm-treed. Natives were not supposed to get a thrill from a palm tree. It was just a tree. It could be a fir or an evergreen or an oak. She strove to find the tiny details that illuminated the vast differences between the rest of Los Angeleans and herself, and, especially lately, between herself and David. What was she trying to convince herself of, with this little game? Anyone scrutinized in this way would seem hopelessly strange. When she finally reached the vantage point outside David’s office, she became entranced with watching him look intently at his computer screen. She watched him take a sip of tea (she drank coffee and didn’t even understand tea), his eyes not wavering from the blue-green light of the screen, her eyes not wavering from him.
She entered the kitchen and saw that David had washed all the dishes. He was very tidy. She has had her moments, but they’ve been unpredictable and, generally, David has kept things in order. He stepped into the kitchen when she opened the refrigerator.
“How was work?” he asked. She shrugged and opened a cardboard to-go container. She ate in front of the open refrigerator. “Hey,” he said, “you want to order a movie?” She nodded,chewing, and he approached her. He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m not getting anywhere on these rewrites. I’m sick of it.” David was finishing a tenth rewrite of a script about white, rural, Luddite, fundamentalist terrorists who plan to blow up the White House.
“It’s timely” was all he would really say about it. Whenever she described the plot as being about white, rural, Luddite, fundamentalist terrorists, he corrected her. “It’s not about the terrorists. It’s about the hero who thwarts them.” But he often didn’t say more than that. He was weary of it, as he was weary of all the scripts he wrote and rewrote. When she first met him he was an art history student. He was someone who used to trace his fingertips, with a dreamy shyness, along the hollow at the back of her knee.
“I’m sorry,” she said, mouth full of moo shu pork. It was actually all vegetarian. Almost moo shu pork. It was made of seitan.
“Isn’t that what they use to make wicker chairs?” David joked. It was soba and tempeh and seitan. Fibrous mystery food from the East. Almost tasted like real food, faux moo shu pork. She spooned it in. She had the postcoital munchies. She had the postmeandering famishes. Wretched, she thought, and ravenous.
“You know, we could actually eat dinner,” he said.
“I plan to,” she said, still chewing. Mina could eat a tremendous amount of food. She really enjoyed eating. Also, it felt vaguely defiant. So anti-Lorene. A woman of appetites. She laughed at the young waitresses/actresses working at the restaurants, watching them control their eating, fasting and constantly rebuilding their castles of deprivation. They had neophyte eating disorders. Hers was so elaborated, so long contemplated,that it full-circled to the appearance of a normative eating pattern. Yes, a retro affectation — a woman who eats. That kind of self-obsession was an art, a silent, pure art performed and appreciated only by one’s self. She wasn’t defiant enough to be fat, though. There was a little fullness around the hips, a smoothing of edges that had occurred over the last two or three years. Over-twenty-five metabolic slowing. The inevitable decline begun. But of late, of Max, she liked this softness around the hips. It felt sexy somehow. A concession to the immoderate and sensual. Female and decadent, even. She planned, at some liberated later point, to be able to romanticize her fat, fetishize it. But then there was cellulite. Then there was the drooping of large breasts. Sagging. Technically called ptosis. It was a syndrome, a medical problem to be fixed, don’t you know. A pathology, surely. The pencil test. If you placed a pencil under your breast and it stayed there, if the leaning, sagging breast actually held the pencil there, you failed the pencil test. Fallen buttocks, too. Stretch marks. Lapsed uterus, for God’s sake.
Mina stopped eating.
Of course, there was always Dr. Mencer, Lorene’s plastic surgeon. The pencil test, what sadistic misogynist came up with that one? But it could be fixed, nothing was irrevocable. All was curable. Good old Dr. Mencer.