Maybe it was true. Maybe she was. But if she was, it was nothing like the girls on Van Nuys Boulevard in their hot pants and satin baseball jackets. Olivia was linen and champagne and terra-cotta, botanical prints and "Seven Steps to Heaven." "Do you like one of them best?" I asked.
She stirred her iced tea with a long-handled spoon, letting Miles Davis seep into our pores. "No. Not really. How about you, do you have a boyfriend, someone special?"
I was going to tell her that I did, an older man, make it sound glamorous, but I ended up telling her my sorry life history, Starr and Ray, my mother, Marvel Turlock. She was easy to talk to, sympathetic. She asked questions, listened, and kept the music coming, tea and lemon cookies. I felt I had woken up on my raft to find a yacht dropping a ladder. You never knew when rescue might come.
"It won't always be so hard, Astrid," she told me, brushing a lock of my hair behind my ear. "Beautiful girls have certain advantages."
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to know those things she knew, so I wouldn't be afraid anymore, so I'd believe there was an end to it all. "Like what?"
She looked at me close, examining the planes of my face, the bangs I cut myself now. My stubborn chin, my fat, chapped lips. I tried to look ready. She picked up my hand and held it in hers. Her hands were more delicate than I'd thought, no larger than mine, warm and surprisingly dry, but a bit rough. She twined her fingers in mine, as if we had always held hands.
"It's a man's world, Astrid," she said. "You ever hear that?"
I nodded. A man's world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you could get raped or beat up. A man's world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money, and didn't have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.
But I didn't know much more about a man's world. That place where men wore suits and watches and cuff links and went into office buildings, ate in restaurants, drove down the street talking on cell phones. I'd seen them, but their lives were as incomprehensible as the lives of Tibetan Sherpas or Amazonian chiefs.
Olivia took my hand and turned it over, brushed the tips of her dry fingers down my moist palm, sending waves of electricity up my arms. "Who has the money?" she asked, softly. "Who has the power? You have a good mind, you're artistic, you're very sensitive, see?" She showed me lines in my hand, her fingertips like a grainy fabric stroking my skin. "Don't fight the world. Your carpenter friend, he didn't fight the wood, did he? He made love to it, and what he made was beautiful."
I thought about that. My mother fought the wood, hacking at it, trying to slam it into place with a hammer. She considered it the essence of cowardice not to. "What else do you see?" I asked.
Olivia curled my fingers up, wrapping my fate, handing it back to me.
I picked at a burn blister on my middle finger and thought about fighting the grain or not. Women like my mother, alone as tigers, fighting every step. Women with men, like Marvel and Starr, trying to please. Neither one seemed to have the advantage. But Olivia didn't mean men like Ed Turlock or even Ray. She meant men with money. That man's world. The cuff links and offices.
"You'll figure out what men want and how to give it to them. And how not to." She smiled her naughty crooked grin. "And when to do which."
The little brass clock whirred and struck five, a music box tune, tiny chimes. So many pretty things, but it was getting late, I didn't want to go, I wanted to find out more, I wanted Olivia to handle my future like wax, softening it in the heat of her parched hands, shaping it into something I didn't have to dread. "You mean sex."
"Not necessarily." She glanced at the round mirror over the fireplace, at the drop-top desk with its secret drawers and pigeonholes. "It's magic, Astrid. You have to know how to reach up and pull beauty out of thin air." She pretended to reach up and grab a firefly, then opened her palms slowly and watched it fly out. "People want a little magic. Sex is its theater. There are sliding panels and trapdoors."
The night magic. Never let a man stay the night. But my mother's theater was her own pleasure. This was something quite different. I was excited that I knew this.
"The secret is — a magician doesn't buy magic. Admire the skill of a fellow magician, but never fall under his spell." She rose and collected our glasses. And I thought of how Barry seduced my mother, his smoked mirrors and hidden trained doves. She never chose him, not really, but she gave him everything. She would always be his, even if he was dead. He had shaped her destiny.
"So what about love?" I asked.
She had started toward the kitchen but stopped, turned back, glasses in her hands. "What about it?" When Olivia frowned, two vertical lines sliced between her eyebrows and cut into her rounded forehead.
I flushed red, but I wanted to know. If only I could ask without falling all over myself like a clown in size fourteen shoes. "Don't you believe in it?"
"I don't believe in it the way people believe in God or the tooth fairy. It's more like the National Enquirer. A big headline and a very dull story."
I followed her into the kitchen, exactly like ours yet light-years away, a parallel universe. Her pots and pans dangled overhead from a restaurant rack — copper pots, iron. Ours were Corning Ware with the little blue flowers. I ran my hands over Olivia's terra-cotta counters, inset with painted ceramics, where ours were mottled green and white, like a bad cold.
"So what do you believe in?" I asked her.
Her dark gaze ran with pleasure along the warm cinnamon tile, the beaten copper hood over the range. "I believe in living as I like. I see a Stickley lamp, a cashmere sweater, and I know I can have it. I own two houses besides this. When the ashtrays are full in my car, I'll sell it."
I laughed, imagining her bringing it back to the dealer, explaining why she was selling. She probably would. I could hardly fathom someone living so close to her own desire.
"I just spent three weeks in Tuscany. I saw the Palio in Siena," she said, strumming the words like the strings of a guitar. "It's a fifteenth-century horse race through the cobbled streets. Would I exchange that for a husband and kids and happily-ever-after? Not to mention the likely outcome, divorce and overtime at the bank and shaky child support. Let me show you something."
She picked up the small quilted bag on her counter, found her wallet, opened it for me to see the wad of cash as thick as my finger. She spread the bills, at least a dozen hundreds among the others. "Love's an illusion. It's a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I'd rather have cash." She put her money away, zipped her purse.
Then she put her arm around my shoulder and led me to the door. The amber light fell through the bubble glass against our cheeks. She hugged me lightly. I smelled Ma Griffe, it was warmer on her. "Come again, anytime. I don't know many women. I'd like to know you."
I left walking backwards so I wouldn't miss a moment of her. I hated the idea of going back to Marvel's, so I walked around the block, feeling Olivia's arms around me, my nose full of perfume and the smell of her skin, my head swirling with what I had seen and heard in the house so much like ours, and yet not at all. And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.
12
I LAY ON MY BED, wondering what I would be like when I was a woman. I'd never thought much about it before, my possible futures. I'd been too busy sucking fish juice, burying myself in the sand against the killing rays of desert sun. But now I was intrigued by this future Astrid that Olivia had seen in me. I saw myself sort of like Catherine Deneuve, pale and stoic, the way she was in Belle dejour. Or maybe Dietrich, Shanghai Express, all shimmer and smoke. Would I be fascinating, the star of my own magic theater? What would I do with a wad of hundred-dollar bills?
I imagined that money in my hand. My mind went blank. So far, my fantasies had centered completely on survival. Luxury had been beyond imagining, let alone beauty. I let my eyes rest on the striped curtains, until the stripes themselves formed a sculptural shape. Ray had seen it in me. With Olivia's help, I could own it, create it, use it. I could work in beauty as an artist worked in paint or language.
I would have three lovers, I decided. An older man, distinguished, with silver hair and a gray suit, who would take me traveling with him, for company on long first-class flights to Europe, and stuffy cocktail receptions for visiting dignitaries. I called him the Swedish ambassador. Yes, Mother, I would lie down for the father, gladly.
Then there was Xavier, my Mexican lover, Mother's Eduardo reconstituted, but more tender and passionate, less silly and spoiled. Xavier spread camellias on the bed, he swore he would marry me if he could, but he had been engaged since birth to a girl with a harelip. It was fine with me, I didn't want to live with his overbearing parents in Mexico City and bear his ten Catholic children. I had a room of my own in the hotel, and a maid who brought me Mexican chocolate for breakfast in bed.
The third man was Ray. I met him in secret in big-city hotels, he sat in the bar with his sad face, and I would come in in a white linen suit with black-tipped shoes, my hair back in a chignon, a scarf tied to my purse. "I wasn't sure you'd come," I said in a deep, slightly humorous voice, like Dietrich. "But I came anyway."
I heard Marvel calling to me, but she was in another country, too far away. She didn't mean me. She meant some other girl, some drab hopeless thing destined for the army or else beauty school. I lay with my legs wrapped around Ray in a room with tall windows, a bouquet of full-bloom red roses in a vase on the dresser.
"Astrid!"
Her voice was like a drill, penetrating, relentless. If I had a choice, I'd rather be a man's slave than a woman's. I pulled myself out of bed, stumbled into the living room where Marvel and her friends sat on the flowered couch, their heads pressed together over sodas tinted space-alien colors, hands in the snack mixture I'd made from a recipe on the cereal box.
"Here she is." Debby raised her horsey face under her curly perm, eye shadow layered like strata in sedimentary rock. "Ask her."
"I'm telling you, the car," Marvel said. "You come back and you're still living in the same dump, still driving around the same old shitbox. What good does it do?"
Linda took a hit on her cigarette, fanning the smoke away with a pearl-nailed hand. A blond with blue eyes perpetually wide with surprise, she wore shiny eye shadow like the inside of shells. They all went to Birmingham High together, were bridesmaids at each other's weddings, and now sold Mary Kay.
It was the new Mary Kay brochure, illustrating the prizes they could win if they sold enough mascara wands and lip liners and face-firming masques, that they'd been arguing about. "They used to have Cadillacs." Linda sniffed.
Marvel finished her soda, smacked it down on the coffee table. "Just once in my life, I'd like a goddamn new car. Is that too much to ask? Everybody's got a new car, the kids at the high school. The slut next door's got a goddamn Corvette." She handed me her glass. "Astrid, get me some more Tiki Punch."
Debby handed me hers too. I took them back to the kitchen, and poured Tiki Punch from the big Shasta bottle, getting momentarily lost in its irradiated Venusian pinkness.
"Astrid," Linda called, her feet tucked under herself on the flower-print couch. "If you had a choice between two weeks in Paris France, all expenses paid, or a car —"
"Shitty Buick," Debby interjected.
"What's wrong with a Buick?" Marvel said.
"—which would you take?" Linda picked something out of the corner of her eye with a long press-on nail.