Roadmap Part 2

CHAPTER 8 - VOICE MAIL

Message from Boris on my Voice Mail:

"Can you keep me on your AAA membership? It’s about to expire."

I can’t keep anybody on anything. My credit cards are maxed out from too many months of paying Ventura rent with "convenience checks. " What was saving me was my long-standing relationship with the entertainment law firm where I'd worked as an "on-call temp" since college.   

I’d gladly left "law" behind, but now I return to the mega-pay to wander the office halls as confused and vague as an old woman who has returned to her childhood home. Attorneys are starting to complain.  But Georgia, the office manager, has vowed to keep me on payroll. 

My first week back, she takes me to lunch. I keep missing my mouth with the tuna sandwich, pieces falling in my lap like hairs during a haircut. Groping for a napkin, I chirp, "I feel fine, Georgia.  Never felt better."

"Yeah?" she says in her sardonic contralto. "What are you on?"

Georgia is a sensuous African American woman with a take-no-prisoners attitude and Botticelli face. The fast-talking, lustful attorneys (that would be all of them in this 100-attorney law firm) adore her.

"Tell me about your divorce," I heard about it yesterday, but I want her to say it again.

She leans in, as if confiding a secret, "He was mean, he was cruel, insulting.  Just not there.  By the time I left him, I was sure he didn't love me anymore, then he turned around and says, 'I don't get it.  Why are you leaving?'"

"But you knew it was over."

"Because he let me know it was.  Lemme give you some advice.  Let him sue for divorce.  If you sue them, they act like even bigger assholes."

We chew on this, literally. Silent. Then –

Georgia sighs: "Like Mama always said, ‘The man you marry is not the man that you divorce.’ "

CHAPTER 9 - PHYSICAL THERAPY

Tony leans over my shoulder to sniff the steam rising from the wok, "Mmmmm..."

"Want some?"

"Nah."

"It's gonna be good."

On his way to his room, he pauses, hand on the kitchen doorknob, "Okay."

Eva is away for two weeks at a Raw Foods Clinic and all I'd seen of Edward in the last few days is TV light flickering in his window.

Dishing out the Thai curry, I could feel knots in my neck.  Work was leaving my body a wreck.  Could our resident physical therapist be of service?

Tony’s watching “the game” when I enter with the food.  He sits up on his bed.

"Who's playing?" I ask.

"Lakers."

"Great, I love baseball."

"Yeah, man, that linebacker sure can hit the homeruns!  Sit down and I'll teach you."

I sit on the floor eating while Tony raves about my cooking and explains the finer points of basketball, in between cheers at slam dunks.

Bowls empty, I take his and stand up.  Pausing in the doorway, I venture, "I was going to ask for a shoulder rub, but you're busy."

Stretched across the bed, head propped against one hand, he looks up with eyes only, "Thanks."

Back in the kitchen, I curse myself.  Then anger rushes over me.  What a jerk.  Ask not what I can do for you...

I stumble back into his room, my voice loud.  "All week long, I let you use my phone and gave you dinner and let you tape my records and now when I ask for a massage because I'm really..."

"All right," he holds up a defensive hand.  "When the game is over, I'll repay you."  His tone seems designed to make me feel ashamed of my outburst.  I resolve not to be.  But as I wash dishes, I feel uneasiness well up, aware of my vulnerability. Exposed.  On the other hand, he did say he’d give me what I asked for.

  It’s been a long time since a man touched me.  I push the thought away.

Game over, Tony points at the floor.  "Lie down." 

I close my eyes.

His fingers press into me, his tone soft, intimate.

"I feel…it is my responsibility…to educate the person…I am treating." 

His touch is agonizing. I try not to cry out as he pushes on the trouble spots and dispenses information. "During the day be aware of how you take tension into your shoulders. When you feel it, let it go. Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth, six second breaths, three times a day for five minutes...don't hunch your shoulders...stand straight..."

So I hunch over.  Must be very attractive.

He even tries to crack my back ("You're holding on, let go..."). A full blown physical therapy treatment.

"I'm not going to give you pleasure, even though you may want pleasure," he says in that quiet, insistent tone.  "What I'm giving you may not feel as great, but it'll do you more good in the long run."

When I turn over, he places his fingertips lightly on my head, energizing.  Light appears to shine behind my closed lids.  The healing power comes in soothing waves.

"I can feel the caring in your hands," I murmur. "Is this what you do for all your patients?"

"I put my whole self into it," he says, pulling away. "That's why it's so draining."  He curls against the wall, trying to work the kinks out of his own neck, not looking at me.

Session over.  He looks exhausted.

Rolling over, I stretch and look at him, chin resting on my folded hands and gather the courage to say, "I could do Reiki on you."

"I've heard of that.  It's Japanese hands-on healing, isn't it?"

"I'm certified Third Degree," I brag.  Boris and I got the training for free when we did an infomercial for a local Reiki Center.  I rarely offer it because the average person doesn’t believe it's for real.

Tony wants it.

We switch places.  I have a moment's apprehension.  Boris could never stand my massages.  He preferred "professionals."

I lie down behind Tony, lean over and put my hands over his smooth face.  For five minutes, I stay like that, absorbing his physicality.  Laid out before me, his relaxed body is powerful in its grace and build.  I let myself feel how pleasurable it is to lay my hands on the rounded solidness of it.

It’s cool to the touch.  Hot spots can indicate trouble areas.

"Okay, now turn over on your stomach."

"Man, you're goin' to town!" he grins, rolling over.

As soon as I touch him, I feel it. Heat in his kidney area. When I tell him, he responds, "Second chakra.  Where I've had most of my problems."

An hour later I’m done. He’s asleep. I leave him there.

I’m in bed about to turn out the light when I hear him knock. 

"Thanks.  You put me in another world. "

That night I lie in bed practicing the last thing the Ventura psychic told me to do:

"You don’t need me.  You can get your own answers. Before you go to sleep, close your eyes and see a blank screen.  Ask your question, see it up there on that screen.  Then don't think about it anymore." 

I do just that and when I wake up, my first thought is:

Keep it platonic. 

CHAPTER 10 - BORDERS

Chinatown. I’m at Pho 79 with Aunt Vermillion who’s visiting from NYC with Uncle Bram. As I pour her another cup of oolong, she says, "Such a shame…ten years..."

"I know. We were such good friends."

"No, I mean ten years and nothing to show for it.  No house...no property...no kids." She reaches for another Vietnamese imperial roll; I move the plate closer to her. This is our first time in "my" Chinatown together. Holding myself from explaining to her deaf ears, I show her how to wrap the small crispy egg roll in lettuce and mint and hot basil. How to dip it in the sweet-and-sour sauce.

Last night, Aunt Vermillion called to ask if she could visit my Chinese herbalist on Broadway.  My always-dignified aunt complains that she has a "weird smell" in her nose and her New York doctors didn't know what it was. "Smells like something rotten. "

Aunt Vermillion and Uncle Bram are the two most conservative people I know. Nouveau riche Jewish self-made millionaires. She's seventy, he's eighty. Uncle Bram is my blood. They play good-cop/bad-cop with Vermillion taking the angelic role.  And they never set foot in Beverly Hills unless they can housesit.

My mother once told me that Dad had dated Vermillion, but ended up marrying Mom instead. My parents divorced twenty-five years ago. Vermillion and Bram just celebrated their fiftieth.

Auntie is tearing basil leaves off the stem with her fingernails and dropping them into the steaming Vietnamese soup. "We just watched that movie of yours."

"Um, that was just a rough cut. Boris and I aren’t finished…" But I brace myself.

"Uncle and I were shocked."

"Why?"

"In the narration, you mention that when you got married, Aunt Tiffany sent a hundred dollars. Now when your brother got married, everybody sent him a thousand. But when you got married, we didn't send a penny. We had no idea Tiffany sent a hundred. "

Aunt Tiffany had sent a note with the gelt saying that it would have been more, but he was a "foreigner." If the marriage lasted three years, she promised to send a thousand.  And she did.

This in-need-of-editing documentary is my last connection to Boris. 

Four years ago, using money from a script sale, I'd gone to Florida and shot my twenty-five-year old brother's marriage to a Catholic. My father's side boycotted because the father of the bride refused to have a rabbi next to the priest.  Reason?  He didn’t "like Jews" that much but thought my bro was cool.

My father was gone by then.  And my mother...well, my mother.

I could never get the footage to cut right. Then, two years later, Boris' cousin in Kiev got knocked up and had to get married. On holiday anyway, Boris shot his cousin's shotgun wedding. When we saw the dailies side by side, we knew we had something. When cut together, our separate work had the potential to make a whole—m aybe good—movie.

The film opens with shots of our own wedding, and our voice-over narration. "Vhen I got married, my friends said, ‘American voman! Well, we’ll see how long that lasts."

Our last day together, Boris stopped packing and cried out, "That's it, Carrie!  This is the end of the movie! Our divorce!" 

He’s been bugging me ever since to get together so we can "shoot the ending." When I told Georgia, she said, "Just like a man. It’s so cold-hearted. "

"Your blood pressure little bit low," says Dr. Yang’s interpreter. What she always says. We sit at her desk surrounded by waiting Chinese patients in the back of an herb shop that smells the healing smells of ginseng and dong quai. Dr. Yang is a small round woman with painted eyebrows and sparkling white cardigans. I hold out my wrist. She feels the left pulse, now the right.

A few feet away, sits my aunt in a metal folding chair, wedged between pungent smelling shelves and curious Chinese who stare and occasionally smile.  With her sharp Polish cheekbones and almond-shaped dark eyes, my father’s brother’s wife could almost pass.

The doctor tells me my symptoms:

"You have dry mouth."

"Yes."

"Your stomach hurt."

"Yes."

"You have your period."

"Tomorrow." I'd been feeling sick. Not like when my liver and pancreas were infected years ago, but food’s not digesting again.

The doctor fills a page with her black-felt calligraphy while the interpreter says, "Doctor give you three-day medicine. Boil four cup water to one cup in morning. Boil two cup to one cup at night."

"What's wrong with me?"

"Too much heat.  You need to re-lax. Sung."

What they always say.

I introduce my aunt.

The interpreter and the doctor nod a respectful, "Ah!"  Then the interpreter asks, "What is aunt?"

They give Aunt Vermillion "three day medicine" and "come back." Then we went shopping at I. Magnin in Beverly Hills.

I drop Tony’s present in front of him. He groans.

"I don't need any gifts."

"You need this one.  Open it."

His slowly peel back the Chinese newsprint it’s wrapped in.  "It's beautiful..."

"So you won't borrow my cup when I make oolong tea for you."

He put the mug aside, still looking at it. "I need to say this and I hope you don't take it the wrong way..."

I prepare to take it.

"I spent all last year working in therapy on giving to manipulate."

My mouth feels dry, "Do you think I'm giving you too much stuff?"

"It's not the stuff.  It's why you're doin' it."

"There aren't any strings," I insist. Then I remember everything I threw up to him to get the massage.  I apologize.  "I thought I was asking for something small."

"I can't give small.  I put everything into it and it drains me.  Ask me to put up shelves, hang a picture, but don't ask for a treatment."

I try to explain how wonderful it was, how badly I needed it, how helpful his information was.  The look on his face says he doesn’t give a damn.

Twenty minutes later, the kitchen door swings open and Tony bounds in. "Y'know what happened?  I went to turn on the TV and a mouse jumped on it!" We laugh. And in the lightness of the air, he adds. "Thanks for the cup."

"You're welcome."

"I been thinkin'. Maybe I'm goin' overboard with this border stuff. Maybe it'd be good for me to loosen up and not be on guard so much. Maybe I can accept more, give more."

"You want to give more?  Get rid of the mice."

We’d been living with mouse shit all over our kitchen shelves.  No sooner did we wipe it off, then it appeared again.  Disgusting.  Not to mention unsanitary.

We take our tea out onto the deck where we sit in the twilight listening to crickets. I with my herbal medicine and Tony with his cup of Tea Kwan Yin, watching the stars come out.

I share what my aunt said about my aunt saying I had nothing to show for my marriage.

"I would have told her to fuck off."

"She's always been good to me."

"I would have told her to go to fuck off anyway."  Black Topanga night sits in. We keep sitting there.  Without candle or light bulb light.  We never run out of things to say. 

We hear it before we see it: 

Like a nighttime mirage, Eva's RV lumbers up the rough asphalt path toward the house.  She’s not due back for a week.  After maneuvering a laborious three-point turn to reverse the camper, she slides it into Her Parking Space, then jumps out in her silver jumpsuit looking like an un-debriefed astronaut.  Stomping up to where we sit smiling at her on the deck, her arms full of gear, she drops everything with a major thud. Then twists in every direction, blowing raspberries: "PHHHTTT!!!!  PHHHTTT!!!!  PHHHTTT!!!!"

"Eva!  What is it?" We ask.  "What happened?"

"Those people are so fucking UPTIGHT! They think as long as they eat raw foods, they don't have to deal with their emotions! All I wanted was to learn how to make RAW CRACKERS!"

CHAPTER 11- VERMIN

All summer long we'd been kvetching about the mice in the face of Eva's hear-no/see-no shrugs. Today Eva and her helper Consuela have been in the kitchen all day, sealing food into containers and setting traps.  I come into the kitchen for orange juice and have to look down at the glass to hide my smile when Eva yells:

"They are filthy, everywhere and I had enough!"

"Gee, Eva.  Kind of milking the subject."

Throwing her wet, mouse-turd studded rag into the sink, she turns on me, "You want to know why I am 'milking' it?  This morning, a mouse bit my toe!"

"You're kidding!"

"Then, just now, I saw a RAT DEVA...right over there!"

"Rat Deva.  Goddess of the rats?"

"And I said to her, 'GET THEM OUT OF HERE OR THEY'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!'"  From under the sink, she picks up a tiny blue box with a small hole in it.  "It's a 'live' trap.  You catch them in there and drive them to the woods and let them go."

"That hole looks awfully small."  I say, wondering what mouse would be dumb enough to try to squeeze into it?  "Why don't we just get a cat?"

In Ventura, Boris and I had a white tomcat who came in through the bathroom window and never left. His name was Alex. When we left Ventura, the couple next door convinced us to let Alex live with them. 

I didn't miss Boris.  But I sure as hell missed Alex.

"Cats are coyote fodder," Eva says as she sets the trap. "Coyotes ate every cat I ever had."

On the deck, just outside the kitchen window where I’m standing with Eva, Consuela screams. When we run to her, she shows us rats' nests in the utility closet. Too bad Tony’s working and missing this.  Edward’s home but I haven't seen him in days.

"It's open," he calls out when I knock.

I step into the patchouli-scented cabin, move past the neat shelves and desk and picture window that beholds the mountains and into the next room where Edward sits on his bed looking bloodshot and unshaven.  He pats the Indian bedspread for me to sit next to him.  I do it.

"She just discovered the mice."

He rolls his eyes, "Ripcord, Eva."

We smile.  "You okay?" I venture.

He shakes his head, "When I get depressed, I just sit staring at TV."

"Anything I can help with?"

Shakes his head, looks away.  When he looks back at me, his eyes seem to focus for the first time. "Maybe I can get your opinion." He takes a folded paper from his pocket and unfolds it. "From my ex-girlfriend in Chicago. Fumiko."

He reads me the last lines over and over:

"I miss you and wish you were here to share my misery

 in this awful city.  Just kidding.  On both counts. "

Holding the letter between his legs, he leans back. "What does she mean?  That she doesn't miss me or that she doesn't want me to be miserable?  Or that she doesn't miss me and doesn't wish I was there?"

"If she was 'just kidding', why didn't she cross it out?"

 "I can't believe she'd do anything to hurt me."

"Maybe you can't, but she's still a bitch."

"She's not a bitch."  He sounds hurt.  "She was a virgin when I met her."

"Sorry.  I'm the bitch."

He folded the letter carefully and put it back in his pocket, "No.  I know you're my advocate.  And here I am defending her.  I called my sponsor about it..."

"Sponsor?"

"My sponsor from AA.  My dad was an alcoholic. I spent most of my childhood numbed out.  Now alcohol keeps me that way, if I don’t go to meetings."

I know so little about addiction.  My parents were violent and abusive, but alcohol wasn't part of the scene.

"How did you know you were an alcoholic?" I ask, sensing he’ll answer this nosy question.

A moment of thought.  "It's like, if you and I were having a glass of wine and talking, your attention would be on the talk and mine would be on the wine."

"So is it hard for you to go out and socialize?"

He nods.  "Maybe that's why I haven't had a woman in a year and a half."

When was the last time I'd had sex? I try to remember.  Ah yes.  In three months, it will be one year.

New Year's Day, Boris and I were eating cereal on the balcony, watching the ocean waves, when I suggested we make love to break in the new year.  It had been a long time.

"I'm not sexually attracted to you anymore," he said and kept eating.

The next day, I told him I wanted a divorce.

A month earlier, we’d been walking through the park with Si Fu when Boris put me down. Si Fu stopped in mid-step: "You've got a woman most men would kill for and you talk like that about her?" When we got home, Boris asked me if I was "fucking" Si Fu.

 

In the Topanga days to come, Eva's "live traps" prove to be not worth the plastic they’re made out of. Mouse excrement once again adorns our kitchen.  Despite Tony's cheerful theory that "Eating a little mouse shit might make us immune to it, homeopathically speaking," the inevitable comes to pass. I walked in and found a cat in the kitchen.

Eva got the exquisite feline at the Pound.

"But aren't cats coyote fodder?" I ask, suppressing my joy.

"We'll bring her in every night and she'll sleep in the kitchen.  I don't want her anywhere else in the house.  Because that's fleas."

At first glance, she looks like an adolescent grey and white tabby.  But closer examination reveals her to be a calico with raccoon tail and a face that looked like a paintbox exploded in it.  Antsy and meowing, she paces between Eva's feet.  When I bend down to touch her, she ducks under my long skirt and stays there between my squatting legs, purring.

"Mama!" Eva laughs. 

Kitty peeks out at Tony as he walks in with therapy bag over his shoulder.  He pauses and says, "Oh.  A cat."

"Do you like cats?" I ask.

"I don't have any feelings about them," he says, passing through.

"I'm going to call her Zajda," says Eva.

At the sound of her “name,” the cat doesn’t look up.