Shopgirl (8 page)

“CAN I TAKE YOU TO LUNCH?”

Mirabelle stands at her post, and before her is a man in his mid-fifties, a bit overweight, with short-cropped hair and dressed like someone who never thought one way or another about dressing in his life. Everything he wears is in the wrong fabrics for a Neiman's devotee, his belt is not leather, his shoes are catalogue-bought. A porkpie hat sits atop his head. He wears a synthetic palm tree shirt, cotton pants, and well-broken-in work boots.

“You're Mirabelle Buttersfield?”

“Yes.”

“I'm Carter Dobbs, I'm looking for your father.”

Mirabelle and Carter sit at the Time Clock Cafe´. This time, her admirer, Tom, is missing from the tableau, but most of the regulars move in and out of their spots, as though an unseen movie director has yelled, “Places everybody.”

A few minutes into the conversation and Mirabelle knows why this man does not belong, nor care to belong, in the matrix of Beverly Hills.

“I was in Vietnam with your father. I have been trying to locate him, with this address. . . . ” He slides a paper toward her over the metal tabletop. Mirabelle sees that it is her home address, which has remained unchanged in twenty-eight years. “I've written him, but I never get a response,” he says.

“Does he know you?” asks Mirabelle.

“He knows me well. There's never been a problem between us, but he won't answer me.”

“Why not?”

“I think I know why, but it's personal, and I'm guessing he needs to talk to me.”

“Well,” says Mirabelle, “that's our address. I don't know why he won't get in touch with you, but I'm . . . ”

“Are you going to see him?” Carter interrupts.

“Yes, I'm going to see him at Christmas and I can give him your card, whatever you want.”

“Thanks. It's the ones that don't call back that need to talk the most.”

“It was so long ago.”

“Yes, sweetie. So long ago. Some do better than others, and I've just made it a mission of mine to reach my brothers, see if they're okay. Is your dad okay?”

“Not always.”

Mirabelle tries to size up Carter. She has seen his type in Vermont, although Carter is clearly not from Vermont, with his Midwest nonaccent, flavored occasionally with a subtle drawl. Well-mannered, kind, moral. Like her father. Except that Carter Dobbs wants to talk.

Mirabelle's father, Dan Buttersfield, has never spoken to her about one emotional thing. She is kept in the dark about family secrets; she has never seen him angry. She has never been told anything about Vietnam. When asked, her father shakes his head and changes the subject. He is stoic like a good WASP from Vermont should be. The household was shaken when Mirabelle was seventeen when it was revealed that her father, whom she adored, had been involved in a sexual affair that had lasted for seven years. Mirabelle's emotional age was always five years behind her real age, so this information was received as if by a twelve-year-old. It struck her hard and made her bluff happiness for the next eleven years. This event fits exactly into Mirabelle's jigsaw puzzle of sadness still being assembled inside her. Having watched her mother's struggle, Mirabelle keeps a fear harbored inside her of the same thing happening to her, and when anything occurs in her life that is even similar, like a current boyfriend going back to an old girlfriend, she breaks.

Carter Dobbs walks her back to Neiman's. He gives her his card from Dobbs' Auto Parts in Bakersfield, California, and he squeezes her arm good-bye. As he turns away from her, she finally can name what disturbs her about him. He doesn't laugh.

MIRABELLE IS TIED UP IN
Friday traffic, and this is only Thursday. She slogs along Beverly and misses every light. She fails to step on the gas at the exact nanosecond of the light change, and she gets honked at by not one but two drivers.

Locked in the darkness of her car, with the wipers set on periodic, she feels uneasy. The night scares her. Then the uneasiness gives way to a momentary and frightening levitation of her mind above her body. She can feel her spirit disconnect from her corporeal self, and her heart starts racing. She had felt its calling card months earlier, this unwelcome visitor in her body, who seemed to fly through her and then was gone. This time it is stronger than before, and it stays longer. It is as though her body is held down by weights and her mind is being methodically disassembled.

The stairs from her impossible-to-negotiate parking space to her front door are endless; she trudges from step to step. The door is heavy as she pushes it with the inserted key. Once inside, she sits on the futon for several hours without moving. The cat nudges her for dinner but she can't get up.

Mirabelle has been through this before, but the power of the depression keeps her from remembering that its cause is chemical. As has happened several years before, her medication is failing her.

The phone rings but she cannot answer. She hears Ray Porter leave a message. She drags herself to bed without eating. She closes her eyes, and the depression helps her sleep. Sleep, however, is not relief. The depression does not go away, politely waiting to come back in the morning when she is refreshed. It stays, and tonight it works on Mirabelle even as she sleeps, poisoning her dreams.

In the morning, she calls in sick, faking a flu, which is the closest expressible illness to what she is actually experiencing. By noon she has thought to call her doctor, who wants her to come in and who suggests that she is experiencing a pharmaceutical collapse. But the chemical malaise makes her disinterested even in getting well, and she feels the value of everything that has meaning for her slip away ––her drawing, her family, Ray Porter. For the first time in her life, she thinks she might rather be dead.

The hours slip along, and she might have sat on her futon all day had the phone not rung around four. This time she answers.

“Are you all right?” It is Ray Porter.

“Yeah.”

“I called you last night.”

“I didn't get the message. My machine is acting funny,” she lies.

“Do you want to have dinner tonight? It's my last night here for a while.”

Mirabelle can't answer. Ray repeats himself:

“Are you all right?”

This time, she lets her tone speak for her. “I'm pretty okay.”

“What's the matter?” says Ray.

“I'm supposed to go to the doctor.”

“Why? Why do you have to go to the doctor? What's wrong?”

“No. I have to go to my . . . I take Serzone, but it stopped working.”

“What's Serzone?” says Ray.

“It's like Prozac.”

“Do you want me to take you to the doctor? Do you want me to come over there and take you to the doctor?”

“I probably should see him. . . .”

“I'll come and take you.”

Within an hour, Ray collects her, drops her off at Dr. Tracy's, and sits in his car, waiting for Mirabelle in a no-waiting zone in Beverly Hills. He can see the stream of people going in and out of this medical building and wonders how Mirabelle can afford such treatment, but it is a Neiman's employee benefit that provides her with a local doctor, and luckily, her doctor has moved from the valley, twenty miles from her apartment, to the Conrad Medical Building two blocks from her job. Ray sees a beautiful woman in her thirties exiting the building with a broad-brimmed hat pulled low over her face, hiding two freshly enormous lips. Ray Porter guesses there is a waiting period after injection while they deflate to an approximation of actual human form. He sees a vibrant Chiquita with her ass vacuum-packed into a yellow rayon wrap, her torso perched on two tree stumps. He sees what he thought didn't exist except as parody: a leather-skinned businessman with dyed black hair, his shirt open to his waist, and his chest laden with fourteen karat. He clinks as he darts across the street.

He sees a dozen or so women who have decided that overkill is best in the breast department. He wonders if they are kidding; he wonders if the men who adore them excuse their lapse in taste and love them anyway, or see them as splendid examples of woman as hyperbole. This is what he likes about Mirabelle; her beauty is uncultivated and he can trust that what is there at night will be there in the morning, too. He wonders what it is that makes him willing to sit in his car on a street, this millionaire, waiting for a twenty-eight-year-old girl. Is it his lust for her, or is something happening inside him that makes him care for her in an unexpected, unpredictable way?

He sees a family of tourists, with a sixteen-year-old daughter who is so purely beautiful that it makes him ashamed of the lewd image he fleetingly conjures.

Ray has very loose boundaries on what he considers fair game, although rarely has he allowed himself to dip below the arbitrary twenty-five-year-old watermark. What distinguishes him from the man with dyed hair who clinked across Bedford Drive a few moments ago is that whether he knows it or not, Ray is actually looking for someone. But he needs to be killed off several times by getting in too deep with the wrong person; he needs to break a heart and know that he has caused it, and to experience the sudden loss of interest that can occur within hours of a high peak of desire.

At this point in his transition from boy to man, he does not know the difference between a woman who is feasible and one who is not. This is still to come. Meanwhile, his eye roams around and focuses his unconscious on what can be a woman's smallest desirable quanta. The back of her neck seen in the shadow of her hair. The arch of her foot resting in an open sandal. An appealing contrast in the color of her blouse and skirt. These glimpses propel his desire, yet because he won't admit to himself how small the thing is that he wants, he inflates it to include her entire self, so he won't think of himself as a bad guy. Then a courtship begins, unconscious lies are told, and an enormously complex schema is structured, all to attain the mystery of an ankle that enters seductively into an oversize jogging shoe.

As Ray Porter sits in his car in this corridor of lust, where scores of women pass through his crosshairs, a desire for Mirabelle takes root and spreads. He reminds himself that she is not feeling well, but then again, she might be in the mood later, and in fact, a good fuck might be the best thing for her.

Mirabelle emerges from the Conrad Medical Building with a prescription-sized sheet of paper in her hand, comes over to the car, and explains through the lowered window that she will go across the street to the pharmacy to fill it. Ray nods and asks her if she wants him to go with her, she says no. When Mirabelle is halfway across the street, she hesitates and returns to the Mercedes. Ray lowers the window, and Mirabelle, shrinking her body like an embarrassed child, speaks:

“I don't have any money.”

Ray turns off the car, goes in with her, and pays seventy-eight dollars for one hundred tabs of Celexa, the latest miracle of chemistry that should right Mirabelle's listing ship. Back in the car, he suggests that she stay at his place for the night. Mirabelle takes this as an expression of his caring, which it is. It is just that his caring is a potion, mixed with one part benevolent altruist and one part chimpanzee penis.

He drives Mirabelle up the winding roads into the Hollywood Hills as she sags lower and lower. The Celexa will take weeks to kick in and she knows it.

“Thanks for all this.”

“That's okay,” Ray says. “Are you feeling better?”

“No.”

However, the thought that someone is taking care of her buoys her up exactly one notch from the bottom of her earlier depression. An intense headache begins to split her in half, and after Ray slots the car in the garage, he helps her to his bed.

If the headache had not appeared, Ray would have stroked his hand along her, down across a breast to her abdomen, and tried to seduce her. The headache keeps her from seeing the worst side of Ray's desire for her, and the worst side of men's desire in general. He is lucky he doesn't try, because she would have hated him for it.

Mirabelle sleeps motionlessly and silently, with her auburn hair splayed across her face and neck. Ray lies next to her, flipping the TV channels with the volume set to whisper, doing a crossword, looking at her––sometimes wondering if now would be the time to wake her up for her all-important sexual cure. But the night passes eventless, and eventually he nods off and sleeps fitfully until morning.

Breakfast is the same as usual, only this time Mirabelle's inactivity makes sense––she is ill. Ray is leaving town for ten days, and he carefully takes her home and waits while she assembles herself for her day at Habitat. Mirabelle begins to motivate herself toward cure, and she knows physical activity will be good for her.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah.”

He hugs her tightly, with his palms squarely on her sturdy back, then backs out with a wave and a good-bye.

Mirabelle vacantly labors at Habitat, lifting and hauling Sheetrock and occasionally putting on a giddy face for her co-workers that hides nothing. She declines to go out for a beer even though one of the volunteers is flirting with her. In her depression, she has accidentally put on the perfect outfit for driving Mirabelle-watchers wild. The exact right khaki shorts with the exact right T-shirt with the exact right surface tension.

Ray calls her that night to check in on her. She is feeling ever so slightly better, even if only from the placebo effect of one pill and being freed, at least for the weekend, from the monotony of the glove department. Still, she sits essentially motionless through Monday morning, separated from suicidal thoughts by only a thin veneer. She struggles all weekend to keep it from cracking.

Weeks later, Mirabelle doesn't know if she is feeling better naturally or because the Celexa is working. It feels like a natural lift, and she wonders if she needs the pills at all. But she isn't stupid, and she recalls hearing that this is a common feeling, so she keeps taking the pills daily.