“Nothing.”
“Are you going somewhere for Thanksgiving?”
“Yes.”
“Can you cancel it?” says Ray.
“I can try.” She amazes herself with this answer. “Where are you?”
“Right now I’m in Seattle, but I can be there in three and a half hours.”
Ray has felt at 4 P.M. what Jeremy once felt at midnight: the desire to be swimming in Mirabelle. Except that the distance is shorter from Seattle to Los Angeles than it is from Jeremy’s to Mirabelle’s when two people want exactly the same thing. Ray has a plane standing by, at a mere nine thousand dollars, and by the time she has hung up the phone he is out the door.
In the hours between the phone call and Ray’s arrival, Mirabelle’s body chemistry changes hourly, and sometimes a flash picture of deepest love coming her way bursts upon her consciousness. Mr. Ray Porter, twenty-eight thousand feet up, sees her two bright pink nipples resting on top of her cushiony flesh. But as diverse as these two images are, somewhere in ethereal space they align, and Ray and Mirabelle are in love on Thanksgiving Day.
Ray brings airplane food for two, which on the private service he uses isn’t bad. Shrimp, lobster, fruit dessert all wrapped in Saran. They nestle on her bed with their feast spread around them, candles burning, and he tells her how beautiful she looks and how much he loves to touch her, and later, Mirabelle takes out the gloves he has sent her, stands before him wearing nothing but them, crawls onto the bed, and erotically caresses him with the satin Diors.
They make love slowly, and afterward his hand wraps around her waist and holds her. And even though the gesture is somehow compromised by a lack of final and ultimate tenderness, Mirabelle’s mind floats in space, and the five fingers that pull her toward him are received into her heart like a psalm. It is a comforting touch, a connection however tenuous, that makes her feel attached to something, someone, and less alone.
Later, as the millionaire lies next to her in the too-small bed in the too-small room, with one arm around Mirabelle and a cat lying on his chest, they talk back and forth in small packets of conversation. Ray listens to her work woes, her car woes, and her friend woes, and Ray makes up a few woes to tell her in response. They talk back and forth, but their conversation is second in importance to the contact of his hand on her shoulder.
“Holidays can be tough on single people. I generally don’t like them,” says Ray.
“Bad for me, too,” says Mirabelle.
“Christmas, Thanksgiving…“
“…all bad,” agrees Mirabelle.
“Halloween I hate,” says Ray.
“Oh, I like Halloween!”
“How can you like Halloween? You have to figure out what to dress up as, and if you don’t you’re a killjoy,” says Ray.
“I like Halloween because I always know what to go as,” says Mirabelle.
“What do you go as? “
“Well, Olive Oyl.” Mirabelle implies a “stupid” after she speaks. Mirabelle says this without the slightest trace of irony, in fact, with glee that at least this one part of her life is solved.
Although he does not know it, Ray Porter fucks Mirabelle so he can be close to someone. He finds it difficult to hold her hand; he cannot stop in the street and spontaneously hug her, but his intercourse with her puts him in proximity to her. It presses his flesh against hers and his body mistakes her flesh for mind. Mirabelle, on the other hand, is laying down her life for him. Every time she jackknifes her legs open, every time she rolls on her side and pulls her knees up so he can enter her, she sacrifices a bit of herself, she gives him a little more of her that he cannot return. Ray, not understanding that what he is taking from her is torn from her, believes that the arrangement is fair. He treats her beautifully. He has begun to buy her small gifts. He is always thoughtful toward her, and never presses her if she isn’t in the mood. He mistakes his actions for kindness. Mirabelle is not sophisticated enough to understand what is happening to her, and Ray Porter is not sophisticated enough to know what he is doing to her. She is falling in love, and she fully expects her love to be returned once Mr. Porter comes to his senses. But right now, he is using the hours with her as a portal to his own need for propinquity.
In the morning, at a coffee shop around the corner, Ray ruins everything by reiterating his independence, even clearly saying that their relationship is not exclusive, and Mirabelle, in a logical and rational mode and believing that she, too, is capable of random dating, agrees for both of them, then adds that if he does sleep with someone else, she should be told.
“Are you sure you want that?”
“Yes,” says Mirabelle, “it’s my body and I have a right to know.”
Ray believes her, because he is naïve.
Ray stays in L.A. for three days, sees Mirabelle one more night, calls her twice, hurts her inadvertently one more time, levitates her spirit once, makes love to her again, buys her a watch and a blouse, compliments her hair, gets her a subscription to Vogue, but rarely, maybe twice, kisses her. Mirabelle pretends not to notice. When Monday finally comes, she goes to work, passing the perfume girls with confidence, inspired by the undeniable evidence that someone is interested in her.
visitor
“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 Café. 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 every-body.”
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.