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.
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.
girl friday
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.