We drove down Ventura, up Coldwater Canyon, the twists in the road like the rise and fall of Coltrane’s tenor sax. We were dancing it, embodying it as we climbed past overblown Valley ranch homes, white cinder block pierced ornamentally, black cypresses planted in unimaginative rows and geometrically trimmed, up over the top into Beverly Hills.
Now it was tree ferns and banks of impatiens and houses with two-story front doors, grass the radiant green of pool tables, the gardeners with blowguns the only humans in sight. We were entirely free. No children, no job, no foster mothers, just speed and our beauty and the soulful breath of Coltrane’s sax. Who could touch us.
She valet-parked at a hotel on Rodeo Drive, and we walked past the expensive shops, stopping to look in the windows. We went into a store so fancy it had a doorman. Olivia took a liking to a black crocodile bag, bought it with cash. She wanted to buy me something. She pulled me into a store that had nothing but sweaters, scarves, and knit hats. She held a sweater up against my cheek. The softness was startling. I realized I had not thought enough about the possibilities of physical reality.
“Cashmere.” She smiled, her overbite twinkling. “Like it?”
I sighed. I had seen the price tag.
“Good girl. But not peach.” She handed the sweater back to the shopgirl, an eighteen-year-old who smiled placidly. The store smelled of money, soft as a dream.
“Aqua is pretty,” the girl said, holding a cable knit sweater the color of spring.
“Too obvious,” I said.
Olivia knew what I meant. She found one in French blue, without cables, gave it to me to try on. It turned my eyes blue-berry, brought out the rose in my cheeks. Yet in my drawer, it could pass for something from the Jewish Women thrift store. It cost five hundred dollars. Olivia didn’t blink as she counted out fifties and hundreds. “What’s real is always worth it,” she explained to me. “Look how it’s made.” She showed me the shoulders, the way they were knit together with a separate yoke instead of a seam. “You’ll wear it your whole life.”
What was real. That’s what I learned as we moved from shop to shop. The Georg Jensen silver bangle. The Roblin pottery vase. Stores like churches in worship of the real. The quiet voices as the women handled Steuben glass, Hermes scarves. To own the real was to be real. I rubbed my cheek against my sweater, soft as a blue Persian cat.
She treated me to lunch in a restaurant under yellow-and-white-striped umbrellas, ordered us a meal composed solely of appetizers: oysters, gravlax, carpaccio. Hearts of palm salad. She explained how each dish was prepared as she sipped a glass of cold white wine and tasted first one, then another, putting her fork down between bites. I’d never seen anything so elegant as Olivia eating. As if she had all the time in the world.
“Life should always be like this.” She sighed. “Don’t you agree? Like lingering over a good meal. Unfortunately, most people have no talent for it.” She pointed out my empty water goblet to the white-jacketed busboy. “As soon as they start one thing, they want it to be over with, so they can start on the next.” He got a pitcher and refilled the glass.
“I used to go with a man who took me to the finest restaurants in the city,” Olivia continued. “And after we’d eaten, he’d stand up and say, ‘Now where shall we go?’ And we’d move on to another restaurant, where he’d eat a second complete meal, soup to dessert. Sometimes three in a row.”
She cut a small piece of the gravlax and put it on a piece of black bread, daintly spooned a bit of dill sauce onto it, and ate it like it was the last piece of food in the world. I tried to imitate her, eating so slowly, tasting the raw pink fish and the coarse, sour bread, salt and sugar around the rind, flavors and scents like colors on a palette, like the tones in music.
“A lovely man too. Intelligent, rich as Croesus,” she said, blotting her lips and taking a sip of wine. “But he lived like a tapeworm.” She gazed into her straw-yellow wine, as if the solution to the man’s greed was there. Then she shook her head when it wasn’t. “Enormous man, probably weighed three hundred pounds. A very unhappy person. I felt sorry for him. Poor Mr. Fred.”
I didn’t want to imagine her making love to this three-hundred-pound man, lying under him as he hurriedly thrust into her, so he could go again. “How did you know him?”
She fanned away a bee that was exploring her wine. “I was a loan officer in one of his banks.”
I laughed out loud, picturing Olivia as a bank employee. Nine to five, behind a desk, in gabardine and flat shoes. Eating lunch at the Soup Exchange. “You’re kidding.”
“Sure, what did you think, I was some honeychile walking Van Nuys Boulevard in a bunnyfur jacket? I have an MBA. Oh, I knew all about money, except how to get my hands on some. I was out there making payments on a Honda Accord and keeping my little apartment off Chandler, just like everybody else.”
“And the big man saved you from yourself.”
She sighed. “Poor Mr. Fred. He had a heart attack last year. His brother got everything.” She shrugged her shoulders. “But what do you expect of a man who’ll eat three dinners in a row?”
I SAT AT MARVEL’S, watching them eat. They stared at the television the whole time, raising their forks to their lips like windup toys, oblivious to whether it was tuna casserole or cat food gratine. I’d begun to cook, told Marvel I might want to become a chef, it was a good living for a woman. I was gaining weight. My ribs smoothed into the buttery flesh of my torso. I admired my breasts in the mirror, wished Ray could have seen them, cupped them in his mauled hands. I liked the way my body moved as I walked down the street. Marvel thought it was just my age, filling out, she called it. But that wasn’t it. I had been moving too fast. I had been too hungry to become a woman.
13
FULL-ON SUMMER fell like a hammer. By nine in the morning you could already start dreading how hot it was going to be. Olivia took me for rides in the Corvette, up the 101 and then out one of the canyons, Topanga, Kanan Dume, to the beach, then we’d cruise back down the coast highway, the wind against our skins bared to the sun, ignoring the shouts of men from other cars. I’d never felt so beautiful and unafraid.
Sometimes she’d make up a pitcher of rum punch and play Brazilian music on the stereo—Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil, Jobim. Astrud Gilberto sang interestingly flat, like she was half asleep in a hammock, singing to a child. We sat in the living room on the striped cotton daybed, the fans turning slowly overhead, eating mangos with ham and looking at Olivia’s pictures of Brazil. She pronounced the names of the cities in their hushing Portuguese: Rio de Janeiro, Itaparica, Recife, Ouro Preto, Salvador. Pictures of colonial cities painted popsicle colors, black women in white dresses sending candles out to sea. Pictures of Olivia at Carnival, wearing a dress of silver tinsel slit up to the armpits, her hair feathery and wild. She held a white man’s hand, he was tanned and had flat blue eyes.
“You’d love Carnival,” she said. “You dance for three days straight.”
“I hate crowds,” I said, drunk on the rum punch she’d made, sweet and heavy as a brick. “I’m always afraid I’m going to be crushed.”
“It happens,” Olivia said, nodding to the samba music. “You better not fall down at Carnival.”
After a while she got up to dance. I lay down and watched her in her head scarf and wrapped skirt, moving in time to the complex rhythms of the samba. I imagined her dressed only in tinsel and sweat, dancing with the throbbing crowd under the southern sun, the smells of rum and mangos and Ma Griffe. The music moved along her body in waves, her feet shuffling in small, hesitation steps, arms swaying like palms atop her raised elbows. Hundreds of thousands of people of every hue pulsing under the sun.