The Diamond Lane Read Online Free PDF Page A

vegetable?”
    â€œWhere’d it happen?”
    â€œGateau on Melrose.”
    â€œGood God, I ate there a couple weeks ago.” Solly seemed both baffled and repulsed. He had never heard such a thing. Wasn’t bad luck and misery and brain surgery and estranged sisters the stuff of TV miniseries? How tasteless to drag them into real life.
    He ran his hands over his balding head. There were a couple of dime-size dark-brown blotches on it. Watch your karma, Mr. Pre-Cancerous Condition, Mimi said silently to the blotches. It could happen to you. Anything can happen to anybody.
    â€œI knew you were miserable, but I didn’t think anything was wrong,” he said.
    â€œGod, Solly.” Brilliant. He should give up the film business and be a brain surgeon instead. Oh, she thought, oh, a brain surgeon. Everything suddenly seemed unfairly ironic, which was troubling. Mimi didn’t believe in irony. She felt it was more a literary convention. She put it in the same category as deus ex machina . The tears started up again. She felt them tip over the edge of her eyes. Fuck the mascara. She resigned herself to being a mess.
    â€œEveryone in the business is miserable,” said Alyssia. “It’s all relative.”
    â€œShe’s having surgery right this minute,” Mimi sobbed.
    â€œWhat can I do? What can I do?” asked Solly.
    â€œIt’s just so awful,” said Mimi. “I’m sorry.”
    â€œTake some time off. Please. Take all the time you need.”
    Mimi wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She stared at the framed poster over her typewriter, taking deep breaths, trying to calm herself. The poster was from a terrible movie directed by one of Solly’s clients, one which Solly would defend to his death. He refused to let anyone, including himself, think that he’d made an obscene commission on a movie that should have been put out of its misery when it was still just an idea. And here he was, now, offering her time off. People were wrong when they said people in the film business had no morals.
    â€œAll the time I need?” asked Mimi.
    â€œWell, a long lunch why don’t you? But be back by three. I gotta talk to New York today. And Rocky –”
    â€œâ€“ in a minute.”
    â€œFine, fine.” Solly looked at his plastic diving watch. He tapped the face nervously with his fingertips. He owned therequisite gold Rolex but was afraid to wear it for fear it’d get dinged up, wet, or stolen.
    Mimi took deep breaths. Alyssia came over and rubbed her back between her shoulder blades. Mimi suddenly felt good and calm, but kept on with the deep breathing. Steeped in misery though she was – it was awful , she wasn’t saying she liked the idea of her mother getting cracked on the head with a ceiling fan – she did enjoy being someone who had something in her life which warranted deep breaths. Deep breaths were the domain of mothers in labor, actors, athletes, mystics. People at the center of Drama.
    â€œMaybe Alyssia has some Kleenex, or, or something.” Solly waved in her direction and wandered back to his office, pulling on his lower lip. “Jesus,” he said. “Half the places in town have ceiling fans. Alyssia, get me Rocky Martini. Please.”

2.
    THREE MESSAGES AWAITED MOUSE FITZHENRY IN Kisangani: one from the Office of Native Affairs in Kinshasa, for whom she and Tony Cheatham were producing the Zairian wedding film; one from Camisha, the girl in Nairobi who was taking care of their house while they were away; one that read, simply, “Mowz FitHenry fone home.” The prefix was familiar. Either her mother or her sister had called. Besides Tony they were the only two who used her nickname.
    Mouse and Tony had just spent three weeks in the lturi forest shooting a BabWani wedding ceremony, part of Marriage Under Mobutu: Tribal Wedding Customs in Contemporary Zaire . From there it had been two days