All About Jane's Ranch

CHAPTER THREE

Lili heard a horn blast, and then someone yelled, “Lili, Lili.” Yellow slats of light leaked through the shutters in the bedroom. The horn blasted again. Lifting one of the slats, she peered out and saw Hanes leaning against Vivienne’s old Citroen three stories below, her hands cupped around her mouth to make a horn. “Lili,” she yelled. Lili tugged at the window, but it was stuck.

“Okay, okay, I’m coming, already. Ya voy,” she muttered as she ran down the hall to the living room, Vivienne’s borrowed kimono flowing behind her like a sail. She unlatched the living room windows and called out, “Hanes, what is it?”

“Look who’s here.” Hanes tapped the car roof. Gabi stuck his head out and waved. “We’re taking Madame de Gaulle here for a drive.”

“Ven con nosotros,” Gabi said.

So Gabi had only had a one-night stand somewhere and now he was back. Or, maybe he’d thought better of it and had turned around at the airport. Well, cards or no cards, he certainly knew more than anyone. “Give me five minutes,” Lili called down.

Getting ready, Lili scrolled through her tasks for the day. Find the reporter at The Mexican Herald who wrote the article about Vivienne. Call Dr. Jolet. Touch base with Joel, though he was the last person she wanted to talk to right now. It was exhausting, the predictable things he said when it came to Vivienne—crazy, a waste of time.

As she slipped into the back seat of the Citroen, she said, “I need some decent coffee.” “I’ve been drinking the swill in Viv’s cabinets. Good Lord, I can’t believe this thing still runs.”

Hanes turned the key, and the motor grumbled, but finally started up.

“This is Gabito’s baby. He’s threatened to quit if Vivienne ever sells her. Gabi’s the reason Madame DG is alive and well and belching carbon dioxide in Mexico City.” Hanes backed out of the gate and honked. One of Fatima’s grandchildren—so Lili assumed—came running to close it. She watched the boy grab onto the wrought iron bars and swing back and forth a couple of times before he wrapped the chain around a post and fastened the lock.

“Gabi’s father was a mechanic. And a curandero. A Mayan shaman,” Hanes volunteered.

El Starbucks?” Gabi asked. “Mi amor,” he slipped his hand under Hanes’s long hair and rested it on the back of her neck. “Hay uno en Galileo and Aristoteles.”

Lili sank into the cracked leather upholstery in the back, relieved to be moving. As she listened to the hum of the engine, the whir and rasp of traffic around her, Hanes and Gabi quibbled in the front about when he had changed the oil last or if the spark plugs needed to be replaced. Hanes was oblivious to her, caught in Gabi’s charming web. “Senora Baxtair, you drive like a gringa,” Gabi teased.

Lili stared out of the rear window at the cloudless November sky and the office buildings along the Reforma glittering in the early morning sun. The lovers seemed to enjoy having an audience, and she let them prattle on as Hanes maneuvered the car through the traffic, past the Chapultepec exit sign, where drooping, dry leaves of the fresno trees filled the window frame; along the Avenida Mazaryk, where pirulines, pepper trees, hung like green lace; onto Galileo, inching slowly down the narrow street, past double-parked cars and familiar storefronts— Escada, Yves St. Laurent, then Starbucks. Hanes turned into the badly paved lot. “Gabito objects to the drive through. He wants more foreplay before he drinks his coffee.” She tousled Gabi’s hair. “Do you mind?”

“Hanes, mira.” Gabi tapped Hanes’s forearm. “He’s right there.”

“Who? What are you talking about?” Lili asked.

“Maybe he saw the car,” Gabi whispered, shrinking away from the window. “Give me a cigarette, will you?”

Hanes reached into her purse. “Lili, if you look to your right, you can see the corner of Aristoteles, where the news kiosk is. There’s a guy standing on the corner—one of Senor Cementomex’s lackeys.”

“And?”

“Ah, la pregunta perfecta.” The perfect question. She glanced at Gabi, who blew smoke out the window.

Hanes turned to face Lili. “What’s wrong is his boss.”

“Carlos Hellmann,” Gabi spit. “He owns Cementomex.”

“Cementomex,” Lili repeated.

“Look around you, baby,” Hanes drawled. “What do you see? Buildings, right? Everywhere. Constant construction over the whole country. Texas to Tapachula. So, what are all those building made of? Cement, right? Ergo Cementomex.”

Lili stared at the man by the kiosk, who hardly looked like a mogul’s assistant. His face was round and bland, his hair thinning. He wore an out-of-style suit, tapered and flared, all wrong for his chubby, squat frame.

“Suffice it to say, Senor Cementomex owns cement mixer factories, dump truck factories, quarries and by now resort complexes, hundreds of multi-screen cinemas, malls and so on and so on.”

“What does he have to do with you?”

“Nothing with me—with Vivienne.” Hanes brushed her hand across Gabi’s shoulder. “And, by association, with Gabito. Whenever he shows up at the gallery, Vivienne disappears for a few days

“So he might know where she is?” Lili motioned to the car door. “Let me out.”

“Lili,” Hanes said, “ that charming individual on the corner isn’t going to tell us anything. I would have thought the newspaper article would have brought him snooping around the house. It hasn’t happened.” Hanes winced. “Gabi, I think he sees the car.”

“He gets paid to look around,” Gabi said, crushing his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray, then reaching into his pocket. “It’s the one in the middle,” he said, tossing a ring of keys at Lili. “1-9-6-2— alarm code,” he said. “I’ll meet you later.” He opened the door and bolted down the sidewalk.

“Wait,” Lili called, then sank back in her seat, watching Gabi dart across the busy street, through traffic, then out of sight.

“This is where the money comes from, isn’t it?” Lili asked after a moment, her ears ringing from the jackhammers breaking up the pavement by a manhole.

“I think Einstein said the simplest answer is usually the correct one,” Hanes said, cutting the engine at last.

“You think my sister is his mistress? And the gallery some sort of payment?”

“As I said before, I try not to know too much.” He opened the car door. “So, how do you think they came up with the name venti latte?”

“What else do you know?” Lili asked as Hanes handed her a steaming paper cup. She breathed in the bitter smell.

“Only what Gabi tells me, and that isn’t much. The gallery was, is,” she paused, “a gift, and the house? Well, places like Vivienne’s don’t go on the market, so to speak.”

“A gift?” Nice friend, rich friend. “From this cement guy?”

“Look Lili, in Mexico, everything is under the surface, a rodent maze of compadrismo. I don’t ask. That way if I’m kidnapped and tortured by the Mexican mafia, I can’t squeal.”

“What do you mean the Mexican mafia?” Lili imagined Viv tied up in a ditch in Juarez.

“A joke, Lili. Not funny, I guess, under the circumstances. But don’t look so shocked. Asi es.” That’s just the way it is. Hanes lifted her cup, her eyes darting to the wall of tinted windows. Outside, Lili could see the Sheraton Hotel rising behind an enormous fountain. Sheraton, Starbucks, almost like home—but not quite, not at all.

Lili glanced at the kiosk, but the Cementomex man had disappeared. Lili tried to read the lines in Hanes’s face, the tracery of tension, a map to a place she didn’t know. “Tell me why I should trust you.”

“It behooves me to help you, so to speak. Vivienne pays Gabi’s salary. Call it enlightened self-interest.” Hanes dabbed her lips with a napkin. “Take it from an old ex-pat. Things are different here, Lili. Enlightened self- interest is the best we get from each other.”

“Rather cynical, don’t you think?” Lili said.

“Try being a gullible, naïve, middle-aged gringa in Mexico. See where that gets you. My advice, dahlin, is you got to toughen up, baby. ”

After Hanes drove off, Lili walked toward the gallery, trying to shake off his cynical despair. Her sister was trading favorocitos with a cement magnate for a house, a maid, a glamorous livelihood. Inevitable, according to Hanes’s worldview, and certainly possible, knowing Vivienne. In the distance, Lili heard the fast rush of cars on the periferico overpass that bordered this elegant colonia. She turned left on Aristoteles and walked through Parque Lincoln under a bright green cacophony of leaves—pine, pepper, ash and eucalyptus. Lili crossed over to Dumas and headed down the shady street that led to her sister’s gallery, remembering how this had been a stately, residential neighborhood. The boutiques and galleries had been fine homes where nannies had pushed perambulators and gardeners pruned hedges. Now Mexican rock stars whizzed by in Range Rovers, and the upper-middle-class had moved on, up the mountain where they could breathe, where birds didn’t fall out of the sky, dead from contaminated air. Some things changed, Lili knew, and some things stayed the same—like Vivienne, always on the edge.

Lili walked another block, and suddenly, there was the small brass plaque next to an anonymous iron garage door—The Palace of the Blue Butterfly, the Nahuatl goddess’s glyph engraved underneath. Lili would never have noticed it had she not been looking. But then, everything in Mexico was hidden like that. You had to know.

Lili glanced around, trying to get her bearings. Across the street, she saw a synagogue, a remnant of the old days. Reform back then, now it was Orthodox. In the front yard, skinny yeshiva boys played soccer, their tallis flapping around them as they ran. She noticed the bodyguards watching her and shook the keys Gabi had thrown her way. On her third key, the handle turned and the door fell open. Down a flight of stairs, surrounded by bright blue walls and pots of horsetail reeds was the second entrance. Lili tried the other keys until the polished pine door opened, and she was overwhelmed by the smell of turpentine and stale air. Stepping into the dark room, she shut off the bleating alarm and sank down on the stone banquette next to the door.

She flipped a switch on the wall near her, and spots of recessed track lighting shone on modern silver bowls and platters in a display case. Behind it, floor to ceiling glass panels separated the gallery from a garden. Lili flipped another switch and water, sprouting from a volcanic stone in the garden wall, cascaded into a trough, then flowed past papyrus reeds. A polished wood coffee table topped with a vase of dead coreopsis stood on tezontle stones near the banquette. Lili reached for a card leaning against the silver vase. “Vivienne, mi amor, donde estas? Llamame cuando regreses C.” Vivienne, my love, where are you? Was this the cement guy? Carlos Hellmann? Was she running from him, too?

Lili walked through an arched passageway and switched on another track of lights that illuminated rows of colorful, modern canvases and a baroque baptismal font filled with slimy water and brown gardenias. Surely Vivienne could afford a cleaning lady, but obviously no one had been here, not even Gabi.

Finally, after locating the bathroom and a janitor’s closet, she opened the door to Vivienne’s office, but there was no overhead light, just an answering machine blinking, red-black-red-black. On the desk, she felt around for a lamp, then clicked a switch and a circle of light spread over piles of papers, invoices, and boxes. Picking up a pencil and an old envelope, she sat down at the desk and punched “play” on the answering machine.

“Amor, hablo Carlito. Estoy in el estudio en el desierto. Llamame en mi cellular, ok? Ciao. Te amo.” Someone named Carlito, phoning from the desert, Lili scribbled. Seemed strange.

“Vivienne? This is Carolyn in Dallas. You want to give me a call, hon, about the exhibit?”

“Amor, fui a tu casa y me dijieron que no saben donde fuiste. Estoy un poquito preocupado.” Lili recognized the voice, Carlito again.

“Hello, this is Cynthia Allen calling for Dr. Joel Brockman. We’re trying to reach Lili Golden. Could you please have her call Dr. Brockman’s office?”

Lili pressed “stop”, startled to hear Cynthia’s voice.

Flipping through Vivienne’s Rolodex, she searched the “C”s for Carlos or Carlito, then scanned through the “H”s, but there was no Hellmann, either. She went back to the letter A. All she needed to find was one word, one clue to her sister’s whereabouts. Sifting like Psyche and her seeds, she kept flipping through the Rolodex, hoping to find a Carlos or Carlito listed on one of the cards, but there was nothing. Another question for Gabi if he ever showed up.

She dug through the desk, looking for a calendar or Vivienne’s Blackberry, but there was no method for arranging the mess piled on the desk, spilling onto the floor.

She picked up the phone and called Joel’s house on Cupertino Street. As she listened to the dull ring, she imagined the ginkgo tree now bare in his front yard, the dry sweet gum leaves rattling under some professor’s bike wheels.

“Joel,” she said when the machine picked up, her chirpy greeting sounding distant and metallic. “It’s more complicated than we thought.” She paused, imagining where Joel might be at that moment. She didn’t know which colleague or secretary, but as she leaned back in the squeaky desk chair, she understood just how little power she had over what he did. Try being a naïve, middle-age gringa anywhere, Lili should have replied to Hanes.

“I’ll call in a few days,” she told Joel’s machine, catching her breath as she did. She waited for the usual pang of jealousy to twist inside her, but it wasn’t there. For the first time in years, she didn’t really care where he was. He could do as he pleased. She wanted to find her sister.

After locking up, she walked up the stairs to the street level and felt suddenly dizzy. Her stomach growling, she decided to take a cab to the Conasuper and pick up some pasta, then walk back to Vivienne’s, cook a simple meal and try to get some rest.

Walking toward the taxi sitio at the Archimedes Circle, Lili wondered how her classes were going and if she should check in with the substitute, but she’d left videos of Univision news reports for the next three days and had faxed in a quiz before leaving. Then school would break for the long Thanksgiving weekend—surely she’d be back before the sub needed more from her. Her life in California felt so far away from here. At the end of the block by the Jaguar dealership, she turned left on Avenida Mazaryk and headed south towards the line of taxis.

As Lili unpacked her meager groceries—she’d been too tired to wander the aisles for more than pasta and tomatoes, coffee and wine—she felt nervous and buzzy, like Toledo’s swarm of bees. On the way up, she’d checked in with Fatima, who’d said that Carlito hadn’t been around in weeks. She was vague on how many. Too vague, Lili thought.

What Lili wanted more than anything was a good talk with someone she could trust. She really had only one confidant, Miriam, who had taught world history teacher in the classroom next to hers, but she was halfway around the world— no phone, no nada—now that she’d finally broken free of Woodside High’s “golden handcuff,” as she called it. She’d sold the Eichler her ex-husband had coughed up in their divorce settlement for over a million and then was out.

Lili picked up an onion as it rolled toward the edge of the counter. After a brandy and two cups of black coffee at Tosca’s on Columbus in the city, Miriam had asked when Lili was going to get off her tush and do something about her own sterile life. Joel, according to Miriam, was a prig who’d been living off of Lili’s creative energy for years, and the district just trotted her out as their star teacher to seduce the Silicon Valley billionaires into donating money for the computer lab. It was time for her to climb out of the coffin. What would Miriam say about Lili darting around Mexico City trying to hunt down Vivienne? Anything, to Miriam, was better than being buried alive.

Lili slid a bag of ground coffee into the empty freezer, imagining the wind waving across the wheat fields in Greece where Miriam had bought a whitewashed farm house on an island, saw her skin turning brown in the sun as she finally started to write poems on an old wooden table under the fruit trees on her land, no longer stuck behind a desk, her pockets full of chalk dust, making lesson plans. Lili wondered if she could ever stop being so tied to duty, responsibility, if she would ever stop feeling she had to atone for the world’s inequities?

After digging through Vivienne’s disorganized drawers for a corkscrew, she poured herself a glass of wine, remembering the night after Miriam had left, how lonely she’d been, wandering from room to room, empty windows staring back, silent and flat, the only sound a car downshifting, its tires sloshing in the late spring downpour. The heavy, clouded sky had looked dirty and gray. Around ten, she’d called Joel’s office, just to hear a voice, and the art history department machine had picked up. Lili had listened to the beep, the operator’s recorded voice saying, “Please hang up and try again,” then nothing.

Pouring canned tomatoes into a small pan, Lili was struck by the comforting familiarity of kitchen utensils. She searched the cabinets for a pasta pot and filled it with water. As it heated, the blue ring of gas hissing the drops of water from the bottom, she swirled the wine around in her glass, watching it drip down the sides and wondering what her sister might be doing.

As she set a place for herself on the coffee table in the living room— napkin, placemat, wine glass, she decided to put Cuban danzon music on the CD player, which she found hidden away in a mahogany armoire. It struck her then—-she and Joel never danced. Their entertainment? Lectures where Joel knew the speakers; plays where he knew the writers. Even eating in expensive restaurants entailed a cerebral critique. Once she had tried to get him up on the dance floor at his Department Chair’s son’s Bar Mitzvah, but he’d refused, told everyone at the table he couldn’t stand the competition. No one had believed it when he’d told them Lili enjoyed chaperoning the school dances, that she and the AP History teacher always won the Old School dance prize the kids gave out. After the laughter died down, Joel’s colleagues had stared at her like she was some bimbo. Then someone had broken the awkward silence. “High School teacher. Dear God, you’re a saint.”

Oh well, Lili sighed. She had more serious worries than Joel’s snobbery. She shut her eyes and let the music and wine soothe her. A fire would take away the damp chill that settled in the room after dark. Sitting cross-legged in front of the grate, she began to wad up an old newspaper from the basket by the fireplace, stuffing the paper under the grate and piling on the kindling in a teepee. She struck a match, lit the paper, and then smoke spilled out of the fireplace in a suffocating cloud.

She sloshed her wine on the burning paper, and when the small fire died out, she reached into the fireplace and yanked the flue. Something black fell from the chimney.

“Mother of God,” Lili shrieked, leaping away. All she could think of was bats, rats, but the black thing didn’t move— it seemed to be dead. Moving closer, she saw a black plastic garbage bag collapsed like a parachute. Stabbing it with the poker, she dragged it out of the fireplace and lifted the edge, glimpsing a small folder with accordion pleats.

Hearing the lid rattling on the pot of water, she turned off the flame, then peeled the file away from the melted plastic. On one side, there was a scotch-taped Frida Kahlo print, with,“Mi vida,” written underneath in Vivienne’s thin scrawl. My life. Frida’s face had been cut out and replaced with an irregularly cut circle of Vivienne’s so that Vivienne, not Frida, was standing on some kind of gravestone, on the border between two worlds. The truth was Vivienne often crossed another border, the one between the cold tomb of depression and the electric cattle prod of mania. When she was on the electrical end of things, she was careless, promiscuous, dangerous.

Untying the ribbon, Lili glanced at the compartments, but nothing seemed to be organized, at least not alphabetically. She up-ended the folder onto the floor and began to pick through the items, trying to find a pattern in the contents. Paper scraps with numbers, a few postcards, a dried rosebud—hard and papery, its petals crumbling on the parquet—coins, pottery shards with glyphs. Wasn’t that supposed to be bad luck? A locket Lili remembered coveting from childhood, the one her mother had given Vivienne for her fourteenth birthday. Lili had always wanted it. The gold chain, no thicker than a hair strand, was knotted in two places. She traced the etching on the gold oval and tried to open it with her fingernail, but it wouldn’t budge. On the back, there was a tiny but elaborate letter K engraved. Who was K, she wondered as she set it to one side and picked up a sepia-toned picture of Vivienne peering through the face of a wooden mariachi figure, smiling, a big sombrero on her head. Lili turned it over, saw handwriting she didn’t recognize—“Xochimilco,” one of those tourist places, no date.

Rifling through several pages of paper that appeared to be stained with tea, she reached for her reading glasses and scanned the lines Vivienne had scrawled in gold magic marker: “Listen! You must not panic at the blue light; the clear, piercing, brilliant, frightening supreme wisdom clear light. It is the light ray of the Transcendental Lord, the oneness of Infinite Potential. Immortal one, you who were called Vivienne in this life, the smoky light of hell shines before you along with the wisdom light.” This was Vivienne when she was high, manic.

There were some official looking documents written in Mexican legaleeze dealing with residency and operating a business, Viv’s passport—so she hadn’t left the country, at least not with this passport—a bank statement from Banamex, Av. Reforma, Col. Cuauhtémoc. She unfolded it and looked at the balance—over one million pesos. Even divided by ten, that was more money than she had imagined. With that kind of money, Vivienne could plan on being gone a long time. Lili looked at the date on the statement. September twenty-second.

Shaking the file, a scrap of newspaper fluttered out—an article from Proceso about NAFTA. On the other side was a picture of Alejandro Perez-Luna, standing in a crowd. Above him a sign said Local 638—some sort of union meeting, she guessed. The caption read, “The Senator from the State of Mexico is a Man of the People.” Why had Vivienne kept this? Were they lovers? What about Carlito? Hellmann?

Lili filed the picture from Xochimilco under X, the bank statement under B, the locket under L, the picture of Alejandro Perez -Luna under P. Feeling suddenly ridiculous, she stuffed everything else under V and slid the file into the chiffonier with the pills from the medicine chest.

In the bathroom, she washed her hands, then dried them on her sister’s embroidered linen. Funny how Vivienne, who struggled with the demons of madness, managed to make a life where beauty was always present. She held onto things that meant something—the antique towels, the rosebud, the locket. Whereas Lili, the sane one, had lifted her life to her lips and blown, the filmy spores scattering everywhere, until she was left with nothing but a dry stalk. What kind of madness do you call that?

Returning to the kitchen, she raised the flame under the pasta water, and when the water had boiled for three minutes, she dropped in the dry spaghetti. As she was draining it—the steam softening the curls around her face—she heard a firm rap on the door.

“Can we come in?” Gabi asked. Hanes stood behind him.

“I was just making dinner.” Lili thought Gabi might take a hint, offer to return, but he walked past Lili into the living room, followed by Hanes.

“I need a whiskey,” Gabi announced, opening the liquor cabinet and pouring scotch into one of her mother’s Baccarat highball glasses, the ones Vivienne had claimed for her own.

“What happened here?” Hanes asked, pointing to the melted garbage bag.

“I wanted to light a fire,” she answered. “Vivenne had stuff hidden up there in that bag.” She watched Gabi swirl his scotch around the cut crystal glass, shocked at the bitter taste of envy rising in the back of her throat. What had Vivienne said? That she deserved those glasses, because Lili lived a life of the mind.

“Where were you? I waited at the gallery for over an hour.”

“Tenia compromisos.” I had commitments. Gabi walked over to the windows, his back to her. “It’s going to storm.”

A storm this time of year was strange, Lili knew, not the season. She waited for Gabi to make some kind of prophecy.

“You didn’t come here to tell her that, Gabito.” Hanes took the whiskey glass from her lover’s hand and drained it. “Tell her. Andale.”

“Look, life goes on, no?” Gabi snatched the glass and poured another scotch. “Senora Baxtair thought I should tell you since you’re here now.”

Hanes held her hand to her chest in mock pain. “I confess. I called the paper. Now, I may never be forgiven for alerting you to this problem at a most inopportune time.”

“Forgiven?” Lili sputtered.

Vivienne, Gabi interrupted, had been asked months ago to host an important art patron soiree the next night, and he intended to carry on as if everything were normal. He’d spent the afternoon calling the florists and caterers. “You can read Vivienne’s notes. I’m following her plan.” He handed Lili a Xeroxed page of notes, grey and slanted.

Lili glanced at her sister’s handwriting. Thousand white votives. White orchids. Trio from Veracruz. White guayaberas. Doves. “This,” Lili said, “is simply not appropriate.”

Gabi set his glass down on the coffee table. “If we don’t follow through with this, it will destroy our business. I’m telling you, so you’ll know what to say when you come. You’ll tell them she’s in Berlin, that she asked you to come in her place to help sort out the mix-up.”

“I don’t care about the business. I want to find my sister.”

This is what Vivienne would want, he assured her. “May I be frank? No lo chingas.” Don’t fuck this up. Everyone, he told her, will be there—Javier, Gironella, Carlito.

The first two names were meaningless to Lili, but not the last. Perhaps Lili could introduce herself, pry something out of him. “Berlin?” she asked as Gabi and Hanes walked to the door. “Who came up with that one?”

“Oh, Berlin is all the rage now,” Hanes said.

“It’s something she would do,” Gabi added.

Lili had to admit he was right. He knew her sister well after all.

Around nine that night, the storm Gabi had predicted started in earnest, pummeling the roof, washing down the gutters. Raindrops splintered in the car lights circling the Plaza Rio de Janeiro, but none of the cars stopped to open the gate. No one brought Vivienne back. Lili paced. She didn’t trust Gabi. Why should she? He seemed perfectly content with the state of affairs—Vivienne gone, him in the catbird seat. Or maybe he knew something—where Vivienne was—and that explained why he was so sanguine. Lili poked the fire with an andiron and changed the CD, then padded out to the terrace, the patio slick on her bare feet, the cold, grimy rain dripping down her neck, plastering her hair to her forehead.

The lights were on in Perez-Luna’s apartment. Lili moved farther onto the terrace, letting the rain fall over her. A sodden newspaper lay on a wooden table, a coffee cup next to it. He’d offered to help, hadn’t he? She could just ask. Then she remembered Yarabi Molino. Now was not the right time. What if Lili interrupted them? She turned and locked the door behind her. What if she didn’t have the cojones for this, after all?

In the living room, she threw another log on the fire. Hearing a sudden burst of laughter from the mansion next door, she peered out the window. Two women ran shrieking across the street, newspapers over their heads. She wondered who they were, what happiness they were feeling as they ran together across the street.

Lili poured some more wine. How many was that? Was she losing track? Had her father’s drinking started before the blacklist, back in Hollywood, or after he’d been exiled to Mexico? She put the wineglass down and sank to the sofa, fidgety and worried. “Carlito will be there,” Gabi had said.

The rain, one of those mountain storms, stopped as suddenly as it had come. Lili took her wine to the terrace and walked barefoot over the wet tiles. A wing of light passed over her, then dipped and fell to the ground. She blinked into the dark. On the other side of the wall in the neighboring mansion’s yard, a group of women were running in the dark with flashlights, swirling the pale beams in figure eights and spirals. She heard laughter, and the light swiped her again. She waved weakly, feeling slightly stupid and guilty, as if she’d been spying, then returned to the apartment and locked the door.

In the bathroom, she sat on the edge of the tub and washed the dirt off her feet, wiping them dry on the bath mat. Looking down at the streaks on the white rug, she remembered Vivienne’s all-white party plans, and a sick feeling descended on her.

White, she remembered, was the Buddhist color of death.