Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“You’re an old friend?”

“Yes.”

Mina stood holding the phone. She listened to the dial tone. She was late, but it was difficult to get going.

Mina’s mother left Jack long before he “disappeared.” She, her mother, rubber-banded all her credit cards together, placed them on the dresser, and left.

Mina had last seen her father on her one and only visit to Ojai. She had left Jack standing outside the Krotona Library in the Ojai village. Krotona was the name of a Southern California fin de siècle utopia. Jack told her the Krotonians read auras, didn’t wear clothing, and spoke only Esperanto. Mina said good-bye to him, he hugged her, and as they pulled apart he winked at her, a gesture so long lost and utterly familiar it held her dumb and shaken. She felt a hot rush of childhood affection, a kind of swell that closed in her throat. She stared at him beneath the Krotona sign, tan in his strange sandals, and she had to turn away fast, hot tight tears and walking, walking. Fast. She walked past the Krishnamurti Library. She sobbed now in hate of this place, she hated this place, hated being here. Mina walked so fast she didn’t notice the sun-haloed fire poppies, the buckwheat in swatches, or the gray-green thickets of shrubby oaks. She waited for her bus, unaware of the nearby citrus trees edged by low stone walls, not thinking of each stone fitted and balanced against the others by some person, slowly, some long, long time ago.

The drone of the dial tone was replaced by a wincingly highpitched whistle and a voice urging her to hang up. This was followed by the usual staccato high-volume beeps, designed to make even the most dreamy of girls pull the receiver away from her ear and return the phone to its cradle.

Lorene paced, narrating her feelings to herself. “I am feeling anger. I am angry,” she said. This didn’t help. She practiced her breathing at the bar. She tried to focus on her diaphragm, her inhalations and exhalations. Mina was hours late. Officially, one hour and twenty minutes late. Lorene had said seven, be here at seven to go over the bar construction plans, and to allow Lorene to make it to an eight-thirty Pilates class, followed by a massage and reflexology session at the St. John Spirit Gym, conveniently located four blocks from her nearly completed restaurant, Vanity and Vexation. Lorene breathed and consumed gulp after gulp of distilled water. She kept rubber bands around her water bottle. She started with ten. Her bottle held eight ounces. Each time she drained it and refilled it, she removed a rubber band. This ensured she would consume at least eighty ounces of water throughout the day, the minimum for optimal hydration, flushing of toxins, and clear urinary and colon function. She should consume up to one hundred ounces, allowing an extra eight ounces per ten cigarettes she smoked in a day. The extra water plus supplementation of vitamin C (one thousand milligrams every six hours, time-released, since C was water-soluble and not fat-soluble and would be expelled in her body fluids if not used) ensured some protection against the ravages of nicotine on her system, if not mitigating in any way the carcinogenic effects, which was certainly a losing battle, but not unsolvable, she was convinced, not impossible, but in any case a whole other supplement story, the cancer-fighting vitamins, herbs, and minerals contained in St. John Laboratories If YouMust Smoke for women, fifty-milligram tablets, $29.50 a bottle to Spirit Gym members. Mina’s extreme inconsiderateness had increased Lorene’s biostress to such a point that her system would probably render all supplements useless, anyway. The whole day a wash. And no exercise meant Lorene wouldn’t be able to eat anything tonight except for a small piece of skinless organic chicken that she would swallow in approximately four and one half minutes, and a balsamic-vinegar-drenched wild green salad that she wouldn’t finish at all. Lorene lit a cigarette and did what she wasn’t supposed to do, which was phone Mina’s house. David answered and she hung up, and tapped a new cigarette on the zinc-inlaid service bar from where she surveyed the progress of the workers.

At eight-fifteen, when Mina walked into the newly installed sixteen-foot trefoil-shaped oak double doors to Vanity and Vexation, transported from the remains of Lorene’s previous establishment, the highly successful Dead Animals and Single Malts, it was apparent Mina’s tardiness was not going to come up, Lorene merely nodding at her and then looking hard at her nearly finished bar/club room, mid-distance staring and inhaling. Lorene had been highly specific in her vision of her latest high-con restaurant/bar: a shiny, titanium-ceilinged narrow arcade, inlaid fret-patterned mosaic floors (what she described as Moroccan Neo Art Deco) with a line of low Eastern-style lacquered tables, unadorned save the exquisite but unidentical ashtrays arranged at intervals down the center. Lorene’s response to the newest round of Draconian smoking laws was a defiant smoking-themed bar; a private club with the scandalous allure of the illegal vice, with a name from Ecclesiastes and a millennial affection for decadence, it was a sort of smoking speakeasy. So it was crucial to get all the trappings of the vice, such as theashtrays, absolutely correct. Mina had been suggesting drop-bottom built-in ashtrays that could be emptied unseen and unfelt from a distance at the press of a button, or automatically at preset intervals. The question was still discussed at length between them, in the usual manner of Lorene’s listening and biting her lower lip throughout, and then proffering — almost coyly — her meticulous and conclusive analysis of the issue. “Possibly,” she said, nearly inaudibly. She sat on the floor at one of the tables. She waved Mina over.

“Consider this: the best smoking experience of your life, I mean the times you really loved it, really felt sexy and satisfied doing it,” she said to Mina.

“I don’t really smoke anymore,” Mina said.

“Okay, listen.” Lorene put her hand in front of Mina’s eyes. “The lights are low, indirect, faintly warm — the room is crowded — but! You have a table. And you have a drink — a perfect Manhattan, let’s say — and the light catches the red, it glows. And you have cigarettes and you have — what?”

“An ashtray. I thought we knew this already.”

“Yes, an ashtray, but. Do you want to reach over to the center of the table and sort of toss your ash in? No, you do not. You want your own private lovely crystal or enamel ashtray that you can drag to the end of the table, to your right or to your left, so you don’t have to concern yourself with dropped ashes, or horror of horrors, determining which resting cigarette is yours or the next person’s.” Lorene made a dramatic shuddering motion with her shoulders.

“I see your point, but then the ashtrays have to be constantly attended, because nothing is more revolting to a smoker than an ashtray full of spent butts. Then you have servers annoyingly changing ashtrays all the time, sort of remindingpeople how much they smoke, making them feel sheepish and ashamed. So the automatic ones work better, because smoking is private and shameful, so the key to comfort, the comfortenabling environment, as you call it, is discretion, is it not, Lorene? And this outweighs the object-fetish factor, no matter how quaint, of a movable individual ashtray, not to mention the pilferage factor, which—”

“Ah-ha!” she enjoined, and now she actually removed her molded-celluloid blue-tinted vintage sunglasses to reveal and flash her enormous blue eyes at Mina. How long, Mina wondered, does it take to do your eyes like that? She kept glasses of one kind or another on for approximately seventy-five percent of the day. So she had her eyes perfectly made up so that when the occasion occurred wherein she needed to whip off her glasses in some grand eureka move (such as this moment about the ashtrays), the witness to the gesture — the revelation of these eyes — nearly said “Ah-ha!” right back, and was sort of nearly won before she even started talking to you.