New York has some
pretty big rats. (I mean the ones waddling along the stone walls of the Park at
night, not the ones showing up on the front page of the Post.) When my husband
took a job running a Hollywood film production facility I presumed we had left
New York’s rats, pigeons, cockroaches, waterbugs, and the rest of the gritty
zoologica behind; we were going to live in ocean-fresh Santa Monica with
California brown pelicans and Pacific spinner dolphins just outside our
door. It never occurred to me that
rats would also share our So Cal paradise until our neighbor, Debbie, told me
how relieved she was that Jean Pierre, another neighbor, was having his
twenty-foot tall Washingtonia filifera
palms pruned. Not understanding, I
asked why. “Ask the tree guy when
he gets here” she replied knowingly.
Later that day I
had a long discussion with the man pruning; he told me that rats like to live
in untidy palms, the ones with the dead fronds hanging down; they enjoy the
protection from the elements and the close food source that unwary humans
provide. To forestall this, the
trees must be pruned twice yearly.
Chilled, I spent the rest of the day grateful for Jean Pierre’s garden
diligence.
That
night sitting at an outside table at The Blue Plate Oysterette, watching the
sun slip behind the forty-foot King Palms lining Ocean Avenue, I idly relayed
the conversation to my husband, Jamie, as he perused financial statements from
the studio. The idea so captured
his imagination that for the entire time we lived there - literally, until we returned to the East
Coast - every time we passed a palm tree he’d grab my arm and yell “rat!” At first it creeped me out, but since I
never saw one, eventually I concluded that there couldn’t possibly be rats in every tree. Nevertheless, those invisible rodents remained secreted
inside a small, dark sliver of my mind and I cut all palm trees a wide berth .
Still rat-less,
weeks later, in mid-July we were lying on our bed watching the 11 o’clock news
when I heard a loud thwack. I turned
to Jamie. “Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“A smacking noise
outside, like a bird hit the window.”
“So maybe a bird
hit the window.”
“Jame, it’s . . .
what, 11:20; what bird flies at that time of night?”
“Maybe it’s a
bat.”
“Oooooh, do we
have bats here?”
“Maybe it’s a rat
jumping out of Jean Pierre’s palm tree.
Remember what the tree guy said.”
“Ewwwwwwwww.”
“He’s coming to
get you!” Jamie grabbed my
arm. This time I did shriek. What if the much anticipated,
palm-tree-rodent had finally arrived?
He laughed. “If you really
want to know, look out the window.”
Ours is a small
house, a landmarked turn-of-the-twentieth-century beach cottage, barely ten
feet away from an identical landmarked house, across the paved walkstreet that
forms the center spine of the historic bungalow colony. If that long-expected rat had appeared,
he was sprawled on the porch roof, really close, maybe four feet away from the
mattress. I slid Spencer, our
marmalade tabby, off my lap and faced the windows; approaching warily, I poked
one finger tentatively through the blinds.
Peering through
the slats, I saw that something sat in the center of the pitched porch roof; it
was sleek-looking with a long slender growth from one end, too sleek-looking to
be a rat, even one in overly groomed LA. And while it was kind of rodenty in color, it appeared
to have a red stomach. Was it a bloody rat?
Grabbing a long
plastic back scratcher I yanked at the blind cord, then slid up the window sash
and leaned out. I poked at the
object with the scratcher. With a
clunking noise, it rolled over and displayed more of its red stomach. Feeling somewhat safer - rats don’t
generally clunk and roll - I leaned out further and tried to drag it toward me
with the curled end of the scratcher.
It turned and clunked again, this time toward the edge. Leaning out so far I feared tumbling
out to join it on the small rooftop, I swatted again. This time it caught.
I reeled it in. It was a
brown alligator Christian Louboutain stiletto.
Once I had the
window closed, I sat on the rug examining my catch as it dangled expensively
from the scratcher’s curved end.
It caught the light dully on its sable matte finish. I lifted it gently and placed it beside
me on the pale carpet. It gleamed;
it was a left pump, its sole smooth and crimson, not yet scratched from
use.
I knew this
shoe. I had wanted a pair like
this but saleswomen in every shoe department from Barney’s to Saks had sighed
unctuously and inquired why I had not visited them sooner. After all, it was the most important
shoe of the collection and my size, six, was the most common in all of LA. Covetously, I slid my bare foot inside
the foundling’s cool newness. I
hobbled around to Jamie’s side of the bed. “Look at this.”
Intrigued by the
news broadcast, he ignored me. I
removed the shoe from my foot and waved it in front of his face. “Jame, look at this. It wasn’t a rat; it was a shoe on the
roof, a brand-new Louboutain.”
He glanced up
distractedly and nodded.
Perching on the
edge of the mattress I twirled the shoe by its five-inch spike heel. “How would this get here?” I
mused. “It’s expensive. It’s alone and they come in pairs. It’s big, too, look . . . size . . .
oooh, eleven. Wow. And, anyway, they can’t fly, so how . .
.” My voice trailed off.
Jamie looked up
from the Marie Callendar commercial and jerked his head to the right. “Her,” he said.
“Her who?”
He looked at me
intently and spoke slowly, punctuating his words with a pointing index finger.
“Her - across the walkstreet.”
Then, just before he returned his face to the TV screen, he added, “And
they can fly, by the way.”
Her Across the
Walkstreet was an Oscar-winning actress known to the tabloids as America’s
Sweetheart, a Chiclet-toothed girl-next-door, who earned tens of millions of
dollars for every movie she made.
None of the neighbors knew her any better than the average reader of Star or People because, while she and her manager-husband owned the
bungalow opposite ours, they rarely stayed there, since they also had an estate
in Malibu and another in the Palisades.
After waiting for the
next commercial to begin, I asked, “What are you talking about? What does she
have to do with a size eleven flying Louboutain?”
“It’s her shoe.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I have
met some of its relatives.”
“You can’t have;
it’s here alone.”
Jamie shook his
head, amazed by my naïveté. “More
distant relatives, then - a red Jimmy Choo, a black Givenchy, and . . . I am
pretty sure the first one was a crème Manolo. And they all knew how to fly, although some didn’t land too
well; I thought the last one was gonna break the living room window.”
My lips formed a
little “o”. He tapped my chin and
grinned. “Close your mouth or you
may catch the next one.”
It transpired that
our neighbor – America’s Sweetheart – possessed the interpersonal communication
skills of a thirteenth century Mongol.
Whenever she didn’t get her way she threw a screaming tantrum. “Threw” appeared to be the operative
word, too, because a shoe often accompanied the shriek; she wound back and
hurled, although with less precision than enthusiasm, apparently, since no one
had admitted to seeing her husband with a black eye. And as our house sat immediately opposite theirs on the
narrow walkstreet, the shoes landed most often on our porch.
I was amazed at
Jamie’s story. “When does this
happen? Where have I been?”
“I don’t know
where you are. It happens at all
different times.”
“Why didn’t you
tell me?”
He shrugged. “I
didn’t really think about it.”
“Where are they?”
Jamie swigged his
Diet Coke. “I gave ‘em back; what
do you think, I kept ‘em?”
“How?” I
envisioned his knocking on the door and bowing, ‘Your shoe, madam’ like some
Post-Modern Hollywood Sir Walter Raleigh.
“Usually I leave
them on their front steps on my way to work in the morning.”
“Really?”
He stared. “What else could I do with them?”
I considered. Fill them with lemonade and freeze
them, making shoe-shaped granitas.
Plant them with dill and tarragon for a fashionista herb garden.
Amusing, yes, but highly impractical, and nothing that my husband would have
thought of.
“I don’t
know. I just . . . wondered.”
“Yeah, well, toss
it down by the front door and I’ll drop it off on my way out tomorrow.”
“Okay. I guess.” Somehow it seemed wrong to throw it again, so I
carried the shoe to the narrow staircase and descended into the inky
darkness. I wasn’t sure I wanted
to return the shoe, although I certainly couldn’t formulate a reason for
keeping it. It was . . . associated
glory, of sorts, like bidding on a star’s detritus at those Hollywood auctions Julien’s
in Beverly Hills was always promoting.
This shoe was my own little brush with celebrity, except in this case
the celebrity’s Us Magazine life had
been found wanting. Stars! They’re just like us! They feed their kids and phone their
therapists and argue with their spouses, but their nameless neighbors have to
help them find their matching shoes after they have pitched them across
courtyards.
A tiny part of me
wanted to feel morally superior and be sorry for America’s Sweetheart, as
though my life was somehow more meaningful than hers – after all, I didn’t
throw shoes – but I couldn’t quite manage that level of hypocritical envy.
Regardless, for the first time I considered that beneath the great clothes and
red-carpet events it must be pretty weird to be her. She may well do all those real-people things but she does
them with an aging Sober Life Coach rolling along behind her and guiding her
hand while a phalanx of photographers angles to capture every misstep for
posterity.
No, she is nothing
like me. I teach high school
English and worry about rats in palm trees, not rats clutching cameras waiting
patiently for the unflattering money shot to define me to all of America.
I sat in the
darkened living room thinking until the entire colony was silent, then gently
opened the door. I tiptoed across
the paving stones and lay the shoe on the doormat. Treading softly down the wooden steps I gazed up
at Jean Pierre’s palms wondering how many eyes were observing me as I completed
my stealthy mission. However many
there were, it was fewer than the number that watched my neighbor park her
Prius in the Whole Foods parking lot.
Maybe all the rats in LA didn’t live in the trees.
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