Aftermath of Dreaming(48)
Downtown L.A. on a Friday is a driver’s nightmare. People are there only because they have to be at work, but they know that the traffic going out will get exponentially more terrible with each passing half hour after noon, so they all start leaving early. Which I think is what makes it worse. If they would just stay until the usual time, pretend it’s a Tuesday or a Wednesday, then the traffic would be okay. But they’ve never asked me.
The only reason I am venturing here today is an emergency. I got a frantic call from Dipen this morning saying that the casting they did for the necklaces makes them not hang right. How many were done? I asked him, trying to stay calm. All of them, he replied. This is the only time I’ve ever been unhappy that he’s done what he said he’d do on time. As I fight my way through the sidewalk throng to reach his building, I pray that this setback won’t make my order for Roxanne late.
Dipen rents space on a high floor in the Los Angeles Jewelry Center building, an old office tower from the twenties fronted with gorgeous sea-green tile that stands in vertical waves that protrude up the front between rows of windows reaching into a peak that I have heard holds a penthouse suite where wild Prohibition-era parties were held. The bottom of the building has been disgraced with modern and cheap-looking jewelry stores that flank the still-gracious double and revolving doors into the lobby, and a large ugly sign runs the width of the building above the stores. I usually stop for a second before I go in, my hands shielding my eyes from the ruined bottom part, and gaze up at the majestic green—such a choice—and imagine how it was way back when it was built.
But today I am one of the many who are ignoring history as I push through the doors and wait with a crowd for one of the two ancient small elevators servicing the building. The elevators in the jewelry district are notoriously slow, which make the diamond and precious gems dealers on the upper floors nervous enough to hire private security men instead of relying on the ones the building provides. Robberies happen down here all the time.
Dipen’s office is two tiny rooms that were partitioned out of a larger suite—most of the offices I pass in the long narrow corridor to reach his door are like it. People from all over the globe—India, Armenia, Korea, China, and the Philippines—are here in tiny spaces making jewelry for the United States. He grins at me sheepishly when I walk in, his dark hair falling over one of his eyes.
“He use your measurements from the sketch you left me, but no good, not working, come see.”
I follow Dipen around his desk into the other room and see the pieces for the necklaces lying on a worktable. They are shaped like tiny thin saxophones, but smooth, and the part that looks like the mouth of the horn curves back to touch the longer arm. They are meant to be attached by one end to a bronze leather cord, then the other, the part that forms a hook of itself, will hold a big semiprecious stone—a tourmaline or a checkerboard-cut citrine—by clasping a bar that the gem will be suspended from. But the weight and curve of the gold make the pieces fall in toward the gem instead of holding it straight.
“I know this works, Dipen, the prototype did. How’d we do that?”
“I had Mahee for that. This new guy, he follow measurements exactly, but no right.”
I remember how Mahee could take my designs and would instinctively shave off a little here, add a bit more gold and weight there, to make them all fall right. I wish to God he hadn’t gone back to India.
“Okay, let’s figure it out.” I pull out paper and a pen and draw a new prototype by flattening along the back and adding more of a curve on the top. I know Dipen’s going to charge me for the useless batch, and I imagine my profits on these pieces dwindling. “And he’ll melt these pieces down, right, so I won’t have to…”
“Same gold, same gold, and…” Dipen looks away for a moment, as if consulting some hidden oracle. “I knock a third off price for casting those.”
“Thanks, Dipen, you’re the best. And have him only do one first; I’ll come back and look at that.”
“Right, right, all fine,” he says, smiling and walking me toward the door.
“And the other pieces, how are they coming?”
“Fine, no problem, we make many before. Next week, come back, see necklace.”
As I enter the packed elevator to leave the building, I consider for a second getting a new caster, but then remember the horror stories I’ve heard from other designers: casters selling their designs to knockoff firms, casters being paid off by competing designers to stall orders so a talented new designer will fail, casters making pieces that are fourteen-karat gold instead of the eighteen-karat that was paid for. This setback with Dipen is deeply annoying, but nothing considering what it could be.
Sitting in traffic on First Street trying to get out of downtown, I decide to call Lizzie. Maybe I’ll jump on the freeway, take it all the way to Santa Monica and go to her store in Venice to get the check for those sales that she owes me. Her store’s phone rings and rings, no machine picking up, nothing. I know the number by heart, but I check it in my address book to make sure my fingers didn’t forget, then dial the same digits again. Nothing. Jesus, Lizzie, what kind of store isn’t open on a Friday afternoon? I am tempted to drive out there anyway—the really horrific traffic will be going the other way—and wait for her to appear, but that’s a dubious shot. I start to call Reggie to complain about Lizzie, but then don’t. He was so happy last night reading his script to me, sitting on my living room floor with Chinese food containers all around, then talking about Chopin and New Orleans and filming. It’s been pretty much all about me this week so I decide not to bother him about stupid Lizzie—it isn’t anything that hasn’t happened before, and those other times, she always paid.