Aftermath of Dreaming(96)
With Lizzie’s shop no longer selling my jewelry—or even in existence, damn her—the solution is to get into another store, a real one that pays on time. And after Suzanne’s wedding I began thinking of working with pearls.
As I drive through my neighborhood in the September heat to get downtown, I hear the whir of a small engine growing louder with each block. My stomach instinctively tightens against what I fear the noise is, and I immediately begin praying that it isn’t, but I turn the corner and almost run into it. A large truck with a high-sided bed is double-parked in the street and a group of three men wearing straw cowboy hats and long-sleeved shirts despite the heat are the bandits blocking my way. The whirring has become thunderous, like a jetliner taking off, competing only in volume with a radio playing Spanish music that is audible when the buzzsaw one of them is toting isn’t cutting, brutalizing, and massacreing a huge California cypress tree.
Trees in Los Angeles are clipped and groomed like a porn star’s bush. When I first moved here, I thought the bare branches and small sizes were the trees’ reaction to the hot, dry environment, but eventually I understood that that had nothing to do it—people don’t let them grow. Drive along Sunset Boulevard or any street in a supposedly well-to-do neighborhood, and the trees are just nubs with small desperate clusters of leaves trying vainly to get some sun. Supposedly it all started with rogue bands that were hired by billboard companies to illegally and under cover of night cut the branches on trees lining commercial streets, so no one will miss an advertisement of yet another terrible movie we all have to see. Then I guess the idiots who move here and buy homes got the impression that that was the L.A. style, and God forbid they not be in on that, so street after street is nothing but brutal, decapitated sticks. Trees, the one thing that would cool down and shade this Saharan land, are desecrated and reduced to nothing. I have never seen anything like it in my life. I want to make everyone in Los Angeles fly en masse to the South and say, “See? This is how a tree is supposed to look, you f*cking idiot. Now just leave them alone.”
As I drive around the murderers, I have to squelch my impulse to crash into their truck. I know it’s not their fault, that they were just hired to do a job, but all I can think about is trying to stop them somehow. I hit the number on my cell phone that automatically dials Reggie. He’s already at the editing room, but I can leave him a message about it. He’s from Kansas; he understands. At least the tree outside my living room window still looks like one.
The showroom of Vivid Pearls and Gems Company, Importers and Wholesalers, is on the fifth floor of the International Jewelry Center at 550 South Hill Street in downtown. A sad row of tall, sickly palm trees, each trunk barely supporting the fronds, lines the sidewalk in front of the building, which is a large, modern, hulking affair. White horizontal slabs alternate with rows of windows giving the opposite impression of a building you can see into. Transparency and ease of access are not what jewelry vendors want in their place of business. Especially not when the building faces Pershing Square, an elegantly named plaza that holds a few groups of overly pruned trees, but is mostly a small city block of concrete with some permanently installed benches, tables, and chairs that the homeless are periodically roused out of in an effort to show the jewelry businesses that the cops really are doing something about it.
I arrive right on time for my appointment with May Tsou, the owner of Vivid Pearls and Gems, and I have a feeling it is noted and appreciated by her. She buzzes me into the first security door, and I wait inside the chamber for it to click shut behind me, then the inner door is buzzed open, and I push through it into the showroom. May is a small Chinese woman whose easy smile and unlined face hides two decades of her age and her steely-eyed business sense. I have heard stories about her. She gets the best South Sea pearls because her family has been in the business in Asia for generations, so the quality is guaranteed and that makes it worth the hoops one must jump through to buy from her. This is our second appointment. She wanted time to run a credit check on me and, I think, to talk to other wholesalers about dealing with me. When she called the other day to say come down on Thursday, I knew I was in.
She leads me into a small inner room with light dove-gray carpet, walls, and chairs. A dark, sleek table takes up most of the space in front of a doorway that leads to yet another inner room. May walks around the table and into the back room as I sit down in the chair facing her. She soon returns with long, flat black boxes that she stacks on the table. A high-powered lamp, magnifying glass, and scale are already in place. I feel like I am about to buy heroin. Not that I ever have, and I know the normal place of business for that kind of sale is not like this, but my heart is racing as if what I’m about to look at will change my life, or at least how I feel.
Which it does the minute May opens the first box. Lying inside in three segregated chambers and resting on black felt are dozens of gleaming, lustrous, shimmering pearls. Round and full and rich as if the oysters offered not a covered-up glossed-over irritant, but their own wombs. In the midst of this bedazzlement, I realize that May is looking at me with a small smile on her face.
“Beautiful, huh? Tahitian.” With a pair of very long tweezers, she picks up a perfect pearl, then holds it to the light under the magnifying glass for me to see. Her deftness with the tool makes me think of her using chopsticks, whereas when I hold tweezers to examine gems, my proficiency is thanks to eyebrow maintenance.