Vainglory

In august juliette’s severance money began to dwindle, and since she was still mulling over what to do next, she decided to rent out the spare room she had been using as a painting studio. The first person to phone was a woman named Deirdre. “I don’t even need to see it in person,” she said. “I have a good feeling. If you send me a lease right now, I’ll sign it. Do you have a fax machine? I have a fax machine.” She was moving to L.A. from Sacramento for work, she explained, and the pictures Juliette had posted online looked nice enough, and she would love to have a place where she could move right in, and was it OK that she had a dog, a chow chow called the Gipper? Juliette paused and looked around her kitchen, at its clean tile countertops and the hanging copper pots her mother had given her after she despaired of Juliette, who was thirty-four, ever getting married. The house was not large, but it was light and airy and on a quiet street in Los Feliz. She liked her solitude, but she had lived with other people before. This woman sounded friendly enough, and if Juliette gave her the room, then the hassle of finding a renter would be over before it had even begun.

“OK,” said Juliette, “but there will be an extra $500 deposit for the dog.”

“Wonderful!” said Deirdre. “Now, you should know, I have quite a bit of furniture, more than will fill just the one room, but I was thinking I’d bring it all and whatever’s left over I’ll just put on eBay or have a yard sale or something. I have a lot of kitchen stuff, too—I love gadgets. My daughter says at least she knows what to get me for Christmas. Anyway, we’ll just go through and see what we want to keep and what we don’t. No sense having two of everything.”

“Fine,” said Juliette. “That sounds fine.”

Two weeks later, a moving truck pulled up outside Juliette’s house, followed by a station wagon that disgorged a fat woman with curly orange hair and a bearish orange pom-pom of a dog. “Hello!” sang Deirdre, waving both arms over her head while the Gipper lifted his leg on Juliette’s mailbox.

Standing just inside her threshold, Juliette knew she needed to go outside, shake this woman’s hand, and watch the invading army of furniture rumble down the ramp that the moving men were lowering like a drawbridge from the back of the truck. But she was overwhelmed by a queasy longing to shut the door on all of it. She should have looked for a new job instead of pouting for six months and spending her money on paints and canvases that had yielded only trite jumbles of leering, faux-expressionist faces. She should have bought an apartment instead of a house. She should have found someone to marry. Feeling sorry for herself, she walked down the front path and across the yard she had landscaped with indigenous plants—cacti and manzanita and tall, rustling grasses—and reached for Deirdre’s plump, ring-studded hand.

Deirdre had told the truth when she said she had more than one room’s worth of furniture; she had enough furniture for a castle, enough miscellaneous junk for a whole flea market. The men packed Juliette’s former studio so tightly the only way to move through it was along narrow trails that wound like goat paths around towers of Deirdre’s stuff, and then, even though half her possessions were still waiting out on the driveway, Deirdre declared she felt bad for the moving guys, said they had done enough, and sent them home. Standing under the evening sky and surveying her worldly goods, she put her hands on her hips and laughed. The sound was rollicksome and carefree—the kind of laugh, Juliette thought, that insisted on the laugher’s good nature and good intentions. “Oh, crap,” Deirdre said. “I should have known this...