Feeling obscurely guilty over having nothing to do but read, work on my evocation, and read Saki, I called Ivy and, at her suggestion, started organizing and compiling her various address and telephone books. This turned out to be extremely interesting, if somewhat embarrassing when I had to check some of the older numbers. ("Hello?" "Hi, is this the headquarters for the Knights Templar in Chicago?" "Is this the what?" "Nevermind. Sorry.") While I had three address books on my lap, seven more in a circle around me on the floor, and the phone balanced on my knee, my cell rang from the couch arm, across the room. I looked piteously at Mark and he sighed, put down the notebook he was looking at, got up and brought it over.
It was Miyuki St. Ia, who wanted to know if we wanted to go out to Palm Springs with her and her husband Sebastian. "I've been trying to reach you on your ground line, but it's been all tied up," she said with a hint of reproach. Since she was calling from London, I suppose she had a right to be reproachful. "Sebastian is getting a bit...culture-lagged again, so I thought we might go out and a have a minibreak in the desert." She'd already made the reservations at the hotel. Mark and I are going to drive out to Banning tomorrow to meet their charter, and then we'll all drive the rest of the way east so we can see the dinosaurs and the windmills and so on.
It should be interesting. Sebastian and Mia are distant friends of Mark's and mine. No, I am not name-dropping, here. We don't see them very often, but I sort of think kindly of them at intervals, and when I see their names or photos in Town and Country or wherever I smile and take notice. We met them shortly after Ivy scooped us up into her life, and shared a plane ride from Heathrow to LAX with her direction to "be good and play quietly" disconcerting us all equally. As I'm sure it was intended to.
They're both more than a little intimidated by Ivy. And at the time, Mark and I were pretty intimidated by the fact that they were intimidated, so it was kind of awkward. We all thawed a bit when we started talking about Japanese literature and English history; Mia's obsessed with the works of the ladies of the Japanese court of the 10th and 11th centuries (The Pillow Book of Sei Shonogan, and Murasaki's Tale of Genji, and so on), and Sebastian is from early 1700s England and obviously therefore has a unique perspective.
In a weird way, knowing that about him and the little bit I had learned about the St. Ia family made me a lot more comfortable talking to them than I think I ever would have been otherwise. I guess because it gave them more dimension. Really they're both very sweet and a little at loose ends.
St. Ias usually have to do something (and it's usually something illegal) with their time in order to be considered adults. But after it happened, I guess Mia's parents considered that travelling back in time to meet and fall in love with a remote ancestor, and then bringing him to your time and marrying him, all counted as sufficient something. So they've got a pretty lavish allowance, and spend it jet-setting and whatnot. But they don't always seem to know what to do with their time. Mia informed me today that Sebastian is Writing A Book.
"He works on it every afternoon of the week, after he gets up and has his glass of wine."
"What kind of a book is it?"
"It's...well, it does keep changing. Right now it's a rather noir-ish thing set in Hollywood."
"Set in..? Why the hell doesn't he do a historical novel?"
"Because he's trying to branch out." She sounded indignant, so I judged I'd better just "Oh," and agree to meet their plane at two tomorrow. Well, today, actually.
And considering I'll have to get up in the morning, I'd better pack tonight. So I should probably just post this and go to bed. I wonder which parasol I should take.
