Aimee told herself it was just the smell as she turned right and bolted for the big glass doors that lead to the street. The smell of the hot dogs is too much. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. I need to go home right now. The adventure in Middle Earth was over for Aimee, at least for the night.
Aimee’s chin was wiggling, spasming with tears that she wanted to hold on to until she got back into her own apartment. She sucked it all into herself and did her best not to waddle as she ran from the theater.
She paid the taxi driver too much and sprinted into her building where she sat on the couch and admitted to herself that her husband had left. It all crashed in on her.
She wanted to get up and make something. That always made her feel better. She wanted to write something tragic and cathartic about her present situation but then she’d have to read it in front of Lux. Her writers’ group had been ruined by some tarted-up, pert-breasted, red-haired, twentysomething idiot. They’d have to get off the erotic bent immediately. How could Aimee listen to Lux go on about anything sensual while picturing her wrapped around saggy old Trevor?
What the hell did Lux see in him? He was old and not rich. And Lux! She was a dodo! Not exactly a trophy with her loud wardrobe and her lowly status. It was all wrong.
Aimee grabbed her knitting bag and tried to concentrate. It was so nice at the knitting store surrounded by other clacking needles and charming conversation, but in Aimee’s real life knitting was impossible. Still, Aimee needed to make something. Since all passageways to the comfort of creating were temporarily closed to her, Aimee picked up the phone and started to make some mischief.
“Hey Brooke, Aimee here. You there? Call me back as soon as possible! You will not believe who I saw sitting in this bar around the corner. Kissing! Are you there, Brooke? I’m at home. Call me as soon as you get in.”
Aimee hung up the phone and sat quietly for a moment, wondering if Margot Hillsboro might be interested in gossiping about Lux’s sex life.
6. Belleview
EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, LUX extracted herself from Trevor’s bed and let herself out of his apartment. He planned to take her shopping later that morning, but first she had a nagging errand that had to be run. She did not, under any circumstances, want Trevor to join her, so she slipped out before he awoke. She skipped down the front steps of his apartment building. Her first stop of the day was the bakery at the end of his street, then onto the subway.
Lux walked up the long hallway looking for the room number the nurse had given her. She shifted the cake box from one hand and to the other and worried that he would cry because it was not chocolate. She tried not to look into the rooms as she passed. The displays of human weakness in blue hospital gowns juxtaposed against the kindness of cheerful visitors started her head spinning stories that she did not know how to purge.
She entered room 203 and, as the nurse said, found him in bed C. He was sitting up, happily chatting at his neighbor in B. When Lux entered she drew the green curtain around his bed.
“Is that cake?” he asked before hello.
“Yeah, Daddy,” Lux said, “the kind you like.”
“Black and whites?”
“No, Daddy, carrot cake. You love this kind.”
He lay back against his pillow and thought about it, trying to remember when he had loved carrot cake. He couldn’t find any notation of such a fact anywhere in his brain, but then, there were so many holes that sort of information could slide through.
As a young man, he had wanted to be anything other than a fireman. Unfortunately, his own father insisted that all males living in the Fitzpatrick home would grow up to be firemen. His heart wasn’t really in the job. One afternoon his disregard and his hopeful, wandering mind got him trapped under the wrong beam at the wrong time. He lived through the collapse of the building, but a broken back put him on permanent disability and prescription painkillers.
In some ways he was a grand success. He was alive and walking in spite of his injury. He was cheerful in spite of multiple surgeries, constant pain, and limited mobility. He had survived a sadistic, controlling father. A gentle man, he broke the cycle of father-child violence that stained his ancestors for generations prior. His disability payments, combined with the illegal sale of some of his more interesting prescriptions, had fed and sheltered his family of six. He truly loved and cared about his children. When her first grade teacher quietly suggested to him at a parent-teacher conference that Lux might be retarded, Mr. Fitzpatrick adamantly insisted that everyone immediately stop smoking pot around his beloved daughter, at least on school nights.
In some ways he was a great dad. He was kind and usually at home. He loved to play games and always wanted to make brownies. He was open, available to talk and happy to help his children through their problems. Unfortunately, most of his advice was strained through the colander that was his brain. When Lux was being bullied on the schoolyard, he advised her that even if someone hits you first, you can never, ever hit back. But spitting is ok.
He was currently hospitalized for a bleeding ulcer. The prescription pills helped him with the pain in his legs and back, but they ate out bits of his stomach. He tried to compensate, experimenting with a combination of illicit and prescribed marijuana. For years nothing worked. In pain and despair he began to waste away. When Lux was in third grade he finally solved the problem. In a linen closet in their home, under specially ordered hot house lights, he grew a small, but widely praised crop of Cannabis, subspecies Indica. These highly hallucinogenic buds eased his pain, but contributed to his fear that Lux was in danger of swallowing her tongue. To combat the latter, he kept her home from school for a whole week, staying with her constantly and feeding her soft foods that he insisted on preparing himself. Lux remembered it fondly as one of the best weeks of her life.
“How you feeling, Daddy?” Lux asked as she sat down next to his bed.
“Good. You?” he replied.
“A’right,” Lux told him. “Job’s ok. And I got a boyfriend.”
“Sounds like you’re heading straight for the stars.”
“Yeah well, why not, right?”
Lux’s father smiled and patted her hand.
“And how are my boys?”
“Ian’s still in Utah. Sean’s up for probation and they let Joseph out early. He’s home now, which is really nice. Mom’s so happy. You wouldn’t believe it could happen, but he got even more muscley this time,” Lux said.
“And how’s my little Patrick?” he asked with a soft smile.
“Uh, well, his fur is growing back.”
Lux smiled and her beloved father beamed back his great pleasure.
“All good news then,” he said.
“Yep,” she agreed. “Listen, Daddy, I came by cuz I wanna ask you something about your sister.”
“Which one? The whore or the housewife? Or the lesbian?”
Mr. Fitzpatrick only had two sisters.
“Estella.”
“Whore.”
“How’d she get to be that way?” Lux asked.
“It’s like when you hard-boil eggs. Some are hard to get out of the shell and others just slide right out,” Lux’s father pontificated from his hospital bed.
Lux thought about it for a while.
“Well, wuzzat mean? That she was just like that?”
“Yes. Because that was what she decided to do after my father kicked her out of the house for having a baby at sixteen with a guy who wouldn’t marry her. Navy fucker just passing through town. She coulda scrubbed floors or picked a guy who woulda married her, like your mom did. Decisions. Decisions.”
“She had a baby?” Lux asked. Lux had never heard anything about Auntie Who-ah having a baby.
“Yeah. She gave it away. I used to like to pretend I was her give-away baby cuz she would come bring me ice cream and patch me up when your grandfather got crazy on my head. I heard from the lesbo that she died with no money and no friends.”
Lux knew that Auntie Wh
o-ah had died with substantial money and property to her name. She had left bequests to several charitable organizations and one grateful niece. She gave good advice like, be strong and true to yourself. Lux could imagine Auntie Who-ah would bring ice cream and comfort to a frightened little boy, but could not imagine Auntie Who-ah, who had always told her to make sure she did the things that made her happy, would have allowed a crappy family and an unwanted pregnancy to force her into prostitution. Lux told her semi-conscious father that she doubted his story.
“She wasn’t like that,” Lux said.
“Sure, when you met her she wasn’t like that no more. It’s easier to tell the world to go to hell when you got lotsa money,” he told Lux and then for his own amusement he added, “or a permanent disability check.”
Lux waited until the giggles subsided. She wanted to tell him about the house she had inherited from his sister. He would not disapprove of it the way her mother would, but he would take it away from her. Not all at once. A little loan at a time would slowly bleed away her money. Still she wondered if she should give him something when she sold the house. He was happy and kind and his body hurt him most of the time. Lux sat quietly and wondered if she could give him $1,000 in pain relief without raising the suspicions and outstretched palms of her mother and brothers.
While Lux tried to figure out how she could safely encode her love and generosity, a nurse came in and jabbed a syringe into the tube that lead into his arm.
“What’s he getting?” Lux asked.
“Morphine,” said both the nurse and her father at the same time. The nurse reported it as if it were a fact. Her father mouthed the word as if it were a special dessert topping and he a very good boy.
“Listen, Pumpkin,” her father said in a very serious tone, “I been meaning to talk to you about something, but I don’t know how to say it, so I’m just gonna say it. I don’t like that boy, Carlos, you been seeing.”
“We broke up,” Lux said, and her father’s face broke into a happy smile.
“Problem solved,” he mumbled and drifted away into the sweet relief of chemical sleep.
7. Paint
AFTER HAVING A BEER and a giggle with Aimee and Margot, Brooke caught the 7:10 p.m. train to Croton-on-Hudson, where she kept her studio. It was a beautiful room with old wooden floors and big windows. It had been redesigned just for Brooke, to her specifications. The light was perfect. Brooke had been painting there for years and created some of her most significant work under its roof. The only drawback of the studio was that it used to be her parents’ pool house, and therefore gently reminded her that most of her comforts and independence came not from her work as an artist, but from the successful investments of prior generations.
Brooke let herself into the main house, walked into the kitchen, and opened the Sub-Zero fridge. She pulled out the roast beef, the mustard, and yesterday’s focaccia and started to make a sandwich.
“Oh! I didn’t see you there,” Brooke said to her mother.
Her mother was sitting in the dark in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and thinking too much about Brooke. Like her mother, Brooke was beautiful, blond and naturally thin, with long legs and porcelain skin. In low lights they looked like twin sisters, although the mother did not have a medieval dragon tattooed on her lower back with claws that stretched over her buttocks and a tail that curled into the inner thigh of her left leg.
“I’m glad you’ve come. Bill Simpson wants you to go with him to the Muscular Dystrophy ball on Saturday. You should call him tonight.”
“This Saturday?” Brooke asked.
“No, Bill Simpson’s ball is on the twenty-fifth,” Brooke’s mother explained.
“Hmmm,” Brooke said, trying to picture her jampacked social calendar in her head, “did he say what time it started?”
“Oh, he didn’t say at all. I heard about it from his mother. You should call him tonight. Bill turned out to be such a handsome man. And he seems to love you so much.”
“Yes. He does.”
“Are you going to call him?”
“Of course.”
“Tonight?”
“I’ll call him tomorrow, Mum.”
“You should have married him when he asked you.”
“I didn’t want to get married so young.”
“It’s amazing that he’s hung around so long. Waiting.”
“Yes, Mummy, it is.”
“But I haven’t seen you two together in several months.”
“I know,” said Brooke.
“Have you two broken up?” her mother asked.
“No, just kind of slowed down,” Brooke said.
Brooke’s mother wanted to ask why. Ten years after the fact she still didn’t understand what happened to the big wedding she started planning the moment her beautiful daughter, Brooke, began to date Eleanor Simpson’s handsome son, Bill. The event was long past due, and now Brooke was talking about slowing down. What is my beautiful girl doing wrong? What is stopping her from finding a good husband, Brooke’s mother thought.
“Carole will be coming around with the kids tomorrow,” Brooke’s mother said, instead of saying what was going on in her head. “Can you stay?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“It’s Emma’s birthday.”
“I know that.”
“Seventh.”
“Wow, that was fast.”
“You got Emma a blue plastic purse and a matching belt. For Sally, you got her a Barbie. You know, a consolation prize for it not being her birthday. I wrapped them already, but since you’re here you can sign the cards.”
“Thanks, Mum.”
Brooke’s mother waved her diamond-crusted hand to indicate that it was nothing.
“Do you want to see the latest pictures of the girls?”
“No way! I’ll see them tomorrow in person and give them both a big hug.”
Her mother seemed disappointed.
“I mean,” Brooke said, “why don’t you give me the pictures and I’ll take them into the studio to look at while I prep.”
Brooke took an envelope of snapshots and a quick kiss from her mother out with her to her studio. Brooke’s cell phone rang. Aimee. But tonight Brooke wanted to stay focused on her mission, so she turned the ringer off and slipped it back into her purse.
“Aren’t you going to call Bill?” Brooke’s mother asked again.
“I will, Mother,” Brooke promised.
It began when her mother called his mother because Brooke’s date for some cousin’s debutante ball had gotten ill at the last minute. As it turned out, Bill was also a cousin of this cousin and already had his tux pressed in anticipation of the event. Bill arrived at Brooke’s parents’ upper Fifth Avenue mansion modeling the perfect picture of a respectable, posh, New York teenage escort. They were drunk and having sex while her corsage was still perky. Throughout high school they were inseparable. Both of their mothers assumed a wedding would follow college, but that assumption became a hope as Bill finished law school.
“She’s too ‘arty’ for him,” some people gossiped.
“She’s too ‘old money’ for him,” others contradicted.
“I heard he offered to marry her ten years ago but she was too interested in her career to bother with marriage back then. Bet she’s sorry for that now,” ran the most unpleasant of the stories.
Brooke ate the roast beef sandwich while flipping through photographs of Emma and Sally, her sweet and pretty nieces. Darling blond girls, age seven and three, caught in various poses of merrymaking with their mother, Brooke’s younger sister. Tucked in with the photos was a check for $1,000 drawn on Brooke’s mother’s account. The check was for no reason except that Brooke’s mother thought that Brooke was failing to enjoy life to its fullest. Brooke tucked the check into her pocket and began to pull canvases from the rack.
She didn’t marry Bill after college because at twentytwo he was the only man she had ever slept with, other than her riding instructor. She told him
that she still had oats to sow. She figured if he really loved her they would settle down together when they were both ready. At thirty-seven, she was ripe and ready. She wanted children. She wanted them with Bill, but by then Bill had other things on his mind. He asked her to wait for him to figure a few things out. She waited in the way beautiful, smart, rich, talented girls wait. She focused on her art and saw other men. Still her heart, and, by extension, her womb, waited for Bill.
Five years slipped away and by forty-two, Brooke figured that sweet, chubby babies would only be hers if she got a commission to paint cherubs on a church ceiling. There had once been plentiful tears about the children she did not have, but Brooke had put aside that hope.
Sometimes she was sorry she did not marry Bill in her twenties. Other times she would not have traded those years of freedom and paint for anything. What pained Brooke consistently was what would become of the children she had brought into the world: the unhung canvases stacked in the pool house going bad from neglect.
She pulled one of her creations from the rack. Her mother, sitting on a lawn chair near the pool on a too-hot day, wielding a cocktail and a cigarette; the whole image shimmered like an oasis-mirage in the desert. Brooke looked long and hard at the canvas. Tonight was the night, but that was not the painting to start with. A selfportrait was likewise spared and returned to the rack. A picture of her parents’ living room and the dog sleeping on the couch. She would begin there.
Brooke pulled out a large tub of gesso and began annihilating the dog and the living room and the moment captured from another lifetime. Suddenly a wail sounded from outside the window.
Tuesday Erotica Club Page 6
