Her mother, holding a tray with two gin and tonics stood outside the glass door shouting.
“No! Stop! I loved that dog! What are you doing?”
Brooke opened the door and let her in.
“Relax,” she said, grabbing a drink off the tray.
“I love that painting!”
“It’s a good one,” Brooke agreed as she continued to white it out and send it back to oblivion.
“Why?” Brooke’s mother demanded, horrified and with tears.
Brooke gestured to the rack behind her, full to overflowing with canvases. Good canvases. She had a keen eye for character and each painting stared back as if it was speaking, cut off in mid-sentence. She painted people, dogs and trees, and other representative images. Representative images had not been in fashion for many years. Brooke knew it going in but had followed her heart.
People liked her work. Over the years she’d sold many canvases and received many commissions, but no one wrote about her work, no one ever resold her paintings. And so she had remained unimportant.
“Canvas is expensive,” Brooke explained to her mother.
“I’ll pay off the rest of your debt,” Brooke’s mother announced.
“It’s not the money, it’s the space,” Brooke said. “I can’t stand to see them stacked up like this, like firewood. Mum, I can’t add another beautiful baby to this stack of shit we have hidden away here. I tried making really small paintings but that wasn’t for me. And I don’t want to stop painting, but I want to stop accumulating canvases that no one sees. When I stop painting I feel all backed up, like I desperately have to drain the spit-valve of my mind but you know, then it comes back to the I’m-tired-of-creatingthings-no-one-sees, so I decided that I would paint over the stuff I have. So I can keep making shit without having to make piles of shit.”
“It’s not shit,” her mother whispered.
“Stuff,” Brooke corrected herself. “I don’t think it’s shit either. No one thought it was shit. They just didn’t think it was gold. With no one looking at them, they’re kind of dead, these things I made. You wouldn’t keep your dead children stacked up like this and that’s how I’m starting to feel about them. They’re great, big, dead, unloved children that I made and at least this way I can recycle them back into some kind of life. Jesus, Mummy, don’t cry.”
Brooke’s mother was sobbing into her gin and tonic. “It’s my fault.”
“Yeah, ok, I mean, if you want it to be.”
It worked. She laughed.
“It’s not a question of fault, Mum. It’s just that I picked a field with a very small winner’s circle. And I’m not in it. I’m not even close to it anymore.”
They sat in silence, both suffering from Brooke’s failures. Brooke’s mother sat quietly while Brooke whited out three or four canvases, scraped down the rough spots, preparing them to take paint again.
“Thanks for the check,” Brooke said after a while.
“Buy yourself something nice,” her mother said warmly. Brooke smiled although she knew that there was nothing on a store shelf that would satisfy her. The way her mother said that, the way her face caught the light captivated Brooke and for a moment, filled with the pleasure of a new adventure, she thought she would paint her mother looking mournful and loving at the same time. But Brooke hesitated. There were so many wonderful paintings of her mother. The house and the rack were filled with them. She would paint the little girls, the nieces. She would give it to her sister as a gift. She would make it beautiful and happy, knowing such a painting would find a home on a wall of her sister’s house with lots of lovely admirers to consider it and give it life. Brooke fumbled for the packet of snapshots and began working.
Her mother disappeared. The room disappeared. The yellow of a little niece’s dress started whispering gently to Brooke like a lover, saying “More blue in me, more blue, sweetheart. Let the shadows lay, perfect, perfect, I’m lovely.” Brooke worked until her legs started to hurt and her stomach rumbled. Somewhere in the studio lay a half-eaten sandwich and a bed waiting for Brooke to flop into it, happily exhausted.
The painting was well on its way. The little nieces looked as wonderful in paint as they did in life and her sister would swell with the pleasure of seeing her babies saved forever in their moment of loveliness. Carole would hang the canvas somewhere where everyone would see it first thing when they walked into the house. And when Brooke and her sister and their mother were all dead and long gone, maybe the two nieces would argue about who would get the lovely painting of the two little girls they had been.
The older one would win. She always won. And she in turn would hang the beautiful painting of her lost daffodil-yellow self somewhere where people could still admire it. She would die. Everyone dies. She would will the lovely yellow painting of the little girls to one of her own grandchildren and on and on until the owner might forget exactly who the two girls were, but he or she, this fictitious progeny now only distantly related to Brooke, would still love the way the yellow in the little girl’s dress was making love to the blue. And then Brooke would live forever.
“If that is what I have,” thought Brooke as she fell asleep, “I’ll have to make it be enough for me.”
8. Atlanta Jane
STILL GLOWING FROM A two-hour workout, Margot waved to the doorman as she sashayed into the elevator. At the last minute a stranger jumped onto the elevator and so Margot rode all the way up to the top floor and then back down to the lobby. When she first signed the lease, Margot loved that the elevator doors opened directly onto her apartment. Twenty years later, it made her feel anxious and vulnerable. Now, she would ride up and down the elevator until she was the only person left in the car, and only then would she put her special key in the slot that showed her initials.
Recently, she had wanted to build an additional door, or interior vestibule, something that needed to be unlocked between her private apartment and the public elevator, but the owners would not allow it. That had been a shock. In her heart Margot believed the apartment belonged to her. All her things were there. In fact, the actual ownership of the apartment had changed hands four times in the twenty years Margot had been renting it. She swore the next time the rent went up she would find someplace where she could have total control.
Finally alone in the elevator Margot slid her special key into the slot marked “M.H.” and the elevator jerked skyward. Once her key was in the door, the elevator would not stop until it reached her apartment. On the long ride up she rested her shopping bags on the floor and flipped through her mail. Bills. Bills. Bullshit and bills. And one large ivory envelope with Trevor’s last name above an unfamiliar return address.
Margot dumped the junk mail into the trash, placed the bills on the counter in the kitchen and then tore open the large, ivory envelope.
You are cordially invited, the invitation began and after lots of well-thought-out, old-fashioned words, it ended by informing Margot that Trevor’s eldest son was getting married at a Long Island synagogue at 8 p.m. on Saturday in six weeks’ time. Very nice. An excellent excuse to buy a new dress.
When their youngest child left for college, Trevor’s wife dropped fifteen pounds and got a fashionable new haircut. She chucked her old wardrobe right down the incinerator. And then the swan flew away, taking with her the summer cottage in the Catskills. Margot held Trevor’s hand through the divorce.
Once, over Chinese take-out in his apartment, Trevor had leaned over his mu shu chicken with the intention of kissing Margot on the lips. She was just about to laugh at something on the television and therefore at the same moment he put his mouth on hers, she exhaled a huge, garlicky guffaw. Their first moment of intimacy felt like getting too-spicy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
“Christ Margot, I think you may have popped my lung,” he laughed.
“No, not popped,” she countered. “Just over-inflated. But let me hold on to you because you’re in danger of spinning all around the room like a big balloon
with the lips suddenly untied.”
They flopped back on the couch and wiped the laughter from their eyes and the kiss from their mouths. Margot reached across and held his hand but Trevor did not attempt the kiss again. There would be plenty of time for that, Margot thought. Our friendship will find that kiss again, soon.
But the invitations for take-out and videos dried up after that evening. Margot was busy at work and they still had lunch together. She hadn’t really noticed their distance until she, after registering the full meaning of the word “peri-menopausal,” called him. She left some tears and a request for company on his answering machine. She got a response by email two days later. Sorry you’re blue, he wrote. By that time though blue was no longer her color. She was black and red by then and so their friendship burned up to a little ash. Maybe the wedding would rekindle it.
Margot put her take-out dinner down on top of her briefcase and looked at the ivory invitation. She thought about weddings. In all her life, Margot had only received one marriage proposal, from a boy named Bobby Albert.
Bobby Albert was blond and strong and probably stupid, although in her youth and inexperience, Margot didn’t recognize the latter. She planned to lose her virginity to him, maybe even in the back of his father’s truck. As long as there was a clean blanket to lie on, she wanted him. She didn’t, however, want him in the cornfield.
It would be hard for anyone meeting Margot Hillsboro today to see her as a fuck-me-in-the-back-ofa-pickup-truck girl, but in those days she was a smalltown girl named “Allie Hillcock” and the pickup truck would have worked just fine.
Thirty-four years ago, before she changed her name, Margot desperately wanted to have sex with Bobby Albert. She couldn’t wait to pop the snaps on her cheerleader bodysuit and feel him touch her body. She was making a beeline for that pickup truck, but the feeling came over him too quick and all her plans to make love in a way she could paste into a scrapbook got lost in the corn. They were kissing and she was pulling him back to that truck, but he just couldn’t move another step without having sex. So she lost her virginity to Bobby Albert in a cornfield.
Not a high summer cornfield, either. It was an early autumn cornfield and all the stalks had been cut. No corn at all. No cover for anyone who might look out and see Margot’s skinny legs splayed out or Bobby Albert’s white ass pumping up and down. After he came, Bobby Albert asked Margot Hillsboro, nee Allie Hillcock, to marry him.
Allie Hillcock said no. He’d ruined her deflowering fantasy, trashy in hindsight but very important to her at the time. She felt violated.
“Like he raped you?” her second therapist had asked her.
“No. We were definitely on our way to having sex. In the truck. He violated my idea of what that sex should be like. My first taste of sex and it made me feel cheap and insignificant. I was discount, bargain-basement sex. Not worth the extra few feet to the truck bed. I was devastated at the time. I couldn’t bear to be myself anymore and so I changed.”
“And do you think you changed for the better?” Margot’s third therapist enquired.
“I think so,” said Margot, “but I still can’t understand why anyone would ever want to get married.”
Margot had met Trevor’s son a few times while he was at Yale, and then once again after she’d pulled a little string to get him a good internship. Margot thought he was a nice boy, cut from the same cloth as Trevor except that the boy was still bursting with the beauty of—
Youth. Trevor hasn’t taken care of himself as well as I have taken care of myself. That’s why the boy in his youth is so remarkably more handsome than the father, Margot told herself.
“Let’s take a look at what Mr. Ping put together for dinner,” Margot said out loud to the take-out bag. She ate asparagus and eggplant while flipping through a Bergdorf ’s catalogue looking for the perfect gown.
She ate her vegetables slowly, but dinner was still over and done with too quickly. She wanted to eat more or have a drink, wanted to go back to the gym, wanted to rot in front of the TV set, but Margot was too controlled to allow any of that to happen. Eating more would result in her becoming too fat. Back to they gym? Too thin. TV made you too stupid. Was it too late to go out to the stores? In a department store or a boutique, Margot felt calm and in control.
Her unquenchable, unachievable desire to change her skin caused her closets to literally burst their hinges. The swollen closets in Margot’s apartment held an outfit for every occasion. She had stunning eveningwear that actually got worn to company parties. When a black-tie charity event came up, Margot could be counted on to buy a whole table and invite her colleagues to join her partly because she was truly charitable, partly because she wanted an excuse to get a new dress. She had suits, both formal and casual. She kept her cashmere sweaters stacked in the zippered plastic bags that her linens had come wrapped in. Amidst all this wonder and spectacle, Margot owned only one pair of blue jeans and one pair of flat shoes.
When the closet doors would no longer shut on the great beast of her wardrobe, Margot culled and cleaned and gave away, which put her on a first name basis with the people at Goodwill. Recently, Margot discovered the vacuum bags that would suck all the air out of the spaces between the clothes she shoved into them. This reduced the storage requirements of her wardrobe and Margot hailed it as a miracle of modern science.
Margot stood in front of her magnificent closet. She looked at her watch. It was not too late to go out shopping, but even that pleasurable sedative was growing oppressive.
There was always the briefcase, but Margot had already sworn off using work as an opiate. After her landlord refused to allow her to build that interior door, home furnishing magazines turned sour and Margot gave up the narcotic of redecorating her apartment. She wanted to work on something that was hers, something she could own. But for all her money and pleasure, she didn’t own anything real. Margot sat at the table and looked out the window, waiting for a sign that told her she was ready to begin creating her next life. Preparation, for Margot, was everything.
A departing lover once screamed in her face, “You’re an anal-retentive control freak.” He might as well have told her the color of her own eyes.
“Yes! I know!” Margot had raged back. “If you can’t deal with it, piss off!”
Preparation was good and he failed to understand why she was not about to teach him. Kissing prepared her for heavy petting, which lead to sex, in the same way high school prepared her for college, which gave her the skills to succeed in law school. At fifty, Margot was ready to start creating something that would carry her through years seventy to the end. It wouldn’t do for Margot to arrive at seventy and say, “Oh, golly, look where I am. Now what?” Like everything else in her life, seventy would flow gracefully from waves that had been generated at fifty.
She crossed to her computer and flipped it on.
As an attorney, words had been her bread and butter. Words had lit the pathways of Margot the girl, Margot the student, Margot the lawyer. It was only reasonable to assume that words could light the way of Margot the gracious old lady. Margot sat down and began typing.
At 50 49 50 55 Trevor was still a hot, sexy stallion stud man and when he leaned over and kissed her…, Margot paused, momentarily concerned about the name. She’d use a universal replace to change it later.
…when Trevor leaned over and kissed her, the earth moved, but that was just the beginning. Kissing her left an open invitation for her to kiss him back. And kiss she would. Oh how she was planning to kiss this man! Her obsession with health food and aerobics paid off when she, even at fifty, could drop her dress to the floor with the lights still on and not worry about the best angle to approach his bed. Full on was best for her, and she strode across the room, tossed aside the covers and took his strong, rigid penis in her…
Penis? No, Margot thought, penis is too clinical. What’s another good word for penis? Always a planner, Margot opened a clean screen in her word processing program and
proceeded to make a list of synonyms for “penis.” The list looked like this:
Penis, Pecker, Peter, Putz, Package, Pud, Rod, Dong, Shlong, Ding dong, Thing, Wang, Weiner, Weewee, Z-Z, Peenee, Wrench, Sausage, Shmuck, Salami, Johnson, Joy stick, Groove thing, Genitals, Cock, Club, Hammer, Manhood, Harry and the Boys, Pipe, PP, Prick, Raoul
She erased “Raoul” because it really only applied to a specific weekend she had spent with a particular man in Brazil. Then she had the computer sort the list into alphabetical order and saved it in a file easily accessible for later use. Pleased with her effort she made the same list for “testicles,” “breasts,” and “vagina.” An hour later, and her homemade thesaurus in place, Margot felt prepared to continue writing.
Trevor lay back on his couch and while her hands entertained Harry and the Boys, Margot let her mouth find his…
Margot stopped writing again. It was ok to call him Trevor but she felt too giddy writing about a character named “Margot.” Maybe Ellen. Alma. Jennifer. Atlanta. Margot erased everything she had written and started again.
Atlanta entered the room and Trevor’s heart stopped. She walked strode leaped across the room and landed on top of him where she began tearing at the bedclothes until she got to his…
I’m a frigging sex-lion, thought Margot. Sounds like I’m going to doink him and then eat him. Sitting alone in her apartment, Margot giggled out loud as she typed.
… until she got to his…skin and then Atlanta started with one light finger to trace down the line of his chest. As she got closer to the line of his belt the tension across his chest, among other exciting things, was growing thicker and Atlanta started to…
Wait. What about the name Atlanta Jane, Margot thought. Ooo! I like that. I’ll make it a western when I eventually add the story part to the sex part. This could be good. Very good. Who do I know in publishing that owes me a favor?
Tuesday Erotica Club Page 7
