Liberating Paris

by Linda Bloodworth Thomason

  Rudy entered, struggling with a box of four hundred linen napkins. Mavis barked into the phone, “Look, I just need to know that it will still be packed in dry ice when it gets here.” Rudy stopped and stared at her.

  “My God! Are we ordering more sperm?”

  Mavis scowled, waving him off.

  Upstairs, Milan paused outside the door, listening to a conversation between Charlie and several other boys as they played a video game.

  “What are you, man, some kind of pussy?”

  “Oh, look at that! He’s running away! Just like a little pussy!”

  “Pussy. Pussy. Pussy.”

  Suddenly Milan’s face felt hot and she was filled with anger. She didn’t know if this had something to do with the disrespect that was currently being inflicted on her by her own husband, but hearing her son speak so disparagingly of women both surprised and infuriated her. And also caused her to use a word that she had never used before in her life. When she entered the room, the boys had immediately stopped playing and looked up at her.

  Milan said evenly, “Charlie McIlmore, if you want to use that word, then you better learn to use it correctly. How dare you say that pussy is weak! Pussy brought you into this world. Pussy…” she was searching now, “holds your head when you’re sick and, and…irons your pajamas.” Milan set the cookies down, looking around.

  “Who do you think painted this room? Who do you think spent four hours driving to Little Rock and back to get you that video game that nobody else could find?” Charlie looked unsure. Milan said, “Well?”

  He guessed, softly, “Pussy?”

  “That’s right! As a matter of fact, I don’t think there’s anything in this entire house that you can eat, drink, or wear that wasn’t brought here or made possible by pussy. And there’s nothing bad or scared or weak about it! I think I can speak for all your mothers when I say the next time I hear you boys using that word”—Milan couln’t think of anything, then—“you better give it some serious thought.”

  Charlie and the others were frozen, speechless. They had never seen this side of Milan and she had never seen it herself. Then she smiled and said sweetly, “Now I brought you all some cookies. Would anybody like one?”

  They nodded, hoping that was the right answer. “Well, I’ll just be downstairs if you need anything else.” Then, she left, feeling better. The way people who have little control over their lives feel when they have finally drawn a line somewhere.

  Across town, the man who hadn’t helped with the wedding music was installing an intrauterine device when his nurse came in and said that Kathleen Duffer was on the line and that it was important. He took the call in another room and was shocked to hear her sounding hysterical. He thought something had happened to Luke or Elizabeth. And when she assured him that this was not the case, he relaxed a little. Then she said, “We need to talk. I can’t tell you over the phone. It’s too important. You have to come here tonight.”

  Wood left Paris immediately after scraping a cervix for cancer cells and drove the two and a half hours to Excelsior Springs without stopping. All that time, he was wondering what the hell this was. Was she wanting to end it or maybe give him some kind of ultimatum? Suddenly, he felt irritated that she had refused to tell him anything on the phone. Maybe driving three hundred miles round trip in one night across mountainous terrain was fun if you were twenty. But Wood was thinking he was tired and that he was too old for this kind of nonsense. He wasn’t sleeping well on his office sofa and now he could hardly keep his eyes open. If he were having an affair with Milan, she would never ask him to do something like this. She would be concerned for his safety. Or, at the very least, meet him halfway, as she had in college. Or better yet, tell him not to come at all, because that’s what phones were for.

  He wondered if he got killed on this treacherous road, whether Duff might wear red to his funeral and then tell everyone that he would’ve wanted her to be gay. He suddenly realized that they had never even discussed what she should do if something happened to him. Now he had a sick feeling that if he died, then sometime down the road, she might tell their story to her son and he, in turn, to Elizabeth. No! No! No! Wood was horrified just at the thought of it. Their children would never be old enough to hear something like that. Not if they lived to be a thousand! Now he was bothered by the feeling that Duff might not have the good judgment to know such things. And for the first time, he realized, just as he pulled up in front of her darkened house, that he really wasn’t sure how much he trusted her.

  She answered the door wearing his old high school football jersey and no panties. He was shocked because he hadn’t seen his jersey in years. Hadn’t even known that she had it. And then, before he could even remove his jacket, she had jumped in his arms and wrapped her bare legs around him, probing his mouth with her tongue. He was thinking that she tasted like cigarettes and beer and he didn’t know why he hadn’t noticed this before. She took his hand and led him to the sofa. “God, I’m glad you’re here.”

  There were lavender-scented candles burning everywhere. She said she had gotten off work too late to pay her electric bill. She sat opposite him with her legs half-folded, taking in a deep meditative breath. “Something terrible has happened. I know you’re going to be angry, but just listen before you say anything. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Right now he was wondering if she knew that her legs were apart enough that he could see everything or that maybe because she was so upset, she wasn’t aware. He was thinking, “I look at this all day and then I drive all night to get here and the same damn thing is staring at me.”

  She began, “Luke read my journal.”

  “What journal?”

  “The one I write in. Every day.”

  “About what?”

  “Personal growth. Observations. You and me.”

  “Shit. You’ve got to be kidding. Why would you do that?”

  “I’ve always done that.”

  “Why? That’s stupid.” He got up. He was angrier than she had ever seen him.

  She said, “It’s an outlet.”

  “Maybe for teenage girls! That’s why there’s a teenage girl on the pink plastic cover! What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  She was genuinely hurt. “I can’t believe you’re talking to me this way. I’ve always collected my thoughts in journals. I thought you knew that.”

  As bad as this was, she’d had a strange confidence that it would bring them closer together.

  He tried to calm himself. “Okay. Just tell me what was in it?”

  “Everything.”

  “What do you mean, everything?”

  Now she was yelling. “Everything we’ve done together! Everything I think about it! Everything!”

  Wood began pacing. “This is unbelievable. This is a damn nightmare.” Then he crossed to her. “You can’t just write down general information, like appointments and dates and things to do? You have to actually get a piece of paper and put our names on it and the fact that we fucked? I don’t get that! How could you be so careless?”

  She looked at him for a long time and then said, evenly, “You’re the one who had to get married.”

  He sat for a while and hung his head. The lavender from the candles was starting to burn his eyes. “You do understand, don’t you, that this will destroy our children? I mean, forget what they think about us. They’ll never be able to have anything together now.”

  She was smiling but there was no happiness in it. “And when did you realize this? When you were lying on top of me or between my legs?”

  He nodded, acknowledging her point. After a while, he asked, “All right, tell me what Luke said.”

  “He said he was too upset to talk and that he wanted to discuss it with Elizabeth first.”

  “Well, that’s great. That’s great.” Wood was laughing now to himself. “I don’t know what to say. Alienation. Death. Destruction. We got it all now.”

  She crossed and put her arms around his waist, la
ying her head against him. “I’m sorry. I thought it was locked.”

  Wood nodded as though he understood. He held her and patted her, trying to feel something. After that, he left.

  For the next few days, Wood wandered around in a stupor. He didn’t attempt to contact Duff or Milan, but he tried constantly to reach his daughter at her dorm, where she refused to take his calls. He stopped eating and dark circles appeared under his eyes. His patients began asking if he was ill. One day, when he was sitting in his office telling a woman about her options for menopause, he noticed that a pair of his underwear was actually lying on the sofa and he was sure she had seen it, too.

  Duff rolled into town on Thursday in her little Toyota and set up camp at the Holiday Inn. She hadn’t been able to speak to Luke either, but she took that as a good sign, figuring that if he and Elizabeth were going to call off the wedding, they would’ve done so by now. She was here to oversee the preparations for the rehearsal dinner, which her parents, who would be coming in from Florida tomorrow, had agreed to host.

  The dinner would be held at a place Duff had long ago rejected—the country club of Paris. But now she was grateful to be staging this important event there. Because she could only imagine the tricks Milan had up her sleeve for the wedding. She wouldn’t be surprised if the Tournament of Roses Parade came down the aisle. Certainly Duff didn’t feel competitive about money, but she didn’t want her son to be humiliated by a rehearsal dinner at IHOP either.

  What she was concerned about at the moment was that she hadn’t heard from Wood. Duff felt ill herself just thinking what he must be going through. As painful as it was for her and Luke right now, they at least had shared their many past troubles together. She had sheltered him from nothing. That’s why they were so close. She knew it had to be so much worse for Wood and Elizabeth, who had been supremely buffered from most of life’s hardships.

  To tell the truth, Duff was starting to feel that maybe it was best for everyone that Luke had read her journal. She certainly hadn’t wanted their children to find out about her and Wood in this fashion, but maybe there was no good way to tell them. And at least now, it was out in the open, which was exactly where Duff liked to operate. She had always been a person of integrity and deeply resented being forced into shadowy terrain. At least now she could be honest and forthright with her son, having regained the side of herself that she respected most.

  Duff spent a good portion of the afternoon conferring with the chef at the country club, along with Mr. Leonard Stiles, who had been the manager for over thirty years. Today, he seemed overly solicitous toward her, having remembered that she was the first and only woman to go topless there.

  That night, Wood called to say that he had to tend to a longtime patient, Trudy Davis, who was dying. He didn’t care that she had actually died the day after the Picasso exhibit. He no longer had the energy for new lies.

  Duff ordered some Bailey’s Irish Cream from room service and signed her daddy’s name to the tab. By nine, she was smoking in bed and watching some insects eat their young on the Discovery Channel. She was wondering if this was some kind of cosmic message, cheap symbolism, or merely a coincidence. She noticed a rogue hair of mysterious origin on the thin bedspread and, repulsed, kicked the cover onto the floor. Then, she lay back down on the sheet with her hand over her eyes, unhappy, emitting smoke.

  At Fast Deer Farm, the list maker was propped up in her clean, fluffy bed surrounded by all of her notebooks. She had on her favorite peach nightgown and her skin looked luminous in the romantic restaurant lighting that she had long ago had installed in her and Wood’s master bedroom. Right now, she was conducting a sort of mental wedding rehearsal by outlining the ceremony on paper. She spoke softly to herself, enumerating each step. When she got to the part where the mother of the groom and the mother of the bride would be seated, she wept a little, but never even stopped to wipe her eyes. Then, she went right on with the rest of the make-believe ceremony, as though it had been only slightly interrupted by a small summer shower.

  Even though it was past ten o’clock, Wood was still seated at his desk in his office, refolding a fast-food wrapper and talking to Charlie on the phone.

  “I don’t get it, Dad. Why can’t you just come home?”

  “I can’t right now, Charlie. Your mother and I’ve got some things to work out.”

  “Well, you better not wait too long. She’s acting crazy.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Nothing. She just came running in my room and gave me and all my friends this big lecture about how pussy is strong. And we better not ever forget it. I’m not kidding, Dad. She must’ve said it fifteen times.”

  Wood was puzzled, then he said, a little weary, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you, son. Those sound like words of wisdom to me.”

  Mavis’s big Oldsmobile Cutlass was speeding away from Whispering Pines Cemetery. Mavis was driving and Milan was in the backseat with baby Paris, after having delivered a lush bouquet of Elizabeth’s wedding flowers to Dr. Mac’s grave. This was Milan’s way of including her fatherin-law in the festivities and a small opportunity for Mavis to show thanks for the little girl in the backseat. Right now, Milan, who always got dressed up to go to the cemetery, was singing “Jimmy Crack Corn” to Paris. She did this mainly so she would not have to speak to Mavis.

  Mavis said, “You should sing ‘In This World of Ordinary People, I’m Glad There’s You.’ She loves that.”

  Milan frowned. “That’s no baby song.” Then sweetly to Paris, “Is it? You should tell her that’s no baby song.”

  Mavis made an abrupt turn onto a blacktop road, tipping Milan over. After about a mile, she pulled into a driveway and parked the car in front of a trailer. Before the three had even reached the porch, a minuscule country woman named Yankee Epps, who was Tommy Epps’s cousin, came out to greet them. Even though Mavis made all of Doe’s wedding cakes, it was Yankee who spent painstaking hours adding the sumptuous details. And now Mavis wanted Milan’s approval before this one made its final journey to Fast Deer. The cake was exquisite and Milan graciously found words of praise for both women, but directed it all to Yankee.

  Once they were back in the car, the glow from the cake had faded. Now Milan was wetting an antique handkerchief with her mouth and rubbing Paris’s face with it.

  Mavis watched in the mirror. “Please do not spit on my child.”

  “We’re freshening our faces. Mind your own business.”

  Then, suddenly, out the window on her right, Milan noticed Wood’s Austin-Healy sitting in a car wash stall and saw that Duff, holding a long metal wand, was the one washing it. Duff had on tight cutoff jeans with a long-sleeved turtleneck tucked into the waist and was standing with one hip cocked as she sort of cavalierly slung the wand around.

  Milan yelled to Mavis, “Stop the car!”

  “What? Why?”

  “Stop the car! Now!” Mavis pulled over and Milan jumped out. Then Mavis picked up Paris and placed her in her baby sling and began running after Milan. Now Mavis could see where Milan was headed.

  She called to her, “Do you really want to do this?”

  Milan didn’t answer but picked up speed in her high heels. Mavis said, reassuring Paris, “It’s okay, sweetie. Don’t be afraid. Auntie Milan’s finally having that nervous breakdown.”

  Duff looked up and seemed happy to see Milan coming toward her. As Milan spoke, Duff continued working.

  “If you want to have an affair with my husband, there’s plenty of other towns to do it in.”

  Duff said, “Who are you, the sheriff?”

  “I’m asking you to not stand here, on this street, in that outfit, washing his car, when you know everyone’s aware of the two of you and it’s the day before our children’s wedding.”

  “My car broke down. He loaned me his. I’m washing it as a thank-you.”

  Milan was calm. “No, you’re not. That’s not what you’re doing at all.”

  Sudd
enly Duff didn’t look friendly anymore. She coolly pointed the spray, which was now on soap cycle, toward Milan. “You ruined my life.”

  Milan didn’t even flinch as the suds hit her. “No. You did that yourself. And now I guess you’re working on messing it up for the next generation.”

  Then Milan tried to take the handle away from Duff. As they struggled, Duff said, “Stop it! You’re hurting me! You’re always so damned enthusiastic.”

  Milan got the wand. Now Duff was yelling, “You never forgot to take a birth control pill! You never forgot to do anything in your life!”

  Milan sprayed her with suds. “That’s right. I’m a responsible adult, not a carefree, fornicating goat!”

  (Carefree, fornicating goat! Not from the Reader’s Digest vocabulary quiz, but from simply having had enough!) Duff lunged at her, causing them both to go down. Milan said, as they struggled, “I don’t have to explain myself to you. All that matters is that I got a wonderful daughter out of all of it who’s made your son very happy. If I were you, I’d be glad for that.”

  They were rolling around on the concrete, completely covered in soap when the water went off. A crowd was beginning to form.

  Milan yelled, “Put another quarter in, Mavis.”

  “What?”

  “Put another quarter in!”

  Mavis said, “I don’t have another quarter! Anyway, it takes four.” She turned to several people, explaining, “She doesn’t know. She washes her own house and car.”

  An elderly man handed Mavis some coins. “Here, I’ve got a couple.”

  A redneck type came up with the rest. “Hell, I’ll give ’em a dollar if they keep it up.”

  Mavis took the coins and, carrying Paris, ran to the control box and deposited them.

  Milan yelled, “Put it on water, not soap!”

  And Duff added, “And kill the wax!”

  Milan seconded this. “Oh my God. That’s right! Kill the wax!”

  Mavis shook her head, yelling, “All right! I heard you!” Then, as she fidgeted with the box, “I’m trying to read the damn directions, here. You’ll take what you get!”