“He had gnats swarming her in that one band camp scene, for goodness’ sake,” Loretta pointed out, and Mitzi nodded in agreement.
“See? Who does that? He hates women. He’s going to take one step in here, sense our ovaries, and hiss and melt into a pile of bloody goo, like a vampire in sunlight.”
“Mmm, yummy description, Mitzi. Let’s eat,” May said, and they all stood up and made a beeline for the buffet. Jean hurried in to cut the lamb and arrange it on a tray, and was pleased to see a little juice and blood run out onto the china as she did.
But before she could get herself a plate, there was the sound of a car door slamming, followed by the clack of dress shoes coming up the front walk, then a man’s cough. Jean’s heart seized, and she stood motionless, a serving fork in one hand.
Everyone else had just gotten settled when the doorbell sounded.
“He’s here,” Jean heard Bailey say, and then heard the scrape of Bailey’s chair being pushed back. On one hand, Jean was grateful to her granddaughter for answering the door, as she seemed to be frozen in place and completely incapable of doing anything other than listen to her heartbeat at the moment. But on the other hand . . . Oh, Lord, Bailey was answering the door.
Jean heard the door pull open, and heard hushed whispers coming from the table, along with intermittent scraping and clanging of forks on china (yes, she had even brought out Grandma Vison’s good china for the occasion—plates she’d only ever used on Thanksgiving and Christmas), and then the hum of a male’s voice heading toward the kitchen. Jean noticed some of the ladies craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the Great R. Sebastian Thackeray III as he made his way into the kitchen.
Jean dropped the fork she was holding with a clatter onto the dish below it. She jumped into action, rushing to the man and holding out her hands as if to take something, which he did not have.
“Welcome,” she said. “I’m Jean.”
The man, who was incredibly short and stout, a block of pudge and excess skin balanced on two fire hydrant legs, came in, scowling. Bailey was following, a smug smirk on her face. Jean dreaded to think about what might have already been said, and silently pleaded with Bailey to say nothing more. The man’s eyes darted around balefully, his swollen lips overly wet.
“Smells like a short-order cafeteria in here,” he said. He wrinkled his nose. “Old grease and unfounded opinions all balled up into one oppressive feast for the senses.”
Jean’s mouth flapped shut. She wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Was he insulting the smell of her house? She honestly couldn’t tell.
“You can take my jacket,” he said, pulling off his sport coat and holding it out toward her between his index and middle fingers, as if he might drop it at any second, and if she wasn’t prepared to catch it, God help her.
Jean grasped the jacket and hung it on the coat hooks on the kitchen wall, her hand bumping up against the little vase that sat on the shelf above, nearly knocking it off. She stopped its lazy roll with one palm.
“Please help yourself to some dinner,” she said. “Plates are over there. And we have wine on the table. Or would you like something else?”
He sneered. “Mmm, supermarket wine, how could I resist? Twist top, I presume?”
Jean blinked. This time she was sure he was insulting her. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Did you have any trouble finding us?” she asked, going through every Polite Hostess effort in her repertoire. Bailey disappeared into the dining room. The author picked up a plate and proceeded to serve himself, fastidiously, almost daintily.
“I once traveled through Turkey for two weeks, alone, with nothing but an American Express and a pocketful of lira,” he said in a recitation voice that boomed so loud, even the soft noise in the dining room stopped. “I have lived twenty years in New York City, and never once have I gotten lost.” He spooned some of Mitzi’s hash brown casserole onto his plate, then glanced up with a grin that was not altogether friendly. “I think I can handle suburbia with aplomb,” he said.
“Oh. Okay,” Jean said, and, not knowing what else to say to or do for this curious little man, she edged into the dining room, loitering in the doorway until he finally made his way over, his plate nearly overflowing with food. He had taken some of everything, Jean noted, except for her lamb.
“So,” he said, settling into a chair and scooting up toward the table. Mitzi leaned forward and poured him a glass of wine. “What have I missed? Gossip, no doubt. Whom are we hating today? Supermodels? The Real Housewives of Missourah? One another?” He crammed a huge bite of potatoes into his mouth.
“You,” Bailey whispered at Jean’s side, and Jean shot her a look. Bailey went wide-eyed and shrugged.
Thackeray didn’t notice. He ate another spoonful, and then another, everyone else around the table pausing to stare.
Finally, he licked his lips, swilled some wine, and gazed around the table. “So, are we here to talk or what?”
Uncomfortable, Jean shifted, knowing there was no way she was going to eat any of the food she’d put on her plate, not that she’d brought her plate into the dining room anyway. In her haste to make everything perfect for Thackeray, she’d accidentally left it on the kitchen counter. She cleared her throat. “We actually read Blame a couple months ago. But we had such a lively discussion about it, we thought it would be interesting to get the author’s viewpoint on the story.”
He motioned to Jean with his fork. “Yes, your granddaughter told me as much. You don’t look so bad for a dying woman, by the way.” He shoveled more food into his mouth.
Jean glanced over at Bailey, who blushed deeply. “Sorry,” Bailey mumbled. “I kinda lied to get him here.”
“It didn’t work,” he said. “I knew she was full of shit from the moment I read the first e-mail. She had that certain adolescent entitlement about her, that certain fuck-you-ish-ness that makes teenagers so very charming to be around.”
Jean could see Bailey’s face transform from blushing embarrassment to glaring anger. She knew that look all too well. Until recently, it was the only look Jean had ever seen on her granddaughter. She knew that Thackeray had better watch his step, or he would find out just how much “fuck-you-ish-ness,” as he so indelicately put it, Bailey had in her.
“But . . . I have to appreciate anyone who will offer up her family on a silver platter to a word whore such as myself. A voyeur of strife. A stealer of pain. I’m hoping, though not hopeful—and yes, there is a difference—that she wasn’t lying about that. Where’s the alcoholic mother?”
At this point, Jean and the others were so confused, they could do nothing but exchange puzzled glances, but Jean felt Bailey stiffen next to her.
“She’s in rehab,” Bailey said.
“Oh, ho!” Thackeray crowed, throwing his head back. “It’s too perfect! The drunkard mother can’t be properly denigrated because she’s in rehab, drying out. I couldn’t have written it better myself.” He pointed to Jean again with his fork. “And I am assuming this . . . dying grandmother . . . of yours is the one whose husband died?”
Jean sat up ramrod-straight. What all had Bailey told him about her?
Bailey nodded, her mouth working silently around words only she could hear.
He shrugged. “Kind of a boring story. People die all the time. But I suppose I could use your extreme passion for the boring and ordinary for a twist. To never leave the dead one’s side, to pine until you’d pined yourself into a pine box. To forget how to live because you watched him die. Oh, how beautifully poetic. The dramatic irony is killing me.” He gulped more wine, closed his eyes as if to enjoy whatever scene it was he had set in his mind. “Do they actually call people ‘widder’ in Missouri, or is that just how I imagine it to be? As in ‘Widder Jones’? Ah, never mind. I can make it work even if they don’t really say it. I can make the whole world believe it, that this Widder . . . What w
as your last name again?”
He snapped his fingers at Jean, and she answered, the response popping out of her mouth before her brain could even unscramble everything he was saying. He spoke in such riddles, she had a hard time making sense of it all. “Vison.”
“The old Widder Vison,” only he said it vah-son, “rattling around her drafty house, desperately alone and lonely, only to discover that her Mr. Perfect—or should I say Mr. Perfectly Dead—had a long-term affair. Tell me, Widder Vison, how well do you think you know your dear, old, dead husband?”
“Very well,” Jean responded icily. This time she understood perfectly what he was getting at, and she felt something dangerous well up inside her, felt herself sit up straighter, defensively. This man knew nothing about her, about Wayne. Who was he to suppose anything about their lives?
“So how did it feel when you discovered that Mr. Perfect had taken a gay lover?”
Jean gasped. “He never did!”
“Ahhh, the dear widder has a touch of the bigotry,” he said, elongating his words in a crude interpretation of a Midwest accent.
Jean tried to chuckle, but what came out sounded so mirthless, she couldn’t really classify it as much of anything more than a grunt. “Oh, please,” she said.
“Not a denial, Widder,” he retorted, gleefully tucking a deviled egg into his mouth.
“Stop it,” Bailey said, and when he started talking again, she said it louder. “Stop it!”
At first, he looked amused. His eyebrows shot up into his thick black hair. Then his mouth drew down into a thin line. “I do believe you got me here under false pretenses, Bailey. I do believe your promise of letting me use your, in your words, ‘fucked-up family’ for a story went uncleared by the powers that be.”
“What?” Jean breathed, turning to Bailey. Bailey looked down into her lap, fiddling with the cloth napkin there.
“Well, that’s a shame. Not even the absent father for me to whet my teeth on.”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Loretta said. She had an uncharacteristically steel glint in her eyes. “She’s a girl. Leave her alone.”
Thackeray mimed wiping tears from his eyes. “Oh, well, since she’s a girl . . .” He propped his elbow on the table. “She happens to be a very manipulative girl. These weren’t things I pulled out of her—she offered them. I am human to take her up on her offer.”
“No, you’re not human. You’re a monster,” Mitzi said. “We knew it by page five. It’s about time you caught up with us.”
Again with the cocky, unkind smirk. “Oh, so that’s what this is about. You recognized yourself in my work, and it’s Attack the Author Day. Spare me the colloquialisms. You paid a lot of money to get me here. Offer me an argument.” He took a bite of potato and then made a face, reached up to his mouth, and pulled something out. “Jesus, is that a hair?”
“Here’s an argument,” Mitzi said. “You have mommy issues.”
Thackeray laughed, a mirthless sound. “And is that your professional opinion, Dr. Nobody?”
“It’s all of our opinions,” Dorothy said. She held up the book. “This book sucked. We couldn’t believe you meant it to sound like it really sounds. But after listening to you talk, I can see that you did. Why?”
“Because it’s the truth,” Thackeray snarled, tossing his fork down onto the plate and chipping a piece from the edge. Jean cringed. It had been important to Grandma Vison to keep these dishes—all of them—in the family. “That’s what you people want, right? You book readers, isn’t that what you’re always after? The truth? Well, here’s a truth for you. Sometimes stories are just stories, and you are the ones supplying the so-called truth. And then, when you don’t like the reality your own brain has supplied, you blame the author. You come after my blood because you don’t like how the reflection of your own misgivings made you feel. How dare you question an artist about his art? You are clearly both tacky and stupid.”
“I’m not the one sitting at someone else’s dinner table, eating someone else’s food, and insulting everyone around the table,” Dorothy said. “If you want tacky.”
Mitzi piped in. “Here’s a news flash. You’re a far cry from perfect.”
Loretta nodded. “You have the nerve to criticize people for their size, and you’re Chubby McHamburglar.”
“You’re definitely no artist,” Mitzi added.
“How many awards adorn your walls, my dear?” Thackeray responded.
“How many friends adorn yours?” Loretta shot back.
“I’m betting zero,” Mitzi said. “I’m betting negative on the friends list.”
“Let’s have it, then,” he said, tossing his napkin into his plate and leaning back in his chair, crossing his arms triumphantly. “You want to criticize the book? Go ahead. Criticize.”
“Well, for starters, we’re not created by our mothers alone,” Bailey said, her voice shaking. She stood. “There are fathers too. And there is personal responsibility. You want to know something about personal responsibility? Ask any kid of an alcoholic. Responsibility is all we know. We’re practically choking on it. You act like we’re doomed to repeat our mothers’ mistakes, and that’s not going to happen. It’s bullshit.”
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Ah. So you’re afraid you’re going to be doing the twelve-step line dance in the future, is that it? You don’t like the central theme of responsibility for how our future generations are shaped? You have issue with that? Maybe you should turn on your Internet and text out a bomb threat. That’s what your generation knows best.”
Bailey shook her head, her eyes slitted in such a way that Jean hadn’t seen since spotting her up in the loft at her old house. “You don’t know anything. I will not be like her. She doesn’t shape me; I do.”
“Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Pollyanna, but statistics say you will be exactly like her. And your daughter exactly like you. And on and on until the world is populated by an unhealthy proportion of drunk Visons who eventually kill themselves off with the hooch. Darwin at his finest.”
Bailey opened her mouth, but another voice cried out from the end of the table. “That’s not true.” Janet had pushed herself out from the table and was perched on the edge of her chair.
“Really, now?” he mused. “What do you say we make a bet, then? I’d like to wager that your mother is fat. That she’s such an important role in your life, she can’t practice even a modicum of self-restraint, and she clearly taught that to you. Am I right?”
Jean noticed a tear streak down Janet’s face, but she made no move to wipe it away. “No. That’s not true,” Janet said again. “But what is true is that you’re a scared little man.”
“And you are the embodiment of my main character, Blanche. A self-righteous, quivering mound of excess flesh, too into your own sensibilities to care anything about anyone else’s.” He swept the ladies with his gaze. “You all are. You are all proof that once again I am right. Look into the mirror, ladies. You will see loads of awards in it, with my name on each and every one. You are the very characters, with your binge eating and your affairs and your illegitimate babies, who win me accolades and make me rich.”
And then the room erupted. Mitzi jumped out of her seat; Loretta clenched her fists at her sides; even sweet May shook her head disgustedly. They all talked over one another, slinging insults and barbs, inviting him to do things to himself. And he shouted back, superior and haughty and predictable.
Jean didn’t yell. She didn’t know what to say. This meeting had not gone as she’d expected at all. She’d thought maybe he’d explain why he wrote the things he wrote, that maybe they’d give him a little piece of their mind, that he’d hear it and they’d adjourn over pie. Instead, she watched as the larger-than-life, intimidating celebrity she’d imagined morphed into a bitter, ugly little man as full of bile as his books were.
But when s
he looked to her left, she saw Bailey, shrunk back into her chair, her feet pulled up to the seat, her face buried against her knees, her shoulders shaking with tears. She turned her face to Jean. “I’m not going to be her. I swear I’m not. I can’t be,” she cried, and Jean couldn’t take it anymore.
She stood. “That’s it!” she yelled, her voice edging through everyone else’s, cutting them all off in midsentence. “That’s it!” she repeated. She turned to Thackeray. “Get out of my house.”
He stared at her in mute shock.
“Get up, get your arrogant opinions, get your cheap suit coat, and . . .” She paused, clenched her fists. “Get the hell out!”
It seemed to take a moment to sink in on Thackeray that Jean’s sudden outburst was directed at him. But when it finally did, he angrily pushed his chair out, stood, and swept into the kitchen in one motion.
“I should have known better than to think that a bunch of doughy Midwesterners would have the brainpower to understand my work,” he muttered as he hurried to his coat.
Jean followed him, and was followed in turn by each of the ladies, who filled the kitchen doorway like a posse running a bad guy out of town.
“And another thing!” he said, yanking his coat off the hook a little too harshly. The vase Jean had nearly knocked over earlier, and which she had only settled without pushing it properly back up on the shelf, made two teetering swoops and rolled off, shattering on the floor at Thackeray’s feet. Out of it tumbled Noah’s weed, which Bailey had been stashing all summer.
Everyone stared at the marijuana that had showered over Thackeray’s shoes.
“Is that . . . ?” Loretta asked, and Bailey burst out laughing.
“That’s pot!” Thackeray exclaimed, doing a disgusted little jig to shake it off.
“Where did that come from?” Jean gasped, mortified.
Bailey, disabled with giggles, choked out, “The pool.”
The Accidental Book Club Page 23
