‘So,’ Valerie said, sidestepping him, ‘there really is a Paula.’
‘What’s it to you, lady?’ Paula said.
‘Um,’ Valerie mused, ‘Ted here was rather unkind in his characterisation of you.’
Paula recoiled as the rangy Valerie looked her up and down. Beside her vividness, Ted thought, Paula looked like cardboard. Pale, depleted.
‘We’re here to save you, Paula.’
‘Save me, from what?’
‘From yourself.’ She jerked her head towards Ted standing with his hands hanging. ‘And from him.’
‘Look, lady, I don’t know what religion you’re selling but I’m not buying.’
‘What we have here is a standard co-dependency situation. He needs you to drink so he can. You’re enabling each other.’
‘Who the hell is this, Ted?’
‘She’s one of my students. Take no notice.’
‘You’re never going to get your kids back, Paula. You’ve got to face that fact. Look at yourself! Why did you lose them in the first place? Because.’ Valerie paused here and advanced, wagging a crimson-nailed finger. ‘Because your first loyalty is to this.’ She picked up Paula’s vodka and slammed it down on the counter spilling its contents.
‘Hey!’ Paula said, affronted by the waste, and clambered down unsteadily from her stool to square up to Valerie. ‘What’s it to you, anyway?’ Then she fixed on Ted. ‘How does she know all this about me?’
‘Because dear old Ted’s been getting off on your story.’
‘Ted?’
‘Only last week we were all doing a character study of you which he tried to pass off as a person in his novel. This from the guy who’s allergic to the confessional in our writing!’
‘Valerie, that’s enough!’
‘You’re not in the classroom now, Ted.’
Ted turned to Paula beseechingly but Valerie persisted.
‘What you need, Paula, is to get away from people who are sucking the lifeblood out of you.’ She shot a steely glance at Ted.
‘What the fuck!’ Paula exhaled. ‘Is this, is this your idea of a joke?’
She was pacing up and down now, but there was nowhere to run to – no back entrance and Valerie’s army stood four-square blocking the front door. Skipper’s regulars gaped dully.
‘You need a real friend,’ Valerie went on, ‘the kind of friend who will be totally straight with you. With no bullshit.’
Paula stared at Ted.
‘You been writing about me, Ted?’
‘It wasn’t like that, Paula, honest.’
‘You been spilling my secrets? Talking about me in class?’
He shook his head vehemently.
‘You sad motherfucker!’ she spat.
‘Anger is good,’ Valerie interrupted.
‘Know why I drank with you? Because I felt sorry for you. Living alone with the ghost of a fucking book, how sad is that.’
‘Paula, please …’ Ted started.
‘And all this time you’ve been sniffing around me like some perv going through my undies.’
There was a ripple of gnarled laughter from the curious crowd of onlookers. Valerie placed her talons on Paula’s shoulder.
‘C’mon, Paula,’ she declared, ‘let’s get you sober, girl!’
She linked Paula’s arm and to the applause of the bar’s patrons (even the pool games had halted) she frogmarched her towards the exit, surrounded by a phalanx of Ted’s students.
Ted slumped back on to his stool. The rest of the bar returned to their drinks, feeling let down in the wash of anticlimax. Ted signalled to Skipper for a double whiskey, which Skipper wordlessly pushed towards him. He drank greedily from the golden glass.
‘Have I just lost a regular?’ Skipper asked.
‘She’ll be back,’ Ted said. ‘Can you see Paula on a twelve-step programme? I don’t think so!’
That was three months ago. He had tried to track her down, desperately at first. He found out where she worked – Melvin’s Superstore on Sycamore – but she wasn’t there. Brian, the day manager, who looked about twelve, said she’d simply disappeared.
‘Heard she went to one of those Christian rehab places, out Conway direction,’ he added as the pair of them stood in the dog food aisle.
‘You don’t have an address, do you?’ Ted could hear the jilted panic in his voice.
Brian shrugged.
‘Sorry, dude.’
He’s avoiding Skipper’s these days. One public scene in a town this size is quite enough, thank you. But it comforts him to imagine Paula still there, sitting at the bar happily, blamelessly sozzled, easing into blissful unwind. Climbing carefully down from the stool to go the Ladies’ Room, rubber-limbed, wavering – or was that only how she looked to him because he was often in a similar state, dreamily drunk and blearily semi-detached?
He’s still showing up for workshop. Well, life goes on; that’s the trouble with it. Valerie Kleber smirks at him with a bitter lemon twist, while the others treat him with mutinous contempt. Well, why wouldn’t they? He’d been unmasked as a sad old fuck. Wasn’t that Paula’s verdict? He felt bereft. Paula hadn’t just walked out of his life – she’d walked out of his novel too. Now both of them were gone. There was a bleak sense of relief in acknowledging the novel had defeated him; but the loss of Paula, that was another thing entirely. That’s the lesson, he wanted to shout at Valerie, smug with victory, that’s the difference between fiction and reality. Reality breathes and hurts and drinks too much; it lets you down, it leaves things unfinished, up in the air, high and dry. Whereas fiction, fiction is just still life. Still fucking life.
He goes to the fridge – big as a starkly illuminated spare room – and reaches for a beer. He releases the ring pull – it seethes – and he raises the can in a silent toast. To Paula. Saved and lost.
DRAG
Clothes maketh the man, Mother used to say. Her words stay with you as you riffle through the hanging ghosts in your wardrobe. It’s a moment of infinite anticipation. What to wear? The evening’s expectations are secreted among the limp fall of fabrics, the yielding crush of shoulder pads, the sly whispers of silk. You whisk two or three recruits from the comradely army in the closet and set them up around the room – over the mirror, on the twin mother-of-pearl inlaid handles of the wardrobe, or fainting on the bed. It makes it seem more like play; makes more of a ritual of it. Often the bedroom will end up strewn with discarded clothes, denuded hangers, fleets of shoes poised in the second position and still you won’t have made a choice. You find such disarray intoxicatingly seedy, though nothing could be further from the truth. You’re a careful dresser, in fact discreet, but unambiguously feminine. You don’t go overboard, of course. No polka dots, no stilettos in pre-school colours. But you don’t like sober either – otherwise, what would be the point? It is called dressing up, after all. You can’t stand calculated understatement, that eunuch look the younger ones go for. Those pinstriped trousers or sober little black suits with a white T-shirt peeking underneath and a bit of underwire cleavage just to tantalise. That really is drag. You’re doing impersonation, not caricature. You’d love to totter around in platforms or heels but there’s your feet to consider. And your height. You can’t afford to magnify flaws. It’s all about disguise, as any ‘girl’ will tell you. The opaque tights are your biggest compromise. With a different anatomy you’d go for broke and wear fishnets. But if you’re big-boned you can’t play the vamp with any kind of grace. Anyway, you want to look like a woman, not a tart.
The bridge club variety, you mean, the blue rinse brigade, George sneers. Bitchy! But according to George, you have slender hips – this said with some envy – and a real waist. You appreciate George’s fitting-room verdicts, admiration professed if only to the mirror. Makes you feel real. Your biggest weakness is floral. Not loud, but more the summer garden variety. Mother used to have swing dresses with pink coins of colour like lily pads dimpling a Monet lake. You used to love those. M
aybe you’re operating out of sentiment, or nostalgia. Though even you would baulk at admitting that your fashion sense is down to Mother’s frocks. But, look, you loved your mother. It’s not a crime, is it? Though these days any extravagant expression of affection, particularly for your mother, seems to arouse suspicion. Suspicion of what, you’d like to know. You’re not afraid to admit that you idolised Mother – God rest her. You keep her alive this way too, with those blessings of hers. You use them sincerely though sometimes people, including George, presume irony. (You open your mouth and your mother comes out, George says.) Maybe you cling to Mother’s memory simply because for so long there was just the two of you.
Father disappeared when you were two – he did one of those magic tricks. Put his hand in the till and went up in a puff of smoke. Left you both in the lurch, Mother would say. In your mind’s eye you saw a drunk on a deserted street, lewd smile, evil laughter, rotten teeth. Something to do with that word lurch, as if he had reeled off and blundered into another dimension. Of course, he wasn’t like that at all. The family photograph (yes, just the one; this was a time when fathers took the photos rather than appearing in them) shows him in a rumpled suit, hair in corn drills, shirt collar askew. He looks like an overgrown schoolboy, his worthy clothes over-tended, unloved. He was a solicitor’s clerk. He worked in a chamber of brown linoleum, bentwood chairs, a hatless coat-stand, a mahogany desk inlaid with green leather. There was a hatch to keep the public at bay. He stayed in the inner office, trapped behind towers of thick-lipped manila folders. Keeper of the chequebook.
‘He couldn’t even get cheating right,’ Mother would lament.
It was the first out-of-character thing he had ever done. For years he had plodded off to work every morning, peck on the cheek for Mother, and the promise of promotion. Before you came along, a late child, unexpected. Of course, you don’t remember him. Useless, was Mother’s verdict. And she made him so over the years. What use could he possibly have been? Mother was your world. Authority, breadwinner, confidante. If that screwed you up, as George would put it, then so be it.
The dressing up started at home. Mother did it, and you copied her. She had a wardrobe that housed a future that never came. A ball gown in turquoise taffeta whose skirts seemed tainted with water marks when you looked at it in a certain light. A couple of cocktail dresses, one in black silk, backless, another in plum velvet with a sequinned bodice, heavy as a suit of tears. Some of her clothes you can only remember fragments of now – pink netting here, the fringes of a scarf there. The greatest treasures were hidden away. A fur stole, all watchful eyes and snakish tails, pungent with mothballs, wrapped carefully in tissue paper in a hat box on top of the wardrobe. The wedding dress the light had turned to ivory still rustling superstitiously under a clear plastic shroud from the dry cleaner’s. And below in the shadows of frothy hems, Mother’s shoes. You remember pushing plump five-year-old feet into a pair of her white patent slingbacks. Cold in there. They bowed in the middle like a sagging bridge and the heels threw you forward into the mousehole of the toe. And the lovely clatter they made, the slap and clack! It was a trade-off with Mother. If you agreed to have your hair washed and not to scream when the shampoo got in your eyes, Mother would allow you to wear her shoes for a treat after bath-time. Forget satin corsets and suspenders, you say. The memory of being naked in heels seems to you the ultimate in erotic.
Then you moved on to her evening gloves. She had several pairs – cream, pearl grey and black. Your little fingers burrowed to the tips – it was like climbing inside her – the scalloped ends bunching around your bare bony shoulder. You liked to rummage in the drawer where she stored her headscarves. Horses and anchors and nosegays of daffodils. You’d toss them in the air and in their fluttering descent, her bouquet was released – Blue Grass. You fingered her floral polyester blouses – cross-your-heart, fabric-coated buttons, sleek to touch but toothily static. Skirts billowed round your head. No slacks here – Mother didn’t hold with them though she acknowledged they were handy if you were a working woman. Which, somehow, implied that she was not. The final frontier was her underwear. Flesh-coloured brassieres, lace-hemmed bloomers, the shivering agony of slips. You turned her roll-on into a straitjacket, your arms and torso encased like an Egyptian mummy; then you lay on the floor and played dead.
Mother was on a fixed income. She managed a nursing home and you lived in. You spent your childhood among old ladies, querulous or melancholy, sagging folds of skin merging with crumpled clothes. Their bony fingers with rings they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, part with, twitched on counterpanes or feverishly counted off the decades on beads. There was the accompanying smell – though Mother was scrupulous about hygiene – which is not urine, as people like to think, but the sour odour of organs slowing down. Vapours of decay, in other words. Not the ideal environment to grow up in but it was home. You felt singular among all that fading female energy, a buoyant child, beloved.
‘Baby,’ they would call after you as you dodged past the asparagus ferns in mock-brass urns in the hallway. They always had their doors ajar.
‘Baby!’ Sometimes it sounded menacing, envious. You were baby to all of them. Some other baby, some lost baby. In her turn, Mother lavished endearments on her patients – sweetheart, pet lamb, even love – and they would invariably soften and wilt and bend to her will. For a moment they would shed their pruney carapaces and smile beatifically at her. But for you she reserved a special term. Darling, come and help Mother out of her dress. Darling, run and get the bedpan for Mrs Proctor. Darling, tell Mother that you love her.
Maybe that’s why you were slow to make friends. How could the world outside ever replicate Mother’s love and that of all those senile surrogates? You didn’t feel the lack, not when you were a child. And, afterwards, you had George. Mother and George never met. Well, you kept them apart, didn’t you? Mother would not have taken to George’s vulgar candour. Is George the kind of friend we’d like to cultivate, darling? No, would have been the answer. No one would be good enough. You feel a stab of resentment when you think of it now, when you stand here faced with a wardrobe full of clothes that echo hers. It makes you wonder. Have you somehow turned into Mother? All dressed up and nowhere to go?
No, not true. Tonight you have somewhere to go. On the bed you lay out a jade velvet skirt, a black sateen jacket, a white blouse with an extravagant ruffle to hide the crêpey skin around your neck. They lie there playing dead, as if you were dressing a corpse. You wanted to do this for Mother, to choose a costume for her final journey. The thought excited you even in the midst of grief. The turquoise taffeta, the fur stole? You liked the thought that the fox with its hunter’s eye and the long drip of its tails might be buried, and once below ground might reassemble itself and emerge into the night to prowl again. But no, Mother had left detailed instructions. She wanted a shroud, plain brown from the Poor Clares. But you did help with her make-up; that undertaker had no idea! Now you sit in front of the triptych dressing-table mirror doing your own. Like most of the furniture, it’s Mother’s. All wrong here. Too big and overpowering for the rooms of a semi-d on Prosperity Drive, a place Mother would have looked down her nose at. Scruffy children playing on the street and next door attached, darling! True, on summer evenings you are plagued by boys ringing the bell wanting their football back, and when you look out on your pocket-sized lawn you find your Calla lilies trampled and broken. But despite that you’ve grown to like it here. You stop and chat to that nice Mrs Devoy and have a nodding acquaintance with Mrs Elworthy, a working woman like Mother, with two little girls and no sign of a husband. You don’t belong here exactly but you can’t be put out. You own it, something Mother never did. You have something to leave. But to whom? You shake away the mournful thought and examine your pores in the mirror. You used to watch Mother doing her face. If Father had stayed around you might have been as fascinated by his shaving rituals. As it was, Mother didn’t have anyone to watch admiringly as she powdered her face,
sending clouds of motes reeling into the air, or applying lipstick – Coral Island – to pouted lips. No one, that is, but you. It was the ceremony that compelled you. The mask behind which Mother’s face disappeared, the glossy lips, the brooding eyeshadow – Deadly Nightshade. You were fascinated by the tweezers, the eye pencils, the emery boards. The mystery of all the little brushes – what were they for? – the powder puffs, the pale squares of make-up in a box like your water paints, the tiny bottles of gilded nail polish. Even then you were learning how to be a woman.
Mother used to bring you with her when she went to the cosmetic counters at Switzers. You used to love that. Picking up the phials of perfume, lifting the heavy glass stoppers and inhaling the scents – tea rose, verbena, musk – while Mother tested lipstick on her hand, or had her cuticles done. What a pair you must have made! Mother in her starched whites from work – she wasn’t a nurse but she said people had more faith when they saw a uniform – and you in your shorts and sandals, a crop-haired urchin. You were going through your tomboy period then. The assistants were charmed that you were so taken with the products.
‘Lovely to see a sensitive boy,’ one crooned. She had alarming black hair in a Cleopatra cut and an ochre complexion.
‘The world will soon beat it out of him,’ the other said tartly as she redid her fearsome lashes. And they both laughed knowingly.
You blushed defiantly. Mother was too discreet to point out their mistake. Afterwards, years afterwards, she said. ‘But, darling, that would have spoiled it for you. You wanted to be a boy then. I knew it was just a phase you were going through.’
You’re all done now. Ready for the performance. Roar of the crowd, smell of the greasepaint! Despite the numerous times you’ve made yourself up – how many times in a woman’s lifetime, who could calculate? – you’ve never quite got used to the dusty, caked feel of foundation. And the look, despite your best efforts, seems fake. If Mother were alive today – a preposterous thought; she’d be 108 – she’d say pityingly, ‘Look at you, darling.’
Prosperity Drive Page 17
