Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  Sunny paused and faltered. What was there to say? “She writes her books into tape recorders.” She did not mention the dogs or the dish towel.

  “When I was a teenager,” Diane confessed as they walked, “Nona York’s books were my first introduction to sex, oh, long before I had a boyfriend. After reading Nona York, I couldn’t wait to have sex.

  It all sounded so—so—so exquisite, so passionate, so breathless.”

  “We all read her too.”

  “But then, when I actually did have sex, it was—well, it wasn’t like Nona York at all. I was disappointed. Depressed, really. I’d expected so much more. And for years, honestly, after I’d had sex with a man, I used to have to go home and read Nona York novels. To even out the experience. You know? Like needing to masturbate because you haven’t been satisfied. You know what I mean?”

  “Hmm,” offered Sunny, taking the conversation quickly elsewhere.

  “Nona used to have us to tea when we were kids, my sisters and I.

  She always treated us like young ladies even when we were little girls. The old artists around here would often invite us to tea, and Celia would always send us with some little gift and we had to have our hair combed, clean clothes, all that. It was a sort of education, I suppose.”

  “I’m surprised your mother would let you go to Nona York’s house. Was she actually having that kind of sex?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, Celia didn’t read Nona’s books.”

  As they walked, Woody and Scott behind them, Diane would stop here and there and point out what she wanted photographed and Scott would place little markers in those places, and when they were all done, hours later, Diane blithely excused herself to go to her room (the apple-green-and-pink one so beloved by Dorothy) and take a hot bath and have a nap while Scott and

  169

  Laura Kalpakian

  Woody (muttering continually) spent the rest of the afternoon meticulously setting up shots. They took, in one day, perhaps two hundred photographs, in two days some five hundred.

  The day of the party, all of the food that could be photographed in the morning was to be laid out and Woody and Scott busied themselves in Henry’s kitchen and the dining room, setting up their equipment while Celia fumed. Timing was everything. If these shots took too long, or the lights were too hot, the whipped cream peaks of Henry’s Trifle would melt. Moreover, no one had ever ordered Celia about in Henry’s kitchen. She pushed a yellow bowl of green apples back onto the table.

  Diane removed them again, instructing Scott and Woody to do exactly as she said. “Let’s get back on track here,” she upbraided Celia. “The point in Joie de Vivre! is not real life. Our purpose is to make Joie de Vivre! readers believe that with less money, less time, less talent and less taste than you have, they can do exactly what you do here. That it can be reproduced. In total.”

  “But that’s not possible. It’s not just the recipes, it’s—”

  “Look, Celia, you’ve done what you do best. Now let us do what we do best. The party’s tonight, why don’t you have a lie-down and a cup of tea?” And with that she shooed Dorothy, Sunny and Celia out of Henry’s kitchen.

  “To hell with tea,” Celia muttered as they walked through the foyer, “I need Wild Turkey.”

  Most of the guests for the Joie de Vivre! dinner came to Isadora on the 4:10 ferry. Victoria and Eric, Ned, Bethie and Wade. Russell escorted Celia, Sunny and Dorothy along the concrete path. (Launch was baby-sitting Brio, endlessly listening to her recite Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are.) Nona had picked up Grant and they all assembled, by prearrangement, in Henry’s library.

  They looked, for the most part, rather uncomfortable, but perhaps that was the clothes as much as the occasion. Grant, in the same fine clothes he’d worn to the engagement party, fidgeted with his tie.

  Nona had traded her shitkickers for sensible shoes.

  170

  STEPS AND EXES

  The assorted Robbinses were at ease in casual finery. To Victoria’s dismay, Sunny had not updated her magnolia-wallpaper dress or the rope-heeled platforms. Sunny thought that Wade and Bethie looked less like lovers and more like allies, soldiers in a common cause, wearing the same uniform: black pants and T-shirts with ReDiscovery’s colorful new logo, the R and D boldly imposed in red and blue over words in a clean, crisp script, Discover Your Life…Recover Your Strength…ReDiscovery. The shirts sold for $20 each, said Bethie, “but everyone on staff gets one free. We wear them in the office. And anyone who signs up for a seminar, those people get one free.”

  “How much are the seminars?” asked Grant.

  “They’re three hundred fifty dollars for a two-day session.”

  “But three hundred dollars for students and seniors,” Wade added.

  “A bargain,” Grant agreed, with an unobtrusive grimace.

  Diane breezed in from the dining room, calling out to Woody, and abusing Scott. “More wax on the salmon, Scott, more—”

  “Wax!” cried Celia, nearly dropping her glass of sherry. “Wax?”

  “Oh, Celia, it has to gleam.” Diane pursed over the word, then gave a bright gasp of pleasure and went straight to Nona York, took her hands and exclaimed over her wonderful books and the hope that Nona was still writing and would go on writing.

  “What else would I do?” asked Nona.

  Diane moved right along, through the rest of the family, her scarf and palazzo pants fluttering around her and her thin wrists weighted with jewelry. A thick silver and turquoise necklace hung from her neck, reminding Sunny of a ball and chain. Victoria, however, wanted to know if that’s what they were wearing in New York nowadays.

  “Oh, don’t ask me about New York! Impossible place! Impossible.

  Ask me about Albuquerque!” Diane greeted Eric like her own dear nephew and told Dorothy she could see where her son got his looks, then just as swiftly, to Ned, she implied that those good looks had come from dear old

  171

  Laura Kalpakian

  Dad. “Hello, handsome,” she joked with Grant. On meeting Russell she asked Celia if she’d kept this gorgeous man a secret on purpose.

  When Diane’s back was turned, Celia rolled her eyes and made a gagging reflex, and so she missed what Diane said to Wade and Bethie, but then she heard them decline.

  “Sorry,” Diane said blithely, “the T-shirts have to go.” Wade and Bethie again refused to follow her instructions. So she repeated, “No T-shirts.”

  “We were never told this was a formal party,” Wade stated coldly.

  “Yes, but you knew it wasn’t a beach picnic either. Anyway, that’s not the point. It’s the logo.”

  “I don’t mind what they wear,” said Celia.

  “Joie de Vivre! minds.”

  “This is what we’re wearing,” said Wade stubbornly.

  “Sorry, Wade. No can do.”

  “These are our clothes.”

  “Not the point. Joie de Vivre! cannot be seen to be endorsing any product that doesn’t pay us for advertising.”

  “ReDiscovery is not a product,” stated Wade, “it’s a program.

  Recovering the self means discovering the life denied. It’s an unfolding program and it treats the whole abusive personality, not just a single substance.”

  “I don’t care if it makes gold bricks out of cow shit, Joie de Vivre!

  cannot endorse it,” Diane interrupted, urbanely immune to his sincerity. “I’m sure it’s all very worthwhile, don’t get me wrong, but Joie de Vivre! can’t be supporting one group over any other. Personally, I don’t have anything against T-shirts. I love T-shirts. I wear them all the time. And I think Recovery is great. Some of my best friends are recovering whatevers. But Joie de Vivre! is a magazine and can’t be making political statements. You know how awful politically correct can be. But, well, we’re all prisoners in victimville and it’s a dirty little war.”

  Celia laughed out loud at the image.

  Wade unhooked his elbow fro
m Bethie’s arm and spoke to Diane in his low, compelling voice. “I don’t think you under-172

  STEPS AND EXES

  stand. This is a program. This is a set of principles, like a theology.

  This is—”

  “Look—” Diane combed her ringed fingers through her glossy hair. “I really can’t get off track with this issue. I have a deadline to meet. This is supposed to look like a family party, but it can’t be a family, see? Let me put it this way. You and your fiancée can change clothes, or you can’t be in the pictures. The pictures are the point of the exercise. Like it or lump it.”

  “We’re not giving up our principles.”

  “They’re not principles. They’re T-shirts,” Diane corrected him.

  “People don’t wear principles. They have them, or they don’t.”

  Grant stepped forward and took off his sport coat, putting it around Bethie’s shoulders, as though she might be cold. “There,”

  he said, as much to Bethie as to Diane. “There. You keep your Tshirt. You wear the coat.”

  Victoria shifted her body weight slightly and Eric immediately knew to take off his sport coat. He handed it to Wade. Wade put it on.

  “Cool.” Diane flashed them a smile as sterling as her jewelry.

  “Now, where were we?”

  The dreadful evening passed into photographic history, Bethie and Wade stung into frosty reserve, everyone else, their good manners dwindling with advancing exhaustion and galloping anxiety.

  All the guests pretended this was just the sort of delightful occasion they so often enjoyed together and they were so fond of one another’s wonderful company that they did not hear Diane Wirth carping and sniping, abusing Scott and dictating to Woody, who muttered Fuck, shit, piss under his breath while he took pictures of everyone having a lovely time.

  173

  P A R T V

  Some Remembered Eden

  The Joie de Vivre! pictures, when they arrived in my post office box about six weeks later, were awful. The salmon looked better than the guests, and he’d been poached. In these pictures there was no soul to Henry’s House. Nothing invitational, just cute. The place looked cute. We all looked like we suffered from obstructions of the gut. In her note, Diane chirped and bubbled, reminding me I could not reproduce these shots without the express written consent of Joie de Vivre!, and that I had already signed documents to that effect both for the pictures and for the recipes which were now property of Joie de Vivre! magazine. I didn’t read on, but put all of it back in the envelope. I turned to leave the post office when Nancy called out that she had two envelopes, one for me, one for Sunny, that looked to be identical and both had postage due. She took my IOU

  because I hadn’t brought any money.

  174

  STEPS AND EXES

  I’d walked down to get the mail this beautiful Friday morning just to savor the weather. We were booked, of course, but guests couldn’t check in until the one o’clock ferry. Lots of time between then and now, so I wandered toward the dock. A cloudless day, the sky rippled out from some bolt of heavenly blue and gazed at itself fondly in the waters of the Sound. The trees all round Useless were no longer stippled with green, but so thickly leafed they seemed to ripple, a wind-driven green current. Bursts of amethyst and scarlet rhododendron, the last of them, flamed between the Useless dock and Henry’s House, but I’d no sooner reached the road when I saw Bobby’s old Subaru bounding toward me. He must have left Seattle at dawn to be here this early. And I gulped slightly because it was Friday. Russell was home.

  Russell still regarded Bobby as a competitor for my affections and loyalties, and since I couldn’t make him understand anything to the contrary, I’d given up trying. Rather than endure Bobby’s presence, Russell moved to his Massacre apartment on Saturdays and stayed there till Sunday night when he and his laundry came home. But now it was a Friday morning and I’d left Russell at the table with a cup of coffee, Dorothy deep in a Nona York novel, Sunny at the computer and Brio playing school with Baby Herman.

  Bobby’s car trundled to a halt. “Hello, Celia! Isn’t this the most glorious morning?”

  “Isn’t this the wrong day, Bobby?” I ventured. “You always come on Saturday.”

  “Un-dim your vision! How could this be the wrong day for anything? But, if you are referring to Russell, you have my solemn word, there will be no further incidents, no further arguments. Even if provoked, I have vowed not to respond. I will tie myself up and light my own faggots first. I have not come to make trouble with Russell. I embrace Russell! In this weather, I embrace everyone. So glorious! I called Sunny last night and I said weather like this cannot be squandered in work! I’m coming on the early ferry and you are going to play hooky. I told her I’d

  175

  Laura Kalpakian

  write her a note, just like I used to do when she was in high school and we’d go play hooky.”

  “Did you convince her?”

  “I convinced Brio. She was easy. But don’t worry about Russell.

  I can’t answer for his moods,” Bobby added with a tinge of malice,

  “but I will be the soul of sweetness. I’ll just pick up my girl, Brio and leave. Russell won’t even know I’m there.”

  “Oh, I think Russell will know you’re here.”

  “I will not be crowding Russell’s space. I’m taking this class now that explains all about territorial imperatives between alpha males.

  You should play hooky with us today.”

  “And who would do the cooking?”

  “Let them eat cake. Feed them all Twinkies and put them to bed.”

  “What about your piano students?”

  “I gave them all their freedom. They were delighted.”

  “And Janice?”

  “I turned on the Crock-Pot and threw in a chicken before I left.”

  “Yummy.”

  “I tried to talk Todd into coming with me, but he’s too much Janice’s son. What’s that you’ve got from Bethie?”

  “Probably bride stuff.”

  “Bethie doesn’t seem to talk about the wedding as much as she used to.” His expression darkened. “Whenever I call, Wade says she’s never home and I keep hoping, well, maybe she’s not home.

  Maybe she’s found another lover and she’s having an affair. Wade seems a little stuffy and serious for Bethie.”

  “She wouldn’t be living with Wade and sleeping with someone else. That’s not like Bethie, but I have to admit, I haven’t talked to her much. I haven’t seen her since the Joie de Vivre! fiasco.”

  “Sunny and Victoria told me how terrible it was.”

  “Well, it was, but the T-shirt business, that was stupid really. I called Bethie the next day, and I said what did it matter? I wish I’d never heard of Joie de Vivre! I said Diane Wirth was shallow 176

  STEPS AND EXES

  as a dog dish, but Bethie was just sort of silent, a little grunt now and then. Then Bethie said she had to go. She couldn’t talk to me.

  And since then, sometimes she talks to me when I call, but sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes there’s lots of interference and other voices on the phone.”

  I declined Bobby’s offer of a ride and he threw the car in reverse, backed up a few hundred yards and burned up my driveway, leaving a great cloud of dust and exhaust. Bobby always did drive like a fool and he believed in seat belts only metaphorically, convinced they constricted his freedom. I might have shared his ideas twenty-five years ago; then, lots of things seemed metaphorical, significant, pointing always to some larger Truth. Maybe that capacity for discovering meaning—or inventing it—diminishes with age, like your close-up vision. But Bobby still concocted metaphors and believed in them. In that regard, I guess he remained relentlessly true to his young self. When we were first together, lovers, Bobby’s great charm was his belief that in making love we could create Eden without the sin. And now I’d found, seeing him every weekend for months, his appeal is that we both remembered
the past that way and it did not tinge the present.

  I knew within the hour, Russell would be on his way to self-imposed exile in Massacre and if I stayed away, I could avoid his anger or hurt or whatever it was, so I walked up to Henry’s the long route, by way of the Useless dock and the sloping lawn. I don’t often see it from this perspective. In this light and from this distance, the house has a lemony glow and the white wicker furniture dotting the lawn looks like bits of frosting, rosettes, artful and accomplished. I had my keys, but didn’t go in the front, rather round to the side, to the wisteria arbor where the fountain was silent. I plugged it in and my feet ground over the husks of all the spent wisteria blossoms carpet-ing the flagstones. I sat in the rocker there and tore open the envelope from Bethie. The other one, to Sunny, was exactly the same weight and heft.

  But in this envelope I found no wedding froufrou. I held in my hand twenty pages, notebook paper, handwritten, hand-scrawled, the writing slanting hard to the right, like a skiff in a stiff wind, the 177

  Laura Kalpakian

  letters growing tinier and tinier against the implied horizon of the lined paper, words flattened by the force of the emotions. It had been stapled again and again so that these pages should not shift or fall from order, tumble or spill, once dropped—as they surely would be dropped, as I dropped them to read

  I am recovering my childhood, reclaiming my memories; it is better to see it, to say it, to speak it, even if the pain it brings me is unendurable. Pain is a path. Pain is the path to healing and there is no healing, no wellness without pain, but horror and the sickness are [illegible].

  I won’t be silenced any more. I was a child. I was alone. No one protected me. I was abused by the men my mother slept with. The men she slept with came to my bed when they were done with her. Bobby Jerome came, called himself father, lover and I could not speak or cry out and when I whimpered, he told me it was pleasure. Oh God, he smiled when I whimpered because he thought I took pleasure in his hands and his fingers. He would come to the bed and sit there and hold me and poke in me and make me hold his thing [scratched out]