“I can’t. I’ve got my hands full.”
And she does. Literally. Full of nasty stuff in a garbage bag that I can smell from six feet away. “Tomorrow? I’m in town until late afternoon,” I say.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve got to spend every spare minute on this house. We move in three weeks from now.”
“Three weeks?” I say in a shocked tone that I regret even more than the hand flop. Caroline looks like she might burst into tears. She steps in front of me so that I can’t peek beyond her to see what she’s up against.
“Three weeks,” she says like she actually thinks it’s possible. She pulls up her mask, slips back inside, and shuts the door.
“See why I’m thin?” Gwendolyn asks over a cardboard turkey and brick biscuit dinner in her hotel room. I don’t know how she can stand living in this small suite with no view whatsoever. She’s been here for two weeks already, with another three to go before she closes on her new place and moves in. I’d go nuts.
“Does the hotel manager bring up everyone’s room service, or does he just do it for you?” I watch her closely to see if the obvious crush the hotel guy has on her is mutual, or if she has even noticed it.
She wrinkles her nose. “I think he just does it for me.”
“He’s cute!”
“Is he?” she asks, like she honestly hasn’t noticed. She lowers her voice to a whisper. “He keeps bringing me flowers and asking me out…” She leans in so she’s whispering right in my ear, “Sometimes when I peek through the peep hole he’s standing out in the hall staring at the door.”
“He’s like the dude in My Fair Lady waiting in the street for Eliza Doolittle!” I say.
“Shhhh!” Gwen covers up my mouth and we huddle together, giggling as quietly as we can, as if he’s out there right now.
“But he is cute,” I say after I have recovered enough so that Gwen lets me have my mouth back. “Are you tempted?”
“Nah. I went to school with Walter and he was always a nice guy. But he’s not my type.”
“What is your type?”
She shrugs and blushes. I love the way she blushes; she gets this rosy pink color that spreads from her cheeks down her neck.
“Does it feel good to be out?” she asks, changing the subject.
I pretend I didn’t hear her as I divide the rest of the wine between our glasses. This is the second bottle tonight, which makes it only the tenth or twelfth bottle we’ve ever shared in all the time we’ve known each other.
“So, does it?” she asks again.
I sigh heavily before I look over to find her staring slightly cross-eyed with drunkenness. I giggle so hard I go from sitting in the chair to lying on the floor, somehow managing to keep my glass upright. I lift my head and finish the drink in one swill.
“Okay,” I tell her seriously. “If you really must know, I’m not exactly ‘out.’”
“Uh, yeah you are.” She moves from her chair to the floor beside me.
“No. Not really.”
“How not? Your picture was in the paper making out with a man! It’s been on television. It led to us losing our jobs and getting kicked out of our home. How can you say you’re not out?”
I resent that she’s suddenly so clear and lucid. “Well, whenever I’m asked if I’m gay, I don’t answer.”
She frowns at me like I’ve let her down, like I’ve let myself down. “You’re trying to be coy?”
Actually, I’m trying to keep my mother from being so ashamed she calls me deviant again. I wish it were coyness, because that’s better than what it really is: cowardice, plain and simple. I’m too scared to say who I am. I’m not proud that I’m a chicken, but I know Gwendolyn will let me get away with it. She lets me get away with everything.
“I aspire to coy. Really, I’m just plain scared.”
“You’re not just plain anything. You’re complicated and talented and brave. I think you’re perfect,” she says before promptly curling up with my leg for a pillow and falling asleep.
I pet her ratty hair and make a mental note to send her some baked goods. She needs to put some meat on her scrawny bones.
I watch her face while she sleeps and think how sweet it was of her to say I’m perfect. I don’t think anyone has ever said that to me before. Maybe it’s why I liked the name So Perfect, because that’s what I’ve been chasing all this time. I probably should have gone for something more realistic, like Good Enough.
Chapter Eleven
Gwendolyn
I run for the phone and try to dial with shaking fingers.
“What are you doing?” my dad demands. I’m terrified he’s going to have a heart attack.
“I’m calling 911!”
“Give me that phone!” He turns his vermilion face away from Armand on the television screen, leans up from his recliner, and snatches the phone away from me. Clutching it tight, he falls back into his seat.
I watch my dad watch Armand. I hold my breath. While I hate the interview too, at least I’m not going ballistic. I’m not even really angry as much as I am hurt. My face has been hot with embarrassment from the very first question that Stuart Bolder asked. The first thing our viewers want to know is, how long did it usually take Gwendolyn to memorize your lessons well enough to pass them off as her own?
The interview is being conducted in the So Perfect house, so I know that Trey is somewhere in the background, orchestrating it all like a smug puppeteer. The large dining room is set up with seating for fifty; Stuart and Armand are in the adjacent family room on the leather sofa, on a raised platform for the occasion, and turned to face the audience.
Armand laughed at the first question and shook his head. The dining room crowd clapped and nodded, as if they understood Stuart to mean it must’ve taken a loooong time to teach that Gwendolyn Golden boob anything at all.
“I told you you’re the fall guy, Dedo! You’ve lost the fight.” My dad’s fist is clenched around the remote; his knuckles are white.
“I’m not in a fight,” I mumble.
My dad has tried to share what the tabloids have said about me all along, and I’ve tried not to listen. I’m only watching this interview because he turned it on. I’ve only kept watching because he won’t let me turn it off.
Stuart asks more questions that I can tell were fed to him. Is it true that Gwendolyn set the kitchen on fire three times? Is there a more hopeless cook and clueless decorator in existence than Gwendolyn Golden?
If Armand were here in this room teasing me, I would laugh along with him. I’ve always known the life we lived was more than a little absurd. Armand isn’t here, though, and I’m not in on the joke. I am the joke.
My dad is definitely not laughing. If he wasn’t apoplectic, and if Armand wasn’t mocking me on television, I’d be able to enjoy watching my old partner in crime. His on-camera presence is impressive and I know for a fact the old focus groups had it wrong when they said I was more likable. Armand’s occasional slight lisp is working for him. He looks gorgeous in a heather blue sweater and jeans, his roots neatly touched up and his hair mussed to perfection. His voice is at once confident and confidential, and the way he laughs makes it seem like he’s sharing a private joke. Which I suppose he is.
“Have you seen your old partner since you were outed as a fake couple?” Stuart asks, smiling in a way that’s hard to read. Armand looks a bit nervous.
“Actually I visited her last week. We’re joshing her in good fun here tonight, but she’s a wonderful kid and a good friend.”
“Why would you call her a kid?” Stuart leans closer to Armand, but not too close, like he’s drawn an invisible line he knows he shouldn’t cross.
“I don’t know. I guess she’s a little helpless about some things,” Armand says, still apparently trying to keep things light.
“Like?” Stuart asks.
“Like feeding and watering herself, for example. Making her bed, cleaning up her messe
s, paying her bills. Anything besides painting.” Armand laughs lightly.
My dad growls beside me.
“At least she’s a great painter, right?” Stuart asks in a loaded sort of way.
I hold my breath and stare at Armand. He can tease me all day long about my inability to cook, the fact that I’m a slob, my distrust of magnifying mirrors, or my boredom with fashion trends, really almost anything at all. If he disses my work, though, I’m going to be seriously hurt.
“Right?” Stuart asks again.
“Well, look here,” Armand points to something on the sofa cushion beside him, “there’s turquoise paint on my distressed leather! Gwendolyn spreads paint all over the house because she’s as careless as a five-year-old. She ruined gold silk curtains in her bedroom by somehow getting magenta paint all over them! On a ten foot high window? Those drapes, with their blackout linings and beaded tassels, were worth a thousand dollars!”
“Does she paint well, on canvas?” Stuart asks.
Armand shrugs his shoulders. “Let’s just say her pictures look nice on house wares, but I doubt she’ll ever have her own wall at the Met.”
As Stuart Bolder breaks for a commercial, a montage of images fills the screen in succession, including the photo of Armand and his one night stand that started it all, street side shots of the Grand Dame, me looking my best in an early catalog photo, and entering the hospital here in Riveredge looking my worst.
I don’t see any of it completely clearly. I only half see and half remember the images because my vision is blurred by tears. Let’s just say? Well, screw him! Armand has told me a million times that he loves my work. I wonder what else he has lied about.
I shut off the TV despite my dad’s protests.
“Can you believe your own husband turned on you like that, Gwen-o?”
“You know he isn’t really my husband,” I say after blowing my nose.
“Still!”
My dad’s outrage seems to lessen when a few minutes have gone by. “Did you really set the kitchen on fire three times?”
I sigh. “Four.”
At first I really tried to learn to make all the recipes. It felt wrong pretending to be competent at unfamiliar tasks, but Trey said he hadn’t hired me to burn the house down. Armand could teach me what I needed to know, when I needed to know it. I should just paint, relax, and maybe lose five pounds before the next catalog shoot—or gain five—the main point being that I was never quite right.
“Your mom was a great cook. She tried to teach you a few times, too, remember?”
It felt like a boxing match whenever my mother and I tried to do something together. We’d rush in and tangle for a few minutes, then go cool off in our respective corners, Megan in my mother’s, Dad in mine. I remember a thousand screaming matches and slammed doors.
“Megan learned her way around the kitchen. But you and your mom were too much alike to get along,” he says.
I look up at him. “If we were so much alike, why did she hate me?”
“Hate you?” he asks, like I have just asked the stupidest question in the history of the entire world.
I don’t retreat though, because I know she hated me. I was there. I stare back at him with my arms folded.
He shakes his head like I’m an entire swarm of gnats buzzing around his head, bugging the crap out of him. “She didn’t hate you! She loved you girls. Maybe she thought it was a weakness to show it… Trust me, you would’ve thought she was downright warm if you’d ever gotten to know her mother. Now that woman was a Grade-A bitch.”
I sniff dismissively, like I might if he were defending a serial killer by telling me about the guy’s sad childhood. As if blame can just be batted around like a balloon forever, never to land.
“Your mom wasn’t a patient woman, I’ll concede that. But if you remember, as hard as she was on you girls, she was ten times harder on herself.”
I know this is true. My mother would rip out five hours’ worth of precise quilting stitches if she discovered she’d made an error that no one, not even with a magnifying glass, would ever notice. She’d throw away a batch of cookies if the color wasn’t absolutely perfect. I’d have to sneak some from the garbage can when she huffed out to the patio for a cigarette.
My mother wanted precision and perfection in herself and everything around her. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to art: she couldn’t prove that what I painted was wrong. She might not find it to her liking, in fact she never complimented any of my work that I can recall. But she couldn’t point to how, exactly, it failed to measure up, like she did with everything else about me.
I’m shook up, embarrassed, and hurt by the things Armand said. I don’t want to go back to the hotel, though. It doesn’t seem at all like home, and I’m afraid Walter the manager will try to comfort me. When I first checked in, he asked what my favorite color was and I just randomly picked lavender because I love so many colors I don’t really have a favorite. Ever since then, each time I come back to my room there is something new and lavender there. It started with a bouquet of actual lavenders, then the bed linens, and towels, and shower curtain… Everyone says that Walter’s so sweet, but I’m starting to wonder, what is the difference between an admirer and a stalker?
I don’t feel like painting in my dad’s spare room either. Not right now. I walk to his kitchen with hunched shoulders to fetch him a beer. I don’t trust my dad to keep the TV off unless I babysit him, and I don’t want him to get upset watching the rest of Armand’s interview.
I spend some time neatening the condo kitchen. I unload the dishwasher, which is full of the same dishes I used as a kid. The canisters, silverware, salt and pepper shakers and pans—everything here used to be in our big house on Park Street.
I put in a load of laundry, fold the towels from the dryer and put them in my dad’s bathroom. I’ve been keeping his place up since he got home from the hospital. His stint there was so short that he never missed a single Wednesday morning billiards tournament at the club house, or a Friday evening poker game. Last week I popped in on the latter.
I was surprised to see the exact same group of men I remembered from my dad’s poker games during my childhood. If I happened to wander in back then, the men razzed me about boys, or my performance in a volleyball game, or an art award I had won. At the senior clubhouse they picked up where they had left off, teasing me about being on TV.
Since the men aren’t allowed to smoke in the clubhouse, unlit cigars hung from their mouths as they played. Some of them live in the senior community, and some drive out for the games. I had a sense of continuity and rightness, seeing them all together, knowing they’d been together so many times over the years, throughout so many changes in their lives. I kissed each one on the cheek as I left. Can I have your autograph? Ed Hurley teased.
I had almost forgotten what it was like to live in a small town. I have known so many people here, for so long, I’ve found unexpected comfort in recognizing an approaching face as someone I actually know, not someone who thinks they know me because they’ve seen my photographs or watched me on television. I have run into Smith’s mom at the clubhouse a few times already, because she lives here in the senior community. Each time she has greeted me exactly like she always had. I’m grateful for the normalcy of simply saying hello to an old acquaintance, as if I’m as entitled to such moments as everyone else.
“It’s nice to have you around, Lynny. Your sister’s always in such a damn hurry, but you don’t mind hanging out with your old man,” my dad says when I sit on the sofa in his living room again.
“I don’t have the kind of responsibilities Megan has,” I say. I still can’t stand the bitch, but I have to admit she’s a busy woman.
“Her husband’s a deadbeat,” my dad insists.
I haven’t been around Megan and her family much. When my dad got out of the hospital they had us over for dinner, but it was awkward. Kyle appears to be a long-suffering house hus
band who takes care of everything domestic, while she brings home the bacon. Their kids, Leah and Aaron, are smart and very polite, but they seemed scared of me. It’s hard to get a real understanding of a family in a short visit, though, and of course I know impressions can be deceiving.
“You’ve never believed anyone was good enough for your daughters,” I remind him. He rolls his eyes and grunts.
The doorbell rings. I get up to answer it.
“Hey,” I say, opening the door, surprised to see Smith Walker.
“Hey yourself. Are you okay?”
His green eyes are so kind. I’d been tough through Armand’s interview, but seeing the look on Smith’s face reminds me how bad it really was.
“You mean the interview?” I try to scoff but if comes out very indelicately, more like a snort.
“I watched from my mom’s condo. I’d noticed your car here earlier, and when I saw how the interview went… Well, I raced right over, such as it is.” He smiles and reaches for my hand. I give it to him.
I shrug. I don’t feel the pressure to be brave in front of Smith that I felt with my dad.
“Who’s here?” my dad calls out.
“Smith Walker,” I reply.
“Bring him in here.”
I’ve gleaned that Smith has made quite a success of himself: he lives in our old neighborhood only one street from Megan, he has his mom set up here, and he owns a company that appears to be thriving despite the terrible economy. I bet my dad still thinks of him as the upstart from the poor side of town, though.
Smith nods and pastes on a formal smile as he makes his way down the hall toward the living room. “Hello, Mr. Golden.”
“Did you see that gay bastard on television, making my D-Lynn look like a fool?”
“I saw the interview,” Smith replies.
“Well, she’s still a Golden in this town. And that means something.” My dad juts out his chin as if he expects Smith to disagree or challenge him.
As Is Page 10
