by Sarah Bird
I have no time to lose. No time for regrets. No time to stop and secure the side door of the little minivan. I have to accept that the stack of flyers I printed up in the most eye-catching of neon hues is fluttering out the open door like a dazzling cloud of butterflies. Any other time, I would have worried about leaving a trail of neon evidence emblazoned with my name, address, and three phone numbers, none of which is currently working. Compared with tax evasion and unlawful delivery of drugs, however, a littering charge hardly registers.
Against all logic, a deep calm seeps through me as I reenter Pemberton Heights. Some would call it the scene of the crime. But what crime? The crime of a few event coordination missteps? Or the crimes I committed as Mrs. Trey Dix, wife of one of the state’s most powerful lobbyists, when I supplied tenderloin up front while, around back, Trey provided legislators with powders, pharmaceuticals, trips to golfing meccas around the globe, senatorial letters of recommendation to West Point, private audiences with the pope, girls—both professional and nonaffiliated—and, most crucially, big juicy cuts into the biggest and juiciest deals that ever made their way through the Texas state legislature?
Here’s what I will tell the IRS on my day of reckoning: I could not have been more blind. I suffered under the delusion that the not really really rich have about the really really rich: I believed that since they have so much, they wouldn’t be petty.
To my sorrow, I learned that the really really rich are not like Evel Knievel, who, when asked why he was jumping the Salt River on a motorcycle, answered that it sure wasn’t for the money. That he wasn’t going to eat any better or dress any better or live in a better house. That he already had enough. What I learned is that in Dix World there is no such thing as “enough.”
Agent Jenkins, I will say, the really really rich, like my former mother-in-law, the She-Wolf, and her spawn, want not only theirs but yours as well. Yours and your children’s for the next umpteen generations. That’s how they got really really rich. They didn’t get it by being exceedingly nice and always waiting their turn. They rig the game so they get everything in perpetuity and we, the peons, get just enough to stay alive and keep working for them. It’s the perfect host-parasite relationship except that a tapeworm will never make you feel like it’s your fault for wasting away. As I said, I am no Bolshevik, but that’s the game I was a victim of and that’s how it’s rigged.
That is what I will say on my day of reckoning.
I deliberately avoid Pemberton Palace and head east toward Bamsie Beiver’s carriage house. The plan is to nip into my squat, clear out anything worth pawning or ingesting, and be gone before Bamsie returns. Before sneaking onto my street, however, I check to make sure that Bamsie’s black Range Rover is nowhere in sight, that the coast is clear. On my way to the Beiver residence, I pass stately homes with their accompanying stately vehicles out in front. The Tatums’ navy blue Jaguar. The Quisinberrys’ cream-and-chocolate Rolls-Royce. The Oglesbys’ silver Benz. The IRS agent’s beige Ford Focus.
Shit! Shit! Shit!
My foot is on the accelerator before the words “stake” and “out” have time to wrinkle my cerebral cortex. I blast by the Focus. Luckily, Jenkins isn’t in it. I spot him on the porch of the carriage house, nailing something to the front door. A fresh cloud of flyers printed with my smiling likeness blows out the back door. I regret now having chosen a photo that played up a certain resemblance I bear to a younger, slimmer, generally much hotter Martha Stewart. Felonious panderer to the moneyed class is an unfortunate note to be hitting at this precise juncture.
Not until I emerge safely from Pee Heights do I notice a blinking on the minivan’s dashboard that turns out to be a low-fuel light. I have no money and I’m running out of gas. A big swig of Code Warrior helps to calm my thrashing heart.
Think. I have to think.
Clearly, my lam time will be limited. I must go to ground. Locate a safe haven, shelter in the storm. But where? The answer pops into my head and I reset my compass for the Elysian Fields of west Austin far, far away from the Oh Three zip code, for the world of Dellion-aires, spindly brainiacs who managed to hang on to their bubble gazillions. Thankfully, there is almost no cross-pollination between them and the family money/billable-hour serfs of Pee Heights. So it is safe to head for the one place big enough and remote enough to house my Bedlam of anxieties: the Pyramid House.
April 3, 2003
3:45 P.M.
I ALMOST NEVER DO THIS, but at that very singular moment, I have absolutely no other choice. When the fuel gauge needle drops into whatever color is below orange and the cursed minivan begins choking and sputtering, I pull over and carefully dab the back of the van with mud, paying particular attention to the license plate area. Then I coast on fumes into an undercapitalized mom-and-pop station not yet equipped with credit card readers and other troublesome security devices. I execute a nimble fuel-and-flee, limiting myself to the few dollars’ worth of gas I can pump before Mom starts shrieking and Pop retrieves his shotgun from under the counter.
“I’ll pay you as soon as I can!” I yell out the window, already too far away to be heard or hit.
I swoop along the hills high above Lake Austin on 2222, a road with a perfect roller coaster of numbers for a name. A couple of sips of Code Warrior and I am blissfully at one with what nature remains, shoved in between the bumper crop of robber baron mausoleums that sprouted during the money kegger years along what had once been a winding country lane.
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh!
I effortlessly maneuver a maze of turns that delivers me to the hugest piece of cheese a poor little mouse like myself can imagine: the Pyramid House. I gaze fondly up at the site of so many lavish affairs and recall the many times in palmier days when I led a convoy of caterer’s trucks up to this very residence.
The Pyramid House is a nearly life-size replica of one of the smaller pharaonic tombs built by gaming magnate Turk Lord and his trophy wife, Blitz, with the help of a platoon of the finest masons that could be smuggled across the Rio Grande. The official cost is given as twenty million, but insiders always poke thumbs up at least eight or nine times, bringing the actual total closer to thirty million. The Lords built their house high above the banks of Lake Travis to celebrate the success of Turk’s first massive multiplayer online game—Sand!—in which teams of grave robbers battle gangs of mummies to be the first to plunder the tombs of the pharaohs.
I remember my clever boys in their backward caps waxing enthusiastic about how realistically the mummies’ windings flapped as they attacked marauding grave robbers. If only my boys had been half as good at plundering in real life as they were in the virtual realm I wouldn’t be sitting behind the wheel of a minivan. Sadly, in the end, the only sure way for the clever boys to make money proved to be off of the other clever boys.
When the Bubble Bucks were rolling, though, they rolled higher at the Pyramid House than anywhere else. When Sand 2! was released, Wretched was hired to supply lobster kebabs and truffle couscous for five hundred. For that event, I had all the boys on my staff dress in authentic muslin slavewear that bore an unsettling resemblance to giant diapers. The diaphanous Cleopatra costumes I designed for the girls were a big hit, though, with the geekazoidal gaming crowd. I rented a dozen camels from the San Antonio Zoo to use as mobile serving stations. The camel toting kegs of Courvoisier was the most popular dromedary of the night.
The days of Courvoisier by the keg seem long ago as I pilot the minivan up the steep hill. But my eye is not on the vast hummock of hand-quarried limestone; no, I am focusing on the very cozy guesthouse off to the side. If I can just hole up there for a month or two, out of sight, out of mind, I am certain I can find a way to save myself.
A truck from A Moving Experience, specialists in transporting museum-quality furnishings, blocks the drive. I am not surprised to find Spree Winslow supervising the unloading of fabled pieces of furniture. Spree is an interior designer. Or what is it Spree is calling
herself now? A design curator? Something that conveys Spree’s lockjawed steeliness and talent for snaking high-demand items away from major museums for her clients. Spree has moved out of the price range of mere Old Austin Tarrytowners. Tapping into the Gates-esque fortunes of the very, very few who rode Austin’s techno-bronc to the buzzer, Spree Winslow is the Dark Mistress of New Austin. For example, she has managed to mind-control the Lords into believing that their inner Lords can be expressed only by the furniture of Art Deco master Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann. So Spree was dispatched to scour the Continent for Ruhlmanns and other furnishings worthy of the Pyramid House. Outmaneuvering several museums and a private collector in Singapore, Spree has acquired a truckload of “important pieces.”
“Don’t bruise the pores of the amboyna wood!” Spree shrieks in the native Brooklyn accent she uses on anyone not paying her fifteen percent commission. Spree keeps her clientele intimidated by whispering to them in a Boston Brahmin accent. Also by being better clothed, coiffed, shod, bejeweled, and skinnier than anyone she deigns to work for. Strike that. Work with.
Intent upon the vault-size item swaddled in thick layers of quilted blankets being edged down the gangplank, Spree does not notice my approach. One of the movers stumbles the tiniest bit and Spree comes unglued.
“Be careful! This isn’t a dinette set from the RoomStore! The Victoria and Albert Museum wanted that piece! That is a genuine Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann Art Deco cabinet worth three-quarters of a million dollars!”
“Spree, did you say that your commission is ten or fifteen percent?”
“Blythe Young, what the hell are you doing here? I thought you’d moved back to Abilene.” Spree never wastes a particle of charm, to say nothing of basic human decency, on any transaction she isn’t getting a chunk of. It does cheer me a tiny bit, though, that I still rate the lockjawed whisper.
“You’re looking well yourself, Spree. Is Blitz around?”
“Turk and Blitz are helicopter skiing in Norway.”
“This time of year? Odd. How long will they be gone?”
“At least a month. After Norway, they’re going to do the Snowman Trek in Bhutan. Then they’ll be attending the Kalachakra performed by the Dalai Lama.”
“A month? Are you sure? Hard for me to imagine Turk taking that much time off from his empire.”
“What are you doing here? I heard you’d gone out of business.”
“Really? Actually, I just wrapped an event for Kippie Lee Teeter. Garden party. Saumon en croûte. Une bombe gelée. Baskets of violets on all the tables. Chamber group. Very elegant. Kippie Lee adored it. It was sort of a rehearsal for the event I’ll be doing for Laura at the ranch in Crawford.”
Spree bares her perfect little teeth in an unconvincing imitation of a smile and states flatly, “Blythe, leave now.”
I understand Spree’s hostility. In her place I would be hissing, spitting, and casting the evil eye because I am breaking so many precepts of the Swami Code.
That’s what we are, Spree and I, Swamis. It takes a tremendous leap to jump from the ranks of caterers in panel trucks with tinfoil trays of rice and beans to event planner; from interior decorators working on commission at Rooms To Go to curators of a private furniture collection; from nothing to what Spree has. To what I had and have lost my grip on: full Swamihood.
The blessed state of Swamihood is achieved only when no party, no garden, no wardrobe, no diet, no interior design, no flower arrangement, no massage, no facial, no manicure, no Botox injection, no lipo, no laser peel, no pet training, no haircut, no highlight, no low light, no yoga, Pilates, spinning, personal training, or therapy session is considered quite right unless it has been sanctioned by a bona fide Swami.
We both understand that I am violating the first of the Swami commandments: I am thy Lord, thy Swami, thou shalt have no other Swamis before me. The presence of another Swami casts doubt on the divinity of both, leading to confusion and heresy. As a Swami who has seen better days, whose high-priced judgments are now in serious doubt, I am a living reminder that Swamis might not have all the answers. That their very expensive opinions might be fallible.
“Are they here?” Blitz Lord skips down the limestone steps. “Are my Ruhlmanns here?”
I give Spree a look that says her lie about the Dalai Lama has been officially entered in the Swami Grudge Book, then I turn all my attention on Blitz Lord. Blond hair, white teeth, tan skin, blue eyes, Blitz could be a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model tomorrow if it paid a fraction of what being married to Turk Lord does.
Blitz started off as Turk’s personal trainer, which gave her that most dangerous of all powers, permission to touch. Why wives ever allow husbands they want to keep to go to a trainer, dental hygienist, facialist, or anyone other than a barber with hair growing out of his ears is beyond me. And a massage “therapist”? Start dividing the artwork right now. Anyway, after Sand! hit big, Turk (then known as Marvin) ditched the first Mrs. Lord—the only female in three states who would talk to him during his Dungeons & Dragons years—and married Blitz. She turned out to be a great acquisition. Especially after being retrofitted with new, even perkier tits, puffy lips, and rumors of a tightening “down there.”
Blitz leans in close to hear Spree’s refined whisper. “Not only does Aunt Spree have your Ruhlmanns, Petunia, but many, many other goodies that will transform the architecture of your life.”
Blitz claps and bounces about on aerobically perfect calves. “Tell me! Tell me!”
Happily for Spree, Blitz Lord is the ideal client: insecure with tons of social aspirations. An eager student, she parrots every Swami opinion planted in her buttermilk blond head as she tries to throw off trophy wife status and work her way into the heart of Austin society. Her current push consists of giving giant donations to the Platinum Longhorns. Though membership is typically reserved for actual graduates of the University of Texas, a sufficiently large gift of Sand! dollars has made Blitz, a graduate of the Elixir Institute’s Six-Week Personal Training Certification Program, into an honorary Platinum Longhorn. I am certain, though, that the Plat Longs’ steering committee, composed of Zero Three alumnae such as the Kipster herself, Bamsie, Cookie, and most of the other henchbitches, will never allow a “nouveau” trophy wife outside of the Zero Three zip code to do anything more than write gigantic checks.
Spree begins the inventory. “Well, there’s a fabulous Scalamandré armchair, a to-die-for nineteenth-century Burmese Buddha, an absolutely gorgeous chandelier from a Mogul palace in Gujarat, which I heard Susan Dell coveted mightily, and—”
“Blitz Lord! Look at you!” Cutting Spree off, I squeal in the high-pitched tone audible only to dogs and Texas women. “You look great!” Of course Blitz looks great. It’s her job. Blitz fends off the cyber sluts who swarm around her alpha-geek husband with marathon running and a live-in personal trainer/chef. She looks especially radiant today with a tan freshly sprayed on by someone who knows his anatomy.
I ignore Spree’s ovary-shriveling glare and push on. “Spree told me all about the Ruhlmanns. She knows what a hugehugehuge fan I am of Ruhlmann’s work and insisted I come out for a quick peek.”
“Oh. Cool.” Blitz’s enthusiasm, subdued though it is, assures me that the sound of the drums beating out the news from Zero Three that Blythe Young is a pariah has not yet reached the Pyramid House. It is only a matter of time, though. Blitz is already giving me “the look” that asks why I am still present. “The look” is the canary dying in the mine shaft, which reminds the Swami that she is not really just one of the girls. Behind “the look” are the words You may go now.
Luckily, Blitz cannot utter those words. They are too overtly Upstairs for a good middle-class, suburban American gal whose only experience with “help,” before Turk Lord upgraded her from personal trainer to wife, was the guy from Orkin who came to spray for cockroaches once a year. I have to connect with Blitz and connect fast if I am to have any hope of Kato Kaelining myself into that snug guesthouse.
No, I have to go deeper. Guesthouse deep. Husband? Children? Schools! Yes, that’s it! Schools are a surefire connection point. Always good for at least half an hour about how the client is not really a private school person, but, God, they are praying that little Max and Lucy get into St. Stephen’s. Or at least St. Andrew’s.
Schools? Children?
What am I thinking? Children pale beside The House. Copper guttering, butler’s pantry, wine cellar, farm sink, outside shower, panic room. The anthropology of The House swirls through my head. I feel as if I am taking a final exam I have forgotten to study for.
Screw The House.
I’ll never trump Spree in that arena. If I have any hope of getting into Blitz’s hideout, I have to play my one ace in the hole: I am thin.
“Blitz,” I interrupt, “you really do look great. Have you dropped some ell bees?” Fat Talk, the universal female bonder.
“God, are you kidding? I’m a total blob. But you, you look great.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No, seriously. What are you doing?”
I think it best to keep my own special program of speed, Eve cigarettes, Code Warrior cocktails, and financial suttee, all combined with a hummingbird metabolism I did nothing to deserve, to myself. “I’m the blob here.” I pinch the few micrometers of flesh on my belly and shake them despairingly. “I can’t get rid of this no matter what I do.”
“I know!” Blitz wails sympathetically. “I just can’t get the definition I want in my abs. I’m the blob. You look incredible. Are you training with anyone? Because you seriously look great.”
Great? Me? I make Kippie Lee look Rubenesque.
