Girls' Night Out

by Kate Flora

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  Copyright © 2014 by Kate Flora

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  Table of Contents

  Girls' Night Out

  Reading Guide Questions

  About the Author

  Girls' Night Out

  Getting a six-foot dead man into his SUV wasn’t easy for a small woman in stilettos and a pencil skirt. He flopped like a dead fish and seemed to have more limbs than an octopus. I now understood the true meaning of the term dead weight. But hard or not, I was sending Jay Hanrahan home and without the good time he’d planned on when he’d had the bartender dump that powder into my drink. Even with Georgia and Callie there to help, it was a challenge. We couldn’t just roll him or drag him; we had to use kid gloves. We needed to get him back to his own place intact and unbruised, put him in his jammies, and get him into bed.

  As we levered him into the front and fastened his seat belt, a truly ironic precaution under the circumstances, I thought about the crazy sequence of events that had brought us here. It wasn’t the sort of thing my book group usually did.

  ***

  “A Boston jury has just found local attorney Jay Hanrahan not guilty in a date rape case that’s grabbed headlines throughout the region. Complainant Ellen Corso…” The news announcer’s voice would have slid over me like background noise if I hadn’t caught Ellen’s name. Most of what passed for news here in Boston was disaster stories—shootings, stabbings, fires, and horrific accidents I’d never felt required much attention. But Ellen’s news did.

  Still holding the cake I’d taken from the oven, I turned to stare at the screen. Hanrahan stood behind a bank of mikes, the brick courthouse facade as a backdrop, smiling a disarming Catholic schoolboy smile. His pricey, bouffant John Edwards coiffeur was static in the breeze that fluttered the eager reporters’ clothes. His yellow patterned tie matched the useless silk square in his pocket. Predatory, unnaturally white teeth gleamed as he straightened his already straight tie and leaned into the microphone, JFK handsome but with cold eyes.

  “I’m relieved, of course,” he said, “but I always believed the jury would understand the situation. Ms. Corso and I had a few drinks followed by a pleasant, consensual sexual encounter. That’s all there was to it. Two adults having sex. It’s unfortunate she came to believe it was something else. I can only hope she is getting, or will get, the help she needs.”

  “You’re the one who needs help, Hanrahan. You’re the one who had sex with her while she was drugged into unconsciousness.” I surprised myself by speaking aloud. Women living alone must be careful about this sort of thing—talking to themselves, their TVs, or their pets, dressing in clothes that make them look like bag ladies, exceeding the single daily glass of medicinal wine. These were the signs of loneliness and instability. Even at 38, with a comfortable income and cherishing my privacy, there were times I worried about myself. Just last week I’d woken with a painting so vivid in my mind that I’d dashed into the studio in my robe at 5:00 a.m. and was still wearing it at 1:00 when my UPS man rang the bell.

  As reporters swarmed Hanrahan with their questions, the camera shifted to a woman on the sidelines flanked by two cops and a fierce-looking iron-haired woman I assumed was her attorney. My friend Ellen. Hanrahan’s alleged date rape victim. Or, since the jury had just found him innocent, Hanrahan’s wrongful accuser.

  She wore the boxy black suit sexual assault victims wear to court to avoid any suggestion in the jury’s mind that they might have invited their attack—pleated below-the-knee skirt, double-breasted, square-shouldered jacket with no suggestion of a waist. Dowdy low-heeled pumps. No nail polish or jewelry except her wedding ring. Ellen’s delicate beauty was so completely obscured an observer of Hanrahan’s stripe might have thought it a mercy fuck.

  Curling tendrils of dark hair escaping from her severe bun blew across large gray eyes glazed with pain and shock, underlined by circles as dark as a kindergartner’s drawing of a football player. She’d clamped her lips tight and pressed a fist against them in a failed effort to still their trembling. Sun glinted off the tracks of silver tears. Ellen looked ten years older. She looked like she’d been hit by a truck.

  Heat from the pan burned through the potholders, and I dropped the cake. In a rush, I swept it up onto the counter with a small wisp of gratitude that it had fallen pan side down. I snapped off the news, stopping Hanrahan in midsentence, and went to my studio, closing the door firmly on the house, the news, the awful stuff of everyday life. Book group wasn’t coming till 7:30. I had a few hours to put some work between myself and the look on Ellen’s face.

  I paint flowers, an accurate if oddly Victorian way to put it. They painted prim little flowers. I paint large canvases of gorgeous, gaudy, somewhat erotic blooms that work well with a variety of decors. Although I had once jokingly told an interviewer that if Thomas Kinkade was “the painter of light,” I was the painter of boudoirs, I’d always regretted saying that. I hate being put in any box. In my artist’s statement, I spoke about technique and about texture and light. About intention. About my interaction with the viewer. I took serious pleasure in creating flowers more perfect and real than the real. Flowers that evoked an emotional response. At shows, people reached out to touch them or leaned in to smell them. They smiled and sighed with pleasure.

  But I wasn’t just a housewife who dabbled or an aspiring painter with another career. I’d put in my time as waitress and receptionist. I’d hidden my irritation, frustration, and weariness behind a faux smile until I was able to leave that behind. This was my job as well as my passion. Painting what sold paid the mortgage. Just like my friend the glassblower, who called cobalt “cash flow blue,” I knew that if I painted roses they would sell. But not the roses I was painting today.

  My palette was normally soft and rich—hues of pink, rose, and ivory or creamy peaches and apricots, large, closely focused portraits of unfolding flowers. One of my favorites, a blowsy four-by-five-foot bouquet of peonies in a celadon vase, hung over my fireplace.

  Today, everything was stark white and blood red, a single, enormous rose on a strong green stem, rich, gleaming velvet petals touched with quivering drops of dew, as wet and perfect as drops of blood, standing in a pure white art deco vase. Then a second painting, the perfect rose savaged, petals crushed and torn away, bruised to deeper, blackened shades of red, falling through the air and scattered onto a white damask tablecloth, the bruised petals curling protectively inward.

  Later, my white shirt spattered with the symbolic gore of the rose’s evisceration, I went to clean up and get ready for book group. Tonight we would be discussing Proust’s Within a Budding Grove. I needed to clear my head, chill the wine, and warm the cheese, to embrace the acute and obsessive observations of Proust’s character and keep my distance from Ellen’s face.

  ***

  Ellen might have been in the room, in all of our heads, but no one mentioned her until I served dessert, a peach and raspberry upside-down cake I’d invented, topped with fresh whipped cream. Normally, my friends fell greedily on whatever I baked, which was lucky for them and for me. It was no fun to cook for people who only pushed food around on their plates. But Callie, Georgia, Suzan, and Tess swore they never ate at all on
the days book group met at my house, saving themselves for the hors d’oeuvres and dessert. Maybe that was why our group had lasted so long.

  During our senior year in college, we’d started it as a spoof on our mothers’ nice social lives. We’d sit around Georgia’s shabby apartment, complaining about our mothers’ assessments, attachments, and unrealistic hopes for us, drinking tea and discussing Jane Austen. The tea drinking hadn’t lasted long. We’d quickly embraced wine as the libation of choice. None of us had chosen easy paths—Suzan was in social work, Georgia a lawyer doing domestic relations work, Callie had become a doctor. Tess had taken her chip-on-the-shoulder, don’t treat me like a little Asian doll attitude to business school and worked for the IRS, where, as she bluntly put it, she got to screw people without ever taking her clothes off.

  We all needed the mellowing effect of wine to unwind from law, medicine, finance, and the infinite plug-the-hole-in-the-dam challenges of social work. I enjoyed the company, after my long solitary days, and a chance to feed people I loved. I liked not having to drink my wine alone.

  Tess was usually our leader, but tonight it was Callie who picked up her fork, then threw it down with a clatter, sending a splat of whipped cream onto the coffee table, her words exploding like uncorked champagne. “Did any of you see the news tonight? Did you see Ellen, what coming forward to try to stop that man did to her? I know I took a vow to do no harm, but I’d like to castrate that son of a bitch. It’s not the first time. He’s a Teflon rapist just like William Fucking Kennedy Smith.”

  “I called her,” Tess said, leaning forward suddenly, her shiny black hair almost brushing her dessert. “She didn’t pick up. I left a message, saying we’d be here tonight if she wanted to come. That we were concerned about her. I asked her to call. But I can see why she wouldn’t be taking calls today. There are so many nutcases out there.”

  There was a chorus of agreement. Everyone, it seemed, had seen Ellen on the news.

  “Did you see her face? How awful she looked?” I hit my chest with a fist. “It was like getting punched right here. I’m awfully worried about what she’ll do.”

  Ellen had been the sixth member of our group, quieter, shyer, and more fragile. The one we all worried about. She studied too hard, worried too much. She’d become an MIT professor to please her critical academic father. He never even noticed. None of us could understand how she’d crossed paths with Jay Hanrahan, while we all, sadly, could see how she might have become his victim. Despite her brilliance, even in her 30s, Ellen retained a naive and childish innocence.

  Until now.

  We had each called and offered to go to court with her. Ellen had turned us all down. Even me. “I can handle it,” she’d insisted. “You’re all busy. You’ve got jobs.” The sad thing was, we hadn’t been too busy for friendship, but she had always been stubborn and unable to take anything for herself. I thought it would have looked good in court for her to have a row of supportive friends, but we had honored her wishes. Now we regretted it.

  “You want to castrate him, honey, you can count me in,” Georgia said. “I am so sick of men behaving badly. I’ve got one right now, a divorce situation, where the bastard looted the bank and stock accounts, moved in with his mistress, and now he wants to put his wife and three kids out on the street. He was one of those controlling assholes who kept his wife in the dark about their finances—pressured her to give up her career, you know, giving her the ‘You just be the pretty little woman’ thing. Now that she’s had three kids and has lost 15 years of seniority, he’s replaced her with a young hottie. He’s hidden all their assets in his so-called business. She’s driving a leased Lexus that’s about to be jerked out from under her. The kids are about to be kicked out of their private schools. She doesn’t even have grocery money, and now he wants the goddamned house. Jerk called me up screaming because I got a judge to restrain the house sale.”

  “I told him I would only speak to his lawyer. That if he ever contacted me again, I’d have the judge throw his miserable ass in jail.” Georgia smiled her Miss America smile. She really was from Georgia and had been a high school beauty queen. In a woman as smart and cool as she was, beauty could be a lethal weapon

  “Your guy, Georgia,” Tess said, waving a red-tipped finger, “I wonder if he pays his taxes? Lived in a nice house in Concord and sent his kids to private school? I do just wonder if his reported income matches his documentable expenditures? Sometimes…”—her smile was sweetly malicious—“a friendly government agency, tipped to such a situation, can freeze accounts, putting a serious crimp in a spender’s style. And, for your client, there’s the innocent spouse rule.”

  “Could you really?” Georgia smiled. “What an interesting idea.”

  “I like Tess’s idea,” Suzan said softly. She didn’t speak much; she was usually too wrung out from work. She came, she said, for the company of healthy, functional, and intelligent grownups who wouldn’t need her to sort out their lives. “Wouldn’t it just be the coolest thing if we actually did something about some of these guys? The things I see…” She shook her head. “I should be past being surprised at people behaving badly to each other, I know, but sometimes…I mean, not to discount the importance of Proust or anything, this group is the only thing that keeps me reading at all, but what if, just for a few sessions, our meetings focused on something else?”

  I hesitated, unsure about sharing this, but I thought they needed to know. “I talked with Ellen,” I said. “She’s thinking about getting a gun.”

  Georgia grabbed a fork and stabbed her cake so hard the plate broke. Chastened, she set the pieces down carefully. “Oh, Rory, honey. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m not mad at you.”

  “We’re all mad,” I said.

  “I’m serious,” Suzan said. “I think we should do something before poor Ellen does something impulsive and ruins her life.”

  “Ruins it even more, you mean,” Callie said. “Whatever it is, I’m in.”

  My rush of excitement was tinged with an edge of fear. My personal courage went into sustaining myself as a painter. I was brave about my work and its worth, not about confronting the world. “What are you suggesting? That we become vigilantes? Forgo sipping wine in favor of righting wrongs? The Caped Readers or something?”

  Suzan folded her arms. “Maybe I am. It’s obvious the system won’t do it.”

  “So what are you thinking?” Callie said. “That we should go after Hanrahan? And do what? Castration’s a bit dramatic. I’m all for revenge, but I’m not too keen on going to jail. I’ve got a busy practice. My patients depend on me.”

  “OK,” Suzan said, “how about what the guy did to Ellen? I say we do the same to him.”

  ***

  Metafore had about as much ambience as a McDonald’s at 11:00 p.m. Canned lighting, canned music, the art one step above painting on velvet, and an abundance of fake plants dulled with dust. The women at the bar wore too few clothes over too much flesh and looks of shifty-eyed desperation, while the men wore the undisguised looks of shoppers at a meat market. This was my second time in the place. Once had been more than enough.

  The bartender, a pale, egg-shaped man with thinning hair who had seriously introduced himself as Mad Dog Kelly, was dying to be my new best friend. He leaned over confidentially whenever he could to admire the impressive cleavage produced by Georgia’s Wonderbra and Tess’s too-small satin camisole as he tried to learn my story. On my last visit—a brief foray to check the place out—I had obligingly disclosed a recent divorce and heartbreak. Tonight I embellished the story with spurts of anger at my imaginary ex.

  I was swinging my feet in Tess’s hot pink Chinese Laundry stilettos and sipping the girliest drink I knew—a Cosmo—when Hanrahan came through the door. He paused like someone making an entrance in an old black-and-white movie, straightening his tie while his cool eyes lasered the room, falling at last on me, and on the small pink bag—scooped that afternoon from T.J. Maxx—that I’d set
on the barstool beside me. Through lowered lashes, I watched Hanrahan look at the bartender and caught Mad Dog’s slight nod. The predator, it seemed, had a coconspirator.

  I wondered if Hanrahan came in after and shared the pictures. If studying the victims gave the egg-shaped man a vicarious sex life.

  “Excuse me? Is this seat taken?” His voice was deep and pleasant. He waited, looking down with one brow raised.

  “It is now.” I set my purse on the bar, and the dance of predator and prey began. I reluctantly revealed my loneliness, Hanrahan shared his. We bemoaned our empty places, and I told my sad tale of being abandoned by the friend who was to meet me here and drive me home. He kindly offered a ride. When I ordered my second Cosmo, he ordered one, too, again with an almost imperceptible nod to Mad Dog. My artist’s eye, so used to studying the minute details of things as well as the whole picture, saw the bartender’s sleight-of-hand, the quick spill of powder into my drink before he set it up on the bar.

  I might not have to use the dose I’d brought after all. I just slid my glass close to Hanrahan’s, did a quick switch while he and Mad Dog were drawn to the TV screen when a Red Sox batter popped up and the shortstop dropped it, and I was in business.

  I was hot to be out of there, moving ahead with the program, but first he had to drink that drink, so I sat through his suave patter, smiling sweetly and twisting coyly on my stool, letting him enjoy the full benefit of the Wonderbra’s charms. Men don’t know it, but a Wonderbra could probably even give them cleavage. He wove compliments and questions about my sorry situation with his own tale of abandonment and loss. The way he told it, poor Jay Hanrahan had a sadly empty life. I had to admit he was a pretty good actor.