As Ashley dug through the pockets of her jeans, Deedee said, “Dammit, wish I could, Mrs. Bloom, but I am flat busted. I just punched up my account at the ATM, and moths flew out. That new house, you know.” She pulled at the V of the front of her dress to show the safety pin keeping her bra together. “And the bra came from Wal-Mart to begin with. I’m not even sure how I’m going to pay for my whiskey. As a matter of fact, could I trouble you . . . would it be rude if I . . .,” and she tentatively reached her forefinger and thumb into the can to pinch the corner of a sawbuck. Mrs. Bloom slapped Deedee’s wrist and walked off, huffy.
“You love to torture Mrs. Bloom,” Ashley said. She winked a hello at Viv and gave her a welcoming little finger wave.
Along with Viv’s whiskey sour, Jones brought a champagne-slipper glass of water for Yvonne in her straw bag. Viv put the glass on the floor, and Yvonne cautiously poked out her trembling head to lap at the water like a kitten.
Viv had dropped a twenty-dollar bill into Mrs. Bloom’s coffee can, though she hadn’t been able to completely follow the story. Her mind had caught on the baby in the burning bed. Viv asked, “Would you all do it over again?” and Ashley and Deedee looked at each other, wondering what she was talking about. “Have kids, I mean,” she said. “They could’ve just grown up to burn your house down. Got revenge on you for all they think you did to them.”
“Well,” Ashley said, “sure. My daughter’s very spoiled, and my son’s very gay and very handsome, and I’m not being homophobic here, but that just strikes me as a deadly combination. I mean, he’ll be devoured, won’t he? Once he’s out in that tragic little world?”
Ever since Ashley’s son had come out of the closet, many of the Saturday conversations had revolved around diagnosing just exactly when Ashley should have known, and what, had she known when she should have known, she should have done. What kept the conversations from veering into homophobia, they assured each other, was the fact that the gay men they knew, even the ones they’d accidentally dated in the past, were the only men they tended to trust with all their hearts. “But yeah,” Ashley said. “I’d do it again. No question.”
“I love Naomi,” Deedee said, “but Zeke and I were so young, even though we didn’t know it then. In all honesty, if I somehow had the chance to do it all differently, I’d be very, very tempted to do it all differently.”
“Do you think that’s why you divorced?” Viv asked. “Because you married too young?”
“Who knows?” Deedee said.
I know, Viv thought, and she hated knowing. We only ever kiss, she wanted to tell Deedee. She wanted to confess her dumb little thing with Zeke just so she could dismiss it, downplay it, make it clear that it was Deedee’s friendship that she truly valued. When kissing Zeke, she felt heady from being under his spell, from the touching and the attention. But sometimes, when he left, it almost seemed he’d never even been there at all. And she had to admit, that was part of his appeal.
“Did you ever ask him if there was another woman?” Viv asked.
“Yeah, I asked him,” Deedee said. “When we were first breaking up. He said no.”
“But have you asked him since?” Viv asked. “Now that you’ve been divorced for a couple of years?”
“No, but maybe I’ll ask him next week,” Deedee said with a wink. “When we meet for drinks.”
“Drinks?” Viv said. “Drinks.”
“Drinks. I made a date with Zeke just before I came here,” Deedee said.
“Today?” Viv said. “You talked to Zeke today?”
“Yeah. A little bit ago. I got a wild hair, as they say, and asked him out.”
“So you called him?” Viv asked. “He called you? When?”
“Well, I called him, left a message on his cell phone. He called me back.”
“And you had conversation?” Viv asked. “Or you just asked him out, and he just said, ‘Sure’?”
“Look at you, on the edge of your seat,” Deedee said, smiling. “It wasn’t much of a conversation, but it was pleasant. I told him I bought him a chintzy souvenir in the Bahamas and that maybe we should get together so I could give him the cheap piece of crap. He giggled about it. Oh my god, I felt like I was blushing just talking to him on the phone. I felt like I was nineteen years old.”
“But the drink part of it,” Viv continued. “Who suggested meeting for a drink?”
“Me. Just me. When I was rained in at the hotel,” Deedee said, “I had time to think. I thought, hey, maybe Zeke’s having the same frustrations that I am. Out there, trying to meet someone you can even feel comfortable with, let alone someone you might want to think about falling in love with. Wouldn’t it be so much easier just to take up where you left off with someone old than to negotiate your way around all the neuroses and habits of a completely new person? I don’t mean to imply that we’re back together just because we’re meeting for a little nothing glass of wine, but, my god, wouldn’t it seem all the less sad? When I get ready to go out on Wednesday night to meet Zeke, I’ll still be the same disappointed person venturing out to meet another disappointed person in a bar, but,” and she stopped to puff her sputtering cigarette back to life before continuing, “but it won’t be the same at all. It’ll be complicated and maybe stupid, but so easy in so many ways, and so much what I need right now. A friendly face, or a semi-friendly face at least, in a, really, a very hostile crowd. Am I still in love with him? Not quite. But could I be again, easily? Yes, maybe.”
“Oh, god, ignore me,” Ashley said, waving her hand in the air and blowing her nose in a cocktail napkin. No one had even noticed she was crying. “There’s no reason for this. I’m not a serious person. I should be ignored.”
“Ashley?” Deedee said. She leaned over and put her hand on Ashley’s wrist.
“I was just thinking about Viv’s question, about life without my kids,” Ashley said. “Then I started to think about life without Troy. And that’s kind of what I have already, you know? Maybe he’s having an affair, huh? He has been researching those swingers,” Ashley said, twisting her hair around her finger, biting her lip. She then let go of her hair so she could crook and uncrook her fingers, making quotation marks in the air, while repeating the word “researching.” “Those sex parties I was telling you about. Maybe he’s hooked up with one of those tragic, put-upon wives. One of those women with the sad eyes serving pigs in blankets, trying to pretend they’re having the time of their lives while strangers sneak into their spare rooms to skate on thin ice. That would be exactly Troy’s type, I think. Wounded. And loose. And deluded.”
Ashley remembered vividly the house of the one swingers’ party Troy had taken her to. It had seemed too lived in to be anything but uninviting. When you kept the same house for so long, Ashley speculated, you seemed to fail to notice the yellowing of the pink roses in the patterns of your wallpaper, and the permanent splatter of grease above your stove. Your domesticity cast a dangerous spell of extreme comfort, she concluded, and you found yourself blissfully adrift among your own invisible filth.
“Nobody’s cheating on anybody, baby doll,” Deedee said, refilling Ashley’s glass from the bottle of champagne in the bucket of ice water.
Deedee then pushed herself back slightly from the table to cross and admire her own legs. She’d always had a nice pair of getaway sticks, as Zeke, up on old detective movies, had called them. His calling them “getaway sticks” might prove prophetic, Deedee thought, for there was a disease that ran in her family that had rendered her mother legless. The veins close up, the legs die, the doctors hack them right the hell off. “Well, I’ve got one foot in the grave, Deedle-dee,” Deedee’s mother had joked, sitting up in her hospital bed and raising her cup of weight-gain in a weary toast the morning after she’d lost her left leg just below the knee.
Deedee now pressed her finger against her leg, testing for thinness and feeling. Any threat of inheritance seemed too far off to be truly frightening. And maybe Zeke would be with her after all in o
ld age, at her side, missing her great gams right along with her. Not to read too much into a thing, but a lot could spark up over drinks Wednesday next.
“I should just learn to keep my big mouth shut,” Viv said, reaching over to gently rub Ashley’s back. “This is my fault, bringing up affairs and children and doing things over. What is there to do over? You have pretty little lives, girls, you really do.”
With her foot, Viv scooted Yvonne and her bag beneath the table, then excused herself. A touch drunk from having been drinking since morning, she stepped carefully down the steep stairs to the basement, wiggly on her high heels, running her fingers along the walls, across the framed pages cut from books on surrealist art. Empty bottles shattered in a room in the basement, dropped by the wait staff through a hole in the floor upstairs.
In the bathroom, Viv looked in the mirror. She looked young for her age, she decided, which justified her lying about it regularly, especially to the editors of O! La La. She’d actually turned forty just a few days before the “Flirty and Under Forty” issue had hit the newsstands. The magazine had celebrated her as an up-and-comer even as she’d already up and went. She was officially too old to be so young.
Viv remembered Deedee’s and Ashley’s weddings, when they were all still in college. Viv had been a bridesmaid at both, the only black person in either crowd. Yet she’d felt like a ghost, barely there, knowing somehow that if marriage happened for her, it wouldn’t happen for years. She still remembered the long toasts that made much of Zeke’s looks and Deedee’s common sense, of Troy’s and Ashley’s literary light. Viv, so young, had thought it worth marrying practically anybody at all, just so your friends would weep with happiness for you, articulate all your best qualities, for once in your life.
As she was going back up the stairs of La Buvette, Jones was coming down, on his way to the basement’s kitchen, carrying two picked-at plates of food. “How could someone leave so much salmon?” Viv said as they stopped on the steps together and she tore off a bite of fish with her fingers. “I’m starving, but I can’t stand to have anyone see me eat,” she said, eating.
Viv’s tongue worked around a small fish bone, and just as she was about to reach in and pluck it out, Jones surprised her with a kiss. Not a peck-between-friends kind of a thing, but a full-on backseat lip lock. She wanted to enjoy the kiss, but she was concerned about the bone swimming from her tongue to his and down to stick in his gullet. She pulled her head away, and the bone indeed had left her mouth. “Oh, god, open your mouth,” she said, and he did, and she reached in to retrieve the bone. “I just saved your life,” she said, showing him what could have been the instrument of his death.
“I owe you,” he said. He winked and continued down the stairs, and Viv continued up, her drunk headache having lifted, the stairs not so steep and narrow. She’d recommend it to all her friends, a key to a fleeting minute of happiness: get yourself kissed unexpectedly by someone young and beautiful.
Back at the table, where Ashley and Deedee were going over the bill, Viv remembered the kisses at their weddings. When else, where else, would people tap on their glasses and sigh and applaud when a man simply kissed his own wife?
“Remember when the hospital bought the old Cinerama movie theater so they could tear it down and put in a parking lot, and we made popcorn and picketed?” Viv said. Of course they all remembered, for it hadn’t been that many years before.
“Remember when we went to Chicago to Christmas shop on Michigan Ave,” Deedee said, “and we ate in that Chinese restaurant, where one of the waiters was curled up asleep in a booth?”
“Remember when we saw that old man in that big fur coat?” Ashley said.
They all smiled and nodded, squinting as if into the deep past, though that had been only two Christmases ago.
They went on like this for a bit, revisiting recent times together, their dinners out and evenings in, all mistaken for mundane at the time, now sparked to life when viewed through this lens of nostalgia.
Mrs. Bloom
As Mrs. Bloom, drinking alone only a few tables away, clawed around for her pill box, Peach Mobley’s head slipped from her purse and gently back-and-forthed, autumn-leaf-like, as it fell to the floor of the wine bar. Mrs. Bloom glanced around to see if anyone had noticed, then plucked Peach’s paper noggin from the tile and returned it to a baggie with all the other heads and the hands and feet recently clipped from her stockpiled collection of the “Flirty and Under Forty” issue of O! La La magazine. With her purse in her lap, her hands sunk into it, she compulsively touched at all the pieces of the women precisely cut out with an X-Acto knife. It had gotten so that, by simply blindly running her finger along the edge of a cheek or the heel of a shoe or the sweep of a curl, she could identify who was who.
Mrs. Bloom took the hand of Viv, Omaha Beauty No. 4 in the magazine spread, from the baggie in her purse and wantonly leaned it against the stem of her glass.
You were expecting a woman-hating man? Mrs. Bloom rehearsed in her head, tempted to stand atop Ashley Allyson’s coffee table during the Sugar Shop party and confess to her stalking. Would it be better if I told you I’m not entirely what I seem to be? Maybe I’m a twisty little pre-post-op transsexual on my way to Trinidad, Colorado, the American home of state-of-the-art genital-snipping and trench-digging machinery, or whatever the hell they use to stick a permanent hitch in your giddyup. Would you be happier with that sad little portrait? Are you more comfortable with yet another druggy gender freak, a lost boy leaking testosterone from his nips and tucks? Maybe in the horror movie of your mind, I don’t just stalk these women, but I bugger them too, strapping on some phallic gizmo with hellish bells and whistles to stand in for the poor cooked sausage in my panties. Mrs. Bloom pictured herself a character in an Almodovar movie, a lethal half-man, half-woman played by a stately Spanish actress in sunglasses and slinky floral dresses, a pearl-handled pistol stuck in her garter.
Mrs. Bloom planned to take her Folger’s can of illgot cash across the river to Council Bluffs, Iowa, to the Triple X Carnivale, a porn shop chock-full of full-color photos of all the various varieties of rape. She was running out of compromising positions, and adult stores were illegal in Omaha.
It was a shame, Mrs. Bloom thought, that she must cheat and thieve with her coffee-can donations in order to afford the stalking. For years now, Mrs. Bloom had struggled to put together the Omaha Street, a real sacred-cow tipper, a rag of integrity that spat and vinegared on every dropping of injustice she got wind of. But keeping honest and keeping advertisers were often contradictory tasks. Even the fluff could prove incendiary—a restaurant reviewer declares somebody’s duck à l’orange to be a touch gamy, and the next thing you know, you’re offering free ad contracts to the restaurateur to make amends. Meanwhile, O! La La, a breezy blowjob-of-a-thing, skips along empty-headed and inoffensive, pissing daisies and shitting lollipops, and it manages to staff twelve adequately paid hacks and to afford its publisher a house on a lake and a downtown condo down the street from the Performing Arts Center.
So it was a pretty serendipity that had reared its ugly head one day a few months before. The Omaha Street and O! La La shared the same printer, see, and one day the printer’s truck accidentally dropped off at the Street one palette of publications too many—on Mrs. Bloom’s dock had been left one thousand copies of the “Flirty and Under Forty” issue of O! La La, one thousand glossy images of each lucky bitch tastefully profiled and dressed up in fine linen and silk, ripe for the plucking. Though the truck driver realized his mistake and returned an hour or so later, it was by then already too late. Mrs. Bloom had devised a plan that would turn O! La La’s pandering into an embarrassment for all concerned, and she’d hidden the magazines away. Mrs. Bloom could make those women regret ever having sought out special attention for their beauty and youth and success, and the publisher of O! La La would get a nifty black eye.
At first, Mrs. Bloom thought the most she would do would be to print some porn off some of
the more guileless sites in the recesses of the Internet, glue on some of the women’s characteristics, and send these shockers out for a week or two, just enough to knock that queeny, mewling, pompous publication down a notch. She wasn’t even sure if her tactic was original—it had sprung to mind so quickly, so fully formed, it seemed she’d read about such a thing before, this mixing up of body parts.
But soon enough, the magazines in the basement began to breathe. The Omaha beauties, their telltale hearts a-beat, lay there pressed within the pages, immobile but alive, like bludgeoned victims left for dead. Mrs. Bloom’s scheme began to blossom with potential and sublimity. She would seek out quality printed porn, new and vintage, and her every gesture of harassment would be a piece of outsider art, a carefully articulated sexual quip. It would be a performance in collage, and when she felt she’d said all she’d wanted, only then would she confess. After her admission, which would be on the cover of the Omaha Street, and after serving her eighteen days or whatever paltry sentence you might get slapped with for bugging dames, she’d publish a tell-all. The book would be issued by a radical press, but not too radical—sometimes those presses that were beyond-the-pale were too pallid, their books full of typos and wrapped in brown paper. The Paper-Doll Diatribe: Art, Journalism, and Whores on Parade needed a cover and a marketing campaign that was hip and that swung with more than a speck of sexiness. Mrs. Bloom’s book needed the French tickle of a Maurice Girodias—it could be another Lolita, a SCUM Manifesto, with proper manipulation.
Mrs. Bloom counted the money in the Folger’s can. It was rumored that the proprietor of the Triple X Carnivale in Council Bluffs kept in a back room a porn so divine and esoteric that you had to pay $100 just to gaze upon it. You could turn its pristine pages only when wearing white gloves, and the lights were kept dim so as not to risk yellowing all the bright pinkness of the ladies in the centerfolds. These magazines were the pinnacle of filth, the women the crème de la crème of the unspeakably nasty. Mrs. Bloom longed to collect them all.
Devils in the Sugar Shop Page 9
