Devils in the Sugar Shop

by Timothy Schaffert

  “She got up on the table,” Deedee whispered, riveted, a forkful of strawberry tart frozen just before her lips, “and started telling us about the torture of being saddled with an enormous schlong. She says when she was young, she was a famous porn star named P. P. Swell. She says she’s made love to ten thousand women.”

  “She was perfectly herself this afternoon in my erotica class,” Ashley said. She watched Mrs. Bloom over the tops of her sunglasses. “Well, as perfectly herself as I suppose she can be, I guess.”

  “Who screamed?” Viv asked.

  “I think it was what’s-her-name,” Deedee said. “The accountant. She’s terrified of men.”

  No one at the party encouraged Mrs. Bloom to inch back into decency, to tuck away her invisible superstar johnson, lower her kimono, step down off the coffee table. They let her act out her complete mad scene, many of them—pastry chefs and theater directors, painters and sommeliers—still seething from some critical slap they’d received from the reviewers for Mrs. Bloom’s newspaper.

  So it wasn’t Mrs. Bloom who had Viv rattled, but rather the roomful of pale, skittish women looking on, doing nothing. We’re all alone, Viv thought.

  “Mrs. Bloom, love,” Viv interrupted, pulling Mrs. Bloom’s underwear back up. She pulled down the bottom of the kimono, then took Mrs. Bloom’s bird-boned old-lady hand in hers. The gesture, the touch, seemed to set Mrs. Bloom right, and she blinked and smiled shyly, like a volunteer from the audience being helped from a magician’s box.

  “I’m going to walk you home,” Viv said. Mrs. Bloom lived nearby, across the street from La Buvette. “Would someone grab her coat from the other room?”

  “It’s a yellow slicker,” Mrs. Bloom said. She leaned into Viv, consenting to be rescued. Mrs. Bloom had looked so old for so long, her hair always a premature shade of hag, her voice a harsh collision of whiskey burn and smoker’s rasp, her face a raisin, that somehow Viv had never imagined the woman actually aging. She thought she’d more likely been born a shriveled curmudgeon in a roomy caftan, her fists balled with feminist complaint.

  “Someday soon she’ll be dead,” Viv scolded the women of the party, as if Mrs. Bloom had already fallen deaf at her side.

  The Sugar Shop party seemed to be over as everyone began to down the last of their drinks and collect their coats. It was still only intermission, but Ashley and Deedee made no effort to keep people from leaving. As a matter of fact, Ashley ended up announcing, with a slip of paper held up in the air between two fingers, one leg kicked up girlishly behind her, “Anyone interested in crashing an orgy?” She wiggled the paper, which evidently spelled out the provocative address. Viv scooted Mrs. Bloom out the door.

  Friends do things for each other, Viv had lectured Zeke, only minutes ago, when she’d called him on her cell. For example, say, if a friend has done something that she feels terribly guilty about, you tell her that it really wasn’t all that terrible, regardless of whether you think it’s terrible or not. And when you’ve gotten into the habit of kissing a friend’s ex-husband, and you realize that’s really not cool, you quit kissing your friend’s ex-husband.

  “Can we just hold hands, then?” Zeke had asked, and she’d almost said yes.

  Viv decided that after she dropped Mrs. Bloom off, she’d go hear Jones’s band play in the basement of Agent 99, the lesbian bar full of posters of Barbara Feldon. Viv would sit toward the back in one of those space-age, egg-shaped chairs of the 1960s, nurse one more cocktail, and watch all the young girls try to disguise their crippling anxiety, their sad eyes kohl-rimmed, Swisher Sweets sagging from their puffy lips. And Viv would raise her glass to her dog, Yvonne, in her bag. Many things she hadn’t wanted from life—a series of bad breakups and even worse get-back-togethers, a shaky career, a generalized uncertainty that had plagued her throughout her thirties, a perverted stalker—had all happened already, and none of it had ruined her. Such knowledge, in the right hands, could render a person indestructible.

  Mrs. Bloom

  In a Freudian knicker-twist, Mrs. Bloom had thought it was a gun she’d packed in her panties, a phallic snub-nose, though she’d had no particular victim in mind.

  No one had to die, because the pistol in her britches fell impotent. As she sat among the women at the party, pleased to be in their company, the gun she thought she’d smuggled in snaked into something flesh, and it brought along with it a living history. And when Viv touched Mrs. Bloom’s hand so gentlemanly, even the new weapon between her legs got feet and walked off. And Mrs. Bloom was a little girl again, once again oblivious, curious, unlearned.

  In the aftermath of the Sugar Shop party, Mrs. Bloom sat alone at her kitchen table smoking a hand-rolled cigarette of pipe tobacco and drinking oolong from a delicate cup. Her window was open, and the thin curtains spiraled, inviting Mrs. Bloom to slip out, and down, and away.

  But, as she knew, no one had to die tonight, no one at all. Mrs. Bloom took her teacup and cigarette to the window to study the snowflakes so big they looked magnified, microscoped, and she could make out the fine architecture of each flake, crystal cathedrals not at all unique, halls of mirrors upon mirrors, dropping to shatter swiftly and quietly against brick and pavement. She took from the pocket of her kimono the plastic baggie of heads and hands and feet, and she turned it inside out, sending the clippings out the window to fall with the snow. A hand landed in a bird’s nest in a bare tree, a head settled in the fur trim of a woman’s coat, a foot figure-eighted across a frozen-over puddle. Maybe Mrs. Bloom would not confess on the front cover of the Omaha Street after all but would let the Flirt vanish, and the local news anchors could out-shout each other with reports of the Flirt’s sudden silence. As she thought about it now, it was exactly the way she wanted to go—in a flurry of quiet.

  Peach

  Actually, I’m nothing worse than a sad, hungry, little Gretel, Peach promised herself. She stood in the cold, at the glass front door of Mermaids Singing, glancing inside, watching a clumsy rush of shadows fall from around a wall of books. She could see her keys where she’d forgotten them on the desk. She knocked again.

  A Gretel sees the world distorted through a window of sugar, looking in on other lives in candy houses. She nibbles away at gingerbread eaves and licks the stripes off peppermint doorknobs. She doesn’t want to be destructive, she just craves sweetness.

  Peach pressed her forehead against the glass, even touching the tip of her tongue to it. She squinted, reading the pantomime of the shadows on the floor of the shop—elbows rocking with the buttoning of a blouse, legs kicking with the pulling on of pants. Oh my god, Peach thought, her heart sinking. My sister really is cheating on Mickey.

  Just as she was prepared to fall into a deep despair over the hopelessness of it all, Plum stepped from around the bookshelves, Mickey right behind her, the two of them still very much intact despite their disarray: part of Mickey’s shirttail stuck in his zipper, Plum’s blouse inside out, both of them smiling crookedly, their cheeks a pinched pink, their hair mussed.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Peach said as Plum let her in, though she wasn’t sorry at all. It pleased her to walk in on such marital bliss. She kissed both Plum and Mickey on their cheeks and held up the cold bottle of cava she’d grabbed at La Buvette on the way over.

  “You’ve forgiven me?” Plum asked, taking Peach’s arm and leading her to the intimate picnic Peach had just spoiled as efficiently as an army of ants. “Eat the rest of this curry chicken,” she said, and they sat on the blanket spread out on the floor before the section labeled Conspiracy Theory. “And there are still some samosas too.”

  Mickey got to his knees and popped the cork on the wine, then poured some for them all. “Plum told me what she did,” he said. “That was cuckoo. Even for Plum.”

  “I don’t know what possessed me, Peach,” she said. She leaned on her elbow and ran her fingers slow over the stretch of her neck. “I’m just jealous, I guess. I’d loooove to be having an affair.” She sighed. “A s
tolen afternoon at a foreign movie, sitting in the back row of the theater to kiss. How scandalous of me.” At that, Mickey leaned over and lifted Plum’s wool skirt a bit to bite into her leg. “Ow!” she said, slapping at him. “Such big teeth you have.”

  Peach surveyed the row after row of novels and poems and memoirs, collections of explicit love letters sent back and forth, journals unexpurgated, sordid portraits of artists, so many books inspired by the wrong turns of love.

  Reading Peach’s mind again, Plum stepped over to the Mean Lovers section of the shop and returned to Peach’s side with an art book. “That Picasso is of his lover Dora,” she said, pointing to the portrait on the page. “It actually began as a painting of a different lover. He changed the features of the woman in the painting as his passions shifted.”

  Peach considered adapting her erotica-writing exercises from Ashley’s class into a play for the Rubberneck Theatre. She’d model the stage exactly after Troy and Ashley’s elegantly crummy loft. The Troy character wouldn’t wear socks with his loafers or take ice with his cocktails. Maybe the closer she got to the truth of the matter, carefully defining Troy by the things he never did, the less her own story would seem so true to life. She loved the idea of the whole affair fading into fiction.

  “Oh, looky here,” Plum said, peeling something from the bottom of Peach’s shoe. “It’s a picture of your foot. It must have fallen off one of the Flirt’s porn collages.”

  Cute, Peach thought at first, her severed foot cut off from its sinister connotations. For a moment this tool of her destruction became something whimsical, unexpected. But when Peach looked at it more closely, when she held it in the palm of her hand, she saw that it wasn’t her shoe at all. It was the shoe of one of the Flirt’s other victims. How had she ended up with it? Choosing not to wonder, Peach blew it from her palm, like wishing on a fallen eyelash.

  Naomi

  Lee plucked a loose blue feather from Naomi’s Mardi Gras mask and brushed her blushing cheek with it. Lee wore a mask too, as did Peyton and Tate, masks sold in a cellophane bag, four for a dollar. On the way to the swingers’ party, they’d stopped at an About a Buck because Tate had insisted on showing up at the party reeking of cheap aftershave.

  The many footsteps in the snow on the front walk at 14812 W. Josephine Lane were fading away, dusted over. Lee tickled her cheek with the feather to cheer her up, Naomi knew. It hadn’t entered her mind that they’d actually end up at the party—Peyton rarely followed through on anything. Naomi figured they’d detour to the basement of Agent 99, where they’d all gain entrance without fake IDs because Lee was friendly with the doorman, a husky drag queen with one of those drag-queeny names that are part classic B-list celebrity, part serial killer or assassin. (Was he Squeaky Van Doren? Or Zsa Zsa Wayne Gacy?) Lee served as a mascot—they’d dubbed him the Marble Faun, after the young handyman adopted by the Bouviers in Grey Gardens—for a whole motley kingdom of queens, all of them jowly and only half plucked, their wigs full of rats’ nests, runs rampant up and down their glittery pantyhose.

  As Tate opened the door, Naomi blushed so hard that her eyes watered. She wanted nothing to do with any of the men who might be there, but she wouldn’t have objected to being noticed. Lee’s attention had been focused all evening on Tate—though Lee and Tate had sat just inches from each other in the car, they’d text-messaged back and forth for the whole ride like a couple of fourteen-year-old Japanese girls, giggling and muttering as they thumbed at their cell phones, making sure Peyton and Naomi knew they were excluded.

  Peyton strolled into the living room, her hips swinging, clearly having rehearsed the moment in her mind, tossing some confetti up into the air that smelled of a sea-breezy deodorizer. But only a few people witnessed her grand entrance, fully dressed middle-aged women reading each other’s tarot, sitting on the floor by the fireplace with large goblets of red wine cupped in their hands. The women were strangely unmoved by the appearance of four young people in bad tuxedos and tattered prom dresses and owl-eye masks. Were the women high? The kids could’ve been rapists and thieves, copycatting A Clockwork Orange, Naomi thought. Peyton’s confetti fell without ceremony onto a carpet the color of raspberry sorbet.

  Then suddenly a handsome man, fiftyish possibly, possibly older, mustached and with thick and curly salt-and-pepper hair, stepped into the room from the kitchen, wearing only his underwear and carrying two highballs of a dark liquor, the swing of his dick making the silk of his boxers shiver. He was so exactly what Naomi expected to see—looking like a millionaire from a 1980s TV soap—that the effect was somehow shocking. When the man winked at them, then disappeared down a hallway, all the children were tempted to follow this mythical creature into the dark woods.

  And Peyton seemed about to do just that. But she stopped at the end of the hallway and bowed her head, multicolored confetti caught in the white crepe and crocheted rose petals of her dress. She’d likely pictured her confrontation taking place in a crowded room of timid people in the act of building up their nerve. At the most, she would’ve caught her father knotted up in a game of pre-coital Twister, or licking salt off the fist of a woman while prepping for a tequila shot. Peyton might have imagined herself wrecking the party with her sarcastic confetti and ironic ball gown and youthful condescension. She probably hadn’t considered the possibility of arriving too late, her father having moved on to one of the back-room dog piles.

  Tate had apparently found himself unable to hide his beauty a second longer and had pulled off his mask in order to romance the tarot ladies. Lee followed him, and Naomi went to Peyton’s side. “I’ll go with you,” Naomi whispered. “We can go find him.”

  Peyton took a deep breath. “Gross,” she said. She took Naomi’s arm, sisterly, in hers. “Walk with me to the bar,” she said, and they strolled across the living room to an antique sideboard. “I’m going to have a little whiskey first because I feel a cold coming on,” Peyton said, and Naomi poured herself some rosé. They linked arms again and went into the room that the man in the silk boxers had just abandoned, a room, empty and shag-carpeted, where a board game had been set up and left behind. Naomi could feel Peyton’s arm shivering against her own.

  “Let’s just sit a minute,” Naomi suggested. “Drink a little.”

  Tate and Lee came into the room too, and they all stretched out on the floor to play the game, a drinking game called Happy Hours. The fly-specked, roughed-up cardboard box, something from the early ’60s, featured cartoonish partygoers dressed splendidly.

  They picked up where the previous players had left off, even drinking the amber liquid left over in the highball glasses that lined the game board. Peyton rolled a five, moved her little plastic pink elephant across the board, then drew a Cocktail Napkin card. “You’ve been arrested for driving drunk,” she read aloud. “Dry out in the clink and skip a round.” She moved her elephant to the corner of the board, into the jail space.

  “You’re a menace to society,” Tate said with a wink.

  Lee rolled the dice and moved his mini–martini glass two spaces. He too drew a Cocktail Napkin card, and read, “Take a drink and make a drunken confession.” Naomi could tell by the way Lee drained the glass, then took a deep breath, that quite the confession was on its way. But before he could say anything, Peyton shot back the rest of her own drink, stood, and pinched Tate’s collar to tug at him to stand up. “I need your help, lover,” she said, and she led him from the room, the two of them moving purposefully into the forbidden corridor.

  “I think I’m in love,” Lee said, sitting just behind Naomi, his lips at her ear. “No, I know I’m in love. Definitely.” He toyed with Naomi’s zipper at the back of her dress, inching it up and down, up and down. Don’t say another word, she wanted to say to him, wanting to stay in the impossible moment as long as she could. “I’m in love with Tate,” Lee said. “But I can’t tell anybody. If he finds out, then maybe he’ll never flirt with me again. Every time he kind of touches me, even though I kno
w it doesn’t mean anything really, it just feeds me, you know? Every little touch, that he probably doesn’t think twice about, I can be distracted by for days. I want that distraction more than anything.”

  Lee still played with her zipper, and Naomi reached back to slap at his hand, like shooing away a mosquito. “You can’t tell anybody?” she said, turning his words back on him, her accusatory tone lost with a break in her voice.

  “No, of course I can’t tell anybody,” Lee said.

  “That’s not what I mean,” Naomi said. “What about me? I’m anybody. I mean, I’m not nobody. Do you hear yourself? You say you can’t tell anybody, and you’re saying it to me, right to my face. Like I don’t matter.”

  “Dude,” Lee said, reaching out to run his fingers lightly over the back of her neck. “You’re definitely anybody. You’re everybody. You’re being a freak.”

  Naomi would’ve left the room, but she feared stumbling into becoming a fourth wheel in somebody’s ménage à trois. She decided she’d say nothing. She’d pout, forcing him into being overly affectionate. Maybe she’d even seduce him by telling him she’d never have sex with him again.

  In all honesty, she didn’t know if she could bear the intimacy anymore. When they were in bed together, he was in love with her, she had no doubt. On top of her, he’d look right into her eyes, and he’d put his hands in hers. Sometimes he even actually said it—I love you—and she sometimes actually said it back. Then afterward they were just friends again, and Naomi politely pretended she hadn’t heard a word.