Devils in the Sugar Shop

by Timothy Schaffert

  Naomi now heard laughter in the street and car doors slamming. She heard singing. She heard lousy renditions of snippets of Elton John songs and some shoddy Cher impressions, all sucked-in cheeks and warbly throats.

  “Ah, they found the place,” Lee said as he and Naomi went to the window to watch the queens. All Lee had to do was call, and no matter what the weather, they arrived, freshly lipsticked and squeezed into loose tights. They twirled up the walk beneath the fat, soft snow-flakes, graceless on stilettos. They spun and danced like dumb children, their tongues out, their palms up. They were a walking holiday wherever they went, Naomi thought. Part party doll, part happy accident, each queen thought herself the most stunningly decadent by far.

  Naomi leaned her cheek on Lee’s shoulder, the slick sleeve of his cheap suit smooth against her skin. Was I your first love, at least? Naomi would ask him, but later, when they were alone again in his room and he was feeling affectionate, when the chances were better that his answer would be yes.

  Peyton

  Peyton and Tate passed through one of the back bedrooms, where a foursome had blossomed, all the participants naked or next to naked, a black-lace bra having been flung aside to catch on the corner of a framed Hirschfeld caricature of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A pair of boxers, patterned with red hearts, dangled from the ankle of one of the gentleman between the legs of one of the ladies on the daybed.

  Peyton had found the booze in the glasses next to the Happy Hour game to be particularly potent. Just a few sips had made her feel small, her toes and fingers numb, and yet, though she seemed to be slipping fingertip by fingertip into a state of nothingness, nothing about the house made her nervous any longer. When she’d first walked into 14812 W. Josephine Lane, a house surrounded by streets with names like Edna Boulevard and Gertrude Drive, a regular little ladies’ sewing circle, Peyton had been intimidated by the emptiness of the front room. What kind of party so quickly went quiet so early in the evening? It suggested to Peyton a lurid weakness. Was there no time for idle chitchat at such things? No getting-to-know-you? Anything innocent?

  Tate held on to the back of Peyton’s dress, and together they scurried up along the twist of a spiral staircase, into a hallway, and down another hall. They slipped through a small, dark room, a spinning multicolored strobe light madly sprinkling the bed and floor and walls with hectic dots, Barry White throaty and smooth on a stereo, a grandmotherly chenille bedspread rolling and roiling with lumps of activity beneath it.

  Peyton held her hands over the eyeholes of her mask. “Daddy?” she said, but she didn’t know if she said it loudly enough for anyone to hear. Or maybe she hadn’t spoken the word at all, her lips still tingling, losing feeling, from the liquor.

  At some point, Peyton lost Tate, but she didn’t turn around to look for him. She found a child’s room and was relieved to see its sanctity respected, no naked bodies beneath its pink canopy or its ruffled comforter. A winter garden party of polka-dotted stuffed animals carried on in the bay window, with decorum and nobility, as if nothing at all uncivilized was happening just a few doors down. Not even a tiny teacup was overturned. Only on the giraffe was there any sign of dismay, one tiny stitch torn on its long purple neck.

  “My god, I’ve even had sex with her in our apartment.” Peyton recognized her father’s voice coming from another room. She crawled to a vent on the floor near the bed. She lay on her side, clutching a rag doll, twisting the doll’s yarn hair around her finger as she listened. “On the sofa in the living room. We knocked over an end table and broke a really, just really, beautiful blue bowl that Ashley had made in a glass-blowing class at the Hot Shops last fall. She would come home from that class looking so pretty, her cheeks still flushed pink from the furnace, her clothes soaking with sweat.”

  Peyton plucked at the loose button eye of the rag doll. Could you show us, on this doll, where your father disappointed you?

  A car passed on the street below, its headlights sweeping through the room and sparking on the brass of a doorknob. Peyton pushed herself up along the wall, then through this new door into a bedroom. The room was dark but for a thin line of light beneath a closet door. She neared it, following the sound of her father’s voice, slowly, the doll’s cloth foot clutched in her fist, the doll hanging limp at her side, its skirt up over its head.

  Peyton opened the closet door and tore off her mask. The gesture, quick and dramatic, felt the most dangerous, most potentially damaging thing she’d ever done in her life. But she witnessed nothing. There stood her father and a woman, both fully clothed, leaning against opposite walls of the wide walk-in closet, their arms crossed on their chests, only the toes of their shoes touching. Troy leaned back against the bookshelves full of boxes of old board games—Clue, Life, Monopoly, Risk—their titles coyly accusing. The woman rested back against hanging negligees.

  “Peyton,” her father said, standing up straight, holding out his hands, then bringing them back to press against his chest, over his heart. “I’ve been trying to call you all day.”

  “I’ve been through this whole house looking for you,” Peyton said. “So you can hold yourself personally responsible for the things I’ve had to see tonight. And if I would’ve seen you, I wouldn’t have looked away, you bastard. You would’ve had to deal for the rest of your life with the fact that your daughter saw you doing something disgusting.”

  “I’m just . . . I’m not . . .” Troy said, stammering, his voice low. “I’m writing a book. . . .”

  “Mom fell down the stairs,” Peyton said.

  “Oh, my god,” Troy said. “Where is she? She all right? What stairs? Here?”

  “The stairs at home, you shit,” Peyton said. “Don’t panic, she’s fine. But she could’ve been not fine if she’d hit her head or something. But maybe that’d be better for you, if she was in a coma, huh? Because I think she might know about your affair. I’m not the one who told her.”

  “Of course you didn’t tell her, because you don’t know anything,” Troy said. “There’s nothing to know. There’s no affair.”

  “Oh, did I misinterpret that e-mail that you accidentally sent me? Should I forward it to Mom to see how she interprets it?”

  “It would kill me if I ever hurt any of you,” he said.

  Peyton leaned in a bit, slowly. “Then die, motherfucker,” she slurred, but saying it quick, like she was Samuel L. Jackson. She turned and rushed off, wishing she had pushed the rag doll into his chest as some nicely realized symbolic gesture. But she now clutched the doll to her own chest and looked to the floor to find her way out of the room and the winding hallways, following the crocheted roses that had fallen from the hem of her dress.

  Deedee

  Shameless from liquor, the ladies of the Sugar Shop party descended on 14812 W. Josephine Lane, the lot of them crude, chortling, swinging their hips, fancying themselves anthropologists investigating the suburban sexual underbelly. They showed up at the swingers’ party in separate cars, having to park up and down the block, and they walked along the sidewalk oblivious to the bitter cold and their stylish boots not made for walking.

  “Where was Viv going?” Deedee asked Ashley as they tumbled from Deedee’s summery convertible, “after she took Mrs. Bloom home?”

  “I don’t know that she said,” Ashley said.

  Though she and Ashley had talked nonstop in the car on the drive over, Deedee’s thoughts had been with the doodle on the paper folded and tucked away in her purse. Viv makes a call on her cell, quick-draws an uncanny caricature of Deedee’s ex, Zeke, then suddenly must be off. You didn’t have to be completely paranoid to put that particular two and two together, she thought. “Who is this?” Deedee asked Ashley, handing her Viv’s drawing.

  “Oh, my god,” Ashley said, smiling. “A Viv of Zeke.”

  “Why?” Deedee said.

  “I don’t know,” Ashley said. “Isn’t he in her drawing class too? Where’d you get it, anyway?”

  “I tore it
from your refrigerator notepad just a few minutes ago. Viv looked to be having a very pleasant conversation, beyond pleasant, to be honest, leaning against the fridge, doodling, then she walked away, and here this was. She had to have been talking to Zeke, right?”

  “Well,” Ashley said, handing the drawing back to Deedee as they followed the wavy front walk, “not necessarily, but I guess it does seem like . . . I mean, wow. How ’bout that? They must be . . .”

  “Great,” Deedee said. “Thanks. Thanks a ton.”

  “Oh, my god, you’re pissed at me. Why? What?”

  “Would it kill you to tell me, for once in my sorry life, what I’d like to hear? Does that doodle really look so much like Zeke? Does the possibility of them hooking up seem so goddamn . . . possible?”

  “I don’t think that’s what I said at all,” Ashley said. “It’s definitely weird. I don’t think it’s likely. Zeke and Viv? Viv’s our friend, she wouldn’t . . .”

  “Oh, now you’re just backpedaling. You’re just telling me what I want to hear.”

  “No, I’m not, but isn’t that what you wanted me to do? Didn’t you just say, ‘Tell me what I want to hear’?”

  “So you admit it. You’re just telling me what I want to hear. You don’t think that Viv and Zeke are an impossibility at all.”

  “Deedee,” Ashley said, stopping her, taking her elbows in her hands as they stood outside the front door of the house, petting the fur on the sleeves of her coat, “I don’t know what I think. I’m not thinking at all. All I know is you’re talking about a man you divorced already. I’m preoccupied with the man I haven’t divorced. I’m still married. And my husband could be in this very house, on the verge of being caught in the act. Just let me have a lot on my mind right now, okay?”

  Ashley did look a fright, her face all banged up, her eyes bloodshot. Deedee gave Ashley a peck on her good cheek and smiled and nodded, though Ashley, as Deedee saw it, didn’t have it so bad. Even if, by some nasty wrinkle in the universe, Ashley and Troy ended up divorced, it would be one of those perfect undoings, where everyone is best friends with everyone’s new spouses, then one day the exes fall back in bed with each other and their lives begin to revolve around reconciliation.

  Deedee had done her best to convince herself that she and Zeke had that same kind of screwball romance, their marriage not kaput but only in a Hepburn-and-Tracy state of disarray. Now that she thought about it, she’d even once or twice, during art class, intimated to Zeke, in a way that she’d considered covertly flirtatious, that he ought to ask Viv out on a date. Deedee had wanted to come across as inaccessible and unaffected by Zeke’s looking for love, but her reverse psychology had backfired.

  Ashley put on her sunglasses, took a shaky breath, and opened the front door. The living room was already packed with the transplanted Sugar Shop party, the women raiding the wet bar and dirty dancing along to the husky voice of a drag queen karaoke-ing to a Mary J. Blige power ballad. The music came from a tiny speaker in the portable karaoke machine but was nonetheless intensely loud. Deedee wondered how anyone could be getting it on anywhere in the house with such caterwauling ricocheting through the halls.

  “I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d freak,” Ashley shouted above the change in tune to a solo rendition of the Neil Diamond–Barbra Streisand duet, “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” by a man in a yellowing platinum wig and gold lamé, “but this is where our kids went tonight. Troy accidentally sent an e-mail invite to Peyton, so she got everybody dressed up to come crash the party. I’m a terrible mother, right? I should have stopped them. I’ll go get us a drink.”

  So where’s Naomi, then? Deedee wondered. Why can’t our children rebel in sensible ways, in ways we understand? Why can’t Naomi just smoke Kools, get throwing-up drunk on Boone’s strawberry wine, like I did when I was sixteen?

  Keeping Naomi safe had always felt like a dark and odious task, forcing Deedee to acknowledge all the ugliness of modern times. Raising a little girl had made her intimate with all the millions of ways a child could be violated. She’d felt like an unwitting partner in crime with pedophiles and kiddie pornographers, had come to know their twisted MO backward and forward. She’d always said she’d be one of those hip moms, one of those moms who listened to their kids’ music and enjoyed the same movies. But it was impossible to be hip with a youth culture so booby-trapped. So Deedee had written letters to editors, spied on her daughter’s chat-room conversations, and even petitioned against a local children’s bookseller when it began to carry those glossy-covered tales of teenybopper lust, marketed to twelve-year-olds, penned by glamorous hacks in designer flip-flops and vintage Swatches.

  “I’ve got to find Naomi,” Deedee said when Ashley handed her a drink. “She shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t have not told me.”

  “I know, I know,” Ashley said. “I figured you were upset. So I just asked around on my way to the bar, and it turns out the kids have all left already. Tess was the first one here from the Sugar Shop party, and she said the kids were leaving just as she got here.”

  “Is she sure?”

  “Yes, honey,” Ashley said.

  A man dressed in the style of a pre-widowed Courtney Love, his fishnets torn to shreds, perfect circles of bright-red rouge on his cheeks, sang “Heart of Glass” in a shrill falsetto, his XXL baby-doll nightie snug on his beer gut. “Guzzle that down,” Ashley said. “I need you relaxed to help me relax. It’s Campari, remember it?”

  “I need a cigarette,” Deedee said, opening her purse. “I don’t suppose smoking is allowed in this den of iniquity.” But Ashley had already vanished down a hallway.

  Deedee found the kitchen, and some paper matches in a drawer, and a door to the backyard. It was well after dark, but the night sky glowed with a silver haze like it does some midwinter nights. The massive yard was an explosion of landscaping, with a short bridge over a heated pond of Japanese fighting fish, with iced-over concrete fountains, bonsai trees, chimineas, a stone replica of the Bird Girl from the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. And far in the back, with a light in the window, was an inviting prefab bungalow.

  As she crossed the footbridge, Deedee stumbled, spilling her Campari and dropping her cigarette to hiss in the stream. In the bungalow, a man sat alone listening to Chet Baker and smoking a thin, womanish cigar. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Deedee said. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.”

  “No, no, no bother,” he said. “Excuse the smoke. I can put it out?”

  “No, no bother,” she said, instantly feeling stupid for repeating what he’d just said. “I smoke like a fiend.” Deedee stood in the open doorway, waiting for some kind of invitation. The man wore skinny pants and battered alligator shoes. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, the striped pattern of which wrestled with the polka dots of his necktie. It was one of those clashing ensembles that made you look either fashionable or like a clown. He wisely topped it all off with an extra-clunky pair of self-consciously ugly Elvis Costello specs. Deedee guessed him to be maybe twenty years younger than she was. And here’s the thing, she’d say later in the week to the girls at La Buvette, he had the short arms and narrow shoulders of a dwarf, but he didn’t appear to be at all short. He was dwarfish in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  “I’m Tucker,” he said, and had Deedee been sober, she knew she would’ve contorted herself to avoid his gaze, to get invisible, not wanting to give another man the satisfaction of critiquing her looks. But tonight she stepped in, took a seat on the sofa he sat on, and requested a puff of his cigar.

  “Here,” he said, “have a whole one of your own.” He lit one for Deedee, but after a few puffs she began to feel sick to her stomach.

  “I’m sorry, I have to put it out,” she said, putting it out.

  “They are disgusting,” he said, in a whiskey-and-honey Southern accent. “So what brings a nice girl like you . . .” He trailed off with an adorable giggle that belied his pug-nosed appearance, a drago
n tattoo at the side of his neck.

  “I just wanted to see this bungalow,” she said. She shrugged her chinchilla from her shoulders. “It looked cozy from the house. What brings you out here?”

  “I had to get away from the party,” he said.

  “I did too,” she said. “But a different party. I mean, I don’t know when you came out here, but the party has likely changed gears. There are drag queens now. And a bunch of drunk women. And a karaoke machine.”

  “Yeesh,” he said. “All I have to do is leave a sex party for it to get interesting.”

  “Are you married? Here with your wife?”

  “No. You’re probably not going to believe me, but I’m not here for the sex. I’m a photographer.” He took a miniature camera from his pocket, a camera small in his palm, smaller even than the spy camera she’d ordered from a comic-book ad when she was a kid and that hadn’t worked even once. “It’s a little digital thing that doesn’t take pictures for shit. But they end up looking abstract, and . . . and artless, in an artful way, you know what I mean? Anyway,” and he leaned in closer to Deedee and softened his voice, like he was telling a secret, “a woman bought one of my photos that I had up in a gallery here . . . well, it was a nude photo of me, which I delivered to her house. I helped her hang this huge, borderline obscene picture of myself, with all my tattoos, and, you know, my privates on parade . . .” Deedee laughed into her glass as she took another drink. “. . . right above her fireplace, right there in the tastefully designed front room, right? So anyway, she tells me about these parties she and her husband go to, and that I should come to one. That’s when I had the idea for a photo essay. I can sneak some shots on the sly, and it’ll just be these lousy pictures. You’ll look at them, and you’ll think you can tell that there’s sex going on in them, but you can’t quite see anything at all.”

  “So why aren’t you in there snapping away?”