Devils in the Sugar Shop

by Timothy Schaffert

“I got enough,” he said. He produced a flask from out of nowhere and poured something into her cup.

  “No no no no no,” she said. “Stop. I’m trashed.” She took another sip.

  “Besides,” he said, “I’ve been around the block a time or two. I’ve done the group thing. Most of the appeal of that sort of thing is the not having done it before. So once you’ve done it, you’ve done it, and so what?”

  “You’re so jaded. And you’re, what, all of twenty-one or something.”

  “Twenty, actually,” he said. “Well, I will be twenty. In eight months.”

  “Oh, my god.” Deedee shot back the rest of her drink and held her cup toward his flask for more. “I could probably go to jail just for picturing that naked portrait of you hanging above that woman’s fireplace. What is the age of consent, anyway?”

  “You know,” he said, lifting an index finger, “I happen to know the answer to that. In Omaha, it’s sixteen. Can you believe that?”

  “Hm,” Deedee said, “my daughter is sixteen,” already missing her.

  “Yeah? Where’s she tonight? Wink wink.”

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever felt older than I do right now.”

  “Then maybe you should let me kiss you. Maybe that will work to reverse the signs of aging.”

  “That might be just what I need,” Deedee said, as if he’d just offered a spare Zoloft or a stick of chewing gum. “I have reason to believe that my ex-husband and a good friend of mine might be . . . well, something might be up between them. Maybe I’m an idiot to think that Zeke and I could be happy together again. I’m afraid, Tucker. Afraid of falling in love again, but also afraid of not falling in love again. Last month I went on a couple of dates with this guy I really liked. He wore suits. He took me to nice places for dinner and always picked up the check, which I’m here to tell you is pretty rare, men are happy to let the woman pick up the check, especially when the woman makes good money. Listen to me, Tucker, if you really, really want to impress a woman, pick up the check every time, even if she offers to pick it up, even if it seems like she might be offended by you picking up the check, based on, whatever, feminist principles or something, pick it up anyway.”

  She took a little rose-colored pot from her purse, a Sugar Shop product called Angel Tickle. It was sold as a soothing sensitizer for the underside of the head of the penis, but Deedee found it to be a nice tingly lip balm. “So me and this guy are at a steakhouse, we’ve had more than a few cocktails, and a bottle of wine, and the conversation turns to sex, which was perfectly fine by me, but he leans in and says, ‘I’ve been known to get into some pretty weird stuff,’ and I said, ‘How weird?’ and he said, ‘Trust me. Weird,’ and I said, ‘How weird could it be?’ knowing, of course, that it could be really, really weird. So then he says, ‘Satanism.’ Satanism? Who does that anymore? So I ask what exactly Satanism entails, and he says, drawing pentagrams, lighting candles, drinking urine, pooping in front of each other. He says it leads up to the best sex he’s ever had. I had to bite my lip to keep from giggling. A grown man and woman. Pooping for the devil. But I pretended that I was fascinated, and that I was a little turned on. I didn’t want to ruin dinner.”

  Tucker took the pot of Angel Tickle and rubbed some of the balm on his own lips. “What are you going to do about your friend?” he asked.

  “What friend?”

  “The friend who might have something up with your ex-husband,” he said.

  “Oh, her. Nothing,” Deedee said. “She can have him.” She immediately wished she hadn’t heard herself say it, as if just uttering such permission was some kind of surrender. Tucker leaned in for a kiss, and she let him kiss her for a few seconds. “I didn’t mean that,” she said, pulling back after a moment.

  “You didn’t mean it?” he said, confused. “The kiss?”

  “The what? The kiss? Oh, no no no no no,” Deedee said. “What I didn’t mean was the thing I said . . . about how she can have him. No. I’ll just ask her to leave him alone. That’s what friends do for each other, right? They leave each other’s exes alone. And actually, don’t you think it all might be a good sign? My ex and my friend having a little fling? Maybe it’s some twisted way of Zeke’s to get close to me. Maybe he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. It’s the subconscious.”

  Tucker took a pack of regular cigarettes from his front shirt pocket and handed one to Deedee. Deedee said, “Why on god’s green earth would someone your age smoke? I thought you kids were so much smarter than the rest of us.”

  “Maybe I don’t even know I’m doing it,” Tucker said, winking. “It’s the subconscious.”

  Now that Viv, via her doodling, had outed herself as an ex-husband stealer, Deedee replayed recent conversations in her mind, weighing every snippet for ulterior motive. Just that evening at La Buvette, Viv had asked Deedee, essentially, if she regretted having a child. And Deedee, essentially, had said that sometimes she did, indeed. Would Viv take that information to Zeke, then Zeke to Naomi? No one was safe from a home-wrecker, even if your home had been pre-wrecked beyond repair.

  Deedee decided she could afford to do what rich families did—keep the children close by bribing them with all-expenses-paid cruises and foreign vacations. She and Naomi could go to Rome next, or Barcelona, and the trips could be annual, or more than annual. Unlike what she might have told Viv a few hours ago, back when all Viv’s questions were merely hypothetical, Deedee couldn’t imagine a long life without Naomi always in it.

  Deedee looked up at the smoke in the room, and she thought how cozy she’d been just that morning in the airport smoking lounge, Naomi at her side. She normally disliked airports for their state of in-between. You were neither here nor there.

  Lost watching the smoke reflected in the bungalow window, Deedee failed to realize that much of the haze and cloud in the glass wasn’t confined to the room—the main house was slightly on fire.

  Ashley

  Ashley gritted her teeth and spied around in this house of love, peeping, seeking her husband, and though unaroused by the bumping and grinding going on just beneath her nose, she did not consider herself, in the slightest, a prude. This is not shocking, she thought, investigating, from a doorway, the snaky, writhing mass atop a fold-out sofa bed, looking for an identifiable limb. She taught an erotica-writing workshop, after all, regularly analyzing her students’ dirty clichés, condemning the use of the words “lips” and “folds” and “petals” when describing the vagina, forbidding any character’s mouth from forming into “a perfect O” of pleasure or surprise or delight, or into an O of anything, for that matter. As a class, they’d together dissected the anatomy of an orgasm, weighed the advantages of girth over length, of curved-to-the-left over curved-to-the-right.

  Nonetheless, she was relieved to find Troy naked nowhere in the house. Instead, she walked in on him sound asleep alone in a pitch-dark sunroom, many overgrown plants, dead from winter, on the windowsills. She sat on the end of the daybed littered with tiny brittle leaves and pondered her insomnia. Sometimes, when she’d wake in the middle of the night with Troy out like a light beside her, she’d try to ease her anxiety by inventing a romance with a stranger. First she’d compose the man, stitching together a sexy Frankenstein’s monster of warmth and intellect, then she’d set the scene for seduction. But because she found nothing particularly erotic about infidelity, she’d have to mentally dissolve her marriage before allowing herself to be seduced by her fictional lover.

  Sometimes she’d picture an ugly divorce, one that left her broke and embittered, and sometimes Troy would die—a fall from a ladder, a heart attack, a swift and efficient terminal disease. Then Ashley would imagine her reaction (a stern state of denial? Weeks of catatonia? A surprising, unspeakable sense of relief?) and the getting on with her life (move to a bigger city? Buy a house on a lake with the insurance money?), which involved several minutes of interior decorating: arranging lamps and loveseats, positioning new pieces of art on the walls. At some point, bef
ore consummating her relationship with Frankenstein’s monster, she’d fall asleep and would sleep the sleep of the dead until morning.

  Troy’s fly was open. Another woman might have found the zipper’s exposed silver teeth to be accusatory. But Ashley realized his fly had probably been undone all night as he swaggered around. As Ashley reached over to zip him back up, he woke.

  “Ashley,” he said, sitting up, touching a finger to the red line on her cheek.

  Ashley took a long drink of her Campari, swishing it around on her tongue, questioning. “Those tablets,” she said.

  “What?” he said.

  “Do you remember those tablets that your teacher would give you in the fifth grade? You’d eat them, then they’d leave red streaks on your teeth if you hadn’t brushed good enough? I just realized that’s exactly what Campari reminds me of. It’s been bugging me all day.”

  “Disclosing tablets,” he said. “That’s what they’re called.”

  “How do you even know that? Oh, forget it, you know it because that’s what you do. You know things.” Ashley always riddled Troy with questions whenever she was writing. He somehow knew what kinds of birds you’d hear whistling on the coast of New Jersey, and the names of flowering weeds in Mississippi. Just ask him—he knew the extent of ruin a possum in the attic would create, and the kind of smoke a ten-year-old cigarette would make when finally lit, and the kind of pencil you would need to write words on glass. Without Troy, her characters would fumble around, as inept and ill equipped for life as she was herself.

  Troy took a sip of her Campari. “Yep,” he said, “disclosing tablets. I’m suddenly seeing those film strips with pictures of smiling cartoon teeth brushing their own heads with toothpaste.”

  “I bet you were one of those kids who always got to turn the knob on the film-strip projector,” Ashley said. “Remember that little beep you’d hear, so you knew when to advance the film? I’d have, like, this complete conditioned response to it. My heart would race, my hands would shake. And I always got behind or ahead, and the kids would yell at me.”

  “Turning that knob is one of the great,” and he stopped a moment to wiggle his fingers in front of himself, squinting, trying to come up with the right word, “lost tactile memories of childhood. That and popping bubble wrap.”

  “Or squirting glue on your hand and letting it dry, then peeling it off,” Ashley said.

  “Sharpening crayons in the pencil sharpener.”

  “That’s a good one,” Ashley said, feeling the turning of the handle in her wrist as the sharpener’s blades shaved the wax. They sat quietly, trying to think of more. Then Ashley said, “Why haven’t you asked about my banged-up face?”

  “Peyton was here,” he said. “She told me you fell down the stairs.”

  “I hope to god that Peyton didn’t see you . . . doing . . . anything . . .”

  “No, god, of course not,” he said. “Ashley, are you kidding? I haven’t done anything. Do you really think I would’ve been doing anything? I only came here by myself because I would’ve just worried about you all night if you’d come along. All Peyton saw was me having a conversation. I’d been playing a drinking game earlier, and came up here to pass out. It’s stupid. I’ve been stupid. I haven’t taken a single note, and I won’t remember anything. I’m never going to have a book to write.”

  “Well, you never have paid good enough attention,” she said. “You talk, you don’t listen.” What she wanted to say next she could feel in her throat, could feel it making her salivate and her hands shake, that old fifth grade film-strip-beep feeling. “You’re having an aff—” she started, just as he said something too. They both stopped midsentence. “Go ahead,” she said.

  “No, you go,” he said. “What?”

  “I don’t know if I can say it again without throwing up,” she said. “Are you sure you didn’t hear me?”

  “I didn’t hear you,” he said, though the sheepish tone in his voice suggested that he had indeed heard her, and that he was offering her one last shot at avoiding the topic forever.

  “I think you’re having an affair,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “No. No. No. No.” He gave each no its own distinct melody and facial expression, like he was rehearsing a line in front of a mirror. The first no was a no of disappointment; the second one, shock; the third, confusion; fourth, coddling; and, fifth, he pedaled right back to his first instinct, disappointment, and added a pinch of offense. Combined, all the no’s spelled out, to Ashley, one big fat lying cheating yes.

  “I guess, in this situation, the next thing you’re supposed to ask is, ‘Who is it?’” she said. “So. That’s what I’m asking.”

  Troy rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and chewed on the thumbnail of his other. “I won’t see her again,” he said.

  “Oh god oh god oh god,” Ashley said, setting her drink on the floor and standing, pacing, shaking her hands in front of herself like she was trying to quick-dry her nail polish. “Don’t admit it. You’re admitting it. Why are you admitting it?”

  “I don’t have to,” he started. “I mean, I’m not really admitting anything if you don’t want me to. I mean, I’ll say what you need me to say.”

  “I need you to tell the truth. Above everything, right now, I just think we really need the complete and absolute truth here.”

  “Okay, if that’s . . .”

  “Shhhhh,” she interrupted. “And I need the truth to be that you’re not having an affair.”

  “Well, then, that . . . that’s the truth.”

  “Which is?”

  “The last thing you just said. Whatever the truth is that you wanted, is the truth that I’m telling you.”

  “So, Troy,” she said, putting her hands on her hips, “is it that you were born without a spine, or did you have it surgically removed at some point? Or was it ripped raw right out of your asshole?”

  Troy sighed, rolled his eyes, and seemed just about to give back as good as he’d gotten, which most likely would’ve only led them down a snide, destructive, and catty path, so it was probably best, Ashley quickly realized, that they were interrupted by the shrill, deafening bleat of a hallway smoke detector.

  Outside, in front of the house, a drag queen, microphone in one hand, a cigarette in the other, mascara running down his craggy, clown-white face like streaks of pollution on marble, his tights painted with varicose veins, sat on the karaoke machine, treating the other queens on the lawn to the love theme from Titanic. Ashley saw no fire, only heavy smoke. Men and women in various stages of undress, or wrapped in sheets, or clutching pillows to their naked chests and private parts, tumbled from the front door coughing and wheezing. Some of them, on the verge of asphyxiation, dropped onto the lawn to squirm, inadvertently creating apocalyptic-looking snow angels.

  Ashley stepped among the partygoers, looking for Deedee and counting heads, making sure all her friends got out okay. Most of her Sugar Shop guests weren’t even feeling the cold, still loud and laughing as they danced to their cars, some of them even kicking along in a conga line.

  Troy had sped Ashley from the house, telling her to hold tissues to her face as he put his arms around her and guided her through the smoke-filled hallway. Now, on the front lawn, he took off his shirt to wrap it around a fiftysomething woman who’d somehow managed to escape from the house looking elegant and only slightly put out, naked but for a pair of sunglasses and hot-pink strappy sandals, holding an unspilled martini complete with twist on the rim. It annoyed Ashley that circumstance allowed Troy to be heroic.

  The singing queen wore a black cocktail dress similar to Ashley’s. After finishing Titanic with gusto, he embarked on the theme from The Poseidon Adventure. Ashley dabbed at her own cheeks, which she realized must be streaked with mascara too. Across the lawn, Troy helped a dizzy couple into their car—the man’s shirt was buttoned unevenly, his belt unbuckled, the woman’s dress unzipped down the back. Bobble-headed and gasping, the couple sped off, squeali
ng their tires.

  “My god, Ashley,” Deedee said, suddenly there, “eeek.” She licked her thumb and began rubbing at Ashley’s face. “Have you been bawling your eyes out?”

  “No,” was all Ashley said.

  Word had already spread among the evacuees that the evening’s arsonist was a woman who’d shut herself in a bedroom closet as her husband had sex in the master bath with two women and two men, five people in a four-person whirlpool tub. With her Bic, she’d lit the lace of a feather-light peignoir. She now sat in her minivan, on her cell phone, confessing to police.

  “Let’s go before the fire trucks block us in,” Deedee said.

  “You go,” Ashley said. “I need to talk to Troy. Wait’ll you hear this: he basically admitted to having an affair.”

  “Oh, Ashley,” Deedee said. “Goddammit. Well, you need to go to him right now and let him know he’s not responsible for any of this,” gesturing toward Ashley’s face and down the front of her dress, wincing, “the welt, and the mascara, and the ripped hose. Don’t give him an inkling that he’s the reason you look like such shit. It’ll just feed his ego.”

  Though Deedee insisted on waiting for Ashley in the car, Ashley insisted that Deedee go home. Ashley simply couldn’t listen to another word of advice, not from a friend or family member, not from Sybil the Guru or a magazine article. All the marital aids, whether in the form of sex toys or self-help seminars, were just a parade of the blind leading the blind. In the end, all there was to guide you was what little sense you had.

  “I’m not crying if that’s what you’re thinking,” Ashley said, walking right up to Troy. He stood near a woman got up in a French maid’s uniform who seemed to be feather-dusting ashes from the ruffles. “The smoke, is all.”

  He raised his chin and clucked his tongue, and she knew he was about to slip into a few tuneless bars of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” She put a quick kibosh on that, shaking her head and holding her finger to his lips to shush him.