Venus Envy, page 21
“Who knows? But he’d like us to think he’s the father.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Wonder if Kenny knows.”
Carter hadn’t thought about that. “Oh, yeah. Hurt his feelings, I bet.”
“Or make him bullshit mad. What a sneaking coward Billy is. He avoids me like the bubonic plague, dumps Kenny in a skinny second, and now is ready to waltz this poor creature into a state of matrimony. Unbelievable is right.”
“Maybe he’d lose his inheritance if his people knew he was gay.”
Frazier snorted. “No, he wouldn’t. What he would lose is his image of himself. He likes having secrets. He likes believing he’s smarter than other people. If he fools them about being straight or about some business deal it means he’s superior. He’s twisted that way but maybe that’s what lying does to the liar. It isn’t that they feel bad about themselves or they’d stop. Right?”
“I guess so.”
“It makes them feel smarter than other people.”
“Too deep for me. I’m just trying to separate from my wife and survive.”
“You will. I’m worried about the money.”
A crease deepened alongside his mouth. My money’s tired—it doesn’t work for me anymore.” He lowered his voice. “I was hoping I could live with you for a little bit.”
“Oh, Brudda, I knew you were broke when you walked through the door.” She touched his big forearm. “Come on home. We can fight under the same roof again. It’ll save on gas.”
44
THE SLAM OF THE BACK DOOR AWAKENED FRAZIER, AS IT DID Curry and Basil. Curry yapped and Basil shot off the bed to investigate. Frazier jumped out of bed and glanced at the lovely Cartier enameled clock on her bedstand. 7:45 A.M. Throwing her red silk robe over her shoulders, she hurried down the stairs, fearing it would be Laura just spoiling for a fight.
Worse, it was her mother.
“Where is he?”
“Asleep in the guest room.”
Libby charged off toward the back of the house. “He’s in this terrible state because of you. Your confession has rattled him. I just know it. He can’t think straight and …” She reached the door to the guest bedroom and barged right in.
“Mother, leave him alone.” Frazier uttered the battle cry of her childhood.
Carter lifted his head off the pillow. Upon viewing his mother in full cry he flopped it back down again.
“Wake up! Wake up and get out of here. I’ll help you pack.” Libby flounced to the side of the bed.
Carter groaned, then sat up, his curly blond chest hair matted against his body. “Mom, give me a break.”
Libby tugged on him. “Come on. You can go home with me.”
Frazier leaned against the door, wondering if her brother would fight back.
“I’m staying here.”
“You can’t stay here. You don’t know what kind of people Frazier will bring home. It’s not healthy.”
“Mom, you’re smoking opium.” Frazier rolled her eyes but she was beginning to sizzle.
“You stay out of this. You’re a bad influence on Carter. He’s having a nervous breakdown. Men always leave their wives when they have nervous breakdowns and he’s getting to that age.” She underscored that age.
Carter threw back the covers and headed for the bathroom. His nakedness bothered neither mother nor sister. He called from the bathroom, “If I’m going to be blasted and beaned, at least let me have my caffeine fix.”
Frazier pulled her mother by the arm off the bed.
“Let me go.”
“Come into the kitchen.”
Once in the kitchen and joined by Carter, Curry, and Basil, Libby escalated her entreaties. The caffeine hit her too.
“You can’t stay here, Carter. You come home or you go back to Laura. She’s a good wife and she loves you. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
He cut his gaze toward her. “I know exactly what I’m doing and I should have done this years ago. I just thank Jesus we don’t have kids so I don’t have to drag anyone else through the slime.”
Libby glared at Frazier, radiant in the morning light and free from artifice, not a dab of makeup. “You and your damned letters. He’s confused. You’ve got him confused. You’ve given him crazy ideas.”
“I have not!”
“I’ve seen the letter.” Libby triumphed.
“She doesn’t miss a trick, does she?” Carter referred to his wife.
“Carter has always been the emotional one and you’ve been the intellectual one. You made a rude appeal to his emotions, knowing he was approaching middle age.”
“I’m thirty-seven!”
“As I said.” Libby relished the moment.
“Carter has never listened to me in the past. Why should he listen now?” Frazier defended herself. “Mom, you can’t stand the fact that your perfect family isn’t perfect. Never was but even your powers of denial are too weak for this dose of reality.”
“Don’t you lecture to me, missy.” Libby raised her voice. She turned to her son. “She’s a bad influence on you. People can’t just go out and live their lives as they would wish. One makes commitments. One makes sacrifices. Frazier told you to run away in her letter, or words to that effect. You can’t do that. You stay right here and you stick by Laura. She’s a good wife, and let me tell you, you won’t find any better.”
“Then you live with her.” Carter, usually able to defuse his mother’s anger, became angry himself.
“Yeah, Mom.” Frazier enjoyed echoing her brother.
Libby ignored her and reached over the table for Carter’s big paw, which he withdrew from her touch. “Laura will take you back. She’ll forget all about this woman you have on the side. Men do those things. We women know that. She wants you back and she swears to me shell never ever mention a word of it.”
“Christ, you two are a real duo.” Carter pushed away his coffee cup. “Mother, I am not a particularly good specimen. I’m fresh out of money. Fresh out of patience and fresh out of prospects but I feel better than I have felt in years. Years. I will never go back to that rigid bitch. Don’t even think it for one second. I hate her friggin’ guts and if you don’t shut up I’ll soon hate yours.”
Tears sprang into Libby’s eyes. “How can you talk that way to me? It’s Frazier’s fault. She’s fought me since she was little. Now she’s taking you away from me. My boy wouldn’t talk to me like that.”
“Yes, and maybe that’s why your boy drank like a fish and fornicated like Don Juan. If I’d had any balls I would have talked to you like this when I was in college. Well, it’s balls to the wall now. You stay out of my life. You get off Frazier’s case. If you prefer the adored Laura to either of us, fine. Just goddam shut up about it!”
Libby rose, shaking, and headed for the door. “I will not sit here and be insulted by my own son.” She moved slowly and with offended dignity, expecting Carter to call her back, to sing out an apology, to ease her advertised pain. Silence greeted her stately exit.
When they heard the door slam, Frazier and Carter exhaled with relief simultaneously. When they heard the motor turn over and the crunch of stones as she backed down the driveway, their shoulders dropped.
Frazier spoke first: “I try to recall moments when she was loving.”
“The thunderstorm story,” Carter said. “Remember that?”
“Oh, yeah.” Frazier smiled. “I was afraid of the thunder and lightning and you laughed at me.”
“Actually, at the advanced age of six I think I was probably afraid too. We were out in the backyard and a storm, black as pitch, appeared out of nowhere and the wind started blowing. Mom ran out to get us and I remember lightning striking close to the house. The lightning was lavender.”
Frazier did remember. “Then she told us never to be afraid of a thunderstorm because God was putting on a show for the angels. The bigger the thunderstorm, the bigger the show. The lightning was the house lights going up and down and the thunder meant the angels liked it, they were applauding.”
“After that I wasn’t afraid.”
“Me neither. Not of thunderstorms, but I could still be afraid of Mother.” Frazier sat up in her seat. “Except years later when she used to tell us about the Redington genealogy, she used to emphasize the Rachel Redington story.”
“Shelling peas.” Carter nodded his head. “Lightning hit the colander or the pairing knife. But I didn’t think the story of our ancestor’s speedy demise took away from Mom’s thunderstorm story. That was more proof that anything can happen—absolutely anything.”
“Ah, I took it to mean: now you see her, now you don’t. Funny how neither of us ever forgot it.”
“Who could?” Carter changed the subject: “You know, all my life there’s been some woman telling me what to do and how to do it. Sometimes I hate ’em all and other times I’m scared shitless by myself.” He lifted his head and gazed at her. “You’re the only person I trust.”
“I’m a woman, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“You’re my sister, and”—he blinked—“you’re gay. I’m safe because you’re not one of them. Sometimes I think there’s this conspiracy by the entire female sex, the heterosexual ones, to weaken men and drive us down, to work us to death, to just use the living shit out of us.”
“Honey, in the war between the sexes I feel like a referee. I can see both sides clearly.”
He reached for a blueberry muffin. “I’m getting to know you all over again. Up until college we were best friends and then, well, you went your way and I went mine and maybe that’s just the way it is. I’m kind of glad all this has happened. I haven’t paid much attention to you or to anybody.”
“Me too.”
“Think it’s the way we were raised up?” He generously applied unsalted butter to the muffin, the blueberries peeking out of the dough.
Frazier thought a long time. “In some ways it is. Let me put it this way: we were never rewarded for showing genuine emotion. Remember when Uncle Ray died? I was in fourth grade, so I guess you were in sixth, and we started to cry at the funeral and Mother got after us about that? We learned to hide everything, I suppose. Being a man you could act out, as they say, in ways I wasn’t supposed to, but I think ultimately we both took our revenge on the emptiness of that. I will never be empty again. I may be on the floor wretched but I won’t be empty. Anything is better than that.”
“Kinda scares me.”
“What?”
“Feeling the pain. That’s why I love booze. Deadens the nerve endings. I can slide by.” He made a sliding motion with the edge of his hand.
“Least you had lust.”
“You lusted after money. Is there much difference?”
“Uh, my lusts lasted longer.” She smiled.
“Yeah, but mine were more fun.” He got up and started another pot of coffee. “Sis, think you would have changed if you hadn’t thought you were dying? I mean, did you lie there and bargain with God—you know: ‘Dear God, if you let me live I’ll give myself to charity,’ or something like that?”
“I’ve asked myself that a thousand times since. I actually think I would have made some changes but I would have taken my sweet time about them, tried to cover my ass, tried to play safe. If nothing else, I’ve learned that if you can’t take a chance, to hell with you.” Her eyes snapped.
He lifted his coffee cup in a toast.
45
LIKE A BACKBEAT, THE STEADY THUMP OF EMOTIONAL TURMOIL kept Frazier moving fast. Her every action seemed punctuated by underlying tension. When it would surface she’d push it out of her mind and return to work.
Outside, the apple trees blossomed and the dogwoods, buds barely open, still gleamed a pale green tinged with white or pink.
Mandy, sensitive to Frazier’s moods, steered clear of her today.
Laura Armstrong didn’t. She swept through the front door, ignored Mandy, and charged into Frazier’s office.
“How dare you!”
Frazier, bent over more transparencies, research books spread over her desk, didn’t at first look up to behold the righteously enraged sister-in-law. “You’d prefer he sleep out on the street?” She waited a moment, then wickedly added as an afterthought, “Or with someone else?”
Mandy hovered at the doorway. Laura spun on her heel. “Get out of here, you snoop.”
With a quickness Laura hadn’t imagined, Frazier was in her face. “Don’t you ever speak that way to her. Ever!”
“Oh, is she your new darling?” Laura’s lip curled.
The room resounded with a crack as Frazier slapped Laura so hard a red hand-mark remained on her expertly cosmeticized face.
Mandy, now by Frazier’s side, gently backed her employer away from a gasping Laura.
“Why don’t you leave, Mrs. Armstrong?”
Laura, with a new target for her curdled unhappiness, spat, “Stick to your own kind.”
Frazier brushed past Mandy and threw Laura against the wall. “You’re sick!”
Mandy, agile and clear-headed, wedged herself between the two women. She placed her hands on Laura’s shoulders and propelled her toward the front door, where she managed to get her out on the street. Two white women on the warpath was not her idea of a good day.
She returned to find Frazier quivering with rage.
“I’ll kill her. I will fucking kill her.”
“She wouldn’t be worth going to jail for. I’d settle for permanent scarring. Or you could shoot out her kneecap?”
“What?” Frazier paused in her fury.
“Shoot out her kneecaps. Imagine. No more aerobics. No more tennis lessons. She couldn’t dance at country club parties anymore. She’d have to walk with a cane unless you blew out both patellas. Need a wheelchair then. You’d be sued, of course, but you wouldn’t go to jail. Temporary sanity would be your plea.”
Frazier, relieved by Mandy’s humor and assistance, laughed. “Sanity?”
Mandy gravely nodded. “Be doing the town a favor. Actually, slitting her tongue would be even more thoughtful. Think of the peace and quiet.”
“She could write notes.”
“Cut off her hands.” Mandy chopped at her right hand while imagining the gush of blood, the exposed bone, the thunk as the liberated hand would hit the floor.
“Where did you come from?” Frazier sighed, filled with gratitude for this wonderful spirit in her life.
“Birmingham, Alabama, as you well know.”
“Well, God bless Birmingham.” Frazier reached over and embraced Mandy, then stiffened and let her go.
“You don’t hug people of color?” came the sharp retort.
“Fuck you, Mandy.” Frazier put her hand to her temple. She could feel the blood pounding. “No. What if someone walked by. How would it look?”
“Like two people hugging.”
“Don’t be purposely obtuse. If Laura said … what she said”—hearing her sister-in-law’s voice in her mind infuriated her again—“then she’ll spread it all over town, if it isn’t already. That’s not fair to you.”
Mandy drew herself up to her full five feet two inches. “I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself and there are plenty worse things than being called a dyke.”
“Such as?”
“Nigger.” That hit the room like a howitzer shell. Mandy added, “Or stupid. If a woman’s afraid to be called a lesbian, then she’s afraid to be a woman.” Mandy saw that Frazier didn’t follow. “Its all part of being a woman. A wife. Girlfriend. Sister. Lesbian. A man can’t be a lesbian. So what’s the big deal? There really are worse things than being called a dyke.”
“I think you’re smarter than I am.” Frazier, suddenly humbled, meant it.
“You made the millions—I didn’t. I’ve never felt compelled to defend my femininity, if you know what I mean.”
“Maybe I think too much and feel too little. You’re smarter about feelings.” A wave of exhaustion swept over Frazier.
“Fray, are you all right?” Mandy noticed her pallor.
“Yeah, yeah. I think I’ll sit down for a minute.” She slumped into a chair.
“Whatever you avoided in feelings, you’re making up for it now.”
“Boy, is that the truth.” Frazier dropped her head back and stared at the ceiling. “Mandy, it’s one damned thing after another. Mother flew in this morning, the proverbial wet hen. Accused me, in so many words, of perverting my brother. You know, he fought back. To her face. I could have kissed him. Guess I should tell him Laura was here.”
“Tell him tonight.”
Frazier sniffed. “Smell that?”
“Your perfume?”
“No.”
“It’s someone’s perfume, only”—Mandy drew in air deeply—“something else. Something richer. Maybe it’s Laura’s scent.”
“Ha! Laura never cast a scent of intrigue.” Frazier stood up. “What are you wearing?”
“Jardin de Montacatini. Number VI.” Mandy, with her forefinger, wrote out the Roman numerals. “What are you wearing?”
“Ysatis. The usual.”
Mandy walked over and leaned close to Frazier’s neck. “Very nice.”
A slight shiver darted up and down Frazier’s spine. “Thank you—but that’s not the fragrance. There’s something, uh, joyful. Do you know what I mean?”
Mandy sucked in as much air as her lungs could hold, then exhaled with a laugh. “Yes.”
Laughter, a low roil like the lap of an ebb tide, soft and sweet, filled the room.
Frazier tore into the big room. Mandy followed. They both stared at the Mount Olympus painting.
“It’s coming from them.” Frazier pointed to the assembled gods and goddesses. “I swear it.”
Mandy, at a loss to explain the extraordinary fragrance or the laughter, studied the painting. The great chiseled face of Jupiter glowed with radiance. Venus, wrapped in a golden light, smiled, a heartening smile. Juno, majestic, surveyed the other gods and goddesses. Mercury, so gorgeous and young, wings on his heels, had a devilish look on his face. Apollo, the ideal of reasonable art, plucked at his lyre. Vulcan, sweaty and huge, paused in his labors to attend to whatever his mother was saying. Neptune and Pluto, fearsome in their separate power, nonetheless exerted a masculine charisma oddly lacking in Dionysus, who exerted something sexy but not male. Diana, chaste and pure, seemed achingly young, while Athena encompassed a clarity and dignity that underscored her beauty, an unadorned beauty.
