“It’s a very generous offer,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”
“Cash only,” Lily said.
“Hey,” the wine dealer called from the front door. “I’m done. Come with me out to the car for a sec, will you?”
Lily followed Vicky out, as if she needed a bodyguard.
The long-limbed wine dealer climbed onto the Subaru’s tailgate and swung up his legs, flipped over onto his hands and knees, and dug into one of the cases. “Ah. Yes. Here it is.” Scooting back to sit on the tailgate, his legs dangling, he handed Vicky a musty bottle. “Stony Brook Cab, 1984. Worth at least a hundred and drinking perfectly right now. Elegant.” He kissed the bunched fingertips of one hand. “This is nirvana in a bottle.”
“Hey, thanks!”
“Always give a little back,” he said with another wink. “Wine is about so much more than business. It’s poetry and friendship. It’s art. History.”
“See,” Vicky said to Lily, right in front of the man. “Not everyone is a Vulture.”
The antiques dealer stood in the front door and called out, “I’m very late for my next appointment. I’ll make you one more offer, but it’s my last.” He flapped another check at Vicky.
“Just take it,” Lily said. “We can cash it in—”
She caught herself, but Vicky knew she’d been about to say “in Nebraska.” That wasn’t going to happen. But checks could be cashed even here, if you knew where to go. Vicky took the check and walked back inside the house. She sat in the Kenmochi and caressed the curve of the wood, and then tore the check in half. “Nah.”
“Vic.” Lily actually snapped her fingers, as if bringing Vicky out of a hypnotic state. “You’re moving. You have no way of taking these chairs with you.”
“The wine guy got his Subaru up here.”
“You don’t have a Subaru. You don’t even have a car.”
“I’ll go up five hundred,” the Vulture said. “I know you’re in a bind. But that’s it. Don’t play with me. I’ll walk.”
Vicky named a figure three times greater than the one he’d written on the check, mostly for Lily’s benefit, to keep from getting scolded for not trying. But she didn’t want to sell her chairs. They were so gorgeous and awesome and unique.
The man sniffed hard and left, tossing his card on the Le Corbusier.
“Where’s that bottle? Let’s celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?”
“Life!” Vicky settled into one of the troughs of the Paulin back-to-back and used the corkscrew on her Swiss Army knife to pull out the cork. “God, I’d love to get my hands on one of Paulin’s tongue chairs. It’d be like resting in someone’s mouth, your whole body held by her tongue.”
“Do you know that bonobos tongue-kiss?”
“Ha! You still in touch with that ape researcher?” Vicky took a swig. “Mm. Good.”
“Actually, he might be here. In Berkeley.” Lily fell into the other trough of the back-to-back chair.
“No shit. Try this.” Vicky handed the bottle over her head.
Lily took a swallow. “Piquant nose. Sexy legs.”
Vicky hooted. “It’s opening up nicely. Cherry musk. Hints of leather restraints. Silky panties finish.”
Lily laughed. “You still haven’t told me what happened with Sal.”
“Tell me you weren’t a bit besotted with that motorcycle fellow.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The way you looked when you got off the bike.”
“I’m married.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
At least Lily laughed. But then she said, “You’re coming back to Fair Oaks with me.”
Just the sound of those two words, Fair Oaks, made Vicky shudder. “Are you in trouble or something? Lil, what’s wrong?”
“No. You’re in trouble. You’re broke, remember? You’re trapped in a disaster zone. Also homeless.”
The words trapped and disaster gave Vicky a little frisson of pleasure. She chuckled.
“It’s not funny.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Where are you going to live?”
“I’ll find an apartment.”
“There are no apartments.”
“Are you kidding? There’re tons of apartments. The entire East Bay population has fled.”
“Most of the city is still without power and water. There’s hardly any food.”
“Granted, it’s all a little dicey. Nothing I can’t ride out.”
At first, when Sal still believed that Vicky could be reconditioned, she’d said, “Look. Natural selection rewards only those mutations that have highly favorable adaptive qualities, ones that enhance survival. Intelligence is definitely a positive trait. But not wildcard intelligence. Not random intelligence. A person needs a trajectory to go with her intelligence, a plan for it, ambition, and the ability to take steps toward a goal.”
“I have goals,” Vicky had said.
“Exactly. Goals. Plural. Like five million.”
Vicky should have said, “You’re my goal.”
But Sal wouldn’t have liked that, either. She wanted something romantic for herself. Goals when it came to house payments and jobs, yes, but complete and total abandonment of reason and success probabilities when it came to their relationship. Sal wanted fate and destiny. Sal was flat-out impossible.
“Victoria.”
“Yes, Lillian?”
The sisters snorted short laughs. Then Lily went back to serious. “Maybe this one is something you can’t ride out.”
“I’m sorry. I really am. I should have called. I made you come all the way out here to find me. That’s just plain fucked up. I’m sorry. But I’m not going back there. I’m staying here.”
Lily heaved a big Lily sigh. Weight of the world.
“Okay,” Vicky said. She figured she’d toss her sister a bone. “You’re right about one thing.”
“And that is?”
“Paul.”
Lily twitched uncomfortably but waited for Vicky to elaborate.
“Which makes Sal right, too. I should have said those words to her: ‘You’re right.’ Maybe I’d still have a place to live. Not to mention a girlfriend.”
Okay, Vicky admitted to herself, she was in a little bit of trouble. Maybe Lily could help her. Just keep talking. Try to tell the story. The real story.
But that was the problem! How could anyone tell what was real?
“So she left you because of Paul?” Lily sounded incredulous.
“Partly. She has a list two pages long of why she left me. But he was definitely a deal-breaker.”
“You’re not…like…involved with him?”
“Oh gag. Hell no! Are you out of your mind? No!”
“So then what...?”
“She thought he was dangerous.”
“Is he?”
“Please. The head of the neighborhood association?” Sometimes Vicky hated herself. Why did she fake bravado? With Lily, of all people.
“He was in your house.”
Thank god Lily and Sal had never met. Vicky could just imagine how they’d enjoy ganging up on her. But she really did have this one under control: by the time he got back from San Jose, she’d be long gone.
Vicky shrugged, hoping to convey nonchalance to her sister.
Of course it didn’t work. Lily was looking more alarmed by the second.
“Hello!” called a voice at the front door. “I’ve come to see about the bed and TV you’re selling.”
“Excellent,” Vicky said, speaking both to the woman at the door and to the interruption of Lily’s interrogation. She plunked the wine bottle onto the floor and launched herself out of the Paulin back-to-back chair. “Right this way!”
14
After fi
nishing at the church, Lily flew across campus on the bicycle Vicky had given her. Her black plastic garbage bag raincoat flapped in the wet breeze. Another fight in the Trinity Church community room, this one more like a brawl involving six men, had kept her late mopping up and discussing security measures with Kalisha and Ron. Meanwhile, it’d gotten dark and begun to rain again. She usually avoided the campus, which was still strictly off-limits to the public, but it was a much shorter route, especially on the bike. If she went fast, Arkansas, San Diego, and North Dakota might not even see her.
Despite the bloody fight, despite the lashing rain and deep darkness, Lily felt reckless and elated. The hundred-dollar Cabernet still trickled through her bloodstream, along with the endorphins from her motorcycle jaunt with the skinny man. Mainly this: Vicky was alive.
Nothing could take away the pure joy of that knowledge. Not even the sketchy circumstances of Vicky’s situation. Maybe those circumstances even added to Lily’s happiness. She wasn’t crazy to have come. Vicky needed her.
She let herself in the door and careened happily into the front room, shouting, “Victoria! I’m home!”
The first thing she saw were the twitching flames of a dozen candles reflected in the floor-to-ceiling windows. Next she saw her sister sitting on the floor, back against one of those windows, elbows on her knees, holding a bottle of wine. Another woman, artificially blonde and plump, wearing a tight, lime-green cocktail dress, swung in the bubble chair. Matching lime-green heels rested on the carpet beneath her. Lily was pretty sure this wasn’t Sal.
The woman startled out of the bubble chair, emitting a little cry of distress, hitched one of the heels onto her foot, and reached for the other. Her sudden movements caused the candle flames to shimmy, and one taper tipped over. Wax pooled onto the white shag carpet. Lily could hardly blame the woman for being alarmed. She probably looked crazy dressed in the black plastic garbage bag with holes cut out for her head and arms, wet hair plastered to her head, and snot running from her nose.
“Please meet my sister, Lillian.” Vicky spoke in a smooth and suave voice that Lily wouldn’t have recognized.
“Just Lily.” She gave Vicky a stern glance and held out a damp hand. The woman placed a couple of shiny red claws against Lily’s palm, withdrawing them quickly.
“I serve dinner at Trinity Church’s free meals program,” Lily said, as if that explained something. “There was a big fight tonight.”
She shot Vicky another, less concealed look of pissed-off inquiry: Who is this bimbo? And I thought you sold all the wine.
“Gloria lives down the street,” Vicky said, her eyes doing that evasive thing.
“Well, that’s handy.” Lily rustled down the hall to the bathroom. She peeled off the plastic bag and shook the rainwater into the bathtub.
Then, on second thought, she walked back down to the living room. She intended to remind Vicky of her impending homelessness and the need to deal with it. It was time for the floozy to go home.
Neither woman heard her reenter the big living room. They’d begun some lesbo scenario, which Lily really didn’t want to see, so she skulked back to the bedroom. Her good mood fizzled. She was cold and tired. She really didn’t need Vicky’s shenanigans—
Wait. Gloria.
As in, Paul’s wife, Gloria?
Lily lowered herself onto the bed and tried to wrap her mind around what she thought she’d just seen. It wasn’t possible. Not even with Vicky.
Yet that was exactly what was happening: Vicky was kissing her neighbor Gloria, Paul’s wife.
What was she supposed to do now? Some sort of intervention was in order. Wasn’t it? She’d feel like someone’s mom charging back into the living room and telling them to break it up. Vicky was two years older than she was, as in fully adult, a good thirty-five years old. Lily had no business telling her who she could and could not have sex with. Why oh why did Vicky love stirring hornets’ nests?
She crawled under the covers of the king-size Tempur-Pedic, scooting to the far edge of the giant bed so that Vicky would have plenty of room, when she was finished with the floozy, to slide in on the side nearest the door. She pulled the covers over her head and let herself fall asleep.
Lily dreamed that she was in Vicky’s red kayak on the San Francisco Bay. She paddled hard but wasn’t strong enough to fight the outgoing tide. She got swept right through the Golden Gate, the water moving in violent rapids, shooting her out into the Pacific Ocean. She risked tipping the kayak by twisting her waist in the cockpit and looking back at the bridge, its red ribs arching across the gap. She turned forward again, looking west, in the direction of change and pioneering, and aimed for the horizon.
She didn’t feel them fall onto the other side of the bed—just as the Tempur-Pedic company advertised—and she mistook their moans for her own dreaming lament. Only when the soft fabric, what she would later identify as Gloria’s lime-green dress, landed on her head did consciousness begin to kindle.
Someone was panting her sister’s name.
Lily’s mind ignited. She lay in a state of paralyzed disbelief. This couldn’t be happening.
It was.
Lily began to ease herself off her side of the mattress, thinking she’d roll under the bed. But that was a stupid solution. If Gloria spent the night, she’d be pinned there for hours. Lily had to pee, badly.
Someone kicked her. A moment of stillness, perhaps as the kicker briefly wondered what she’d kicked, was followed by the resumption of sexual quickening.
A hand flung across Lily’s face, causing her to squawk.
Gloria vocalized next, hers a guttural, nearly prehistoric paroxysm of fright.
Vicky said, “What? What?” Then, “Oh, shit.”
Lily bolted upright.
Gloria screamed a bloodcurdler. She shot off the bed and out the door.
“Your dress!” Lily shouted. She clicked on her flashlight and shone it at the naked woman lunging toward her. Gloria yanked the lime-green dress off the bed and, with it wadded in her hand, ran back out the bedroom door, her buttocks jiggling.
Vicky and Lily listened to Gloria’s bare feet thump down the hall, make a couple of wrong turns—into the den, the bathroom—before she found her purse in the kitchen. The front door slammed.
“I hope she put the dress on,” Lily said.
Vicky lay facedown on the bed and whimpered.
As Lily got up to go to the bathroom, the beam of her flashlight found, forsaken on the floor at the foot of the bed as if in a postmodern fairytale, one lime-green high heel.
“The bathroom stinks,” she said coming back into the bedroom and sitting on her side of the bed. They’d been peeing down the bathtub drain, and Vicky had told her to just dig a hole in the backyard if she needed to shit.
“That’s the Floreses’ problem. We’ll be out of here soon.”
“Why?”
“I’ve explained all that to you. They’re evicting—”
“No! Why that woman. Paul’s wife.”
“She likes a little something on the side.”
“And you’re that little something.”
Vicky smiled. “She’s a poet. A damn good one, too. But you know the type. Everything is up for redefinition.”
“Including her marriage.”
“Including her marriage,” Vicky answered solemnly, as if she were on a witness stand, talking about someone other than herself.
“Jesus. Do you not think or do you just get off on trouble?”
“Here we go.”
“Where did you think I’d be? We sold the guest bed.”
“I didn’t invite her! She just showed up. In that dress! Paul’s in San Jose for the night and she thought it was a good opportunity for a last little hurrah. Okay, you’re right, I should have sent her right back home. But I figured, Sal’s already dumped me. So.”
Lily shined the flashlight on her sister’s face. “Apparently you didn’t send her packing even when Sal was in the picture.”
“That was a mistake. I admit it. Gloria’s very aggressive.”
“It appears that her husband is pretty aggressive, too.”
“True. He can be gnarly.”
Vicky moved aside and then held up a hand in front of the flashlight beam to make beak shadows on the wall.
“You know, I’ve been thinking about the kayak,” she said. “There’s no way those glued skateboards are going to hold up under the duress of pavement friction.”
“You said nothing would compromise the stick of that glue.” Lily allowed herself to be drawn into the diversion, mostly so she could point out the inconsistency. But also because what could she possibly say now? What could she possibly do?
“I did say that. But it’s not true. I have some giant bolts. I’m going to bolt the wheelbases of our in-line skates onto the kayak bottom. Then seal the bolts with that epoxy. The combination will work. Yeah, and the in-line skates will be more nimble, probably turn better than the skateboards.”
“You have to be out of the house by midnight tomorrow.”
“True.”
“You don’t have time to bolt in-line skates onto the kayak.”
Vicky blew her signature raspberry. “That’s a full twenty-four hours. Sal and I were going to use the in-line skates to get in shape. We tried once, for like ten minutes, but they hurt our feet. And the kayak hurt our backs. So it’s perfect, put the two together and make something entirely new.”
“How did Sal—and Paul, for that matter—find out about you and Gloria?”
“Oh, shit. You know what? I totally forgot to put the rest of the stuff in the garage on Craigslist! Posting the Harley was kind of emotional. I got derailed and just moved on to the house contents. Oh well. I don’t need any of it. I’m going to live like a monk. How’d the bicycle work out? Take whatever else you want.”
“Do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Go apologize to Sal.”
Vicky got out of bed and found the lime-green stiletto. She chucked it at Lily.
“Hey! That thing’s lethal.”
The Evolution of Love Page 10