“Yes.” She kissed me grudgingly, making me feel I’d dodged a bullet. At the door, she breezed past Celeste as though she didn’t exist.
I spent almost an hour gearing myself up to make good on my promise to ‘talk to’ Celeste, before I finally called her over to my desk. She made a little salute and said, “Reporting for duty, sir.” She must have seen something in my face, though, because her perkiness collapsed marginally.
I decided to keep it simple, to avoid any misunderstandings brought about by too much talking.
“I want to tell you one thing. I don’t want to talk about it. I just want you to do it. Mind your own business.”
“I don’t understand, Mr. Raleigh.”
“Celeste, would you ever talk to anyone, say Mrs. Trentam, about the financial information that we look at in this office?”
“No, sir, never,” she gasped.
“Then why would you think it was acceptable for you to tell her about anything else that goes on in this office?”
“I would never—”
“I know that you did. As I said, we’re not going to talk about it. Mind your own business. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. I felt badly for quashing her perkiness, except that it made such an improvement in her personality. She was almost bearable for the rest of the afternoon.
That was how the Hall of Fame and its attendant preparations became a dirty secret. Or maybe it was the relationship that was the dirty secret, but Meda seemed defeated by the knowledge that she’d agreed to it. The relationship and the event. It’s not pretty, but her aura of defeat made me want to spend a lot of money on her. The fact that she let me should have set off some alarms.
I started out wanting to wash away the bad taste of all the fighting and the incident at the Chairman’s party by buying her some nice things, but then it started to feel like I was rewarding her for giving in. We went into the city for a day of shopping, so she’d have some appropriate evening attire for the Hall of Fame, but it wasn’t some crappy Eliza Doolittle scenario. There was no illusion I was initiating her into a higher class. It was just a day of waiting for her to try on clothes, and watching sales people fawn over her. The experience was far from delightful and I concluded that any future venture should involve Meda and my money, but never again me.
On the drive back, the money I’d spent on her hung over us like a pall. The dress, the shoes, the various undergarments and accessories. Once she had been properly outfitted, there was a hard edge to her, as though she was bitter to find that the gap between everyday Meda and society Meda was a gaping maw that could only be filled with thousands of dollars. She rode limply next to me, her gaze occasionally wandering in an accusatory fashion to the bags and packages in the back seat.
“I’ll be glad to see Annadore,” she said. “I hope Mom didn’t let her eat too much candy.”
Or let the aliens abduct her. I hoped Meda’s irritation was over, but when we had retrieved Annadore from Muriel’s house and driven back to Meda’s, she refused to take the dress and its accouterments into her house.
“That dress is too nice to even take inside my house. It cost more than the house did.” After I helped her get Annadore out of the car, I tried to insinuate myself into their evening.
“I don’t really feel like it, Bernie.” She meant something else. “I’m not in the mood. I have my period.”
“We don’t have to do anything,” I said, borrowing a page from her, but she made it clear I better not come in. I took the dress home with me.
Meda was so convinced that the dress was too nice to go in her house that the night of the Hall of Fame, she got ready at my house. I was afraid of her by the time she came downstairs. I’d spent a measly half an hour showering and shaving and getting my tuxedo on, while she had been the better part of three hours in her preparation. She stepped into the parlor in a defensive stance, expecting I-don’t-know-what reaction from me. I wanted to make some snide remark like, “You’re not wearing that, are you?”
I couldn’t get the joke out. Looking at her made my throat hurt.
I would identify what I was feeling as lust, but I always thought of lust as a feeling that starts in your crotch and radiates outward. This started in my chest, scorched my liver, and then traveled like an electric shock to my groin. I thought it must be what people call “falling in love.” I had the vertigo of a fall from a great height, and in my stomach, the terrifying thump of impact.
The dress was a shadow-filled, dark red, and looked like it had been made to a mold of her. The plunge from her throat to the center of her cleavage left me humbled and incredulous. I had kissed those breasts. She wore make-up, so that if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d never notice her scars, but it was her facial expression that left me feeling weak in the knees: serenity, edged by a lingering spark of defiance. She licked her lips, revealing a touch of nervousness and said, “I look okay, then?”
The only things we hadn’t bought on our shopping trip, I’d borrowed from Aunt Ginny—a mink and silver fox coat—and from my grandmother’s safety deposit box—a diamond necklace and earrings. When Meda opened the case, the light touched the diamonds and refracted off them.
“Shit,” she said. “I better not lose these.”
“They’re insured.” I helped her put the necklace on, and then the coat. It carried the ghost of my aunt’s perfume and enveloped Meda like a cloud. It was strange to think of my aunt as a younger woman being Meda’s size, but I agreed with Oscar Wilde that Aunt Ginny must have simply decided she didn’t want to be that tall anymore. The other thing I’d borrowed from my aunt was her chauffeur, Ron Grabling, although I’d decided against her sedate Bentley and gotten my grandmother’s silver Rolls out of storage. Meda was still giggling when we headed down the drive.
“Hi, Mr. Grabling,” she said.
“Hello, Miss Amos. I always knew you were meant to ride in a Rolls Royce.” Of course they knew each other.
“Mr. Grabling used to help us fix our bicycles when we were kids,” Meda explained. The ride went quickly with the glass partition down, chatting with Ron. When we arrived, the valets at the convention center stared openly at the Rolls and at Meda. Proof I’d achieved my goal of making Meda feel fitted to her surroundings. She glided up the stairs on my arm, but she never quite managed a real smile. She was nervous.
The event turned out to be a bigger fuss than I’d imagined, as there was easily seating for six hundred if they intended to fill it. There were two other inductees, both of them men of my father’s age, to whom we were introduced before the crowds began arriving. One of the other inductees latched on to us in a paternal way, or at least his interest in me was paternal. I recognized him from the billboards for his real estate agency. He introduced us to the people he knew, with only a few variations in the response. Half the people we met didn’t spend two seconds on me, their gazes immediately drawn to Meda. The other half didn’t look at me at all.
The Chairman and his wife had regained their composure and Meda graciously pretended there had been no embarrassing incident at their party. There were a lot of remarks made about what an impressive businessman my grandfather was, but they were mostly made in an effort to keep a dying conversation going around the supernova effect of Meda’s presence. As we made our way to our table, people all over the room wrestled with the dilemma of her presence. Heads turned, doing double takes, risking whiplash. At the table behind us, everyone turned to look, then looked away, erupted into whispers, and turned to look again like a flock of penguins. I wondered how it felt to be Meda, knowing I wouldn’t like it. When I took her hand under the table it was ice cold and trembling.
As for my own performance, I had tried to work up an anecdote about my grandfather, but the only ones I could think of didn’t cast him as anything but mercenary. He was so conniving and vicious at Monopoly that Robby threw the game away to avoid playing it with him. I ended up with a sixt
y second remark on how happy I was to accept the award in his honor and how much I regretted that he had not lived to receive it. The reality was that he declined to be “honored” while he was alive.
It was all beginning to wear on Meda. Even at the edge of the spotlight, I felt the pressure of that much attention directed at one location.
“Can we go soon?” she asked in a tiny voice, as soon as it began to look like things were breaking up. In the car she turned away from me and was so silent that I said the first thing that came to mind.
“You were so worried you’d be out of place, but you were wonderful. You’re always wonderful.” She burst into tears with such a passion that I recoiled from her. “Why are you so upset?”
“Because I feel like a freak show! Like I’m not even a real person. And you just took me there so people would look at me instead of you!”
For nearly ten minutes solid, until I contemplated getting Ron involved, she cried. I tried to touch her, but she slapped my hand away.
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“It was like those awful fucking pageants,” she moaned at last. I numbly handed her the handkerchief from my breast pocket, finally understanding, and knowing what an ass I was. At the house, I practically had to carry her and she refused to go any further than the sofa inside the doorway of the front parlor.
Real Person
Meda
Bernie turned on the lights as he left the room, and when he came back, he was taking off his tuxedo jacket. He came and stood over me, but I promised myself I wasn’t going to get into it with him. All I wanted was to take off those stupid clothes and go home and be alone, and I knew he was going to make it difficult. I hated him so much right then, because it always had to be so complicated with him. He pulled me up off the couch and yanked his aunt’s coat off me, so I knew he had to be furious, because he’d never been rough with me.
That’s when I saw the kitchen shears in his hand. He squatted down and took hold of the hem of the dress, cut into it, and then ripped it up to my hip. I put my hands on his shoulders to stop him. He didn’t look at me, but he went a little slower when he worked the shears across my belly and up to the neckline of the dress. Then he went snip-snip, across the shoulders of the dress, and the whole thing fell on the floor.
I figured he would see the look on my face and stop, but he started in on the rest of my clothes. He slit the slip like he had the dress, cut the garters off the tops of the stockings and then cut the garter belt right in the middle. He peeled the stockings down my legs until he got to the shoes, and not knowing what else to do, I lifted my feet up one at a time to let him take them. Then he worked his way back up, cut my panties off, and then cut the straps off my bra. He slid the shears into the front of the bra, between my breasts, and I held my breath when he cut, because the shears were cold and I knew they were sharp. I didn’t feel exactly afraid of him, but I was afraid something terrible was going to happen. He was like he always was, standing there with his bowtie not even a little crooked, not two hairs on his head out of place.
For the longest time, he looked at me, top to bottom, standing naked. Then he took hold of that big diamond necklace of his grandmother’s and pulled on it just enough for me to feel the pressure of it on the back of my neck. I braced myself, thinking he was going to yank it off. I waited for him to open his mouth and say, “You crazy, ungrateful bitch.”
Instead, he looked right into my face and said, “You’re not a freak show. This is not a pageant, Meda.” Then he let go of the necklace and pressed his hand over it, pressed it against me. “This is a gift. For you to keep. I wouldn’t give it to you unless you were real.”
I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I picked up what was left of that insanely expensive dress. Six thousand dollars hacked up with a pair of kitchen shears. I swear that dress cost six thousand dollars. I laughed so hard I had to sit down. Bernie looked like he couldn’t decide whether to frown or smile. He looked so alone there was only one thing to do. I opened my arms to him and for once there was nothing polite about it.
Mrs. Bryant’s Social Call
Aunt Ginny
I was surprised when Mrs. Bryant came to see me, but thinking she’d come on a social call, I tried to be friendly, and asked after her family and her retirement.
“I just came to tell you one thing, and I’ll apologize for it. I know it’s not my place, but I thought you should know. My daughter, Mary Beth Trentam, you know she’s Mr. Raleigh’s housekeeper now. She mentioned to me that Cathy, her niece, and Mr. Raleigh were seeing each other. Were dating.” I nearly laughed, except that Mrs. Bryant looked so serious.
“Cathy, they also call her Meda?”
Mrs. Bryant nodded and drew herself up a little.
“Yes, ma’am. I have nothing against her, but obviously she isn’t the right sort of girl for your nephew. She had a child, out of wedlock.” So, she was there to caution me against some lower class girl who had designs on Bernie.
“I’ve met Meda and she seems perfectly delightful. And Bernie, of course, is a good boy. I can’t see how you could possibly object to them dating,” I said, careful to put the emphasis on the word ‘you.’ It was a struggle to stay polite. I am not a violent woman, but I felt an urge to pick her up and shake her like a terrier shakes a rat. I supposed she’d sat in the same church with me for the last fifty years, worked for my father-in-law for a good thirty years, and exchanged no more than about ten polite words with me at any given time. There she was tattling on my nephew. She didn’t improve my feeling for her with the next thing she said.
“I prayed a long time before I decided to come see you. And Father Reginald and I talked about it, because he’s worried, too, about Mr. Raleigh. Meda is a good person, but she’s not a Catholic. The Amoses are just a different kind of people from the Raleighs.”
The truth about Virginia Waxman Raleigh is this: my parents took a good look around them when we moved to town and realized all the wealth and influence in the area was in the hands of Catholics. They never once looked back to their Methodist roots, but even when I was being confirmed, I knew in my heart that they were not my People. I knew why I was there. I told myself, This is because it must be, because I was an obedient daughter, but in my heart I never accepted the things they believe. No one can mediate between you and God. You stand alone before him. The numbers are tallied up in each column and the priest will not be there to hold your hand when the judgment is put upon you.
My parents had certainly intended to move up in the world socially when they became Catholic, but I don’t suppose that even in their wildest dreams they expected to move up quite so far. By the time I met Alan Raleigh, I was already twenty-six. He was twenty when he proposed and although his family was polite to me, I can’t help but wonder how happy they were when we married. I was seven years his senior and a records clerk at the county hospital.
“You knew my husband, of course, Mrs. Bryant.”
“Oh, yes. I was so sorry—”
“It was my husband’s habit to interfere with my nephew’s personal life, but it isn’t mine,” I said, silently apologizing to Alan.
Mrs. Bryant excused herself. I did not show her to the door.
Faking It
Meda
Things were better after the stupid Hall of Fame was over. We had a kind of normal relationship, going on dates, and having sex like regular people. One night, though, we went back to my house after a movie and went to bed. I knew that condoms sometimes make things last longer, but after about half an hour I’d had enough.
“Bernie, if you don’t stop, I’m gonna be sore tomorrow. Just let me finish you up,” I said, but it was like he was in a trance. He blinked at me a couple of times and looked confused. “Are you okay? Tell me what you need.”
He shook his head and wouldn’t look at me. I thought about the fact that he was usually very focused on me, that I usually didn’t do anything for
him, except let him do what he wanted. I should have let it go, except I felt guilty, so I kept trying, and he pushed me away.
“I-I-I just c-can’t,” he stuttered, which I’d never heard him do before.
“What do you mean, you can’t?’
“I can’t. It feels really good, but I can’t come.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. That’s how it is.”
“Are you saying you can’t come now, or are you saying you can’t come, like ever?” He wasn’t even going to say anything, but then I saw the look on his face and I knew. “Ever? You don’t—well, what in the hell have you been doing with me?”
“I usually just pretend. Nobody expects guys to be very dramatic about it, either, so it’s never really been an issue,” he said and shrugged.
“You fake it?”
“You’ve never faked it?”
“Well, okay, I have. But I don’t do it all the time, and I haven’t done it with you, and don’t look so smug. What about when I walked in on you that morning?”
“No, I usually do then. It’s just with…”
“With somebody else in the room. Oh, Bernie, you’re so messed up. You can’t sleep with somebody else in the room. You can’t have an orgasm with somebody else in the room. I bet you have shy kidneys, too.”
I laughed because it was so crazy, but he turned away from me, and he didn’t look embarrassed. He looked crushed. I felt bad for teasing him, so I tried to apologize, but he wouldn’t answer me. He got up and stripped off the condom, and then he pulled on his shorts and went out to the bathroom. When he came back, he sat on the edge of the bed, staring off into space. I rubbed his back a little and he let me.
“Have you thought about maybe seeing a psychiatrist or something?” I hoped he wouldn’t think I was still teasing him.
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