Trevor entered from the bedroom in a bathrobe, half his face still showing the pillow marks. He padded sleepily around his kitchen, poured himself a glass of juice, and stared at Lux while he drank it.
“Where have you been lately, sweetheart?”
Lux kept her eyes on her notebook. It all starts out so good until you come to “where you been, bitch?” Trevor spoke softly, used the proper helping verb (“have”), a gentle endearment (“sweetheart”) and the extra word (“lately”), which implied a more random request for information. But that didn’t make it any better for Lux. In Lux’s experience, any conversation that starts with “Where you been” ends with a bruise on the arm or a bite on the ass.
“I told you already, I was helping Jonella with the baby cuz she’s been sick.”
“Yes, but…”
“That’s what happened,” Lux said so firmly he knew she was hiding something.
“I understand but, um, is everything ok?”
“Yes,” Lux said.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, Trevor, everything is ok, why the fuck didn’t you invite me to your son’s wedding?”
Trevor stopped as guilt hit him square in the face. I didn’t invite her to the wedding and now the little bunny is angry with me, he thought as he misunderstood what she was saying. Trevor believed that because Lux was shouting at him about being left out of the party that she was angry at him about being left out of the party. It was not true. Lux couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Teddy’s wedding. Lux was afraid and she was doing her best to avoid getting hit, or even worse, bitten.
“Parry” was one of the vocabulary words on Lux’s list of concepts and phrases that she wished to own and operate. Once she got the right spelling and found a dictionary, she learned that it means 1) to ward off weapon or attack; 2) to avoid answering a question directly. Every fight Lux ever had, even the battles she won, ended with a new bruise on her body because she had never heard the word “to parry” and therefore did not understand that she could also defend herself by moving away. She liked the concept and was working on perfecting it. Her inquiry as to the location of her wayward wedding invitation was a defense disguised as an attack. This was far too complicated for Trevor to understand. Nor should he be expected to.
“The wedding. Yes. Damn, Lux, I’m sorry. That was a horrible mistake. Is that why you’re angry? The invitations went out weeks and weeks ago and my wife wrote up the guest list and, oh bunny, it was an awful night. You would have had a terrible time. I had a terrible time. But I should have brought you.”
“I wouldn’t have come, Trevor. I don’t want to meet your ex-wife or your kids or any of those kinda of people in your life. Do you understand? I don’t want to meet them.”
“Oh. I see.”
He didn’t see. All he saw was Lux pushing away from him. He assumed she was disappointed with the realization of his limitations. She’d obviously seen the reality of his age and the smallness of his status in the world.
She appeared at his door last night looking tired and sweaty. Her hands were chapped and raw, as if she’d been swimming for too long or washing something in harsh detergents. He’d rubbed cream on her palms and fingers before he took her out to dinner. Over burgers and beer she quizzed him, first about compound interest, then Mozart, then how the stock market worked. What did the word “respectively” mean and how did you spell it. He knew all the answers and delighted in telling her how smart he was. Then they came home and made love in his bed. He fell asleep blissful.
At 9 a.m., she had jumped up out of his bed and made several calls to Carlos. They discussed paint and the location of keys. Trevor burned, knowing that Carlos was an old lover, an old, younger lover. He rolled over and tried to forget it. He closed his eyes and searched for her in his bed, but she was already gone. Up and about and getting ready for the day.
When he finally dragged himself out of bed, Trevor found his little bunny sitting at the table in the dining room, in love with her notebook, rereading the same page. She sat, comfortable in a panties and T-shirt as only a young woman could be, scratching her pencil around the page, half-naked and not paying any attention to him. And now this fight about the wedding. He wished he’d just invited her.
Trevor put down his glass of orange juice and crossed the apartment in three steps. He kneeled down on the floor next to Lux and grabbed her hand a little too hard. She pulled it away.
“What did you say to Carlos today?”
“Nothing much.”
“Why did you have to call him so early.”
“He’s, ah, painting something for…my mom. I was supposed to let him into the…her house so he needs to know where keys are.”
“Why don’t I take you shopping today,” Trevor said, employing his own awkward parry in response to her hesitant answer.
“No. I don’t wanna,” she said, not really looking at him. “I got stuff to do. And I still gotta get there and make sure Carlos doesn’t fuck it up.”
Lux went back to her notebook, reading the first two lines of her thoughts again, willing herself to find the third line that would certainly set her free. Trevor stood up, slowly as the floor had been hard on his knee. He had to have her, had to keep her. He wanted to remind her of how good it had been between them. He lifted up her hair, still wet from the shower and kissed her neck.
“Trev…”
“What?”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Cuz.”
He slid his fingers down her hand and pulled the pencil out of her fingers. He stood her up, turned her around to face him and kissed her lips. He slid his hand into the waistband of the panties as he licked her neck and breasts, then her navel. He pulled off the lacy little thong.
The possibility of finding the third, perfect line evaporated. Lux stared at the top of his head, knowing she was meat. She didn’t have enough words yet to express the nuances of what she was feeling at the moment so instead she just mooed like a cow.
“Moo,” she said again as if the word meant something.
Trevor laughed, wondered if she was crazy. He took her moo as a signal to proceed because that’s what he wanted to do.
Without the right words she could not hold or share the feelings that were raging around in her head. Without the right words the feelings couldn’t even become thoughts that she could turn over and examine from any angle other than desperation. Brooke had said that Trevor loved her and wanted her for his own. But Carlos had once owned her and it took a beat down from her brother to get her freedom back. She did not want to be owned by Trevor, did not want to be owned by anyone ever again. Lux did not understand that the word “own” could be used to both to describe a possession and to imply a singular love and so she could only assume they were both equal to her experience of the word “own” when applied to her understanding of “love.” That was a dark and ugly place to be, something to be avoided at all costs. She stood quietly and waited for Trevor’s love to end.
Trevor was the king of cunnilingus. He was sure his wife had stayed with him several years longer than she wanted to because of it. She hated him but wanted custody of his tongue. No judge was going to order him to give it to his ex-wife every other weekend and so she had hung on as long as she could. He would make desperate, panicked love to her, hoping she would love his tongue enough to overlook the rest of his faults. It was happening all over again as Trevor used everything he had in an attempt to bind Lux to him to no avail.
She’d been here before. Not really in the mood. Other things on her mind. Sometimes Carlos could get her going, even when she didn’t want to be revved up and turned over like a motor in his wrench. She stood there, waiting. Maybe Trevor had that magic too. Maybe when it was over she’d be glad he had insisted, but for now she was just mad. The thoughts and feeling were stuck in her chest like food that goes down the wrong pipe. She stood there letting him put his mouth in her crotch, waiting for Trevor to do something i
nteresting.
She’s a fucking mannequin, Trevor thought. When is she going to touch me, even lightly? He ran his tongue around the lips of her vagina and reaching the clitoris, believed he felt a spark of interest lighting up in Lux. She put her hands on his head at least and he took it as a sign to go further and deeper. When she finally started making some noise he pushed her back and entered her quickly. She rocked and moaned but when he looked in her eye the image reflecting back to Trevor was that of a thief, a bore, a brute, and Trevor lost his erection immediately.
Well, Lux thought, Mom said that happens a lot with older guys.
“Sorry,” Lux said cautiously. She’d seen this part in a couple of different movies, the part where the guy can’t get it up and so the girl gets killed. Trevor didn’t seem the type, but wasn’t Diane Keaton surprised when Mr. Goodbar started to beat her. Carlos could be really sweet too when he wasn’t being a fucking asshole. You never could tell with guys. Best to play it safe.
Lux slid out from under Trevor.
“That was great, really,” she said trying to sound upbeat and satisfied. Trevor sat down hard on one of his kitchen chairs. His naked body seemed to gray and lose animation as it sank into the vivid blue vinyl of the seat. Lux grabbed a quick shower, and then her keys.
“I’ll call you later, Trevor,” she promised and bolted for the door, heading out to meet Carlos and talk about paint.
17. Lord of the Rings
“ARE YOU OK?” MARGOT hissed at Aimee in the darkness.
“Fine, yeah, fine,” Aimee whispered back as she found her seat in the theater again. She was puking about every four hours now, well up from last month’s record of once or twice a day. The nausea was usually followed by thirst and an irrational hunger for protein that gave Aimee deep insight to all those vampire movies. She glared at hot dogs with the lust of Dracula’s newly raised bride. She finished chewing the slice of sugared ginger that had been recommended by the health food store to settle her stomach and then started on the strips of roast beef she had smuggled with her into the movie theater.
“This is the best part,” she whispered to Margot as Merry and Pippin set off a burst of stolen fireworks and Frodo, fearing the dragon had come to the shire to claim his beloved uncle, sheltered the older hobbit as best he could.
“But, didn’t we just see these same characters come back here from a long journey? And didn’t that short, white-haired man…”
“Hobbit.”
“What?”
“Bilbo is a hobbit.”
“Right. I knew that,” Margot said. “The Bilbo hobbitman, didn’t he just sail away with all those elves and Frodo and the Gandalf guy? Why is he back?”
“Because,” Aimee whispered, “that was part three. This is part one.”
Brooke’s head rolled too far forward and she woke with a startled snort.
“Huh? Oh. Hey, remember I wanna party with everyone on the island,” Brooke said and then fell right back to sleep wedged between Aimee and Margot like the Dormouse between the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. Margot laughed and pushed Brooke’s mouth closed so she would not snore.
“See, we came in at the tail end of part three and now we’re back to part one,” explained Aimee. “Now we get to watch the whole thing from the beginning.”
“And that’s a good thing?” Margot asked, unsure of the cost/benefit of such a time commitment.
Aimee nodded merrily and turned back to the screen.
Oh, why not, thought Margot as she dug into the goodie bag she had smuggled into the theater.
Earlier that morning, Margot had been sitting at home alone, feeling trapped, when she decided to call Aimee.
“Help me!” she giggled when Aimee answered the phone.
“What’s up girl?” Aimee asked, glad to be of service to Margot.
“I’m trapped in a circle, and I’ve got to get out before I bankrupt myself!” Margot wailed, laughing at the same time so Aimee wouldn’t be too freaked out by her need.
“What happened?” Aimee asked.
“Well, usually it’s not a problem but this month I just could not pay off my entire credit card bill and so I thought I would try to distance myself from my one true love,” Margot began.
“And your one true love is who?” Aimee asked.
“Henri Bendel,” Margot said as if it were obvious. “And so I made, not a spiritual choice, but an economic one and decided to spend the morning in my own kitchen, working on a new adventure for Atlanta Jane.”
“Excellent choice.”
“You’d think. So I start to make a very un-Margotlike list of all the possible things my Atlanta Jane could do. I start to type stuff like ride horses, save the town, make love to Peter, confront a crooked sheriff, go shopping.”
“Go shopping?” Aimee asked.
“Exactly. I’m sitting there, staring at the blinking curser at the end of that delicious word ‘shopping.’ Atlanta Jane doesn’t go shopping. I go shopping. And the thought whirled around in my brain in such a confusing way that I got right up from my desk, put on my sandals and went shopping.”
“What’d you get?” Aimee laughed.
“Something good, but something kind of disturbing happened when I got to the store.”
“What?”
“Ok, please don’t think I’m silly but it was like this peace settled upon me as soon as I got out into the shops. I was making good decisions, narrowing the field, creating a terrific outfit and the annoying work of being a full human being kind of fell away.”
“That’s a problem?”
“Well, I’m not sure if I want shopping to be my best and only friend. It was like the pleasure centers of my brain were all ignited over a new pair of earrings. I bought a fabulous gray-green suit with this green-gray blouse to match.”
“That’ll go great with that string of peacock Tahitian pearls you got last week.”
“Exactly. And then the sales girl scurried off to find some shoe/purse ensembles that they had not even unpacked yet.”
“I love when they scurry,” Aimee admitted.
“Oh god, yes! It makes me feel important, if only for a moment or two. So I buy the whole outfit and race home to try it on with the pearls. And here I am prancing around my apartment, and these thin elegant fabrics feel like protective armor, like a new, better skin. And I’m so happy and the problem of the day has been solved and then guess what happens.”
“What?” Aimee asked and she really wanted to know.
“Atlanta Jane suddenly appears in my living room.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No!”
“What was she wearing?”
“Her dusty buckskins and she was carrying a rifle. She looked good. She immediately began telling me off.”
“Margot, you tell the best stories!” Aimee laughed. “So what’d the fictitious Miss Atlanta Jane have to say to you?”
“‘What did you do today? What did you make today? Who did you talk to? Where are your friends? What about me?’ She’s scolding me in this flat twang. ‘What are you doing with your life? That mismatched girl, Lux, she needs to be taken shopping. You need to have a human experience.’”
“She said that?”
“She did.”
“So how are you going to make that happen?”
“I’m doing it right now, Aims. I’m calling you! Let’s go do something today.”
“Great!” Aimee sang, happy to be included in Margot’s personal epiphany. “I was planning to spend the afternoon looking at paintings. Why don’t you come with me?”
Aimee’s Sundays used to be shared with her husband, wandering the halls of a museum or gallery looking at photographs. They never looked at paintings because they didn’t interest him.
“I bet we can get Brooke to give us a tour of the Met,” Aimee told Margot on the phone. “She was a docent there for a while, when her parents still lived on Fifth Avenue. You’ll love it. She knows everything about the stuff in t
here.”
“That’s great. You want to call Brooke, or should I.”
“Well, it’s before 1:30, so you call her.”
“What,” Brooke groaned when her cell phone rang. Margot quickly explained her need.
“Well, I usually sleep all day Sunday, but hey why not. I spent the night at Bill’s house so I’m already in the city.”
They met on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum to find it unpleasantly crowded. They stood in line for twenty sweaty minutes and Aimee’s feet swelled until they looked like sausages.
“I’m sorry, I have to sit down,” Aimee said. “It’s ok if you want to go in without me.”
“We’re not going to abandon you and your chubby ankles,” Brooke declared. “We just have to form a new plan.”
Lunch was an option, and lunch plus Lord of the Rings, Aimee promised, would be even better. Aimee led her friends downtown.
They made individualized snack decisions at the deli before coming into the movies. Margot had carrots and sliced apples, Brooke got crackers, and Aimee bought beef. When Brooke stopped at the door of the building and eyed the movie poster with some concern, Aimee found the perfect words to reassure her.
“The theater is air-conditioned,” Aimee promised.
Brooke fell asleep immediately, overwhelmed by the cool darkness and the previous evening’s revelries. They’d quietly entered the theater close to the end of the third installment. The snacks were perfect and the movies lush and beautiful to look at. The characters were so very serious and Margot so very disinterested in do-or-die heroism that she laughed inappropriately at several moments. Controlling herself, Margot struggled to understand why the salvation of Middle Earth was so important to her new friend.
She lasted through the final twenty minutes of the third movie and all of the first. When the second film started up again, when the half-naked Smeagol was captured by Sam and Frodo, Margot felt she had enough of this fantasy. The gray, starving, sexless skin and bones of the computer-generated character was too much for Margot. She was looking for a way to escape when Brooke woke up, declared herself hungry, and got up to pee.
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