by Lee Irby
Gibson, Gibson, where are you? Hiding behind the boxwood hedge that surrounds a usurious bank? In back of that closed Chinese diner? Come out, come out, wherever you are!
Somebody does, much to my surprise. From behind a large trash bin, a homeless guy jumps out and waves at me. “You lose something?” he yells as he squats on his haunches in front of a shopping cart that contains his meager possessions. Maybe he lives inside the defunct restaurant, though it’s not obvious how he gets in and out.
“No, just looking for someone.”
“Who?”
“A girl.”
“I just seen a girl go by. Nice looking! She belong to you?”
“No.”
“What’s her name?”
“It probably wasn’t her.”
“How do you know?”
A great question, and one that I can’t logically answer without incriminating myself. Maybe it was Gibson skipping by this homeless man. But think about it. This is a very busy road, with all kinds of traffic and congestion, and maybe a dozen people have already walked past during this brief interlude. So am I confessing to being Gibson’s killer? No way. She never meant to harm me. She never tried to ruin my career. The only possible motive was that I made an untoward sexual advance that she rebuffed…and normally I’d never do something so stupid…normally I know how to behave around women…normally I’m extremely normal.
“Thanks for your help.”
“She went that way.” He points in the general direction of Regency Square Mall, which would be a likely destination for a truant with forty bucks in her pocket. I’ll have to go there then, though I do have another reason for stopping by. Shoes. Specifically white shoes for the wedding, since I left mine behind. If I happen to see Gibson at the mall, all the better. No one will be more surprised or relieved.
Regency Square was once Richmond’s most fashionable high-end shopping mecca, with its glass elevator and assortment of eateries, the best known of which was O’Briensteins, which billed itself as an Irish-Jewish bagel pub. But it’s long gone, and so are the upscale boutiques, now replaced with cheap discount chains, which in all honesty suits me fine because I don’t feel like shelling out another eighty dollars for shoes I won’t wear again. In and out, that’s my goal. Park, buy the shoes, and get out of a place that even in high school sickened me. Yes, I’m actually at Regency Square Mall, which feels surreal because the last time I was here had been during high school, when confidence oozed from every blocked pore and I swaggered up and down the concourses with a disdainful sneer. Prom time was just around the corner, though I had no date…just like I have no wife…or lover. At least, not anymore.
While I’m still sitting in my car, however, I get a text.
I was in a 3some last night it was fantastic
Now who would send me such a text? For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s from Lola, the willowy double-jointed temptress who is possibly a student of mine. The real question becomes: how should a sane person respond? I could offer congratulations, in which case I’d cease to be a sane person. I could also beg her to stop bothering me, which would validate my probity and possibly redeem me in your eyes.
What to do, what to do?
If Lola exists, then she isn’t respecting any boundaries. She knows I’m helpless, powerless even, her captive, which apparently gives her the right to intrude at will, burst through the closed doors of my soul like an aggressive encyclopedia salesman, “sharing” the latest with me, the tales of her wanton excursions with men, women, men and women, sometimes lots of men and women. There are also potentially complex legal reasons why she shouldn’t be telling me about a threesome or any other integer-based sexual dalliance.
It’s safe to say I should consider this text the ultimate bad omen and begin to disengage from her as quickly as possible. But I don’t do that. At some point I’ve embraced what Poe called “the spirit of PERVERSENESS,” when one is drawn to behavior known to be wrong, repugnant, possibly criminal, simply because it’s wrong, repugnant, and possibly criminal. As Poe put it, “It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself.”
Hence, my reply: Who was the guy?
I send the text and almost vomit, right there in the nearly empty parking lot, next to a minivan dotted with anti-Obama bumper stickers. My reply text has to rank among the dumbest questions ever asked in the history of wireless communications. It’s not necessarily germane to the story for me to recount the larger context of this bizarre exchange of texts, but I offer this glimpse into my gestalt as evidence of the kinds of pressure I was under at that moment. Otherwise nothing else makes sense, how I let myself get duped and put in the precarious position I’ll soon find myself.
A quick review. I’m at a mall, shopping for white shoes. My almost-sister is missing, and perhaps I killed her (and the waitress in Gettysburg, not to mention my ex-wife). My mother’s house has become a weapons depot. In my hands is a smartphone and I’m waiting for it to buzz. For her reply. Waiting in vain, as her reply never comes because she’s cruel. Or merciful. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference, and besides, I control my destiny, not her.
I wish I believed that. Lola controls my destiny and she can be a heartless taskmaster…I’m under her thrall and have become her minion, and if I just stop there, there’s nothing to worry about. But we’re just scratching the surface…
I slip the phone into a pocket, and some might congratulate me for showing strength. A man in my position can’t get waylaid by some extremely promiscuous nymph who delights in hurting intellectuals. So she had a threesome. Big deal. What she does on her time is her business and she can spend it any way she wants, no matter how salaciously.
I’m almost at the entrance to Macy’s when my phone buzzes again. I know it’s her, based solely on the vibration. She has a way of forcing her personality into my electronics, just as she’s managed to penetrate the darker recesses of my mind and implant her noxious brand of sweet poison. I ignore the buzzing in the vicinity of my groin, again showing fortitude and restraint in abstaining from checking my phone, qualities often associated with virtue, extolled by Aristotle and countless other seekers of wisdom.
But America is a land surfeited with traps and I walk right into one. Inside the department store, I’m accosted by the overwhelming stench of perfume that smells as if it’s being blown through the AC ducts. My senses besieged, next I encounter two mannequins, lithe male figures perched on a pedestal, both attired in pastel-colored beachwear, their skin a dusky shade of ochre, their facial features bland, with chiseled cheeks and slightly upturned mouths, but eyes that survey the horizon with caution, the way a sentry at a lonely outpost might scan the night for any sign of the enemy, as I should’ve been. Something about the mannequins triggers in me a memory of one of Lola’s former lovers, a sullen journalism major who earned spare money posing nude for a drawing class in our art department. At one point she regarded him with sickening reverence, until I was able to convince her of his numerous foibles.
In a flash my resolve melts away and I take out my phone. It’s all so wrong, so horribly wrong. I know what awaits me. A photo.
Here he is.
Because there’s always a photo, since she’s a diligent documentarian of her misdeeds, a careful curator of her crassness, and a trained assassin who shoots only for the head, seldom missing.
The image that appears on my phone is clearly of a man, and clearly he’s naked and standing in front of a mirror in his bathroom, holding his phone up next to his face as he snaps off a selfie. She always picks the same kinds of men—feckless, hairless breeds with scant muscle tone, buzz cuts, and a penis of Priapus, the Greek god of fertility and livestock, and this one looks to be part donkey.
Wait a second. I know this one. Had him in class last year. Biggest pain in the ass ever, always nagging me about the assignments and how hard I graded. Him? Of all the guys she might have coupled—or tripled—with, she has to select a suitor she knows I disli
ke, intensely so, as I grunted angrily when she claimed he was “super-cute,” and honestly there’s just one way to interpret her action here—she was out to maim in a deeply personal way.
I’m just about to finger a retort on the small keyboard when I hear a voice.
“Eddie? Is that you?”
I look up from my phone, my face panic-stricken, because I know that voice, even if I can’t place it right away. One glance at the woman standing across from me instantly generates a name: Leigh Rose Wardell. We share a warm embrace, my phone still in hand, but the digital image of Loverboy fades to black.
“Fancy running into you here,” I quip, falling into my Richmond persona, the disgruntled aesthete with a compassionate core. It’s like learning to ride a bike: one never forgets how.
“I was just about to say the same thing! How are you?”
“Oh, fine. I just figured I’d wander aimlessly around Regency Square and buy a Led Zeppelin poster from Spencer’s.”
No wedding ring. Hair in pigtails. Expensive but tasteful workout clothes, but she does look plumper than the girl I knew in high school. Not unpleasantly so. In fact she’s damn attractive in a kind of earth-motherly way, her flawless skin free of makeup, giving her a natural, unmediated appearance. Real, in other words. Mature, adult, confident. No bra straps showing. No random piercings. No acne, no garish fingernail polish. A grown woman.
“That sounds like you,” she chuckles, eyes brightening in delight, animated by my eternal goofiness. “Are you living in Richmond? Of course you’re not! Why would I even ask that question? You’re in New York, right?”
“Upstate.”
“Not the city?”
“I take the train down as much as possible.”
“Are you still writing?”
“I teach writing, but I guess that’s not the same thing. You look fabulous, by the way.”
“So do you! Hey, you feel like getting some coffee? I was just on my way to Starbucks. I have this routine. I pretend to work out at the gym and then go stuff my face with chocolate croissants.”
“Sure, I could use a new routine and yours sounds perfect. No pain, all gain.”
“Eddie! I can’t believe you’re here! I was thinking about you last night, as a matter of fact.”
Let me add at this juncture one salient point about Leigh Rose Wardell. She is rich. Filthy, stinking rich. The kind of rich that can buy private islands, make a politician bark like a seal, and cause Mercedes dealers to weep uncontrollably. Her family eats money for breakfast instead of cereal. But I never cared about that element of her life, one of the reasons we still have a connection after all these years, despite losing touch. It seems like a connection anyway, not that I can discern true human emotion anymore.
My phone buzzes again. Another text from Lola. A thin, pained smile forms on my face.
“Thinking of me? Why? Were you suffering indigestion?”
“No! Oh gosh, it was just a weird dream. Come on, let’s go.”
She grabs me by the arm and we skip off like Hansel and Gretel. She genuinely appears to relish being with me, because in her mind I’m the same dashing and fearless lad from 1993 who had goals and aspirations, but if she ever got ahold of my phone and scrolled through the texts contained therein, her opinion of me would change. What’s the all-time record for living a lie? And once she discovers the truth about me, she can tell the world of my fetid secret life, unless I eliminate her first. There’s a motive for you! I kill only to protect myself…but the truth is I’m the one who’s in grave danger. This might look innocent to you, long-lost high school lovers who’ve serendipitously reunited in a major department store, but the reality is far different. It’s like I’ve strapped dynamite to my back and, though the fuse is long, it’s lit. Chekhov advises that, if a playwright intends to explode a bomb onstage, then it’s best if this bomb gets passed around so that every character can handle it, thereby pushing the audience to the edge of their seats, waiting for the big ka-boom! Is your pulse pounding yet? The dead will die again, don’t forget.
Just as we’re about to exit Macy’s, I see that off to my right is the shoe department. I screech to a halt.
“What’s wrong?” Leigh Rose asks me.
“I need shoes.”
“Shoes?”
“For a wedding. Come on, a detour.”
“I love shopping for shoes! Whose wedding is it?”
“My mother’s.”
“Get out! Good for her.”
“Not quite.”
“No?”
“Long story. I need white oxfords.”
So we veer off, still arm in arm. What’s eerily coincidental is our reunion echoes our first meeting, which was also happenstance and at a store, although a very different venue, Plan 9 Records on Cary Street. I was combing through the New Wave bin when this totally grunged-out girl came in, ripped jeans, ratty flannel shirt, reeking of freshly smoked pot, and she started chatting up the clerk, who played in bands, and I inched closer to eavesdrop on their conversation, because I’d overheard mention of Domino’s Dog House, a crazy bar at Shockoe Bottom I’d wanted to check out. I was wearing retro Converse sneakers, the same kind that Kurt Cobain wears in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, and she called me on it. “Hey, Cobain” were her first words to me, and my reply elicited her first laugh: “Can you call me Kurt?”
Everything about our relationship was accidental. We didn’t go to the same high school. She lived in an enormous mansion in Windsor Farms, the stately neighborhood of Richmond’s wealthiest and most powerful, while we dwelled in decidedly middle-class Traylor Estates. We had no common friends. But we were both high school seniors who wanted out of Richmond, and for three months we were inseparable, exploring the clubs and dives of the city’s old quarters that were beginning to be gentrified. She was the black sheep of her prominent family, and I was a kid whose father had just died. But she was headed off to Tulane and I was matriculating to William and Mary, and as random as our meeting was, so too was our drifting apart. There was never acrimony, no bad blood, but just an understanding that we were moving in different directions.
When we get to the shoe department, Leigh Rose shoves me into a chair and instantly takes charge, one of my favorite traits of hers. Many of the Richmond girls I knew were afflicted with a fatal case of Scarlett-O’Hara-itis, which caused them to act coquettish and overly helpless, forgetting that Scarlett was a fierce tigress and not an indolent wallflower. Leigh Rose had been raised to be a Southern belle but had rejected the premise, much to the consternation of her parents. She spoke her mind. She defied stereotype.
One look from her is all it takes to get a drowsy “sales associate” over to us. She’s already selected three different styles for me to consider and orders him to fetch them. After he trundles off, she sits down next to me as we wait for his return.
“I actually bought a pair of wedding shoes but forgot to pack them,” I explain, somewhat sheepishly, reluctant to speak to her of my life in Ithaca, which suddenly seems to belong to another solar system.
“I do that kind of thing all the time. My mind wanders. I forget things I don’t want to, and remember stuff I don’t want to. If I could just reverse the order, you know? So anyway! Who is your mother marrying?”
“I haven’t met the groom, to be honest. His name is Mead George. He is roughly our age.”
She repeats the name to herself and gazes down at her lap as if she stores her address book there, and then she looks up at me with a startled expression. “Our age?”
“So I’ve been told. I don’t want to impugn the man’s motives, and perhaps he loves her, but an impartial observer might conclude that he’s after her money, which she came into last year when an aunt died, which is when he moved in with her. So his timing is pretty much perfect.”
She winces and recoils her head, her body stiffening ever so slightly, straightening her arms like she’s trying to push herself up off the seat. “That’s terrible,�
� she says in a very somber tone, the way one begins a eulogy. “I can’t believe she’s falling for it.”
“Should I say something? I wasn’t planning to. I just don’t think it’s my place.” Twenty feet away a group of young children, who don’t seem to be supervised by an adult, begin groping a male mannequin who’s outfitted in a pair of snug-fitting briefs. Each in turn squeals in delight when a small hand makes contact with the contoured groin, until a harried mother toting a newborn shoos them away. Almost on cue, my phone buzzes. What torment has Lola visited upon me now? What photo has she sent spiraling to my blackened heart?
“No, you can’t say anything. It’s her life, and ultimately her money, and she can do what she wants.”
“So my initial reticence is the way to go?”
“It has to be.”
I’ve forgotten how alluring Leigh Rose’s eyes are—a bewitching tone of fern green, deeply set, with flat brows and porcelain skin that contrasts with the luminous color of her pupils. Sure, wrinkles have begun to sprout here and there, but I also can still discern the girl she was. But we see in our lovers what we want to see, not who they really are. For thirty years the French artist Pierre Bonnard painted the same woman, who was his mistress, and not in a single painting did he age her. Even when she was in her sixties, Bonnard envisioned only the brash and bounteous young beauty he’d first fallen in love with, not the harping crone she later became.
The sales associate brings out three boxes of shoes and plops them down in front of us. Each pair costs around $100, money I really can’t afford to spend on an item that will get worn maybe twice. I kind of wish Leigh Rose had perused the sales rack, where white shoes often languish, but she really isn’t a sales rack kind of girl. I’m certainly not going to alert her to my depleted bank account, and so I dutifully try on each pair that she picked out. But one really stands out: a moc-toe slip-on with a decorative silver strap that screams 1977 pimp.
I perform a stilted version of John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever, complete with a strut and an arm extended at a jaunty angle. “Studio 54, anyone?” I rasp.