by Sean Stewart
Candy glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “I must say, Sugar is a lot of fun to shop with. Wait’ll you see what’s in the trunk.”
I whimpered. “How much?”
“I couldn’t keep track, to tell the truth. I just put it on your gold card. American Express,” she intoned. “Don’t leave your body without it.”
“I’ll call them up. I’ll cancel the purchases and return everything.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Candy said. “Hey, I had to sign for it all. You want me to get in trouble for faking your signature? Besides which, they aren’t your clothes to give back. They’re Sugar’s.”
“Shit. You’re right.” A new thought occurred to me. “Oh no. Candy, did she…? I mean, she didn’t go off with anyone, did she? Not in two hours.”
“Not really. Mind you,” she added, smirking, “there was a very pretty salesclerk in Victoria’s Secret she was flirting with. Carmelita. Finally she called her into the changing room to help with a garter belt. Now, I’m not saying anything happened—but they took fifteen minutes at it, and pretty Carmelita came back fairly flushed.”
I considered. “Could have been worse.”
Not that I would ever, ever show my face in the Galleria again. Ever.
“First the Widow, now Sugar.” Candy turned left onto a stretch of Westheimer that I recognized, not far from Momma’s house. “Girl, you’ve got a bad case of the ghosts.”
“Mockingbird Cordial,” I said.
“What?”
“What’s a Mockingbird? What does she do?”
“Sings. I don’t know,” Candy said. “The Mockingbird can be anyone, I—Oh.”
“Yeah.” I pressed my hand against my forehead but it didn’t seem to help. “I think she let the Riders into me. I think that’s what the cordial did, Candy. Damn it.”
Hush little baby don’t say a word,
Momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.
There are some gifts that cannot be refused.
“Is there any more left?” Candy asked.
“No, you may not drink the stuff. It wasn’t meant for you, Candy. Momma left it for me, damn her. Anyway, I flushed the rest of it down the toilet after the Widow mounted me.”
“Oh.” It was hard to read the tone of her voice.
I sat upright and took a deep breath, which pulled the hem of that ridiculous skirt up to about my navel. “Candy?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s not your fault you’re pretty.”
“Oh, Toni.” She didn’t turn around. “Thank you,” she said.
FOUR
I wasn’t at all happy about being afflicted with Momma’s gods. Then the IRS called up and made me even less happy. It turned out that Momma owed them a lot of money. A lot of money. We couldn’t see the will itself. That was under court seal, but to make a long story short, it took all of the (not much) money Momma’s estate had left, plus most of my savings, to square our family’s accounts. (As Mary Jo had feared, there was no money for her roof either; just some old photographs and a handful of Momma’s paintings.)
Luckily, I was used to paying off Momma’s debts. Was I mad about having to pony up thousands of dollars of my own money? Sure. Furious. But I had known Momma all my life, and ever since she died I had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. There was just bound to be a nasty surprise waiting for me. To have it be something I could deal with by cashing in a mutual fund and writing a check seemed almost too easy.
And even if money was suddenly a bit tight, I had an excellent job and, for the first time, a real sense of direction. I had a plan. Momma was dead and I was going to have a family of my own. For the time being I had a good job; the next trick was to acquire an equally good father for my baby.
It sounds cold-blooded, put like that, but statistically, children who come from two-parent homes do better in school than those from single-parent families. Obviously there is a confound there, as plenty of single moms are dirt-poor. And of course lots of kids from one-parent families turn out fine. Still, I saw no reason not to stack the odds in my child’s favor. Candy might be the sort to draw to an inside straight, but as an actuary I preferred to stick to the percentages, and the percentages were better with a father figure in the family.
Sex never was one of my strong points. I was self-conscious on dates, confused, ashamed of my appearance. I wasn’t a teenager anymore, I didn’t stammer and blush, but like a lizard or a roach, I had developed a dry protective coating. At my best I could be funny; but dating me, as Candy said unkindly, was still too much like going out with your high-school librarian.
Failing to be friendly, flirty, and engaging when it was only my Saturday night on the line was no big deal. Now that my baby was at stake, I no longer had the luxury of embarrassment. I owed it to my child to get a mate, and there was no excuse for not doing it as calmly and rationally as I would go about managing my mutual fund or stock portfolio.
Which meant I had to date. To this end I dressed up in my best Single clothes and shouldered my way into Cabo’s Mix-Mex Café, which I knew from reading the Houston Press was the singles spot in town.
“How on earth are you supposed to meet someone when you have to scream your order over the jukebox?” I said to Candy the next day. “I lasted about four minutes. I swear there was blood in my ears.”
She hooted with laughter. “Toni! You can’t go to Cabo. Go to the Bookstop on Shepherd. That’s the best pickup spot in the city for, you know, people like you.”
People like me? I didn’t ask.
And the Bookstop was better, much better. The Shepherd store is a converted Art Deco movie house. Down at the end where the screen used to be they have a huge magazine stand, perfect for loitering and friendly chitchat. The first time I went there, however, it took me so long to work up my nerve to talk to someone that the store clerk pointedly asked if he could help, obviously thinking I was planning to shoplift a copy of Architectural Digest or Crank! I slunk out in shame.
The following week I tried again. This time I fell into a perfectly lovely conversation with a beautiful man in his mid-twenties with a gorgeous smile and one unexpected gold tooth. I followed him, still chatting, to the checkout counter, where he bought his copy of Out! The Magazine of Gay Liberation.
We parted amicably. It is a strange but true fact that gay men are way easier to talk to than straight ones. I toyed with the idea of finding a paternal queer for a marriage of convenience, but that would mean giving up any hope for sex inside my prospective marriage. It seemed defeatist. Also, it would be hard to explain to a kid why Daddy and Mommy were always fighting over their boyfriends.
With two strikes in the count I shortened my swing and just tried to put the ball in play. Good things happened, up to a point. I met a guy named Tom who was riffling through American Photographer examining telephoto lenses. His eyes lingered, but did not fixate, on the Artistic Nude inside, which seemed like a good sign. We made it as far as the cash register, still chatting. I started to ask him if he’d like to go for a drink, remembered that I couldn’t have alcohol because I was pregnant, changed to ask him out for coffee; remembered I couldn’t have caffeine either; realized further that even a Coke was out of bounds, and was too flustered to think of anything else.
Three strikes and out.
So it was some relief when a date came to me, from an unexpected direction: Bill junior, damp palms and wide mouth and all.
It seemed like fate. Just before Sugar possessed me, Candy had predicted I would marry Bill. Three weeks later, completely out of character, he asked if I could come to lunch with him. Mrs. Bill Friesen, Jr. Well, I supposed I could get used to it. Maybe I could practice writing it out on the bottom of his checks. There would be a certain justice in having the money Momma had made come back to her daughters after all.
Here it was Friday, and we were standing together in the elevator of the Downtown Hyatt, heading for the Spindletop dining room where he had reservations. My only problem wa
s that I desperately wanted to throw up. It wasn’t Bill’s fault. I had morning sickness.
Take my advice: if you are ever out on a date when you are violently nauseated, don’t go on any long elevator rides. The first sickening lurch as you start up is a test for the strongest esophagus. The back wall of the Hyatt elevator was made of glass and looked out on Milam Street, downtown, so you couldn’t miss how fast the ground was dropping away. I looked away from the window. I looked up at the burnished bronze light bar above the elevator doors. I glanced at Bill Jr., standing beside me, and gave a little smile. He gave a little smile back.
The street plummeted away from us.
I refused to throw up on this date. I was wearing my beautiful silk shantung jacket over a pair of slacks and a rather dressy white silk blouse; I was determined not to get that outfit dirty.
“Morning sickness.” The words seem to promise that you’ll be okay in the afternoon, don’t they? Fat chance. I hadn’t had an appetite for five days. It wasn’t just like having the flu either; my body was engaged in a much weirder betrayal. Food didn’t smell like food. I could pick up a cookie and the smell of the baking soda in it would be overpowering. The ketones in bananas nearly made me faint. And that acrid, sap-green taste in lettuce! You might as well ask someone to gnaw twigs. There was a chemical stink on cabbage; a strange, industrial stench bound to anything canned; a rotting-garbage odor coming off fruits and vegetables. My books assured me that the thing to do was to have little meals as frequently as possible, so I started each day with a soda cracker. If you want to know what it was like to get that cracker down, go to your bathroom and eat a bar of soap.
One thing I found which did help was coarse-ground black pepper. For some reason, pepper had very soothing anti-nausea properties for me. If I covered my crackers with pepper I could swallow as many as three of them.
The elevator raced up a seam of clouds between two office towers. “Ever been here before?” Bill Jr. asked.
“No.” I stared resolutely at the elevator doors.
“Um…Are you afraid of heights?”
“No.” More staring.
A sudden shadow chopped down behind me like a guillotine blade falling. We must have entered the top of the shaft. A moment later the elevator stopped with another sickening lurch. (Actually it was the tiniest bump, but any lurch is sickening if you are as nauseated as I was.) The doors opened, revealing a small, tasteful foyer and a small, tasteful hostess. She smiled at me. I didn’t smile back. Nor did I move.
“We’re here,” Bill Jr. said helpfully.
I was going to have to walk out of the elevator. It would have been a splendid time for Bill to offer me his arm, but he didn’t. With great dignity I stepped forward on my own and forced back a rush of bile by biting my lip, hard.
“Reservation for Friesen.”
“Yes. Right this way, please.”
Although Bill didn’t know it, he was interviewing for the job of Mr. Toni Beauchamp. I can’t say his initial rating was high, but I did give him points for his choice of restaurant. Nice enough to be nice, but not too nice; not the sort of stuffy, swanky establishment I had feared, with gloomy oil portraits on the wall and young men named Gustav offering selections of 14-ounce steak for thirty dollars a pop.
There was a bit of affectation at the Spindletop—antique marbletop sideboards for serving stations, sprinkled with a variety of breads, rolls, French knots and baguettes which had all been dried and sprayed with plastic sealant—but the antique furniture had been left with the dints and scratches unfixed, and the glass walls let in a great deal of light, making the seating area pleasant and cheerful. One other oddity of the restaurant was that it was circular: a ring of tables around a central hub which housed the kitchen, foyer, and elevators.
“Will this suit y’all?” the hostess asked, leading us to a table next to the window. There was a booth on one side of the table and chairs on the other. Bill looked at me.
“This will be fine,” I said. My voice came out strangely high and gushy, as if I were enthusing over somebody’s baby pictures. Nervousness. I noticed that Bill waited for me to choose, chair or booth. Score another point for him. I chose the chair side. Easier not to have to struggle out of a booth if you have to run to the Ladies to throw up.
We sat down. Bill was looking at me rather intently, I thought. I tried to see beyond the wide mouth and doughy face to the person within.
“Nice view,” I offered. Our window looked nearly due south. Some thoughtful person had lettered the names of the office buildings outside on the glass. We were seated opposite 1100 MILAM. Beyond the little cluster of skyscrapers in the downtown core, Houston looked very flat. Well, it is flat, of course, relentlessly flat. There are few buildings more than two or three stories tall, but there are trees everywhere, particularly live oaks. Viewed from the Spindletop, Houston looked like a flat expanse of broccoli crowns stretching to the horizon, interrupted some miles away by the white mushroom cap of the Astrodome. Occasional pale apartment blocks bobbed above the broccoli, like lumps of tofu.
I closed my eyes and counted to ten while a wave of nausea subsided.
“I come here for luck,” Bill said.
“Pardon?”
“Spindletop. You know.”
“Oh. Right.” Spindletop was the name of the first East Texas gusher. “The oil partnership. How’s that coming?” I said, to be polite. Bill had gotten Friesen Investments heavily involved in some hideously risky oil speculations. Because I always wanted everyone to be more cautious, nobody in the office could tell when I thought something was risky and when I thought it was insane. Bill’s oil deal verged on the insane.
“I know you think it’s a risky investment, but you do have to admit that our first well was a bonanza. It wasn’t ‘just a fluke,’ as you said.”
In my new capacity as potential encouraging soul mate, I nodded understandingly. “I’m sure it just looked that way from the outside. I know you went over the geologicals very carefully.”
Bill looked at me, surprised. “You do? I mean, yes, I did.”
I wondered if a sip of ice water would settle my stomach. It didn’t.
“When my father was a young man, he built this company on oilfield exploration.”
“When your father was a young man, he had my mother guessing which land to buy and which wells to drill,” I said. “You don’t have her. You have me. I don’t dowse for oil. I read stock quotations. I research companies. I estimate risks and calculate buy-out costs. Not as glamorous, but it’s what I do.” With a really commendable burst of willpower, I manufactured a fetching smile, one part sly humor, one part self-deprecation. The effort made my eyes water.
Bill’s tongue peeked out from between his lips, slid furtively around his mouth, and then pulled back into hiding. The inner man, I told myself. Concentrate on the inner man.
(Momma is watching me do the dishes. Technically she is drying, but in fact she’s smoking a cigarette and propounding her theories of marriage. “The trick to keeping a husband,” she says, “is to let him understand that you know, and tolerate, and in a goofy way even love, the little flaws and imperfections that would shame and humiliate him if anybody else were ever to discover them.”)
“Ah. Yes. Look, Ms. Beauchamp—”
“We’ve known one another since we were in diapers, Bill.” Still holding that smile like a pearl diver holds her breath. “Outside the office, Toni would be fine.”
“Um, okay.” Bill Jr. leaned forward over the table, his shoulders hunched, brow furrowed in an expression of Serious Intent. “Well, Toni, you’re probably wondering why I asked you here today. The truth is—”
I shrieked. Bill jumped back as if he’d been shot, bumping the table hard with his large knees. Ice water slopped from our glasses and ran briskly over Bill’s side of the table onto his lap.
“Omigod, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize—” I grabbed the cloth napkin from my plate and dabbed at the spilled water on
his side of the table.
“No problem.”
“It’s just, oh damn, I’m sorry—” My pregnancy-enhanced sense of smell picked up the oily, dirty-pipe odor of Houston tap water.
“That’s fine, I can mop up over here.”
“The restaurant…I just realized the restaurant is moving,” I said weakly, sinking back into my seat. I bit my lip, hard. “It’s a revolving restaurant.”
“Of course. Didn’t you know?”
“A restaurant that goes around and around.” My stomach was whirling majestically around the hub of the Hyatt Regency. The next set of letters on the glass crawled toward me, informing me that the green skyscraper hoving into view was the Enron Building. “No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“My dad used to bring me here when I was little. I thought it was neat.” Bill put his sopping napkin back on his salad plate. “It’s funny how what you notice changes. When I was a kid, I always used to look for the Astrodome, especially when we came here for lunch and I knew the Astros were playing a day game. When I got older, in business school, I started connecting the skyscrapers to the businesses inside. There’s Tenneco. There’s the Allen complex. There’s the Pennzoil Building.” He looked out the window. “You know, I don’t pay much attention to the buildings anymore. Now I see the trees. I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels, in America and Europe too, and there’s not another city in the world for trees like Houston. No town on earth looks so green from above. We take that for granted. Now I often find myself thinking, if for some reason everyone were to leave, there was a neutron bomb or something, I think the trees and the swamp would be over this city in a second. The Hyatt here, the other skyscrapers, they’d stick up out of the jungle like mysterious ruins in an old Tarzan movie.”