“Oh thank god,” she said and tossed her jacket in the back. She threw herself in beside me, slipped off her shoes, and dropped them on the floor with her purse. Her phone rang right away from somewhere deep in the folds of her suit jacket. She ignored it. But when it rang again she fished it out, turned it off, and tossed it back. I said something like, “Does somebody need to make an emergency withdrawal from the bank, or something . . .” But I saw her distraction and let it go. She pushed her shirt cuffs up past her elbows and sat with her hands behind her head, half-moon sweat stains under her arms. I had been listening to Billie Holiday, weighing the idea of trying a new number on the casino crowd — say, “Fine and Mellow,” or “Summertime,” what with the heat wave holding. She reached over as I pulled away from the curb, edged the volume up a notch, then sat back and watched “our good old horrible” pass by, her cheek flickering on and off under the row of streetlights.
When we got to Havenhurst I noticed the Caddy parked in its usual spot. I pulled in beside it, turned off the ignition, and we sat there listening to the music, her bare feet on the dash, head tipped back against the seat. The late hour meant it was early Sunday by then, but at least neither of us had to work that day. She asked how my night went, commented on my cheesy cufflinks, expressed amazement that I could sit down in that skirt, never mind play piano in it.
“That’s all I can do,” I told her. She smiled, ran her hands through her hair, and turned the volume down a notch.
“Well. Will you look at us,” she said. “Two hot babes with nowhere to go. How the hell do you even get in trouble in Buckthorn anymore?”
I laughed and suggested we drive around until we ran out of gas, like in the old days, and she said, “That fucking bastard.”
Her eyes were on the Eldorado the whole time. I thought maybe the car had broken down after all, and she had to fork out the cash to have the beast (okay, bastard) towed back to Havenhurst. She shook her head as if to say no, that’s not it, and whispered, “Scumbag.”
She yanked the door handle, got out, and started across the parking lot barefoot. I gathered up her shoes, purse, jacket and followed. Not a word all the way up in the elevator. She let us into the apartment and switched on the overhead light, the same kind of useless designer chandelier that barely lit the lobby. I dropped her stuff on the sofa and followed her down the hall to the bathroom. She left the door open, as usual, hiked up her skirt, sat down.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
“I’d tell you, but I’m not sure how much you can take.”
“All of it,” I said. Naive of me, as it turned out.
* * *
Of course I had wondered about the manager at the bank, that Don Aurbuck character, not to mention his tricky employment offer. I figured that’s what Honey meant when she referred to a “hotshot” job, nice car, pricy wardrobe.
It turned out she had a lot more going for her than that. She’d just turned twenty-one when her and Inez came in off the road, all those failed attempts to thrive in various small towns and assorted jobs behind them. A year after she accepted the job at the branch in Torrent she was driving Aurbuck’s Corvette, his MG, whatever fancy car she wanted (though not to work, he discouraged that — too flashy) and living in his condo next to the Four Seasons downtown. She was a quick study at the bank. Had a head for numbers; after all she’d been the Crescendo’s best (under the table) croupier at sixteen. That was fine, but Aurbuck made his real money in online trading and a few other things he had going on the side.
Dinners out every night, parties, holidays in hot places. Summers they drove up to Aurbuck’s old family cottage on Silk Lake. Three generations, he told her. Old money. Honey said it looked like a cottage from an old magazine. A mahogany motorboat with a catchy name scrawled on the stern in gold leaf and tethered to a dock with a hot tub at one end and a tiki bar with a grass roof at the other. A caretaker, a local guy from Port Union, the nearest town, lived in a cabin on the property all summer and fall — twenty acres so you never knew he was there until his services were needed. Whenever called upon he’d cast off, gun the massive inboard into a low, churning growl, and cruise guests to the luxurious (yet quaint) marina to buy cigars and wine and special order lobster and steaks for the barbecue, which Honey said was really a massive grill installed in an outdoor kitchen. Everything about Aurbuck implied he came from money and was making more of it.
“He might have had twenty-five years on me, but still he had his charms,” Honey said, “if you know what I mean.”
Of course I didn’t. Was she talking about the boat, the cottage, the trips? Or was it the sex: the things an older, experienced man might teach a beautiful young hick from Buckthorn? I didn’t ask for details. I tried not to look as if the only thing “threesome” meant to me was piano, cello, and violin, but she knew me well enough to know better, even with the six lost years figured in. It seemed the combination of money, sex, and drugs led to some wildly unorthodox nights. She said it was fortunate that she was high or stoned a good part of the time and couldn’t remember all the sordid details.
Two years into the relationship, just as she began to question why a guy rolling in dough would hang around a ho-hum bank from 8 to 4, even as manager of a main branch in a major city, she found out that his extracurricular activities weren’t exactly on the up and up. Pretty soon hers weren’t either. She turned out to be quite an asset.
“It’s just not that hard,” Honey said, “to rip off people’s bank accounts, especially retirees — older folks who can’t keep track of their prescriptions, never mind their savings and investments. Especially if they have complex portfolios, and maybe a dormant account or two. The position of trust: that’s your strong point. Play your cards right, and certain clients will eventually refuse to deal with anyone but you. If you own a top-notch cologne, one fitted cotton dress shirt in, say, buttermilk or biscotti, a tailored suit, two pairs of pearl earrings — one black, one white — and if you back it all up with a pair of heels so elegant they make a certain type of financial guy sick with envy, well — you’re halfway there without lifting a finger. More than halfway if you also have personality. But all the rest comes first. Don’t look at me that way, Nic. It’s not like I’m defending this bullshit way of the world. I know it’s not fair. I’m just saying that’s the way it is. And sometimes you’ve got to make the most of the way it fucking is.”
She also realized that Aurbuck’s interest in her during the meeting she and Inez sat through that first day hadn’t been a coincidence. He’d recognized her from a website.
“What kind of website?” I couldn’t imagine what it would be. She’d never been big on social media even back in our teen years — too much of what she called “stupid stuff” from guys.
“I don’t know how else to say this, so I’ll just come out with it.” She said that when things were at their worst with Inez she disguised herself as best she could — cut and dyed her hair — and did some online porn to pay bills; six months at most but long enough for Aurbuck to see and remember her.
“You might be surprised to know how many guys get off on a girl who’s made herself up to look like a young boy — I mean, except for the obvious — with smoky eyes and wearing a little too much Vamptastic Plum lipstick,” she said.
Might be surprised? I’m sure my heated-up face told her how right she was, and I couldn’t help wondering, while not really wanting to know, what exactly would be the “right” amount of plum lipstick for a woman who looks like an underage boy to wear? And what on Earth did this whole scenario lead to? And for how long? I sat there despising that Aurbuck pervert — and wondering what he saw.
We were sitting at a table with a cold teapot between us, her cup empty, mine full, now cold too. I felt her eyes taking me in, measuring my response to the news. I found myself thinking fondly of that flask of hers.
“I hope you’re not going to get
all cardigan sweater on me, Nic,” she said. I pretended not to know what she meant. She’d taken my silence as judgment. That wasn’t exactly true. I was surprised, sure. But mostly I was angry she hadn’t come to me back then, rather than get involved in desperate situations, and told her so.
“We were what — eighteen?” she said. “Your mother was all over you for ignoring your child prodigy when I left. Nobody had any fucking cash. And I was supposed to call you up out of nowhere, literally, and hit you up for a couple of hundred bucks so I wouldn’t have to flash my tits online?”
I reminded her that I could have offered support in other ways. “Everything’s about money with you,” I said and then felt awful, because I knew it wasn’t true. The circumstances were rotten, that’s all.
“Oh my god, Nic. I’ve done worse shit than flash my naughty bits, fake a little ecstasy, and talk dirty to a bunch of guys living in their mothers’ basements — or, more often, a hotshot rich guy behind closed doors at the bank. The so-called legit crowd in their skinny designer suits and patent loafers? Now, there I’ve pushed some boundaries. The fucking godawful stories I could tell you.”
She gathered up our cups, tossed them in the sink, then turned back and said, “And you’re wrong. It’s not all about money with me. I’m sorry to have to interrupt the Chopin Étude or whatever you’re living in, but I’m not the one who decided that every fucking thing in this world depends on cold, hard cash.”
“You probably mean a Bach fugue,” I said.
She stared at me for a beat or two. “I’ll bet you’re right,” she said.
She unzipped her skirt, stepped out of it, then disappeared into the bedroom. Over her shoulder she said, “Nevertheless, you’ve muffled yourself, let’s say, from certain aspects of the real world. Are you even listening to that Billie Holiday stuff you like so much? Ask her. She’ll tell you.”
I ignored that remark and hollered back, a little louder than planned, that I didn’t want to hear any of those awful stories she referred to.
“You might not have any choice,” she said as she came back, wearing an old T-shirt and shorts. She sat down at the table again, serious then, and sober. She confessed that Aurbuck had been calling her for days, that he wanted her back, but because he knew that was impossible he wanted his loan back instead. She said in his mind the loan comprised all the money he’d spent on her while they were together: the free rent, the clothes, the up-keep on her car, dinners, vacations, and on and on. Everything he could think of.
“He probably wants to be repaid for every tube of toothpaste and box of tampons. As if I didn’t overpay every single night I spent with him. It amazed me how he could transform on a dime into that loan manager my mother and I dealt with that day at the bank. I almost wish the damn gun had been loaded, then I wouldn’t have had to listen to him go on and on about the many ways he’d protect himself and expose me ‘for the depraved little slut’ I am if I should try to leave him. But then I’m the one who threw away my own conscience, stripped off my clothes, and handed him the evidence.”
“He called you what . . . ?”
“I’m sorry for having to talk such embarrassing shit. The man’s a triple-decker dirt sandwich, but it’s all my own fault. And not for one minute do I expect any sympathy from you, and in fact I would strongly reject it. Because I got myself into this whole jam all on my own, with one stupid compromising decision after the next.”
She described how she’d been sitting in Aurbuck’s office late one night, one of many, tapping away on the keyboard. This was close to three years into their relationship, both professional and personal, and at the height of the excess of it all — the many insane luxuries she’d spoken of earlier, and more. And yes, sex and drugs had been a big part of everything they did in their leisure time, just as bank fraud (why recoil from the truth at this point, she said) was part of their 8 to 4. She was working late that night, in the very office where she and Inez had sat the day they came in to beg for that loan, before her mother had pointed out they didn’t know a thing about begging.
She kept the lights low, just a desk lamp — which Aurbuck had insisted on so as not to draw attention. She said she knew that what she was going to say would sound nuts, but at one point she looked out at the parking lot, empty at that hour, just the cones of light shining down, and there was the Eldorado parked at the far end of the lot. She remembered thinking how fucking good it looked because she’d had some restoration done. It was miles better than the day she and Inez had first brought it home. The memory of that drive over to our place on Montague Street became so vivid it was painful to her, and stark, as though someone had taken a photograph of that moment, drained all the color, and handed it back to her.
“And I’m not gonna claim good old Mom appeared out of nowhere, you know, the fog cleared and there she was in all her unique, let’s say, splendor: the thrift-store scarves and crazy hair. It’s more that I felt her, you know, inside me. And her presence was so real I could hear all those damn bracelets jangling away. It didn’t take much to imagine her sitting there, blown away to find me on the other side of that manager’s desk fiddling with his computer. I felt her eyes pass over every inch of me, Nic. Her daughter all tricked out in a pink ruffled blouse — did you know you can pay well over a thousand bucks for a fucking shirt? — the gold watch, the boots, the designer jeans . . . the line of coke I’d just inhaled. And when she asked what the hell I was doing I said, ‘Well, Mother, I’m just now smack-dab in the middle of moving several hundred bucks out of some retiree’s trust account into another trickier account. And then I’ll do the same thing three or four more times, call it a night, instead of larceny, and go back to the fancy condo Gold Stud owns. You remember Hugo Boss? And then I’ll fulfill a few of his disgusting fantasies so that I can keep the ball rolling and never, ever have to go back to the Noblesse Oblige trailer park where you —’” she stopped, as if a sheet of glass had descended between us, and stared into my eyes, searching for some alternative to what she was about to say. But there wasn’t one.
“Where you shot yourself with that peace of crap pistol two days before I would have moved you into the sweetest overpriced bungalow in three hundred miles.”
She broke down then — we both did — like she had that last night at Aurbuck’s office. That’s when she backed out on him, didn’t even return to the fancy condo downtown for her things. Just walked across the parking lot, threw herself into the Eldorado, and started driving again.
“And all along the highway, mile after mile, I kept thinking about what a jerk I’d been and all the crap things I’d done and could never make right again. And how easy it was to be that way, you know, based on circumstance and your own crappy weaknesses. That’s the scary thing. I’d let this asshole into my world, and I’d joined him in his. But anyway, I drove all night and slept during the day, and I think it wasn’t until I crashed somewhere out west, some motel near the foothills with a mother of a T-Rex in the parking lot, that I started worrying about all the terrible shit he had on me, all this stuff I’d colluded in from bank fraud to — well, I’ll spare you the gory, but we got pretty wild. And he had records on all of it, one way or another. Yeah, he loved the bullshit girl from the website as much as I came to despise her.” She got up, went into the kitchen. I heard a drawer open and she came back with a cigarette. “Do you mind?” she said. “I’ll smoke it by the window.”
“Sit down,” I said. “It’s your apartment, after all.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean . . .”
“Sit down for god’s sake,” I said.
“I shouldn’t have told you.”
“You’re finally home, and then you’d refuse to talk to me? How does that make sense?”
When she tried to light the cigarette her hands shook, so I took it from her, lit it myself, and handed it back to her. “Maybe I’ll take up a few bad habits myself,” I said.
> “Don’t do it. They’re a bitch to break.”
“I mean it. It strikes me that I have shit-all to talk about.”
She started to say something, then changed her mind.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“There’s more, isn’t there?”
She drew on the cigarette and flicked it into an ashtray a few times. “It turns out he had a fiancée the whole time we were carrying on. I honestly didn’t know about her until later, but who cares? It’s not a moral victory because I missed one form of cheating among all the others. And would I have cared if I’d known? There’s always a moment, one little beat, when you have the chance to sign on to all the self-serving crap, or say fuck right off. The scary thing is I can’t even remember that moment anymore. I’m not sure if those sorts of choices aren’t lost to me for good. It’s like maybe I’ve damaged something, corrupted some kind of mechanism in myself, and now it’s out of my hands. Do you know what I mean?”
“You’re a clock with a broken spring, is that it? Because no, I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”
“Good. Keep not knowing.”
“No, I mean I don’t think things work that way.”
“Well, maybe his fiancée ditched a part of herself too. Because when she found out about me, she lost something — that’s for sure. And if he’d been able to control himself I might never have known about her. As it was, his need to rage on about what she’d done exceeded his desire for subterfuge, I guess you could say.”
“Well?” I’d gone from wanting to hear nothing whatsoever to insisting on hearing it all.
“Alright. Fasten your seatbelt: me and my man,” here she rolled her eyes and stifled a forced yawn, “headed up to the Silk Lake cottage that last weekend in August. We usually drove up in the Roadster, or the Corvette, but this time he wanted the MG up there too, so he could store it with the boat for the winter. He had two or three cars up there, all fussed over by the guy who took care of ‘the estate.’ By the way, did you know you can buy a brassiere for a car? I never saw a man more excited to snap on a bra. It took him forever. So anyway, I drove the MG, and he the Roadster, which was fine with me because I loathed getting trapped in a car with him. The man could turn a heavenly stretch of highway into a washboard nightmare. And his taste in music! Jesus. It was like pushing a shopping cart down the aisle of an S&M department store. My head was always pounding by the time we arrived at the cottage, or wherever — so I guess you can’t say it wasn’t effective. Anyway, about halfway there I caught up with him, hogging the middle lane as always. And I noticed that some of the drivers passing him on the right were slowing and craning their necks. So I eased up beside him. And that’s when I saw . . . the reason.”
Honey Page 7