Tales From A Broad

by Fran Lebowitz

‘Come on, Frank, please! What are you doing? Please!’

  ‘I think we came in this way, don’t you?’ he asks Otto, pointing in a different direction.

  ‘Yeah, but this is the way back to your kids,’ Otto answers in a real normal voice.

  I crash through the doors and hug and kiss my children. Sadie is giggling madly.

  ‘We saw you screaming, Mommy. Daddy was laughing the whole time behind you.’

  There are still no cars in the lot when we get out. I open my side. There is a horrible stench in the car – rotting, sewagy, definitely not old milk or stale crackers. The kids won’t get in. We roll the windows down but it barely helps.

  We get back to our hotel and Frank and I sit outside on the balcony. I tell him about how truly petrified I was. ‘I mean, all the great things we could have done today – together – the pearl diving, the rubber tapping, the waterfall, the gibbons, the kids would have loved the gibbons. All the things Thailand is known for …’

  He flicks his lighter. ‘Oh well, that’s not all it’s known for.’ He pulls on a big fat joint and we look out over Relax Bay.

  We’re all knackered the next day so we hang at the beach and the pool and wait for Jumper. I say goodbye to Mel and Bernie and the girls.

  They’re on their way east, to Thmptst. Frank and I decide to get a babysitter for our last night. We’ll go to a restaurant the concierge recommends in Patong after doing a bit of barhopping. Bar-hopping is not wandering. It is structured. It’s not about finding the perfect place, it’s about hitting them all. The car smells worse and I didn’t believe that possible. We check between the seats and under the car mats and find nothing.

  After we’ve hit the Rock Hard, Alice, Moonshine Joint and Tequila, we arrive at a cabaret.

  ‘Hey, that seems like fun. Let’s go in.’

  ‘But what about your five-star, five-course …’

  ‘Oh, come on, let’s just check it out.’ We walk in and sit down at a small, round cocktail table near the stage. I feel good, buzzed, happy to be with Frank and, to be honest, happy that we’re going home. After four days on the other side of the looking glass, I will relish straight old Singapore. Phuket is a beautiful place, but it casts a very strange spell – surrounded by sea but living on burgers, men dressed as women, Rittmans addressed as Markses. I can’t even think about what might have happened without Mel … Hux drowning, Sadie choking. Sea lice? Deadly razor burn? The psycho house … but nothing – nothing – can prepare me for what happens next.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our show is about to begin.’

  The waitress gets our last order before the show. In a few moments, all is quiet in the room – except for a quick, loud sniff. And then a guttural hawking, followed by productive hacking, a couple of snorts and a loud hoot. The footlights come on. We see six ladies dressed in red sequins. They are swaying, Motown style, humming softly.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the wonderful …’

  Two spotlights converge on a man who has taken his place between the ‘girls’. He is wearing a green, crushed-velvet dinner jacket. His hair is slicked to the side, he has topaz-coloured glasses and a moustache. He sings the first words to a Chinese heartbreak song. The audience begins excited applause …

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I present … The Sensational Sebastian Gok and the Go-Gos …’

  ‘Think lovely thoughts … Think lovely thoughts …’ I start the chant. Sadie joins in: ‘Think lovely thoughts … think lovely thoughts …’

  ‘Singapore!’ I say.

  ‘Transextypes,’ Sadie says.

  ‘Dino-Park!’ Huxley says.

  ‘The corporate, non-transferable discount we received for being the Markses!’ Frank suddenly joins in.

  ‘My new ring!’ I say.

  ‘The starfish!’ Sadie says.

  ‘The starfish?’ Frank and I look at each other.

  ‘Yeah, the one we put in the trunk of the car.’

  The smell – a dead, real starfish.

  ‘Jumper!’ says Huxley.

  ‘The Go-Gos!’ I say.

  ‘A happy ending.’ Frank and I clink our fifth or sixth glass of champagne.

  Simon and Melanie are bringing their kids over to avoid Pearl’s holiday mark-up. Their daughter, Natalie, is a tawny-skinned girl with dark, soft curls and wide-set almond eyes. She is Sadie’s age. Charlie, pink-skinned and bald, is barely any age at all. They are supposed to come at eight, then we’ll get the little ones set up with Posie before shooting out. My bed is wearing the contents of my closet. Nothing seems right for New Year’s. New Year’s won’t even be New Year’s without my leather pants. They make me dance, make me want to stay up late. They even tell a good joke. They speak to me with their last vestiges of animal spirit. But it’s so hot here I’ll never make it out alive if I wear them. And while I want to be buried in my leather pants, I do not feel ready to go yet. Ah well, the Daisy Duke shorts will have to do – they make me yodel, swig beer and kick butt. Getting dressed for New Year’s, to me, is like picking out the best stuffed animal to sleep with, the right song to have sex to, the right topping on your pizza. You have to be in touch with your mood-goals.

  I blow out my hair real big and am generous with my make-up. The tiny faces of Sadie and Huxley, watching everything I do, get a make-over too. Frank hates that I let Huxley wear lipstick, but he also hates that I paint Huxley’s fingernails. (I never told Frank that I taught Sadie how to put cream on Huxley’s penis after his bris. He would think it had something to do with Huxley’s unflagging fidelity to Sadie.) Anyway, I would rather see Huxley dolled up than left out. Huxley doesn’t think it’s perverse to acknowledge his feminine side. I unpack from Phuket, and finally relinquish the bedroom.

  ‘Frank, it’s all yours. They’ll be here in five minutes.’

  I pop in a video for the kids and wait and pouf my hair a little more. I make myself a gin and tonic. By 8.30, I am still waiting for them, and Frank. I’m looking forward to seeing Frank in what I strongly suggested he wear (suggestion being to lay it out on the bed): a black Jacquard silk shirt, black slacks and his signature cowboy boots.

  Back in the days when Frank first started flirting with me, he didn’t make too much of an impression until I noticed his boots. And how he’d walk in those boots. I met him at my first job in New York. He was on the cc list of every memo I had to type. My guess, from typing his name several times a day, was that he was an esteemed person of advanced years. So when my girlfriend, another secretary in the subsidiary rights department at M Publishing, introduced me to him, I was surprised by his youth and standing. We were all headed into a meeting. I was to write down everything that was said, and there was that tacit understanding that there would, of course, be no quotes attributable to myself in my notepad. That was just one reason no one laughed when I asked if the book title Sniglets was pig Latin for ‘little Negro’. Another reason no one laughed was because Sniglets was a sacred cash cow. Mostly, though, they didn’t get it and they never laughed anyway. But Frank did. He even riffed on Sniglet and Margaret Mitchell, using two cash cows in one irreverent joke. Everyone else was dead silent, looking at the dipshit Shelley Sherstein, the head (giver) of the department. She was the one who clicked by on stiletto heels and Heather-Locklear-circa-Melrose outfits. She was the one who snapped my bra while I was typing a memo, probably just at the FSR, Esq. part, and said, ‘None of my girls will have their bra straps showing.’

  Thereafter, from time to time, Frank would stop by and sit catty-corner to me. Like the day he came down wearing a walkman and just sat there. I finally acknowledged him when I finished typing the 29 names on the bcc part of the memo that I had to get out to fifty bazillion people along with ten pages of photocopying each that I hadn’t done yet. I was a bit frazzled since it was nearly 5.30. He slouched into a chair, all full of nonchalance, which I knew was really ‘damn I like watching you’, and said nothing. I said nothing. I kept on madly typing. ‘I am pleased to enc
lose the excerpt from Fruiti de Lane by Natalie Plattau.’ (Whose last book, Over There, sold 75 copies – the exact number of her close friends and relatives – and was about her three years as an expatriate.) ‘This is Ms Plattau’s diary from her two years spent studying roadkill from around the world. Be sure to catch it in next month’s Uncommon Pets magazine.’ I had a few more lines to type and all the copying and stapling to do, but FSR Esq. started talking.

  ‘Do you like music?’ he asked.

  ‘No. And I don’t like colours either,’ I said.

  He laughed.

  ‘See you later. You look busy,’ he said. I looked up to make amends just as he was leaving. I would have put my head back down to the typewriter, but I couldn’t help noticing his gait. It was eons slower than a New Yorker’s. It was by degrees more casual. It was easy and fluid, unhurried, cool, unflappable. The cowboy boots were doing their thang, scraping across the floor, transporting FSR Esq. into his saddle again. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Though there was nothing nearly acceptable, sartorially speaking, above the boots, there was promise. We could do something with that rancher’s bod – long, thin, elegant and broad-shouldered. Indeed we could. He loped away to the elevator. I put everything down and ran after him. We went to a bar. I got fired and five years later we were married but I’ll not digress on all of that because at least 75 of you – the exact number of my close friends and relatives – already know all about the courtship of Fran and Frank.

  Okay, Frank will be a little warm in these clothes tonight but he doesn’t dance like I do – crazy, frenetically. I always thought I was a good dancer until the damn video camera made a point of proving that I am actually spastically jangling to a meter even the Chipmunks can’t achieve. It’s like everyone around me is hearing something different to what I am. It’s like I’m furiously applauding instead of clapping to the beat … so fast my hands could turn into butter. Maybe Frank moves at the speed of light so it just looks like he’s standing still, leaning against the wall.

  Before I can finish my thesis about attire and why a caged hamster married Brer Tortoise, Simon and Melanie arrive. Melanie has the same dark skin, black lustrous curls and wide-set, violet eyes as her daughter. Her father was Scottish and her mother Maori, traits visible in her colouring and high warrior brow. Her mouth is expressive, her lips shapely but thin. She has a heart tattoo on her wrist and has an artsy demeanour, wearing flowing caftans and gauzy shirts that look very sexy on her. If I didn’t appreciate her, understand her like I do, I might think she was dishevelled and her clothes frowzy. She has a good, impulsive, explosive laugh. But, if I didn’t know her, appreciate her like I do, I might sometimes wonder what the hell she’s laughing about. It could be something from yesterday, it could be the part about ‘Your table is ready’ or ‘Is this your son’s cup?’ It doesn’t take much. She’s that easily tickled. And, well, it does come with the territory, you know, being creative and all, but some might say she’s completely unstable.

  Simon is British, but was raised all over the world, left in boarding schools and often sent to live with relatives while his parents researched … things. He has peach hair and light skin – in fact, he’s pretty darned monochromatic all over. Indeed, at first glance, he’s featureless, but if you squint and catch him in a shadowy overhead light, you can see that there is a nose, a mouth and eyes – they’re just reticent, very British, very reserved. He shows signs of genius – intensity, wit, impulsiveness. I just wish I could understand the half of what he is saying. His voice is low, his accent is thick, he uses a few big words I don’t know, and he’s usually pissed as a potter by the time I see him. Simon and Melanie are in Singapore for only a short while and we hope that means what it usually does – three more years – but Melanie hates living here for some reason. Some people just do. I thought she liked it when I saw her sleeping under the stars a few weeks ago. You can’t do that everywhere, enjoy a slumber in the great outdoors. Turned out she was too tired to make it all the way home and thought she’d just lie near the fish pond and her unfinished vodka and rest her eyes for a minute. It wasn’t her fault that the sun was up before she was. Simon had a bit more stamina. He made it as far as the grocery store steps. Pearl was babysitting so it was okay.

  Simon and Melanie are famous for their fights. They make me and Frank look like mourning doves, but that’s just because we usually get on each other’s nerves when there aren’t others distracting us, like at home, in the car, on vacation, in elevators, etc. To Simon and Melanie, the world is their home, their car, their elevator, and that’s all there is to it. Whether it’s camping down with the fishes or shouting ‘I’ll fucking kill you! You fucking piece of shit …’ over the seesaw at the colourful playground, they are honest, wear their hearts on their sleeves, and are down-to-earth and full of life. There’s no one better I can think of to ring in the New Year with.

  We’ll be going to Sam and Valerie’s party later. The big scandal is that Brenda decided to have a dinner party even though she knew about the Markses’ party. Yes, can you believe? She even managed to bag a few seminal couples, enticing them with her idea of having an elegant New Year’s Eve with a candlelit midnight dinner and fancy dress. It was predetermined who would go to Brenda’s and who to Valerie’s by the established bonds of friendship. The groups overlap, but if forced to choose allegiances, they will find themselves in different camps. Brenda’s minions are more expatty, more Town & Country, know all the right restaurants, clubs, trips and schools. Valerie’s group knows a lot about where you can sneak in wine and duck the corkage.

  Frank is not ready so the three of us have a drink on the balcony. In fact, his delay is bringing us dangerously close to still being here when Sadie and Natalie come down, as they inevitably will, in costume to put on an entirely ad-libbed show that has no end. It’s the performance version of ‘The Song That Gets On Everybody’s Nerves’. Here comes the whispering, the giggling. I hear Sadie back-kick Huxley into the wall, ‘No, Huxley, you’re not in this part!’ They goof their way through a few minutes, only to be interrupted by a thunderous booming upstairs. ‘I can’t fucking find it!’ It’s just Frank banging around looking for something. Frank’s always losing things.

  ‘Out of the way, Huxley,’ Frank says harshly. ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with you. Fran, do you have any idea where my leather satchel is? I have all my cards in it. I can’t go out.’

  ‘Come on, we’ll just take cash. We’re only going for a drink and then to the party. Frank, watch the show, I’ll get money from the coffee can.’ I go to the kitchen and take it down but it’s empty. Shoot.

  ‘All right, let’s just take out cash from the machine,’ I suggest. ‘Carry on without us, won’t you girls. Oh, Sadie, don’t cry. It’s a great show; practise for tomorrow.’

  We leave and go to the ATM, but it spits my card back.

  ‘This is just my luck. The machine isn’t giving any more tonight.’

  We head to a wine bar I’ve spotted to try for some tapas and champagne before going to Sam and Valerie’s. When we’re at the street, Melanie stops and flails her hand.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask her.

  ‘Hailing a cab,’ she answers.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  ‘How else can we get there?’

  ‘Melanie, it’s three blocks away.’

  ‘Yeah. Here’s one.’

  It passes us, lighting up its ‘for hire’ sign.

  Not many more come by and after 15 minutes we use a cell phone and go through the whole Comfort Cablinks thing.

  ‘Is this 9-082-4 …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Going to Bayshore, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you are 9-082-4 …’

  ‘Yes. I’m going to –’

  ‘Leaving from lobby J?’

  ‘No, actually –’

  ‘You have moved from lobby J, is it?’

  ‘No, I’m standing on the street!’


  ‘Is this Mrs Flank?’

  Finally, it is understood where I am and where I’m going and before I hang up, the taxi is there.

  The driver has to travel two miles in the wrong direction just to get to a spot where he can make a u-turn. He turns and doubles back, and when we get across the street from the very spot where he just picked us up, he makes a right, passes a school, a shop and stops. We’re there. It wasn’t even three blocks from where we stood, a five-minute walk.

  The place is empty. I’m not sure why because it’s really quite nice. There’s a long, smooth bar and a couple of pool tables, votive candles and dark walls, oriental rugs and tables all along the periphery, with sofas and cushions. Maybe the crowds come later. We go to sit at one of the plush tables.

  ‘Ah, sorry lah, that one is reserved, you see.’ The waitress indicates the paper tent on the table that says ‘reserved’.

  I notice that all the good seats are ‘reserved’. Only the plain tables scattered in the middle – the type that wobble when you put your elbows on them, as you sit hunched up in your cold, hard chair – are not. I don’t want to be seated in the centre of a big, empty room in an uninspired metal chair, apologising for tipping the table, whilst staring at the good seats.

  ‘Look, there’s no one in here. We’re just going to be about an hour, or less even,’ I say.

  ‘We reserve these tables for our members,’ the waitress answers.

  ‘Members? What’s that?’

  ‘It’s $500 a year.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And $500 the next year.’

  ‘Okay, but what is a membership?’

  ‘You get to have the reserved seats.’

  ‘Yeah?’ we all ask.

  ‘And, you get a bottle of your choice of whiskey, vodka or gin when you join,’ she explains.

  ‘Doesn’t that take business away, you know, if everyone gets a bottle of liquor to take home?’ Simon asks.

  ‘Oh, we keep it here behind the bar.’

  ‘So you can charge for the mixers,’ Melanie whispers to us.