by Warren Adler
"Oh, yes. I had made this commitment..."
"Are you still ... committed?"
"Actually, no. Not anymore."
She was emphatic, which surprised him. As if she was glad that this commitment was over.
"Well, then..." Sam said. "There shouldn't be any reason why you can't come on over and finish the job. I'm ... I'm about to go on my walk. I can wait if..." For some reason he was stumbling. He cleared his throat. Now, why did he mention that?
"Well, I..."
"If you decided against it, then that's all right, too. I'd just like to have the matter settled."
"Yes. I imagine you would."
"Well, then..."
He heard her suck in a deep breath.
"It doesn't have to be today. I just would like to know something definitive. If you're not going to do it, then perhaps I should get someone else."
"I ... I don't know what to say."
"Perhaps you can call me back later. Or, if you decide that you want to start again, then ... just show up when you can. If I'm out on my walk, Carmen will be there. In any event, call me before the day is out so I know where I stand. Okay, Grace?"
"Okay, Sam..."
He sensed her hesitation. More like an awkwardness, which was the way he actually felt.
Then he heard the click of the phone as she hung up. It left him confused.
CHAPTER TWELVE
At first she thought he had called to tell her that he had found out about Anne's clothes. She had lived in dread of that phone call. How could she possibly explain the truth about what had happened? If he discovered the truth she would not have the courage to face him.
Jackie had, despite her prohibition, given the clothes to one of those new, upscale secondhand stores in North Miami. Grace had waited all day for her to return, and when Jackie had finally come back in the afternoon and admitted the circumstances of the transaction she had gone through the roof.
She was too ashamed to call Sam. Of course she would have liked to join him for a swim and a walk on the beach, and to continue the "project" of disposing of Anne's clothes. Obviously he enjoyed her company, which had encouraged her. Now this! Instead she spent the day staring at the door, simmering with anger, waiting for Jackie to return.
She heard a car come to a stop outside their apartment door. Then she heard the key turn in the lock and Jackie came in, smiling and excited
"The lady flipped over them," Jackie said, as if the confrontation of the night before had never taken place.
Grace came closer and slapped her daughter across the face.
"How dare you?" she cried, feeling instant remorse when she saw the outline of her fingers on her daughter's cheek. But Jackie stood her ground, unflinching.
"I dare. So what?" Jackie said, rubbing her cheek. "That hurt, Mom."
"You left me no choice," Grace said, the fires inside of her banking. She had slapped her daughter before, but usually on the posterior. This was the first time she had ever slapped her across her face, and it bothered her.
"Feel better now?" Jackie muttered.
"I feel like shit," Grace said. "Is there no controlling you? And since when do you take my car without permission?"
"How the hell was I going to move the clothes?"
"You had no right."
"Dead people have no right either."
"I made it perfectly clear what I intended to do with those clothes. You disobeyed me."
"You should be glad I did," Jackie said. "They flipped over the clothes. Absolutely flipped."
"You're evading the issue here."
Grace felt totally impotent. Worse, she felt that she had broken a pact with Sam Goodwin. It had been the only shred of integrity that she could hang on to. Everything else concerning her strange relationship with Sam had been a tissue of lies. How could she possibly face him now?
"They wanted to know the source, so I made up some story about their being yours and because of certain problems you needed cash, and they paid up immediately."
She held up a pile of twenties and started to count them out on the Formica counter.
"I don't believe this," Grace said.
"Five hundred dollars," Jackie said. "Mom, I was right. These clothes are valuable. The lady wanted to know where I could get more. She said that she could turn this stuff over in a minute. That's why she paid up in advance. Just as I told you."
Grace felt sick to her stomach.
"How could you do this, Jackie?" she asked.
"How? Easy. And you were going to give them away to charity. Mom, charity begins at home. We need it here."
She smiled at her mother and kissed her on both cheeks, then told her to hold out her palm, which she did. Jackie picked up the pile of bills and put them in Grace's palm. Grace looked at the money, then flung it across the room.
"Are you crazy, Mom?" Jackie shouted.
"I gave my word," Grace said, shuddering.
"Who to?"
Grace shook her head in despair.
"The point is that you had no right to do this. In fact, I forbade it. There's a principle here."
"What principle is that, Mom?" Jackie said, defiant, hands on her hips.
Again she felt the sting of her own hypocrisy. It was better, she decided, to drop the subject, drop the whole thing. Her instincts told her it would end in disaster.
She watched as her daughter knelt on the floor and began to pick up the twenties. Seeing her do this made Grace think of herself. Stooping for dollars. That was exactly what she was doing with Sam Goodwin.
Moment of truth, she told herself. Destiny was sending another message. She declared the Goodwin venture over.
Instead, she had decided, she would seriously pursue a job, a real job. There were plenty of stores in the area who could use a good cosmetician who knew makeup. Get real, Jackie had said. She was right. Reality demanded that she get a job and support herself and her daughter. Mrs. Burns had sent her on a wild journey for which she was not equipped. She wasn't tough enough, smart enough, duplicitous enough.
"Where are you going, Mom?" Jackie asked when she came out of the bedroom dressed in her secondhand designer blouse-and-skirt outfit.
"To get a job," she said, taking the car keys from the Formica counter where Jackie had left them.
"What shall I do with the money?"
"Keep it, Jackie. It's yours."
"Come on, Mom, don't play with me."
"I'm not. Besides, you don't play by the rules."
"M-o-m."
"See you, little girl."
It was midafternoon, still time to look for a job. By now Sam would be very confused by her nonappearance. She shrugged it off. Get real, she thought again. You, too, Sam. Don't be so vulnerable a target for any little hustler come off the street looking for your bucks.
Again destiny intruded, and she got a job at the first place she applied. It was a swank beauty parlor two blocks north of Worth Avenue. She simply walked in the door, asked for the owner and made her pitch. Funny, she thought, how determination and singleness of purpose drowns your shyness. Like with Sam. She had better push that little caper out of her mind, she thought in tough-guy talk.
She introduced herself and outlined her experience with cosmetics to the owner, a glossy lady named Mary, dressed in a pink jumper.
"Just the person I'm looking for," Mary said. "We're putting in a line of our own cosmetics. We need someone to sell it for us."
"Right up my alley," Grace said, overjoyed, more convinced than ever that destiny wanted her to take this turn.
"Maybe you got a following from Saks you can bring in here," Mary said.
"I can try," she said hopefully, doubting the prospect and adding, "I haven't signed a noncompete with Saks."
She was hired on the spot, only the catch was that she was to get commissions only and no advance. She looked over the product line. The products were named for the owner, Mary Jones.
"Not very original, but it's my real na
me, what can I tell you?" the woman said. "It's pretty good stuff."
Grace looked over the line and tested the products on herself. They were inferior to what she sold at Saks, although in this business, marketing and illusion were the watchwords, not necessarily quality.
"Good stuff, huh?" Mary Jones said. "You look like a million."
"Great," Grace acknowledged, wondering if there would ever come a time in her life when she could call it as it was and not suffer the consequences. She doubted it.
The first day on the job she sold four-hundred-dollars' worth of cosmetics and made sixty dollars. Grace calculated that she might gross about twenty-five to thirty thousand a year, although there were no health insurance benefits, which meant she would have to pay for that herself.
It was back to the working poor again, although it seemed a pleasant place to work, with Mary Jones making a gossipy running commentary on her customers. She had bought the business from a woman who had founded the shop forty years earlier. As a consequence, most of her clientele were connected with the old rich elite of Palm Beach.
Mary herself specialized in doing the hair of the older women, who insisted that their styles be done in the fashions of another era. But there were plenty of younger customers: daughters, granddaughters, mistresses of the moneyed members of the posh Everglades Club, which still maintained the antiquated restrictions of the old WASP culture.
"They think they piss blue and shit gold," Mary Jones whispered as she finished the hair of a woman whose last name was a national product. "And they still tip in small change." She held out her palm, showing two quarters. "So I just figure in twenty percent."
After her third day, Grace felt more relaxed about Sam Goodwin. So far there hadn't been any repercussions about the clothes, and Sam had probably found someone else to get rid of Anne's wardrobe, probably the woman with the bun.
But she did have mixed feelings about what might have been her missed opportunity, although she dismissed the entire venture as an act of foolishness. In her mind she called it her ghoulish period. Sam, she knew, would eventually stop grieving for his beloved Anne and would begin dating the available women introduced by her friends, upscale ladies with similar credentials.
Thinking about this gave her an odd sensation. She wasn't sure whether it was resentment or jealousy.
On the fourth day a youngish woman came into the shop wearing tight black tights and a man's shirt with the tails out. Under it she wore a T-shirt two sizes too small, which displayed the awesome outline of a pair of mammoth breasts.
"Silicone before it was banned," Mary whispered. It was still early, and the older customers hadn't shown up yet. Only one younger woman was having her hair done.
"I'm free, free at last," the woman announced as she sat in the chair, where another operator, Maggie, a Japanese girl, worked. A squeal of well-wishing came from the customers and operators.
"That's Millicent Farmer," Mary whispered to Grace. "Married to George Farmer, former chairman of the board of General Marathon."
"Ten mil, ladies," Millicent Farmer said, crossing her legs and smiling broadly. "I broke his prenup. Got me a mean ball cutter for a lawyer. Held the blade to the scrotum and nailed the bastard to the wall. I'm here for the works, girls—hands, face, hair. Send me out in the world to look for new fish to fry."
"You're something, Mrs. Farmer," Maggie said as the operators moved their equipment into place around the loquacious woman. Grace figured her for about forty, with a well-tended face and body. Mary whispered her own running commentary.
"She's had a tuck here, there and everywhere."
"Ten million," Maggie squealed. "Fantastic."
"I put in three years with that alky. That figures out at three million, three hundred odd thousand a year. Not bad for a kid from West Virginia whose old man made moonshine and who never even graduated high school."
"Hell," the woman who was having her hair done in an adjacent chair said, "I've got a masters in psychology and all I could get was a dentist."
"Come on, Barb," Mary Jones said. "Tell it like it is. He's a dental surgeon who does implants in Palm Beach, the land of the implants."
"That's what old Georgo needed, only not his teeth."
The women screamed with laughter.
"Tell you the secret, ladies," Millicent said. She really loved the attention. She looked around the shop, as if to be sure there wasn't anyone around who might be offended by what she had to say. Her eyes rested for a moment on Grace.
"That's Grace Sorentino. She's the makeup lady," Mary Jones said, vouching for Grace as a safe member of the group.
Millicent Farmer lowered her voice.
"Free advice for all you greedy pussies." Millicent laughed. "Find yourself a very rich, divorced golfing drunk. George Farmer, case in point. Distinguished career, captain of industry. Good looks, power, charisma. Living on his laurels. A golden parachutist who made a soft landing on the nineteenth hole of the Everglades Club."
"There are only eighteen, Mrs. Farmer," Maggie said.
"Ah, you're forgetting the watering hole. Think strategically, ladies. He's off to the club before the heat sets in. Eighteen holes, then three martinis, maybe four with his buddies for lunch. Then he comes back for a siesta. You're gone by then, doing your daily dozen, whatever turns you on. When the sun's over the yardarm, the bastard's up for a batch of homemade cocktails, then we're both out to cocktails and dinner. My job, ladies, lookin' good. Lookin' good. Always lookin' good. He sucks his bottle. You keep lookin' good. Day's end, he comes home for a little nightcap and stumbles off to beddy-bye."
"Who could keep up with that?" Maggie said.
"That's the point. Four, five glasses of Dom is all you need to get you through the day and night. He takes his snoot full to bed..." She lowered her voice. "...along with his limp dick. Doctor keeps him off Viagra. Too much booze for that. Besides, all you have to do is cuddle his face between your tits for a few minutes, make a few weird noises and he thinks he's made the earth vibrate for you, then he slips away into the drunken fog. That's half the secret, ladies. The other half is picking right." She tapped her temple. "Keep your eye out for the double dippers."
"Double dippers?" Maggie asked.
"Been through it. Knows the ropes. Number one is usually a twenty-year-old airhead he met in high school, the mother of his children, whose fucking is one note, the missionary position performed with frozen pelvis. No class. No social graces. He makes money and tosses her into the sewer. Number two is a cry for respectability. She's used to the upscale life. Country Club Connie. Has her regular foursome with the ladies, thinks her shit is perfume, works the charity circuit, never says fuck, likes to be on top in the dark, but really gets off on her finger in the tub."
Along with the others, Grace listened, spellbound.
"And now comes Miss West Virginia. Little me." She grabbed her breasts. "Big tits, brassy, barrel of laughs. All his buddies get a big kick out of her. Talks dirty. Keeps his mind on that thing he loves the most. Easy on the booze during the courtship, shows him a thing or two about working his libido and he thinks he's the star of the sheets. Hell, I could give classes on faking orgasms. It's all in the squeal and the body moves. You've got to keep your eye on the ring. Never let your eyes stray from the ring. It's the ring, dummy." She held her hand out, lifting the third finger of her left hand, where a huge rock embellished an engagement ring under which was a diamond-studded wedding ring. "Too valuable to take the fucker off. Forget this significant-other shit. Everything is in the expectation. Show him the best product you got. Make him think he's found Nirvana and that the best is yet to come."
Grace watched the faces of the other women as they listened, mesmerized and awestruck, to Millicent's story. She looked like royalty, a queen on her throne, being pampered, administered to by three women at once, smug and satisfied that she had bilked some poor bastard out of ten million dollars.
Once she got past the humor inherent in Millic
ent Farmer's narrative, she felt a wave of sadness sweep over her. In a number of ways, her story resonated with what had been going through Grace's mind when she went looking for her own Mr. Big Bucks. She tried to imagine what it would be like married to the drunken Mr. Farmer, a never-ending saga of fooling a very sad alcoholic basket case. Weren't there limits to what one did for money?
"But how did you manage to get out of the marriage, Mrs. Farmer?" Maggie asked. It was, Grace knew, the question on everybody's mind.
"Never go into a deal unless you've got an exit strategy. Suddenly Madame Sweetness and Light got to be Dame Big Bitch. By then you know which buttons to push. You also know he's hung up on his drunken lifestyle. It's a no-brainer to pick a fight with a drunk. We became incompatible. I began to sleep separately. No more nose-between-the-tits sex. But it was a symbol, you see. Hell, he was a fucking chairman of the board. Thousands kissed his fat butt. He fantasized that he was Mr. Swinging Dick. I took the swing out of it and got ten million to take a hike. Hell, it won't make a dent in his lifestyle, and ten minutes after I was gone the groupies started to gather."
"Did you ever tell him you loved him?" the woman doing her pedicure asked.
"Ten million times. Hell, the first words he heard in the morning and the last words he heard at night were 'I love you, Georgie.'"
"What would have happened if he had died?" the woman doing her nails asked.
"The prenup had it at two and a half mil. Old George wasn't better off dead, let me tell you. That's another reason why I bailed out while he was still kicking."
"Sounds like your marriage was like serving time," the woman having her hair done in the other chair said.
"Soft time, as the convicts say, in more ways than one." She enjoyed her joke and laughed uproariously.
"It should only happen to me," Maggie sighed. "The man I married is a driver for UPS."
"It's not for everyone, dear," Millicent Farmer said. "Be content. Your husband loves you."
"Loves me? If he loves me so much, why does he carry condoms around in his back pocket? I found them and confronted him."
"What did he say, Maggie?" the woman in the next chair asked.