The Reading Lessons

by Carole Lanham

  Lucinda then reminded him that she was not his wife.

  The fourth memory came to pass a little later, when he was supposed to be getting dressed. Rather than pulling on his pants, he bent Lucinda over the footboard of the bed.

  “Jesus, Hadley. I’ve never been so contorted in all my days. Aren’t you getting tired?”

  Hadley was whipped to the very bone. Still, he would be happy to kill himself, if she’d allow it, in just this way. “I don’t want it to end, Lucinda,” he said. Even though his legs wanted to fold up like a stick of gum, he would have made love to Lucinda all day, if only he could have gotten away with it.

  It was afterward when Lucinda told him that Dickie had but one position in bed—half-drunk on top of her.

  Hadley began to burn with rage. He hammered his fist on the nightstand hard enough to topple a lamp. “He’s wasting you!” Hadley said. “If you were mine, I’d love you so well, I swear to God, I’d give you anything.”

  Lucinda ran her hand over her dress, brushing her bruises with her palm. “You’re a real surprise to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Dickie is a man of experience. You’ve only had books.”

  Hadley stood the lamp back up. “Well, I’m a fast learner.”

  Lucinda combed her fingers through her hair. “Yes, you are. You always have been.”

  “Anyway, you drank my blood. Remember?”

  “That’s different though.” She fixed his collar like a regular wife and rubbed her thumb over the bumps of his scar. “Isn’t it?”

  A hot delicious pain bubbled up inside his veins. “Yes. And no.”

  “Do you still think about that, Hadley?” She touched her tongue to the place and gave it a quick lick.

  “All the time.”

  “And last night? Will you think about last night like you think about me drinking your blood?”

  “I don’t guess I’ll think about anything else ever again,” Hadley said.

  And it was true. Those four memories followed him more closely than his shadow.

  ###

  The following Saturday, Dickie threw a party for Lucinda’s eighteenth birthday. The theme was rubies, and everything had to be red. Dickie gave out ten dollar bills to anyone who could come up with a good red idea. All told, the red ideas cost him two hundred bucks, but Dickie proclaimed the results well worth it. Red Christmas lights draped the beams in the Fireside Room like a big jeweled necklace. Ruby-colored gallicas were brought in from Landcaster, and ruby-colored tapers were stood up in ruby-colored candlesticks on ruby-colored tablecloths under ruby-colored lanterns. The gallicas were Hadley’s red idea.

  In keeping with the theme, the food was a smorgasbord of cranberry gelatin, rosy iced pudding, lobsters, salmon, and slabs of rare steak. Sparkle punch was stirred up in a big crystal bowl. Strawberries were held up to a jeweler’s loop and inspected for redness before being permitted on a tray. The whole banquet blazed like a police siren.

  Lucinda was not normally fond of the Fireside Room. With its stone walls, walk-in fireplace, and deer-carved beams, the place had the tendency to make her sneeze. “It’s too log-cabiny for my taste,” she said once. Indeed, the Fireside Room was a man’s room. It was also the biggest room in the house. As such, the transformation from leather and taxidermy had to be thorough.

  On the morning of the party, a pair of black Fords pulled up in the alley behind the house, courtesy of Dick Worther-Holmes. Four pock-faced lugs in overcoats piled crates of cordials, gin, and Vine-Glo in the hall. Bars were set up around the foyer and in the buffet room. The household staff was divvied into groups of waiters and bartenders. Hadley was assigned to the latter and made to practice his skills by mixing Old Fashioneds for Dickie all afternoon.

  At seven o’clock, Harlan Angel and the Mississippi Boys were set up by the piano playing cocktail music. Dickie greeted their guests in a white flannel suite with a Chesterfield bobbing between his lips and Old Fashioned number six in hand. Lucinda wore a red dress that made Hadley want to bite through his fist.

  Ever since he’d spent the night with her, his nerves had been hopelessly shot. If Dickie so much as passed Lucinda the butter, Hadley’s spine went stiff. Maybe it looked like he was fixing a wiggly chair leg, but he was watching them, waiting for their fingertips to brush, or one of their eyes to wink, or their lips to curve with a secret smile. Lurking under car bumpers or behind hedge clippers, Hadley observed every move they made. If Dickie kissed Lucinda, his blood boiled. If Lucinda kissed Dickie, he died.

  Mama didn’t like the looks of Dickie’s ears. Movie star ears, she called them. “Movie star ears might look glamorous,” Mama said, “but they hide a violent nature.” Villainous ears, was more like it. Dickie used his advantages like he used a rifle, and his aim was dead on. It was hard to compete with a man with good ears. Sometimes it didn’t feel fair. Dickie could dance like George Raft and grow a real mustache like it was nothing. His clothes were always pressed. His skin was one set color. And he had money coming out the wazoo. Worst of all, Dickie Worther-Holmes was the sorry cheater who’d come between Hadley and Lucinda, never mind that he was her husband. Hadley saw her first. And so, when Dickie winked at Lucinda one morning over the top of the newspaper, it was all Hadley could do not to plunge his screwdriver into Dickie’s movie star ear.

  The party only multiplied his suffering by one hundred. All evening long, Hadley watched as Lucinda kissed every man in the room but him. His heart began to hurt so bad, he ducked down behind the bar and had his first-ever shot of bathtub gin. Ten seconds later, he ducked down again and threw up his first-ever shot of bathtub gin in the wastepaper basket. He’d barely rinsed the taste from his mouth when the orchestra began playing Cuban Moon. Dickie took Lucinda by the hand and twirled her under the ruby lights. Everyone clapped.

  Hadley gave himself strict orders not to look. He wiped up the bar. He watched closely as Babe Butternut retrieved a silver flask that had been lashed around the top of her leg with a necktie. When it was offered, he accepted a drink despite the fact that his stomach was still turning summersaults.

  “How is it?” she asked.

  “Hot,” Hadley said.

  And then he looked.

  Lucinda was doing the Twinkle Hesitation with Dickie.

  ###

  He spent the rest of the evening mixing up sloppy concoctions that brought about instantaneous sputtering and quailing from anyone remotely sober. As luck would have it, few people were sober. By two in the morning, the only ones with their eyes still open were Hadley and Babe Butternut, who was thumbing through a deck of cards at the end of the bar and smoking her fiftieth cheroot of the night. Even the ever-efficient Tilly sat with her forehead dropped on a dirty red tablecloth, snoring like a door buzzer.

  Dickie and a handful of stumbling idiots had wandered out to the front lawn to try out the unicycle with the big red bow that Lucinda got from her Jolly 17 club. The rest of the bartenders and waiters got to go to bed, but Hadley was to stand by and make Stingers for anyone who survived the cycling, and Tilly might be needed to whip up a sandwich or two.

  Hadley tried to concentrate on cleaning up spills while he waited for the endless evening to end, but his mind kept returning to that moment when Lucinda ran her hand down Dickie’s backside while they danced the Twinkle Hesitation. Scrubbing at something sticky under a stool, he pictured Dickie’s fat head pinned under his mop and set out to mop his way down to China. The only speck of joy he’d felt all night long was the joy he felt when he imagined that Dickie’s heart was the lime he cut into little green triangles and gave away piece by piece on the rims of Rum Rickys.

  While Hadley mopped and moped, Babe Butternut ground out her stogie in the ashtray he’d just wiped clean and muttered, “Love stinks.”

  Honestly, Hadley couldn’t imagine what a woman like Babe Butternut could possibly have to complain about. He’d noticed her kissing Mr. Houston, from the bank in the middle of the dance floor shortly after the
Twinkle Hesitation, and they’d looked fabulously happy together. Then, not an hour later, he’d spotted her behind the hatcheck with her arms around Dickie’s Sicilian brother-in-law. They too made for quite an ecstatic pair. And a half hour ago, she’d been smooching it up with that newspaper woman with the big dark red lips. Poppy LaRue. Stinky or not, Hadley didn’t know how anyone could ask for more love in one evening than that. Nevertheless, Babe Butternut folded her arms on top of the bar and said, “You look like a man who could use a distraction.”

  Even though Babe Butternut didn’t seem like a choosey soul, he felt unaccountably important. It was rare to come across a rich white woman who would drink after a colored fellow from the same flask. A silver flask with her initials on it, no less.

  She smiled crookedly and shuffled her cards. “Have you ever had your future told?”

  “Once, when I was five or six. My auntie had a gazing ball, but she said there were too many things still in question for her to say how I’d turn out.”

  “Well you’re grown up now, aren’t you? How about I give you a free reading?”

  Hadley was tired and still suffering a strong urge to scrub things into oblivion, but she tapped the deck of cards on the bar and said, “I’m especially proficient when it comes to the ways of love.”

  Hadley didn’t doubt this. “What sort of cards are those?”

  “Fortune cards.” She began to lay them out. He’d seen a deck or two in his time but none this nice. Miss Butternut’s cards had gold edges, and the backs were printed with sphinxes and serpents and lotus blossoms.

  “See here,” she said. “I’ve put the Life card in the middle and the others around it, like so.” She made a rectangle shape of them and added two cards on each side, facing the outer ones the opposite way. “The cards closest to the Life card are the most powerful,” she explained. “The secondary cards are minor influences and each card influences two cards from the inner square. Card seventeen is tied into cards fifteen and sixteen . . . ”

  Hadley yawned. He’d hoped this might prove interesting. There was really only one thing he wished to know: “Do I end up with the one I love or not?”

  Babe Butternut pursed her lips in a way that looked riciculously naughty and consulted the deck. Hadley consulted the deck too. There were words written across the top of each card, and he started reading them to himself.

  The first one said: A SECRET WISH HAS BEEN GRANTED THAT LIES CLOSE TO YOUR HEART. Indeed, thought Hadley. But what comes next?

  A LOVEABLE, UPRIGHT WOMAN the second card informed him. Upright? He skipped to the next one, hoping to see something that made some amount of sense.

  NEWS RECEIVED AT NIGHT. Could mean anything.

  A YOUNG GIRL IS VERY JEALOUS OF YOU. Hadley looked around the place as if he might spot her. Tilly snorted in her sleep and nearly fell off her chair.

  BAD HABITS DIE HARD.

  Was this some sort of joke?

  AN UNSELFISH ACT OF LOVE COULD LEAD TO UNEXPECTED JOY IN THE MIDST OF YOUR PAIN IF YOU ARE WISE ENOUGH TO SEE IT.

  Babe Butternut’s gaze flicked pensively from card to card. She touched the last one.

  THE COURSE IS SET.

  Hadley brought his fist down on a slice of lime. “Well?”

  She looked at him with her famous cereal box eyes. “These cards are warning of danger.”

  “What sort of danger?” Hadley said.

  “Deception,” she whispered. She tapped on the card that mentioned bad habits.. “Lopsided love.”

  Hadley smiled uneasily. It was just a game, after all. The love he shared with Lucinda was certainly dangerous but lopsided? Anyone who heard the way she said his name when he touched her would understand the depth of what was between them.

  “I see desperation,” Babe Butternut said. “And lies. And a potential for violence.” She began to gather up her cards. The unselfish act went back in the red box, followed by the jealous young girl. “I’m sorry, Crump, but my fortune cards are right more times than they’re wrong. You want my opinion? Get out before it comes to spilt blood.”

  The door to the Fireside Room burst open, and Dickie staggered up to the bar holding his gashed head. “I need some ice,” he hollared. “And get me a Stinger on the double. I’m bleeding like a tomato.”

  Hadley and Babe Butternut looked down at the last card just as Dickie dripped on it. BAD HABITS DIE HARD. “Keep it,” she said. “I don’t want it anymore.”

  ###

  The day after the party, Hadley was given the job of driving Lucinda over to Browning House for a private birthday celebration with her father.

  “We need to talk,” he told her when she climbed in the backseat. There were octagons engraved in his forehead from sleeping on the bathroom floor. “I can’t stand this anymore.”

  Lucinda produced a clean piece of purple stationary from her handbag and began writing out birthday thank-you’s on her lap. “What do you think, Hadley? Does peridot get a capitol p? Or a baby one?”

  Hadley didn’t know peridots from parakeets. “Are you listening to me? I’m about to completely snap, Lucinda.”

  “I know, dear. I want it, too. Now pipe down, would you? I need to finish my notes.”

  Hadley had spent most of the night planning out what he wanted to say. “I can’t pipe down . . . ”

  “Shh!”

  “Something has got to give . . . ”

  “Well, that’s just swell!” Lucinda said, glaring at him in the rear view mirror. “I just wrote dangly earring twice. Could you please hush up until I’m done with this? I’ll be happy to listen to every little thing you want to say when I finish up my notes. I want you to hand deliver them for me this afternoon, and I have an even fifty to write.”

  “When will you be done?”

  “Next year unless you shut up.” She wadded up her paper and threw it at his head and started over again.

  Hadley squeezed the wheel so hard, he about popped the stitches on his driving gloves. With Lucinda, it was always later. Later, after we read Dracula again. Or later, after I’m married. Or later, after Dickie goes out of town. It felt like he was always waiting for Lucinda to finish up with something that was more important.

  Earlier, he’d put the ball of his foot down on a cellar spider and smashed it to a gluey pulp. Usually, he had an over-abundance of sympathy for all little creatures and would gently transport even the teeniest of specks out to the garden to be set free. But not today. Today, nothing went free.

  Over brunch, Mr. Browning gave his daughter an Eisenberg dress clip of Austrian rhinestones and the seal-skin flapper coat she’d been eyeing in the window at Warson’s Department Store. While the two of them polished off mimosas, ham and eggs, and a chocolate vinegar cake in the Rosebud Parlor, Hadley was free to visit his mother. Somehow, though, he got distracted on the way to the kitchen.

  It had been months since he’d set foot in Browning House, and it seemed certain that someone had moved all the doorknobs down an inch or two and made the ceilings lower. And when did the ceiling in the entry begin to crack? Nothing shone the way it used to. Hadley felt surprisingly sad. He put one hand on his stomach and swallowed hard. The pungent smell of the old-fashioned gaslights was making him queasy. I’ve grown spoilt he thought. This is a fine old house and I’ve become too good for it.

  Before his feet had chance to inform his brain what they were doing, he found himself in the place that had once been like a chapel to him, the Log Cabin Room. Here, at least, things felt familiar. It didn’t matter where he looked or even if he closed his eyes. In the center of the room, wearing a bright blue bow and tap shoes, a twelve year old version of Lucinda was dancing the Aunt Jemima Slide on the coffee table while young Hadley clapped his head off. The sound of clapping hands echoed still. Under the felling axe, on the far wall, thirteen year old Lucinda was elbowing Hadley and daring him to stick his head in the stove—which he did—while Lucinda clapped her head off. And by the window, a fifteen year old Lucinda parted
the dark curtains and extracted a loose eyelash from his fifteen year old cheek. “Make a wish and blow.”

  Hadley ran his fingertip along the dull blade of Parnell T. Browning’s dirty felling axe as he listened to phantom sneezes, tapping tap shoes, and the clack of one marble striking another. Lucinda was on the pillows, behind the drapes, and in the whorls of the grapevine carpet. She was tickling his ribs and tussling his hair and scooping up his loose eyelashes. NEVER FORGET WHERE YOU COME FROM the sign over the ax reminded him.

  “Hadley?” Lucinda said. At first he thought it was just another memory speaking to him from the past, but the voice proved real. “What’s going on? You look like you’re losing your marbles.”

  His finger trembled on the axe. He’d slept in his trousers and there was a playing card in his pocket with Dickie’s blood smeared on it. “I want to kill him, Lucinda.”

  “You wouldn’t hurt nobody. That’s just crazy talk.”

  He shook his head. “That dance,” he said. “How could you do it with him?”

  “He’s my husband, dear. If you’ll recall, I do a lot of things with him. You’re just lucky it wasn’t worse. In case you didn’t notice, Dickie was fried to the hat last night.”

  “But you don’t love him, so why dance with him that way? I’m sure you bug his eyes just plenty being an accommodating wife every night.”

  All morning, he’d been trying to squeeze that red dress out of his mind. It clung like dumped ketchup to the inside of his skull.

  “Who says I don’t love Dickie?”

  He waved the thought away. “You spent the night with me while he was out of town. I know why you married him.”

  She crossed her arms. “Why did I marry him?”

  “Because your father wanted you to.”

  “Hadley honey, you ought to know by now that I don’t do anything I don’t want to do.” She closed the door and stepped into the Log Cabin Room, sneezing three times like in the good old days. “I love Dickie just fine. You know as well as I do that he’s a good man so stop all this nonsense about killing him.”