Addled

by JoeAnn Hart

  She sat back on her heels and listened to the electronic squawk of feedback as Gene continued to sputter away at the podium. She lit a match, and when she held the small flame to the crumpled paper, Ellen Bruner’s name jumped off the page at her. Madeline somberly reflected on the lawyer’s stupefied, and faintly amused, face as it had appeared behind the bars the night before. She wondered what would have happened if Ellen hadn’t showed up when she did. Would Madeline and Scott have worked out some sexual arrangement that would have kept him chaste for his girlfriend while still having his sport with her?

  She shook her head. It was already over by the time Ellen appeared. Never mind sex without love, what Scott wanted was sex without sex. She couldn’t even have a proper affair. She couldn’t do anything right. Until now.

  Ellen’s papers flared up along with Madeline’s heart. She needed more. She could rip a few pages from the book, but that didn’t seem right. The historic tome must be disposed of properly, set upon a pyre in its entirety.

  She retrieved her bag and rummaged through it. A credit card holder. Some mints. A wilted daisy. That was another thing she finally got right. She’d slept most of the day, too hungover and grief-stricken to get out of bed, but when she did, with her note from Charles in her grasp, she decided to leave the house better than when she found it. She went out to the roadsides and the golf course (where she cleaned up the best she could her daughter’s abandoned campsite) and gathered armfuls of wildflowers, ferns, ivies, branches, and vines. A bird’s nest. Some feathers. She filled the rooms with arrangements, for once not caring about using just the right vase for the material or the perfect blooms or even the correct combinations. She put the flowers together in abundance, mixing forms and colors in the largest containers she could get her hands on, her stockpots. The result was magnificent, and she wondered why she hadn’t been able to accomplish such beauty before.

  At the bottom of her bag she found her spiral-bound book on flower arranging, filled with her own cramped notes. She tore out the pages, filling the hearth with a bright heat, lighting up the impassive deities on the marble columns, making them look alive. She reached into her pocket and took out Charles’s note and added that to the fire as well. The paper caught easily, and it rose up the flue as it burned. She waited for the kindling to fully engage, then lifted the book with both hands. If she wanted to know anything about the past, including Charles’s, now was the time.

  But that would be giving the book too much credence. There was no way of knowing if the entries were true, and even if they were, what did it matter? What-ever generations of Club women had or had not done, she was worse. They might have lied, cheated, fornicated, and committed bestiality for all she knew, but she was the one who had kept their secrets. She had not just gone along with the game—she had enforced the rules.

  From down the hall, she heard heels on marble, then the sound of Beryl Hall’s raspy voice followed by Linzee Gibbons’s manly guffaw. Madeline tensed, but the women kept on going, past the library door to the powder room. The members were beginning to sneak away from the oppression of Gene’s words, and soon they’d be galloping from the tent in a thundering of hooves. She dropped the book gently on the fire and blew it a kiss.

  The draft was strong; the wind was picking up. The edges of the pages began to brown and curl as the book turned in on itself; then the binding began to smolder, the leather reeking like scorched skin. The book slowly opened from the heat, and Madeline caught glimpses of names and dates as the pages flipped through the years, going backward in time, roasting with shame. She had redeemed herself and freed all the women of the Club, even if they never knew how weighted with shackles they were. Even if those shackles were made of gold.

  There was a sharp knock on the door, but she didn’t even flinch. Not yet. There was something else. She walked to the broken grandfather clock, both hands covering the VI, as in an act of modesty. She opened the clock’s face, checked her watch, and set the brass hands to IX, an expansive gesture, with one hand pointing ahead and the other in the air—Olé—forever fixing this moment in time. The Club, sentimental about things that no longer even worked, would never get the clock repaired. What-ever pain or happiness the next few years would bring, she wanted to be able to think back to this room and this hour, when she had moved the Club just a little bit forward.

  The knocking became frantic, and a familiar, imperious voice shouted her demands. “Who’s in there? Open this door.”

  Arietta. Madeline had known that when smoke rose from the chimney, Arietta would smell it from the tent and come hobbling. No one but she had ever lit a fire in the summer. No one but she and Madeline.

  She let the knocking escalate to cane-rapping before unlatching the door and opening it wide. She stepped back so the first thing Arietta would see was the burning book, and its flames lit her up like an ancestral portrait. She was dressed in a dark blue satin gown such as Mamie Eisenhower might have worn, so thickly taffetaed it could have stood on its own. Strapless, it revealed a wide expanse of translucent skin stretched over her collarbone. Black opera gloves bagged at her elbows, and the tiara in her hair had fallen slightly askew. She slammed her hand on the wall switch, washing the room in a sick amber light. It was then that Arietta saw Madeline behind the door, and a terrible look of understanding swept across her powdered face. Raising her cane, she rustled to the fireplace, stopping short of the flames. But it was too late. Too, too late. She had to pull her dress away from the falling cinders of the book.

  Clutching at her satin, she spoke in a dead, even tone. “Madeline Lambert. What have you done?”

  Madeline closed the door and leaned against it, scratching her back on the heraldic carving. “I’ve saved us from ourselves.”

  Arietta struggled to speak, but her red lipstick had turned black and pasty on her lips, sealing her mouth shut.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Madeline asked.

  Arietta swirled on her. “You should be ashamed.”

  “Me? What about you?” Madeline pointed her finger, but withdrew it, afraid Arietta might snap it off. “Controlling and intimidating the women just so the men can screw around without worrying about the consequences.”

  “It takes two to screw, as you so crudely put it.” Arietta gave her a penetrating stare. “And as you well know.”

  Madeline looked away. Damn that Ellen Bruner. She softened her voice. “The book might have served some purpose once, Arietta, but no more. It’s time to let the chips of love fall where they may.”

  Arietta wrinkled her face. “This is no romance novel, Madeline. This is life, and there is nothing wrong with tidying it up a bit.”

  “Tidying is different from cleansing.”

  Arietta turned her head without moving her neck, like a parrot. “Maybe there is some reason why you have such a craving for a clean slate.”

  Madeline blushed but would not defend herself. Besides, any defense of her virtue would be a mere technicality. She pulled a stiff chair over from the table and set it near the hearth, in Arietta’s spot. “Sit down. You don’t look well.”

  Arietta took the seat with an elderly sigh, her spine leaning heavily against the back of the chair. She looked like she could crumple with a touch, and Madeline felt wholly responsible. She hadn’t realized how connected she was to her, how they had shared a bond that was now nothing but ashes in the grate.

  “We had such order,” Arietta said at last. “Everyone could sleep at night knowing that someone was keeping an eye on the big picture.”

  “Who could sleep?” Madeline inched closer. “The women had to cough up their sex lives every time they got pregnant. Let’s let the Ellen Bruners of the world keep track of paternity from now on. Let them unearth the truth with legal argument and science, let them make it a product of the law. I don’t want any part of it, this. . .institutionalized lying.”

  Arietta smiled wryly. “Sometimes only a lie can protect the truth.” She gurgled a laugh and squinted at Ma
deline. “And don’t make that face. You’ll look your age. Remind me, how old is that?”

  “Forty-four.”

  “Yes, still within the range of childbearing. Is that why the sudden need to dispose of the book? Worried you might have to cough something up yourself? A hairball?”

  “If you must know, I’m leaving Charles and I’m leaving the Club.” Madeline pointed to the smoking hearth. “I just wanted to do one decent thing before I left, something to make up for all the pain I’ve caused.”

  Arietta pulled herself to a standing position and raised her cane. Madeline backed up, but Arietta only used it to point at the globe. “Go then, Madeline. And I hope you will discover the dark truth: The world is a chaotic and violent place, and you will have no control over it. It will have control over you. The Club is a defense against that world, and once you find yourself outside its walls, cold, hungry, and alone, you will understand what I mean. But it will be too late. There is no coming back for people like you, who have no respect for the past. Who do not understand its meaning.”

  “I understand all too well.” Madeline knew that much of the color would drain from her world once she no longer had a group around her to uphold the illusion that life was sweet, and they were its cherished guests. But that was the price she had to pay for freedom.

  Arietta shrugged, and her skin, thin and yellow as parchment, looked like it might tear with the effort. She probed among the scorched fragments with her cane. “It was only ink and paper, after all.” She turned to Madeline and tapped her white-haired temple with her finger, making the tiara slip a bit more. “It’s still here. The women of the Club will carry on. They always have and they always will.”

  Arietta grabbed her gown by its neckline and yanked it up, then turned to leave in a crinkling of fabric and tapping of cane. Madeline walked her to the door, where Arietta held out her hand. “Since we cannot have agreement, then let us at least have good manners.”

  “Wait.” Madeline reached in her pocket. “Here, take this.” She pressed the brass key into Arietta’s lined palm and closed her fingers over it. She pointed to the open cabinet. “Lock up before you go.”

  Arietta parted her lips, but Madeline put her finger to her mouth at the sound of foot traffic in the hall. All normal exits were closed to Madeline now, so she headed for the casement window. When she opened the screen, moths that had been clinging to the rusty mesh, yearning for the light, rushed past her toward the Tiffany fixture over the table, beating their wings against the hot bulb before falling to their deaths. Madeline tried not to project. She threw one leg over the sill and then the other, but before lowering herself to the ground, she looked up at Arietta still standing at the door, a single tear carving a path through her face powder. Madeline threw her a kiss, then lowered herself to the ground, landing with a thump on her own two sneakered feet. It was time to go see Charles, for what would certainly be their last meeting outside of a lawyer’s office.

  Chapter Forty

  Making the Cup

  GRIPPING A WHISK, Vita wandered out to the garden with a copper bowl cradled in one arm and sat defeated upon the stone bench. If nothing else, it was cool outside, and dark, so the staff couldn’t see her bitter tears. Leaves rustled in the trees, but here, behind the brick walls, it was calm and quiet, so unlike the stainless-steel dungeon where she had slaved all night, ignored by the big man upstairs to whom, in her heart, she had dedicated her efforts. Even now she continued to labor for him, making a whipped cream substitute from egg whites, sugar, cream of tartar, and vanilla. Tears fell into the cream, and she beat them in with a vengeance.

  It was not long before the egg whites frothed and gained volume, and she tipped the bowl to see if the cream was peaking. The light was indirect, coming from the club-house windows behind her. She turned to see members wandering the halls, cast in single dimensions, like shadow puppets. Where was the beautifully upholstered silhouette of Dr. Nicastro?

  The iron gate creaked on its hinges, and she sighed and went back to her cream. She’d hoped all the employees would be too busy right now to take a cigarette break, that she might have a moment alone with her grief. But there was no privacy for anyone at the Club, and besides, as her mother so often pointed out to her, she had plenty of opportunity for solitude in her empty bed. As a dedicated servant in the temple of art, she had no life.

  “Vita?”

  She stopped whisking.

  “Dr. Nicastro?” In this light she could only make out his teeth, glowing in the dark, and his dimpled chin, glistening with goose. She hesitantly raised her hand so he could see where she was, then used it to wipe her eyes. A thin mist crept along the ground as the cool night air met the warm grass, and Dr. Nicastro stepped out of it like some massive ancestral primate standing erect for the very first time, heading toward civilization, toward her. Even though his bow tie hung at loose ends and his pleated shirt was unbuttoned to the top of his hairy chest, he cut a magnificent figure in his dinner jacket.

  Frank, even before he called Vita’s name, had seen her from across the neglected garden, shimmering in her kitchen whites. Angelita della cucina. But he could have found this angel of the kitchen by following his nose, tracking her fragrance, like a truffle: earthy, exotic, complex, and complete. He approached the stone bench as solemnly as an altar. “Vita.” Nicastro knelt down on one knee before her. “I am undone by dinner.”

  She turned her head to hide her raspberry eyes. Not to mention her look of triumph! She did not want him to think her smug. “All in a day’s work,” she said, giving the cream a petulant turn of the whisk.

  His generous mound of a nose trembled, and he pointed to the bowl. “What is that?”

  “A special order for dessert. Jordan is sending the plates up now. You’d better go back to your table.”

  He adjusted his weight on his knee. “No, this is the perfect ending to such a meal. To be here with its creator.”

  Blood rose to her cheeks, and she looked down at her bowl. “You’ve missed a lot of meals.”

  He put his hand on her thigh. “I’ll never miss another.”

  Vita, shocked and pleased, looked directly at him. “Don’t kneel there,” she said irritably. She moved over a few inches. “Here. Sit.”

  Frank smiled and stood with a groan, holding his stomach, against which his cummerbund was sorely tested. When he arranged his buttocks snugly next to Vita’s, the stone bench sank an inch into the earth.

  “It was all a terrible misunderstanding, Vita.”

  “Was it something I cooked?” She turned her attention back to the cream, pretending indifference.

  He turned to look at the windows behind them. “It was this place. I was fed gossip, and it almost killed me. It almost killed us.”

  She stopped stirring. “Are we an us?”

  “We could be an us, if you can forgive me.” He leaned closer, and she could feel the animal heat of his body. “It’s not just your food I hunger for.”

  Before Vita could control herself to speak, she saw his nostrils widen, then quiver.

  “Do I smell smoke?” he asked.

  “Smoke!” Vita stood in a panic, holding the bowl under her arm like a football, ready to run. Fat fires often erupted in the kitchen ventilation ducts on busy nights, easily controlled, but only if she was there to keep order.

  “It’s not a kitchen fire.” Frank pulled her down next to him again. “Look. It’s coming from one of the chimneys.”

  Vita waved at the air. “It’s putrid.”

  Frank breathed in deeply, increasing the pressure on the few mother-of-pearl buttons still attached to his tuxedo shirt. “Strange,” he said. “It smells like burning leather. Or skin. It’s a little early in the night for human sacrifice, even for the Club.”

  Vita laughed against her will. “Dr. Nicastro, that’s terrible.”

  “Call me Frank.” He nestled closer to her, and she did not object. “What’s terrible is that I believed the most horrible things a
bout you.” He shook his head at his own foolishness. “Phoebe Lambert had told her mother. . .”

  Vita stood up again, this time not so careful of the whipped egg whites. Frank reached up to keep the bowl from spilling, but Vita snatched it from him. “Phoebe told her what?”

  Dr. Nicastro rested his head in his two large hands. “She thought you were fencing stolen goods.”

  Vita put her hand to her mouth. It was bad enough Phoebe had accused her of stealing to her face, but it never occurred to her that she was spreading it around. Vita could have lost her job. She’d almost lost Frank. “And you believed her? After all the food I’ve served you?”

  He looked up at her, his black eyes damp. “What reasonable man would have thought you’d be raising a flock of geese for the banquet?”

  Vita smiled. “Who told you that? I’ll go to jail if Fish and Game finds out.”

  “The evidence is gone now.” He belched like a bullfrog. “But look, you were hiding something and acting suspiciously because of it. You should have just told me what you were up to. Didn’t you trust me?” He beseeched her with his hands, and after a moment’s consideration, she sat down, letting one of his arms, a bulwark of flesh packed in black twill, surround her shoulders.

  “I only wanted to surprise you,” she said. “Who knew you’d believe anything that came from someone who lives on soy wastes.”

  “I was weak. You had me on that low-fat diet.” He pulled her closer to him. “My mind wasn’t working right.”

  She wanted to melt into his body, to be folded into his flesh, to live on his bones with him and share his expansive stomach. Unfortunately, much of that stomach would have to go. He’d gained back all the weight she’d lost for him earlier in the summer and then some. She could not continue to feed him if she could not keep him alive.