Alice Fantastic

by Maggie Estep

  “The stuffed animal business is frustrating,” I said at one point, as we dug into our entrees, mine a pleasant risotto with yams, hers a seitan steak, “it’s all up to the buyers, and toy store buyers are a fickle bunch. I’ve done well, but not as well as I should.”

  “You’re doing perfectly,” Ava said.

  She was looking right into me, the blue eyes big and beautiful. I was beginning to simultaneously melt and tingle when she reached over and traced my cheek with her finger. I nearly passed out.

  She didn’t look the slightest bit abashed over the gesture, didn’t seem the slightest bit abashed over our obviously being on a date in a small town where surely everyone in the place knew who she was. No. Ava Larkin wasn’t an abashed type. I thought of her in the red catsuit she had worn in that Spike Jonze movie. I remembered that, at the time, I had thought Ava particularly stunning in her outrageous costume. I had admired her form and her ability as an actress even though I have always been a bit of a snob about actors, putting them into a pile with architects and lead singers in rock bands as pathological attention-getters. But she really wasn’t the woman in the red catsuit now. She was just a girl I was on a date with.

  We were sharing a crème brûlée when a lanky man with a shaved head skulked over to our table. I saw him coming before Ava did and, even though he was a nice-looking lanky man, I immediately assumed him to be some ne’er-do-well autograph seeker, some potential borderline stalker. I could feel myself frowning as he made eye contact with Ava. But she just beamed, jumped up, and threw her arms around him. “Josh,” she said, “where the hell have you been?”

  As the lanky Josh enfolded my date in his arms I felt a ridiculous and violent pang of jealousy.

  “I’ve been here,” Josh said, when the two finally drew apart. “Haven’t heard from you though, Little Miss.”

  He calls her Little Miss? I thought, nearly enraged.

  “Eloise, this is my friend Josh. Josh is an incredible guitar player.”

  Guitar player? I thought. She’s throwing me over for a guitar player?

  “Nice to meet you.” I forced myself to smile at Josh.

  Ava and Josh chatted for a good five minutes. They included me in their discussions of how late spring was and the new Nick Cave record and the first few months of the exhilarating new president’s tenure. As the conversation progressed, Ava and I continued on with sharing the crème brûlée and, at one point, I saw Josh look from the dessert to Ava to me and I could see a bulb lighting in his mind. I wondered if he hoped for a threesome. I know I didn’t.

  Eventually, Josh ambled back to the table where he’d been sitting with a guy with a nose ring. Ava insisted on paying our check and we rose to leave. We walked out into the brisk, starless night. A small, furtive-looking man was on the front patio of the restaurant huffing a cigarette.

  “Do you smoke?” Ava asked as we walked by the man.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “but not wholeheartedly. My sister does. Chimney.”

  “I smoke for little periods of time. Then my skin gets dry and old-looking and I quit and vow never to do it again.”

  As I considered the sheer impossibility of Ava Larkin’s luminous, pale skin ever looking dry or old, even should she live to the age of 108, I also considered what her lips might taste like.

  When we arrived at the car, Ava grabbed my arm. I wheeled around and practically lunged at her. Our mouths came together and our bodies touched. She tasted like crème brûlée. She put her hands on my ass. I put one on her hip and the other under her shirt, touching the tender skin of her stomach. She bit my lips lightly, then pulled back a little.

  “Since neither one of us is a man, we can fuck on the first date, right?” she said.

  I looked at her, tilting my head.

  “We can, but what’s our not being men have to do with it?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Because men lose interest the moment they’ve conquered, whereas women’s interest just increases after sex. It’s a biological thing.”

  “Oh, whatever you say. I’d walk off the edge of the world with you right now.”

  “I wouldn’t ask such things of you,” she said softly.

  I woke up to find a monster licking my face. Chico the pit bull. His massive pink tongue issuing forth from the massive pink mouth, an intimidating sight if I hadn’t completely trusted the beast.

  “Off me, animal,” I gently pushed him away.

  I was on the hard bed in Mom’s guest room and had fallen asleep around noon shortly after coming back from Ava’s. She and I hadn’t done a lot of sleeping. There had been kissing and biting and coming, there had been the lovely sight of her blond hair mixing with my dark brown hair on the pillow when I woke up, and then a long peaceful half hour as I lay there watching her sleep, on her back, large breasts like melting butter. She had very little pubic hair, just a tiny landing strip even more rigorously tended than my own. She probably had a personal waxer come over and remove every hair from her body. I always do a home job, heating wax in a double boiler on my stove, dripping the yellow goo of it everywhere, and sometimes doing a downright rotten job, slathering it on unevenly with the result of a dent in the symmetry of my own landing strip.

  Chico jumped off the bed and went to sniff through my backpack. I sat up and looked at my inner thighs where there were bruises. Ava’s appetite, as voracious as mine, had caused her to nearly draw blood with her love bites. I stared at the bite-shaped bruises, purple, a little blue, actual tooth marks in one of them.

  “Hellooooo,” I heard Mom come in downstairs.

  “I’m here, Mom,” I called out. I got off the bed, pulled my jeans on, and went out into the hall, Chico dancing at my side, excited that I was finally up.

  Chico bounded down the stairs ahead of me as the half dozen dogs who’d been out with my mother raced up to sniff and lick at me. Ira, the three-legged hound, jumped up on me, putting his one good leg on my stomach and looking up at me searchingly.

  “And where, pray tell, did you spend the night?” my mother asked.

  I had called her late at night, leaving a message that I’d be out and no to worry—but I hadn’t mentioned that I was shacking up with Ava Larkin.

  “At a friend’s.”

  “The Irish guy?”

  “No,” I said. It was a reasonable assumption on her part since the Irish guy, Gerard, was the only person I knew living in the area and he was, according to my mother, a dead ringer for Viggo Mortensen, who my mother thought one of the sexiest men to ever live.

  “Well, where were you, Elo?”

  I finally had my mother’s attention.

  “Ava Larkin’s.”

  “Ava’s? Why?” My mother looked thoroughly confused.

  “Just hanging out,” I shrugged.

  “Just hanging out all …” My mother stopped in mid-sentence when the lightbulb went off. “You mean you had sex with Ava Larkin?” She actually shrieked.

  “Yeah,” I shrugged again, like it was every day that I had sex with a female movie star.

  “I’m not really sure what shocks me more here,” Mom said, looking at me and blinking rapidly, “the gender of the person in question or how quickly you operate.”

  “I wasn’t operating!” I protested. “She asked me out.”

  “Since when do you like girls?”

  “I just like Ava. She’s gorgeous. She’s smart.”

  “She’s filthy rich and she’s my boss,” Mom said. She had put her left fist on her hip. Her eyes were bright and her big curly hair had, I swear, gotten bigger and curlier. She was verging on looking like Malcolm Gladwell.

  “I don’t think this will compromise your work situation. Anyway, she goes to Canada soon.”

  “But what about when you break up with her? She’ll fire me.”

  “Break up with her? It’s not like we’re an official item.”

  “Well, what are you?”

  “I dunno,” I shrugged yet again. I felt pretty shruggish.
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  “When will you find out?”

  “You want me to have a monogamy talk with a girl?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t know, Mom, I just fucked her last night, I have to digest it.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Heathens. You and your sister. Savages. Devil-spawn.”

  “That’s not polite, Mom. I feel very tenderly toward Ava.”

  “You’re about as tender as a bag of rocks.”

  “Isn’t the expression stupid as a bag of rocks?”

  “I didn’t know there was such an expression.”

  “Well, it’s not nice for you to compare your youngest daughter to a bag of rocks, Mom, you’re really getting mean in your dotage.”

  She laughed.

  I laughed.

  Chico let out a sharp, excited bark.

  6. ALICE

  “Look at this piece of shit!” Arthur jumped to his feet and waved his fist at the glass window overlooking the track. “Bum!” he screamed.

  Arthur had gone against his own contrarian grain and bet the odds on the Todd Pletcher—trained favorite. It was backfiring. The horse, a splashy bay colt with a white blaze, had broken alertly out of the gate, gone to the lead, and stayed there for six furlongs, only to start running backwards in the last eighth of a mile and managing, in the end, to beat just one horse, a 70–1 longshot.

  At the table next to ours sat three well-fed, wealthy-looking matrons in pantsuits. They were all staring at Arthur who was so inured to these sorts of shocked looks that he truly did not notice. I offered the matrons a smile of enormous wattage. They looked away.

  Arthur stormed from our table, presumably to go huff cigarettes on the back terrace. I considered joining him but I had weaned myself down to three cigarettes a day now that I was doing some yoga and had even started going back to the gym for kickboxing class where Pedro, the kickboxing coach, had smelled cigarettes on me one day and commented, “Alice, you’re a beautiful woman and you have some athletic potential, why you want to destroy yourself with cancer sticks is beyond me.”

  “I can’t help myself, Pedro,” I said, “it’s the unbearable lightness of being. It really gets me down.”

  This was lost on Pedro, who frowned then turned his attentions to another student.

  Arthur came back to the table. He was grimacing but had gotten over the initial shock of the bum horse losing.

  “Who do you think is gonna call you?” he asked irately, motioning at my phone which I’d been looking down at.

  “A friend.”

  “I thought the homicidal oaf broke up with you.”

  This was true. Just a few days after I’d met and kissed William, the dog rescuer in Central Park, Clayton had come home, flopped onto the couch, and announced it wasn’t working between us. I’d told him he could continue living with me. On the couch. And I’d tried not to think about the slight chest constriction I felt at that moment. It was probably just a heart arrhythmia.

  “Clayton did break up with me,” I confirmed for Arthur.

  “But you have a new victim.”

  “Possibly.”

  “And you’re waiting for him to call and fawn over you after you had your way with him all night long?”

  “I haven’t had my way with him.”

  “Ah. So you’re still in the delusional state, suspending disbelief. Telling yourself this time it will be different.”

  “You’re such a cheerful companion, Arthur.”

  “That’s what you love about me.” He glanced at the video monitor then started scribbling furiously in the margins of his Daily Racing Form. His big, tinted eyeglasses were sliding down to the edge of his nose and a vein on his forehead was throbbing like a gorged flower stem.

  “Arthur,” I said.

  “What?” He didn’t look up.

  “I have to go.”

  “Go where?” He still didn’t look up.

  “Home.”

  “Why?”

  Now I had his attention.

  “I’m bored and cold.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I don’t mean by you. I just can’t focus.”

  “You still coasting off that Pick 4 last week?”

  I hadn’t even told Arthur when I’d hit an insanely lucrative Pick 4 a week earlier, on a day when he had been having particularly rotten luck.

  “Yeah,” I said tentatively.

  He nodded.

  “All right then. Off with you.” He waved a hand at me. “I’ll go find George to tell my troubles to.”

  George, Arthur’s much-abused friend, is an antisocial antiques dealer slash gambler who Arthur has known for years. George is one of those hangdog types, perpetually prowling the track, preferring lurking to sitting down. When Arthur runs out of turf writers or trainer friends to talk to, he finds George and makes his shy, quiet friend sit at the table listening to his theories and tales of tough beats.

  “See you, Arthur,” I said, bending down to peck him on the cheek.

  He grunted and waved his hand at me again, as if waving off a gnat.

  I went down the escalator, past the kiosk selling programs, and outside, through the drizzle and onto the subway platform. The sky was low and threatening. A very fat man was sitting on one of the wooden benches, rocking back and forth. I pictured the late Vito on the platform. His protuberant belly, his quaking jowls. His big, messy body on the train tracks, blood and brain matter mixing with garbage and grease. I shivered. I flipped my phone open and dialed home, wondering if Clayton would answer. He did not.

  The train car was sparsely populated, just three kids in huge sweatshirts, two old men, and one beautiful young African-looking woman the kids kept stealing glances at.

  The fringes of Queens rolled by the train windows.

  When I got home, Candy did a wild, jubilant dance then launched herself into my arms. I cradled her and let her lick my nose.

  “Clayton?” I called out. Nothing.

  I put Candy down. She wiggled in place for several seconds, then ran to the door and eagerly looked from it to me and back. I got her leash off a hook and took her out to pee. We walked over to the river where I stared at the skyline blending into the slate-gray sky. Candy sniffed, dug a hole in a flowerbed belonging to a hideous condo high-rise, and barked at a Rottweiler and his human. The cold, which had gotten in my bones at Aqueduct, hadn’t left. I started jogging, Candy trotted at my side, her curled white tail high in the air, chin up, obviously proud of her station in life.

  I was still cold after jogging for a few a few blocks so I broke into a flat-out run. Candy skipped along next to me, excited by this sudden bout of activity, now and then jumping up to bite at her leash. It was still drizzling and my hair was getting wet and whipping across my face. The air smelled like rotten eggs. Candy had pinned her ears back like a racehorse. We must have looked a little mad. But there wasn’t anyone to see us.

  By the time I got back home, the dog and I were completely soaked. We took the stairs two at a time. I unlocked the door and called out to Clayton. Nothing.

  I went into the bathroom and turned on the water in the tub.

  “Sorry, but you’re filthy,” I told the dog. I deposited her in the tub. Her tail sagged and she pulled down the corners of her mouth as I used the shower sprayer to hose her down. She gave me an insulted and hurt look as I soaped her up with dog shampoo then hosed her again. When I’d rinsed all the brownish water off her, I let her jump out of the tub. She shook, spraying water all over everything. I engulfed her in a huge bath towel and dried her.

  I turned the shower back on, stripped off my wet clothes, and got in. I stood under the showerhead for a very long time.

  I was still cold.

  When my skin had turned red and my feet were pruned, I stepped out of the shower and wrapped myself in a towel. I had just started brushing my hair when I heard Candy let out an excited yelp and then heard the front door open.

  “Clayton?” I called out.


  “Hi, Alice.” He sounded defeated.

  I found him standing just inside the front door, shoulders sagging, hair falling in his face.

  “Hi,” he said lifelessly, “thought you were at the track.”

  “I left. It was cold and boring.”

  “Oh.” He wasn’t looking at me.

  No one seemed to want to look at me today. Had I been struck hideous in my sleep? I self-consciously ran my fingers through my wet hair.

  “What’s wrong, Clayton?”

  “I can’t take being a burden to you anymore, Alice, it makes me feel like a creep. I have to sort myself out.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, not sure where he was headed with this particular line of thinking.

  “I’m gonna put the van back in the parking lot and live there for a while.”

  “That’s absurd, Clayton.”

  “You need your freedom.”

  “You can still be my roommate.”

  “I don’t want to be your roommate.”

  I had spent most of our relationship trying to get rid of Clayton, and now, even though I was interested in someone else, I didn’t want him to move out.

  “I don’t want you to go,” I said, surprising myself.

  “Why?”

  “I like you.”

  “You got a funny way of showing it.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t do that well with interpersonal relationships.”

  “No kidding.”

  “But I don’t want you to live in a parking lot.”

  “I did get some work,” Clayton said. “A carpenter friend of mine needs some help. I’m going to go with him tonight to give an estimate on a job. Then I’ll have at least a few days’ work helping him.”

  “That’s great,” I said, trying to sound genuinely enthusiastic.

  “I can give you some money for bills.”

  “You don’t have to.”