by Cathy Holton
Nita had been a good girl all her life, an honor roll student and student council representative who sang in the church choir; a girl like Eadie Wilkens was a mystery to her. It wasn’t until Nita’s senior year of high school, when she was being crowned Homecoming Queen and Eadie stole the show by standing on her head in the bleachers (she wasn’t wearing any underwear), that Nita had a sudden epiphany and realized for the first time why Eadie Wilkens was the way she was. Anyone else would have hated Eadie for stealing the show the way she did, but Nita understood with a sudden flash of insight that everything Eadie did was just her way of protecting herself. Eadie had grown up without a daddy or brothers or male cousins to look after her, and a rebellious reputation was the best chance she had of putting up a force field. Standing on the fifty-yard line with the overhead lights shimmering through her crown like a halo, Nita realized if she’d been raised the way Eadie’d been raised, without a good home and a good family and a decent place to live, she might’ve turned out the same sad way. For the first time in her life, she felt sorry for Eadie Wilkens. Years later, after Eadie had married Trevor Boone and returned to Ithaca, she’d walked into Boone & Broadwell where Nita was working as a secretary and, taking one look at Nita, grinned and said, “Hey, I remember you. You were the only girl who was ever nice to me in high school.” Eighteen years later she and Nita were still friends.
Nita climbed the stairs with her glass of wine. Dr. Ledbetter was where she had left him, lying facedown on the floor. She picked him up and put him on the bed and then went around the room dimming the lamps and lighting a few candles, which she placed on the tables closest to the bed.
After awhile she climbed into bed and lay staring at the ceiling and trying to imagine her husband coming through the door. She rehearsed several seduction scenes in her mind. Dr. Ledbetter was a big believer in using fantasy to put the zip back into a stagnant marriage, and he had set up several scenarios, including dialogue, to use during foreplay. The only one she could even remotely imagine Charles agreeing to was the Lion Tamer and the Naughty Trapeze Girl. For some reason she could imagine Charles wearing boots and carrying a whip. But this fantasy required installation of some ceiling hardware that Nita would never be able to explain to the children.
She read the other scripts, finding that the dialogue pretty much followed the same format. After awhile Nita realized that she had been reading the same monotonous dialogue in numerous soft-porn romance novels. She had always assumed that porno romance novelists must have incredibly varied and innovative sex lives, but now she had a sudden image of a middle-aged librarian locked in a small room poring over sex manuals and entering the dialogue, verbatim, into an endless stream of repetitive novels. It was shocking. It made her wonder if she had wasted a year of her life immersed in a world of false sex and romance. Nita let the book drop. She crossed her hands on her chest and stared at the ceiling. She wondered how hard it would be to install a trapeze. She wondered which way the ceiling joists ran.
She wondered what Jimmy Lee Motes would say if she asked him to hang a trapeze from her bedroom ceiling.
“NITA, WHAT IN the hell are you doing?”
She awoke with a start. Charles was standing in the doorway, illuminated by the light falling from the hallway and the stairwell behind him.
“It’s nine-thirty and the kids are still playing video games,” he said. “They’re completely unsupervised.”
“Sorry,” she said, sitting up on one elbow. Drool had collected at the corner of her mouth and run down along her chin and the front of her black silk camisole. She wiped her face with the back of one hand.
“Do you have the flu?” he asked suspiciously. He stood in the doorway, a dark and slightly menacing figure.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
“I told the kids to go to bed,” he said, coming into the room. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Okay.” She pulled her hair away from her mouth, trying to make herself wake up, trying to remember why she was lying in bed wearing sexy lingerie.
“Why is it so dark in here?” he said, hitting the switch to the wall sconces. Light flooded the room and Nita shielded her eyes with her hand, swaying on one elbow, her hair wild around her face, lipstick smeared in a red arc around her mouth, mascara oozing beneath her eyes and down one cheek.
Charles stared blankly at his wife, who resembled a deranged circus clown. The sexual aspect of her lying in bed didn’t occur to him. He hadn’t thought of her that way in years, not since the birth of the children. He had a stack of pornographic magazines in a box in the back of his closet that he masturbated to, but he wouldn’t have thought of doing to his wife what men in the magazines did to those women. Sex with his wife was a sacred trust; a covenant based on two thousand years of faith and history. After a minute, he turned and went into the bathroom.
She could hear him running water in the sink. She had been dreaming she was locked in a decrepit old house and the sewer had backed up and was steadily filling the house with green stinking water and a kind of brown sludge. She kept running up the stairs and hollering for everyone to get out, and the sewage kept following her up one flight after another, filling floor after floor of the sinking house.
“Nita, what did I tell you about the toothpaste?” Charles said, leaning around the bathroom door and holding the tube out in front of him like a relay runner holds a baton. Charles was very particular about his toothpaste. There was a right way to squeeze it and a wrong way. The right way was to start at the bottom and roll it. The wrong way was to grab the middle of a full tube and squeeze. He had taught her this years ago, but somehow, during the past few weeks she had spent trying to figure out how to put the zip back into her marriage, Nita had managed to forget.
“Sorry,” she said.
He went back into the bathroom and a minute later she heard him humming to himself as he brushed his teeth.
Nita caught a glimpse of herself in the dresser mirror. She wet her fingers and tried to remove the mascara smudges beneath her eyes. She rubbed her mouth on a Kleenex. Dr. Ledbetter was lying there, faceup on the bed, and she quickly slid him into her nightstand drawer.
“I saw Leonard at the office today,” Charles said, coming out of the bathroom and wiping his hands on a towel. “He says you and Lavonne have a lunch meeting tomorrow to talk about the firm party. He seemed to think Lavonne was getting pretty close to finding a caterer.” Nita pulled the sheet to her chin. She didn’t know what to say to this. She wasn’t very good at lying. She nodded her head slightly.
“Good,” he said. “Is it one of my mother’s caterers?”
Nita nodded again. She tried to imagine her husband as a lion tamer or a pirate. She tried to imagine him with long hair and an eye patch and a curving cutlass strapped to his waist.
“Why are you squinting like that?” Charles said, frowning. “Is there something wrong with your eyes?”
Nita opened her mouth to explain about Dr. Ledbetter’s Christian lovemaking, but then thought better of it. Charles stared at her suspiciously. In the hallway behind him, Logan’s door closed softly. “You might want to make an appointment to get your eyes checked,” he said. “You’re getting to that age when people start needing to wear reading glasses.” He stepped out of his slacks and folded them neatly over a chair. “I’m going to jump in the shower,” he said. “I had dinner at the club so don’t bother to make me anything.”
She waited until she heard the water running and then she went into her closet and took off the black camisole and put on her favorite flannel nightgown and her slippers with the pig faces the children had given her last Christmas. She stuffed the camisole in the back of a drawer where she would never find it again. She was thirty-nine years old. Her eyes would be going soon. Her breasts would sag. Her thighs would dimple. All that time she had spent reading soft-porn romance novels and going to Passion Parties and reading about how to explore her sexuality, she should have been developing
a hobby. Something safe and matronly like collecting spoons. Or scrapbooking.
From inside her closet, Nita heard him climbing out of the shower. She wrapped herself in her bathrobe and noticed Charles had hung his Orvis hunting jacket in her closet, near the front where she would be sure to see it. He was scheduled to leave four weeks from now for his annual hunting trip, and Nita supposed he had hung the jacket there to remind her to take it to the dry cleaners. She reached to move it, and as she lifted the hanger, a long slim package of condoms fell out of the pocket.
“Nita!” he called from the bathroom. “Make sure my mother’s at that lunch meeting tomorrow. She may be able to help you with some of the details for the party.”
Nita stood there looking at the condoms and feeling like someone had kicked her in the stomach. They were in a blue cellophane wrapper with the picture of a rhino on the front. Ribbed for her Pleasure! it read across the front. She’d had her tubes tied eleven years ago and this thought clanged through her head, insistent as an alarm bell. She looked down at the little blue package in her hand. The voice in her head said, What does this mean? But she knew what it meant. She closed her fingers tightly over the condoms and stood, clenching both fists. Something monstrous rolled beneath her breast like a heavy wheel, like a stone rolled across the mouth of a cave. All her life she’d been a good girl. All her life she’d done what was expected of her. It was too late to change now. She opened her hands and looked blankly at the palms, at the fresh crescent nail marks. Already the heaviness in her chest was receding, leaving in its place a creeping numbness. She slipped the condoms back inside her husband’s jacket.
“I hope you remembered to pick up my shirts at the cleaners,” Charles shouted, wrapping a towel around his waist. “I have to be in court in the morning and I need my lucky blue shirt.”
Nita had read once that denial was unhealthy, but so far she had found it to be both practical and safe.
Charles quickly combed his hair and checked his teeth in the mirror. “Honey?” he said, stepping out into the bedroom, but Nita was gone.
RETURNING HOME FROM her stakeout of Trevor and his new girlfriend at the Pink House Restaurant, Eadie Boone poured herself a tumbler of scotch and took a hot bath. She was sitting up in bed drinking a second glass of scotch and contemplating a midnight call to Denton Swafford, her personal trainer, when the phone rang.
“Eadie.”
“Yes?” She recognized Trevor’s voice. She smiled and snuggled down in the covers, resting her drink on her stomach.
“Stop following me and Tonya.”
“My God, is that her name?” Eadie wondered if the girl was with him. He sounded nervous.
“You know there are laws out there protecting people from stalkers.”
“You flatter yourself,” Eadie said. She didn’t like to think about the girl lying in bed with her husband. All in all, Eadie had been pretty patient about the whole situation, but her patience was beginning to wear a little thin.
“And stop calling wherever I am and having yourself paged. After awhile it loses its effectiveness.”
“I guess I’ll just have to start showing up in person.”
Tonya had climbed on top of Trevor and was doing things that, given the fact he was talking on the phone with his wife, made him very uncomfortable. “What is it you want, Eadie?” Trevor made a movement with his hand for Tonya to stop but she ignored him.
“I want you to come home.”
“That’s impossible,” he said.
“You know she can’t make you happy. She can’t give you what you need to make yourself happy.” Eadie wondered if Trevor was getting any writing done with Tonya around. When they were first married and lived in the basement of the house in Athens, they used to spend whole weekends shut up in the bedroom. He always kept a stack of books on the bedside table, and after they made love, he would open a book the way some men would light a cigarette. He would read for a while, and Eadie would sit on the edge of the bed making charcoal sketches of him reading, Vivaldi playing softly in the background. After awhile he would put the book down, and reach for her.
“I want you to get on with your life.” Trevor put his hand on Tonya’s shoulder and shook his head. The girl sat back on her heels, frowning. “I want you to get on with your life and stop following me around.”
“Come home, Trevor. It’s too hard to fight when we’re not living under the same roof.”
“You’re crazy,” he said.
“That’s why you love me.”
“My mother was right.”
“Your mother was crazy, too. That’s why you fell in love with me. Boys always marry girls like their mothers.”
He laughed. Eadie could always make him laugh. Tonya rolled off him and stalked off, her high-heeled slippers clicking loudly against the hardwood floor. She slammed the bedroom door as she went out.
“What was that?” Eadie said.
“Nothing.” He knew Tonya wouldn’t leave. She never left, no matter how angry he made her.
Eadie said, “I’ve got to go.” She put her fingers over the receiver and said loudly, “Stop it, Denton.”
“What was that?” Trevor said.
“Nothing.”
“Is that goddamn personal trainer there now?”
“Of course not.”
“You tell him I said to get the hell out of my house,” Trevor shouted. “You tell him I said—”
“Come home and tell him yourself,” Eadie said, and hung up.
AT A TIME when many women she knew were striking off on their own, leaving the scattered wreckage of twenty-year marriages behind them, Eadie Boone struggled daily with the undeniable certainty that she was still in love with her own damn husband. It took courage to admit this, and a steady belief in the infallibility of her own judgment, especially in light of the fact Trevor had left her for another woman.
He had left her but he had never stopped loving her. Eadie knew this. He had convinced himself that it was over between them, but deep down inside he was still as hooked as he had been that day she rode by on the Georgia Homecoming float, desirable and aloof. In those days, she was an art major attending the University of Georgia on a scholarship. Trevor, a second-year law student, had looked up at her as she passed above the crowd and gallantly announced to his drunken fraternity brothers, “Boys, there goes the girl I will marry.” She had thought him somewhat mild at first, and incapable of sustained combat, and it was not until their first argument in the dining room of the Chi Phi house, when she had thrown a dessert plate at him, and he ran his finger through the sticky mess on his face, licked it, and calmly announced, “Blackberry, my favorite,” that she knew she would marry him.
She was eighteen and he was twenty-four. They were from the same small town, but had grown up without conscious knowledge of the other. She had grown up in a single-wide trailer on the wrong side of town and no one had expected much of Eadie Sue Wilkens except early motherhood and disgrace. Trevor was descended from landowners and pine barren speculators and had been raised by his widowed mother in a huge old mansion on Lee Street. They married that same year, against the wishes of his mother, who could not forgive Eadie for being a trailer trash girl and, even worse, an artist. Eadie sculpted women out of clay, headless things with huge breasts and private parts. Eadie’s sculptures started out small, during the first few years after she married Trevor and came to live in his mama’s big house, but over the years they got bigger and bigger until Eadie had to start selling off the furniture to make room for them. Mrs. Boone had died, from shame some said, soon after watching Trevor slip an heirloom platinum diamond wedding ring on Eadie Wilkens’s finger, and after graduating from law school Trevor had returned to Ithaca to his mother’s big house and his grandfather’s law firm. Even in those early years, there was something about Eadie’s dedication to her art that drove Trevor crazy. Every time he came home to find another big-breasted woman in his house, he’d get mad as hell and shout at Eadie and s
he’d shout back and then, next day, she’d start on a bigger one. After awhile Eadie and her big women chased Trevor out of the house and he got himself a girlfriend, a cocktail waitress out at Bad Bob’s saloon, and an apartment over on the other side of town. But even with Trevor gone, Eadie found ways to make trouble. She started sleeping with a bouncer out at Bad Bob’s and eventually fell in with a bunch of artistic types from Atlanta who would come down on weekends and sleep in Trevor’s big house and drink his whiskey and talk about Kafka until four o’clock in the morning. After that, she used a big chunk of his money to open up a house on Fourth Street for women and their kids who needed a place to hide out from their bad husbands. After awhile, Trevor got tired of trying to live without his wife, and he moved back home to Eadie and her big women.
And now here he was, years later, caught up in the throes of some embarrassing midlife passion, and here Eadie was again, trying to save him from himself. She would not give up on him. At least not yet, although she could look down the road and see an end to her patience. Eadie was an optimist, but there were limits to what even she was willing to take.
THE MORNING AFTER Trevor’s phone call, Eadie awoke to find herself in bed with her personal trainer. She didn’t usually let Denton stay the night, and when she awoke, she lay very still, trying to accustom herself to the unfamiliar sensation of waking up next to someone, trying to figure out how she had managed to get herself into this predicament. She was pretty sure it had something to do with the amount of scotch she had consumed the night before. She was pretty sure it had something to do with the fact that her husband was sleeping with his goddamned legal secretary. Letting Denton Swafford stay the night was not something she had planned on, and was sure to complicate matters. Still, she thought, turning to look at the sleeping Denton, who lay on his back with one well-muscled arm thrown over his head, what was done, was done. She might as well make the best of it. She poked him in the ribs with her finger.