“I’ll leave the key under the mat.”
“You won’t be there?”
“No. You go.”
Audrey clicked through old photos of the last time the house was on the market. Dark wet bar, run-down potting shed, sun room, vinyl exterior. Oy. “And let’s find you a new home too. You can’t forget about that.” The other brokers were forever blowing the next step. Always acting like a herd of cloven-hoofed sheep in high heels, scurrying from one open house to the next, forgetting creative ways to make another sale. As the interior shots downloaded, she prayed to god that someone had set fire to the mauve wallpaper. “What a captivating home. I’d be happy to help.” Leona ran around in figure eights on the lawn, chased by an invisible predator.
“Take a good look and see what it needs.”
“Where can I reach you?” she asked, then wrote down a ten-digit number whose area code she didn’t recognize. Malibu? Pasadena? Fresno? “I’ll get back to you in a few days and give you my thoughts and a marketing plan. We can get the contract signed and the house on the market by the end of the week.”
“You’ll know what to do, I’m sure.”
“And you say you were referred to me by my advertising?”
“Photo. I like your photo. Pro-vo-ca-tive.”
And the phone went dead.
chapter 18
Sorry I’m late,” Catherine whispered as she sidled up to Amity in the back of the unfamiliar living room. “What have I missed?”
“Pin the tail on Rafael Nadal,” Amity said, flatly. “There’s no telling where the fun will end.”
In front of them, a sparrow-thin woman in a coral-and-teal Lilly Pulitzer dress finished handing out schedules. More than a dozen seated women about Amity’s age, most of them wearing seaside pastels, perched on the wide couch, the piano bench, the frilled poufs. Catherine felt rather out of place in her dull beige pantsuit.
Lilly Pulitzer tittered in place before a large oil painting of herself. Her high heels clicked on the hardwood floor as she placed her hands on hummingbird hips. “So here’s our tentative tennis calendar, which you’ll also find on the website.” The women shuffled the papers from one to another. “And for those of you who missed tryouts, we’ll see you in the fall.”
“In the fall?” Catherine leaned toward Amity. “But it’s only April.”
“I know, right?” Amity finished what champagne remained in her plastic flute and set it on the side table next to a large aquarium.
Then in consolation Lilly added, “But don’t forget—you can always attend clinics and sub in games.” The audience clapped weakly, as if anything harder might splinter a fingernail, and a general conversational hum rose, signaling the end of the meeting.
“Well, Catherine, apparently we’ve missed the boat.”
“Ralph does like to tell me I’ll be at the airport when my ship comes in.” She looked out the picture window, saw a splash in the large lagoon, and wondered if a squadron of bored alligators lurked just under the surface.
“Consider yourself lucky. At least you missed the icebreaker.” Amity swept her long hair behind her shoulders and Catherine saw her name tag. Instead of the usual HELLO . . . MY NAME IS sticker, it read HELLO . . . MY OCCUPATION IS, then, in preprinted type: CAT HOARDER. Catherine thought of Martha and her recent icebreaker. Perhaps she’d call her later and tell her she was getting out of her comfort zone. Progress, not perfection.
“It could have been worse. Believe me,” Amity added.
Catherine heard a flatness to her friend’s voice and wondered if she were coming down with a cold. “Are you okay?”
“I’m tired.” Amity pointed to the aquarium. “Like these guys.”
They both stared at the brilliantly colored fish. It seemed to Catherine they might just be floating in air, untethered by gravity. Catherine grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing waitress. “Well, I have good news. I took care of the raccoon situation.”
“Really? Thank you. Sometimes even my creeping feels sloppy.”
“And I’m late because I was shopping for lingerie. Ralph gets one final opportunity to prove he finds me irresistible.” She laughed, but she wasn’t kidding.
Amity nodded listlessly. “Say, do you mind if I sneak out? I’ve had about all the fun I can muster for one afternoon.”
“Of course.” As if they’d been tennis partners for years, Catherine leaned over and hugged Amity. She felt the bones in the other woman’s shoulders and wondered if she’d lost weight. “And eat something, would you?”
Amity half-smiled and disappeared out the front door.
As Catherine turned back to watch the fish, Lilly Pulitzer approached.
“Sorry you missed our meeting . . .” She hesitated.
“Catherine.”
“Yes, Catherine. I’m Dixie. Team captain. I was just explaining to some of the new girls how we finished tryouts last week. We like to get our rosters set early. It’s all about building team spirit.”
Catherine noticed that Dixie had lost one large round earring. It reminded her of a missing hubcap on a Jaguar. “But I played USTA in New Jersey. I’m really not so bad.”
“As I said, we’ll get you to tryouts and hopefully onto our roster in September.”
Catherine fantasized about launching her drink into Dixie’s face, the kind of dramatic move she might see in a daytime soap, but she couldn’t damage her future chances with the team. “I like your fish,” she said, apropos of nothing, and wondered if the champagne had gone straight to her head.
“We brought them down from Hartford six years ago. The kids left, the dog died, but the fish remain. I thought they’d live a year or two but we’ve had them for fifteen. No predators. No way to get out. They just wait for food and swim around the castle all day. At least they stay in shape.” She smoothed down her dress. “So are your children pleased you’ve moved here?”
“We never had children.”
“Oh, so sorry. You probably have some tragic tale to tell and I’ve just ruined it.”
“Don’t be sorry.” Catherine looked to the fish. “I’d be the type of mother who shouts: ‘Don’t get too close to the surface! You’ll drown!’”
“I see.” Dixie grimaced. “Well you can have some of ours. I’ve got four, George has five.” She smiled as if she’d just won a rally with a sharp-angled overhead.
“That was a lovely dinner,” Catherine said to Ralph as they headed up the stairs from Alligator Soul. Catherine held Ralph with one hand and her doggie bag with the other. She had saved a perfectly marbled cut of steak for Karma. “It’s nice to get downtown, beyond the gates.”
Once at street level, they navigated the rough sidewalk. She felt his craggy fingers, calloused from holding golf clubs, and even imagined she could feel the indentation from his wedding ring, which he’d gotten out of the habit of wearing. As they followed Barnard Street to the crosswalk, they heard the rhythmic hum of two guitars.
“Let’s go,” she said, pulling him toward Telfair Square. It was not something she would normally do, but she felt invigorated by the steady beat and the potential in the night around them.
Sitting on a wooden bench, two young men with ironic facial hair and vintage T-shirts strummed a song Catherine couldn’t quite place.
“Dylan,” Ralph told her. “‘Hurricane.’”
They watched as several couples, mostly tourists with comfortable walking shoes and green-and-red trolley stickers still stuck to their shirts, swayed to the music. Catherine started to move too, to find the song’s beat, but was having trouble and wondered if it were the musicians or just her. If it’d been too long since she let herself go.
“Would you like to dance?” she asked, suddenly.
Ralph looked at her as if they’d just met, then shook his head. “Rotator cuff,” he explained. “Tweaked it on the long tees today.”
After the song ended, Ralph dug into his pocket, found a few dollars, and put them into the half-full tip jar. “Th
anks, guys,” he said. “Nice job.”
They followed the brick path, the tapestried spanish moss above them, toward their car. A tanker moaned somewhere on the Savannah River.
“So what do you think this would set us back?” Ralph had stopped in front of a block-lettered FOR SALE sign attached to a cast-iron railing. He peered into the lower-level apartment of an old Federal-style brick building. “Five hundred? Maybe six?”
Just as Catherine was going to joke about him planning a move, getting a pied-à-terre for watching football games or hosting poker nights, a pickup truck barreled by and backfired. For a microsecond, in the time it takes for an atom to split or a supernova to collapse, Catherine imagined a drive-by shooting and envisioned Karma’s bacon-wrapped beef in a pool of blood on the sidewalk.
When they reached their car, Ralph scurried to open the passenger door. He could be almost charming when he put his mind to it. While she shuttled the doggie bag to the floor, Ralph started the car and pulled forward. The Jepson Center, three stories of incongruous glass, loomed before them. Catherine thought of Dixie’s fish living safely in an aquarium but never seeing the world, never swimming in the expanse of the Forsyth Park fountain or even a freshwater lagoon. Living to a ripe old age of fifteen or twenty years—however long goldfish lived—but eating synthetic pellets their whole lives.
Instead of heading toward the Truman Parkway, Ralph continued around the square.
“Where are we going?”
“I just thought we’d explore,” Ralph said. “See what type of foot traffic there is downtown on a Saturday night.”
“Foot traffic?” On any other occasion, Catherine might have questioned him further. What did he care about foot traffic? But all evening she’d been careful not to criticize, even holding her tongue when she saw alligator fingers on the appetizer menu—like alligators had fingers dainty enough to slip into a lady’s opera glove. Now traveling in the opposite direction from which they started, they passed the restaurant to their right. “I mean, do alligators even have souls?”
“To have a soul you need to be able to self-reflect, Catherine.” He sounded as if he’d studied these things. “No animal can do that.”
Catherine thought of Karma, probably curled tightly in his dog bed and wondering where the hell his steak was. She knew Karma had a soul, but she wasn’t going to start a fight. She just wasn’t sure if souls extended to cats or hamsters or down the food chain to reptiles. “You don’t think Mr. Peabody self-reflects?” Right away Catherine regretted bringing up anything related to the real estate center.
“They sure do some great marketing selling Seven Oaks, don’t they?”
At a stop sign, a horse-drawn carriage carrying a bored family clattered by. A teenage boy threw what looked like peanuts at the horse’s head while his parents talked on their cell phones. Catherine hoped to change the subject. She wanted to move as far away from Audrey as she could. “So I went to an informational tennis meeting.” She needed him to know she’d been trying.
“You’re joining a team?”
“Any day now.” This wasn’t the night to explain she’d missed tryouts.
“You need friends,” he said, forgetting she’d told him she’d gone walking with Amity.
Ralph pulled the car around a crowded double-decker hearse with visitors on a ghost tour of the city’s supposedly haunted houses. Catherine rolled down the window and heard the driver reference the recent sighting of a Union soldier in full uniform, with a Prussian blue sack coat, haversack, and leather cartridge box.
“How about getting involved with the dog park?”
“Maybe.”
At the wide expanse of Ellis Square, traffic came to a standstill as a bachelorette party with young women in matching glittery tiaras spilled onto the crosswalk. The one in the lead wore a pink BRIDE sash. Catherine remembered her own bachelorette party, a potluck dinner followed by strawberry margaritas at Martha’s walk-up apartment where they discussed conspiracy theories regarding Bob Crane’s death.
“Look at all these people,” Ralph said, breathless.
It took nearly ten minutes to reach Bay Street as they dodged pedicabs and groups taking selfies. There was even a threesome who appeared to be on a scavenger hunt, carrying several palm fronds and a life-size cardboard cutout of Paula Deen.
Once they reached Bay, the traffic picked up. Taking a deep breath, Catherine thought she’d smell salt from the river or perhaps flowering honeysuckle. Instead she got a heady whiff of sweet pralines. In front of the last bar on the street, Catherine watched as a group of rowdy men in cowboy hats and jeans exited. She thought of an old Western movie, the outlaws emerging through swinging doors. Each man held a large to-go cup. “I love Georgia, but an open-container law plus an open-carry law seems like a bad idea,” she said, thankful they’d never had any need for a gun.
Once back at the house, Ralph went to the kitchen while Catherine took Karma for his final walk of the evening. As was their routine, Ralph turned on the dishwasher while Catherine implored their dog to have a bowel movement. Ralph moved to the master bath to floss while Catherine stood with Karma on a patch of grass outside their house. She imagined that everyone else’s dog was capable of scooting out the back door, doing his business, then returning without a Medal of Honor.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she repeated, hoping their secret code word might focus his attention. But he ignored her.
Maybe it’s all my fault, she thought suddenly.
Had she been too protective of Karma? When he was a puppy, she’d hardly ever let him off leash, never allowed him his independence. Even now she hovered, a textbook helicopter mom. Maybe if he’d had a little freedom, he’d be more demonstrative and know he was loved. Although she’d tried to teach him simple commands over the years, he never fully grasped what was expected. Sit. Stay. Speak.
Speak, she thought again.
Long ago, Catherine might have told Ralph that she needed more. She needed a real family and a place to belong. She needed to be adored and appreciated and listened to. Just before her fortieth birthday, she’d brought up the idea of children. Maybe it wasn’t too late. But he’d told her that their indecision had been a decision. They’d chosen free weekends and disposable income over Little League and college tuition. They’d chosen recreation over re-creation. She regretted not pushing back, finding a voice for what she needed. For now, though, she needed to know if he still found her desirable.
Without delay, Catherine yanked Karma’s leash, harder than she ever had. His little head jerked toward the house. He gave her the stink eye as she pulled him back toward the front steps, but she didn’t relent. She needed to make things happen.
It had been more than seven months since she and Ralph had had sex. She vaguely recalled the missionary position and a cursory orgasm during the heat of the New Jersey summer. They sometimes joked about how long it had been, mostly as they watched television ads for little yellow pills—commercials featuring gray-haired models ogling each other in separate claw-foot bathtubs. But fear had stopped her from articulating one crucial question: Is there any magic left between us?
Once inside the house, Karma settled on his bed in the laundry room while Catherine retrieved her pink-striped Victoria’s Secret bag. Peeking out the pocket door, she could see only Ralph’s legs splayed across the bedspread. A funereal TV newscaster reported a domestic disturbance within one of the sturdy brick homes in Ardsley Park, a neighborhood rich with Craftsman gems yet plagued with break-ins. Without delay, she removed the new lacy lingerie from the bag, careful to snip off the plastic price tags. As Karma eyed her suspiciously, she brushed out her hair and remained committed to her plan.
Without disturbing Ralph, she slid the laundry door open and stepped across the hallway to the walk-in closet, the same closet where she’d found Amity, who had opened up a whole new world for her. She quickly undressed, then scooped her breasts into the black push-up bra, plumping them up as if they were sacks o
f settled flour. Then she pulled on the matching black thong and lifted her full buttocks so they settled between the single tendon of material. It felt several sizes too small.
Thinking of the tennis ladies in their high heels, she found the sexiest strappy slingbacks she owned—a pair she’d bought for one of Martha’s weddings—and slipped them on. Standing in front of the full-length mirror she felt a little ridiculous but not embarrassed, for she thought of the bountiful curves of Raquel Welch or Sophia Loren, role models for her generation, women who had embraced their ample bodies. But then Catherine imagined Audrey, with her exuberant breasts and long legs. She would have chosen a pink satin baby doll with ruffles, and would have owned her sexuality. And so Catherine did just that.
She backed up so that her shoulders pressed against Ralph’s golf shirts, then breathed deeply and straightened up as she took several long steps forward, hips swaying, as if she were a lithe Angel on a catwalk. It was time.
Before losing her nerve, she spun around and stepped out into the hallway and took a few steps to the bedroom. “So what do you think?” she started to say, but then saw Ralph’s head fallen to one side of the pillow, mouth open, eyes closed. “Ralph?”
He snorted awake and blinked at her a few times. “Oh my.” He sat up enough to grab his glasses from the side table.
“What do you think?”
“I think that’s an adorable getup.”
“A getup?” Catherine pulled the thong out of the crack in her buttocks.
“Come here.” He shifted on the mattress and patted a spot next to him.
She doddered over on her high heels and sat. She felt ridiculous, like someone who arrives at a Halloween party en costume only to realize it’s come as you are.
“I’ve always admired your enthusiasm,” he said.
“You have?”
“Of course I have.” He cleared his throat. “But we walked eighteen today and I’m not quite sure I can get up for the celebration, if you know what I mean.” He took her hand. “Can I take a rain check?”
Good Karma Page 10