Red Audrey and the Roping

by Jill Malone

  “That’s the spirit,” Grey said as he handed me a glass and smiled at the waitress. “I knew you couldn’t stay filthy for long.”

  With an intrigued look, the waitress merged back into the haze.

  “The bartender and I went to high school together,” Grey said by way of explaining the quick drink service. “He just told me Diana Waelly doesn’t come on until nine, but some quartet will take the stage at seven.”

  “Nine? What the fuck?”

  “Hey, do you want to sit at a table by the men’s room? You can’t leave this kind of reconnaissance operation to Kimo or Karen.”

  “What’s with you and sitting by the men’s room?”

  “Look, you said you were happy to come along early with me, so no bitching now.”

  I’d agreed to come early with Grey in order to tell him privately about Nick, but somehow the opportunity for my disclosure just hadn’t appeared. Nick was supposed to have been my coffee break; my Rex Stout mystery; the popcorn movie to distract me from beige days and another term of second-year Latin. I’d left Ireland for this? Delvo had tried to console me when I told her that Dr. Adams’ strike fixation had consigned me to another year teaching polliwogs: “Focus on summer school—you and I will be the only instructors—no departmental meetings, no frenetic teaching assistants, no more discussions about the merits of fat-free ranch dressing.”

  Instead of a meaningless affair—a couple of dinners, a tour of his studio, his bedroom—the photo shoot at Punchbowl had charged the air for me: I kept returning to the image of him crouched in the parking lot with the film unspooling; and his hands, the way he’d gathered me up and held me. So for the past two months, I’d tried to figure a way to tell Grey and Emily that I’d toned up with a guy they both knew in isolated past tense. Amazingly, I had never found the right opportunity to explain about Nick, so I’d decided to ambush the whole scenario by inviting him to join us for the Flapper Party.

  “The thing is … I invited someone here tonight.”

  “Yeah? Someone from school?”

  “No. The thing is I’ve been seeing someone—a guy. I’ve been seeing a guy.”

  “Yeah?”

  Grey watched me closely as he spun his coaster around the tabletop. My mouth couldn’t keep up with my brain; I had the numb of Novocain anesthetizing my inputs.

  “Yeah. The thing is you know him: Nick Reinhart.”

  “Sure I know Nick—the photographer who dated Emily in college—he was in her last documentary.”

  “Right.”

  “So you’ve been seeing him?”

  “Yeah, for a while.”

  “Well, that’s interesting.”

  He didn’t sound interested so much as pissed.

  “Yeah, the thing is it was difficult to explain—”

  “Well, that’s shocking, really amazing. I’ve never met a chick who kept so many secrets, so many deceptions and ruses—not even my wife. Your whole life is a masquerade ball. Are you incapable of honest human interaction? Is that the fucking problem?”

  “What are you getting so upset about? I wanted to tell you, but things are so complicated with Emily and everything—”

  “Right, complicated with Emily because you’ve been having an affair with her for months, but God forbid you talk to me about it. What’s your deal, Jane; can’t you be open with your friends?”

  “Grey, what—”

  “No, don’t accuse me of overreacting. I have a right to expect honesty from my friends. Honesty may be the only thing we can expect from other people, and I think I deserve it.”

  “I haven’t been dishonest with you.”

  “Oh my fucking god. What are you talking about? You have to tell lies to keep secrets, Jane. Especially you: you’d tell a lie before you’d ever betray yourself.”

  “I don’t have to expose every aspect of my life for us to be friends.”

  “I’m not talking about exposure; I’m talking about honesty. You’ve been telling me your classes keep you so busy five nights a week, and that’s not true, is it?”

  “I’m trying to explain about that—”

  “About how that’s not dishonest?”

  “Grey, can I please talk?”

  “Sure, just don’t develop a habit of it.”

  “Oh god, you’re so infuriating.”

  “I’m infuriating?”

  “Shut the fuck up for Christ sake and give me a chance to explain. I’m sorry, OK? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was seeing someone. It was just supposed to be a harmless affair, you know, no casualties. We got serious so fast that I felt like an idiot trying to explain—I feel like an idiot trying to explain about not telling you before.”

  Grey concentrated on each ice cube in his glass, crushing his coaster in the deliberate collapse of his right palm.

  “Ryan, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I should have told you before.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  That was another lie. I hadn’t told Grey for a number of reasons: if he knew, Emily would be more likely to find out; Grey and I spent so much time together that dating another guy felt traitorous; I worried Nick and Grey might not get along; and I worried too about the way Grey might take the news.

  I felt my face flush when Grey met my eyes.

  “Don’t lie to me anymore,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I felt like a traitor—seeing someone else—and that’s completely irrational because you’re married. I’m not with you. I can see whomever I want.”

  “Have I ever said different?”

  “No, but that’s not the point. I’m telling you how I felt.”

  “Jane, you know I’m attracted to you. Have I ever acted on that, have I ever made a move on you, or made you uncomfortable?”

  “No.”

  “Why is that do you think?”

  “Because you’re married.”

  “That’s right. You’re the most interesting chick I know and I love to hang out with you; I made a choice to be with you and never to act on any impulse—never to let anything interfere with us being friends. That was my choice and I’ve been faithful to it. Gang references aside, truthfulness is about respect, and I think I deserve that respect from you. I’m not asking for graphics of your sex life or an incursion into your privacy, but would mentioning the fact that you’re seeing someone and that it’s serious violate your self-imposed confidentiality clause?”

  “I should have told you before.”

  “That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I’m really sorry. Honestly.”

  “So how’s the sex?”

  “Asshole.”

  “No, seriously, you’re having sex right?”

  “Is Emily going to be as upset as you are?”

  “Worse, I’m sure. But you know, you could have spared all of us by—”

  “OK. I’ve got it.”

  “Actually I can’t wait to see her face; it’s going to be beautiful.”

  His olive-toned face was pink with excitement as the waitress slid our salads and the plate of calamari onto the table. Grey ordered two rounds of drinks before letting her vanish again.

  “May be years before we see those drinks,” he said, “so it’s best to have an extra pair. Jesus, the quartet’s playing. I hadn’t noticed.”

  On the other side of the room, three young men in thin ties and dark suits wailed away on the piano, saxophone, and guitar. A tall woman in a scoop-necked dress fingered the thick strings of an upright bass. They played quick, wildly overlapping notes that had the crowd head-bopping practically unawares.

  “They’re crazy,” I said, grinning.

  “If they can keep that up for two hours, I’ll be impressed. Do you mind telling me how Emily didn’t find out about this guy you’re seeing?”

  “I told you things are complicated with Emily.”

  “Yeah. What does that mean again?”

  “She told me this spring th
at she didn’t want to get too serious—she didn’t want to be exclusive—with me. She said she wanted to tone down. Meanwhile, she’s seeing one of her new bartenders. I wasn’t sure how to read that exactly—you know, curtain or intermission—later I understood she’d meant intermission.”

  “And that was OK with you?”

  “No. No that really sucked. The thing is Emily’s … well, we exist by her rules, you know?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “So I met Nick at the wrap party and …”

  I shrugged my shoulders. Grey’s eyes were lit, his mouth wide with amusement.

  “That’s classic. I hope she appreciates the irony.”

  “I’m not sure why you’re so gleeful.”

  “I like the idea of Emily learning about commitment while you’re learning about honesty.”

  “You really are a bad hat.”

  “Thank you. So you pulled the curtain?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Ah. Then this may not be much fun after all.”

  “No. I’d hoped that you would be happy for me, and that would set the tone for the evening, but my projections were off a bit.”

  He nodded, trying to appear sober and empathetic as he shoveled calamari strips into his mouth.

  “What time’s Nick getting here?”

  “Nine.”

  “So how much does he know about this?”

  “Less than you.”

  “How much less?”

  “He knows I rent the studio behind Emily’s house, and that the three of us surf together, that we’re friends.”

  “Jesus, you’re amazing. It must be something to keep all your different characters straight, yeah? Don’t you ever get confused, assuming your various roles with each of us?”

  “There is a line, Grey, that even you can trip over.”

  “Try that one on Emily when she threatens to rip your heart out and see if it works any better.”

  “Don’t be nasty. I don’t want him to meet you when you’re nasty.”

  “To protect him or yourself?”

  The waitress materialized to drop off four tumblers of whiskey-cokes and collect our plates. In front of the raised platform on which the band played, a couple of shaggy-haired hippie chicks gyrated to the syncopated rhythms. Around the bar, heads and shoulders nodded to the bass beat and the band began to hold the audience’s attention with their complicated arrangements and funky rhythms.

  I wanted to start the night over. It had been a relief to talk to Grey about Emily, a relief to stop the charade, but I had no skin for his vindictiveness, no calluses to protect myself. I drained one of the tumblers—the startled burn—and stared at the band, willing Grey to be calm and reasonable. He fidgeted next to me, shifting his emptied tumbler to the edge of the table, and glanced up with a sly grin.

  “So inviting him to a costume party is symbolic, right?”

  I fingered my peacock feather, “Yes. I’m getting rid of all disguises.”

  “Brilliant. We can all pretend to be our best selves. We’re certainly dressed for it.”

  I nodded. His tuxedo was ravishing; it lent him the appearance of a grownup.

  “Guard the table while I get us another couple of rounds.”

  The dance floor spread like a contagion until anyone who wasn’t queued for drinks at the bar was flopping around in front of the band; heads bobbed like waves through the smoke fog. Eventually Grey and Emily’s classmates arrived and I was able to leave the table to dance with Grey. By the time Nick showed—wearing a smooth black tuxedo with his hair slicked back so he looked like a gangster—the rest of us were sweaty, well buzzed, and giddy.

  I should have known better than to worry about Grey and Nick getting along; they spent the intermission between bands entertaining the table on any number of topics from the political repercussions of the word squaw to the extent of ozone depletion as a result of methane gas produced by cows, to an uncanny rendition of the African or European swallows debate from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. Nick’s dry wit was a perfect foil for Grey’s outrageousness, and they were obviously struggling to hold straight faces quite as often as the rest of us. When Diana Waelly’s set began, at nearly ten, her honey-fused growl poured over the crowd, lending our drunkenness a regal quality as we pitched and swayed.

  Well into the second set, Emily still hadn’t arrived and Karen Cho—International Finance—and Kimo Howerton—Investment Banking—were both ringing the Spark on their cell phones without getting an answer. No doubt we should have been worried, but Grey and I had been drinking steadily since 6:00 p.m., we’d all danced and laughed to stupor, and the music had shrouded us in a bubble of happiness that no one wanted to burst. We didn’t know about the paramedics and cops summoned to the scene of a bar brawl at the Blue Spark; the number of people in gurneys or handcuffs; the bouncers who’d had to be restrained from killing a couple of military guys who’d groped a waitress.

  XXII.

  In July, I met Nick’s mother. Nick’s father had been an army engineer; upon retiring from service, he’d started a construction company that made barrels of money in the real estate swoon of the nineteen-eighties. He’d had four sons, three wives, and had died on the operating table during a bypass operation in 1990. By that time, he and his third wife, Verity, a Hungarian woman he’d met while stationed in Frankfurt, were sleeping in separate rooms.

  In his final year of film school, Nick dropped out and returned home to take care of his mother. It was a decision that he did not make entirely on his own, or for that matter, entirely selflessly. A great portion of the father’s estate had been left to Nick, along with the house in Aliamanu, and the condo in Maui. To his other sons—only two were still living—he left controlling interest in his construction company. His wife got nothing.

  Nick used his father’s money to open the photography studio; had the basement of his mother’s house remodeled as an independent living space with kitchen and laundry facilities so that he could live near enough to watch over his mother while giving each of them a semblance of privacy. I thought his devotion to his mother old-world gallantry of the noblest sort until I met her.

  Verity Reinhart, dark and diminutive, with a curt accent and short thick waves of gray hair, was a spiritualist. During my first meeting with her, she walked me around the living room, encouraging me to hold this rock or that statue and experience its aura. She routinely sited alien ships, had been visited by gargoyles in her sleep—“a heavy weight on my chest and I felt the clawed feet sinking into my flesh”—claimed that her connection to the ethereal world (as she referred to it) came at the expense of her health, and she belonged to a sort of club of spiritualists who met every year in some foreign city where a hubbub of spiritual activity had been report. The city she was bound for that year: Cairo.

  We met for drinks instead of dinner—presumably because Nick anticipated exactly what occurred, unabashed antagonism and revulsion on my side and whimsy from his mother. She thought me the most interesting of Nick’s troupe of girls—“so many that I never can keep them all straight, but, my dear, your accent is delicious!”—and when she found out that I taught Latin, well it was exactly what she’d expected: I had a predisposition to understand the ethereal world where she lived most of the time.

  Honestly, I didn’t try very hard to be polite. The three of us had cocktails together and then Nick and I left to have dinner at John Dominis. After several months of dating, Nick wanted me to move in. Meeting his mother had been a sort of test for our relationship and I had the impression that I wasn’t the first girl he’d brought to his mother for approval, but she’d raised serious questions from my perspective—obviously his mother was unhinged and did I really want some wacky woman who entertained gargoyles living a flight above me?

  Then, of course, there was the alternative: to stay in the studio behind Emily’s mansion and observe the decay. After the Flapper Party, I’d gone home with Nick and hadn’t discovered anythi
ng about the brawl at the Spark until late the following evening. When I came back to the studio, Grey had left a note tagged to my door outlining what had transpired and I’d run up to the main house to check on Emily. I found her in the kitchen, mobbed by her friends. Emily’s nasty glower assured me that Grey’s response to Nick would pale to what I was about to experience. Obviously, her friends had told her that I’d gone home with Nick—you know, that really funny guy you dated in college—which was a shock in itself coupled with the brawl, then compounded by the fact that I wasn’t home to console her in the wake of these events, nor had I bothered to appear until nearly nine o’clock; certainly, my case looked bleak.

  “Can you believe it, Jane?” asked Karen Cho. “A brawl at the Spark, and we’re all dancing at Catacombs completely oblivious. I feel terrible.”

  Still looking at Emily, I nodded. Terrible. Yes, that was extremely compassionate of Karen to feel terrible about a bar brawl that had required medics. The rest of the room nodded assent, as they had been doing all day no doubt, empathizing with all their little hearts: swooping in vulture-like to commiserate, their soulful masks obscuring their delight. I felt sick looking at them. The rest of the room, finally attuned to the fact that Emily, drawn with rage, had not taken her eyes from me, tensed as they leaned forward, waiting to catalog the drama.

  Emily didn’t look at them, annunciating deliberately as though English were her second language: “Thanks so much for coming, all of you. I’m tired now.”

  No one moved to leave. Emily looked up dazedly and smiled at them. Karen glanced at me and backed toward the French doors. The rest of the group followed until the doors banged closed, icing us in.

  “Are you OK?”

  She didn’t answer me and I realized it was a dangerous question.

  “Were you hurt?”

  Even worse. My stomach wrenched. Our conversations were always desperate—I couldn’t relax and talk plainly about Nick or even what I felt for her—charged with sexual tension and something ugly, something insinuating that frightened me. Maybe I hadn’t come home on purpose. Maybe I knew something had happened when she didn’t come to the bar, and I wanted her friends to tell her about Nick first so that I wouldn’t have to. Maybe her fury would make leaving easier.