She said this perfectly innocently, her tone of voice not signaling anything, but her face was another story; Max was certain those green eyes were telegraphing all sorts of innuendo as they stared right at him.
“Right,” he said. He suddenly wished he had a glass of cold water nearby.
“Are you okay, Max?” Emily inquired. “You actually seem a little pale.”
“Yeah, fine, fine,” Max insisted, getting up and pretending to find interest in some papers on the desk. He glanced at the clock. “Okay, look, um…from what I understand the car will be here in forty-five minutes to pick us up, right? Why don’t you go get dressed and join me downstairs for a quick breakfast?”
“Or we can order room service,” the blonde suggested. “It would probably be quicker…”
“No! Good God no! I mean, no, I’d rather eat in the restaurant. In fact, I’ll go down now, get us a table and tell the kitchen to get started on two English breakfasts.” He draped his coat over his arm and grabbed his satchel. “Just be sure the door locks when you leave, alright?” And without further ado he was gone.
Chapter 14
Saturday—London
Late Saturday morning Danielle and Katie arrived in Katie’s Prius at an upscale furnishings shop in Battersea. As they pulled into the parking lot Katie said:
“Now be nice, Danielle. I don’t want a repeat of the other day when you were threatening to kill people.”
Danielle followed Katie’s eyes and saw Arlene standing near the store’s entrance.
“Don’t worry,” Danielle told her companion as Katie parked, “I’m alright. It’s time to talk to Mom rationally and that’s what I plan to do. Besides, you know I refuse to make such a hysterical scene in front of Max, that’s why I chose to meet her here.”
For pretty much all of this past week Danielle had remained seething over finding Arlene and Nita together on Monday. The fact that her mother believed in her own lesbianism enough to actually go through with having sex with a woman coupled with Nita’s betrayal of Danielle’s friendship meant that over the past few days Danielle had gotten little sleep, suffered atrocious headaches, overate, was short of temper and lashed out at everyone, from her underlings at work to even the BBC News presenters on television who apparently did not know on Wednesday evening that Danielle was in no mood to hear that Chechen rebels had stormed a Russian supermarket and taken hostages.
Finally, last night she decided enough was enough. It happened when she took a good look at herself in the full-length bathroom mirror, saw the bags under her eyes, the drawn expression on her face, the gray hairs she’d been too preoccupied to bother dying, her right hand clutching four more extra strength aspirin and her left clutching a package of Seabrook’s crisps. She decided then it was definitely time to try a different tactic of communicating with her mother because her current tactic of incessantly calling Nita’s and leaving messages on the answerphone in which she referred to the wedding planner as a backstabbing bitch and Arlene as a crackpot imbecile was not working.
The olive branch Danielle chose to extend came in the form of shopping. Danielle and Katie were in the process of converting an unused room in the mansion into a sort of sanctum sanctorum for themselves and they needed to buy furniture and other décor. So after getting that appalling look at herself in the mirror Danielle immediately rang up Nita’s condo, this time leaving a calm message in her most winning voice inviting Arlene and Nita to come along shopping. She made sure to stress that she was done with the histrionics and that because even Max was going to show up for a little while that she would be sure to be on her best behavior.
“Hi, Mom!” Danielle greeted Arlene enthusiastically, holding open her arms for an embrace. The two women air-kissed with mwah-mwahs and then made the usual compliments about one another’s outfits as if this encounter were no different from any other. Nonetheless, Katie was on guard, prepared to step in like a referee at a boxing match.
“Where’s Nita, Mom?” Danielle asked.
“Oh, darling, she’s still too afraid to see you, the silly thing. I told her there was nothing to worry about, of course, but she insists on remaining behind locked doors. I took a cab here.”
“I’ll be sure to call her today and invite her out for lunch sometime next week,” Danielle promised. “Shall we go in?”
They started off merely browsing. Arlene asked Danielle and Katie what purpose the room they were designing was to serve. Katie replied that it was to be a combination reading room, home spa, hobby room and Max-free zone. So Arlene suggested that bamboo would fit in nicely. At a pre-arranged signal from Danielle after about ten minutes Katie began subtly lagging behind the other two women as they moved among the wares until she was far enough away to give her companions some privacy. She kept her eyes on them, though, ready to intervene if necessary.
“So, Mother…” Danielle began, but Arlene, who had noticed Katie’s tactful withdrawal, decided to cut her daughter off and take control of the impending conversation.
“Do you remember the Get Away From It All Girls?” Arlene asked, examining the price tag of a lamp.
“Uh, yeah…sure,” was her daughter’s answer, wondering what the hell this bit of ancient history had to do with anything. “Let’s see, there was you and Mrs. Adler and Mrs. Dreiser, Mrs. Aldrich and—”
“…and Margene Baychester and Helen Asch; the six of us.”
“Right, I remember Mrs. Asch baked great cookies. But what does your old gang of girls have to do with anyth—”
“Do you remember what the Get Away From It All Girls used to do?”
Danielle considered, and then shrugged. “All I remember is that the bunch of you would get together twice a year and go on a girls-only camping trip to Oak Creek in Sedona. That was the joke, right? That you six were ‘getting away from it all’…the husbands, the kids, the housework. I’d be left home alone with Dad for a week and everyday he’d almost burn the house down trying to cook dinner until he finally wised up and started ordering take-out.” Her mobile beeped; it was a text from Max. “Why are you bringing them up?” she asked, beginning to type Max a reply.
Arlene said, “Well, I want you to think for a moment, darling. We made those camping trips for years, right? Six women traveling up north, leaving the men behind, leaving the cleaning behind, leaving the men behind, leaving the demanding children behind, leaving the men behind, leaving the dirty dishes and the laundry behind…” Arlene stared at her daughter. “Leaving the men behind…”
“Okay, I get it,” Danielle said, making a face as though she was dealing with a retarded child and was just humoring it. “You left the men behind, which is not really surpri—”
The mobile dropped from her hand.
“You left the men behind,” she gasped.
Arlene was nodding.
“We left the men behind,” the mother confirmed.
“Do you mean to tell me that…?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of? What the hell does that mean? Either you did or you didn’t!”
“It’s more complicated than that, darling.”
“I can assure you it’s not, Mother.”
Arlene took a quick look around to be sure they were alone.
“Okay, listen, darling,” she said. “Ever since Monday I’ve been trying to figure out how to say all of this and it’s still very, very hard. I’ve actually lost sleep over it, darling, and you know how terrible my eyes look when I don’t get enough sleep.”
“Forget about your eyes and just get on with it, Mom,” Danielle pleaded.
“Fine. Okay, I think you would agree that we live in a pretty open-minded era, no?”
“For the most part, yes; but there are glaring examples of room for improvement,” Danielle answered.
“But things used to be a lot worse,” Arlene stated. “There are plenty of us still walking around who can remember when blacks were treated horribly, for instance, and a woman’s place was in the kitch
en.”
“Yes, I know all that, Mom, but—”
“You only know it from books, darling. To you it was just a bunch of history lessons in school but for me it was different. You see, I grew up wanting certain things out of life. I wanted a nice house, I wanted all the trappings of affluence and I wanted security. I wanted what many little girls of today want but unlike girls of today the girls of my generation could only obtain those things by toeing the line so to speak. We had to marry a nice young man, bear his children and stay home and keep house. If that didn’t happen then quite frankly there was very little way a gal could get to enjoy the kind of lifestyle I’ve enjoyed all these years.”
Danielle was shaking her head, confused and even a little dismayed.
“Mom, you were a young woman when the sexual revolution began. Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, even fucking Erma Bombeck…you could’ve—”
“Darling, don’t be ridiculous, the sexual revolution never made it to Arizona, and it certainly never made it to Fountain Hills.”
“So are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Danielle pressed.
Arlene let out a sigh.
“Darling, think about how conservative and Republican Arizona is nowadays; it’s never been a very liberal state, and back when I was growing up it was much worse. Back then lesbians were women who lived alone in cabins out in the woods near Flagstaff. I simply did what a lot of other women in my shoes did. I play-acted because I was too scared not to and because I was raised to believe that being gay was...”
“Evil?” Danielle suggested. She remembered her Grampa Sam, Arlene’s father, using that very word when she was an adolescent and had overheard the grownups talking about some gay men who were in the news that night.
“Yes, evil,” Arlene concurred. “Your father and I were pretty lax about religion when you were a child, darling, but I was raised in a very Christian home and there weren’t many things worse than being gay in the eyes of my family.”
“Jesus, Mom, I can’t believe this.”
“Anyway, I didn’t want to live in a cabin in Flagstaff; I wanted to live the American dream; so I made sure I did everything I could to get it.” Tears started streaming down her cheeks but she quickly dispatched them with a handkerchief daintily applied to the corner of each eye. “Hence your father.”
She blew her nose and then laughed.
“It may surprise you, darling, but the mothers of half your friends growing up were lesbians and I suspect that more than one of the dads played for the other team as well. That was Fountain Hills back then; a lot of people in disguise. That’s why the Get Away From It All Girls was so important. It was a chance for six of us closet lesbians to run away and have sex with each other safely without the risk of being found out in town and exiled away from our homes, our children and everything else.”
Danielle was so stunned by all she’d heard so far that now she staggered and had to take a seat on a nearby two-thousand quid settee. Arlene continued dabbing at her eyes, giving her daughter a chance to absorb it all and process it. Finally, Danielle said:
“Can I ask you something, then?”
“Of course.”
“If all this is true then why the hell did you freak out when I told you I was bisexual and that I was planning on living with a lesbian?”
“Because I was so used to being afraid for myself and what I could possibly lose that I became afraid for you and what you could possibly lose. I saw that you had a good life: a high-paying job, a penthouse in New York and a wealthy man. I feared it would all be taken away from you. It was a knee-jerk reaction; I guess you could call it a generational thing. Do you understand?”
“I suppose,” Danielle said. “I mean, it makes sense. I remember one of Max’s aunts, on his mother’s side, the African-American side, telling me that her first reaction when her daughter brought home a white boyfriend a couple of years ago was being afraid for their safety; and this was in New York…black girls run around with white guys all the time there, and vice versa. But Max’s aunt grew up in South Carolina during Jim Crow and so being afraid of something like that was sort of a habit.”
Arlene looked down at her feet.
“There might have been another reason I flipped out the way I did,” she said quietly.
“And that was…” her daughter prodded.
Arlene met Danielle’s eyes.
“Jealousy,” Arlene stated with a chuckle. “I was jealous that you were able to be…free. Your confession made me mad at my own life and my own cowardice. Also, I’ve always been jealous of women like Katie; lesbians who aren’t afraid to live life as lesbians. That’s the real reason why I’ve always said I hate Ellen DeGeneres.”
Danielle got off the settee and hugged her mother. When the embrace ended Danielle held Arlene at arm’s length and said, “And so why did you seem so put off by Nita when you first met her at Momo that night?”
“Oh, darling, I wasn’t put off. I was infatuated! It was frightening how strong an effect meeting that woman had on me.”
The daughter nodded. “Katie had the same effect on me,” she said with a smile, remembering. “So that answers that but now I have another question.”
“Fire away,” Arlene said encouragingly. Obviously she was starting to feel reassured.
“Why all the drama about what Dad did, then? Knowing what I know now I would think you would have been relieved because it means you could now live the rest of your life the way you were meant to.”
“It’s the principle of the thing, darling! I devote three decades of my life being a good wife, only sneaking off to have sex with women every so often, and he repays me by having a second family in New Mexico?”
“And why didn’t you just come out and say all this straight away when you arrived here, Mother?”
Arlene shrugged. “I’m used to lying about it, I guess. Besides, I wasn’t sure how you’d react so I figured that pretending the idea just came to me would be better. I had no idea, darling, you’d react so vehemently against it!”
“Um, excuse me?”
This came from Katie who had just stepped up.
“Sorry to interrupt. Is everything alright?” she asked.
“Fine,” Danielle responded. “We have a lot to tell you.”
“It’ll have to wait, I’m afraid,” Katie said. “I just came to let you know Max has arrived. Is that your mobile on the floor?”
***
Max was in London because he had spent the morning doing interviews about Writer’s Block for various radio, TV and print outlets, and though he had to rush back up to Liverpool because the shooting schedule was so tight, he had persuaded the producers to allow him just a small bit of time to say hello to his wife; thus he had been driven to this shop before getting back on the helicopter to Liverpool.
However, Danielle was wishing Max had stayed away just a little longer. She didn’t want this conversation to end so abruptly because there was just so much more she needed to learn from her mother—her mother who was now taking on the appearance of a stranger in Danielle’s mind. Danielle would’ve liked nothing more now than to forget about this shopping trip, forget Katie, forget Max and go back to the mansion alone with Arlene to spend the rest of the day holed up in some room asking questions and rediscovering this woman she thought she knew so well.
But, she supposed, there would be time for that later. Besides, one does not keep Max Bland waiting unless one has a damned good excuse and she knew her mother’s confession would not qualify.
“Mom, I promise we’ll talk later, okay?” Danielle said, giving Arlene another embrace. “We can stay up all night talking if you’d like.”
“I would like nothing more, darling,” Arlene replied.
Turning, Danielle squealed in delight when she laid eyes on her husband. Rushing into his arms she kissed him deeply.
“Mmmm,” she purred. “I’ve been dying for that.” Although she and Katie had had sex frequently over the past se
ven days, Danielle was craving some good old-fashioned heterosexual fun.
“Please say you have time to fuck me,” she whispered in his ear.
“Sadly I don’t,” Max answered. “The goddamn BBC insists on sticking to their shooting schedule so I only have time to pop in to say hello, remind you what I look like and that’s it.”
He then embraced Katie and Arlene in turn, but he asked Arlene if she’d been crying because he noticed her eyes were red; she blushed and excused herself to go to the restroom.
“What’s with her?” Max inquired, not sure he really wanted to know.
Danielle said, “I’ll explain it to you both later. God, it’s so good to see you, I’ve missed you so much.”
“I’ve missed you, too.”
“Now, who’s the blonde?”
Danielle, with that uncanny ability certain women and secret agents possess had sensed the threat as soon as she’d welcomed Max. This, even though Emily had tactfully remained standing by the entrance half the store’s length away and would have appeared to anyone else as having nothing at all to do with the reunion going on. But Danielle had perceived instantly that the gorgeous woman was not just another shopper popping in for a new dining room set and therefore had watched her carefully with her peripheral vision while she was greeting Max. More than once had she thus caught the woman in the act of looking over at Max and even looking Danielle up and down in an appraising manner.
“That’s Emily,” Max said. “She’s my assistant on the show—Janice’s idea,” he tacked on hurriedly. “I’m kinda stuck with her. Actually, she’s quite helpful, you have no idea how demanding it is up there.”
“She’s hot,” Katie muttered.
Danielle found herself nodding; she couldn’t help it, actually; Katie was right, Emily was hot. Despite whatever risk she posed there was no denying that one fact.
“She’s hoping to eventually become a producer,” Max added. “She’s trying to convince me to let her do a documentary about me.”
Danielle gave him a look.
Two for One-Relatively Speaking (The Two for One series) Page 13