Viv led the way to her office in the back, knowing how her slip dress always looked to be slipping right off, inch by inch, with each strut and wiggle of her hips. She put the cassette in her stereo and cocked her head to listen to Holiday’s voice, pitiful, heroin-choked. Holiday distractedly let “Everything Happens to Me” fade and fell into an impromptu, a cappella, finger-popping version of “I Don’t Want to Cry,” prompting the piano player to scold, “I don’t know what key you’re in, Jesus Christ.”
“Rough stuff,” Viv said, tucking Yvonne back in her straw bag, where the dog curled up at the bottom, nesting in a silk scarf. Viv downed her shot of scotch and dropped into the cushions of the sofa next to Zeke. They kissed as Holiday let “I Don’t Want to Cry” fall apart too, complaining in her drug-addled croak, “It’s a hard tune, that’s why I never want to fuck with it.”
After making out for a short while, Viv stopped to ask what had made Naomi upset.
“Nah, I don’t really want to talk about it,” he said. Zeke did this to Viv often. He’d offer a peek at something intimate in his life, then clam up. It seemed calculated and competitive, not at all accidental, this act of revealing, then concealing. It seemed his way of reminding her that they were not lovers and were maybe even something far less than friends.
“I’ve been dating someone nice,” Viv lied. The very second she said it, she wanted to admit her lie and to blame it on Sybil the Guru. Sybil the Guru, in books, taught bad habits to desperate women and conducted seminars on manipulating men and bettering your life through deception. Her advice was musty, of the send-yourself-flowers-and-call-the-deadbeat-up-and-say-How-wonderful-to-send-me-flowers-but-why-didn’t-you-sign-the-card? variety. But Sybil the Guru, with her blond up-do and rhinestone-studded barrettes, with her high heels and her vintage Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses, had a way of making everything old sound new again, a way of giving every cheap effort a pinch of élan. Even all the worthless advice you’d followed before sounded promising when Sybil the Guru gave it a spin.
“What’s he like?” Zeke asked.
“Well, he’s black, which will make my mother happy finally,” she said, to imply that perhaps Zeke’s whiteness made him less than perfect for her. Viv’s last two fiancés had been white men, and though her mother wasn’t opposed to such things, the way she would say, “I only want for you what you want for you,” always had a sad ring of resignation.
“So he’s black,” Zeke continued, leaning in to kiss her neck. “What else?”
“He has a pretty face, like a girl,” Viv said, inventing a man, a novelist, maybe, or maybe a painter, maybe a sensitive illustrator of children’s books. But not too sensitive. He should be able to fix things, like appliances on the fritz. He should be able to cry at the movies, but not bawl, and not at scenes too sappy. “He’s built kind of like you, but he doesn’t spend time at the gym or anything. He’s like you but without muscles.”
“I’m me without muscles,” Zeke said.
Viv put her hand on Zeke’s upper arm. He definitely had a muscle or two. And he had beautiful brown eyes and a full head of soft brown hair with a few distinguished tendrils of silver.
His choosing Deedee, all those years ago, still confused Viv. Deedee was certainly not unattractive. She had a pixie-like nose (not at all pug, as some might say) and naturally feathery dark-blond bangs and icy blue eyes that sparkled so much she seemed on the verge of tears. But next to Zeke, any woman might look deformed. Zeke was of a “holy shit, would you look at that fine motherfucker” level of beauty. Seeing him for the first time back in college, at a bar with Deedee, had been like catching a glimpse of a unicorn.
“Were you just the marrying kind?” Viv asked now during a break in the kissing, Billie Holiday having begun “I Must Have That Man.” Viv ran more Bonne Bell over her lips. “Why did you get married so young? Have a child so young? I mean, relatively young.”
“You can get addicted to that stuff,” Zeke said.
“Addicted to marriage,” she said, nodding, understanding.
“No, to that Chapstick stuff. Lip balm. Carmex. You use too much of it, and you just need more.”
Viv didn’t doubt it. She had become a little addicted. She’d even been applying it to her hangnails.
“Well,” Viv said, “if you won’t tell me why you married her, then tell me why you divorced her.”
“Easy,” he said. “I fell for somebody else. I had an affair.”
“She’s wondered about that,” Viv said. Ever since the divorce, Deedee had spent Saturday happy hours conducting a postmortem of her marriage to Zeke, retrieving old arguments from years in the past, squinting for clues. Though she occasionally conjured up a theory about the dissolution of her marriage, Deedee never presented any hard evidence of adultery.
“She doesn’t really know,” Zeke said. “She suspects, I think, but I’ve always denied that I knew Olivia before the divorce. I guess it wasn’t even really the affair that ruined everything. It was the guilt. You know, when I was in high school, I was in the drama club, and we watched a tape of a play that had Cloris Leachman in it.”
“Oh, I love her.”
“Oh, yeah, she’s great. In this scene, she’s having a night alone with her husband, and it’s their twenty-fifth anniversary or something, and she baked a cake, and she asked him if he’d ever had an affair. And he said, yes, he’d had two. Then she said that she’d had two too. But then it turns out that they were just ribbing each other, and they actually hadn’t had affairs. And they had to swear on it. And Cloris Leachman, at first she’s making a big joke of it all in that way that couples who know each other so well do, the way they act like they’re the oldest, dearest friends in the world and know exactly what the other person will think is funny. They share this sense of humor, and it’s like a waltz, an easy waltz. Cloris Leachman, she gets serious, and she smiles, and she swears, with her hand in the air, that she’s never cheated on her husband. And that she never would. And never could. And that scene, in this play that I don’t even remember the name of, defined for me how a marriage was supposed to end up. More so than my parents’ shitty marriage, or anybody else’s. And I remembered that scene as I drove home from Olivia’s house that first afternoon, and I felt like I was going to throw up. My head was swimming. I was in despair. I’d never have that moment with Deedee, on our twenty-fifth or thirtieth or fortieth or whatever, I’d never be able to swear, honestly, that I’d never cheated, and never would, and never could. In a twenty-minute roll in the sheets, I made that moment forever unattainable. And when I realized that, I started to pick at the stitches, to nitpick, to blame Deedee for my infidelity. If she hadn’t been so comfortable, or so preoccupied with Naomi, or so convinced that I’d never cheat.”
Viv poured more scotch. “Couldn’t you have just ended it with Olivia? You know, you could have used the infidelity as a way to revive your marriage. Married men always go back to their wives. Isn’t guilt, after all, the most effective motivation we have, really, for doing the right thing?”
“Oh, but the sex with Olivia was fucking phenomenal,” Zeke said, patting his hand quick at his chest to simulate a rapid heartbeat. “I mean, Jiminy Cricket. The fuckin’ earth, you know, it moved, you know what I’m saying? And, and, and just nonstop. Linda goddamn Lovelace never had as many orgasms as this woman, I mean, you’d barely get inside her, you’d barely just kind of rub against her and she was rocking the bed like it was the goddamn Exorcist. Holy Moses. Deedee, meanwhile, took daaaaays to come, you know, my jaw was in traction half the time, but Olivia, you know . . .”
“Okay, yeah, yeah, I get it. I got it.”
“Well, yeah, sorry,” Zeke said. “I just had never had sex like that before. Or since. I was a virgin when I married Deedee. Because I was religious. My parents weren’t religious at all. They were way not religious, which was why I sought it out elsewhere. When I was a kid, some kids we called the God Squad would drag me to these weird churchy carnivals, these
things with preachy ventriloquists. Hey, I’ve never told Deedee about my, my and Olivia’s, well, little zippity-doo-dah. So kind of keep it under your hat, huh?”
“Of course,” Viv said, and she resisted the urge, upon all this sudden, uncharacteristically intimate revelation, to pursue a definition of their own little zippity-doo-dah. She felt compelled to rattle off all those deadly questions (Where do you see this thing going? Are you ever going to try to get me into bed? When are you going to introduce me to all your little friends?), but she heard Sybil the Guru’s voice, from the speakers at a seminar, snapping with her trademark mouthful of three or four slugs of Bazooka: Every time he pokes his head up out of his hidey-hole, every time he offers a smidgen of insight into how his tricky, tiny brain works, he pops back down into the dark and stays out of reach for days. You gotta let him hibernate. If you try to force him up out of the hidey-hole, he gets his days and nights mixed up, and it’s all over. Repeat after me: “Respect the hidey-hole.”
Besides, it had been enough to hear about the virginity. It explained so much. Religious men often married women who were less than beautiful. Maybe it was like mortification, a hair shirt.
“I got the oddest one yet from my stalker today,” Viv said, admiring how expertly she kept herself from showing too much enthusiasm for all of Zeke’s chatter. “My head and hands and feet glued to a picture of a woman in a paper gown, all wide-legged in a doctor’s stirrups. Is that even a kind of porn? A trip to the gynecologist?”
“Everything’s a kind of porn.”
They both stared up at the wall above the desk at the stalker’s collages taped to the brick. “My favorite’s the one on the upper left there,” Viv said. “The one where I’m lifting up my nun’s habit to show off my chastity belt. It’s kind of a cliché, you know, the whole madonna-whore thing, but it almost works.”
Viv had gone through stages in her relationship with her stalker: her first reaction to the mailings had been a mixture of amusement and disquiet and shock; then she’d been frightened for a while as the collages had kept arriving; then she’d become mostly annoyed. The stalker had ceased to feel as threatening and had begun to finally even seem a creative collaborator, last week, when she had seen Sybil the Guru on a talk show.
The truth is very easy to grasp, Sybil the Guru had preached. If you aren’t the mad love of a man’s life, you really aren’t much of anything to him.
“You’re somewhere else,” Zeke whispered, smiling, as he stopped kissing her. He looked at his watch, then bent over to put on his shoes. She hadn’t noticed that he’d kicked them off. He’d never taken off his shoes before in the studio. “You’re going to be late for the girls at La Buvette,” he said, leaning over for a quick good-bye kiss before standing.
“I’m not even sure if we’re meeting there tonight,” Viv said. “Ashley is having a Sugar Shop party later. Maybe we’re skipping cocktails.”
Zeke put on his parka and pulled up the hood. “I like you, kiddo,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “But I like you just a little bit less than you like me. And I always will. Remember that.”
“Whatever,” he said, and he winked and left.
La Buvette was only a few blocks away, so she thought she’d better venture up there just in case. She put her robe back on and returned the chopsticks to her hair. She freshened her makeup. Being selected as “Flirty and Under Forty” hadn’t made her feel better about anything. As a matter of fact, it just seemed to emphasize the fact that she’d fibbed, technically missing the cutoff age just by the skin of her teeth.
On the cassette, Billie Holiday had stopped singing altogether to tell muddled stories from her career, such as one about how tough it was to find good-paying gigs in Chicago. “I don’t have a legitimate voice,” Billie said, with what sounded to Viv like pride.
Ashley, Deedee & Viv
Ashley, distracted, scalded a delicate buttermilk pudding and wrecked a torte, so she put on her pea coat and abandoned her kitchen, heading off to La Buvette. Her party was only a few hours off, but she couldn’t quite stand another minute alone in the apartment. She took the usual table in the back near the dusty jars of exotic spices and boxes of water crackers and bags of basmati rice. The happy-hour crowd was subdued. Her glass near her lips, she watched the flicker from a candle on the wall reflected in a row of black bottles of red wine.
Her hearing tried to catch up with the flow of the song from the speakers overhead, and finally she recognized it, Roy Eldridge doing a rainy-day riff on “If I Had You.” A cork popped, a spoon rang as it stirred sugar in a cup, an old woman, smoky-throated, laughed a laugh that echoed. A wine glass fell and rolled but didn’t break, and those who witnessed applauded.
At the front of La Buvette, the walls on either side of the front door were not really walls at all but rather French doors of a sort that unlocked and unlatched down the middle, the wine bar and grocery having originated years ago as a fruit stand in the marketplace. In the spring, the waiters pulled open the walls and pushed the tables out, and the sunlight rushed in to make everyone squint and perk up. Ashley felt transported whenever she saw those doors open on the first warm day of the year. Omaha was at its most magical when it most resembled some other city.
“Smell me,” Deedee said the second she arrived, holding out the back of her hand. She’d gone home to clean up. She still wore that pelt of chinchilla but beneath it now was a violet-colored dress swirled with paisley. “Smells like cedar chips in a guinea pig’s cage, right? It’s spray-on tan.” She pulled her hand back and sniffed at herself, wrinkling her nose.
Deedee ordered a shot of chilled Southern Comfort from Jones, the waiter they always demanded, a skinny twentysomething with a drooping faux-hawk who played the dulcimer in an indie band.
“What are you thieving now?” Deedee asked. Ashley had taken out her little notebook and golf pencil.
“Spray-on tan,” she said. “Guinea pig cage.” Since her new erotic novel was meeting with rejection, Ashley was de-sexing it and re-peopling it, taking notes, filling the book with her friends’ and family’s oddball idiosyncrasies. Maybe she would render this book impossibly personal, unpublishable. She missed her old life already, in many ways, back when publishing a novel had been simply a dream. And now Peyton was in college, Lee weirdly almost of age, Troy so suddenly mysterious despite her having gotten to know him backward and forward many years ago. She thought ahead and saw herself an old lady wishing she’d recorded all those years of conversation with Viv and Deedee at La Buvette. The fact that she had never done, and would probably never do, something so impractical and lovely for her elderly self broke her heart in two.
“I might have to kill you off in the book, though,” Ashley said with a sigh, feeling sentimental. “The novel needs some kind of significant death.”
“Kill me all you want,” Deedee said, taking out her pack of menthols. “Just don’t make me fat.” Deedee, self-conscious now, fiddled with her tennis bracelet as her cigarette smoked between her fingers. “Okay, I can’t wait for Viv, I have to tell you now,” Deedee said. “I just called Zeke on his cell phone a little bit ago, and asked him out for a drink, and he said yes. Now I know it could be nothing, but even if it’s nothing, it’s kind of something, don’t you think?”
Jones set down Deedee’s drink. “I brought you a double, JonBenet,” he said. He called Deedee JonBenet because of her blue eye shadow and the way her voice went high-pitched and babyish whenever she had too much to drink. “Ah, and there’s Lady Di,” he said, nodding toward the door.
One slow night Jones had joined them at their table, his dish towel slung over his shoulder, and Viv had talked about how hard she’d tried as a little girl to get her hair as straight as Diana Ross’s in Mahogany. It wasn’t until she was in college that someone told her that all of Ross’s hairdos had simply been wigs. So now Viv was Lady Di after Diana Ross.
Jones winked at Viv as he walked to stand behind the cheese-and-meat counter.
He wore a tight T-shirt promoting some girls’ volleyball championship, and his math, for tallying up the bar tabs, was scribbled across the front of his baggy, faded jeans. Viv had once heard his band perform, a quartet of sissies with bobby pins and painted toenails and grim tattoos—a dagger up a neck, a big-titted nude reclining up an arm bruised by junk. Viv had worn dark glasses to the coffee-shop performance, some vodka snuck-in in a sippy cup she’d once stolen from her sister’s kid. While the songs had had the shivery twang of Celtic ballads, the lyrics alluded to frantic death wishes and addiction. Though Viv only had a decade, a decade and a half, on Jones, she’d felt elderly among his band’s fans.
Viv was relieved that her drinking compatriots were perched per usual at their back table. Their Saturday get-togethers felt like a reunion of sorts. When Ashley and Deedee had been mothers of young children, they’d become cut off from the world as if vaguely diseased, their sons and daughters acting on them like a debilitating bug caught on a vacation to an underdeveloped country. Back then, Ashley and Deedee couldn’t drink much, couldn’t have parties in their homes. You could call them at any hour of the day and they’d sound beat and frazzled. They weren’t the mothers that Viv had hoped they’d be—unimpressed by their children and mostly indifferent to their needs.
Viv got to the table just as Mrs. Bloom approached it, jingling the change in a coffee can beneath their noses. Viv sat, then stilled the wobble of the table with a crumpled gum wrapper she stuck beneath one of the legs.
“I’m doing a quick collection to raise money for the legal representation of the teenaged girl who burnt her house down in South O,” Mrs. Bloom said. “You haven’t heard? She dropped a match in her baby brother’s crib and the whole house of sticks went up in a puff of smoke. They want to send her to jail, but she’s been raped all her life. Cousins, uncles, stepdaddies. Neighbors. Friends of the family. They’ve all had their turn. It’s time for her to have a chance to rise above her circumstances.”
Devils in the Sugar Shop Page 8