“You’re probably freezing to death,” he said, reaching out to rub her bare arms.
“Where’d we go, Troy?” she said. “I mean, what . . .” Then she stopped. The fact that she was a writer was ridiculous, words so often failing her left and right.
“We didn’t go anywhere,” he said. “If, when you say where did we go, what you mean is what happened to those two kids who were so in love, so in love they got married and started having babies only months after meeting each other. . . . I don’t think we were even old enough to drink. . . . If that’s what you mean, then we didn’t go anywhere. We’re exactly the same as we were. The same couple of sweet dummies are right here. I’m the same as I was twenty years ago, mostly. And you’re that same prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.”
“Troy, I’m going to go home. And I can’t have you there for . . . well, I at least need to get away from you for the rest of the night. So you should go to a hotel, or . . . oh, I don’t care. Go wherever you’ve got to go. But not home.”
“You can’t break up with me, Ashley. If we break up, the kids’ll hate us.”
“They kind of already do.”
“No, they don’t. They love us madly. They just want us to think they hate us so we’ll work harder to get them to love us more.”
“You know all the angles,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know anything. I need you around so I know what’s what.”
“Call me tomorrow, maybe,” she said. Ashley had to turn and walk away before she became sentimental. A few more minutes of his gorgeous, pathetic regret and she’d be sniveling in his arms.
“Ashley,” he said, following her.
“I need to be alone, Troy,” she said.
“I can be alone with you.”
Ashley shook her head and raised her hand and kept walking. He would have to work harder to woo her back. She needed extravagant gestures at this point, like a truckload of flowers delivered to her door or an embarrassing, very public serenade beneath her window. She needed all the predictable love stuff, the sappier the better—cliché-ridden messages on heart-shaped balloons, stuffed toy monkeys that kissed with magnetic lips. Boxes of Godiva, an antique book of love poems, mix CDs, an overpriced, barely-there negligee. For now, she needed him to assure her that love wasn’t complex, that the two of them were not above tradition. For at least a short while, there needed to be no over-thinking.
After walking for only a block, Ashley felt numb from the cold. But when she tried to call a cab, she saw that her cell phone’s charge had run down. She turned around to look back at the house, where a few emergency vehicles now sat, their dancing red lights adding to the circus. They’ll find me, she thought, frozen blue in my party dress, mere feet from a house on fire.
If she ran back to Troy now, allowing him to rescue her and to begin his begging for forgiveness ahead of schedule, would that be so defeating? The evening was an extreme one, after all.
But she knew she couldn’t return to her husband just now, unless it was to deliver her knee to his groin, or to drive the heel of her shoe into his foot, or to say something pithy and quotable like scorned women do in movies, provoking applause from the audience and celebratory hoots of mob justice. Ashley loved the vicarious thrill of such moments at the theater, when you feel the tension in your own fist, your lips trembling with empathetic rage, then thwack!, she lets the bastard have it. In life, however, belittling and/or assaulting your husband failed to have the same appeal.
Ashley continued on her trek away from the party. Beyond the front gates of the housing development, perhaps she’d find a convenience store with a phone. Because maybe it wasn’t reconciliation that she wanted. She could see herself unmoored, at ease but adrift, basking in the sympathy of her friends.
A white stretch limo pulled up to the side of the street. “Do you want to get raped?” one of the drag queens shouted from the window. He asked his question with such game-show-host bravado and cheer that it sounded more like an invitation than a warning. “You shouldn’t be out walking alone.” The queen opened the door wide for Ashley.
“I live way downtown,” Ashley said. “Maybe you could just call me a cab.”
“You’re Lee’s mother,” one of the queens said. “Get your skinny little ass in.”
The limo was long enough for all the long-legged men to stretch out luxuriously. Ashley scooted in between a Tina Turner and a stubble-chinned Liz Taylor in her Maggie the Cat slip, and accepted a flute of champagne.
“Don’t worry if you spill it, sugar, it’s cheap as sin,” said one queen in a bedazzled flesh-tone dress like the one Marilyn Monroe had worn to sing to JFK. His face was heavily made up, but he wore no wig. His bald head was patchy with psoriasis.
“How’d you get the limo so quick?” Ashley asked.
“We’ve got Jimmy Ritalin up there on speed-dial,” Marilyn said, gesturing toward the young, angel-faced chauffeur.
“So how do you know Lee so well?” she asked. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer, but she couldn’t keep from asking. “How do you know I’m his mother?”
“Oh, Mrs. Allyson, you don’t recognize me, do you?” said a man in an opalescent pleather minidress and spidery eyelashes that looked too heavy for his lids to lift. “I’m Stubby! Used to live down the street from you. Used to be so fat. I babysat Lee and Peyton. Now I own a comic-book shop where Lee hangs out sometimes. Your boy is going to be so famous, Mrs. Allyson. He’s so talented. Do you know that? Do you realize how insanely talented he is?”
“Lee has more talent in the tip of his little tiny pinkie,” said Tina Turner, “than I’ve got in my whole tongue.”
“Where did he learn to illustrate so beautifully?” asked a much older man, with an English accent, in a yellow polyester pantsuit with Swiss dots. He twisted his string of pearls around his finger.
“He just,” Ashley began, “he just always has.” She was taken by surprise, not by the fact of Lee’s talent but that so many others would be so aware of it.
“He’s been making a mini-comic about our exploits,” Stubby said. “Oh, it’s splendidly filthy.”
“His work is very striking,” the Brit said, “but he needs to venture further from the manga influence. Accentuate his own style. I loaned him a bunch of the Tijuana Bibles I’ve collected, to try to get him to bring a more primitive, rougher edge to the work. But his art will be in a gallery someday, I know it. And published. He’ll be highly respected.”
“The comic is called Those Fabulous Bastards of Omaha,” Stubby said, “and in it we have a live-sex stage act called ‘Bedraggled.’ Isn’t that clever?”
“Has a single one of you trashy little whores ever even heard of decorum?” Liz Taylor said between gritted teeth. “Maybe Mrs. Allyson here doesn’t want to be privy to all the vulgarity.”
“Oh, poo-poo dat, bitch. Mrs. Allyson is a novelist,” Stubby said. “She’s cool with it all. You’re cool, right?”
“Yeah,” Ashley said. “Yeah, I’m cool,” and she began to cry with a mix of exhaustion and pride. Ever since Lee had announced that he was gay, Ashley had been too troubled to notice anything else about him. Of course Lee’s work should be in a gallery. And Ashley should’ve been the first one to tell him that.
She wouldn’t cry for Lee anymore, she decided. But couldn’t she at least shed a few tears for Naomi? Leaving the apartment that night, Naomi had looked just right for him, despite her ill-fitting cast-off prom dress and the wires poking through the petals of the cloth daisies of her dusty wrist corsage. The poor girl, blushing as Lee put his arm around her waist to pull her close, to kiss her cheek, had been the picture of optimism and despair.
The men all leaned toward Ashley to attend to her as she cried, offering tissues, and cooing, and refilling her glass of champagne. Marilyn poured some bubbly onto her silk scarf and began to wipe away Ashley’s lines of mascara. Stubby took out a makeup kit and went to work on concealing her welt, then re-blushing her
cheeks. Tina Turner teased Ashley’s hair with a pick and lacquered it high with a purse-sized can of fruit-scented hairspray.
“Lee should put the party in the comic book,” Marilyn said, leading the queens to discuss plot points as they fussed over Ashley.
“Bedraggled could be performing at the big Sex Ball of West O,” Stubby said.
“When a disco inferno sparks up,” the Brit said.
“And we have to risk life and limb to rescue all the burning trash,” Liz Taylor said.
To clear her mind of the harsh realities of the evening, Ashley closed her eyes to watch Lee’s pictures spring to life in glorious Technicolor. She knew exactly how he’d illustrate the fire, each lick of flame an elegant curlicue of orange and yellow. He’d capture all the drag queens’ clever damage, but he’d give it some glamour. One drag queen’s shapely leg would taper off into the knife-sharp pointy toe of a narrow shoe, another queen would have a towering Marie Antoinette powdered wig that leaned to the left. One would wear a see-through baby-doll nightie, his tucked penis partially visible in transparent panties. There wouldn’t be a single falsie among them, all their breasts fantasy made flesh. No matter how raucous his tale, Lee would give these gentle men unique beauty, showing them a strange kindness they deserved.
A chubby geisha girl with a Harley rider’s handlebar mustache, who’d been sitting silently up front with Jimmy Ritalin, passed his parasol back to Ashley as they pulled up to the curb in the Old Market. The snow had started up again, even slushier than before, but still people milled up and down the streets, from bar to bar.
Ashley was surprised to realize it wasn’t even yet eleven-thirty, and seeing such night activity made her feel a little less lost. After swapping a passel of air kisses with the queens, Ashley stepped from the limo and decided to walk down to La Buvette to drink alone in the hour or so before closing.
Beneath the papery parasol, Ashley thought about a night downtown at the opera a year ago, a production of Madama Butterfly with women wearing polka-dotted kimonos in bright, nautical blues, reds, yellows. Ashley had fallen in love with the whole spectacle, could still see the polka dots shimmying with the ginger steps the many geishas took. A little girl played Butterfly’s little boy, every movement well oiled, and Ashley had become mesmerized as she’d gazed through her antique opera glasses, the child performing like an incredibly brilliant monkey zipped into a child’s costume.
Anne and Phil, who’d been waiting tables at La Buvette for years, didn’t at first recognize Ashley with her makeover, and Ashley decided she liked the disguise of it. Phil told Ashley her hair was “dramatic.” Just last week, Ashley had accidentally knocked over a fifty-dollar bottle of French champagne with her eighteen-dollar fake Birkin bag, but Anne hadn’t made her pay for it, so Ashley ordered the same brand of champagne tonight. “To Anne and Phil,” she said, raising her flute, “who freshen my drinks and are always good to me.”
Ashley sat at the table at the window to watch the people out in the cold and the wet. She knew she’d be up all night inventing the confrontations she’d have with Troy, taking both his part and her own in her mind. Her husband would have her manner of speaking, and he’d end up whispering in her ear all the things she most needed him to say. But for now, feeling drunk, and eased by the flicker of candles, she considered her next novel, which she realized needed to be operatic, not the tiny tale of little lives and small worlds she’d been working on.
She thought she might write about Omaha at the turn of the century—not the most recent turn but the one before that—when the city was mired in political corruption, the streets polluted with child whores turning tricks in tents. The Old Market had consisted of fruit warehouses then, evidenced still by the hooks in the ceiling of La Buvette from which bunches of bananas had once hung. Those fabulous bastards of Omaha could be characters in her book, their hoop skirts and ostrich-feather fans on fire as the city burned, or quaked, or drowned, like some greater city somewhere else.
Ashley was glad she lived just around the corner and wouldn’t have to risk catastrophe by driving home. She sometimes felt on the verge of developing a crippling, irrational fear of something mundane, like riding in a car or crossing a street. She could easily imagine herself phobic, stunned to complete stillness on an ordinary day.
The window became too wet and slicked with ice for Ashley to make out anything but the halos of streetlamps and headlights, so her focus switched from the life outside to the glass. On the windowpane was the press of lips, an imprint of a kiss left behind. She touched her finger to the ghost of the bottom lip and accidentally wiped part of it away. Maybe someone had passed by outside whom someone inside had loved. Loving someone is childish, she’d read in a book. There was truth to it. What you felt when you fell in love was a melancholy burn of nostalgia. If love didn’t always begin with the threat of ending, she realized, it probably wouldn’t be worth much to us at all.
A NOTE ON THE COVER DESIGN
The cover of Devils in the Sugar Shop is based on a design by Maciej Zbikowski for the Polish release of the 1968 Italian film Le Dolci Signore, a bedroom farce starring Ursula Andress and Virna Lisi. Poster design reigned in Poland as a respected and refined art form from the end of World War II until 1989 when the rise of capitalism brought a more commercial approach to the advertising of cinema, opera, and the circus. The design work of the 1950s and 60s was known as the Polish School of Poster and demonstrated diverse influences—folk art, surrealism, art deco, and pop art among them—favoring abstraction over celebrity portraits, metaphor over plot.
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