Fortune Is a Woman (34 page)

“You are such a good little soldier,” Marilyn said, “to indulge me so. Thank you sweetheart.”

“So…I could actually sleep here tonight if I wanted to?” Lydia asked, following her mother’s lead and dropping the topic of illicit sex. It was a muddy subject anyway.

“You could actually move in if you wanted to! If you didn’t mind the contractors coming and going.”

She would mind contractors coming and going. “What’s the status here? I see new plaster and woodwork. They’re nearly done inside?”

“Practically. Except for sanding and painting and staining and tiling. That stuff. Which reminds me, we’ve got to go over those color chips before you leave for Madrid.”

Lydia was leaving next week, Christmas Eve in the morning. These last few days before the much-anticipated departure were dragging by in slow motion and the late night phone conversations with her wife were simply not enough to get her through them cheerfully. Moreover she was troubled with herself, too troubled to tell anyone about it. She had behaved badly in the parlor–there were other words she could use to describe her conduct, but badly would suffice–and the episode there with Venus had left her feeling hollow inside. There was a bevy of apologies for it on the tip of her tongue, but she hadn’t the courage to deliver any of them. She needed a fix, to be filled with Helaine Kristenson again, and the TV and newspaper features of the Love Doc, a nickname that had always made her cringe, were poor substitutes for the real thing. The same for the sex videos Delilah gave her as a prank for Christmas. Dumb, hokey, and uninspiring, a reaction which Delilah subsequently denounced as “downright un-American”.

“You could really use a therapist, Liddy,” she joked.

True.

Her Love Doc was homesick and showing the strain of her foreign tour. With every passing week she saw her audiences growing larger, louder and more demanding. This was going beyond anyone’s expectations, auditoriums and theaters choked with raucous fans and celebrity hounds, sidewalks, streets and entrances congested with rancorous crowds of supporters and protesters clashing with each other every chance they could get. Helaine was spooked by it all, and security, though Lydia could see that she was hesitant to discuss it, was becoming a number one issue for her and her entourage. Yesterday she had called earlier than usual sounding dead on her feet and Lydia wondered aloud how she was going to make it through Christmas in that condition. She had even heard herself offering to cancel their rendezvous so she might rest up for the next leg of the journey. Happily she received strenuous objections to that proposal.

“Carlos has the logistics all figured out and he promises to have me completely restored by your arrival. He’s my lifesaver.”

Carlos this, Carlos that. And now Carlos was her lifesaver. What flavor, she wanted to retort. “Okay.”

She was frequently finding herself jealous of the incredible Mr. Montague. Not only because he had the privilege of being with her wife everyday, but because he was so proficient at providing for her needs.
“Tell him I’m delighted,” she said, biting her lip and flipping him the bird across the Atlantic. “It gives me such a sense of security to have him there.”

“Darling? You’re jealous of Carlos?”

“No, no. It’s good you have him.”

“You needn’t be, you know?”

“I’m not really. I’m being sincere. I’m truly grateful to him. Really I–”

“Sweetheart?”

“Oh, I…what was the question, Mom?”

“The color chips?”

“Right. I want us to pick out the colors before I leave for Spain. Did I already say that?”

Marilyn shook her head and smiled empathetically. Her daughter always acted dazed when Helaine wasn’t with her, lost somewhere in a foggy love spell that no one else could possibly lift. Until recently, she had forgotten what it was like to feel that way, but it was something they both had in common now, leaving the planet at the wave of someone’s wand. Or at the mere idea of it.

“Getting there,” Roy announced, returning to them with a broad smile on his swarthy face, a kitchen towel tucked into his belt. “They fit perfectly,” he said, casting a shy glance Marilyn’s way. “Thank you, Lydia.”

“Oh, good,” she said, gift perfect fits. So now, thanks to Delilah and her keen eye, Mom would be dating a man who wears leather pants. “You’re welcome.” (Wait till Daddy finds out.)

“Eddie called,” Marilyn said hastily, sensing her daughter’s ambivalence.

“Oh?” The prodigal son’s annual phone call home. “From where this time?” Lydia asked.

“Hong Kong.”

Hong Kong. What an excellent place for a man to live whose only interests were women and wampum was what she didn’t say. Dinner was wafting into the living room. She lifted her head and sniffed the air hungrily and swallowed bitter words before she could utter them. Eddie was a sacred cow to her mother and there would be no joy in slaughtering him. He could do that for himself.

It was these subtle movements–a raised head, flared nostrils, dilated pupils–followed by a measured restraint, her dignified silence, that finally won Roy Mann over. Before this he had thought Marilyn’s daughter arrogant and perhaps even frigid. She was, he could see now, a very dutiful daughter, and very much like her mother, undeniably warm-blooded.

“He’s coming home, he says.”

“For the holidays?” Lydia asked. Roy was smiling benignly at her. She willed him to put another log on the fire and he got up with a grunt and did it.

“Sometime in the new year,” Marilyn said, unconscious of the fact that she was admiring his backside.

The idea of Eddie coming home, stirring things up with the family again when they were already too topsy-turvy, seemed to have a chilling effect on Lydia. She pushed her chair closer to the fireplace. “It will be wonderful to see him again,” she lied. “It’s been…I don’t know how long…too long.”

Marilyn gazed at Prometheus playing with his embers and flames. She didn’t know how she would explain him to her son. Eddie was tough on women and unsympathetic. In that respect, he was more like his father than he could ever stand to admit. “Yes, it has been, sweetheart. Too long. Too long.”

_____

It now had a purplish hue to it, which no amount of lipstick could mask from those who knew her well.

“Who did that?” her mother demanded.

“Mama, I hit my mouth at the gym. Merry Christmas.”

“Gym?” Jasmine asked skeptically.

“Yeah, gym. No presents for you, right?”

“Right,” Jasmine replied, smacking her sister’s outstretched palm. “You look like hell,” she jeered.

“Thanks.” Venus said, handing her a check. “That’s so the bums can be in furs this winter.”

“Venus, who hit you?” her mother asked again. “What piece of sh–”

Venus held up her hand for silence. She did not want to hear Lydia Beaumont vilified, not even anonymously. Besides, she didn’t hit her.

Mama dropped the subject and they all took their seats quietly.

She didn’t hit her. She elbowed her by accident, but flailing arms and hundreds of elbows was not the impassioned response Venus was shooting for from Lydia and after the ill fated match in the parlor she felt further away than ever from winning her. In all probability it was time to give up the hunt. She licked her wounds constantly as she chowed down dinner with her family and evaded their prying questions. In less than twenty-four hours she would be in Paris. Once there, the plan was to hide under the covers for a couple of weeks until everything healed. Her bruises, her pride.

“It ain’t football,” her father muttered. “Pass the gravy.”

She shot him a curious look and handed him the butter dish.

“Ain’t a game at all,” he said. “Pass me the gravy, Venus. The gravy.”

_____

For sure love is not a game, but it started out that way for Edward Beaumont the third and he played it hard and fast, an approach he had unfortunately learned from his father, deviating only slightly from his miseducation in that he never married and had no intentions to do so. Ever.

He had been happy playing his games in Hong Kong. Hong Kong was like Shanghai had been for him before he found it necessary to flee: one terrific playground. In Hong Kong he hoped to get back in the swing of things again, stop looking over his shoulder all the time, but as with Shanghai, and before that, Bangkok, and before that, London, his hopes were ultimately dashed.

Everywhere he went was the same for Eddie. He continued to do what it was he always did; he continued to get what it was he always had. In short, nothing but trouble, with a capital
W
.

The woman with child in the present case was, as always, an attractive one, from an attractive and well-connected Chinese family, the sort of family who did not take kindly to being dishonored by anyone, let alone the distinguished looking westerner who had presented himself to them as a good catch for their educated daughter, who had deceived them with his charm and sophistry into believing he was courting her for the purposes of marriage, painting a rosy picture of their daughter’s future married to a successful American businessman while he pilfered from them and then squandered away in high-risk investments, funds worth more than her dowry.

They were after their rambling, gambling, middle-aged American playboy on the run, the breathtakingly reckless day trader who had defrauded them of all that they deemed invaluable. They had their goons hot on his trail and that wasn’t funny to Edward Beaumont III. They were big goons and there were a lot of them and they had followed him all the way to Hong Kong and they didn’t seem to mind a game of hide and seek, nor were they about to give up the chase for him anytime soon.

So he was going home at last, returning to the scene of his earliest romantic crimes. Those girls must all be married, divorced, and remarried by now, he reasoned. The dust finally settled. Whatever it took, he would, he promised himself, tread very lightly once there, so as not to stir it all up again. Yes, he would. A day or a decade, no matter. He was going to tread lightly now, until this storm blew over, until everything settled back down again.

_____

“Daddy knows he’s coming?”

“Your father doesn’t return my calls. I don’t know what he knows.”

The “your father” clanged like a broken bell. Lydia gazed into the fire and waited for Roy to check on the turkey again before saying another word. When he abruptly left she sent her mother a pained expression but still said nothing. In the embers she could see shadowy figures. They were dancers and fighters. They were frantically fusing together and licking at the walls, only to disintegrate.

“I’m sorry, honey.”

Sorry, honey, sorrow, honey, sad, honey. Lydia was sorry, too, ineffably sorry. Sorry rose up scorching and licked at her insides. She was sorry that the lake house had needed a master carpenter, that its former mistress had needed a master carpenter.
I have a fire going
. She was sorry about Venus. She regretted the elbow and the earrings. She thought of calling to say so.
Sorry I nearly put your teeth out in a panic
, she wanted to tell her
. Forgive me.

“Lydia…?”

“I know, Mom. So am I.”

Roy reentered the room cautiously wearing his new pants. “Ready when you are.”

“Ready as ever,” Marilyn said, glancing to her daughter.

Lydia glanced to both of them. Del was right, she mused. Roy was a man who could get away with wearing leather pants without the risk of looking queer. Delilah was wrong, however, in her romantic hope that Marilyn would ever be done with him.

Standing an arm’s length apart from each other, Lydia could practically see the force that was pulling them together. Illuminated in lamplight and winter’s fire, they didn’t look old so much as weary. Two weary people who had closed a vast distance between them, walking for so long it had forever stooped them, traveling by day till the sun and the wind and the rain had bleached their hair white and permanently stained their skin, traveling by night till the darkness had left them farsighted. Nothing and no one could have prevented this man and this woman from coming together. They were so clearly each other’s destination.

“You go on ahead,” Lydia told them. “I need to make a quick call.”

Fortitudinous

It helped immensely to find Paris dry and warm, even if the skies were inclement. It didn’t hurt either that Claudine was there at the airport when the plane landed. Venus took her hand and allowed herself to be whisked into a waiting taxi.

“Ooh–what happened?”

“I hit it, Claudine.”

“She bit it?”

“Hah.”

At the apartment in Marais things were exactly the same as when Venus had last seen it, the cat sleeping like an overindulged trollop on the only decent chair Claudine owned, pantyhose and brassieres hanging from the kitchen hooks, half-read books and newspapers covering the floor like a carpet, and emptied boxes of Parisian confections collecting at the foot of the four-post bed. How the woman loved her
chocolat
.

She smiled and marveled anew at Claudine’s exclusive address with its exposed plumbing network and turn-of-the-century appliances, the walls thick with paint and paper and so warped it made her feel seasick to stand up for too long or to ponder the pictures that hung on them, whether they were crooked or not. The wide plank floors were wavy, too, worn into an etched path that forked from the small entranceway. One road led to the left through the living room into the kitchen, the other went right for the bedroom, sneaking past the half-drawn makeshift curtains Claudine had tacked across the doorway for privacy. Privacy from whom, Venus could only speculate. Maybe there were some who came uninvited, who were not welcome in her bedroom. To them, perhaps she was just a coquette and not a mistress. If that was the case then she liked the curtains there, Venus decided, stepping over the fork deliberately and halting in the middle of the living room to drop her bag.