The Social Climber of Davenport Heights (2 page)

As always I ended in a huddle with my three closest girlfriends.
Girlfriends
might not be the best choice of words. None of us were girls and we were hardly friends. We were four women who shared some mutual goals and were not too circumspect about what happened to those unfortunate enough to get in our way.

Tookie, Teddy and Lexi, however, were born into this avocation. Like David, they’d grown up in the club. Unlike him, it had become the center of their world. I was, I suppose, their outside contact. I not only had my antecedents from the world of the average American, I actually went out there every day and worked. It was undoubtedly mind-boggling.

Also, I had utterly missed out in the name department. Tookie’s birth certificate listed her as Portia Hlynn. Teddy was the nickname for Theodora. And Lexi was short for Alexandria. Still, they treated me as if I were one of them.

“Jane!’ Lexi called out as soon as she saw me.

The other two waved me over, as well.

“That is a great dress,” Teddy said. “Goldblum’s?”

“Saks,” I answered. “It’s a Louis Feraud, I think.”

They all cooed appreciatively.

“David’s not with you tonight?” Tookie asked.

“No, he was otherwise engaged,” I said, rolling my eyes meaningfully.

The three nodded their understanding.

“Boffing the bleached blonde again?” Teddy said, sighing.

I didn’t bother to answer.

Lexi shook her head, indignant. “You really don’t need to put up with that, you know.”

She spoke from experience. The former love of her life had lifted more skirts than a strong west wind. She finally caught him with his pants down, literally. At a dinner party in her own home, she’d walked in to find him getting a blow job from the wife of one of his junior partners. These days Lexi was the third wife to an older man. She may not have loved him as much, but she was definitely a lot happier.

“I don’t really care,” I told them, which was mostly true. After a while you can develop a callus on nearly any muscle, including the heart. “The thing with David,” I said, “is that no matter where his penis might be, his heart is on the golf course.”

The absolute truth of that statement brought a round of distinctly unladylike guffaws. I used the humor as an uneasy segue.

“So who looks probable among the candidates,” I asked.

“Mr. and Mrs. DigiTool are the favorites,” Teddy said.

We all laughed again. It was a joke.

DigiTool was a local software company that had made its college-geek founder wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. He contributed heavily to local causes, but nobody would ever seriously consider him “country club.”

“I saw them at the symphony,” Tookie said. “Birkenstock sandals with hairy feet. What was he thinking?”

“Oh, you meant him,” Lexi chimed in. “For a second I thought you meant his wife.”

That snide remark evoked more snickers.

“Seriously,” I said, “who may have a chance for membership?”

“Dr. and Mrs. Rubenstein look good this year,” Teddy said. “She’s been so visible at the art museum and they’ve given him a chair at the medical school.”

Tookie tutted and shook her head. “They are very Jewish,” she said.

“You’re Jewish,” Teddy pointed out.

Tookie gave a huff of incredulity and rolled her eyes. “We’re only bar-mitzvah-and-sitting-shivah Jewish,” she stated. “The Rubensteins actually go to temple.”

“Well, that’s all right with me,” Lexi said. “Less crowding at the juice bar on Saturday morning.”

We all giggled naughtily.

“Daisy and Thorn Whittingham are back on the board,” Tookie said.

I was surprised. “I thought that after the last time they were blackballed they had huffed off and said they’d never try again.”

“Never say never when it comes to the country club,” Lexi philosophized.

“I suppose you’re putting the Brandts’ name in again,” Teddy said.

I nodded. “Millie and Frank are adorable people,” I told
them. “And I’m not saying that just because I’m an associate in their real estate brokerage. They are just a darling couple.”

“They are,” Tookie agreed. “Everyone loves them. I thought they’d get in two years ago. I can’t believe they were rejected again last year.”

I shook my head sadly.

“I wonder who it is that keeps voting against them?” Lexi asked, looking around the room as if hoping to spot the offending person.

“I haven’t any idea,” I said.

Of course, I knew exactly who kept voting against them. I did. As long as I was the person trying to get them into the country club, I was in a great position in the company. The last thing I wanted was for them to not need me anymore.

The evening dragged on in this manner. The four of us chatted together, gossiping about friends and assassinating the reputations of enemies. It was still early when I made my exit.

“The Beemer convertible?” the young, good-looking parking attendant said to me as I stepped out on the porch.

I nodded, not bothering to correct him. True aficionados know that the nickname
Beemer
actually refers to the BMW motorcycle.
Bimmer
is the correct nickname for the automobile. But
Beemer
just sounded so much better, I used it myself. Ignoring what you know is not the same thing as ignorance.

“You headed home already, Jane? The party’s just getting started.”

I turned to see Gil Mullins in the shadows of the patio. The middle-aged ne’er-do-well son of a recently deceased trucking company boss, Gil was always flirting with me, and when he was sloshed he tended to get obnoxious.

“That husband of yours ought to be worried, a sexy fox like you out among the wolves on her own.”

Sexy fox?
The man was still living in the seventies.

I gave him a dismissive half smile and focused my attention in the direction from which my car would arrive.

To my displeasure, Gil didn’t pick up on my hint, but instead slithered up beside me and wound a sweaty arm around my waist. Gil was not an unattractive man. He had the tall, lean frame of an athlete. But the years, getting close to sixty, I’d guess, were beginning to collect around his belt, and his once-handsome face now had the perpetually florid hue of a daily drinker.

“Jane, baby,” he said, his gin-and-tonic breath much too close to my face, “I’ve been hot for you for a while now.”

“I’m not interested,” I stated flatly, peeling his hand off my body.

“Ah, come on, honey,” he tried again. “We’re all interested. Life is short, we’ve got to grab for the gusto while we can.”

I rolled my eyes and stepped away from him. My car, a red BMW 328i convertible, was coming up the driveway. I felt safe and confident enough to fling insults.

“It seems pretty pathetic, Gil,” I said, “that your pickup lines are so stale you have to resort to beer commercials.”

The Beemer stopped and I walked around the back of it to the driver’s side. The parking attendant got out and handed me the keys.

“Bitch!” Gil cursed at me.

The parking attendant was immediately alert.

“Is he bothering you?”

“Not enough to make it worth your while,” I told him.

“Whoring slut!” Gil shouted out. “Frigid lesbo!”

The young man’s eyes widened.

I smiled reassuringly at him. “Is it possible to be all those things at the same time?” I asked, and gave the kid a teasing wink.

He opened the car door for me and I handed him his tip. I seated myself behind the steering wheel and reached for the handle just as the parking attendant closed the door. In the resulting collision I broke a fingernail.

I cursed under my breath, but he didn’t hear it. Gil was screaming for his own car.

The young man leaned over my door to speak to me privately.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll stall him long enough so he can’t follow you.”

I thanked the guy. It was nice of him to try to protect me, but the truth was that Gil knew exactly where I lived. If he was intent upon continuing this confrontation, he could easily do so.

“Better put up the top, ma’am,” he said. “It’s started sprinkling.”

I nodded. As I headed down the drive and out of the gates, I pressed the button for the roof. It rose slowly, leisurely, like a protective cover keeping out the night sky and drops of rain. I slid the latch at the stop sign. There was just enough drizzle to be a nuisance. I switched the wipers on to intermittent.

Going straight home didn’t seem like a good idea. I wasn’t afraid of Gil Mullins showing up, I just didn’t want the hassle of dealing with him if he did. And I wasn’t ready to face the empty house yet. David would undoubtedly spend the night at Mikki’s apartment and come sneaking in at breakfast. We’d both pretend that he’d been in his bedroom all night.

I drove down Highland Boulevard and got on the freeway. I wasn’t headed anywhere specific, just driving in the night air. Driving and thinking.

Lexi was right, I probably shouldn’t put up with David’s infidelity. But I couldn’t imagine what I could do about it. Of course I could ask him for a divorce. He’d probably love that.
Our marriage had been over for years. Brynn was the only common interest we had. If we divorced I’d lose everything. Financially, I’d probably do all right. I didn’t even need his cash, and I’m sure the court would see that I got plenty of it anyway. But it was David’s lineage that was old money. His family had the rank and the prominence. Without him as my husband, I’d lose everything that I’d worked most of my life to gain. I’d be persona non grata at the club, a nobody in the community, a cautionary tale for younger women at the Junior League, and a regular scrapper and toiler at my job. No way was I going to go back to that. I wondered idly if a good lawyer could get me custody of our social position.

I took the outer loop, away from the lights and traffic of the city. Suburban housing developments glittered like constellations of earthbound stars in the darkness at the sides of the roads.

If I did divorce David, what would Brynn say? Or I guess, more importantly, what would Dr. Reiser say? How much permanent damage could a broken home do? Practically every girl she knew had been through at least one family breakup. They all seemed to manage. But Brynn was somehow so fragile, so easily wounded. Had I made her that way? She’d had the best of everything. I’d seen that she had everything that I had ever wanted.

I’d seen that
I
had everything I’d ever wanted. But I wasn’t any happier than she was.

I didn’t blame all the ills of my marriage on David. The infidelity, yes. But that was just a small example of a lot of things that were wrong. We hadn’t shared our lives, really shared our lives, for a very long time. Maybe we never had. It might have been different if Brynn had been a boy. David had wanted a boy. If we’d had a son maybe he would have taken more responsibility for raising him. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been so
overwhelmed with it. Things could have worked out differently if our baby had been male.

David loved Brynn, there was no doubt of that. But he’d started pleading for another child when she was just a toddler. By then I knew that I was in over my head. I flatly refused. David didn’t acquiesce gracefully. He hounded me about it for years. I’m not sure he ever really got over the idea. We just quit talking about it. I’m sad for Brynn that she didn’t have siblings, but I was never sorry that I didn’t have more children. I would have made two children twice as screwed up as one. And as for my career, no way. I’d have been too busy shuttling kids back and forth to therapy appointments.

I glanced down at my broken fingernail. I didn’t have a manicure scheduled until Tuesday. My purse was sitting on the seat beside me and I began rifling through it, looking for an emery board.

I looked up again. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I knew that something was wrong. I didn’t know what. There was an alertness in me that was primordial, the kind of caution that saved my ancestors from saber-toothed tigers stalking from downwind. It zizzed adrenaline into my brain. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what. I didn’t quite see it. Then I realized what I was looking at.

An eighteen-wheeler coming from the opposite direction, maybe a quarter-mile of empty freeway away from me, was haphazardly listing across three lanes of the interstate. It was a huge tanker truck. Not going particularly fast, but moving steadily and irrevocably toward the passing lane.

I watched it, detached. The driver must be asleep, I thought. It was a good thing there was no traffic, I thought. Somebody could get killed.

When the truck jumped the median, my reflexes went off
like an alarm clock. It was coming across the road at me, the tanker load it hauled slithering to the left in front of me like a tail on a giant T. rex.

I swerved into the far right lane. It kept coming. I leaned down hard on my horn.

“Wake up! Damnit!” I screamed.

If I sped up and went off on the shoulder I might be able to get around it. But if the tanker did hit me, my going faster wouldn’t help. I didn’t have time to think it through. I stomped the gas pedal all the way to the floorboard and fled toward the very edge of the pavement.

It was going to be close.

It was going to be too close.

I saw the clear freedom of three empty lanes ahead for just an instant. Then the back of the tanker jackknifed in front of me. I turned sharply and heard the scream of metal as the passenger side of the Beemer skidded along the guardrail. Friction sparks lit up the darkness. I hit the brakes.

The impact was surprisingly sudden, sharp, loud. For a half an instant I was held taut by the seat belt. Then the air bags deployed and I was completely immersed in a world of beige.

Propelled back into my seat, I gasped for breath. I don’t know if I had been holding it or had it knocked out of me.

It was quiet. Amazingly quiet. The only sound was oxygen rushing into my lungs and the pounding of my pulse through my veins.

The air bags began their slow deflate and the faint whistle brought with it the first sense of reality.

“I’m all right,” I whispered gently, not completely sure that it was true.