The Canterbury Sisters (11 page)

“In fact, Psyche feels so lonesome there in the castle,” Angelique says, “that she even asks her awful sisters to come pay her a visit. And that’s how I knew I was Psyche.”

She says this last line with a strange sort of casualness, flipping the dark curtain of hair away from her marked-up face, stopping halfway astride one of the rough, low fences we’ve been crossing all afternoon, teetering a moment, until her boots find solid ground on the other side. They have small pointed heels and small pointed toes, utterly impractical for the trail, but I’ve noticed that tiny women like Angelique are often masters of walking in impractical shoes, willing to go to any degree of discomfort just to be a bit taller.

“I guess you’ve all seen our house,” she says, glancing around for confirmation. “It’s the one on the series and it’s got four whirlpool tubs and a chef’s kitchen and Nico even called it The Castle, that’s what he used to say, but once we moved in, I was just like Psyche. So desperate for company that I broke down and asked my older sisters to come for a week and visit us. They said I did it just to show off, to say, ‘Nah-nah-nah, look at the size of my bathroom,’ but that wasn’t it. I really missed them. And I was, like, trapped. Which sounds stupid, because how can you be trapped in a castle, but that’s what it felt like.”

“Wealth and leisure,” Jean says, “can be surprisingly hard to bear.” She smiles warmly at Angelique. It’s hard to imagine two women with less in common on the surface, but they have found a kinship in their stories. It’s a secret, I suppose, that supremely successful women can share only with each other. God knows, none of the rest of us want to hear it. The secret that having it all isn’t nearly enough. That what we’ve been taught is the end of the story is actually the beginning, that paradise can become just one more box to escape.

“When Nico first moved us into The Castle,” Angelique is saying, “having all those servants flipped me out. Like one day, I was craving these pomegranate martinis. The kind they have at Del Frisco’s, you know? They’re super good, so I went down to the bar in the billiard room and I started messing around, looking for the stuff to make them, and suddenly this guy comes in out of nowhere. He was like the butler and valet and bodyguard and bartender and all that stuff rolled into one and he says, ‘Oh no, ma’am’—he called me ‘ma’am’—and he takes the ice tongs right out of my hands and he makes a big pink pitcher of martinis. But here’s the thing: I didn’t want a pitcher of martinis. I was by myself. I only wanted one. But they were good, so I drank them, and the next day when I come in from my workout it’s sitting there on the bar, another pitcher of pomegranate martinis. And after that he made them every day, just in case I might want one, and it seemed mean not to drink them when he’s made them just for me and the next thing you know there’s a whole episode of me checking into rehab at Promises Malibu, because I’ve got a pomegranate martini monkey on my back.” She stops, exhausted from the chore of walking and talking simultaneously, just as Tess warned that the speaker would be. “They made my life into a fucking joke. Pomegranate martinis. Did you see the bit they did on
SNL
?”

“You were speaking of Psyche?” Tess prompts. “How she couldn’t bear living forever like that, never seeing her husband’s true face.”

“Oh yeah, Psyche,” Angelique says. “That poor little bitch. She has everything, except, like you say, the knowledge of her husband’s true face, and her sisters are flipped out when they see her castle. More jealous than ever. So they start working on her. Sure, this all seems great on the surface, they tell her. You’ve got the designer clothes and the limo, but your husband, bottom line, he’s still a snake. Which is just fucking word-for-word what my sisters said about Nico. Nice bedspread, they would say. Nice car, and nice coat, but your husband—he’s Mafia, and you’re the only one who’s too stupid to see it. So there I was, living out the story my mother told me, and I know what you’re all thinking. That I really was as dumb as a rock not to understand what was happening right in front of me.”

“No woman sees her own myth,” Tess says.

“But I should’ve,” Angelique says fiercely. “Because my wedding was like a funeral too, you know? When I said I was going to marry Nico, my father said, ‘You’re dead to me,’ and my mother wore black to the wedding, fucking black, and in case there was anybody on earth that missed the point, they showed up at the church in a long limo that looked just like a hearse. Even standing there in the vestry before I went down the aisle, my father was still trying to talk me out of it. He said I was marrying a monster, just like they told the girl in the story, and once my sisters got inside the castle and saw . . . once they saw all the nice shit Nico had given me, they couldn’t stand it. They convinced me to get a private investigator and have him checked out, just like Psyche.”

Angelique smiles bitterly. “Oh, I know. Psyche didn’t really hire a private investigator. But her sisters convinced her that she must kill the snake, that she needed to cut off his head with a knife and even though the sex was great, stupid Psyche believed them, because deep down in her heart she knew it was all too good to be true. And if there’s anything that can make a girl pull a knife on a guy, it’s if she knows he’s acting too good to be true.” We have all stopped here, just over the last and largest of the rough-hewn fences, waiting for the end of her tale, and she looks slowly around the circle, pausing on the face of each woman in turn.

“She knows she can’t kill Eros in the light,” Angelique says. “So she waits for him to come for her in the darkness, like he always does, and they have great sex like usual. Maybe better than ever, who knows? I bet it was better than ever, because sometimes a little danger is hot. And when it’s all over and she knows he’s asleep, she takes up an oil lamp and goes to where he is laying . . . lying?”

“Lying,” say Tess and I in unison.

“She lifts the oil lamp,” says Angelique, still mimicking the characters of her story. Exaggerating each motion, like a mime. “And for the first time she looks upon his face. You think she would have figured it out by now, after that many nights together. You would think she could tell the difference between having a man on top of her or a snake, but anyways, she takes the oil light and she goes to where Eros is sleeping and of course he isn’t a snake at all, he’s the god of love. Beautiful. Just a beautiful man lying there asleep on the bed before her. Her hand starts shaking. It shakes so hard that drops of hot oil spill from the lamp and fall on Eros and he wakes up. He’s furious. He’s given her everything, every luxury, his whole heart, and now she’s gone and disobeyed his only order. She’s seen him for what he really is.”

“Men don’t like to be seen,” says Claire.

“Oh, please,” says Valerie. “Are you kidding? They strut like peacocks.”

“That’s not the same thing as being seen,” Claire says.

“No, it sure as hell isn’t,” says Silvia, putting her hand on her friend’s shoulder. It looks like Claire is wearing cashmere, like the woman is hiking in a cashmere sweater. We’re all just a tiny bit seedier today than we were back in London, except for maybe Valerie, who was such a wreck yesterday that she had no ground to lose, and Claire, who stepped out of her room this morning ready for a photo shoot in
Town & Country.
I wonder how she got her hair so smooth without a blow-dryer or flatiron, or if she’s one of those women who travel so frequently that they have a whole other set of European-wired hair care appliances.

“Eros flew away in anger,” Angelique says, vigorously flapping her hands. “And Psyche’s left standing there with the knife, so at first she thinks she’ll just kill herself on the spot. But something stops her. I don’t remember what.” She hesitates and looks around again, this time her eyes slipping over the rural scene, pausing on the sheep, the barns, the shabby little trailers in the distance where Tess has told us the Polish migrants live during harvest. The farms we are walking through are all part of conglomerates now, even here, even on the trail that leads to sweet Canterbury. The local kids don’t hang around the county after graduation—they go to London looking for opportunity, or maybe farther still. Farmworkers from eastern Europe come in on buses to harvest most of the hops, and the apples too, and they shear the sheep. The migrants do it all, except for when Londoners travel down sometimes on Sundays, claiming they want to work the fields. Tess says it’s the new thing among the pseudo-humble, eco-conscious fashionable city set: to take the train south for the day, lugging along their Wellies and a picnic basket full of pâté and pear tarts from Harrods. They play at farming for an hour or two, take lots of pictures to put up on Instagram, and return home, no doubt having brought more trouble to the Poles than help. But I’m hardly in a position to sneer. Some might say that paying to walk somewhere is ridiculous, that Americans playing pilgrim are no better than Londoners playing farmer, and I wonder at the solitary woman weaving now between the trailers, what she thinks of us as we pass. She is pregnant and her arms are full of wet laundry.

“There was a point where I thought about killing myself too,” Angelique says. “Dr. Drew stopped me. You might have seen that episode. You might have seen the whole thing, because the private investigator I let my sisters hire . . . he came back with this shit about Nico owing a fortune to the IRS. That’s the tax man,” she adds to Tess, who soberly nods. “Do you have a tax man here?”

“Everywhere has a tax man,” says Valerie.

“Did you know that if you turn someone who is delinquent in to the IRS you get ten percent of whatever it is that person owed to the government? So the more in arrears a person is, the bigger the payday for the snitch.” She laughs, an ugly sound. Angelique may stumble over some words but she has no trouble with the language of the courtroom. Terms like
delinquent
and
arrears
roll right off her tongue. “My sisters sure as hell knew it. That’s the kind of fact women like them make a point of knowing. So yeah, I’m the dummy in the story. I let them talk me into hiring an investigator and when he comes back with his dirt, they turn around and use it to screw Nico. He goes to jail and they go to Barbados.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” says Jean, who’s made a lifelong career out of blaming herself.

“Do you really think that’s true?” Valerie is asking Tess. She is suddenly serious, with none of her usual silly jokes. “What you said a minute ago? That every woman is living her own hidden myth?”

Tess shrugs and takes a sip from her water bottle. “It’s a tenet of child psychology. We recognize our story when we’re very young, which is why children can be so passionate about fantasy play. You know, superheroes and princesses and the like. It’s why as little girls we may have demanded to hear the same fairy tale over and over, because we somehow knew that it was our story. But as we grow older, our lives become more complex and blurred with details. We no longer see the patterns in ourselves as clearly.”

“Mine was Cinderella,” I say.

“And that would not have been my first guess,” Valerie says softly, straight back to the snark, but I let it slide. Because the memory has suddenly come back to me, full force.

“My mother hated it, of course,” I tell them. “She did everything she could to try and guide me toward a more politically correct story. She told me that Cinderella started as a Chinese legend, that it came from a culture of foot-binding, because in the end the girl with the smallest foot won the man. And after that every time I wanted to watch
Cinderella
, she made me watch this documentary about foot-binding first.”

“Jesus Christ,” says Silvia. “Your mother must have been a barrel of laughs.”

“Actually, she was,” I say. “In her own way. You all would have liked her, a lot better than you like me.”

Maybe I meant it as a joke. I don’t know why I ever said it, that part about nobody liking me—it just came out, but there is a brief, painful beat in which no one denies it. And then Jean says, a little too quickly, “If your parents were truly hippies, I’m surprised you were allowed to watch Disney movies at all.”

“They were revolutionary hippies,” I say. “Out fighting the good fight. I was left alone a lot.”

We fall back into a pack and walk on for a minute, past the Polish woman who has shifted the basket of laundry to her hip, and whose face is tilted back, bathed in the soft afternoon sun. She looks like a painting. Maybe a Vermeer. The effect is marred only by the fact that when she turns, I can see she has earbuds in, the source of her music evidently tucked in some sort of pocket. They look like the same kind Becca has pulled out a couple of times, when it’s late in the walk and she’s completely had enough of all these old women who just don’t understand love.

“What happened next?” Claire finally asks. “With Psyche, I mean.”

“She spends her whole life trying to get back what she lost,” Angelique says. “And her sisters . . . after they’ve driven Eros away from Psyche, they actually have the gall to make a move on him themselves. They figure if it worked for her, it’ll work for them, so they go up to the same cliff where she was supposed to meet her snake husband all those years ago and they jump off, thinking the same wind that carried her gently down will carry them down too. But it doesn’t, so it’s just splat, that’s all, a great big splat at the bottom, and I wish my sisters would jump off a cliff too, but they don’t. They just gloat.”

“Do you still speak to them?” asks Jean.

“Fuck no, I don’t speak to them. I guess you don’t watch the show. My sisters are dead to me. Dead,” she echoes, looking down at the ground.

“I watch the show,” says Valerie, surprising everyone. “I love TV.” Which may be the most shocking statement that’s been made along the trail so far. Nobody says “I love TV,” especially not people who love TV. I mean, everybody loves TV, we all have our guilty pleasures, those shows on the high channels that we gobble compulsively, late at night, but we don’t admit it. We say, in fact, “I don’t watch much TV,” even if we know damn well that we grew up on the stuff, that it’s pressed into our collective DNA. That we can name every kid on
The Partridge Family
and quote whole scenes of
Will & Grace
by heart.