Venus Envy (12 page)

“Don’t confront her,” Mandy advised.

“Why not?”

“Because Laura’s devious. She’ll wriggle out of it and find a way to make you look paranoid in the process.”

Frazier appreciated Mandy’s viewpoint. “Damn, I hate to let her get away with this.”

“You’re rich. Hire a private detective for a month.”

“What?” Frazier couldn’t believe her ears.

“The worst that will happen is that you’ll waste a couple of thousand dollars. Remember those crocodile loafers you bought at Gucci’s in New York? They were a thousand and fifty.”

“Now don’t throw them up in my face.”

“I’m not. I am merely suggesting that you have tossed around thousands of dollars when you felt like it, so you can afford a detective to follow Laura. If she’s Miss Squeaky Clean, well, fine. If not, I say nail her ass to the floorboards.”

“You continually amaze me, Mandy.”

“Prairie justice.”

“Well, you never have taken a shine to her.”

“Oh, it’s not just that or how she gets all sincere about
where she was when Martin Luther King was shot, what she thinks about the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, the latest Eddie Murphy movie. Does she think I’m incapable of discourse on any subject that does not involve an African-American?” Mandy sighed. “I think of Laura not as a honky but as a toot.”

“A toot?”

“Yeah, she’s not big enough to be a honky.”

“I think I’ve got a lot to learn from you, Mandy.” Frazier dug out the phone book and flipped through the Yellow Pages for private investigators. She stopped for a minute and winked at Mandy. “There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and Laura means to say it all.”

R
IDING TO THE LAST,” BY LIONEL EDWARDS, EXECUTED IN
1938, brimmed with dash and speed. Frazier loved many of the twentieth-century artists, and one wing of her gallery gleamed with their work. She had Peter Curling’s racing paintings and Constance Holford’s magical work that seemed to lift off the canvas. Susan Crawford’s racehorse studies sold quite well, as did the work of Heather St. Clair Davis, whose hunting scenes were ravishing. Peter Biegel’s work now drew good prices and the Lionel Edwards paintings sold literally like hotcakes. Frazier especially liked Cecil Aldin and G. Denholm Armour for their sense of humor.

Surrounded by these paintings, she held the world outside at bay. Fox-hunting attire in Sir Alfred Munnings’ paintings and Lionel Edwards’s sublime work had changed not a jot. Tradition lulled one into believing life would be similarly consistent. Life had other ideas.

As Frazier left the modern wing of the gallery she passed the huge Olympus painting. She could have sworn great Jupiter winked at her.

The phone jingled. Mandy grabbed it, then silently mouthed, “Ann.” Frazier winced but took the call in her office.

“Your idiot brother, one hundred and eighty pounds of condemned beef, is running around town celebrating your lesbianism. Can’t you shut him up?”

It took a moment for Frazier to understand, although Ann was clear enough. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Good.” Ann hung up.

Mandy wandered in. “We should introduce Ann to Sean.” Sean was Mandy’s boyfriend.

“Why?” Frazier asked bleakly.

“They’re both violently concerned with their public images.”

“God knows Ann is. She’s ass over tit because Carter, according to her, is running all over town with the good news about little me.”

“Oh, boy.” Mandy wrinkled her nose. “Maybe this will make you feel better.” She handed her boss a letter postmarked Charleston, South Carolina. “I’ll make myself scarce.”

“You don’t have to. Sit down. Might as well share whatever Jinx has to say.” Frazier neatly opened the letter from her college sorority roommate with a heavy silver letter knife. She hummed. “Okay. She’s glad I’m alive. She was surprised by my phone call, she thinks it’s weird that I’m gay, but everyone is weird in her own way.”

“So far, so good.”

“She doesn’t know why I’d want to be a lesbian, but then she doesn’t know why anyone wants to be heterosexual either. People are different.” Frazier laughed.
“Then she says not to forget Trebonious Volvo.” She explained, “We suffered through Livy together in college and we invented a scribe called Trebonious Volvo. He wrote scurrilous comments in the margins of Livy’s text, in Latin, of course. Then Trebonious graduated from being a scribe and blossomed into a writer on his own. He used to pen searing and occasionally vulgar letters to the editor of the campus newspaper. Once he printed broadsides for the ‘Mr. Pig Contest,’ which the sororities seized upon and carried out.”

“Mr. Pig. Is this like Miss Ugly?”

“Yeah, exactly. Jinx and I got pissed off,
I
mean major pissed off, at AAT because they hosted the Miss Ugly contest, a hallowed tradition. Every brother would invite the worst-looking female he could find to the house for a big dinner.”

“I thought Sigma Nu was the rowdiest fraternity.”

“They would have been, but AAT thought of this decades ago. Anyway, the girls had no idea what was going on and as you can imagine, they probably weren’t asked out much by anyone. So to be invited to AAT—and the brothers were good-looking—was really a thrill. Then one of them would be crowned, except she wouldn’t know why. The brothers would leave the ladies after dessert, for cigars, they said, but really to vote by secret ballot as to which girl was the ugliest. The winning brother received a keg of beer all for his very own.

“In our junior year the greatest tradition sank to a new low. In the middle of a fried-chicken dinner some bozo cut the lights and a food fight erupted. A chicken bone put out the eye of one of the contestants, if you’ll forgive the use of the word. That frosted it for us. Well, it did for AAT National, too, and for the president of the university, who yanked their charter in a hurry. We couldn’t let
it alone though, and both Jinx and I aren’t hard to look at but we thought, how stupid that women are judged by external things. If women judged men’s looks as harshly as men judge women’s, I can guarantee you that seventy percent of the male species would never get laid, and I mean never. So we instituted the Mr. Pig contest and the best part was—oh, what wimps—the best part was that the fraternities, as well as some other men, rose up in righteous wrath saying that ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right.’ Ever notice how when the tables are turned the boys just can’t take it?”

“Yep. A good man is hard to find.”

“A hard man is good to find.” Frazier smirked.

“Come on, that one’s got gray hairs. So what happened with ‘Mr. Pig’? Still going on? Still making the boys furious?”

“Yeah.” Frazier nodded. “Know what else we tried to institute, and we really ate it on this one—a slave auction. We wanted to auction off Tri-Deltas and Delta Tau Deltas, our brother fraternity, to anyone who needed work done. We figured we’d get some good money out of the Chapel Hill townies who wanted to finally tackle those odd jobs that pile up. My God, our sorority president, Melody—I kid you not, her name was Melody Myers—shit a brick. Not only were we branded as sexists by the wimps, now our own sorority sisters feared we were racists. I still think it would have raised
beaucoup
funds. Am I a racist?”

“Not any more than most Caucasians.”

“Isn’t it peculiar that we’ve avoided certain topics over the years? Well, actually, if you know my family it’s not peculiar, although Carter’s sure making up for it.”

“That’s a generous way to describe the Mouth from the South.” Mandy returned to the previous subject. “Are you burning to give me your views on race? Do you
want to be absolved for the sins of your great-grandfathers all the way back to 1640? Isn’t that when your people stumbled onto the Tidewater?”

“Uh-huh. I am an old, old Virginian. Whoop-de-do. No, I don’t want to be absolved for anything because I didn’t do it. I leave guilt to those white people who want to prove they have refined emotions but still don’t want to do anything about the problem, which, if you have noticed, and I’m sure you have, is termed
the race problem
or
the black problem.
It’s not a black problem; it’s a white problem. Pure and simple.”

“Whoever has the gold makes the rules. That’s the real golden rule, and since that’s white folks, they can’t see past their blinkers. When I was a teenager I used to fly off the handle about it. Mom and Dad would ignore me, which only made me worse. Now I realize that a small percent of the population will never impose its worldview on the majority. The nature of being a minority is to explain,
ad nauseum
, how you see the world, assuming the majority can take time away from their own self-indulgence to listen.”

Frazier stared at Mandy’s light eyes, her delicate nose and chiseled lips. The secrets of the blood screamed out for each of us: Irish, Italian, Slavic, German, English, you name it. When, last century, two centuries ago? … Who knew but what some fine-boned European contributed genetic material to what was now Amanda Eisenhart. Frazier couldn’t help but wonder who fed into her own veins, as well. It was a silly Southerner who believed he or she was racially pure whatever side of the fence one fell on. “I think that’s absolutely true.”

“I have this theory that if a person belongs to a so-called ‘oppressed’ group they can be defined by that. They can incorporate the master’s view of themselves into their minds and never go beyond it. Then there are
the people who protest endlessly. They make a career out of expressing the anger of that minority. I don’t want to be a professional African-American. I want to be Mandy Eisenhart.”

“If people will let you.”

“You have to fight for it, fight for yourself.”

Frazier folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope. “You have to find your enemies to fight them. See, that’s where I get confused. I feel like I’ve fallen into a vat of Jell-O. Take Billy Cicero, for example. Not a peep.”

“Hurts, doesn’t it?”

Frazier nodded. “Maybe the longer you put off the day of reckoning, the more painful it is when it arrives. You know what I think about? I think about Jacob Marley in A
Christmas Carol
Remember when he visits Scrooge, clanking and shuffling fathoms of chain, and he warns Scrooge that the chains he has forged in this life are already far heavier and longer than what Marley’s dragging around? Chillingly accurate. That last night in the hospital I counted my fathoms of chain.”

“I’ve only forged ankle bracelets.” Mandy giggled.

“You’re a real prize.” Frazier laughed. “And what’s engraved on your ankle bracelet? ‘Heavens Above’?”

The remainder of the day passed happily. A dealer out of London cabled to buy John Ferneley, Sr.’s portrait of bull terriers. The detective called to say he would start shadowing Laura Armstrong beginning Monday. Frazier still had her doubts about that but she was angry enough to go ahead with it. The pool table merchant from Richmond promised to deliver the table Saturday before noon. Mandy worked late on billing and Frazier stayed at the gallery with her to make calls to the Coast. Los Angeles was ever a fruitful source of quick cash.

Q
UICK CASH DOMINATED THE ROUND TABLE WHERE FRANK
Armstrong joined his paving colleagues. Once a month this small, clubby group of the better contractors in the state gathered in Richmond to discuss business, swap or buy equipment from one another, and compare notes on new methods of paving. The soil varied dramatically from one end of Virginia to the other and this called for different approaches to building roadbeds. Frank generally found himself building roads in the unyielding and badly draining red clay. The fellows in the Tidewater contended with sand. Some of the boys in the southwestern counties coped with shaley rock, a bitch to work with and often dangerous when cutting through a hill or mountain.

Paving contractors, like realtors, were under oath not to discuss their commission percentages or bids, lest
discussed the commission with the seller and the buyer but until that commission was written in the listing agreement, the realtor couldn’t speak of it. For the contractors the struggle centered on bids. Most of these men would be bidding against each other for the lucrative state jobs the highway department doled out and sometimes they even bid on pieces of federal highway. A good estimator was worth his weight in gold, a lesson Frank had learned the hard way when, as a young contractor, he underbid a job to secure it and then faced losses which he made up out of his own pocket.

Pickens Oliguy, a florid-faced, jocular man, sat next to Frank. “You hanging in there, Frankie?”

“I am, but I had to trim my employees by twenty percent and I can tell you, Pickens, I felt like a worthless sack of shit the day I handed out those pink slips.”

“Join the club, Frank,” George Demerius called from the other side of the table. “This downturn isn’t heading back up. I wonder if we’re gonna get the nose of this bird out of the dive.” George had been a fighter pilot in World War II and Korea. Aviation remained his metaphor.

Frank shook his head. “Those men have families to feed. I don’t know….” His voice trailed off.

“Nothing we can do.” George boomed. “If business comes back up we’ll all rehire those people, of course.”

“It’s not just the economy.” George spit out his words. “It’s the goddam taxes. The red tape! They’re telling us to fly and then yanking off a propeller.”

“Hear! Hear!” the other men at the table chimed in.

“I will vote for anyone who cuts back taxes. I don’t care if he’s a Klan member or a faggot or if he’s a she.” Pickens banged his fist on the table. “I don’t even care if it’s some dressed-up nigger.”

Frank blinked hard. He hated that word but he knew
he wasn’t going to change sixty years of one man’s prejudice. “As I see it,” he said, “we have to lobby harder here in Richmond and in Washington, but maybe what we need to do right now is begin to pool equipment. Temporarily. Maintenance costs will eat us alive. And I know I’m not the only person here carrying heavy interest at the bank for some of the stuff. Maybe we need to canvass one another’s inventory by region and divest ourselves of what we can part with. They’ll buy it out west—Arizona, New Mexico. At least, I think they will.”