Venus Envy (2 page)

“I know, Brudda, I know.” She called him by his childhood name. She couldn’t say
brother
when she was tiny; she called him Brudda. “It was kind of a setup that we’d be pitted against each other, you know.”

“I know, I know.” He sobbed. “I could do no right and you could do no wrong.”

“In Daddy’s eyes. ’Course, if it was Momma it was the reverse.”

He lifted his eyes to hers. “But, Frazier, did you have to be so successful?”

“You know, I’ve had ample melancholy opportunity to think about us. Yes, I did have to be so successful. I just didn’t want to be … like her. And I guess you didn’t want to be like him. Since Big Daddy made himself a ton of money, oh, Carter, I don’t know. Maybe you just rebelled and said, ‘I ain’t doing jack shit.’ Well, you hurt him. You surely did hurt him, but you hurt you too. You’re as smart as I am.”

Carter grabbed a tissue and wiped his eyes, blew his nose. “I don’t know about that. I couldn’t have started an art gallery. I couldn’t abide your customers.”

“Maybe not an art gallery, but you could have done something else.”

“What?”

“Carter, how many times have we talked about this? You could have gone into the paving business with Dad.”

He threw up his hands. “And have him tell me day in and day out that I’m half the man he is? No fuckin’ way. Nothing I do is or ever was good enough for him!”

“Maybe failure gets to be a habit. Maybe it’s comfortable. God knows you’ve got enough women making excuses for you. Momma, your wife, your mistresses.” He didn’t flinch at the word
mistresses
, so she continued: “Maybe being adored by women is kind of a curse—know what I mean?”

He nodded. He did know what she meant but he still stalled on the runway. Thirty-seven years is a long time to wait for liftoff. “You think I’m a bum?”

“Sometimes. Mostly I think you’re self-indulgent and
I think you’ve wasted a lot of time hating me ’cause I grabbed the brass ring, if you’ll forgive an awful expression.”

“Dying flushes out the truth, doesn’t it?” A rueful smile crossed his chiseled lips. “While we’re on the subject of flushing, I don’t want Billy Cicero at your funeral. I don’t care if he is heir to the largest tobacco fortune in the United States. He’s a sleazeball. I mean, Sistergirl, what we don’t know about that bastard we can’t even imagine.”

However, Frazier did know. She didn’t need to imagine. “He’s got his ways. I don’t want to waste what time I have left arguing with you about Billy. I want us to make up. I don’t want you to have guilt about me, or harbor resentment. I’m going to be out of this mess. You, Brudda, got another good forty to fifty years of it. Until we resolve conflicts we repeat them.”

“Shut up,” Carter flared. “Don’t rub that therapy bull on me. It’s just another form of religion, I tell you, and it’s as full of baloney as the old one.”

“Then let me put it in plain English. Stop comparing yourself to Dad. Stop comparing yourself to me. Stop drinking. Stop pretending you like selling real estate. If you won’t go into Armstrong Paving, then buy a goddam shrimp boat on the Gulf of Mexico and be a captain. It’s the only thing you love and you’re a damned fine sailor. Screw the country club. Screw the state of Virginia. Screw everyone’s expectations of Frank Armstrong’s boy. Go be your own man.”

“You don’t like Virginia?”

“I love Virginia. That’s not the point.”

He rubbed his chin. A blond stubble accentuated his natural virility. “Well … well, if only we could have talked like this years ago. I …” Tears spilled onto his muscled chest. “Forgive me, Sistergirl, forgive me.”

“For what?”

“For hating you. I should have been proud when you made your first million but I wanted you dead. And now …” He broke down again.

“There’s nothing to forgive, Brudda, nothing at all. I didn’t do anything to make life easier for you. I didn’t want you around my customers. I treated you like a dumb redneck and you’re not and I sucked up to Dad. Oh, how I sucked up to Dad to get the seed money to start the gallery. I paid him back every penny plus interest but I know that when you wanted to buy that quarry to start your own business he wouldn’t give you a dime. I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t do a damned thing except agree with him when he said you’d get drunk and go bankrupt.”

“He’s probably right.” Carter sobbed even harder.

“It doesn’t have to be like that. Believe in yourself. You’re the only brother I’ve got and I didn’t. I mean …” She was crying too.

The nurse came in to find brother and sister wrapped in each other’s arms, crying so hard they were gasping. She gently extricated Carter, then tried to put the tube down Frazier’s throat. Carter charmed the well-meaning lady into leaving his sister alone. After she retreated they spoke quietly for a bit and then Carter left. Frazier watched his back as he walked away, wondering if she’d ever see him again, and worrying that he wouldn’t change. He could be a happy man, if only …

But then, was she happy? She’d made a mess of money and she’d make even more if she could live. She knew her field, she loved it, and she loved profit. Ah, yes,
profit
, the sweetest word in the English language. No,
net profit
was the sweetest, truly the sweetest. Net profit. But had she been happy? She lied to her family. She lied to her friends. She lied double-time to her lover. The only
person she told the truth to was Billy Cicero and he was an even bigger liar than she was. Well, no. She told the truth to Mandy. Beautiful, black Mandy, whom she teased and called “Afrodite.” She had left the business to Mandy in her will. Mandy wouldn’t know that until the will was read. The Stubbs, John Sartorius, the Marshalls, the Herricks, all the fabulous English sporting art, to say nothing of the other merchandise—uh, art, the Thiebaud. The list was glorious and expensive, deliciously expensive. Were she going to live, Frazier would make Mandy her partner on Mandy’s birthday. Frazier wished they could have the chance to work together that way. Mandy deserved to be her partner but it gave Frazier some solace to know that Mandy Eisenhart was going to be one of the richest young single black women in Virginia. Maybe there was some justice in this world or the next. Mandy was the only person she would really miss. Funny. They never socialized. The relationship was all business but when she thought about her life, that was her greatest love, that damned art gallery, those incredible paintings.

Maybe she had made some people happy. She’d found them the right painting at the right price. That was something.

Outside her window a robin perched in a tree, the red buds swelling despite a light dusting of snow. Spring would arrive early in Charlottesville this year. Frazier loved spring. She closed her eyes and listened to the determined chirp. There was something obscene and truly offensive about spring coming, about people enjoying themselves and her being dead.

Carter’s visit had exhausted her. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. She didn’t want to miss anything. Not one second. And she hoped she’d be spared more emotional farewells. Emotional expression
was all very well but she had made a life of emotional repression her very own and she might as well die as she had lived—with distance and reserve.

She dozed off. Her friends, the doctors, and nurses marveled at her ability to withstand pain but she felt very little. No wonder governments declared morphine and cocaine illegal; apart from being highly addictive, those substances made one feel divine. She had heard that for terminal patients a speedball of morphine and cocaine might be mixed, but she was kept to morphine.

When Frazier’s eyelids fluttered open, the nasty digital clock read 3:12. The ticking of the pendulum, the little click of hands as they swept the minutes and then the hours, had contented the human race for hundreds of years. The rhythm of the sounds gave signal not so much that life was passing but that all was regulated, harmonious, and in perspective. The great grandfather clock in the hall of her parents’ Federal house sang out every fifteen minutes, a longer note on the half hour, and joyous chimes on the hour. The moon phases, as exquisitely painted as the clock face was tooled, announced that time was decorous. But a digital clock announced a paucity of imagination and a break with tradition. No hands. Frazier thought of them as amputees. Well, had anything important ever happened at 3:12 in the afternoon?

Before she could answer her own question Billy Cicero glided through the door. Billy’s impeccable wardrobe kept a platoon of tailors busy on Jermyn Street in London. Today he wore a charcoal suit with a pale pinstripe, thin but not quite a chalk stripe. His vest was dove gray, his; bright-white shirt was made of the finest cotton, and his tie was plum with tiny gold snaffle bits embroidered throughout. Billy had attended St. Paul’s in America and then Oxford in England. He never wore a
school tie because anybody who was anybody knew what college you attended at Oxford. School ties were for people who didn’t count, and in Billy’s book most people didn’t count.

“Precious, you look like shit.” Billy smiled and then pecked her on the cheek.

“Really.” Frazier agreed with him. “If I’m going to die I might as well be as attractive as possible while I’m doing it.”

Billy reached over and picked up the telephone receiver. His strong fingers punched in the numbers. “Terese? Billy. We need you over here at the hospital, east wing, room six twenty-five.” He paused. “Hair, brows, makeup, and”—he grabbed Frazier’s hand—“manicure too. On my tab, darling. Thank you so much.” He hung up the phone. “The miracle worker, Terese Collier, will arrive in this holding pen in two hours. Think you’ll live that long?”

“Guess I have to.” Frazier squeezed Billy’s sun-browned hand.

Billy Cicero possessed a catastrophic beauty. No one was immune to it, least of all Billy himself. He towered over most people at 6′5″. His shoulders were as broad as the continental shelf; his body muscular and well proportioned. His face was as if Michelangelo’s “David” had sprung to life with dazzling teeth, deep-brown eyes, and thick black hair.

People oohed and aahed whenever Billy and Frazier made an appearance. “The perfect couple,” bystanders whispered. Frazier stood 5′11″ in her stocking feet and when she put on heels she topped 6′2″. She was as golden and tawny as Billy was dark, and with her green eyes, catlike in color and shape, she cast a spell over people, as did he, but Billy was aware of his physical presence and used it ruthlessly. Frazier never did believe
she was beautiful, no matter how many times she was told. What she did believe, however, was that she was a natural athlete and she drew more confidence from that than from her exterior.

“You’re not really going to die, are you?” Billy kissed her again.

“I tell you it’s almost worth it to get away from all these long faces. Mother pitched a hissy yesterday and Carter broke down today. It’s more than I can stand. Tell me anything that doesn’t have something to do with me. Tell me about work or the stock market or … anything.”

“Stock market’s in the toilet. Atlantic Tobacco is going strong, I’m happy to report. Thank God all those Europeans and Africans love their cancer sticks. Uh—sorry, darling.”

“I don’t care.” She reached into his inside suit pocket and pulled out a soft package of Muleskinners, the cigarette that put Atlantic Tobacco on the map during World War I. It was now enjoying a resurgence as a butch brand, in its original package design. Smoking Muleskinners meant to hell with the health fascists, and plenty of young men were lighting up. While Frazier preferred brown Shermans, out of New York, she smoked Muleskinners in public for Billy’s sake.

“Gimme a light.”

He plucked the cigarette out of her lips. “No.”

She plucked it right back and ran her hands over his body, searching for a lighter. She found the gold Dunhill in his left pocket. “You know, Billy, if I’m going to go I might as well go on my own terms. What’s the point of prolonging life if you’ve forgotten how to live? I could just as easily have gotten cancer of the lungs without smoking. Remember what happened to Sandy Faulconer? Never smoked a day in her life.”

“I don’t think I’ll be as brave as you are.” He clicked open the top of the lighter and rubbed his thumb over the barreled dial. A medium-sized flame shot upward and Frazier inhaled with reverence.

“God bless the American Indian.” She closed her eyes in ecstasy. “Billy, I’m not brave. I’m accepting the inevitable. Oh, this burns my throat but it burns good. I took that damned tube out which was rubbing me raw and I made the nurse turn off the oxygen machine.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Otherwise we’d have been blown to bits.” He joined her in a cigarette. “Deep down I guess I don’t believe you’re leaving me. If God should grant us a miracle, you and I are going to get married. I mean it.”

Frazier coolly appraised him. “Then aren’t you glad miracles are in short supply?”

“Baby darling, we should have done it years ago. You go your way and I’ll go mine and who’s the wiser? I suppose I could even sire children on you, and our respective parents would froth with joy. You want to get along, you go along.”

“Doesn’t sound like you.” She decided to allow Billy his grand gesture. “But we’d make a good team. We always have. I don’t guess Kenny would turn somersaults of happiness.”

“Oh, Kenny. Kenny played Nothing in Much
Ado About Nothing.
How much more boredom can I stand? I’m a martyr to Kenny’s tedious quest for meaning. Life doesn’t mean anything. Just do something to keep yourself off the streets, to keep your two brain cells filled with electricity.”

“Ah, come on, Kenny’s all right.”

“We should get married and Kenny and Annie should get married. They’d be perfect together.” Billy laughed. “Poor Ann, with her torpid resentment because we don’t take her to parties in New York, or even on the west side
of Richmond for that matter. But”—he drew a long drag—“I’m being uncharitable. She does love you and I suppose she’s good in bed.”

“And I know that Kenny is not hung like a hamster.” Frazier put another pillow behind her. “Nor are you, my sweet.”

“You know, there are people out there, millions of them I suppose, who don’t like sex, who don’t think we should do it, or that anyone should do it, and I guess they don’t do it at all. Can you imagine that? Night of the living dead. I mean, honey, a man could at least lash it to a toothbrush or something. You’ve got to try.”