Venus Envy (22 page)

Ruru whistled the whole way home, which drove Chief, Marco, Toby, and Lulu into harmonious howls. She couldn’t wait for the phrase
calculating bitch
or some variant thereof to reach Laura’s ears.

Carter, like many men, had married a woman much like his mother. Since Ruru never liked Libby, Laura didn’t stand much of a chance either. Perhaps both Libby and Laura chose to live through a man, whereas Ruru thought you lived as a separate being. Your man was your partner but not your reason for living. No person can bear the weight of being so central to another person’s existence. Sooner or later the woman becomes disenchanted; the man suffocates.

It seemed so obvious to her that such relationships would culminate in varying degrees of estrangement. Yet millions of people fell for the old romantic bullshit: You are my everything. I can’t live without you. I was nothing until I met you. Et cetera, et cetera.

She pulled a U-ie on Avon Extended and headed toward the country club. Why wait? Why not tell Frank what the hell was going on and Libby, too, if that blowfly was hanging around.

And Libby was. She was terrorizing her maid about polishing the silver, the usual Georgian stuff, which Libby had bought at a London auction and passed off as a family heirloom. She passed it off, as Frank passed out when he received the bill. That was the last time he ever let his wife hop on the Concorde by herself. Crossing the Atlantic was a joint venture after that or Libby would
have looted Europe. Field Marshal Goring must have been her secret role model.

“… and that’s the story.” Ruru folded her arms across her chest.

“I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it,” Libby shrieked.

Frank shook his head. The pettiness of people disturbed him. Maybe that was one of the many reasons he kept his emotions to himself. That and the fact that he realized decades ago that no one really wanted to know what he felt anyway. Maybe Ru and Frazier wanted to know, but not sharing had become a habit, and habits, as any smoker could tell you, were the devil to break.

“A rumor has a life of its own but we have to stand together on this one. If anyone even hints at this, let them have it.”

“Why doesn’t Frazier leave town?” Libby suggested. “It’s all so embarrassing.”

“Libby, you don’t believe this tripe?” Ru shouted.

“I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know what these lesbians do, thank God.”

“They do what you and I do, or did, with our husbands. They simply do it with women.” Ru wanted to strangle Libby.

“Well, if she’s got to do it, then she could shut up about it!” Libby snapped. “See how worn-out poor Frank is … because of this.”

“I am not worn-out,” said Frank, who was but not because of Frazier.

“Darling, you don’t see yourself. You drag in from work at night, gray in the face. It breaks my heart to see you.” Libby trawled from her depths.

Ru didn’t believe this performance any more than she had believed Wilfreda’s. If Libby was so concerned about Frank, she could spend less of his money. “Frazier
shoulders more than her share of the blame, Libby. Carter hasn’t been walking on water recently.”

“The poor boy. The real estate market is down, way down”—Libby’s voice dropped—“and well, it had to be a shock to learn about Frazier. After all, they were devoted to each other when they were children.”

“A devotion you tore apart every chance you got.” The cords stood out on Ruru’s neck.

“Girls, we’re getting off the track.” Frank agreed with his sister but if he said that, he’d have two months of bleeding hell with Libby. “Ruru, people are like vultures. They feed on other people to make up for their emptiness.”

Both women stopped to stare at Frank. He so rarely spoke in such a fashion that the effect was powerful.

“Oh, Frankie …” Tears snuck into the corners of Ru’s eyes.

“They’ll chew on this until another scandal comes along and then they’ll chew on that. If anyone says anything to me about my girl, so help me God I will smash his face in!” He slammed his paper on the armchair and stood up.

“Now, honey, don’t be upset,” Libby cooed.

“Upset! I was born and raised here. I work hard. My daughter works hard and has made something out of her life. And this is my reward? To watch Frazier be picked apart by vultures, none of whom are her equal in any respect? Do I know what this lesbian stuff is about? My God, I can barely remember my own sexuality, much less understand hers!”

Libby blushed. “Now, honey, don’t tax yourself.”

He brushed past his wife, a wife he had realized within the first two years of marriage was an empty gourd, but Frank had made a vow before God and man and he intended to keep it. And by the time he realized he was
truly alone in this world he had a son to support. His generation didn’t think about divorce. Frank discovered golf, and then when Frazier came there was another woman to steal his heart.

“Frank, I do understand it.” Ru surprised Libby and Frank.

“What do you mean?” Libby’s eyes narrowed to slits.

“Frazier needs nurturing. I don’t mean mothering. I mean nurturing, and women do that better than men. Refute me if you think I’m wrong, Frank.”

“No, I don’t think you’re wrong.” He sat on the edge of the armchair. Libby noticed but shut up.

“I guess hormones are hormones,” Ru kept on, “and no doubt there is lust. We don’t feel it but it can’t be any different than what we did feel. It’s what’s underneath. It’s the caring part. She needs more help than we knew. Frazier was the perfect kid, straight A’s, the best athlete, president of her class, but we didn’t stop to look inside her. Carter commanded most of our emotional attention. His need was, and remains, obvious. She needs nurturing. It’s as simple as that.”

Libby felt this was a sly attack on her maternal job description. However, Ruru so cleverly phrased it that she wasn’t sure how to fight back.

Frank’s voice wavered. “If only I could have back the years.” Ru walked over to her brother and put her arm around his shoulders. Libby seethed. “If only I had paid more attention to my children.”

“Poppycock. You were a good father.” Libby’s defense was really an offense.

“You know, in our time, in my time”—he half-smiled—“we didn’t think of that. I thought if I made money, that was it, you know, and if I took the kids fishing sometimes. Now, now I know what a mistake I made. I lost my children.”

“You did not.” Libby’s upper lip curled.

“Maybe I didn’t want the emotional responsibility. Maybe it was easier to push it off on my wife.”

“Frank, you’re being too hard on yourself. A mother naturally has a stronger bond to the children. That’s Nature’s way,” Libby said, ignoring the fact that her bond to Frazier was one of unremitting hostility, and perhaps a part of that hostility lay in Frazier’s youth and beauty. The daughter had surpassed the mother.

“It’s never too late, Frank.” Ru hugged Frank and noticed how thin he was between the shoulder blades. “And you did the best you could with what you had. That’s all any of us can ask of ourselves.”

“Sounds like something you heard on
Oprah,”
Libby sniffed. “You could go on the show as the Phantom of the Oprah.” Since Libby rarely evidenced a sense of humor she must have been thinking extra hard to get one up on the quick-witted Ru.

“I like her and I like her show.” Ru released Frank. She nearly said, “And I don’t like you,” but then that was obvious.

Frank sighed. “What this town needs is an enema.”

D
ESPITE THE SUNBURST OF FORSYTHIA AND THE SWELLING
of the redbuds, spring stalled. Gray clouds slid down the Blue Ridge Mountains to spread their gloom over central Virginia. The robins puffed up their red breasts to keep warm and humans grumbled in their winter sweaters.

Frazier escaped the elements by walking through the covered shopping mall, a place she usually avoided but she’d run out of her favorite Lancôme body lotion, and the only store that carried the expensive stuff was in the mall. As it was six-thirty in the evening, the place reverberated with the click of human heels, the slow scrape of teenaged boys in high-top sneakers, and the occasional pop of walkers as the aged participated in the orgy of commercial display.

Frazier passed two athletic-shoe stores selling sneakers at exorbitant prices, especially those endorsed by a
basketball player. Basketball, a game played by chromosomes, captured the marketeers of Reebok, Nike, Puma, and other assorted brands. Hard by the sneaker stores were clothing franchises brimming with men and women rummaging through the spring sales. The smell of chocolate cookies, yogurt, and McDonald’s assailed her nostrils. Bad as that was, turning into the cosmetics department of Stone and Thomas, a decent store for a mall, was worse. Surely this was what a cheap whorehouse in Paris smelled like, a signature scent laden with lusty promise.

A fine-looking redhead, in her early thirties at most and serious about her hair as only Texan women can be serious about their hair, bent over the counter as she lined up bottles of Red, Poison, Opium, and Cinnabar. Although she had never met the woman, Frazier knew this was Sarah Saxe. The prospect of conversation lured her, probably as sailors were lured by Circe.

Frazier reached out for Ysatis. Sarah, a friendly sort, cheerfully said, “I’ve never tried that but I am tired, truly tired of Giorgio.”

“Too overpowering.” Frazier smiled, and when she did her resemblance to her brother was uncanny.

“Haven’t we met?” Sarah uttered the oldest pickup line in the world.

“No, but I believe you know my brother.”

“Oh.” Sarah, unwary, beamed.

Frazier marveled at how open the woman was, how utterly different from Laura. “I’m Mary Frazier Armstrong.” Frazier held out her hand. “But everyone calls me Frazier, except for Carter, who calls me Sistergirl.”

Sarah clasped her hand. “You look like twins. No wonder I thought I knew you.” She quickly withdrew her hand, fearing that Frazier might be judging her for
having an affair with her brother, but Frazier thought it was because Sarah had heard that she was a lesbian.

“Yes, everyone says that.”

“I, well, I’m glad to meet you.”

“I’m glad to meet you, too, and, Sarah, if you think I don’t approve of your time spent with my brother, you’re wrong. His wife is a whistling bitch. At least you make him happy.”

Sarah glanced around. “Would you like to have a cup of coffee? I mean, there are never enough salesclerks in here.”

“We could go into menopause waiting to buy the perfume.”

Sarah laughed. “We’ve got time.”

“Time. We’ve probably got another twenty-five years and I would like to know what a lesbian needs with a period.”

Sarah doubled over. She hadn’t expected Frazier to be lighthearted. Then again, Frazier usually wasn’t and she had not referred to herself in this manner in public before, but perhaps the two women, bound by love outside the bounds, found they could be free with each other.

“You’re not at all what I expected,” Sarah confessed as they sat down at a table.

“You are.” Frazier opened her napkin.

“Oh …”

“And I’m glad. I’m thrilled, actually, that he’s not fooling around with another proper Virginia woman, a woman who knows her pedigree, your pedigree, and who wears pastels in springtime.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You look like Texas to me, sugar.”

“And you look like something off the cover of Vogue. Carter never told me that you were beautiful.”

“No sister is beautiful to her brother, I guess.”

“You all are getting close again?”

“Oh, Brudda and I are best friends except when we’re enemies.”

“He’s sure glad you bought his truck.” She ordered coffee while Frazier settled for Perrier. “Too late for coffee?”

“I’ll be up all night.”

“Doesn’t affect me much one way or the other.” She lifted her eyes to Frazier’s. “When Carter first told me about … things, I made a couple of cracks, you know, dyke stuff, but I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t have to tell me this.”

“I know that I don’t, except that I feel like I know you. It’s weird. Anyway, I’ve had my share of threesomes so maybe I know a little more about the subject than Carter—but he doesn’t know that yet.”

“Is this a sexual confession? Because if it is, I want to hear everything.” Frazier leaned forward. She understood instinctively why Carter loved this woman. God knows, the girl was hot.

“Uh, well, yes, in a way. I mean, when I met Carter, I figured, wow, what an animal. I just wanted to jump his bones, which was easy enough.”

“Isn’t it always?”

“Yes.” Sarah laughed. “But one thing led to another and I discovered I liked this guy and he was so miserable—I mean, as miserable as a puppy with a stomachache.”

“Have you ever seen his wife?”

“Once. But she can’t be the only source of his misery.” Sarah hit the nail on the head. “He doesn’t believe in himself.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well, after like comes love and I love your brother
and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t want to get hurt, I don’t want him to get hurt, and I’d like to say I don’t want his wife to get hurt but I really don’t give a flying fuck about her, you know? I suppose I should. I wouldn’t want a husband running out on me.”

“Your husband wouldn’t.” Frazier listened to the ice cubes tinkle in her glass as the waitress placed the beverage before her.

Sarah half-smiled. “Every woman would like to think that, but time changes people and men get restless.”

“How is it you never married?”

“Never wanted to. It felt like a trap to me.”

“Would you marry Carter if he asked you? Sorry if I’m being too direct.”

“I don’t know. I want to say yes, but his drinking worries me—not that he gets ugly or anything when he does. He’s actually kind of fun until he passes out but he isn’t doing his liver any good.”

“You don’t drink?”

“Not like that, I don’t.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, he’s been unfaithful as long as I’ve known him but I think he really loves you. That’s a change.”

“He does?” Sarah’s innocent need to know was touching.