Shameless from liquor, the ladies of the Sugar Shop party descended on 14812 W. Josephine Lane, the lot of them crude, chortling, swinging their hips, fancying themselves anthropologists investigating the suburban sexual underbelly. They showed up at the swingers’ party in separate cars, having to park up and down the block, and they walked along the sidewalk oblivious to the bitter cold and their stylish boots not made for walking.
“Where was Viv going?” Deedee asked Ashley as they tumbled from Deedee’s summery convertible, “after she took Mrs. Bloom home?”
“I don’t know that she said,” Ashley said.
Though she and Ashley had talked nonstop in the car on the drive over, Deedee’s thoughts had been with the doodle on the paper folded and tucked away in her purse. Viv makes a call on her cell, quick-draws an uncanny caricature of Deedee’s ex, Zeke, then suddenly must be off. You didn’t have to be completely paranoid to put that particular two and two together, she thought. “Who is this?” Deedee asked Ashley, handing her Viv’s drawing.
“Oh, my god,” Ashley said, smiling. “A Viv of Zeke.”
“Why?” Deedee said.
“I don’t know,” Ashley said. “Isn’t he in her drawing class too? Where’d you get it, anyway?”
“I tore it from your refrigerator notepad just a few minutes ago. Viv looked to be having a very pleasant conversation, beyond pleasant, to be honest, leaning against the fridge, doodling, then she walked away, and here this was. She had to have been talking to Zeke, right?”
“Well,” Ashley said, handing the drawing back to Deedee as they followed the wavy front walk, “not necessarily, but I guess it does seem like . . . I mean, wow. How ’bout that? They must be . . .”
“Great,” Deedee said. “Thanks. Thanks a ton.”
“Oh, my god, you’re pissed at me. Why? What?”
“Would it kill you to tell me, for once in my sorry life, what I’d like to hear? Does that doodle really look so much like Zeke? Does the possibility of them hooking up seem so goddamn . . . possible?”
“I don’t think that’s what I said at all,” Ashley said. “It’s definitely weird. I don’t think it’s likely. Zeke and Viv? Viv’s our friend, she wouldn’t . . .”
“Oh, now you’re just backpedaling. You’re just telling me what I want to hear.”
“No, I’m not, but isn’t that what you wanted me to do? Didn’t you just say, ‘Tell me what I want to hear’?”
“So you admit it. You’re just telling me what I want to hear. You don’t think that Viv and Zeke are an impossibility at all.”
“Deedee,” Ashley said, stopping her, taking her elbows in her hands as they stood outside the front door of the house, petting the fur on the sleeves of her coat, “I don’t know what I think. I’m not thinking at all. All I know is you’re talking about a man you divorced already. I’m preoccupied with the man I haven’t divorced. I’m still married. And my husband could be in this very house, on the verge of being caught in the act. Just let me have a lot on my mind right now, okay?”
Ashley did look a fright, her face all banged up, her eyes bloodshot. Deedee gave Ashley a peck on her good cheek and smiled and nodded, though Ashley, as Deedee saw it, didn’t have it so bad. Even if, by some nasty wrinkle in the universe, Ashley and Troy ended up divorced, it would be one of those perfect undoings, where everyone is best friends with everyone’s new spouses, then one day the exes fall back in bed with each other and their lives begin to revolve around reconciliation.
Deedee had done her best to convince herself that she and Zeke had that same kind of screwball romance, their marriage not kaput but only in a Hepburn-and-Tracy state of disarray. Now that she thought about it, she’d even once or twice, during art class, intimated to Zeke, in a way that she’d considered covertly flirtatious, that he ought to ask Viv out on a date. Deedee had wanted to come across as inaccessible and unaffected by Zeke’s looking for love, but her reverse psychology had backfired.
Ashley put on her sunglasses, took a shaky breath, and opened the front door. The living room was already packed with the transplanted Sugar Shop party, the women raiding the wet bar and dirty dancing along to the husky voice of a drag queen karaoke-ing to a Mary J. Blige power ballad. The music came from a tiny speaker in the portable karaoke machine but was nonetheless intensely loud. Deedee wondered how anyone could be getting it on anywhere in the house with such caterwauling ricocheting through the halls.
“I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d freak,” Ashley shouted above the change in tune to a solo rendition of the Neil Diamond–Barbra Streisand duet, “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” by a man in a yellowing platinum wig and gold lamé, “but this is where our kids went tonight. Troy accidentally sent an e-mail invite to Peyton, so she got everybody dressed up to come crash the party. I’m a terrible mother, right? I should have stopped them. I’ll go get us a drink.”
So where’s Naomi, then? Deedee wondered. Why can’t our children rebel in sensible ways, in ways we understand? Why can’t Naomi just smoke Kools, get throwing-up drunk on Boone’s strawberry wine, like I did when I was sixteen?
Keeping Naomi safe had always felt like a dark and odious task, forcing Deedee to acknowledge all the ugliness of modern times. Raising a little girl had made her intimate with all the millions of ways a child could be violated. She’d felt like an unwitting partner in crime with pedophiles and kiddie pornographers, had come to know their twisted MO backward and forward. She’d always said she’d be one of those hip moms, one of those moms who listened to their kids’ music and enjoyed the same movies. But it was impossible to be hip with a youth culture so booby-trapped. So Deedee had written letters to editors, spied on her daughter’s chat-room conversations, and even petitioned against a local children’s bookseller when it began to carry those glossy-covered tales of teenybopper lust, marketed to twelve-year-olds, penned by glamorous hacks in designer flip-flops and vintage Swatches.
“I’ve got to find Naomi,” Deedee said when Ashley handed her a drink. “She shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t have not told me.”
“I know, I know,” Ashley said. “I figured you were upset. So I just asked around on my way to the bar, and it turns out the kids have all left already. Tess was the first one here from the Sugar Shop party, and she said the kids were leaving just as she got here.”
“Is she sure?”
“Yes, honey,” Ashley said.
A man dressed in the style of a pre-widowed Courtney Love, his fishnets torn to shreds, perfect circles of bright-red rouge on his cheeks, sang “Heart of Glass” in a shrill falsetto, his XXL baby-doll nightie snug on his beer gut. “Guzzle that down,” Ashley said. “I need you relaxed to help me relax. It’s Campari, remember it?”
“I need a cigarette,” Deedee said, opening her purse. “I don’t suppose smoking is allowed in this den of iniquity.” But Ashley had already vanished down a hallway.
Deedee found the kitchen, and some paper matches in a drawer, and a door to the backyard. It was well after dark, but the night sky glowed with a silver haze like it does some midwinter nights. The massive yard was an explosion of landscaping, with a short bridge over a heated pond of Japanese fighting fish, with iced-over concrete fountains, bonsai trees, chimineas, a stone replica of the Bird Girl from the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. And far in the back, with a light in the window, was an inviting prefab bungalow.
As she crossed the footbridge, Deedee stumbled, spilling her Campari and dropping her cigarette to hiss in the stream. In the bungalow, a man sat alone listening to Chet Baker and smoking a thin, womanish cigar. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Deedee said. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.”
“No, no, no bother,” he said. “Excuse the smoke. I can put it out?”
“No, no bother,” she said, instantly feeling stupid for repeating what he’d just said. “I smoke like a fiend.” Deedee stood in the open doorway, waiting for some kind of invitation. The man wore skinny pants and battered alligator shoes. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, the striped pattern of which wrestled with the polka dots of his necktie. It was one of those clashing ensembles that made you look either fashionable or like a clown. He wisely topped it all off with an extra-clunky pair of self-consciously ugly Elvis Costello specs. Deedee guessed him to be maybe twenty years younger than she was. And here’s the thing, she’d say later in the week to the girls at La Buvette, he had the short arms and narrow shoulders of a dwarf, but he didn’t appear to be at all short. He was dwarfish in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
“I’m Tucker,” he said, and had Deedee been sober, she knew she would’ve contorted herself to avoid his gaze, to get invisible, not wanting to give another man the satisfaction of critiquing her looks. But tonight she stepped in, took a seat on the sofa he sat on, and requested a puff of his cigar.
“Here,” he said, “have a whole one of your own.” He lit one for Deedee, but after a few puffs she began to feel sick to her stomach.
“I’m sorry, I have to put it out,” she said, putting it out.
“They are disgusting,” he said, in a whiskey-and-honey Southern accent. “So what brings a nice girl like you . . .” He trailed off with an adorable giggle that belied his pug-nosed appearance, a dragon tattoo at the side of his neck.
“I just wanted to see this bungalow,” she said. She shrugged her chinchilla from her shoulders. “It looked cozy from the house. What brings you out here?”
“I had to get away from the party,” he said.
“I did too,” she said. “But a different party. I mean, I don’t know when you came out here, but the party has likely changed gears. There are drag queens now. And a bunch of drunk women. And a karaoke machine.”
“Yeesh,” he said. “All I have to do is leave a sex party for it to get interesting.”
“Are you married? Here with your wife?”
“No. You’re probably not going to believe me, but I’m not here for the sex. I’m a photographer.” He took a miniature camera from his pocket, a camera small in his palm, smaller even than the spy camera she’d ordered from a comic-book ad when she was a kid and that hadn’t worked even once. “It’s a little digital thing that doesn’t take pictures for shit. But they end up looking abstract, and . . . and artless, in an artful way, you know what I mean? Anyway,” and he leaned in closer to Deedee and softened his voice, like he was telling a secret, “a woman bought one of my photos that I had up in a gallery here . . . well, it was a nude photo of me, which I delivered to her house. I helped her hang this huge, borderline obscene picture of myself, with all my tattoos, and, you know, my privates on parade . . .” Deedee laughed into her glass as she took another drink. “. . . right above her fireplace, right there in the tastefully designed front room, right? So anyway, she tells me about these parties she and her husband go to, and that I should come to one. That’s when I had the idea for a photo essay. I can sneak some shots on the sly, and it’ll just be these lousy pictures. You’ll look at them, and you’ll think you can tell that there’s sex going on in them, but you can’t quite see anything at all.”
“So why aren’t you in there snapping away?”
“I got enough,” he said. He produced a flask from out of nowhere and poured something into her cup.
“No no no no no,” she said. “Stop. I’m trashed.” She took another sip.
“Besides,” he said, “I’ve been around the block a time or two. I’ve done the group thing. Most of the appeal of that sort of thing is the not having done it before. So once you’ve done it, you’ve done it, and so what?”
“You’re so jaded. And you’re, what, all of twenty-one or something.”
“Twenty, actually,” he said. “Well, I will be twenty. In eight months.”
“Oh, my god.” Deedee shot back the rest of her drink and held her cup toward his flask for more. “I could probably go to jail just for picturing that naked portrait of you hanging above that woman’s fireplace. What is the age of consent, anyway?”
“You know,” he said, lifting an index finger, “I happen to know the answer to that. In Omaha, it’s sixteen. Can you believe that?”
“Hm,” Deedee said, “my daughter is sixteen,” already missing her.
“Yeah? Where’s she tonight? Wink wink.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever felt older than I do right now.”
“Then maybe you should let me kiss you. Maybe that will work to reverse the signs of aging.”
“That might be just what I need,” Deedee said, as if he’d just offered a spare Zoloft or a stick of chewing gum. “I have reason to believe that my ex-husband and a good friend of mine might be . . . well, something might be up between them. Maybe I’m an idiot to think that Zeke and I could be happy together again. I’m afraid, Tucker. Afraid of falling in love again, but also afraid of not falling in love again. Last month I went on a couple of dates with this guy I really liked. He wore suits. He took me to nice places for dinner and always picked up the check, which I’m here to tell you is pretty rare, men are happy to let the woman pick up the check, especially when the woman makes good money. Listen to me, Tucker, if you really, really want to impress a woman, pick up the check every time, even if she offers to pick it up, even if it seems like she might be offended by you picking up the check, based on, whatever, feminist principles or something, pick it up anyway.”
She took a little rose-colored pot from her purse, a Sugar Shop product called Angel Tickle. It was sold as a soothing sensitizer for the underside of the head of the penis, but Deedee found it to be a nice tingly lip balm. “So me and this guy are at a steakhouse, we’ve had more than a few cocktails, and a bottle of wine, and the conversation turns to sex, which was perfectly fine by me, but he leans in and says, ‘I’ve been known to get into some pretty weird stuff,’ and I said, ‘How weird?’ and he said, ‘Trust me. Weird,’ and I said, ‘How weird could it be?’ knowing, of course, that it could be really, really weird. So then he says, ‘Satanism.’ Satanism? Who does that anymore? So I ask what exactly Satanism entails, and he says, drawing pentagrams, lighting candles, drinking urine, pooping in front of each other. He says it leads up to the best sex he’s ever had. I had to bite my lip to keep from giggling. A grown man and woman. Pooping for the devil. But I pretended that I was fascinated, and that I was a little turned on. I didn’t want to ruin dinner.”
Tucker took the pot of Angel Tickle and rubbed some of the balm on his own lips. “What are you going to do about your friend?” he asked.
“What friend?”
“The friend who might have something up with your ex-husband,” he said.
“Oh, her. Nothing,” Deedee said. “She can have him.” She immediately wished she hadn’t heard herself say it, as if just uttering such permission was some kind of surrender. Tucker leaned in for a kiss, and she let him kiss her for a few seconds. “I didn’t mean that,” she said, pulling back after a moment.
“You didn’t mean it?” he said, confused. “The kiss?”
“The what? The kiss? Oh, no no no no no,” Deedee said. “What I didn’t mean was the thing I said . . . about how she can have him. No. I’ll just ask her to leave him alone. That’s what friends do for each other, right? They leave each other’s exes alone. And actually, don’t you think it all might be a good sign? My ex and my friend having a little fling? Maybe it’s some twisted way of Zeke’s to get close to me. Maybe he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. It’s the subconscious.”
Tucker took a pack of regular cigarettes from his front shirt pocket and handed one to Deedee. Deedee said, “Why on god’s green earth would someone your age smoke? I thought you kids were so much smarter than the rest of us.”
“Maybe I don’t even know I’m doing it,” Tucker said, winking. “It’s the subconscious.”
Now that Viv, via her doodling, had outed herself as an ex-husband stealer, Deedee replayed recent conversations in her mind, weighing every snippet for ulterior motive. Just that evening at La Buvette, Viv had asked Deedee, essentially, if she regretted having a child. And Deedee, essentially, had said that sometimes she did, indeed. Would Viv take that information to Zeke, then Zeke to Naomi? No one was safe from a home-wrecker, even if your home had been pre-wrecked beyond repair.
Deedee decided she could afford to do what rich families did—keep the children close by bribing them with all-expenses-paid cruises and foreign vacations. She and Naomi could go to Rome next, or Barcelona, and the trips could be annual, or more than annual. Unlike what she might have told Viv a few hours ago, back when all Viv’s questions were merely hypothetical, Deedee couldn’t imagine a long life without Naomi always in it.
Deedee looked up at the smoke in the room, and she thought how cozy she’d been just that morning in the airport smoking lounge, Naomi at her side. She normally disliked airports for their state of in-between. You were neither here nor there.
Lost watching the smoke reflected in the bungalow window, Deedee failed to realize that much of the haze and cloud in the glass wasn’t confined to the room—the main house was slightly on fire.