Confessions Of A Falling Woman And Other Stories (2 page)

"Well, I…"

Then the puppet did the bit that's become his trademark. The punchline where he lifts up his hand and all but the middle finger falls over. I still don't think it's funny, but I yelped with laughter at the incongruity of Tim telling a dirty joke. The audience was laughing now, too, and I could feel the tension ease around our table.

Up on the stage, Tim looked genuinely puzzled.

"Please excuse Rocky," Tim said. "I don't know what's gotten into him."

"Your friend Philip, that's what got into me. I'm talking sodomy, Tim. Didn't you notice it's a little sticky in there?" Tim froze, his eyes moving slowly toward his left hand. The room sniggered and squealed.

"Puppet fucker." The puppet leered directly at Philip.

"Rocky, now hush."

"Once you've had a puppet, you never go back. Right, Phil baby?" I looked over at Philip, who smiled good-naturedly at the stage.

Mrs. Zibintzky said, "I may be too old for this."

Tim and Rocky started this riff on plastic surgery. Pretty funny stuff and I was laughing, and then he said something very specific about a neighbor and a botched breast job, and I realized he was talking about Darla. No one was supposed to know. I mean, it was a ridiculous secret, but when you come right down to it, most of our secrets are. I stole a glance at Darla, who was staring rigidly into some middle distance.

"Man, I've got more real parts than she does." The puppet cackled viciously. "It must be hard on that boyfriend of hers."

"Why do you say that?"

"He can't tell for sure when he's two-timing her. 'Did you have your ass done, honey, or am I having another affair?'"

"The little shit," Zak croaked. Darla rose and I started to say something – I don't know what. Zak was already reaching toward her, but her look stopped all of us cold. She left.

My name crackled over the mike.

Tim was looking quizzically at his puppet. "I thought you liked her, Rocky."

"She's a loser, Tim. I went to see her in that Shakespeare play. Man, that was painful."

"Well, it was a tragedy, Rocky."

"You're telling me. She was so bad, the Surgeon General had warnings posted in the program. I ignored that, I'm tough, but Tim, there's a limit to what a human being can endure. Halfway through her mad scene, the audience started chanting 'Jump, Jump, Jump.' First play in New York closed by the Board of Health."

There was more, but the words began to run together, blurring into a howl of laughter. I kept staring at Tim, transfixed by his placid smile. His lips were slightly parted, and I couldn't tell whether they moved when the puppet spoke.

Afterward, we congratulated Tim, not warmly, but he didn't seem to notice. He hugged me and then giddily introduced a man in a slouchy silk suit named Graham. I held out my hand, but Graham had already turned back to Tim.

"Tim, first rule: you don't use real names. You don't want your roommate suing you for libel, now do you?" Graham laughed like someone who gets paid to, which, as it turns out, he does. He works for the cable company where Tim got his first break.

When we left the club, Tim was chatting it up amiably with a bartender and a few others who acted like he was their best and oldest friend. He waved to us happily and said he'd be along later, but he never came back. I heard later he was living in a loft downtown that belongs to some LA muckety-muck.

The apartment building was dark when we returned to it that night, every window a blank. We let ourselves in and I suppose we said good night or something to that effect, but all I recall was the buzzing of the fluorescent tubes in the vestibule and, as I climbed the stairs, the sound of doors shutting quietly below me, one by one, the click of deadbolts turning.

I turn on the television sometimes when I see Tim's name listed in the cable guide. So do Philip and Juan; I can hear the nasty cackle of that puppet on the other side of the wall. The others probably watch him, too, though when I see them on the stairs, we don't mention Tim. We comment on the weather or complain about the boiler going out again. We say we should really get together, but you know how these things go. Time flies.

When my baby sister called and asked me to fly down from New York, my first thought was that the entire family had finally gone off their rockers.

The idea, as Lizann explained it, was to get the Queen Mother when she was sober and her defenses were down. Everyone would go to a few training sessions beforehand, and then on Saturday meet up at Daddy's office. He'd bring her over there on some pretext and then, well, then I suppose you have to imagine a really horrendous surprise party. Surprise! Your whole family and your best friend are here because we all love you. But (and this is the kicker) this drinking thing is out of hand, and we've made an appointment for you to check in at the local rehab clinic.

"It'd just mean so much to her if you were there, Torrie."

"That's plain craziness. She's hardly going to appreciate my presence at a lynching." I could hear my voice sliding into its old curves, matching the drawl on the other end of the line.

"She'll probably be angry at first." Lizann is truly sweet, so it's hard for her to allow that anyone she loves might behave badly.

"At first? She'll have your butt in a sling for the next ten years." "Well, something's gotta be done before she kills herself. Doctor Jackson tried to talk to her about going to a clinic after she jitter bugged through the French doors at Christmas. He says if she'd been sober she would've broken half the bones in her body. Course, she put on a big show. Told him that she was absolutely horrified at his insinuations, that she never had more than a glass of sherry before dinner. She kept insisting that Tootie had simply put too much wax on the floor before the party. She even tried to fire Tootie." Lizann's laughter tinkled over the wires.

Every family has its stories. In ours, my mother is always the star. She won Miss Baton Rouge 1949 for her rendition of that mockingbird-and-magnolias speech in
Jezebel
, the one where Bette Davis tells Henry Fonda that she's in his blood, "just like the smell of fever mists in the bottoms." Some talent scout met her and invited her out to Hollywood to do a screen test, but as she tells it, she gave all that up to be a wife and a mother. Still, she's never lost her penchant for drama. One year she made us kids dress up in our costumes and dragged us out trick-or-treating on the morning of November first because she'd been too plastered to take us out the night before. At each door, she made a pious little speech about Lizann, her youngest, being sickly, and how she just couldn't let the little ones wander around the neighborhood in the damp of evening. She has an uncanny ability to humiliate, to make you absolutely crazy with rage. Then comes the coy act, or the righteous anger, or her famous imitation of a martyred saint, whatever suits the occasion.

When our brother, Ted, brought Lydia home for the first time, the Queen persisted in calling her Mrs. Gardner. She kept it up all through cocktails and dinner, politely inquiring after the health of Lydia 's former in-laws and behaving for all the world as if she didn't know that Lydia had been divorced for almost a year. Afterward, Ted pitched a fit, he really laid into her, but she was too cagey for him.

"Surely your friend doesn't object to good manners." This said with a hand fluttering to her bosom.

"You were deliberately embarrassing her, Mama, with all that talk about her wedding."

"You weren't there, Edward. It was ravishing. Ray Gardner was in the military, you know, so they had that lovely business with the crossed sabers."

"You're a shrew. You knew damn well that she divorced him. You read the notice to me yourself."

"Well, my goodness, darling, I don't commit everything I read in the papers to memory."

It can get funny, so long as you're not on the receiving end. But we all get on her bad side if we cross her.

So I'm still not sure why I promised Lizann I'd take part in this particular drama; I'd worked so hard to get away from them. I went up North for school, a move that was variously interpreted as an insult to the family, to the state of Louisiana, and to Tulane, Daddy's alma mater. When I graduated, I stayed on in Boston and stumbled around for a while, waiting on tables. Every Sunday evening for almost a year, the phone would ring at eight o'clock. I'd grit my teeth like one of Pavlov's dogs hearing a bell, but no matter how hard I tried to match her cordial tone, within ten minutes I'd be screeching into the receiver.

Of course, the last straw was my moving to New York to give the acting thing a go. Actually, her words were "the last nail in my coffin." You might think she'd be pleased that I was so clearly trying to fulfill her fantasy. But there you'd be wrong. She didn't want anyone to upstage her, least of all me. She needn't have worried.

We had a big fight one night that culminated in her telling me that while I had many good qualities, an actress needs a certain sparkle that makes people sit up and take notice. I, in turn, let her know just what I thought of her long-cherished illusion that she herself had this sparkle.

"That so-called studio scout, he wasn't dazzled by your talent, Mama. He wanted to get you in the sack. Jesus, it's the oldest line in the book. 'I could make you a star.' Even I've heard that one, Mama, even dull little me."

Daddy says that they played hide-and-seek with the key to the liquor cabinet for weeks after that phone call. I started spending Christmases and Thanksgivings with friends.

Sometimes guilt did get the better of me, but I always, but always, ended up being sorry. On every plane back to New York, I would swear up and down that this time I had learned my lesson. I guess whoever said that blood is thicker than water knew what they were talking about. I don't know how else to explain going back one more time.

My flight got hung up in Atlanta for hours while they fiddled with a hitch in the landing gear. I sat hunched over the pamphlets Lizann had mailed me, checking my wristwatch and wishing like hell that they'd let us off the plane so I could have a drink and a cigarette. Between booking a last-minute dinner party and my meat supplier losing an order, I'd already missed the first two meetings at Serenity Lane. The way things were going, I might very well miss the final one. Just about the time I'd decided to get off the plane and catch a flight heading back to New York, the pilot's voice crackled over the PA, the lights flickered, and the plane began to lumber forward. It was already dark by the time I landed in New Orleans.

Aunt Maybelle and Uncle Duke were waiting at the airport. Duke grabbed the overnight bag out of my hand as I stepped into the terminal and ushered me through the sparse crowd around the gate to where my aunt sat in the waiting area. He said, "Does this look like our Victoria to you? I'm not at all sure, it's been so long. I just grabbed the prettiest young lady comin' down the ramp."

Maybelle grasped my hand in hers and began to tear up. "Well, we're just so happy to see you, Victoria. We're just so glad. I don't know what in the world – " She broke off, sniffling, and clicked open a patent leather handbag, searching for a hankie. "Your father, poor dear, he'll be so happy. He wanted to come here himself, but he didn't want Ellen to… All this sneakin' around. It makes me feel like a traitor, I swear."

Duke broke in, chuckling. "You still charging them Yankees eighteen dollars for a plate of gumbo and greens?" This is another family joke. I started teaching myself to cook back when I was about thirteen and the Queen took to napping through the late afternoons. By the time she'd come downstairs to collect the sherry that Daddy rationed out to her each evening at cocktail hour, she'd already be too stupefied to put together a meal. I never was a fancy cook, but I loved tying an apron around my waist and feeding people. The catering business started out as a sideline, something to tide me over between acting jobs, but when the Cajun rage hit New York, I became sort of a small-time Colonel Sanders. I provide the local color, a trumped-up version of Southern hospitality, and my Grandmother Wilene's recipes for corn-bread and bourbon pie.

The meeting at the clinic had already started by the time we arrived. Ted was in the middle of reciting something, but when the three of us slipped in he stammered to a halt. A dumpling-faced man with blond wisps of hair combed across his scalp smiled and waved us into empty chairs near the door. Everyone else in the room I knew: Daddy, Lydia, Lizann, and my mother's friend, Winnie.

'Ted, that was just fine. We'll pick this up again in a minute, after we get Torrie here oriented a little. Torrie" – the man shifted his smile to me – "my name is Henry Bujone, and I'm going to be assisting in this intervention. I understand that you had a difficult time getting down here. But you're here now, and that's going to mean so much to your loved one." Henry's voice rolled like molasses, the long steady drawl of a preacher. "Lizann here tells me you used to be an actress. Might I have seen you in anything?"

"You might have." I left it at that. I don't know why, but I took an instant dislike to the man.

"Well, then." He cleared his throat and resumed, "We're just doing a little role-playing here. Kind of like a rehearsal for what we're gonna say tomorrow. Everyone here has made a list of specific events and times when the dependent's drinking has impacted on their lives. Did you get a chance to read the literature?"

I nodded, trying hard to keep my own smile from cracking into a smirk. No one who'd met the Queen Mother even once would call her dependent. Imperious, manipulative, and phony, yes, but not dependent.

"Well, if you have any questions, you feel free to speak right up. Let's see, Ted, you were telling your mother about the time she dropped your little boy. Why don't you tell her how that made you feel?"

Ted scrutinized the sheet of yellow legal paper in his lap.