Shakespeare's Trollop (5 page)

As I carried the box down the stairs, I returned to a familiar worry. I'd have to get another regular client for Friday mornings. I'd had Deedra and the Winthrops on Friday; then the Winthrops had dropped me, and now Deedra was dead. My financial future was looking grimmer by the week.

I was supposed to meet my friend Carrie Thrush at her office; Carrie had said she'd bring a bag lunch for us both. I got in my car, stowing the box in the backseat. Minutes later, I glanced at my watch to find I was running a little late, because I had to find a business Dumpster on the other side of Shakespeare, one that wasn't too visible, and deposit the box of sex paraphernalia after removing the two jackets. I was certain no one saw me. By the time I turned in to Carrie's office, I assumed she'd be in her office, fussing over food growing cold.

But when I pulled down the small driveway marked
STAFF PARKING ONLY
, Carrie was standing in the little graveled lot behind her clinic, where she and her nurses parked their cars.

“Want to go somewhere with me?” Carrie's smile was stiff and self-conscious. She was wearing white, but it wasn't her lab coat, I realized after a second's scrutiny. She was wearing a white dress with a lacy white collar. I could feel my eyebrows draw together in a frown.

I didn't remember ever seeing Carrie in a dress, except at a funeral. Or a wedding.

“What?” I asked sharply.

“Go with me to the courthouse?”

“For?”

Her face scrunched up, causing her glasses to slide down her small nose.

Carrie had on makeup. And her hair wasn't pulled back behind her ears, as she usually wore it at work. It swung forward in shining brown wings.

“For?” I asked more insistently.

“Well…Claude and I are going to get married today.”

“At the courthouse?” I tried not to sound astonished, but she flushed.

“We have to do it before we lose our courage,” she said in a rush. “We're both set in our ways, we both have everything we could need to start a household, and we both want to have just a couple of good friends at the ceremony. The marriage license list'll be out in the paper tomorrow and then everyone will know.” The legal notices always appeared in the local paper on Thursday afternoon.

“But…” I looked down at my working clothes, not exactly pristine after getting into closets and under beds at Deedra's.

“If you want to run home, we have a few minutes,” she said, glancing down at her watch. “Not that I care what you wear, but if I know you, it'll bother you the whole time.”

“Yes, not being clean at a wedding does bother me,” I said shortly. “Get in the car.”

I couldn't say why I felt a little angry, but I did. Maybe it was the surprise of it (I'm not fond of surprises) or maybe it was the switch in moods required of me: from death to marriage in a single day. I had become sure Claude Friedrich and Dr. Carrie Thrush would get married, and I'd become sure it was a good idea. The difference in ages was substantial; Claude was probably forty-eight or so, and Carrie was about thirty-two. But I was confident their marriage would work, and I hadn't regretted turning down a chance to try intimacy with Claude myself. So why was I upset? I owed it to Carrie to be happy.

I made myself smile as Carrie ran on and on about why they'd made their decision, how her parents were going to take it, how soon they could get Claude's things moved into her small house.

“What about a honeymoon?” I asked, as I turned the key in the lock of my own little house, Carrie practically on my heels.

“That's going to have to wait for a month,” Carrie said. “We'll take a long weekend starting today, from now until Monday night, but we're not going far. And Claude has to take his beeper with him.”

While Carrie alternated staring in the mirror and pacing the floor, I stripped off my cleaning clothes and pulled out my good black suit. No. Couldn't wear black to a wedding. I grasped the hanger holding my sleeveless white dress. No, couldn't wear white either.

But after a second's consideration, I realized I had to. I camouflaged it with my black jacket and a black belt, and I tucked a bright blue scarf into the neckline. I pulled up my thigh-highs, slid on my good black shoes, and replaced Carrie in front of the bathroom mirror to repowder and to fluff my short curly hair.

“I would have given you a wedding shower,” I said sourly, and met Carrie's eyes. After a little pause, we both began laughing, because that seemed such an unlikely scenario to both of us.

“Are you ready? You look pretty,” Carrie said, giving me a careful once-over.

“You too,” I said honestly. With her short-sleeved white dress, she was wearing brown pumps and carrying a brown purse. She looked fine, but not exactly festive. We got back into my car, and as we passed a florist, I pulled in to the curb.

“What?” Carrie asked anxiously. “We're late.”

“Hold on a minute,” I said, and ran into the shop.

“I need a corsage,” I told the old woman that came to help me.

“An orchid?” she asked. “Or some nice carnations?”

“Not carnations,” I told her. “An orchid, with white net and a colored ribbon.”

This admirable woman didn't ask questions, she just went to work. In less than ten minutes, I was handing Carrie the orchid, netted in white and beribboned in green, and she tearfully pinned it to her dress.

“Now you really look like a bride,” I said, and the knot inside me eased.

“I wish Jack were here,” Carrie said politely, though she hadn't really had much of a chance to know him. “Claude and I would have enjoyed him being with us.”

“He's still in California,” I told her. “I don't know when he'll be back.”

“I hope you two…” but Carrie didn't finish that thought, and I was grateful.

The courthouse, which occupies a whole block downtown, is an old one, but recently renovated. Claude was waiting on the wheelchair ramp.

“He's wearing a suit,” I said, amazed almost beyond speech. I'd never seen Claude in anything but his uniform or blue jeans.

“Doesn't he look handsome?” Carrie's cheeks, normally on the sallow end of the spectrum, took on a becoming rose tint. In fact, she looked more twenty-five than thirty-two.

“Yes,” I said gently. “He looks wonderful.”

Claude's brother, Charles, was with him, looking more uncomfortable than Claude did. Charles was more at home in overalls and a welder's cap than a suit. Shy and solitary by nature, Charles managed to make himself almost invisible even in this small town. I thought I could count on my fingers the number of times I'd seen Charles in the years I'd lived in Shakespeare.

He'd really made an effort today.

When Claude saw Carrie coming up the sidewalk, his face changed. I watched the hardness seep out of it, replaced by something more. He took her hand, and brought his other hand from behind him to present her with a bouquet.

“Oh, Claude,” she said, overcome with pleasure. “You thought of this.”

Good. Much better than my corsage. Now Carrie looked truly bridelike.

“Claude, Charles,” I said, by way of greeting.

“Lily, thanks for coming. Let's go do it.”

If Claude had been any more nervous he would've made a hole in the sidewalk.

I spied Judge Hitchcock peering out of the door.

“Judge is waiting,” I said, and Claude and Carrie looked at each other, heaved a simultaneous sigh, and started toward the courthouse door. Charles and I were right behind.

After the brief ceremony, Claude and Carrie had eyes only for each other, though Carrie hugged Charles and me, and Claude shook our hands. He offered to buy us lunch, but with one voice we turned him down, Charles wanted to crawl back in his cave, wherever it was, and I was not in a festive mood after my morning's work, though I was making an effort to be cheerful for my friends' sakes.

Charles and I were glad to part, and as Carrie and her new husband drove away to their weekend prehoney-moon, I went back to my house, despising myself for my nasty mood, which I hoped I'd hidden well enough. Changing back into my working clothes, hanging my good outfit in the closet, and grabbing a piece of fruit for lunch, I was restless from the dark feeling inside me. As always, it translated into a need for action. It would have been a good day for me to be mugged, because I would have enjoyed hurting someone.

While I cleaned the tiny house of the very old Mrs. Jepperson, while the round black woman who “sat with” Mrs. Jepperson every day did her best to catch me stealing something, I carried that core of anger within me, burning and painful.

It took me an hour to identify my anger as loneliness. It had been a long time since I'd felt lonely; I'm a person who enjoys being alone, and the past few years had afforded me plenty of that. For a long time, I hadn't made friends; I hadn't taken lovers. But this year had seen so many changes in me, and unfortunately, side by side with the willingness to have friends traveled the capacity for loneliness. I sighed as I put Mrs. Jepperson's stained sheets in the washer to soak in bleach.

I was just plain old feeling sorry for myself. Even though I knew that, I didn't seem to be able to quench that resentful smoldering inside me.

I went to my next job, and then home, without being able to find a thought to still my inner restlessness. Jack, whose timing was often off, chose that moment to call me.

Every now and then Jack told me all about a case he was working on. But sometimes, especially in a case involving financial transactions and large sums of money, he kept his mouth shut, and this was one of those times. He missed me very much, he said. And I believed him. But I had unworthy thoughts, ideas that dismayed me; not their content, exactly, but the fact that
I
was having them. California, the home of tanned young hardbodies, I thought; Jack, the most passionate man I'd ever met, was in California. I wasn't jealous of a woman, but a
state
.

Not surprisingly, the conversation didn't go well. I was at my most clipped and inaccessible; Jack was frustrated and angry that I wasn't happier he'd called right in the middle of his busy day. I knew I was being impossible, without seeming to be able to stop it, and I believe he knew the same.

We needed to be together more. After we'd hung up, just barely managing not to snarl at each other, I made myself face the facts. One weekend every now and then wasn't enough. It took us hours to get re-accustomed to ourselves as a couple, together. After that we had a wonderful time, but then we had to go through the detachment process when Jack returned to Little Rock. His hours were unpredictable. My hours were generally regular. Only by living in the same town were we likely to see each other consistently enough to establish our relationship.

Your own life is plenty hard without complicating it with that of another. For a moment I wondered if we should stop trying. The idea was so painful that I had to admit to myself, all over again, that Jack was necessary to me.

I didn't want to call him back when I was so fraught. I couldn't predict what he would say, either. So what I ended up doing that evening was going into the empty guest bedroom and kicking the hell out of my punching bag.

Thursday was biceps day in my personal schedule. Bicep curls may look impressive, but they're not my favorite exercise. And they're hard to do correctly. Most people swing the dumbbells up. Of course, the more swing you put in it, the less you're working your biceps. I've noticed that in every movie scene set in a gym, the characters are either doing bicep curls or bench presses. Usually the guy doing bicep curls is a jerk.

Just as I put the twenty-five-pound barbells back on the weight rack, Bobo Winthrop walked in with a girl. Bobo, though maybe twelve years younger than me, was my friend. I was glad to see him, and glad to see the girl accompanying him; for the past couple of years, even after all the trouble I'd had with his family, Bobo had been convinced that I was the woman for him. Now that Bobo divided his time between college in nearby Montrose and visits home to check on his ailing grandmother, visit his family, and do his laundry, I seldom got to visit with him. I realized I'd missed him, and that made me wary.

As I watched Bobo start working his way around the room, shaking hands and patting backs, I moved from free weights to the preacher bench. The short young woman in tow behind him kept smiling as Bobo, shoving his floppy blond hair out of his eyes, introduced her to the motley crew who inhabited the gym at this early hour. She had a good, easy, meet-and-greet style.

The early-morning people at Body Time ranged from Brian Gruber, an executive at a local mattress-manufacturing plant, to Jerri Sizemore, whose claim to fame was that she'd been married four times. As I put weights on the short curl bar at the preacher bench, I marked Bobo's progress with a touch of amusement. In his golden wake, he left smiles and some infusion of joie de vive.

What did it feel like, I wondered, to be almost universally known and liked, to be attractive to almost everyone, to have the backing of a strong and influential family?

With a shock like a dash of ice water, it occurred to me that I had once been like that, when I'd been about Bobo's age: before I'd gone off to live in Memphis, before the media-saturated nightmare of my abduction and rape. I shook my head. Though I knew it was true, I found it was almost impossible to believe I had ever been that comfortable. Bobo had had some hard times himself, at least in the past year, yet his long look into darkness had only made his radiance stand out with greater relief.

I'd finished my first set with the curl bar and returned it to its rests by the time Bobo worked his way around to me.

“Lily!” His voice was full of pride. Was he showing me off to the girl, or the girl to me? His hand on my shoulder was warm and dry. “This is Toni Holbrook,” he said. “Toni, this is my friend Lily Bard.” The gaze of his dark blue eyes flicked back and forth between us.

I waited for my name to ring a bell with this girl—for the horrified fascination to creep into her gaze—but she was so young I guess she didn't remember the months when my name was in every newspaper. I relaxed and held out my hand to her. She stuck her fingers up against my palm instead of grasping my hand firmly. Almost always, the offenders who shake hands in this wishy-washy way are women. It felt like getting a handful of cannelloni.

“I'm so pleased to finally meet you,” she said with a sincere smile that made my teeth hurt. “Bobo talks about you all the time.”

I flashed a glance at him. “I used to clean for Bobo's mother,” I said, to put a different perspective on the conversation. I'll give her this, she didn't flinch.

“What you want on there, Lily?” Bobo asked. He waited at the disc rack.

“Another set of dimes,” I told him. He slid off two ten-pound discs, put one on each end of the bar, and then added clips to secure them. We were comfortable working with weights together; Bobo's first job had been here at the gym, and he'd spotted for me many a time. This morning, he took his position at the front of the bar and I straddled the seat, leaning over the padded rest, the backs of my hands toward the floor so I could grasp the bar to curl up. I nodded when I was ready, and he helped me lift the bar the first couple of inches. Then he let go, and I brought it up myself, squeezing until the bar touched my chin. I finished my ten reps without too much trouble, but I was glad when Bobo helped me ease the bar down into the rack.

“Toni, are you here for the rest of the week?” I asked, making an effort to be polite for Bobo's sake. He slid the clips off, raising his blond eyebrows interrogatively. “Dime again,” I said, and together we prepared the bar.

“Yes, we'll go back to Montrose on Sunday afternoon,” Toni said, with equal politeness and a tiny, clear emphasis on the
we
. Her smooth black hair was cut just below chin-length, and looked as if it always stayed brushed. It swung in a lively dance when she moved her head. She had a sweet mouth and almond-shaped brown eyes. “I'm from DeQueen,” she added, when her first sentence hung in the air for a second or two. I found I didn't care.

I nodded to show I was ready, and Bobo gave me a little boost to get the bar off the stand. With a lot more difficulty, I completed another set, making sure to breathe out as I lifted, in when I lowered. My muscles began to tremble, I made the deep “uh” that accompanied my best effort, and Bobo did his job.

“Come on Lily, squeeze, you can do it,” he exhorted sternly, and the bar touched my chin. “Look at Lily's definition, Toni,” Bobo said over his shoulder. Behind his back, Toni looked at me as if she wished I'd vanish in a puff of smoke. But I was honor-bound to complete the next two reps. When they were done, Bobo said, “You can do another one. You've got it left in you.”

“I'm through, thanks,” I said firmly. I rose and removed the clips that secured the weights. We began putting the discs back on the rack.

Toni wandered over to the water fountain.

“I need to talk to you this weekend,” Bobo said quietly.

“Okay.” I hesitated. “Saturday afternoon?”

He nodded. “Your place?”

“All right.” I was doubtful about the wisdom of this, but I owed it to him to listen, whatever he wanted to say.

My forehead was beaded with sweat. Instead of searching out my towel, I lifted the hem of my T-shirt and dabbed at my forehead, ensuring Bobo saw the horrendous scars on my ribs.

I saw him gulp. I went on to my next exercise feeling obscurely vindicated. Though Bobo was handsome and wholesome as a loaf of good bread, and I had once or twice been tempted to take a bite, Toni was from his world. I intended to see he kept my age and bitter experience in his mind.

Janet was doing shoulders this morning, and I spotted for her while she worked on the Gravitron. Her knees on the small platform, the counterweight set at forty pounds so she wouldn't be lifting her whole body weight, Janet gripped the bars above her head and pulled up. She was working pretty hard the first few reps, and by number eight, I wandered over to hold her feet and push up gently to lighten the strain on her arms. When she'd finished number ten, Janet dangled from the bars, panting, and after a minute she slid her knees off the platform and stood on the uprights. Stepping off backward, she took a few more seconds to catch her breath and let the muscles of her shoulders recoup.

“Are you going to the funeral?” she asked. She moved the pin to the thirty-pound slot.

“I don't know.” I hated the thought of dressing up and going into the crowded Shakespeare Combined Church. “Have you heard if the time's certain yet?”

“Last night, my mother was over at Lacey and Jerrell's when the funeral home called to say the coroner's office in Little Rock was sending the body back. Lacey said Saturday morning at eleven.”

I considered, scowling. I could probably finish work by eleven if I got up extra early and hurried. If I ever got around to getting my clients to sign a contract, I decided one of the clauses would be that I didn't have to go to their funerals.

“I guess I should,” I said reluctantly.

“Great!” Janet looked positively happy. “If it's okay with you, I'll park at your house and we can walk to the funeral together.”

Making that little arrangement would never have occurred to me. “Okay,” I said, struggling not to sound astonished or doubtful. Then I realized I had a bit of news I should share.

“Claude and Carrie got married,” I told her.

“You're…you're serious!” Janet faced me, astonished. “When?”

“At the courthouse, yesterday.”

“Hey, Marshall!” Janet called to our
sensei
, who'd just come out of the office in the hallway between the weight room and the aerobics room where we held karate classes. Marshall turned, holding a glass of some grainy brown stuff he drank for breakfast. Marshall was wearing his normal uniform of T-shirt and muscle pants. He raised his black eyebrows to ask, What?

“Claude and Carrie got married, Lily says!”

This caused a general burst of comment among the others in the room. Brian Gruber quit doing stomach crunches and sat up on the bench, patting his face with his towel. Jeri yanked her cellular phone from her workout bag and called a friend she knew would be up and drinking her coffee. A couple of other people sauntered over to discuss this news. And I caught a blaze of some emotion on Bobo's face, some feeling I found didn't fit in any category of comfortable response to my trivial piece of gossip.

“How did you know?” Janet asked, and I discovered I was in the middle of a small group of sweaty and curious people.

“I was there,” I answered, surprised.

“You were a witness?”

I nodded.

“What did she wear?” Jerri asked, pushing her streaky blond hair away from her forehead.

“Where'd they go for their honeymoon?” asked Marlys Squire, a travel agent with four grandchildren.

“Where are they gonna live?” asked Brian Gruber, who'd been trying to sell his own house for five months.

For a moment, I thought of turning tail and simply walking away, but…maybe…it wasn't so bad, talking to these people, being part of a group.

But when I was driving away from the gym I felt the reaction; I'd let myself down, somehow, a corner of my brain warned. I'd opened myself, made it easy. Instead of sliding between those people, observing but not participating, I'd held still long enough to be pegged in place, laid myself open to interpretation by giving them a piece of my thoughts.

While I worked that day, I retreated into a deep silence, comforting and refreshing as an old bathrobe. But it wasn't as comfortable as it had been. It didn't seem, somehow, to fit anymore.

That evening I walked, the cool night covering me with its darkness. I saw Joel McCorkindale, the minister of the Shakespeare Combined Church, running his usual three miles, his charisma turned off for the evening. I observed that Doris Massey, whose husband had died the previous year, had resumed entertaining, since Charles Friedrich's truck was parked in front of her trailer. Clifton Emanuel, Marta Schuster's deputy, rolled by in a dark green Bronco. Two teenagers were breaking into the Bottle and Can Liquor Store, and I used my cell phone to call the police station before I melted into the night. No one saw me; I was invisible.

I was lonely.