The Fire Night Ball (4 page)

Marlena was taking another look at her thought processes during the past half hour.
Something was not quite right.

When such moments of illumination arrived, cousin Chloe had taught her, she should sit perfectly still and allow her thoughts to flow where they would.

“When you’re taking a walk in your inner space, nothing is unimportant.”

It had started while she was on the examining table--a sensation of hyper-awareness, as though she were floating above herself and peering through a crystal skull into her working brain. Oddly, her mind seemed much younger; a seven-year-old brain was displayed for her to observe, the brain who'd been Typhoid Ronnie's sidekick.

Marlena focused on two separate reactions that had been going on inside her head during his physical examination of her.

On the one hand, she'd been thinking
: Fuck! That's Typhoid Ronnie’s hand feeling me up! Let me outa here!

On the other hand, he now was an adult doctor of medicine, a sanctioned authority figure, and she was his patient. It was her job to submit without a struggle, right?

But, why so fast? Her submissive response had come up so quickly, she'd barely registered the first impulse. This insight shed light on episodes from childhood that had been on her mind since the discovery of the two notebooks.

Had she been programmed to be sexually passive?

Marlena touched her bare feet to the floor, coming back with a thump to the present. As she pulled on her bell bottom jeans, she jerked her mind back to the ominous specter of being pregnant and ruining her dream.

Did Typhoid Ronnie continue to bring her bad luck? But Chloe had taught her that we make our own luck. As she closed the examination room door, nausea swept over her in waves. Fearing she might tip over and embarrass herself, she walked slowly down the hall.

Harry had grown colder of late and their meetings were less frequent. Would she be able to get him on board with an escape from this gossipy town, if indeed she was carrying his child?

“Distant men and far-off places,” Dr. V had once observed, “often appear far more romantic than they really are.”

Naturally, if she confided in Chloe, she would be pressed to answer a slew of questions she'd much prefer to ignore.

What professional damage was she doing to herself? How would the community perceive of her if they knew of the affair? What legal hot water was she in? Finally, how would it all end?

Blah, blah, blah….

Almost everyone practices amateur psychiatry these days, Marlena thought, just as they used to apply permanent waves at home.

She'd read her share of self-help books about the bad karma created by romantic egotism. But she also knew one long weekend with her lover had the power to cast off any demons of doubt and blast all well-intentioned advice to the four winds.

Damn the torpedoes--full speed ahead!

"I will never give up on Harry," she vowed silently, clenching her fists. "Never! No matter what happens, I will never give up Harry."

At the check-out desk, she fished in her purse for business cards and came up with the house key to Mill’s Creek Chloe had given her yesterday. Was this a lifeline she should grab at, before Letty took another stab at driving her from town on a rail?

As she fumbled around in her purse for a pen, the purse fell off her arm and the contents spilled out onto the floor, rolling everywhere.

“Fuck!”

“Are you all right, Miss?”

“I apologize. Too much coffee,” she mumbled, hurriedly gathering up her belongings. On a business card, she wrote down the phone number for Mill’s Creek and handed it to the woman. “That’s where I can be reached tomorrow,” she said. “The doctor will have test results for me.”

“Better watch yourself outside, Miss Bellum. It’s icy.”

She started to correct the honorific, then gave it up.

"Do you have a phone I could use?"

"Out in the hallway, dear."

Shivering in the unheated vestibule, she looked in the yellow pages for Bryce Scattergood, whom Chloe had recommended for real estate appraisal. She noted he was broker of his own company, also president of the Northeastern Wyoming Association of Realtors (NWAR).

"I've been expecting your call, Ms. Bellum," said Mr. Scattergood.

Really? Why would that be? The Bellums and the Scattergoods hadn’t been on speaking terms for two generations. Was another weird revelation in store?
The deep rumble in his voice was sexy.

They agreed to meet in his office Wednesday to discuss the market value of the Bellum house.

Now what? If she went straight to Mill’s Creek, she was assured peace and quiet. Chloe kept office hours in town during the week. She could tell Faith she was assisting Annie Witherspoon, Chloe's housekeeper, with preparations for the big Christmas Fire Night Ball.

Duty was the only excuse that worked with Faith. Marlena had relied heavily on it to keep her mother at a safe distance during the past year. The last thing she'd needed was Faith showing up unannounced at her new digs in the Castro and getting a load of her lesbian roommate, the microbiologist.

Power to the sisters and their exuberant romps, which they sometimes inveigled Marlena into joining. But Faith would die if she walked into that scene, nor would she be tolerant of Kat's heavy eye makeup, multiple piercings, and tongue stud.

There was no point waiting around at the hotel for Harry. Last night had been another disappointment. He'd never shown, presumably kept longer than expected in Laramie.
Harry doesn't confide in me as he used to.

What would Harry say when she quizzed him about the bank's low-ball offer to buy a pink Victorian house on an abandoned city street, which for decades was the Bellums’ beloved home? What would he say if she turned out to be pregnant?

First stop today, she decided, would be the hotel, where she'd pack, touch base with Chloe and Faith by phone, and, most critically, leave a note for Harry that they needed to talk. Then she'd go to Mill's Creek, collapse, and attempt to recover from this latest blow to her equilibrium, not to mention her ego.

As she drove into Alta's tiny downtown district, the shopkeepers were letting in customers. Snow-blowers were out on the sidewalks, plows were clearing the streets, and school children were admiring the display through the glass windows of Harrison's Olde Timey Department Store.

She loved holidays but she felt lethargic, not at all in the spirit, as she drove under Harrison's silver banner:

Celebrating 75 Years of Lighting Local Christmas Trees

Join us Sunday for Fire Night 1977

Fuck me!

Instinctively she slammed on the brake pedal. All she had in her suitcase was a red sweater from the Horchow Collection for Faith. There were no Christmas gifts for Chloe and Annie. How could she have forgotten?
Was she losing her powers, just when she needed them most?

As she proceeded up the mountain to the Alta Hotel's valet parking, a new agenda emerged, a shopping day with Faith. She got out from the silver BMW with less bounce than usual and in the proximity of old black Joe. The grizzled valet now worked only part-time because of rheumatic legs; he came hobbling over.

“Seen Mr. Drake today, Joe?”

“Nope. Not expectin’ him neither. Will you be needin’ help with any bags today, Miz Marlena?”

“Oh, no. You know me, Joe; I travel light.”

“Yessum. Never seen you even once with anythin' bigger dan a knapsack. How you manage dat?"

“Traveling light is my specialty, Joe. It’s a state of mind."

"My wife Dorothea don’t know fum dat state. When we tooken our weekend in Vegas she brung herse’f a suitcase big as an ice-box. Woman, I ses to her, you expecks me to truck that big ol' thing up dos steps? Carry yer own big bag; you got de muscles for it. Uhn, uhn, uhn.”

The last big suitcase she had trundled, Marlena told Joe, got left behind on the Queen Mary when she was bringing B. L. Zebub to Wyoming from the Cotswolds. It took weeks to recover the suitcase and another week to iron her clothes.

Their arms were pressed lightly together as they stood at the railing of the ship's aft deck. When their eyes locked, the sensation was like wildfire through her veins.

"Do you feel it?" Harry said.

The world beyond his eyes was cloudy, as though she were being hypnotized.

"Do you feel that current?"

She hadn't answered, but did she ever! Her panties were sopping wet.

Hastily sweeping the words and images from her mind, she continued: "After that, Joe, I bought myself a travel wardrobe that wears like iron. And I carry a small bag I can easily tote.”

“Yo' sho’ do
look
light. Seem to ol' Joe you needs to stop hangin’ around ‘dis here hotel and workin’ day and night.”

She watched Joe slowly tighten his white gloves.

Not every native in Alta was a gossip, a prude, a bigot, or a vicious hatemonger like crazy Letty Brown-Hawker and her clan. Perhaps the good people were why Typhoid Ronnie had come back and why Chloe stuck it out here, when she could be living the high life doctoring famous people in San Francisco, New York, or even Europe.

Or could there be another reason why Chloe stayed?

During Sunday brunch with her mother, when she had delivered the torpedo-like news of her legal separation from Coddie and admitted to a relationship with Harry Drake, Faith had shot one back.

She'd revealed that Chloe and Harry had nearly eloped in 1947. Their elopement had fizzled before it started, and 1947 was so long ago, but yet--what if Chloe and Harry were more than old friends?

Marlena strode through the hotel lobby, acknowledging the perfunctory smiles of the staff as she breezed past them.

“We go way back, Harry and I,” Chloe had said on that first day over drinks.

“Chloe and I go way back,” Harry had said Sunday night in her hotel suite.

An image of Chloe and Harry naked in bed, getting it on, arose unbidden. Walking into the elevator, she numbly pushed the button for the sixth floor.

Which made her more jealous? Chloe as a rival for Harry's hungry lips and hard cock? Or Harry as a rival for Chloe's motherly affections?

In the annals of sexual politics, odder things had happened than one's psychiatrist stealing one's lover. All the more reason, then, to stay at Mill’s Creek, where she could keep an eye on Chloe's comings and goings.
Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.

With her next deep breath, Marlena managed to become thoroughly ashamed of herself. She would have washed her mind out with soap if it were possible. She reached the sixth floor, ran down the hall to Suite 66, clutching her stomach, and got inside just in time to vomit in the bathroom toilet.
See, it's all stress-related, not a pregnancy
.

Then she called Chloe, to tell her she would be checking out of the hotel and moving to Mill's Creek later today.

Two decisions down. Now for the note to Harry.

At that precise moment, Marlena noticed her signed divorce petition papers were still spread out on her desk.

Fuck!

She'd intended to hide them before running out of here this morning. Harry mustn't see them. It would plant the wrong idea, a suspicion she was applying psychological pressure on him to file for divorce.

Having jammed the signed papers into the preaddressed overnight delivery envelope, she then set the envelope in her out-basket, where her assistant would pick it up before leaving and mail it for her.

Quickly she jotted on musk-scented notepaper: “Harry, urgent we connect before the holiday. Let me know when, where. Staying with Chloe. Call me. Marlena.”

Ball’s in your court, my love, she thought, putting the note inside its pink linen envelope. She would take this message up to his room personally, to make sure he got it.

Harry would probably assume she was fishing for her Christmas gift. The pearl-and-aquamarine bracelet he’d given her Sunday wasn’t a Christmas present, but penance for showing up days late without sending a word.

“The stones are the same color as your eyes, my love. Are you crying? No. I didn’t think so. I've never seen you cry. I like that about you.”

Dry-eyed, but in her heart, she was bleeding from wounds of rejection, so dismissive had her lover's words and actions become of late. She feared his seeing how much she needed him, how obsessed she was with regaining the fervor of their early years.

She'd worn the bracelet yesterday for lunch with Chloe, and when she'd said it was a gift from Harry, no frown or wrinkle had appeared on Chloe's smooth face. There was no reason, she assured herself, to fear Chloe's reaction to the affair.

Indeed, as it turned out, Chloe had already known about the affair. It had all come out over cocktails at B. L. Zebub's, after Marlena's nerves had already been shot to hell by Mrs. Brown-Hawker’s threat of a curse hanging over her head.

"Chloe, it's been so long since we had a chance to hang out."

"Much too long, dear."

"The last time was between Cleveland State and grad school, when I came out on the train to spend the summer with Granny. You'd just opened the summer horse camp for girls. I signed up and immediately developed a huge crush on Jack Nelson, your blond horse handler with the rippling back muscles. But Jack didn’t know I was alive.”

Chloe chuckled. “I find
that
hard to believe. Jack's an older cousin of Apollo Nelson, my current ranch hand. In fact, Jack's getting married this week to his former sweetheart, a second marriage.”

"Well, Jack put me on a fat-assed Spanish nag named Holy Toledo, nothing like your well-bred steeds, Dickens and Darwin. I was determined not to go anywhere on that beast. I wanted to stay near Jack. He slapped it and yelled, ‘Go, Holy Toledo, go, goddammit!’

"But the horse wouldn’t move an inch. I was willing it not to go. That was the first and last time I ever used my mental powers on an animal.”

“Your ability to concentrate is powerful. No question of that.”

“A girl at horse camp told me Jack had the hots for the barmaid at the Plush Horse. So I snuck down there one night and caught the pair doing it outside in the holly bushes. But after awhile, I could care less.

"Remember what a beautiful place the old Plush Horse used to be, back in the fifties? I couldn't keep my eyes off the old inn. I was horror-stricken by what terrible shape it was in. That night, I lay awake for hours, thinking if there was something I could do to save the life of the Plush Horse. Despite my willing it otherwise, the fire department condemned it, and it was torn down the following year.”

Chloe observed, "That was a great opportunity for Harry Drake. He got his grandfather’s prime property back for pennies on the dollar.”

Marlena noted the pointed comment about Harry. Was Chloe testing her? If so, why?

“I felt a lot worse about the Plush Horse going down the tubes than I did about the barmaid going down on Jack Nelson.”

“Perhaps that’s when you found your calling, dear, to save historic buildings.”

“Well, it wasn’t the other," Marlena quipped. "Oral sex is hardly my favorite, unless I'm the one getting it. And--”

“Yes?”

“That wasn’t the only eye-opener I received. You were volunteering at the Brighton School for Indian Girls, now corrected to Native American Girls. Remember?”

“I taught courses for them--”

"In Cultural Trends and Western Philosophy,” Marlena quickly finished her cousin's sentence.

“Right.”

“That was my first exposure to Ayn Rand and Objectivism. We read her introduction to the 1968 edition of
The Fountainhead
, and I became a devotee. But the philosophical H's also had a big effect. I stored it all here, alphabetically,” said Marlena, knocking her knuckles on her large noggin.

“Let’s see. There was Hamilton, an evolutionary psychologist who was applying Darwin to modern human behavior, like you. I dug Hegel’s dialectic: one extreme precipitates the other, like a pendulum. Finally, the best of all, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: when you examine a particle with an electron microscope, the nature of the particle is changed. So, the more you investigate, the more skewed the results. What’s my grade, Dr. V?”

“'A' for adequate, given your talents.”

In a lowered voice, Marlena said, “I remember everything I see or read, almost in the same degree of detail you can.”

Chloe could quote an entire book verbatim.

“It’s a rare gift. My mother had it. Yours does too. The correct term for it is an eidetic memory.”

“It sometimes presents a problem.”

“For whom, dear?”

"You aren't about to practice psychoanalysis in a bar, are you, cousin Chloe? So, what are your plans for the rest of the afternoon?"

"A young patient of mine has invited me to her seventh birthday party at Bottomly's Cafe. I promised I’d be there by five.”