Venus Envy (19 page)

She stalked over to him. His eyes were big as eight balls. “Baby, trust me. You’re going to love every minute of this.”

“Does it hurt?” He couldn’t take his eyes off the quirt.

“Not the way I do it.”

She didn’t lie. She tickled him with the lash of the quirt all over his body and then took twenty minutes to tie him to the bed with the thongs, taking time every now and then to stroke his cock. This alien, immobile sensation, unlike anything he had ever felt in his pursuits of pleasure, unhinged his body. His cock thundered. Surely he had the biggest erection in human history. Yet he was being nudged, slowly, ever slowly, into some deep recess of his soul. He felt like a man and a woman simultaneously. He had to trust Sarah because he was helpless. She wrapped the lash of the quirt around his cock, tightening it and then loosening it, mounting him at her pleasure. Convulsions wracked every cell of his muscular body. It lasted so long that his mouth became parched and he rasped and gasped for air.

Sarah slowly moved on him, sometimes gliding upward, then descending again. They had waited so long that their orgasms detonated like the atom bomb. Her chaps were pliant with sweat and she dropped, exhausted, onto his chest.

Later, when Carter kissed Sarah good night and shut the door to her small apartment behind him, he could barely pick up one foot and put it in front of the other. It was as though he were on a down escalator trying to run up. He wanted to spend the night with her. He wanted to sleep wrapped around her, his nose buried in her red hair.

By the time he opened the back door to his own home he missed Sarah so much he hurt.

The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed ten times. The television flickered in the living room. Laura sat on the sofa, her feet propped up on the coffee table. Her gardening drawings dotted the floor.

“Hi.” His voice wavered.

“You got the good news, I see.”

“What?” He tensed, instantly wary.

“Your insurance company says, ‘Fuck you.’ I knew they would.” Oh, how Laura loved to be right.

“Oh—that.” Carter pretended he had known.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?” She continued to repose on the sofa, although her back was rigid.

“I’ll think of something.” Carter swayed on his feet. He wanted to go to bed and pull the covers over his head.

“Ask Frazier. She’s rich.”

“I’m not asking Frazier.”

“Oh.” A drop of poison coated Laura’s vocal cords. “Are you going to run to Momma?”

“No.” Carter blinked.

“Good. She’s been through enough already. I worship and adore your mother because she worships and adores you.” Laura showed her fangs.

Was this the mongoose and the cobra? Carter wondered. “Mother likes the idea of a son. She doesn’t like the idea of me. At least Frazier knew that about Mom. It took me until now to figure it out.”

“Well, aren’t we insightful.” Laura crossed her legs and swung them off the coffee table. “What brand of bourbon produced that realization?”

“None. I haven’t touched a drop since Saint Patrick’s Day.”

Laura clapped her hands together, the action accentuating her mockery. “Turning over a new leaf?”

Carter walked toward the bedroom. “Yes.” He closed the door behind him. The poison hung in the air, a mist of marriage misery. He gulped for clean air. He didn’t know what to do or how to do it but finally, finally, he was ready to try.

T
HE RAIN ON THE TIN ROOF TAPPED OUT A CODE, A RAT TAT
, rat tat tat. Frazier strained to hear the message, a code from Zeus/Jupiter, for he was the real rain god. Perhaps all natural phenomena—rain, snow, sunshine, an early blossom of pussy willow, a lost swallowtail butterfly, the green eyes of a kitten, a sweet wind from the south—perhaps all these carried messages and we had lost the ability to read them.

Frazier could read the newspaper though, and her eyes rested on a searing headline:
DON’T BE AFRAID TO TRY CHEESE SOUFFL
é
S
. This encouragement boldly jumped off the page in sans-serif twelve-point type.

She mouthed the headline out loud: “Don’t be afraid to try cheese soufflés. Why, yes, what if the soufflé falls? I mean, does one’s sense of self fall with it, kerplat?”

The cat rolled over on “kerplat” and purred.

Frazier directed this discussion at Basil: “Are cats
afraid to try cheese soufflés? I mean, if you could cook, Basil, would fear of failure paralyze you? Paralysis through analysis. There you’d be, frozen in front of the oven, door ajar, gaping at you. What else can we fear? The heartbreak of psoriasis. Offending thy neighbor with body odor. Hell, it’s not so bad if you covet your neighbor’s wife but don’t have B.O. South Africa’s ready to blow. Eastern Europe is shaky. Abortion protestors litter the pavement with their bodies but a flat cheese soufflé is a terrifying prospect.”

She threw the paper on the floor. The rustle caused the Jack Russell to bark.

“Shut up, Curry.”

If Curry could, he no doubt would have replied, “Shut up yourself, crab.”

Frazier glanced over the bed and noticed that she had been reading the food section. Reportage of South Africa rarely appears in the food section.

The patter increased; the clatter filled her bedroom. A sizzle provided counterpoint to the music as an errant raindrop slithered down the open flue and fell into the fire. Curry and Basil curled up together at the end of the bed. The temperature in the low forties, raw, crawled into the bones, whether human, feline, or canine.

Burrowed into the down comforter and flannel sheets, Frazier opened Bulfinch’s
Mythology
, which she had bought on her way home from the gallery. Her hands would chill. She’d hold the paperback with one hand, keeping the other under the covers. When the holding hand tingled with cold she’d switch hands.

Dionysus’s goblet unnerved her. She decided to reacquaint herself with the Greek myths, but on a night like tonight concentration proved difficult.

For one thing the downpour reminded her that the last time she’d made love was four months ago, with
Ann during a storm. How did Carter do it? She limped along with one woman and her brother used to knock them off like ninepins. She considered asking Carter how he convinced these damsels to go to bed with him and then, more impressive, how he slid away from them. Not that Ann clamped down for a lifetime commitment. Poor Ann, so far in the closet that she was in danger of turning into a garment bag, trembling at the prospect of being unmasked. Commitment by its very nature unmasks us. Time does the rest.

Frazier wondered if she’d ever make love to a woman again, or a man for that matter. She wasn’t that picky. She preferred to think of her attitude as a whimsical disregard for gender. But she knew that her deepest affections, if she could locate them, were reserved for women. Right now, hands cold, fire crackling, deepest affections paled before animal sex.

Well, it was a sure bet no one in town would go to bed with her. Now that the news was out, thanks in part to Carter’s drunken night at Buddy’s and Laura’s sly hints and judicious indiscretions, no one remotely homosexual would go near her. That was the great Charlottesville way: straight in Charlottesville, gay when you left it.

A life of aloneness. Not so bad, really. A life with no sex. The absolute, rotten worst.

She switched hands. Thoughts of sex drew her back to the painting of Mount Olympus. With the exception of Artemis and Athena, the gods frolicked without guilt. But then guilt was a later invention creeping out of the deserts of the Middle East. Jews invented guilt. Christians refined it.

Why was everything so complicated? After all, a simple matter of human plumbing should be of no concern except to the individuals exchanging fluids.

Frazier gave up, closed the book and snapped off the
light. The firelight danced over the walls, creating shadows. As she dozed off she awoke for a moment and one big shadow looked like Vulcan at the forge.

The goblet. She rolled over and moaned. She must have been hallucinating, and wasn’t Mandy great about it. Still, it was so real.

The rain drummed in waves of energy. Frazier listened and thought that Zeus/Jupiter was as good a god to believe in as any other: we need to explain what we can’t understand. Thunder and lightning must have terrified primitive peoples, as it still terrified young children. Why not invent a majestic god of flowing beard who hurled perfectly fashioned lightning bolts onto the earth? And as for the goblet brimming with wine as deep as thought, her mind was playing tricks on her. Or maybe it was the god of bad lightning.

For a moment between consciousness and sleep she wished there was a Venus. Perhaps the goddess would take pity on her and bring her love—or a perfect cheese soufflé.

I
’
LL KILL THE BITCH,” LAURA MUTTERED UNDER HER BREATH
. This rage erupted, overflowing her carefully put-together face, contorting her features. Once she regained control of herself Laura carefully replaced Frazier’s letter in Carter’s manila envelope with
miscellaneous
scribbled on the tab. Knowing her husband’s traits, Laura had instigated her search feeling certain that he would have filed Frazier’s letter somewhere. In his way Carter was a meticulous man.

She expected an agonizing confession from Frazier over being gay. Just like that confident—no, arrogant—sister of his to make no apologies at all. By God, she should suffer for what she wrote. Telling Carter to leave her. To make her work for a living, as though living with that goddam brother of Frazier’s wasn’t work enough. How dare she?

The blow—Sarah Saxe—wasn’t entirely unsuspected.
Laura’s nose had picked up the scent on Carter’s clothing. She believed his lies because she wanted to believe them. Why rock the boat? He trimmed back his wild running after women, but then real estate sales were down, so he no longer made much money to squander on them. Laura steeled herself for the inevitable concurrent rise in Carter’s libido with the economy, but Frazier had written that he was in love with Sarah. A little wandering any wife could stand. So what if Carter strayed off the reservation? He returned at night. Besides, her patience and outwardly “good wife” demeanor won her high, high points from the other women in the Garden Club. Obviously, male unfaithfulness bound more women together than they cared to admit, so how a woman handled the problem indicated her status among the Old Guard—the old and guarded.

Had she been a passionate woman Laura would have wrapped her fingers around the cool handle of a .38 and blown off Carter’s balls. Ah, but that would be showing some emotion. God forbid. Far better to drain him drop by drop, to humble him with forgiveness, a technique she had not yet mastered. But then, if Laura understood forgiveness she would have understood a few potshots with a .38. Laura opted for the tiny cruelties: the cold looks, the acid comments away from other female ears. In public she placed her hand on her husband’s forearm and smiled brightly. One would almost have thought she was a political wife, but then perhaps all wives were political.

She threw on her luscious neon-green tights, her matching aerobic sneakers, her green athletic bra, which could be worn alone, and over that she tossed an electrifying pink T-shirt. Time for classes over at the Boar’s Head Sports Club.

And who should be in her aerobics class, the toughest
of the day, but Ann Haviland. Laura, now fully in command of herself, fluffed up her hair in the mirror, reapplied her lipstick, and hummed to herself.

No fool, she hazarded a guess that Frazier and Ann probably were an item. Why would any woman hang around Frazier if it weren’t for sex? Flawed though this thinking was, Laura did ferret out the buried bond between Ann and Frazier.

The physical act of sex between two women didn’t offend Laura. After all, she’d seen porno movies, and the sight of a perfectly turned-out woman diving into the shaved and pomaded crotch of another, while not visually stimulating—after all, what can you see?—wasn’t horrendous. Other than that, what could they do, poor things? That didn’t bother her. She could even stretch herself to see that Frazier’s beauty, smoldering despite her blond exterior, could unbalance another woman. Weren’t Frazier and Carter so alike in that way, two shockingly good-looking people? No, that didn’t offend her. What offended her to her very core was that the facade was marred, rather like a new car with a scratch on it. Frazier should have married according to her station, borne children, raised them, and if she indulged in a little muff-diving here and there, who was the wiser? At least no children could spring from such a union. Laura vibrated with outrage because now she had to face an uncomfortable issue publicly. People would hint. They already had. There weren’t many points to be won for enduring a lesbian sister-in-law, either. Worse, she’d better be careful about how she was perceived with Frazier.

Darcy Schleswieg so much as stated at bridge the other day that she had heard lesbians were very seductive. They especially targeted vulnerable women, the assumption being that no strong woman would hop in
the hay with another strong woman. Darcy, that fountain of cosmopolitan knowledge, had opined over a bid of four hearts that the public was wrong, wrong, wrong about lesbians. They weren’t those butch creatures trudging to the Softball diamond. No indeed, they were really terribly gorgeous and that’s how they gained access to your person. You never suspected. Read in: Darcy never suspected Frazier. Laura smirked. She might also read in that Darcy was put out that Frazier never made a pass at her.

Darcy’s entire life revolved around her ability to attract men sexually. It was the expression of her power. Not such a jump to figure that this might extend to Frazier, whom Darcy would then publicly spurn as having come on to her, thereby gaining a double victory. Laura knew how these women thought. She should. She was one of them.

Laura slung her brightly colored gym bag over her shoulder and headed for the obligatory BMW. She wasn’t really prejudiced against Frazier and she believed this of herself. But she was bullshit mad, rapaciously angry at Frazier’s heartrending letter to Carter. She was going to make them both pay, brother and sister, the twins like Apollo and Artemis. And Ann Haviland would be her cat’s paw.