Venus Envy (4 page)

“Stop worrying about it,” Frazier commanded. “Just live for two when I’m gone—or name your firstborn after me.”

“I’m not handling this very well.” Mandy sobbed.

“You were the one who wanted to know!”

“No, not that. I’m not doing very well about your being sick. I’m sorry. I should be comforting you, not the reverse.”

“Mandy, don’t worry about it. Comfort my brother. On second thought, don’t comfort my brother. He already has one mistress that I know of.”

“Still?”

“Oh, yeah, the one with the cowboy boots and tits big as Texas. In fact, I think she is from Texas. Those girls down there are serious about hair too. I never saw so much hair on a woman’s head. Of course, I’ve only seen her from a distance.”

“What does Laura say about Miss Texas?”

“She thinks he’s given her up.”

“So how do you know he hasn’t?” Mandy’s natural curiosity was taking over.

“Because when he cried all over me—and I confess I cried back—he stank of Giorgio perfume. The stuff oozed right out of his pores. Laura wears Hermès, as you might suspect. Giorgio is much too loud for Laura. The Garden Club would turn up its collective nose, literally. Even the daffodils would shudder.”

“Um, um,” Mandy hummed.

“You got it, girl. My brother may be a failure in many respects but when it comes to women he’s irresistible. It’s hard for a sister to see a brother as sexy but ever since I
can remember Carter has been a triumph of androgen, or whatever it is that attracts the girls like flies.”

“My mother says women
are
like flies. They’ll settle on shit or on sugar.”

“Your mother doesn’t like women much, does she?”

“Well, this statement was provoked by my sister’s falling for a man Mother considered too dark for an Eisenhart. Mom’s a horrible snob that way.”

“Yeah, so’s mine—about suitable matches. Before Charles married Diana I swear Libby would lie awake at night and plot how I might meet the Prince. ‘If only he could see you, sweetie,’ she’d say. ‘They want you when they see you.’”

“True enough.” Mandy paused a moment while her dog barked. “Enough, Duncan.”

The Scottie barked harder.

“Duncan’s true to form,” Frazier remarked.

“Am I forgiven?”

“I said you were. Don’t repeat yourself. You know how I hate to be bored.”

“I know. Well, don’t forget to write a letter to Tomorrow. Promise?”

“I will. Bye-bye.”

“Bye, boss.”

Frazier hung up the phone. Like the claws of physical desire, loneliness and longing seized her stomach. There was so much to live for. How could she have so squandered her time? She thought of the lips unkissed, the thighs uncaressed, the paintings she’d just missed purchasing. She thought of the music she adored and how she wished she had kicked off her shoes and danced in the dew on spring grass. Simple pleasures, animal delights, all were shoved aside in her ascent and in her fear that if she cavorted, frolicked, and played, she might betray herself. Spontaneity evaporated inside her.

Control. Control yourself. Control your destiny. Control your emotions. Well, she controlled all right. She controlled herself right out of any action that did not lead directly to her bank account.

She lay there and wondered why so many people who considered themselves aristocrats violently opposed displays of emotion, honest exchange. Not that the middle classes were much better. They preferred to talk about emotion rather than show it. The joke was that talking about emotion often vitiated the emotion. They wound up bloodless. Frazier’s friends, the U.C.’s—the Upper Classes—preferred neither. A single poppy in a round crystal bowl sitting on a perfect terrace could elicit as much rapture from Billy Cicero’s mother as an orgasm. Probably more. Small wonder that Billy, like the moon, never showed his mother his dark side.

Frazier kept returning to the lips unkissed. If only she had pressed her mouth between DeeDee Cheatam’s shoulder blades in their Tri-Delta days. And Frances Peterson. She was so hot, with her long, long body and her ice-blue eyes. Who knew what might have happened if Frazier had just reached out once or twice or, well, more than that. Then she had spurned Victor Nederlander, which nearly killed her mother. What she remembered about Victor, her beau in her middle twenties, was the downy hair on his chest. She made him crawl over hot coals for sex and then she hurt him by not enjoying it. What would have happened if she’d let go? Every now and then she’d escape to Charlotte, North Carolina, to the Guest Quarters with someone, male or female, only to forget them after the weekend. As Frazier had good taste, they were nice people, people worth remembering.

Keep your distance. Don’t get involved. Don’t reveal
too much. Keep it light. But people couldn’t keep it light. They had emotions, even if Frazier didn’t.

She was having them now. All the pain and even the pleasure she’d sidestepped in her thirty-five years had boomeranged into an anguish more profound than any physical pain. Again, Frazier gasped for breath. Her head pounded. She fumbled for the oxygen tube and managed to turn on the tank. The smooth, pure air clarified her mind as well as her lungs.

She had never truly loved anyone. Of course, she had never truly hated anyone either, but this lack of passion seemed a further incrimination of her refusal to become engaged, to connect. She sucked in another breath and with it her mind bent under the weight of her sorrows.

She grabbed for the
Common Service Book
, the gold letters I.H.S. beckoning in the lower right-hand corner. A frayed red silk page marker bore testimony to Libby’s constant use. Frazier gulped in more air, then replaced the tube and turned off the oxygen. She composed herself as she opened the book to page 430, where her mother had placed the marker. It was the “Order for the Burial of the Dead” and Libby had underlined burial.

Furious, Frazier nearly tossed the book against the wall. The only thing restraining her from this small fit was the realization that the thud would disturb whoever was in the adjoining room, suffering with God knows what. She hoped they suffered merely the pains of their disease and not the pains inflicted by family.

She dropped the book back into her lap and the pages fluttered to 441. Her eyes fell on “Responsories.”

The shroud of mortality drew closer around Frazier’s strong shoulders. A blue chill shot down her spine. She closed the book and fumbled in the nightstand for her solid gold Montblanc pen. Billy gave it to her on her last birthday, September 17. He laughed when she turned thirty-five and said that that was the age at which Dante wrote the
Inferno
, for thirty-five was believed to be the beginning of middle age in the Middle Ages. On her birthday card he wrote, “Welcome to the Middle Ages.” The next day she called Fahrney’s, a pen and stationery store in Washington, D.C., and discovered that the pen cost $8,500.

A phone book would serve as a desk. She yanked the Yellow Pages out of the drawer. When she took out one sheet of Mandy’s paper the tube from the morphine drip swung in the way of her writing. Frazier tore it out of her vein.

“Goddammit, if I’m going to die I might as well feel it. I might as well feel something before I go!”

Then she began writing, writing, writing. Mandy suggested one letter per day to Tomorrow but Frazier wrote volumes. She wrote to Billy, to her mother and father, to Carter, to her Auntie Ruru, whom she adored, to Ann, to Kenny Singer, and lastly to Mandy. She was so tired by the time she got to Mandy that she wrote only, “Thank you.”

By now, midnight beyond thought, she was withdrawing from the morphine. She felt sick to her bones. She put stamps on the envelopes and placed them on the nightstand by her bed.

She was going to die. She’d never felt so wretched. She shook. Nausea consumed her. She considered jamming
the morphine needle back into her vein but she was determined to feel something, anything, this pain in her last moments. At least she would die knowing she had told the truth to the people she could have been close to—perhaps. Maybe her death or her truth could be a spur to them. Maybe they could change and find a few shards of happiness amidst the rubble of their psyches.

Frazier, trembling uncontrollably, clicked off the light. She remembered that it was Ash Wednesday. Why she would remember that she didn’t know, but it stuck in her brain like a piece of cotton on the boll. She wondered if she should ring the nurse or call up her pastor for the Last Rites. No, she’d lived this life fundamentally alone. She might as well die alone. Frazier Armstrong fell into a boiling sleep from which she never expected to return.

The descent into Hell had begun.

T
HE OFFICIAL BEGINNING OF SPRING WAS THREE WEEKS IN
the future but already the predawn light cast a softer gray glow on the horizon. The peepers sang down at the lake, indicating they cared little for official dates. The horses, cats, and dogs were shedding their coats, and bluebirds would soon awaken to dart along fence lines and bushes searching for a suitable nest site. A great heron poised at the edge of the lake appeared ghostly in the pale light.

Jogging along the dirt road through his property, Dr. Yancey Weems breathed in the cool air laden with moisture. Running in forty-degree weather suited him and he had learned to rise before dawn during his days as an intern. Like most early risers he prided himself upon this trait and felt superior to those slugabeds who awakened at 7:30 or 8:00
A.M.

His beeper disturbed his reverie and rhythm. Cursing,
he turned and ran back toward his work shed, where there was a telephone.

Yancey picked up his message to call Thornton Rogers, head of oncology at Albemarle General Hospital in Charlottesville. He knew it wouldn’t be a happy call. Which of his patients had surrendered at last?

“Thornton, Yancey here.”

“Get your ass down here faster than a crow flies, Yancey,” Thornton commanded. Thornton commanded everyone, except for his wife. “We’ve got a problem.”

“Who?”

“Mary Frazier Armstrong. Just get here.”

W
INKING OVER THE HORIZON, THE FLAMING HALO OF THE
sun announced hope and happiness and a new day. Apollo had again replaced his sister in the sky, the sun kissed the moon goodbye, and day enjoyed victory.

Yancey Weems, sent on this mission by Thornton Rogers, bent over Frazier’s inert form. The nurse quietly rolled away the morphine drip and the other machines.

“Mary Frazier.” Yancey sounded shaky. “Mary Frazier, wake up.”

Frazier rolled over, the remnants of Terese Collier’s makeup more on the pillow than on her face.

“Here.” Yancey handed her a cup of real coffee. “Slug up first.”

The hot liquid popped her internal clutch into first gear. “I’m here now. I mean, my brain is warming up.”

“Uh, Mary Frazier, honey, we’ve known one another for a long time. I’ve known your family ever since I
moved here for my residency, and well …” Beads of sweat dotted Yancey’s upper lip, though it wasn’t remotely hot. “And well, I have wonderful news but please don’t sue me. I’ll take care of everything. I swear I will.”

“Will you cut to the chase? I may be dying but I’m not dumb.”

“That’s just it. You’re not dying. You’re as healthy as a horse except for a severe case of bronchitis and stress—you’re under a lot of stress. Work, I reckon.”

Frazier didn’t move a muscle. Then she felt her face. She touched her wrist to feel her pulse. She pinched her arm, then shouted, “Thank you, Jesus!” She remembered the other patients. “Sorry, Yancey.”

“Oh, it’s quite understandable. I would dance a jig myself. This whole thing is due to a computer error—I want you to understand that. We enter data according to social security number and a lab-work order number, and somehow your numbers became scrambled with another individual’s who, as luck would have it, was having symptoms somewhat similar to yours. I think a lab technician punched up a wrong digit. The X-rays from last night show that your lungs are clear—remarkably so, given that you’re a smoker. ‘Course your bronchial tubes are infected but”—he paused to catch his own breath—“Thornton Rogers and I would have caught this right away if we could have gotten the X-rays when we wanted them.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass how it happened. I’m just glad I’m going to live and oh, God, how I am going to live! I’m flushing my two packs a day as of this moment. Never again. It’s too frightening now, the possibility of cancer. I’ve been spared once.”

“I hope, for your sake, you stick to those words,” Yancey kindly admonished. “Now I want you to understand we’ll give you some pills to help ease you off the
morphine. And please let me explain about the morphine. It often acts as a respiratory depressant but, given what we thought was the advanced spread of the cancer, Thornton and I considered pain relief the humane course of action.”

“I ripped the goddam thing out of my arm last night. I don’t want any more chemicals or drips or doctors.” She smiled slyly.

“Still, the stuff is very powerful. Remember, we thought you were in excruciating pain. Our hospital is correct in all procedures for the terminally ill. Anyway, you’ll not have too much trouble handling the morphine withdrawal and I’ll prescribe antibiotics for your bronchitis. You’ll be as good as new in no time.”

Frazier’s eyes glazed over. She turned from a babbling Yancey and looked at the nightstand. The letters were gone. She jumped out of bed and knelt on the floor, peering under the bed.

“The letters—my letters.”

“I beg your pardon?” Yancey squinted behind his horn-rimmed glasses. Why any man thought hornrimmed glasses were attractive was beyond Frazier. They didn’t make men look smart; they made them look like wimps.

“Yancey, I put eight stamped letters here on this nightstand and they’re gone.”