When Venus Fell (45 page)

She smiled gently. “So you’re saying if the President can meet Russians with his false teeth glued in, we can greet a few harmless guests for the weekend?”

“You got it. I’ll be right here next to you. I know I’m not Simon, but I’ll do my best.”

She hugged him, then reached out to me. “Thank you for being here, too.” I nodded awkwardly and squeezed her hand. She sighed, brushed the front of her brown dress, and straightened her shoulders. “Ready,” she said.

We heard shrieks and strange running noises outside on the cobblestones. Gib bolted to the front doors and flung them open. “Goddamn,” he said softly. The entire herd of British pigs scrambled past and headed for the front lawn. “They rooted a hole under their fence,” Isabel called as she darted after them. Ella followed her gamely, waving to me with the end of a fringed plaid scarf she wore With a plaid jumper.

Carter galloped into the yard on his gray gelding. He slid the horse to a stop inches from the pigs. “The Manchesters are here! They drove by the barns to visit! They ought to be here any minute!”

Our first guests, of course. They had perfect timing and formidable credentials. Sissy Manchester was a travel correspondent for a dozen major southern newspapers; her husband, Casper, wrote a column titled “Inn-Side View” for a prominent regional-history magazine. “I’m trying to think what Simon would do,” Min said quietly. “He’d laugh. But I can’t.”

Gib swung into calm crisis-command mode, calling to Carter, “Wait here and help me with the Manchesters’ luggage!” He gestured brusquely for me to follow him. Then, to Min, “Minnie, you stay here at the doors and smile as if we chase pigs every day.”

“It’s beginning to feel that way,” she answered.

We hurried into the courtyard. Gib pointed. “You flank the pigs that way; I’ll take the other side. We’ll help Isabel and Ella corner the herd out there by the box shrubs.”

I made a wide arc to the right, waving my arms. “FeeMolly was right about the little bastards,” I called. “I wish I had her meat cleaver at the moment.”

Gib strode to the left. “I can see
that
headline on the first-weekend reviews.
Entertainment at Cameron Hall Now Includes Pig Massacres.”

Carter leaped off his horse and blew a kiss at Ella, who had scooped up one of the miniature pigs in her arms. “Why, ma’am, your baby is my spittin’ image,” Carter teased. She laughed. I scowled past him at the point where the main drive curled out of the forest. We had no time for Carter’s flirtations. I wanted everything to go well.

Gib and I assisted as Ella and Isabel started gently coaxing pigs into a corner hemmed by shrubs. But then Shag and several other dogs loped around a corner of the Hall and happily dived into the pig population. Pigs scattered in all directions.

Ella held her hapless porker against her chest as a hound reared on his hind legs and nosed the pig in the fanny, at the same time raking Ella’s hands with his paws. “Get down, dog, get down,” she ordered with no effect. The already hysterical pig squealed like mad. Gib and I ran to Ella. He pulled the dog away and I grabbed the pig out of her arms.

As if on cue the small, squirming, offended pig squirted watery brown pig shit. The pungent stream arced across the front of my gold blouse and down the right sleeve of Gib’s dress shirt. We stared at each other. A smell like a thousand acres of rotting Louisiana swamp rose from us both. We heard the distant sound of a car. “Oh, dear,” Ella said, and covered her nose.

It was hopeless. The Manchesters, the first and most influential guests of the grand reopening, the symbolic embodiment of the approvals that would honor Simon but also gently push him into the past, arrived in their big blue Mercedes as Gib and I stood there doused in pig excrement. They were neatly clad in matching ski jackets, plaid shirts, brown slacks, and loafers with fringed tongues. They had the look of well-fed gourmands, but more than anything they resembled Phyllis Diller and Bob Hope about to set out on a hike along
the back nine of a Palm Springs golf course. They gaped at Gib and me.

Min went to them, a smile pasted on her ashen face, her hands extended. “Sissy. Casper,” she began. “How nice to see you again—”

One of the loose pigs bolted out of the shrubbery and nearly knocked Sissy Manchester down. She staggered against her Mercedes, then plucked a miniature tape recorder from her purse. “I was attacked by a pig,” she said into it.

Casper pulled a large professional camera from a bag and began snapping pictures of us.

“Next week we’re having miniature pork chops,” Gib said.

By evening the Hall had a full quota of paying guests. Their luggage had been carried to their rooms, and a shaky but warm welcome had been offered by Min to the guests who came after the Manchesters—whom we greased with champagne and pastries as quickly as possible. There were tears and kind words from many of the longtime guests, but ultimately they made it clear they’d come to survey the inn’s new management with professional thoroughness. They soon sprawled out over the house and the back decks, into the woods on the hiking trails and off to the stable to select horses for weekend riding jaunts.

I showered and scrubbed myself, then, with no time to go back to the cottage for clean clothes, I donned a pink-silk pantsuit outfit Ella loaned me. It was two sizes too large. I looked like I was wearing pajamas. I hid behind the piano and played Chopin while high tea was served in the library that afternoon.

Gib disappeared then returned looking fresh-scrubbed, dressed in clean clothes and smelling of excess cologne. I switched to Broadway show tunes for the cocktail hour, during which I drank four cups of coffee and massaged my tired hands. The guests filled the tables in the elegant main dining
room and a second, more intimate room that Simon and Min had converted to an additional dining space over the years. I was glad for the long dinner break.

Meals at the Hall were served family style in huge bowls and platters. The feast would take a good two hours. “Still the best nouvelle southern cuisine in the region,” I heard one guest sigh as I passed the dining-room door. FeeMolly’s famous reputation remained intact and glowing after a year’s hiatus. Outsiders didn’t know she was a homicidal maniac, or that FeeMolly probably thought
nouvelle
was a liberal word meaning
expensive
. She might be right.

As dinner progressed I washed highball glasses and straightened the self-serve bar in the music room. Ella and Isabel had been pressed into service as wine stewards.

Gib had disappeared into the inner mazes of the Hall—those dim, claustrophobic service alleys some old mansions harbor between the main rooms. Several guests complained that their room thermostats weren’t working. Wearing a bulky toolbelt, he emerged from a narrow service door in the back hall as I went past with a tray of freshly dried wineglasses for the music room’s bar.

“Hello, gorgeous, when did a looker like you start wait-ressing in this hallway?” he quipped, just as his belt snagged the corner of my tray. We collided, toppling four glasses onto the floor. One bounced safely on the rug, one smacked the leg of a sideboard, cracking off its glass stem, and the other two shattered.

“At least we’re not cleaning up pig crap,” I said wearily as we squatted together, picking pieces of broken glass out of a dignified old Turkish rug. Gib pulled me to him for a kiss.

“I swear I still stink,” he said. “But I put on a gallon of Carter’s Old Spice.” I wound my arms around his neck and kissed him back.

“Oink,” I answered. “It’s your imagination.”

“I don’t think so. The woman who produces the
Travel South
cable-channel show sidles away from me every time I
go past her.” He hesitated. “But maybe she’s repulsed by this.” He nodded toward his maimed hand.

“She’s gagging on the pig aroma,” I assured him solemnly. “Without a doubt.”

He feigned a sniffing gesture at my floppy pink suit. “Either that’s pig, too—or really
bad
Chanel Number Five.”

“Hey, buddy, I bought this Chanel Number Five from a guy on a street corner in Chicago. And it cost me
five
whole dollars. So don’t you go insulting pig shit with any comparisons. Not while you’re wearing a cologne appreciated by Carter and old men whose sense of smell is gone.”

“Is this weekend going to be a total fiasco?”

“Behind the scenes? Yes. But all we have to do is look calm onstage while we run like rats on caffeine
back
stage. That’s all that matters. That’s show biz.”

“The system worked smoothly when my brother was in charge.”

“No, it didn’t. He and Min just knew how to make it
look
easy. It’s all about gluing your teeth in and smiling like a Cheshire cat. You said so yourself.”

We stood. He cupped some of the glass shards in his hands, and a few fine specks glittered with eerie decoration on the scarred area where the other half of his hand had been. Carter had whispered to Ella that Gib avoided shaking hands with any of the guests. “It’ll get easier,” I said gently. He shook his head.

Saturday was another unending sequence of fumbles. Isabel dropped a platter of French toast she was carrying to the buffet table at breakfast. At noon Ebb and Flo walked into a guest room intending to make up the bed and instead surprised a naked couple in the throes of a less-than-dignified activity involving one of the complimentary apple muffins from the baskets Ella had arranged in each room. The couple was irate. Ebb and Flo retreated quickly. “I ain’t sayin’ we
haven’t walked in on a few dillydallies over the years,” Ebb reported, then Flo finished hotly, “But we ain’t
never
walked in on anybody using a baked good that way.”

As we all tried to appear nonchalant Ella interjected hopefully, “See? I told you a gift basket would be appreciated.”

“You can’t hide down there. What are you doing?” Gib asked. I was seated on the floor behind the music room’s elegant carved-oak bar. Until Min rang the Saturday lunch bell I’d had a good twenty people in the music room, well-dressed outdoorsy folk playing cards, reading, chatting, or listening to me play the piano. I astonished them—if I do say so myself—by playing every song from
West Side Story
. I was exhausted.

Ella had gone upstairs with Carter. I suspected they were in bed together in a spare room. I raised a glass to Gib from my cozy enclave behind the bar. “I’m drinking a lovely vintage of crisp seltzer water. With two aspirins in it. I have a headache.”

“Must be catching.” He poured seltzer water in a glass, popped in three aspirin from the bottle I’d left on the bar, and downed the mixture in two gulps. “Mrs. Echlestine fell off Primrose this morning. Carter says she’s got a sore back.”

“Who has a sore back? Primrose?” Primrose was the horse Carter had taught Ella to ride. She was a fat, placid old mare, a sofa with hooves.

“Very funny. Mrs. Echlestine is upstairs soaking in a tubful of Isabel’s wildflower bath oil.”

“She’ll be all right, but she may sprout blooms.”

Gib sighed. “I think it’s safe to say she’s not having a great experience under the inn’s new management.” He pulled out a low footstool and sat down facing me, behind the bar. I smoothed a hand up his thigh. I wished we could sneak upstairs, too. “Let’s hide,” I said. “Even if we’re only hiding behind this bar. I’ll go get some sandwiches. We’ll have a picnic.”

He nodded. “We could call out for pizza. It’d only take two hours’ delivery from Knoxville. But I wouldn’t mind soggy pepperoni and a cold crust if I could stay here with you.” He considered his hand as if it were the key to the inn’s future. “One of the guests asked me about the accident. I didn’t know what to say.”

“Give me your paw,” I ordered. I held it in both of mine. “Shake. There. It doesn’t feel so odd. People won’t notice if you act like there’s no reason for them to notice.”

He said gruffly, “I imagine my own fingers. It’s called phantom finger syndrome. The doctors say it’s common in amputees. I wake up sometimes, or I reach for something, and I could swear my fingers are still there. They tingle, they itch, they hurt. Is that crazy?”

“No. I believe you.”

“Why?”

“You’re the most bluntly
sane
man I’ve ever seen.”

“I think that’s a compliment.”

“Pshaw. I’m drunk from the seltzer water.”

“Good.” He turned one of my hands over and gazed solemnly at my palm. “How interesting. You’ve got a new love line.”

“Do you see any predictions about us using food in shocking ways?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Let’s go upstairs, then. I’ll get the muffins.”

“But what I really see is a woman who’s been afraid to relax since her mother died and her father turned his back on the whole damned world. I wonder what that woman would say if I told her I can’t imagine the place without her?”

“She’d say she’s not planning to go anywhere.”

His hand, the damaged one, was warm and careful as he lifted my palm to his lips. He could hold a damaged piece of my heart as gently as a whisper. But like all Camerons, when he held on he rarely let go.

Before Gib and I became the stuff of drama that Saturday night, dinner was going about as well as anything had so far.

“I’m bored. I need a chore to do,” I said. I stood at the kitchen’s back door halfway through the elaborate meal. I knew better than to enter the kitchen with FeeMolly there.

She was arranging vegetable casseroles in large bowls on the big trestle worktable in the kitchen’s center. Ebb, Flo, and Isabel tromped through a swinging service door, carrying the bowls and returning empty ones. Every time the door swung I heard voices, laughter, and the musical chime of silverware and china being played by contented diners. At least they were well fed.

“It’s going fine tonight,” I said when no one responded to my first request. Gib was back in the innards of the house, working on thermostats. Min was in her room trying to recuperate from a nervous stomach and a stress headache, Carter was in a cellar behind Simon’s office, hunting for specific bottles of wine the guests had requested, and Ella was playing some godawful fiddle tune she’d learned to please Carter. She strolled about in a soft, romantic blue dress, wafting the scent of vanilla potpourri from a small Victorian sachet Isabel had
pinned to her shoulder, and her violin was just off-key enough to set my teeth on edge if I listened too long.