Borough Features, page 14
Unlike years past, Gretchen wanted to hear from me, so much so that I thanked Marty silently for providing me with such an excellent lunchtime rehearsal, until I wondered if they’d conspired together all along. Why had I left my previous job? Had I had many girlfriends? Was I still writing poetry? She was especially interested in my parents, having become interested in her own immigrant grandparents at the end of their lives.
This was a softer, kinder Gretchen Sparks than I had known back in college. Was she still spunky? Yes. Still fiery? Definitely. Still hot-headed? I didn’t know it yet, but yes. What was different was an awareness with which she moved through the world, a sense of self-possession, of integrity.
We ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches at a sandwich shop and stopped off at a bar. I had two beers, she two glasses of wine. I did an impression of a history professor we shared freshman year, and she slid her hand onto my forearm and laughed. She left it there for eight minutes.
I walked her home, and she kissed me good night. You read it right. She kissed me good night. This may be a softer Gretchen, but I was relieved to find her still very much in charge.
TWENTY
One’s whole outlook can shift just by driving thirty minutes north of Harlem or west to New Jersey. From the back of the car, Dana chatted with Maurice about basketball, something Vita had no interest in.
Vita did not like leaving the city, not anymore. It made her feel inhibited, naked. Dana, on the other hand, loved the suburbs, being a suburbanite himself. Visits to Connecticut brought out the best in him, and once they settled into Howard and Cindy’s colossal home, even Vita felt the tension tame between them. But today, they weren’t going to Connecticut. They were going to Rye.
Twenty-one days stood between Vita and the election.
The day before, after Maurice had brought her home from the whole Coney Island debacle, Dana had brought takeout from Portofino’s—her favorite eggplant parmesan and garlic knots—and a bottle of good wine. He’d set the table with a candle lit in the center, next to a dozen red roses. She stood there in her leggings and socks and T-shirt and decided she didn’t want to fight any more, and they ate together.
As they ate, he explained that he didn’t recognize the name the day before—that Dominica Padilla was no one to him, but he knew Vita wouldn’t bring it up if she weren’t legitimately concerned. So he had the interns look back through the old database from 2012 that hadn’t even been properly merged with the 2014 one, let alone the 2016, and they found that Dominica Padilla of 86th Street was a registered Republican and a senior citizen interested in volunteering with the campaign. But why would she want to volunteer for a campaign in another district? Dana shrugged his shoulders. And why would he have her name and address in his planner? He had names scribbled down in every inch of his life, he claimed. He reached across the table and took her hands.
“I know what’s really bothering you, Vita.” He had gotten a haircut, she realized when she looked up at him. It was barely perceptible, just a trim, but she knew it. She raised an eyebrow. “It’s my speech the other night. I had no right—no right—to do that without asking you first. I had been worried. I meant to tell you in the car, but I was so damn nervous that I decided against making the speech at all. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, dammit.”
Vita strained to remember what he had looked like that January night twenty years before when he stepped out the window and introduced himself by first and last name. But that night had fallen away in an avalanche when Alexander died, and there was no getting it back.
“And then my fucking father—I’m sorry. I know you love him. I love him, too. But what I’m trying to say, Vita, is that I feel terrible for doing that to you, for putting you through that. You have been through enough.” He came to her side, kneeled on the floor, and put his head in her lap, tears in his eyes. “I understand if you can’t forgive me. I don’t deserve it. I can’t forgive myself for any of it.”
Later, in bed, Dana had asked her to join at the Vittleses’ dinner party.
He had said she could say no, that he would understand. But that this money was important, and it would be important for his US Senate run in two years—the big one—and that after he was in Washington, she could do whatever she wanted. She could live in Brooklyn, or she could live down in the Keys for most of the year, or she could live with him in a D.C. apartment and he’d take care of her. There would be no more parades or fundraisers or public displays. He’d manage without her. But in Brooklyn, he needed her. He couldn’t win the 22nd unless she were by his side.
He traced his fingers around her belly button and kissed her skin till it glowed, stroked her mound over her cotton panties, and even though she said no, not now, later, I swear, he put his mouth on cotton and stubble grazed her thigh, and by the time he entered her, she was fighting not to see the thin wisps of clouds moving overhead, or to feel the beach towel riding up her thighs, or to smell salt and suntan oil, and fighting also the sound of the waves in her ears. He flipped onto his back and brought her with him. Her body bucked on top of him, and gulls screamed in her ears.
She lay awake for a long time after, thinking about brushing the sand out of Alexander’s hair and about him diving into a wave just before it broke and about the way he smelled when he was no bigger than a bundle of bedsheets, like powder and birthday cake. She didn’t fall asleep until nearly dawn.
In the morning before her nine o’clock class, she was running on the treadmill when she heard the women behind her laughing and whispering. With a jolt, she remembered the woman at the Padillas’, the pictures. She slowed the treadmill and pulled up the Metro website. Nothing. The old lady had lied.
Or had she? Maybe it would take another day. Maybe they just got the photos. She knew how to find out. She’d left the gym without showering and dialed the number for Metro while standing in the alley. The receptionist transferred her three times before Gretchen Sparks picked up the phone.
“Sparks,” she said.
“Gretchen,” Vita said. “So good to hear your voice. It’s Vita. Vita Quinn. We met the other day.”
“Really? I must have misunderstood. You kidnapped me and left me on Flatbush at rush hour.”
“Kidnapped is such a strong word.”
“But alas, it fits.”
“I had the wrong idea.”
“Calling me on the phone might have worked, too.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Did you?”
Did she? Vita sighed. “I apologize.”
“Is that why you called?”
“Partly.”
“Ah. Partly.”
“I happened to be down at the Padillas’ yesterday.”
“Gone slumming?”
She ignored that dig. “A neighbor may have taken some . . . compromising pictures of me and mentioned the name of your paper.”
“Ah,” Gretchen said. “The truth comes out. Don’t worry, princess. We don’t publish gossip. If Dabrowski ever read the paper, she’d know that. I sent the pictures to myself and deleted them off her phone. And I’m about to delete them off mine.”
“Meet me. I want to see you do it.”
“You always get your own way, don’t you?”
“You may not know this, but my husband is a very important person—”
“Oh, I know it. State senator. A big cheese. Nobody cares, Vita. I gotta get off the phone now.”
“Wait! Meet me today. I’ll come to you.”
“Goodbye.”
“Please!”
And the little wretch hung up.
As Dana and Maurice discussed college football, Vita tried to put all of it out of her mind—Dominica Padilla, the fat lady next door, and Gretchen Sparks. She tried to think of what she would do after the campaign was over. In the past, they had celebrated with a vacation. Disney the first year with Alexander, Rome the second year without him. She wanted to go someplace new this time—and alone.
Harlan and Linnie Vittles lived in a stately home in Rye—white with shutters and a wraparound porch that Linnie had installed to give it a Southern feel, she had told Vita each and every time they visited, which was more frequent than Vita had liked. Dana took a fifty-dollar bill out of his wallet and slipped it up through the window to Maurice. “There’s a steakhouse on Main. Go down the road and take the second left. Then a right. There’ve got a beautiful mahogany bar. Tell Rutherford I sent you. We’ll text in a few hours.”
A few hours? Vita cleared her throat.
Maurice thanked him brightly and said, “Rutherford. Got it, Senator Quinn. You have a nice time tonight.” She knew Dana liked it when Maurice called him Senator Quinn, but he rarely did. Vita figured he wanted a cigarette and was anxious to get them out of the car.
Linnie waited on her porch in a yellow dress with a crocheted collar and crinoline. Her hair, singed with a curling iron, hung limp around her face, the ends crinkly. She had put too much blush on her pinched cheeks, and her eyelashes were like tarantula legs. Dana had come around to open the door, and he helped Vita out like she were a Southern belle herself.
“Harlan!” Linnie sang though the screen door. “They’re he-er!”
Dana took Vita’s hand, and they walked toward the house just as Harlan came out, followed by Harry Shears and his moth-like wife, whose name escaped Vita. She remembered a trick her father had told her once. When in sales, if a guy is giving you guff and being evasive, focus on making the wife comfortable. If you get the wife, you’ve made the sale. Vita wasn’t selling anything, but if she was here to help Dana, she might as well try.
Harlan blamed the insurance companies for his suffering practice, but his house and Cadillac told a different story. He shook Dana’s hand and drew Vita in for another papery kiss on the cheek. She laughed so she wouldn’t cringe.
Linnie handed her a spritzer. Although they had all been to visit before, Linnie subjected them to the grand tour. The decor was a mix of what Vita imagined was called “tasteful” in Southern Living magazine. It had a Southern country theme of reclaimed barnwood tables and mason jar vases, a stained and polished picnic table in the breakfast nook, and a kitchen mosaic of a plantation, complete with two dark brown “workers” shoveling a bale of hay into a cart. (“Isn’t it just bucolic?” Linnie said.) Vita caught Harry Shears’s wife staring at it with her mouth open. The kitchen was a trip. Baskets hung from the ceiling and lined the walls. A big island stood in the center of the room, adjacent to a hutch filled with salt and pepper shakers. (“I’ve got hundreds in storage because, as Harlan says, ‘Modesty is a virtue.’”) Off the kitchen was the “maid’s bed and bath” that Linnie kept tidy, although their maid wasn’t allowed to rest in it or do anything in it but clean.
They climbed the stairs to tour Harlan’s billiard room, a rec room, and five bedrooms, all but one unoccupied. (“I keep our sweet Bo’s room—Bo is short for Beaufort—just as he left it.”) She did—complete with wrestling trophies and a poster of a girl striding from the ocean in a two piece, nipples pressing against Lycra.) And then there was Harlan’s office, which he kept locked. (“We all know a man needs his space!” Linnie winked at Vita.)
“Speaking of which,” Harlan said, “shall we retreat to the parlor, gentlemen?”
The Shears wife reached desperately for Harry’s hand as Linnie led her and Vita away to the sitting room with its straight-backed velvet couches and grand piano that no one played, at least now that their darling son Bo (short for Beaufort) was in college down at Vanderbilt in ole Tennessee.
Vita was used to the routine. The men played pool and threw darts and talked about God knows what. As Linnie darted off to refresh their spritzers, Vita whispered to—it came to her suddenly, Patricia!––“Let’s get fucking shit-faced.”
Patricia laughed dryly, and her shoulders relaxed.
“Linnie!” Vita called. “You got anything stronger?”
It wouldn’t be proper for them to drink straight whiskey, but Linnie brought out some sour mix, and Vita made her sit down as she fixed the drinks. Before long, Patricia’s words slurred together, and Linnie’s cheeks had a bright blush to them.
Like a doll found in an abandoned orphanage.
She turned to Patricia. “So what’s it like being Mrs. Shears?”
“It’s Summers,” she said. “I kept my last name.”
“Of course you did.” Vita never considered it, but it privately pleased her that many in the borough still referred to her in passing by her maiden name.
Linnie wanted none of it. “I would never have dreamed of insulting Harlan in such a manner. Why it’s simply devastating for a man to endure.”
Patricia rolled her eyes. “It’s 2015. And trust me. Harry’s masculinity is very much intact.”
Linnie blushed.
“How’d you and Harlan meet?” Vita said.
The woman’s mind was easily diverted. Linnie now squealed. “Vita! You know I simply hate to be the center of attention.”
“Indulge us.” Vita got up to mix another round of drinks, going easy on herself and Patricia and hard on Linnie.
“Well it was such an awfully long time ago.” Linnie received her fresh drink and took a gulp. “I can hardly remember the spring day when my class visited Vanderbilt for a concert. I was at Lipscomb University, you see, studying home ec, and Harlan—who has the brains—was at Vanderbilt Medical School.”
“Get to the good part,” Patricia said.
“Well, I didn’t see it coming. Father said I was to find a husband in Tennessee. Why else would he send me to college? But he did not mean that I should marry a scholarship boy! Imagine!”
“Scandalous,” Vita said.
“What with father—who is a descendant of General Jubal Early, I’ll have you know, and the best dang banker in the state of Virginia! And mother, why, she herself was descended from Martha Washington!” Linnie’s face darkened a bit. “No, father wasn’t happy when I brought home Harlan. But try telling that to a girl in love.”
“Linnie,” Vita said, grinning, “are you saying that Harlan was poor?”
Linnie polished off the drink—number four already. “You must understand, father only wanted what was best for me. He didn’t know about Harlan’s talent in surgery. We married in 1980, just after graduation, and he went right on in his studies, straight through for nine more years. Folks don’t know just how long schooling takes to be a surgeon!”
“I met Harry long after that, thank God,” said Patricia. “I missed his starving resident era.”
Vita’s mind drifted, revisiting the events of the day prior, the woman’s ratty brown robe, her pudgy fingers, that damn crazy bird coming out of nowhere.
“Father kept us afloat, of course. I knew he would. I got lonely at times.” Linnie looked off, her fingers worrying her glass. “And I suffered his hanger-on mother with nary a word of complaint. Bore a beautiful baby boy in 1990. Why, the only dark spot on those first ten years came with Vestal Vittles III—out of the penitentiary.”
“What?” Vita and Patricia said in unison.
Linnie, her face flushed, chuckled. “Harlan’s big brother came home, bearded and filthy looking. Hooked on the drugs. He’d be in and out of the commode all evening.” She put one finger on the side of her nose and sniffed; then she waved a hand and frowned, as if batting away his memory. “I wish they’d have let him rot in there.”
Vita felt something leave the room—the liveliness that accompanied Linnie everywhere.
“What was he in for?” Patricia asked.
Linnie leaned forward, the three of them now in a huddle. She whispered, “Vestal murdered their daddy when he was but fourteen years old!”
“Well, look at this pretty henhouse,” Harlan boomed from the bottom of the stairs. Linnie jumped and hid her empty glass behind her back. “Please forgive my interruption,” he said, “but we’ve eaten the pimento cheese and are liable to start on Harry’s arm next.” Linnie laughed too loudly and headed to the kitchen.
“We should help,” Patricia said, and they followed her.
Linnie fussed around the room, opening the ovens and closing them, rocking back and forth. Vita steered the little woman to a chair. On the way, Linnie reached for a drawer and knocked over a big mason jar full of serving spoons.
“Let us do that for you,” Vita said.
“Oh! Of course, little darling,” she said. Her voice was not a song but a slur.
Vita had figured out months ago that Linnie didn’t actually cook. Vita didn’t care about that—she could cook only a handful of dishes herself. But what bothered her was that Linnie pretended to cook. Somebody came to her house and slaved away all day making a roast and mashed potatoes and biscuits and green beans and bacon and three to four other side dishes‚ plus a cherry pie!––and then Linnie took all the credit. The same person probably came to clean it all up too.
But pour a little liquor down her gullet, and Linnie Vittles was all right. As she talked, she drank white wine without Sprite in it. Harlan cut his meat in small pieces and drank from a glass of ice water, and Linnie regaled them with stories of her old plantation house in Virginia. Vita was a little light-headed, but more so from the sugar in the sour mix than the whiskey. She hadn’t had much to drink herself.
At some point she noticed Harlan slip his hand around the stem of Linnie’s wine glass, and in flash, move it next to his own. Linnie noticed too and abruptly stopped speaking. Then the doorbell rang.
“Oh dear,” Linnie said, rising from her chair, “who could that be?”
Harlan made to rise.
“Sit down, sit down—Linnie will see what’s the matter,” Linnie said as she swaggered to the foyer, her toes turning in.
“You girls certainly had fun this evening,” Harlan said, staring at Vita. His smile was false, and she was glad she had gotten to him. But Dana’s look of disappointment was clear too.
