A Secret Rage (6 page)

‘I just remembered the last time I’d seen her she was asleep in my underwear drawer, and then I pictured myself putting the wash away and shutting the drawer without even thinking about it,’ she explained in a shaky voice. ‘Oh, God, she could’ve suffocated!’

To Attila’s intense indignation, Mao had an extra treat for supper that night. Mao accepted her close brush with death quite placidly. In fact, when I asked Mimi if the cat had been frantic when she opened the drawer, Mimi told me rather stiffly that Mao had still been fast asleep.

Cully was a great help; which, like his grocery shopping, surprised me – until I realized that he’d never watched
me
lift a finger to do anything practical, either. When he and Rachel had dropped by my apartment on their infrequent visits to Rachel’s family in New York, I’d of course had the place spotless hours beforehand.

I volunteered to go to the dump bins with Cully on Friday morning, since his load was especially heavy. I perched up high in the pickup that the mysterious Charles (whose last name I discovered to be Seward; occupation, lawyer) had obligingly donated. It had been years since I’d been in a pickup. I felt very down-home.

‘We ought to have a beer in our hands and country music on the radio,’ I told Cully as we bucked along the dirt road that led to the county landfill. It was good to get out of the hot kitchen.

‘It
is
kind of fun,’ Cully admitted cautiously. He was shifting gears with a certain macho air that tickled me. I had a feeling that if he’d been alone, he’d have been going ‘Brroom, brroom,’ pretending to be a cross between Mario Andretti and the Marlboro man.

When we got to the dump and Cully had let down the tailgate, I heaved garbage bags with tremendous panache.

‘That’s the one with all the cat litter and the broken glass in it,’ he protested when I grabbed the gathered neck of the last bag.

I gave him a scornful look. Since Cully was not only a man and a southerner but also a jogger, he tended to be smug about his superior strength. Pooey on you, Cully! I’m tall and I exercise every day – well, almost every day – and I’m not going to play clinging vine.

My training in the control of my facial muscles came in handy. I managed to swing the bag off the tailgate and onto the pile of dumped garbage with the requisite gusto, but I was glad Cully had to shut the tailgate. That gave me a moment to hop back into the pickup and have a blissful second to relieve my anguish by some down-home cussing.

I let out a few more unprintables when I discovered I was bleeding. Some of the broken glass had pierced the bag, and me. I believed the cut was small; but as hand injuries will, it bled profusely, and I couldn’t be sure. When Cully climbed in beside me, he may have had the hint of a smile on his face, but it vanished (fortunately for him) when he saw the blood.

‘Charles has a first-aid kit in the glove compartment, since he takes this pickup when he hunts.’ He reached across me, his arm touching my knee, and pulled out the kit.

I was angry and embarrassed. ‘It’s just a little cut,’ I said through tight teeth.

Cully was already pulling a gauze pad from the kit. He pulled my arm over as if it weren’t attached to a body. Dabbing carefully, he blotted the blood with the gauze. His eyes flashed sideways once, but his look bounced off mine and back to the cut.

It came to me that Cully was a wound healer. That was a beautiful trait in a psychologist, or a brother, or a bosom friend; but fairly dismaying in an object of lust. If I could manage to survive a pretty bad car accident, I conjectured, I might even rate a kiss.

‘What did you start to say to me that day that Alicia was over at the house?’ I asked, just to remind him that I was indeed at the end of my arm.

‘Oh.’ He was absurdly intent on the little cut. He got out a bandage and ripped off those irritating strips of paper that guard the adhesive. ‘I just wanted to tell you to be sure to lock up at night, and just sort of watch out in general for Mimi.’

I frowned. ‘Maybe I’m being dense, but why?’

‘Well, she’s been through a lot lately; Grandmother and Richard and all.’

Mimi was about as frail as an innerspring. Though Cully might not see her that way; after all, he was her dearly beloved and only brother. There’s more here than meets the eye, I told myself wisely, and twirled an imaginary mustache until Cully looked up and caught me.

‘What on earth are you doing?’

‘There’s something you’re not telling me,’ I parried.

He straightened and looked thoughtful. I wondered if I could have my arm back, since it was obvious this was not going to be one of those electric movie moments when the hero suddenly gives way to passion after touching the girl, usually when she’s dismounting. I didn’t have a horse to slide off of; the best I could do was cut my hand.

‘No,’ Cully decided out loud. He bent back over my cut, meticulously applied the bandage, and handed my arm back to me.

‘No, what?’ I asked nastily. My muscles were aching from the weight of the garbage bag, the cut began to throb, and there were about seventy-five things I had to do before I could retire for my much-needed preparty nap.

‘It wasn’t important anyway,’ Cully said, and started the pickup bucking along the road.

We were halfway home when I turned to him and said with absolute honesty, ‘Cully Houghton, you are one of the most aggravating and frustrating people I have ever known.’

He looked considerably surprised, as well he might. I think it was the first time I’d ever said something really personal to Cully.

‘That’s interesting,’ he said after a moment.

We didn’t speak again; but oddly enough, the silence wasn’t uneasy. I blocked him out of my mind, and I was half asleep by the time we got home.

* * * *

Attila was pressed in a hot purring bundle against my leg when I woke up. He’d definitely adopted me, which showed sheer ingratitude to Mimi, who’d found him as a starving kitten and fed him to his present enormous size.

He sat on the toilet lid as I showered and dried my hair. The sound of the blow dryer made him nervous, but he tolerated it to satisfy his curiosity. He even endured my tuneless humming, the closest I will ever come to singing. The nap and hot shower had banished the worst of my soreness. The cut looked clean and small. I felt refreshed and in a mood to party. I tickled Attila under the chin, and he followed me to my vanity table to watch me put on my makeup.

I was thinking sweet thoughts about little furry friends when (via the mirror) I observed Attila carefully and deliberately shoving one of my earrings over the edge of the table. He tried hard to look innocent when he realized I’d caught him at it, but the look didn’t come off.

‘You’re going to have to learn my ways,’ I said grimly, ‘if we’re going to cohabit.
Bad cat
!’ I whacked him on his broad beam.

He instantly bit me and began purring like a chain saw.

We stared at each other.

The cat’s schizophrenic, I concluded. I knelt to grope under the bed for the earring. (Of course it had bounced under the bed – don’t they always?) Attila descended from the vanity with a thud and dived under the bedspread to see what I was doing. He spotted the gleam of gold a split second before I did and quickly sat on my earring. We stared at each other again. It looked like a Mexican standoff.

Fortunately for one of us, little Mao stuck her head around the door to investigate my room. Attila was off the earring in a flash, pursuing the smaller cat with yowls of fury.

Dressing went more smoothly after his departure. Soon I was all ready except for the top layer, and that required some thought.

Before going upstairs for her own nap, Mimi had advised me on what to wear: ‘Something that doesn’t show a whole lot of boob. Wait till they get to know you, for that. But don’t condescend, either; they’ll all know where you’ve lived and what you’ve done for a living.’ As if I needed that advice, after my never-to-be-forgotten gaucherie years ago.

Now I searched through my closet nervously, sliding hanger after hanger across the rod in search of something absolutely appropriate. It suddenly occurred to me how ludicrous my anxiety was. I recalled some of the parties I’d dressed for in New York. Some – not a lot, but some – had been the kind that got written up at great length and talked about for years.

Unfortunately my old ego boosters (Famous People I’ve Drunk With, Publicized Parties I’ve Attended, Beautiful Men I’ve Dated) didn’t seem to weigh an ounce now I was back home. They might as well have been social distinctions on the moon, for all they counted here and now. I gave myself the green light on being nervous. I had every reason to be.

I finally lighted on a dress that mingled every shade of blue and green and covered my chest pretty thoroughly without being in any way virginal. I pulled it on and got everything settled. Then I turned around in front of the mirror and looked over my shoulder. My partially bare back told me my tan was holding up pretty well.

‘Great!’ Mimi applauded from the doorway. She was wearing true red and she looked like a million dollars. She came and stood beside me, and I revolved to look at our reflections in the mirror. We had gazed into many mirrors together across our friendship’s span of thirteen years. I liked this reflection better than any I’d seen.

We were as sharp a contrast as ever – Mimi small and dark, myself tall and fair. Some of the arrogance was missing in the way she stood and held her head; it had been pared off by the divorces. Some of the self-conscious power vested in me by my face had been knocked off my shoulders. Mimi was not so wild and willful. She was not so trusting, either. I was less defensive; and I knew now I would never conquer the world.

I don’t know what Mimi was thinking during that long moment. Maybe her thoughts were traveling the same road as mine. But somehow I was convinced that she saw us as we used to be; not as we were.

She put her arm around my waist and hugged me close, then loosed me to lift my hair on my shoulders and rearrange it in a drift she liked better.

‘Let’s get this party rolling,’ she said briskly.

I blinked, and the moment was gone.

PARTIES IN KNOLLS
started (and ended) earlier than I was used to. About eight-thirty I decided that the entire population of the town was crammed into Mimi’s house. At least the entire
white
population of Knolls – some things hadn’t changed much in the years I’d been gone.

Aside from their uniform skin color, our guests ran the narrow gamut of Knolls society. There were friends of Mimi’s with their husbands in tow, women I vaguely remembered, most of them giddy with the excitement of a night off from the kids. There were plenty of college people. I met the cowardly college president, Jeff Simmons, and found him charming. He had a beautiful head of wheat-blond hair for which most women would’ve sacrificed their microwaves. And there were people unaligned with either college or society cliques, whom Mimi just knew and liked. Town and gown and independent.

I hadn’t been to see Mimi’s parents yet, so I was glad to see them come in the door. Sleek, dark Elaine was still one of the most attractive women I’ve ever known. She swept me up in a carefully loose embrace and brushed her cheek against mine, bombarding me with questions it would take me a week to answer. Not that Elaine intended to stick around and listen if I did. She was wearing a beautiful dress that revealed a lot of still-prime cleavage. If Elaine subscribed to Mimi’s dictum, the people here tonight must know Elaine very well indeed.

Elaine’s husband Don was close on her heels, as always. I hugged Mr Houghton with far more enthusiasm. I’d always been very fond of him, a fondness compounded both of pity and of gratitude for his kindness. I believed it was not easy to be married to Elaine, and I sometimes thought it couldn’t be too easy to be Cully’s and Mimi’s father. In social situations Don was always overshadowed by his family. But he did have his own flair; Don could make money, and he was shyly proud of that, I’d discovered years ago.

‘How’s the man with a finger in every pie?’ I asked lightly.

Mr Houghton looked pleased and embarrassed and altogether like a great teddy bear. He’d lost some hair and gained some weight since Mimi’s last marriage, but his face wasn’t deeply lined and he still had a bounce to his walk.

‘Well, I can’t complain,’ he admitted proudly.

I led Mr Houghton over to the bar, where Cully mixed his father a gin and tonic. They shook hands with an odd formality, but they looked glad to see each other.

‘What are you up to now?’ I asked in a whisper.

‘Well, Nickie,’ Don began slowly, taking a sip of his drink, ‘I’ve bought me a restaurant.’

‘Which one?’ This was sure to be a secret. In addition to owning a big insurance agency, Don was a silent partner in many Knolls businesses.

Don whispered back the name. I recognized it as one of the few good restaurants in Knolls.

‘You demon,’ I said with a grin. ‘You’re going to own this town before too long.’ Don loved that kind of talk; he grinned like a twelve-year-old with a frog in his pocket.

We chatted for a while, and at first I enjoyed it thoroughly. But as usual, Don (bless his heart) began to bore me just a little after a while. I caught myself looking wistfully at guests I hadn’t had a chance to visit with.

Mimi whipped up to rescue me in a swirl of red.

‘Daddy! You let Nick talk to other people. You can have her over to lunch soon and hash over old times. There’s Jeff Simmons over there. You better go tell him that Houghton needs some more insurance, after that awful thing this summer!’

Her father obediently headed in Jeff Simmons’s direction, his face becoming purposeful as he thought of business.

‘You’ve always been such a favorite of Daddy’s,’ Mimi told me as she whisked me away. That pleased me, of course; Mr Houghton had always been a favorite of mine, too. But this evening, as we’d talked, I’d caught a little gleam in his eye that was quite unwelcome in the father of my best friend.

I shrugged to myself. Oh, well, Don had always been an appreciator of women. He bragged about Elaine’s looks all the time, as if he were personally responsible for her attractiveness.