A Wife of Noble Character (4 page)

Vivienne foresaw him dropping it into conversation:
Ran into little Vivienne, and she said the Blanks were having a dinner at the Me-neal, where it just so happens Ima donor!
It would get back to the Blanks, who'd wonder why she said that. Then she'd have to backtrack. She saw the risks before her like items on a shelf. All she had to do was rearrange them a little, play with them, and they'd no longer be risks. She could turn risk into promise.

An hour spent cajoling Randal might reap unforeseen rewards. She didn't want to admit it, but he was up-and-coming. He'd moved to Houston a couple of years ago, from some cold place like Delaware, set on fulfilling vague cowboy dreams by becoming the biggest dermatologist in town. In this short span of time, he'd done just that. At forty, he was the local maestro of blackheads, spider veins, and Botox. His commercials were all over local prime time. Even Vivienne knew his slogan, and not because she'd paid any attention. It was just on so many billboards, on television so often, that she couldn't avoid it.
IF YOU HAVE ACNE, CALL THE RANDAL-MAN; HE'LL LEND YOUR FACE A HAND!
Vivienne thought it was the worst slogan she'd ever heard. He seemed to pride himself on being shameless, and in this regard he was more Texan than anyone, but Vivienne never said this aloud. There was an odd sincerity to his name-dropping, a genuine avidness Vivienne thought he'd do well to tamp down. He'd lobbed money at beloved Houston institutions and was steadily, inexplicably, moving up. Rudy Tomjanovich had spent the weekend fishing at his house on Lake Conroe. His luxury suite at the football stadium overlooked the fifty-yard line, elbow-rubbing distance from Bob McNair. He'd sponsored the biggest covered wagon at the Rodeo Parade and ridden all the way to the old Astrodome, waving like a Hollywood star. Every time Vivienne heard one of these tales, she'd roll her eyes and imagine Lynn Wyatt reluctantly mingling with Randal. He could buy his company, but he couldn't buy his company's enjoyment.

He'd had his eye on Vivienne for months. She didn't even remember where they'd met, some party or other. He seemed to think she was the cherry on top, the prize that would justify his investment in the state of Texas. He'd made his position so plain that Vivienne often had to get creative in deflecting him. She'd secretly pass gas during their conversations, or feign a sick stomach and escape to the nearest bathroom, anything to reduce his attraction to her. These methods had to be practiced discreetly, of course, maybe too discreetly, but he hadn't been dissuaded by her less discreet approaches either. She'd openly suggest that he ask a certain willing woman to dinner, and suddenly he'd turn clever and whisper that he knew what she was up to.

“Come on, now,” he said. “You won't be alone in there with me.”

“I wouldn't worry about that,” Vivienne said, still pleasant.

Randal tucked his thumbs in his belt loops. He was surveying her tone, deciding whether to be offended. “How'll you know what to say to Waverly,” he said, rocking on his boots, “if you don't even go inside? You didn't drive over here just to stand on the lawn, did you?”

The other woman hadn't moved, but her smile was looking a little strained.

He was testing her. “No, I didn't drive all the way out here to stand on the lawn,” she said. “I came out here for some time to myself.”

It took Randal a few chest-hair-stroking moments to absorb her words. Once he did, he seemed satisfied. “That's what I like about you, Viv,” he said. “You don't feel the need to flatter me. I can appreciate quiet time, and I don't want to interfere on you.”

Vivienne made sure to preemptively offer him her hand again. Instead of shaking it, he kissed it. She tolerated this but immediately wiped her hand on the back of her dress. He told her not to be a stranger, as he always did, and set off with the woman, who fluttered her fingers at Vivienne. Once they were out of sight, Vivienne practically threw off her heels. She fumed all the way to her car, mostly angry with herself. Not only had she coddled Randal in order to repel him—the easy way out—but he'd taken it as a sign of respect, and in the process she'd humiliated herself. Why didn't she just tell him she was having coffee with a friend and seeing a museum to begin with? Then she wouldn't have had to skirt the fib about Waverly's rehearsal dinner. Now that he'd been coddled he wouldn't punish her, but she didn't feel relieved. He probably thought he held a secret of hers and a reason to seek her confidence. What did it matter whether he thought she was coming from sleeping with a random guy? It was none of his business; she didn't feel entitled to know how and with whom he'd spent his morning, even if she cared.

She sat in the car and pressed at her temples. She missed the feeling she'd had leaving Preston's. That was a more pleasant, flirty sort of confusion. The confusion she felt now pushed her right up against a wall:
Why do you care?

She drove home, listening to the refrain in her head, unable to answer, blaming Preston. If he hadn't made her feel stupid about her life, she wouldn't currently feel stupid about the way she'd handled Randal. Preston didn't realize how important it was to win people over, to have people on his side. He went around thinking he could analyze and judge everything. He thought success had nothing to do with external expectations, but Vivienne knew how gratifying it was to triumph before her peers, to live up to their standards. Preston seemed to have only himself to live up to, and how could that be enough? The current conflict was a smashup between her desire to exceed the expectations of her world and her desire not to care about those expectations at all. She had no idea where this impulse to not care was even coming from, which was further cause to blame Preston. Not once in all her years of knowing women, of Brownies and Girl Scouts and Junior League and cotillion, or in her sorority, had one girlfriend ever posed to her an alternative on the Way to Be. A few girls had left Texas and gone to New York or elsewhere, but she hadn't known them well. Her own quiet interest in art had never struck her as a path she could realistically follow. The women who went on to careers had always spoken boldly about their interests and their plans in school. Vivienne had come to believe that none of that was for her. Her will was strong but it needed direction, and she didn't like fielding questions about how she might pursue art, because she lacked the confidence to find the answer and she resented how the options posed to her were implicitly postmarriage; she might co-chair an event at the Museum of Fine Arts or take an oil painting course at the Glassell School.

Aunt Katherine, who'd raised her, was least of all a guide to modern womanhood. Vivienne had spent her adolescence avoiding Katherine; in childhood she'd clung to the hope that Katherine would become the mother she'd lost, but by the time she got her period in seventh grade, she'd given it up. She couldn't remember Katherine ever tucking her in or reading her a book. There was no real affection in the house, only politesse and a parade of nannies whose names Vivienne got confused. She hadn't bonded with any of them. Perhaps they'd sensed the unhappiness behind Katherine's bright exterior, or perhaps Katherine hadn't bothered to disguise the unhappiness in the first place, or maybe Katherine's assessment was right: The nannies left because Vivienne was such an awful girl. Just like her mother. Difficult, strong-willed, trouble. Vivienne never actually did anything troublesome that she knew of, but she was the child of her mother, and Katherine considered Vivienne's mother the most troublesome woman in the world. Vivienne only remembered her mother in glimpses, freeze-frames; she didn't know whether she took after her or not. She'd memorized the two photo albums under her bed. Her mother had fairy-tale hair, long and golden and loose. She wore floral dresses. Her smile was bigger in the pictures taken after Vivienne's birth. Her name was May. She named her daughter Vivienne May. The portrait made by the albums differed from the villain Vivienne had come to know through Katherine.
Your mother abandoned my brother—your father! She drove him to his death. She was an atheist. She was never a good wife.
And on it went, till eventually Vivienne stopped hearing it. But the words took shape within Vivienne, a small, sharp shard of shame that her whole identity had to grow around, like a tree trunk over a rope.

Her mother had left the family for a younger man, a mudlogger employee of Cally Petroleum. They were in love. Vivienne knew this because Barbara Grimble, her godsend old-timing, now-deceased neighbor, the woman who invited her over during the holidays for tree-trimming, had told her what she considered the straight facts before Vivienne left Houston for college at Texas Christian. A few months after her mother took up with the mudlogger, her dad drove out to Galveston and smashed his Porsche into the seawall. According to Mrs. Grimble, the wreck had nothing to do with the divorce—her mother hadn't asked for a dime; his gas investments had turned while he was squandering his inheritance playing at being an oilman. According to Katherine, he would never have been so stressed about some investments as to crash into the seawall. He was an heir to the Cally Petroleum fortune; his living didn't depend on his investments. If he'd been worried about money, it was because he'd anticipated how much would be milked from him in the divorce. He was drunk, the police had proved that much. Mrs. Grimble claimed this was often the case; Katherine claimed he rarely drank. The only thing the two agreed on was the wickedness of the media—the whole thing unfolded in the local press as a spectacle. This only caused further invective against Vivienne's mother, who'd then not only privately betrayed the family but publicly humiliated them as well.

All of it meant little to Vivienne. She was three when her father died and four when her mother, who'd moved to Port Aransas with the mudlogger, died too. Turned out all that time she'd been quietly dying of ovarian cancer. “Quiet” was Barbara Grimble's word. The older she grew, the less Vivienne believed that the dying had felt quiet to her mother. On days when she had painful cramps, she thought of her mother. Could she have saved her somehow? Deep inside her, streaming beneath everything, was a second life, the one she might have lived had her mother survived.

There was no custody battle, no need for divorce proceedings, so the divinations of what would have been, the various evils May would have committed against God and Katherine, became speculative myth. Despite the passage of twenty-seven years, it was a subject Katherine and her friends at Gracedale Catholic Church returned to often, and every once in a while Vivienne heard her mother mentioned in passing remarks, usually jokes about the mudlogger himself, a silent figure in the whole tragedy, who'd gotten himself killed in a fire offshore.

That her parents' legacy was this immense unresolved drama full of dead people made Vivienne feel that her life should be the resolution, so that by conceiving her their union hadn't been such a waste. They'd loved each other enough at one point to marry and make a life—her own life—so she couldn't only be the product of loss and collapse. The resolution would be a happy, comfortable married life for herself, with years of love to counteract all the fighting. Vivienne deliberately hadn't mentioned this part of the fantasy to Preston.

Katherine, always determined to convince Vivienne she was unworthy of love, continued to be an obstacle on this point. She kept a slow drip of hurt over Vivienne's head, so slow Vivienne sometimes didn't feel it or, if she did, generously wondered whether Katherine even knew what she was doing. It was part of their private dialogue. Vivienne learned from Katherine that her happiness depended on extricating from her personality any remnants of her mother, that career was secondary to the more important task of getting married—but only after college, and to a reputable man—and that ambitious women were to be avoided: They were usually lesbians. In sinister tones, she reminded Vivienne of what she was set to inherit if things turned out well and what she was set to lose if they didn't, and in the next sentence she'd toss her hands up convivially and exclaim that she
just didn't know what else to say
. Her favorite platitude was that God was like a river—go with his flow and all would be well and right; wrestle against him and drown. Barbara Grimble was probably rolling over in her grave at the injustice this metaphor did to all good Christians everywhere, coming as it did from Katherine Cally's lips, and pretending as it did that faith should be easy. It was Barbara's idea that Vivienne carry a baby picture of herself in the plastic window of her wallet, to remind herself she was lovable. Vivienne laughed off the idea but slid one in front of her driver's license anyway. In the picture she is a toddler, blond as the sun, standing in the muddy Galveston sand in a red toddler bikini, probably a stone's throw from the fatal seawall.

Despite all the reasons she held dear for why she was insufficient, Vivienne was certain of her beauty. Like her insecurities, she held her looks close to her heart and guarded them intensely. To her mind, they were the way out from Katherine and the way into a protected life. If she married well enough, she wouldn't need to worry about the inheritance, she wouldn't need Katherine. It seemed to her that Katherine's threats might be empty. Maybe there weren't so many millions anyway—the company was sold after her father's death, the money scattered amid lawsuits. It eventually made its way to investors, unseen relatives, and Katherine. But Cally remained a name. Vivienne's grandparents had invested grandly in the arts, and the city bore their stamp. Katherine sat on the boards of museums because her parents had purchased the privilege.

Vivienne lived with Katherine in a three-bedroom townhome. It wasn't modest, but it wasn't lavish either. Whether this was because of Katherine's Catholic temperance or because it was all they could afford, Vivienne had no idea. Whatever the estate really amounted to, Katherine had paid for Vivienne's education, and Vivienne got free rent. She used this luxury to amass credit-card debt and spend what money she did earn on trying to maintain a lifestyle appropriate to the oil heiress everyone thought she was. Her name and face were enough to rouse the envy of her peers, even if her home was humble by the neighborhood standard.