A Wife of Noble Character (5 page)

Vivienne decided to employ her cure-all mind-clearing ritual. She turned onto Memorial Drive instead of the freeway, opened the sunroof, and unrolled all the windows, even though the sun was getting hot. Each day that month had been slightly hotter than the last, foretelling the blistering summer to come. She stuck her Madonna mix in the CD player, turned up the volume on “Like a Prayer,” and sped through Memorial Park. As usual there was roadkill here and there—a couple of possums, an armadillo, and a raccoon—the blood and guts of which interfered with her ritual. The point of it was twofold: to rid her mind of annoying thoughts, and to reinstate her preferred sense of superiority and invincibility. It was hard to feel invincible looking at dead animals, but today she managed to forget the instant she passed them.

At this hour the boulevard had little traffic. Joggers were jogging in packs on either side of the road, weaving in and out of the piney woods. Vivienne felt herself returning. She remembered that an oil heiress by the unfortunate name of Ima Hogg had donated this land to the city. Poor Ima had never married, but her grandfather was the first native-born governor of Texas, and she'd been rich, and look at all she'd left behind. The joggers seemed so glad. The sky above the park was a deep Texas blue. Vivienne wondered whether Ima had been sad about being alone or if she'd been too busy with philanthropy to care. She probably would have married if her name hadn't been Ima Hogg. The thought of people remembering her as rich and magnanimous gave Vivienne the surge she'd been hoping for, and she flattened the pedal out of the park. Her hair lashed around in the warm car wind as she drove the miles-long stretch of mansions leading to her own neighborhood.

A slow song came on next, the one where in the music video Madonna falls in love with a bullfighter who breaks her heart. Vivienne, now fortified, slowed to gaze down the long driveways of the mostly Tuscan, ranch, and Tudor-style mansions. There was even a plantation-style Buddhist temple with a marble elephant playing in a pond full of lily pads in the front yard. Next door an old low ranchburger, set back on several wooded acres, was being read its last rites. Orange tape hugged a couple dozen of the trees, and the house itself was boarded up and stripped. There was a big sign in place of the mailbox:
BB DEVELOPMENT
.

The sight of Bracken Blank's mark on yet another lot had no effect on Vivienne. It served only as a reminder that she was on her way to the Blanks' house, and she kept on into more-commercial territory, past George Bush's palatial office tower with its synthetic blue lake, past the St. Pius Academy for Girls, to which Katherine had often threatened to send her, and back into another wooded stretch of homes. By the time she'd made a left at Timber Knoll, waved at the Hispanic guy in the security box—whom she always pretended to know, and who always waved back eagerly as if he knew her too—wound down the cul-de-sac to the Blanks' lengthy horseshoe driveway, and parked her car before the big white colonnade of their French Colonial home, she was past the trials of the morning. The day held promise, and the world did too.

 

III

On a Saturday two weeks later, Vivienne's alarm rang at nine. She worked five days a week at the store, and in order to make her days off feel full, Vivienne imposed order. Rising by ten was essential to this. From her window draped in gathered floral curtains, she enjoyed the view of an old reaching pin oak. Her most luxurious moments of the day were often spent watching gray squirrels scamper along its limbs; the tree was their on-ramp to the roof. If she slept late, she missed her time looking out the window. But if she kept her eyes open after the first alarm, she had forty-five minutes to lie in the fractured sunlight and snuggle into her duvet—Katherine kept the townhouse at sixty-eight degrees in the spring and even cooler in the summer—and watch the goings-on of the tree. She'd suctioned a hummingbird feeder to the window, but it hadn't attracted any hummingbirds yet. Maybe they'd come in deeper summer.

She could usually guess the weather by how much condensation was dripping from the pane. Today it was sopping wet, but the room was unseasonably cold, so it was possible it was a less humid day than the window let on. Her thoughts wandered around what clothes to pack for the Memorial Day party, her goals being to attract Bucky and to look better than the other girls. She reproached herself a little for this thought. Vivienne was aware, in her heart more than her mind, that she didn't have to try so hard, but this didn't stop her. After all, she'd been an active participant for as long as she could remember. It was a way of giving her mind immediate purpose. Bucky would pick her up in a few hours.

She curled up on her side and hugged her knees. The squirrels were tearing up and down the oak. Katherine seemed to be out. There was no vacuum running, no yard blower blazing outside, and no ring of Katherine's voice directing the hands operating the machines. The house quiet, Vivienne closed her eyes and thought of Bucky. She narrowed her mind hard to clearly see him and the parts of his body she knew best. His rough hands, firm calves. She narrated in her mind the nights to come at the ranch and what she would wear that would lead him to say what she wanted to hear and to touch her how she wanted to be touched. The weekend's outfits came to her as if in a dream.

She nestled her computer in her lap on the bed and checked her email, even though the only people who ever emailed her on Saturdays were the credit-card company, Neiman Marcus, and Waverly. She replied to Waverly's pronouncement that the Memorial Day party was going to be SO FUN. Next, with the usual bad feeling in her stomach, she checked her bank account. Today the balance was three hundred fifty dollars, more than she'd expected but over budget for the month. There was still a week left until June, and she'd already spent more than twelve hundred dollars, four hundred dropped yesterday on a dress for the weekend's party, at a little shop with an unpronounceable name Waverly had discovered near the Galleria.

She sank her chin into her palms and calculated. The boutique would owe her about three hundred dollars next week. She'd probably be fine as long as she avoided expensive dinners and shopping trips—easy enough to do in theory. The dinners were more problematic than shopping, due to the element of group consensus. If six people wanted to get dinner, for example, even at some moderately priced place where drinks just added up, her choices, unless Bucky was there, were to go home for the night, not eat, or pretend she could afford it. Most often she chose the latter. Honesty about her situation was unthinkable. And by the end of these nights, signing her credit-card receipt, she had convinced herself she could afford it.

She knew the only way out of living with Katherine was by saving money, and she promised herself
never again
after every gratuitous expense, but she always managed to forget that promise until after the next gratuitous expense. Somehow living at Katherine's wasn't so bad when she wanted a certain pair of shoes, or a massage at the Houstonian with Waverly, or one more eighteen-dollar pour of pinot noir. And then, once the shoes were home, the massage over, and the glass empty, living at Katherine's was worse than ever.

She set aside her computer and went to the old Sakowitz hatbox tucked away in Katherine's powder-blue closet, where cash awaited. She rarely pocketed more than two hundred dollars at a time, fearing that Katherine might notice, but today she took four hundred. Since September 11, Katherine kept upward of five thousand dollars in there, just in case the terrorists showed up. Occasionally Vivienne permitted herself greater sums, but she couldn't be too careful. She performed her heist in under a minute. If she hesitated, the inner turmoil stopped her:
It's wrong to steal, but Katherine deserves it. That money isn't yours, but isn't it your family's? I'm a bad person, but isn't Katherine a bad person too? Two wrongs don't make a right! Vivienne, you are thirty years old!

That slippery business done, she packed up her dresses in a garment bag. She brought two extra evening dresses—fun, short-skirted little numbers—and for the car ride wore a gray romper that tied at the shoulders and left her legs almost entirely bare. The drawback with this choice was, as usual, the imposition of her breasts. A strapless bra looked bulky under the fabric. She picked out a purple bra instead, so that the exposed straps could double as a camisole or bikini.

An hour later, Bucky Lawland pulled in the driveway and honked. Vivienne checked her teeth in the entryway mirror and smoothed out her romper. Her bags were cumbersome, so she spent a few moments deciding how to hold them so she didn't walk outside looking awkward and tipped. Bucky tapped the horn again. She greeted him with effort, trying to make her load look light, but he knew enough to help. He took the bags and threw them in the back without a word. He smelled like deodorant and tobacco. Bucky was a handsome guy, built solid, with dark-brown eyes and soft brown hair that curled up around his ears. But his dip habit made his cheeks look fat, and when he hadn't shaved in a few days he developed ingrown hairs in the whiskers on his neck, which Vivienne didn't dare reveal her intense longing to pop.

They'd been on the road twenty minutes when he started worrying about the weekend allotment of beer. “Do you think I brought enough?”

“If you run out, I'm sure the Blanks will have more.” She reached over and scratched the back of his neck.

He didn't seem to notice, even though it was the first time she'd ever done anything couplish like that. “Last time that's what I thought too,” he said, “but everyone thought the same thing and we ran out.”

“Then y'all can just go get more,” she said, scratching his neck a little harder.

“That means someone's gotta drive in town,” he said. “It's better to have enough when we get there. The town is dry after ten.”

Vivienne returned her hand to her lap. “Then we should stop and get some now, to be sure.”

“I want to get there before dark.” Because she was a woman, he expected her to solve his dilemma by telling him exactly what to do, like his mother, but Vivienne, wanting to be agreeable and lacking experience in mothers, just kept offering suggestions.

“We could call Waverly and ask how much they have,” she said.

“Forget it,” Bucky said. “Clay's shooting some hogs at dusk. I want to get there in time.”

“We're not even out of Houston. There's enough time to stop.”

“It's gonna be shitty if we run out,” he said harshly, as if that settled the matter.

Vivienne looked out at the flatness. Flat fields, flat parking lots, flat strip centers. Everything in sight was flat, except for the spaghetti bowl of freeways they were passing beneath in Bucky's newly jacked-up Tahoe. She already had to pee but didn't say anything.

Bucky was preparing a plug of tobacco and steering with his knee. She decided not to be nervous about this, because she wanted to trust Bucky. The Tahoe swung a little as he stuck the plug in his gums.

“The weather's going to be nice this weekend,” she offered. “Not too hot.”

“Yup,” he said. He reminded her of a goat when he chewed tobacco. In addition to fattening his cheeks, it gave him an underbite. He took his hands off the wheel again to adjust his cap. Bucky wore a lot of caps, and usually white caps, and most usually this particular white cap from Baylor, his alma mater. It was fraying and soft at the brim.

“Do you like my outfit?” she asked, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

He glanced in her direction. “Sure,” he said. “I like how small it is.”

Vivienne smiled but couldn't think of anything to say, so she turned back to the flatness outside. In the side-view mirror she saw Karlie Nettle and her husband, Timmy, two cars behind them.

“Don't lose Karlie and Timmy,” she said, even though she wouldn't have minded.

“They know the way,” Bucky said.

“Maybe this weekend you can teach me how to shoot,” Vivienne said, seeing that his attentions needed to be diverted.

“Yeah?”

“Remember, I've never shot a gun before.” It was true. With no father and only Katherine at home, she'd never even touched one.

“I'll teach you to shoot, baby.”

Gun talk usually sweetened Bucky up. The only thing he loved more than guns was Lawland's, his family's eponymous Texas-wide grocery-store chain, to which his father had recently appointed him vice president. Charles “Bucky” Lawland was a catch. His business degree was being put to respectable use, his personal coffers were ample, and, since turning thirty-one last year, he'd seemed ready to settle down. Vivienne had only known Bucky for a few months, but she'd heard girls talking about him a year before they met. The colossal bonus with him was that, unlike many of his counterparts, he was tall and still in good shape. He'd probably be bald one day, but now he had a head full of hair, and he always tucked in his shirt and wore a belt and had boots for every occasion, in every skin imaginable. His boots were never polished or decorative; he kept them a little dusty and work-worn. He didn't do much boot-wearing work, aside from messing around at his family's or someone else's ranch, but the ranches weren't working. Bucky got his boots worn riding four-wheelers and spinning his truck in the mud.

He was a religious man, but Vivienne tried to avoid the subject with him. Religion seemed to be a thing he kept in a special compartment in his brain for the sake of sometimes acting serious, because that was the way he thought Men should be. In this compartment he also kept his opinions on the way Women should be. There was a time for hunting and a time for Jesus, but as far as Vivienne could tell, Jesus was never available during hunting hours, or work hours, and certainly not during the hours he spent receiving blow jobs from her. In the three months they'd been dating, Vivienne had picked up that he had low expectations and little respect for the women he'd had sex with (and from what Vivienne had heard, there'd been many), but of women he took seriously, he expected angelic behavior and the same compartmentalized devotion to Jesus. In a jolly mood, Bucky wouldn't mind doing a keg stand or two, but in a pious mood, he'd get emphatic and tell her she wasn't “prayerful” enough. She couldn't anticipate his moods, so she tried to behave moderately around him and keep a positive lilt to her voice.