A Wife of Noble Character (6 page)

They hadn't had sex yet. They hadn't discussed it either. There was an unspoken agreement that Vivienne would act as though she were a virgin and that Bucky would too. She found this awkward—they were adults; it seemed reasonable to her that they'd talk about sex, even if they decided not to have it—and adding to the confusion was his excessive horniness. Vivienne thought she'd given more blow jobs to Bucky than she had in all her previous years of blow-job giving. He had no problem suggesting anal sex but had only gone down on her once. Vivienne was not sure how to take this. She hadn't taken him up on his offer, partly because hooking up with Bucky was nothing like her fantasies. It was more like sinking into a warm bath, only to be jerked out the minute you feel relaxed, thrown down, and pounded with a dull meat tenderizer. When Bucky got worked up, his tongue turned hard and pointy and he shoved it into her mouth, or he just let it go goopy soft. The three or four minutes she had nuzzling with him, before he turned ornery, were the best part. She liked how he smelled like shaving cream.

She usually went home after a night spent with Bucky sore and dry and swollen from receiving his dry humps, with an ulcer slice forming on her top lip from closing her mouth over her teeth and onto his penis. But she felt lucky to be the recipient of his thrusts and pokes. A lot of girls would have liked to be where she was.

“Your phone is ringing,” Bucky said.

It was Karlie, calling from behind. “I'm going to die, I swear,” she said. “The fucking AC broke.”

“Sorry,” Vivienne said. She held the phone off her ear. Karlie sounded like she was in full-blown shrill mode.

“Will y'all pull over? I want to get out and ride with y'all.”

“It's not that hot,” Vivienne said. “The drive's not that long.”

“What is it?” Bucky said, spitting into his red plastic spit cup.

“Their AC broke.”

“Put Buck on,” Karlie said. Few things were more grating than Karlie calling Bucky “Buck.” Vivienne could only imagine the feathers that would fly if she had a pet name for Timmy. But Karlie had introduced them; he was her friend first.

Vivienne overheard Timmy's protests. “It's not broken; it just needs more Freon.”

“What the hell is Freon, Timmy! Viv, lemme talk to Buck.”

Vivienne glanced out the side-view mirror. Karlie and Timmy were right behind them now, Karlie in a defiant slouch, the phone pinned between her shoulder and her ear. From what Vivienne could tell, she had one heel atop the opposite knee and seemed to be picking at her toenails. Timmy, angled forward with his big forearms draped over the steering wheel, already looked defeated.

Bucky grabbed the phone. “What is it?” he said.

Vivienne watched through the mirror and tried to overhear as Karlie made her plea. Timmy said something about opening the sunroof, Karlie cussed, all the while picking at her toenails, and then both cars were exiting the highway and pulling into the parking lot of a Sonic in Sealy.

It was late afternoon. The sun had been baking the lot all day. A family of five sat in the shade out front of the Sonic. The parents were eating burgers wrapped in foil paper, staring at the highway and the oblivion beyond, while the three small children ran in circles around the tables, flinging Tater Tots at one another. Otherwise, the place was empty. The thought of riding in the car with Karlie for the next two hours made Vivienne want to fling a Tater Tot at someone too, at Bucky in particular.

“I think Karlie is overreacting,” Vivienne said.

“You wouldn't like it either,” Bucky said. “You'd probably skip out too.”

That he made the same assumptions of her as he did of Karlie was yet another reason to fling a Tater Tot at him. She smiled. “Actually, I wouldn't. I'd probably take a nap.”

Bucky spit out his cud. “Maybe she isn't tired.”

She wanted to remind him that he hadn't even been willing to stop for beer, but there was no point. An argument would only please Karlie. She got out of the car and stretched. It was a sticky afternoon. The heat radiating off the concrete singed her bare legs.

She went to pee. When she returned, Timmy approached with a cardboard carrier holding four huge foam cups. “I got you a green slushy,” he said. “I also got orange, red, and purple. But I thought, Vivienne likes green.”

Timmy occasionally did these painfully thoughtful things, accompanying them with some painfully thoughtful aside, like this bit about the color green. Vivienne did love green. She loved it even more for the fact that most people usually assumed she liked red. But Timmy looked at her and thought of green. Sometimes he seemed to her the tenderest man she'd ever known. He was a decent soul, Timmy, with a youthful, ruddy face, and a fuzzy hairline. He lacked force, though; his constitution was a gelatinous thing that formed itself according to expectation. He received the world and gave back to it without a lot of analysis, and what remarks he did make, what revelations he did have, he seemed to possess no awareness of. This made his words either really dumb or really profound. He was a bear, floating down the river, with a fat fish caught between his teeth.

Karlie claimed she married him because he was sweet. What she didn't say was what a comfortable life he gave her. Timmy was an associate in oil and gas investment at J. P. Morgan and pretty much let Karlie do whatever she wanted, or maybe that was just how it appeared. It was possible he thought he had her reined. Whatever the case, he was oblivious, and Karlie didn't have to worry about the fact that her party-planning business, NettleBee, had only had two clients that year. She was more interested in posting pictures of parties on her NettleBee blog than in planning parties. Each post was a variation on the theme of ocean chic or sexy Texas, with a tendency toward alliteration involving days of the week. Tuesday was for treats, Wednesday for wish lists.

Vivienne read the blog more than she cared to admit and supposed it was all fine, if only Karlie wasn't so hard on Timmy. She barked at him in front of other people and flirted with men openly. More and more, Timmy's legs appeared shortened beneath his gut, giving him the comportment of a young beardless Santa.

“Green is my favorite,” Vivienne said.

Karlie came around and pinched Timmy's gut. “Gimme red,” she said.

“I knew Karlie liked red,” Timmy said.

“That's 'cause red's the best,” Karlie said. This was something she said a lot. Karlie was a bottle redhead, but she'd been on the bottle so long she'd forgotten that she was actually a brunette. She worked to cultivate a personality appropriate to a firecracker. It suited her. She was a taut and freckled woman with a slightly husky voice, shorter than Vivienne, and borderline stout in the legs, a tumbleweed of bumptious female energy that Vivienne had been dodging since high school.

“Vivienne likes green the best,” Timmy said.

Vivienne wanted to tell him to let it go. He was just making conversation, but Karlie was liable to be on a mean streak. She was failing at slyly checking herself out in the truck's tinted windows, making a sort of pout and pricking up her eyebrows. She turned back to them and took up her red slushy.

“That's 'cause Viv's weird,” she said, “but that's why we love her, right, babe?”

Timmy smiled. How could a man like him possibly answer that question?

Vivienne smiled back at him. Sometimes she tried so hard to treat him genuinely that she worried she came off as false.

“I'm drivin' the ladies,” Bucky said. He lifted his cap, ran his hand over his hair, and replaced his cap; this was his signature gesture. Vivienne found it irresistible. His curls were sweaty and peeking out from the brim.

Timmy was still trying. “It's not that hot, Karlie. The sun won't be so high in half an hour.”

“Are you seriously still trying to convince me?” Karlie snapped.

Vivienne listened out of one ear. She was watching a Sonic employee cross the lot to a small graveled area with a brown plastic bench and no shade. She looked about eighteen. She sat on the bench and lit a cigarette and took out her phone. Every few seconds she looked up, then back down at the phone in case it had something new to tell her, and smoked the cigarette. Vivienne thought of the cigarette at Preston's. The morning came back to her in an outpouring of images, like a scattered deck of cards, and she tightened all over.

She had to focus on her current options. The only thing she could do to avoid riding the rest of the way with Karlie was to ride with Timmy. This would mean Karlie would ride alone with Bucky, and who knew what she'd say to him. Vivienne wanted to give her friend the benefit of the doubt, but from the beginning Karlie's expression of happiness about her dating Bucky had been insufficient. Not when you compared it with the usual exhilaration with which she greeted things like scented candles and bulldog puppies. There was also the matter of making conversation with Timmy. Lovable as he was, she didn't think she had the energy for it. The back of her neck was damp and ruining her blowout. She pulled her hair up into a loose bun. Maybe it was a little too hot.

They all climbed into the Tahoe and waited while Timmy trudged back to his truck. Karlie took off her sandals and rested her feet on the middle console. Her toenails were cut short and painted yellow, picked raw at the corners.

“Your toes are gross,” Vivienne said.

This induced Bucky to turn and evaluate the yellow nubs too. “Ouch,” he said. “You're gonna peel 'em off.”

Karlie jerked her feet back. “Like y'all don't have any bad habits.”

“Just being honest,” Vivienne said. “You shouldn't pick at your feet.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Karlie said. “If you wore the kind of heels I wear, you'd do the same thing. I get blisters.”

“Don't wear five-inch heels all the time, then,” Vivienne said.

“I wouldn't if I wasn't so fucking short. You don't need to wear five inches.”

“I'm short too,” Vivienne said, turning to face Karlie, who was scrunched up in the back, fiddling with the hem of her dress.

“But you're taller than me,” Karlie said.

“Who gives a shit,” Bucky moaned. They were still waiting in the parking lot, because Timmy had forgotten he needed to use the bathroom.

Vivienne looked at Bucky to see if he meant to take her side or Karlie's, but he just busied himself preparing a fresh plug. Karlie had tucked her feet under her weekend bag. She shot a stewy glare at Vivienne.

Vivienne, hot in the face, turned back around and buckled up. Lacking Karlie's penchant for sustaining aggression, she couldn't think of what else to say. No matter how hard she tried to have the last word with Karlie, she lost.

Once they were on the road, Bucky drove faster. It was clear he didn't want to miss out on the hogs. He kept a Texas Trophy Hunters Association sticker on his bumper and looked forward to his hunting weekends the way she looked forward to her pedicures. After twenty minutes of tense driving quiet, Karlie fell asleep, her bag still concealing her feet.

“Do you ever feel bad when you shoot an animal?” Vivienne asked Bucky, remembering a summer afternoon she'd spent fishing at an expensive Christian sleepaway camp in the hill country. She was twelve, in an algae-stinking rowboat in the Guadalupe River, with two boys and a camp counselor. They hadn't caught anything and offered a line to her as a concession before rowing back to camp. She immediately caught a little carp and pulled the green gleaming fish from the river with a feeling of glory before the boys, but once she really saw it, gill-panting and wide-eyed, she demanded they throw it back. That had been the plan all along—they weren't fishing to eat, and it was just a plain carp—but the hook was big and had lodged in deep. The counselor tugged at it.

“Put it in the water for a minute!”

The counselor, probably seeing her alarm and being the “adult,” dipped the carp in the river. The boys were hot and indifferent, absorbed in jealousy that a girl had made the day's catch. With the fish underwater, Vivienne had felt relieved. The drama was over for the moment; the fish was breathing. But once it was pulled back to the surface, the extraction of the hook seemed to go on for hours, the gills opening and closing.

Vivienne thought she would scream but didn't. She became still, like the fish. Finally the hook slid loose, and the carp was free. But a moment later it floated to the surface, flapping on its side, blood threading out from the gills.

Vivienne cried, “Kill it!”

The counselor retrieved the fish with a net, laid it on the bottom of the boat, and pounded it with the flat handle of an oar, much to the delight of the jealous boys. There must have been other words spoken, but Vivienne only remembered the counselor saying, “It was instant,” and then tossing the dead fish back into the river.

They all rowed back. By the time they reached the dock, Vivienne felt like a murderer. Less than an hour ago the fish had been alive, living its life. It depressed her, such a pointless death.

Karlie woke up and leaned into Vivienne's ear. “Waverly wants to know why you haven't responded to her text about lilac or fuchsia for the bridesmaid dresses.”

“Lilac,” Vivienne said.

“I think fuchsia,” Karlie said. “Buck, what do you like better?” She fanned the skirt of her strapless paisley-print dress around her knees.

Bucky said, “Lilac sounds like a flower.”

“Lilac is a flower,” Vivienne said.

“Whatever,” Karlie said. “I'm telling her I like fuchsia.”

The Tahoe blasted over the low hills of Highway 290. The trees, mainly oaks, passed as blurs in the side of Vivienne's vision. The sun was setting. It was that warm rosy hour.

“You didn't answer my question about hunting,” Vivienne said to Bucky. “Don't you ever feel bad about it?”

Bucky adjusted his white cap. “Why would I feel bad about it?”