The Queen Gene (14 page)

“Wow,” Jack said, stunned. “I didn’t know you were still upset about Natalie. Luce, we weren’t together then, remember?”

Jack and I had lived together as friends through most of my pregnancy and the first year of Adam’s life. Natalie was his most serious girlfriend, but there was another. She ended their relationship after Jack was called away from their New Year’s Eve party to assist me with Adam’s delivery.

“Just for your information, she did
not
return to Scotland to care for her ailing uncle like I told you. She freaked out in the hospital the night of your accident and said she couldn’t ‘deal’ with the situation because the doctor thought that she was your sister.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Jack said.

“It doesn’t?”

“Nah.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“That relationship was fading. When I came to at the hospital and you said she took off for Scotland, I figured it was bullshit. Her family wasn’t even from Scotland.”

“Oh,” I said. After more than a year being reconciled with Jack, I just realized that I’d always felt as though our relationship was founded on a fault line. I had always assumed that if Natalie had not left so abruptly the night of Jack’s car accident, he and I would never have gotten back together. I shared this with him and he smiled sympathetically.

“How come you never told me this?” he asked.

“I didn’t realize it till just now,” I told him.

“Well, let me set the record straight, Luce. Natalie and I would’ve ended anyway. The accident was a catalyst for it, but that relationship was going nowhere.” Jack smiled, but saw I wasn’t fully over the heartbreak of the past few years. “Luce, the moment I realized we could work things out, the only woman I wanted to be with was you.”

I remembered our long nights when Jack sketched my Rubenesque body. I recalled how we worked with our marriage counselor, talking about our miscarriages and subsequent isolation from each other. I remembered everything we’d been through together from the time we met as grad students in Ann Arbor to parents and arts patrons in the Berkshires. Natalie, a heaviness I hadn’t even realized I’d been carrying, became a mist, evaporating into thin air.

Chapter Sixteen

The next week Robin dropped by in a “May Flowers” theme sweater and a long denim skirt. She had a proposition, she said. “Let’s have a lunch.”

“Sure,” I said. “Wanna try that new Thai place?”

“Oh,” Robin sounded disappointed. “I didn’t mean let’s go out to eat. I meant let’s have
a
lunch, as in we invite a few ladies to your place for lunch.”

“A few
ladies
?”

“Don’t say no before you’ve met them,” Robin encouraged. She had been trying to get me to join the Junior League since we met, assuring me it was a very down-to-earth group of women who do a lot of charity work. I always thought of it as a middle-aged sorority that I wanted no part of. To be honest, I always assumed they wouldn’t want me, so it was easier to reject them first on the grounds that they were snooty and pretentious and judged people before getting to know them. “Give it a try, Lucy,” Robin continued. “You have no idea what you’re missing out on until you give it a chance.”

“Why do we have to do it at my house?” I asked. “Do these oh-so-proper society ladies need to see my home before they decide whether or not I’m worthy of joining their little clique.”

“Oh dear,” Robin said, discouraged. “It was my idea to have the lunch at your place, and it had nothing to do with the ladies checking out your house.” I heard the crashing of glass from Randy’s studio and his scream of frustration.
Perhaps I should go check on him
. “If I can be completely candid with you, Lucy,” Robin said, pausing for me to confirm that she could. I did. “I thought it would be fun to, you know, people-watch at your place.”

“People-watch?” I asked.

“Are you going to make me hit you over the head with it? You have two great looking guys at the place and a kitchen window that provides an unobstructed overview of the guest houses and their inhabitants. Let a couple of bored married ladies come over and ogle a little. It’ll be fun.”

“I don’t know,” I hesitated, wondering if my motives were pure or if I was simply hoarding them for myself.

Robin saw straight through me. “Come on, Lucy! You can’t keep all of the neighborhood eye-candy for yourself. Be a pal and share with the girls. It’s not like men don’t have their innocent fun going to strip clubs and the like.”

I decided not to share my demographic research, which suggested that a good twenty to twenty-five percent of strip club patrons were female. It seemed to stray from the issue, and was not quite ready for Junior League ears.

“Lucy, I have been in such pain for months with this ankle,” Robin said, knowingly making me feel guilty that she injured herself at my house.

“It’s
still
not healed?!” I asked.

“Not fully. Has yours?” Robin returned.

“No. I’ve stopped limping though, which is nice.”

“Lucy, back to the luncheon. It would mean so much to me.”

“Why? I don’t get it.”

“Last week, Renee, Abby, and I had lunch, and we noticed that the things we were talking about now were frighteningly more matronly than what we chatted about ten years ago. Can you keep a secret? On Monday, I saw a pubic hair growing out of the back of my knee! Abby had a Botox goof and the wrong part of her face is paralyzed, and Renee whitened her teeth too much, and they’re now transparent. Poor thing had to get veneers.”

“You had a pubic hair growing from your knee?” escaped disgustedly.

“Yes!”

“Look, I’ve obviously got my own issues,” I said, gesturing to my round body. “But ogling young artists isn’t going to change any of that.”

“No, it won’t,” Robin said, her tone growing more formal. “It will, however, make us forget about it for a few hours.”

“Well, I guess there’s no harm,” I said. Before I could finish the thought, Robin thanked me. “I can’t get sued for sexual harassment or anything, can I?”

Robin laughed. “How about Wednesday? I’ll bring in the food so you won’t have to do anything but set the table.” With my confirmation, she whisked out the door with a lightness she hadn’t walked in with. I thought it odd that a group of grown women would behave like adolescent girls, but shrugged and gave it no more thought.

* * *

Later I called Earl at
Healthy Living
magazine and left a message. “Earl, hey, it’s Lucy Klein. It’s been a while since we chatted, but you expressed some interest in my writing an article about life on the artist community my husband and I started. We’ve got three artists here now, and it’s been quite an experience. I’m not sure I’ll be able to give you the upbeat, inspiring piece you may have in mind, but I think I can write something compelling and truthful. Let me know what you think.”

I hung up the phone and dialed Kimmy as I found a place by the window to perch myself and watch my private television show. Jack and Tom were replacing the windows at Randy’s with shatterproof glass while Chantrell sat in a wooden chair, staring blankly at her vegetable garden. It was noon, but Maxime and Jacquie seemed to be still asleep.

“Kimmy!” I said as I heard her voice.

“Kisses and hugs, Lucy. Kisses and hugs!” she replied.

“You sound chipper,” I said. If I were a tall, skinny, blond former model, I’d be chipper, too.

“I’m in love,” she sighed.

“Nick?” I asked. “The professor?”

“Yes.” I could see her flopped back on her bright orange muppet-fur chair she bought last year when she redecorated her place to look like Austin Powers’ groovy love pad. In high school I could always tell when Kimmy was talking to (or about) a boy because she let the top part of her body hang off the chair, draping down to the floor. “He is so completely different than anyone I’ve ever met. Would you believe that when he found out I’d slept with several of his students on, you know, Spermquest, he wasn’t at all upset.”

“Really?” I said, cynically assuming that he probably bedded several female students as well.

“No, he said that in many cultures, it’s very common for the female to seek mates solely to procreate. He knows that what we have is love and what I had with Jimmy, Ed, Frank, James, Todd, Phil, and Marcus was just an attempt at getting pregnant. I think Nick even said that some women kill the guy after they’ve had sex with him.
That
I would never do.”

“Kimmy, are you sure he wasn’t talking about black widow spiders?” I asked.

“Oh, maybe,” she pondered. “Anyway, we’re talking about maybe getting married or at least moving in together.”

“Does Anjoli know about this?”

“Oh yeah, she’s totally excited.”

“Good, good. So when do we get to meet Nick?”

“When school gets out. We’ll come up for the weekend, okay? You are going to love him. He is so totally smart about people. He’s always telling me what it’s like in other places. And they’re, like, places I’ve been to and everything. I never got to find out squat about those European cities while I was modeling. It was nonstop photo shoots and runways. When Nick talks about what he did in Paris, I’m like, ‘That was
so
not happening at Fashion Week.’ Anyway, you’ll meet him, and you’ll love him just as much as Auntie Anjoli does. Kisses and hugs. Gotta fly.”

* * *

The following week, Robin and her friends walked past a VW bug painted black and silver like a spider as they made their way up to the entrance of my home. Jack even made spider legs that he attached to the sides of the car. One of the women lowered her oversized Jacqueline Onassis shades to get a better look at our lawn ornament. They looked polished and moneyed to be sure, but didn’t appear to have that air of superiority I expected. Abby had a blond shoulder-length flip with wispy bangs peeking out from a tortoise-shell headband, and she wore a simple elegant sweater that looked like it must have cost about $500. Her two-inch-wide-heeled shoes were the same shade of olive as her sweater and had a large silver buckle on the top. Renee actually looked hip in that I-can-afford-to-shop-where-Madonna-does sort of way. She was just under six feet with short black hair and wore jeans with graffiti on them. Under her thigh-length turquoise suede jacket was a simple ribbed white t-shirt that also had a triple-digit price-tag look. The only thing about this threesome that was uniform was the square-tip French manicured nails. Other than that, they defied my expectation of homogenous Junior Leaguers.

I trotted down the staircase to greet my guests, but before I reached the door, I heard women’s voices squealing with concern. I opened the door to see Abby sitting on the steps with her shoe off while Renee turned her ankle in different directions asking if it hurt when she moved it. “Yes, yes, and yes,” Abby answered with her New England old-money accent. Why did people always twist an injured foot around to survey the extent of the damage?

“What happened?!” I asked, moving toward the women.

“Klutzo over here fell up the steps,” Renee shot good-naturedly.

Abby smiled and sparred with her friend intimately, as if they were lovers. “May I remind you of
your
little tumble in Cancun last winter, Miss Graceful.”

“I was drunk,” Renee defended. Then looking at me, “I was shit-faced in Cancun. This one is stone-cold sober. Great piece in the front, by the way.”

“Can I get you some ice?” I asked.

“Please, if it’s not too much trouble,” Abby said. Renee and Robin hoisted their friend up the final two steps. Or at least that was their plan. Renee suddenly lost her balance and fell back three steps to the ground. As I turned around at the sound of Renee’s scream, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Her graffiti pant leg was twisted in an unnatural position and Renee was clutching her knee.

“Make that two ice packs, please,” Renee said.

I couldn’t understand what was happening. The front steps were fully repaired. I understood how Robin fell on them when they were broken. I knew that anyone could trip and fall. But the thought that three women had now injured themselves ascending my front steps was unfathomable.

Thankfully this wasn’t a litigious group. “Let us call to order the meeting of the hop-along support group,” said Renee as she raised her bulbous wine glass. “To new friends, new injuries, and new sights,” she said, smiling mischievously.

“Goodness gracious, which one is that?” Abby asked as she saw Maxime open his front door and stretch. It was not unusual to see him still in his pajamas at this hour, but, thankfully, he had recently shaved, which gave him a devil-may-care look. Last week he looked homeless. Jacquie brushed by him and shouted at him in French.

“That’s Maxime, the French artist who doesn’t do any art,” I explained.

“And who’s Fifi La Bitch?” Renee asked, delighted by the show.

“His wife. She shops pretty much nonstop, taking short breaks only to come home and fight with her husband.”

Renee laughed. “You say that like it’s something negative, Lucy. Insult me no further by frowning upon my lifestyle.” It was clear she was being funny, but there was an indefinable something sad about her comment. Or her delivery. I couldn’t figure out what it was, but something about Renee hinted that there was pain beneath the fabulous outfits and one-liners. She was like a crystal bowl filled with warm kettle corn. But when you lifted it up and checked the bottom, you could see a layer of burnt, unpopped kernels. The kind that makes you flinch from the unexpected bitter taste. The kind that may cause you to chip a tooth.

“Abby, you speak French,” Robin chimed in. “Tell us what they’re saying.”

She listened, knitted her brow, then held one finger up as if to tell us to wait. I decided to use this opportunity to bring the Chinese chicken salad to the table. As I served, Abby began translating.

“Okay, girls, here’s the poop,” Abby said. “She said that Maxime is a worthless slob who ruined their lives. She didn’t go into details, however she feels quite certain that they shall never be welcome in Lyons again. I believe it has something to do with a business deal.” Abby rolled her eyes and added, “We all know how those can go sour in a heartbeat. Now she’s saying something about a violinist.”