Venus Envy (28 page)

A long silence followed this revelation. “If you want to ruin your life, so be it. Leave Carter alone.”

“I love him.”

“Then let me ask you this. Do you love me at all?” Libby demanded. Love sounded like a balance due being called in by a solicitor.

Now it was Frazier’s turn to be silent. She noticed that her foot was heavy on the accelerator and she eased off. Was she really committed to the truth? Then she had to tell it. “No. No, Mother, I don’t love you and I haven’t loved you for many years, but I thank you for all that you have done for me. I don’t think any child can ever pay back the work that a parent does for her.”

“That’s all I wanted to know.” Libby hung up the phone.

As Frazier turned left at Somerset store, heading down Route 231, her mind boiled over. She couldn’t know
what it was to be a mother, although perhaps, if fortunate, she would find out someday. Frazier loved children but would only consider being a mother herself if she was in a long-term relationship and if the father was a dear friend. Billy crossed her mind. He was going to be a father. How curious. She wondered if it would change him.

Frazier couldn’t know the trials she’d inflicted upon her mother: the vases broken, the chicken pox, the golf lessons, the broken leg, the orthodontist, the ferrying back and forth to private school, the absurd recitals, the constant call for clothing and new this and new that, and worst of all, the constant interruptions with those childish voices piercing the quiet, “Mommy—” How could she know? She hadn’t been awakened in the middle of the night with a kid throwing up all over the bedroom. She hadn’t taught a child to skate or endured slumber parties or the steady flow of teenaged boys as they courted her daughter. Nor had she hauled herself out of bed Sunday morning after a Saturday night dance at the club to make certain the family went to church on time. At all these sacrifices Libby excelled. And for these sacrifices Frazier felt gratitude.

Before hearing the shadowing wings of Death’s vulture she hadn’t given much thought to what her parents had done for her, other than the knee-jerk response in public to thank them. She was reexamining everything, everyone, and, most of all, herself.

Libby did everything just right. She was the perfect mother, except that she never sat and listened to either child. Oh, she was harder on Frazier than on Carter but that was to be expected. Libby wanted external results, children praised by her friends. She didn’t want to know her children as people. They were display objects, further proof of her prowess as wife, mother, and lady.
For Libby, everything was an extension of herself, and Frazier had picked up on that while she was tiny. She couldn’t have understood it but she had felt it. Now she understood it. Libby physically did everything just right but she never loved her children—not real, accepting, nurturing love. She probably didn’t have it to give, and what Frazier felt she needed to do was forgive her mother. Libby might be able to be more open, to be giving, but that was Libby’s struggle, a struggle she seemed to sidestep or ignore. Or maybe her mother was so far away from her own self she didn’t even know how empty she was.

As Frazier pulled into her driveway and saw Curry’s and Basil’s faces in the window she realized those two furry creatures had given her more love than her mother had ever given her. Maybe her example of goodness in this life ought to include her cat and her dog. Maybe she should strive to be more like them and less like a human. At any rate, she knew she didn’t want to be like her mother and she prayed that she could forgive her mother. It sounded easy enough but it was proving ferociously difficult.

If Libby and Frank proved templates, her primary examples, she feared her own ability to love. Forgiving her mother was going to have to take a distant second to reaching down in there and trying to make a place in her heart and her life for other people. She’d spent three decades steeling herself against people, hiding, and not just because she was gay. She trembled at the thought of being inadequate even more than at the prospect of being hurt. But those infernal letters had taught her who did love her and that was a beginning. Surely, she had done something right in this life and she was going to have to learn to do more.

A
THIN BLUE LINE OF SMOKE HOVERED IN THE AIR OVER THE
heads of Frank Armstrong, George Demerius, Pickens Oliguy, Randy Milliken, and Larry Taylor. With the exception of Larry, in his late thirties, all the men smoked, but then Larry also didn’t drink, worried about high cholesterol, and wore sneakers. He’d spent too much time out of Virginia, but on the positive side he evidenced a sharp business mind.

The temperature dropped rapidly as yet another cold front whirled in from the west, blustery clouds visible even in the fading light. Frank glanced out the restaurant windows and wished he were closer to home. He’d be driving forty-five minutes in whatever rolled in behind those clouds.

Lately his mind wandered in and out of the moment. He’d find himself vividly alert, interested in his immediate surroundings and the conversation, and then he’d
be back decades, standing in front of the sagging chain-link fence where he first set up business. He could smell the oil that he laid down over the dusty bluestone. He could feel the worn gears grind under his feet when he shifted the ancient dump truck. He felt the energy that filled his young body. He worked morning, noon, and night. He’d walk down the driveways of people he didn’t know to ask if they wanted a load of stone or if they wanted to move up to asphalt. Yes, it was much more expensive, but depending on the quality you put down, it lasted seven to fifteen years and he would guarantee it. He patched holes for free. He sweated in the sultry Blue Ridge summers and he shivered in the raw frost of countless gray winters. He plowed out neighbors’ driveways in the snowstorms for nothing. He lent equipment to struggling friends. He gladly shared his experience with other paving men and he soaked up whatever they could tell him too.

The years sped by until, like Sambo’s butter, they ran together in a golden path. He remembered Frazier taking her first baby steps. He remembered Carter’s tree house, which he’d helped him build. He especially remembered Frazier’s last high school lacrosse game, but when he thought of his children he could recall only isolated incidents. Yet when he thought of his business he could recall the color of the ink on his first set of books. The day Mildred, in a crisp sundress, knocked on the ramshackle building by the Rivanna River, the steam floating up even though the hour was 8:30
A.M
. He remembered her perfume on that August morning and although he never made love to the woman—hadn’t really thought of it—he came to realize he loved her more than anyone, other than his daughter, on the face of the earth. Why? Because she learned to love the paving business too.

Not content to do just the books, Mildred started to
go out on bids. She studied the various surfaces one could use and she studied soils. She learned good grading of roads from so-so. She inspected culverts, drove trucks when a man called in sick, and still got out the bills on time as well as the correspondence.

Armstrong Paving became their baby. Frank was amazed that he didn’t realize this until his sixth decade. Was he abominably slow or were men dumb about these things?

The major disappointment in his life also centered around Armstrong Paving, for he had built the business to pass on to his son. Carter seemed bored shitless by it. Frazier adored it but Frank had been too much a product of his era when his daughter was young. He discouraged her. Now, well, why kick himself in the pants? Frazier would have turned Armstrong Paving into a multistate empire. But she shot off on her own path and built her own business. She loved her business as much as Frank loved his. In his heart he knew Frazier forgave him for his conventional thinking. He was beyond that today. Unbeknownst to his wife, he’d willed the business to both his children, with the proviso that Frazier run the company. If she couldn’t run Armstrong Paving and her gallery simultaneously, she’d find the right candidate to steer the ship while she set the course.

Libby, well provided for in the terms of his will, wouldn’t even notice what became of the goose that laid her golden egg. His wife never once asked him one question about his business. Libby didn’t know a dump truck from a bulldozer, or bluestone from crush-or-run.

The excitement of building his business from the ground up so occupied Frank that he didn’t realize he was quite alone, emotionally, until two years into the marriage. Then the children came and they held him. Of course he would have stayed no matter what.
Frank believed that when you married there was no back door. If you made a bad bargain, then you made the best of it. Perhaps he wasn’t so wrong in marrying Libby. She was a beautiful woman. She knew how to work a party. She happily organized social gatherings for his clients and peers. That she could spend $2,000 on floral arrangements alone stunned him but she explained that this was her form of dump truck: one needs the right equipment to get the job done. In her way Libby had been a partner, socializing for the business. Perhaps the only foolish thing in marrying Libby was in believing that she would love him for himself. She didn’t. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Frank was loved because he was a provider.

He swept his deep, clear eyes around the table and wondered if these men, most of whom he had known at least thirty years, felt the same way? Did they think of it at all?

And why was he suddenly pulled into his past, swirling backwards in an emotional wind-devil? He had lived a good long life but only now was he beginning to understand his life and himself.

Perhaps men grow reflective in their sixties. A glance at George Demerius’s wobbling chin disabused him of that notion. Frazier’s revelation fired Frank to examine himself. While she was sick, the terror at the possibility of losing his beloved child sent him to his knees before God Almighty. That was a lesson but her incredible shift was another. The lesbian stuff baffled him but what affected him was her change in attitude. Cool, aloof Frazier was becoming direct, emotional, and spoiling for a fight. She’d sent Libby into the stratosphere. He wouldn’t mind sending Libby there himself. If his daughter could change, he could change.

“Then this sumbitch says to me, ‘You sent in the wrong form.’ The wrong form? I was building off-ramps
before this toad got his first hard-on!” Pickens expostulated.

Frank drifted back into the conversation. “People who work for the government, whether it’s federal, state, or local, don’t live in the real world, Pickens. They’ve even got a form for when they can get a hard-on, how many hard-ons they’re allowed in one twenty-four-hour period, with whom they can get a hard-on, and to whom they should complain if the hard-on isn’t sufficiently satisfactory.”

Randy laughed. “Sounds like a bunch of dickheads to me.”

“The women are bowheads,” Larry Taylor chimed in.

“Bowheads?” George asked.

Larry spread his hands out behind his head. “Yeah. Haven’t you ever noticed that the higher up they go in the bureaucracy, the bigger the bow? They start out as toddlers with little pink or yellow bows, plaid for Christmas. Then in grade school they wear sparklers. In junior high they use those little terry-cloth things, and by high school they use black silk, or some kind of silk. The kind of bow a woman puts on her head tells you what she expects from life and whether or not she’ll give you a blow job. Bowheads.”

“No shit.” Pickens scratched his own head.

“What does it mean if a woman doesn’t have a bow in her hair?” George wondered.

“Can’t be in the government without a bow.” Larry smiled. “But if she’s a civilian and she doesn’t have something stuck up there she’s probably a little on the wild side, you know, especially in Virginia.”

“Hey,
I
want to know that girl.” Randy clapped his hands.

“What I want to know is what kind of bow means
shell suck my cock?” Pickens returned to the more important subject.

“I’m not telling. Otherwise you’ll be bird-dogging my quail, buddy.”

This elicited a huge round of appreciative laughter.

Pickens shouted above the laughter, “Hey, you know the difference between a bitch and a whore?” The other men shook their heads, so he continued: “A whore does it with everybody. A bitch does it with everybody but you.”

Frank ran his fingers through his hair, a nervous gesture. He couldn’t help but laugh. When you got down to brass tacks the tension between men and women called for some kind of relief. Then again, what was offensive? What was offensive to women didn’t seem all that bad to men. He reckoned he’d never figure it out.

“Back to the prick—I mean no-prick—who fried your ass about the correct forms for the bid,” Randy said. “What did you do?”

“Sent my girl down for the correct form. See, that’s what pissed me off. I did have the correct form but the state has changed it slightly in the last year and this is the newer form. The changes are so small you need a magnifying glass to find them.”

“Asshole.” George clipped the word.

“Yeah, but he’s an asshole with job security,” Frank added. “Why the hell do you think those people can act the way they do and treat people the way they do? Ever look at the qualifications for those low-level state jobs? Not one of us at this table would hire one of those people to work in our companies.” He placed his knife across his plate. “Now the higher-ups, maybe. If nothing else, they’ve learned how to climb and whose ass to kiss. In this world that amounts to genius.”

“You got that right, brother.” George nodded.

“What really rips it for me”—Randy shifted his weight in his seat—“is that those guys down at the highway department know repaying an off-ramp in Louisa County is a six-hundred-thousand-dollar job and I don’t care who does it.”

Larry Taylor quietly got up and walked out of the room. The other men barely noticed as they continued to rag on about the state highway department, the state government in general, and finally, what were the Orioles going to do this year? Clearly that was the premier subject.