Authors: Lisa Howorth
Mann mixed the martinis, adding an extra olive to Mary Byrd’s. She was anemic; she always needed more protein. Weren’t olives protein? He looked around the nutty kitchen. Like the rest of the place, it was full of stuff. Interesting and in some cases valuable stuff, but still—
stuff
. Mann did not see how Mary Byrd functioned in this kitchen, or in this house, for that matter. The kitchen was more of a crazy little museum than a work area. The windowsills were lined with miniature animals, cars, guns, and candlesticks; there were souvenir spoons, plant cuttings, feathers, wishbones, small novelty fireworks, old pill bottles and tins. A Museum of Tiny Crap. She was a magpie. The walls were hung with vintage political posters, old pie plates, madeleine molds, masks, maps, and a huge wooden cutout of a smiling green devil giving a thumbs-up and saying,
blame me
. There were always flowers or at least greenery on the counter, not always in their prime. The refrigerator door was a chaotic assemblage of dozens of photos and magnets and bumper stickers and clippings and invitations and kids’ art. Mann loved stuff, too, but wherever Mann lived, there were lots of cupboards and closets and drawers where things could be hidden or stashed quickly so that his places always looked right out of
Architectural Digest
.
Mann suspected Charles hated the clutter, too, but for some reason Mary Byrd had to be surrounded by it. It owned her. She just loved
things
. Her house—her kitchen especially—was just a metaphor for her life: messy, a little out-of-control, a little arty, full of
objets
and sometimes people she didn’t need but continued to accumulate. He and Charles had decided she had Compulsive Curiosity Syndrome; she couldn’t get out of gas stations or shops without more fart machines or novelty lighters, and in an antique store she
had
to inspect every single item, every little drawer and display case. Charles, Mann knew, had once taken Eliza and William on a Tour of Piles around the house: the Ungiven Pile, consisting of wedding and baby presents that had yet to be wrapped and sent; the Unpaid Pile, the Unfolded Clean Laundry Pile, the Future Yard Sale Pile, etc. A little mean, but funny, and he sort of didn’t blame Charles. He also knew that part of his own appeal for Mary Byrd was his tininess. She’d collected him, too, but he enjoyed it. Usually.
Mary Byrd reappeared wearing her signature red pleated skirt, little black roach-killer boots with almost-high heels, and the shreddy Levi’s jacket that she was probably too old for but looked cute in. They sat on stools at the counter to knock off a round of drinks before Wiggs arrived.
“The children have science fair proposals due tomorrow,” she sighed. “I should stay here and sit on them.”
“Those children will be fine. Eliza’s old enough to be in charge,” Mann said, picking up a caper by its stem and sucking it delicately before putting it in his rosebud mouth. “Anyway, you
hate
the science fair.”
“I know—but they still have to do it.” In the Thorntons’ house it was known as the science
un
fair, because everyone knew that the kids who either had access to their parents’ labs at the university, or had computers and fancy programs that generated cool graphics, or had plenty of money to spend on decorating their prefab display boards with grosgrain ribbon and glitter were the ones who won. The kids whose parents didn’t have extra cash or extra time got their dicks left in the dirt, science fair–wise. For a project in the category of Behavioral Science, Eliza had once carefully documented the process of teaching their old orange cat, Big Boy, to play a toy piano. It was a brilliant project for a second-grader, but it got disqualified for involving a live subject. What the hell
was
the Behavioral Science category, then?
“And you’re right.
I
certainly babysat all my brothers at her age. But we’ll be miles out of town, you know?” Mary Byrd knew the children were fine without a sitter—at eight and almost twelve, a sitter now just offended them—and when alone together, possibly because they were a little spooked and uneasy and glad for each other’s company, they got along fine. It was very hard, often, for Mary Byrd to permit them these little freedoms, to resist the urge to overprotect, because she certainly knew all too well that sometimes any amount of protection or vigilance couldn’t keep bad things from happening. Bad things were like dog shit: it could be anywhere and you had to look out for it all the time. So Mann wouldn’t hear, Mary Byrd went into the dining room booze closet to call Ashleigh from down the street to babysit.
Mary Byrd and Mann sipped their drinks and looked over the daily police and fire reports in the
Mercury
. The crime report was all the usual: MIPs, DUIs, public drunkenness, smoky kitchen, possession of paraphernalia, suspicious activity, driving without a license, animal rescue, animal complaint, cemetery desecration, malicious mischief, domestic disturbance, welfare check fraud, speeding, no vehicle tag, possession of controlled substance, and any combination of college and small-town crap that was testimony to the easy, relatively untroubled life of the town, although Mary Byrd knew that some of these innocent little items probably represented trauma, shock, and heartbreak for some family. It was mean to enjoy it, but they liked to discover the occasional bizarre entry, such as this latest:
uttering
.
Mann said, “What on earth is
uttering
?”
“I don’t know,” Mary Byrd said. “If I weren’t so bummed out I’d go look it up. Maybe it has something to do with lying? Or cussing?”
“Then we’d all be in jail. Maybe something kinky—like with cows?” He was actually semiseriously asking.
“No, dopey. That would be
uddering
, with two ds, not ts.” She laughed at him.
“I knew that,” Mann said.
“Sure you did,” Mary Byrd said. She bit a cracker and sipped her drink, scanning the paper. “This is the way things used to be in Richmond. Like you said: like Mayberry. There wasn’t real crime too much, right?” She had a sudden sinking spell, thinking of the trip ahead of her.
“Everywhere was like that,” he said. “It was Planet Donna Reed.”
There was some noise at the front door: not really knocking, but a barging-in sound, and then, a few heavy steps, then nothing.
“He’s here,” Mary Byrd said, resignedly. “Bottoms up.”
Mann put a hand over his eyes. “Please don’t say anything like
that
around him and get him started on me.” He threw back the last of his martini.
Edward Wiggsby had arrived, and apparently had paused in the hallway to take things in, maybe taking a photo or two. It would be something that nobody else would ever have noticed: a ding in the woodwork showing a century’s layers of old paint, or one scuffed but richly hazel Bruzzi Boot at the bottom of the stairs, or the plastic sheen on Mary Byrd’s purple “lizard” raincoat hanging on the hall tree. It might also be a pale apricot coughed-up hairball on the worn Serapi rug, or a big dead cockroach, Mary Byrd knew, and she thought about rising to intercept him but didn’t. Who cared. Whatever he shot would be a beautiful, intriguing photograph worth tons of money, and the prestige of having him photograph
your
hairball in
your
home would be priceless. Wiggs’s photographs were celebrated for their sublime subtleties of color and subject, and for his uncanny ability to notice things, or conditions of light, in a way that normal people didn’t, as if he had the sight and perceptions of another species. But all his exquisite sensitivities went into his art, and people permitted him his social breaches because of their worshipful dumbstruckness. Charles and Mary Byrd were friends with him because it was good business, but also because his insane, unpredictable life was so fascinating and out of another century, when artists had been celebrities and treated like royalty. He was an
artiste roué
alky like Toulouse-Lautrec who exalted the ordinary and insisted on pushing everything and everybody in his life to the limits. Whatever limits were.
Mary Byrd and Mann sat silently, looking at each other, eyebrows raised, waiting for the next sound. It was the echoey wooden thud of the piano cover being raised and then the rapid play of scales, then arpeggios. The cover thudded again, and in a second, there he was, Edward Wiggs, in all his splendor. Striking a theatrical but easy contrapposto in the kitchen doorway, he announced, “I’m here now. Let the fun begin. Your piano is abysmal.”
“Hey, Ed,” Mary Byrd said, getting up and crossing the kitchen to give him a loose, bent, no-pelvic-contact hug. In return she got an air kiss on each side of her head. With one hand he scrambled her curly hair affectionately. “Darlin’?” he said, and then, “Mann,” almost turning to acknowledge him.
“Hey, Ed,” said Mann. “How are you?”
“I’m wonderful. Couldn’t be better.” Wiggs’s speech was slow and halting; haughty, drunk, or both. There were so many Mississippi accents and his was the melodic, archaic drawl of white Delta planters of a couple generations earlier. “I’m just back from Japan. It was
fabulous
.”
“What would you like to drink?” asked Mann, ever the surrogate husband and host.
“Well, I have been indulging in a little Laphroaig. But a martini might be wonderful. Fresh horses. Or changing horses in midstream. Something like that.”
“Vodka or gin?” Mann asked and flinched like a kid realizing a dumb mistake at a spelling bee.
“Must you ask?” Wiggs sniffed. “There are
only
gin martinis.”
“Right,” Mann said flatly. “What was I thinking?” He reached for Rosalie’s old beat-up, silver cocktail shaker.
“And I’m so delighted to see Beefeater. Why are people drinking that abominable blue swill these days.” He paused. “Just on the rocks, please. And where is Charles?”
“He got caught in a powwow with our accountant,” Mary Byrd answered, keeping her face turned away to ease the lie. “Some problem came up that had to be fixed right away. He’s going to meet us.”
Wiggs’s old camera hung around his neck like a big chunk of
moderne
jewelry. While Mary Byrd put out more crackers and Mann mixed another round of drinks, he drifted around the kitchen, taking everything in. At the stove, the old Chambers handed down from Liddie, he turned on the gas and bent to light a Nat Sherman from a pack that magically appeared in his hand. For a second he watched the blue flame, and moving slightly to the side, he raised the camera with his right hand:
Click. Click. Click.
“I love this stove. It is so gloriously Lucille Ball,” he said.
“Yep, that would be me,” Mary Byrd said. “Many a tuna casserole has issued from its bowels.” She examined Wiggs. He wore a very luxe-looking black cashmere crewneck over a crisp white shirt, lean khakis tucked neatly into the cognac-colored German engineer boots he always wore. The high boots made his long, thin legs seem even longer. Storkish, really. She—everyone—was always awed by Wiggs’s appearance. He was gorgeous—murderously gorgeous—probably the most beautiful man Mary Byrd had ever seen. Or woman, for that matter. He had this amazing skin, pale and translucent; the kind of pallor that always made her think:
blue blood
. Even Mann and Charles didn’t have it, although they were both WASPily handsome.
Wiggs’s silver hair was collar-length but combed back and high, with a wisp that fell over his forehead, so slight as to suggest nonchalance and roguery, or to mock the notion of roguery. A baronial coif. His hands were long and delicate and blue and seemed to exist solely to be set impatiently on his hips, to raise his camera to his eye, or to gracefully bring booze and Nat Shermans incessantly to his thin, often curled lips. The very picture of icy gentility, dissipation, and arrogance, he was a cross between a preppy fop and some Weimar libertine out of 1930 Berlin. Sexy, too, Mary Byrd thought, in an aging, Jeremy Irons sort of way. That such a creature had ever surfaced from Freeman Bayou, like the first feathered reptile slouching out of the primordial ooze and taking flight, was astonishing to Mary Byrd, but as Charles had once said about Wiggs, the Mississippi Delta was the only place on earth where such an exotic rara avis of a man could have been hatched.
Wiggs would descend on them from Clarksdale every month or two, bringing his camera, esoteric audio equipment, and guns. Settling into the same nonsmoking room at the Holiday Inn every time, he would smoke, disassemble the stereo and the guns for a few days, put everything back together, and leave.
Mary Byrd glanced at Mann, who was making Wiggs’s martini with an expression of faint terror, probably wishing he could pee in it. She would have to do her best to protect him. You don’t grow up gay and not have a thick hide, though. Mary Byrd knew Mann could take care of himself. She just didn’t want him to get pissed and leave.
Wiggs walked to the windowsill, where Mary Byrd had her tiny-crap display.
“M’Byrd.
Wonderful
tchotchkes. Where do you
find
these bits?” He picked up a thumbnail-size pot of lip gloss in the shape of a toilet.
“Oh, you know, here and there. Gewgaws-R-Us. June Law gave me that one. Tell us about your trip,” she said, glancing at Mann.