“That’s great, Tony. I know they’ll love it. And the girls all really appreciate the trouble you take.”
Tony began to towel his dripping face. “Do you mean it? They really dig the routines?”
“Of course. And you, too, Tony. Why’s that surprising?”
“All this female attention. Goes to a guy’s head.”
“Oh, come on,” Judy laughed. “With that body, you must have had hundreds of girls after you.”
“No, I was the original Charles Atlas weakling, that’s why I started working out in the first place.”
“You’ve made up for it since, Tony.” Judy turned to leave the room. “Don’t work too late.”
“No chance, I’m taking my Mom out tonight,” he answered.
“What a lovely thought, Tony. Enjoy yourselves.”
* * *
“Can’t we turn the volume down?” Tony’s mother scowled. Carefully dressed diners were shrieking with laughter, calling greetings and gossip from table to table, while waiters clattered with laden trays across the white tiled floor.
“The fashion crowd comes here, Momma.” Tony hoped she wasn’t going to make a scene. “I wanted to take you somewhere real nice.”
“Nice! This old-fashioned stuff!” A scornful laugh indicated her opinion of the fawn leather and chromium interior, all of which had been salvaged from the liner
Mauretania
, that floating objet d’art of the thirties.
“So now you’ve got a job, you got money to burn!” Tony’s mother picked up the elegant menu. “I could cook this stuff for a tenth of the price! Papa and I never wasted a penny. Now, there was a careful man.”
Tony didn’t remember his father as being careful; his earliest memories were of his father fighting with his mother, while Tony cowered beneath the cracked, checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table.
“What’ll you have, Momma? I’m gonna try the crab salad.”
“Crab salad! What nourishment is that? You like chicken, Tony, remember?”
Tony remembered the different grease stains on the kitchen wallpaper, each of which marked a spot where his father had hurled a meal against it. Roast chicken had been the easiest dish to pick off the floor. Tony hated roast chicken. “Okay, I’ll have the chicken, Momma. Now, what’ll you have?”
Small black eyes peered at the menu, reading with difficulty. “I’ll have the hamburger. Why couldn’t you let me fix something in your smart new apartment, Tony?”
She’d never stopped criticizing his apartment. Quickly he said, “It’s being decorated. Wet paint everywhere.” Tony wasn’t clever enough to wonder why this small, scowling woman, who was in her forties but who looked twenty years older, should turn every pleasure offered by her son into an excuse to criticize him.
“Why aren’t
you
doing the decorating?” She waved the menu at his face. Tony raised one arm and ducked as if to ward off a blow, then she continued. “So now you’re too high and mighty to paint your own apartment! You always were lazy; you always lay around doing nothing.”
They fell silent until their food was served, then Tony’s mother suspiciously prodded her hamburger with her fork. “This meat is raw!”
“It’s continental style, Momma, underdone.” Tony felt an almost uncontrollable urge in his gut as his mother criticized on, on, on, and raised her voice until the other diners turned to look at her. This, too, had been the pattern of his childhood meals. She’d complain because Poppa was always late and, in return, he’d criticize the food. Then they were off, bickering about nothing. Voices would rise, fists would be raised, shouting would escalate into screaming, and then the food would hit the wall. Mealtimes were the only times that his family couldn’t avoid being together, and they used these occasions to attack, undermine, and casually wound, using their intimate knowledge of each other to destroy with the accuracy of heat-seeking missiles.
“Please keep your voice down, Momma,” Tony pleaded.
“That’s a fine way to talk to your mother!”
“Momma, I’m only trying to give you a good time.” Once again, Tony wondered whether he would ever earn adult status.
“Don’t interrupt me, or I’ll make you wish you’d never been born!” Tony felt sick. Inside his magnificently developed body, he felt again like a small boy, a small boy terrified of his mother’s unpredictable, sadistic rages, a small boy overpowered by the unreasoned guilt of childhood. Every day, the small Tony had heard that savage voice and moved about the apartment in terror, lest she should pick on some trifling fault—a peanut-butter stain on his shirt, unfinished schoolwork, chores skimped—as an excuse for a beating.
* * *
Tony unlocked his front door and crushed his mother’s bag of homemade cookies into the overflowing garbage bag. Another treat for the roaches. He fed a tape of
Captain Blood
into the video, threw himself on the permanently converted, never-made Murphy bed and turned to the night table, upon which stood a signed photograph of Judy in a silver frame. “I don’t take her out, I’m neglecting her; I do take her out, I’m wasting money!”
* * *
“Isn’t Spyros ever going to give up?” Lili picked the plain diamond bracelet from the newly delivered basket of butterfly orchids and tossed it on Judy’s blue and mauve silk sofa. “If I had kept his bracelets, I’d have enough to reach my elbows.”
“Lucky girl, isn’t she, Mark?” Judy picked up the brilliant stream of jewels and admired it over the back of her brown hand.
Mark shrugged his shoulders and gazed at the smoldering log fire. “That bracelet would feed an African village for years.”
“Don’t be so smug!” Lili reached forward, grabbed the diamond bracelet and flung it at Mark.
“Give
it to the Africans, then,” she said. “I don’t want it, because I know it isn’t a gift, it’s a bribe.” Lili snorted. “When one of Spyros’s little gifts appears in a basket of flowers, you’re supposed to roll over on your back, and be grateful. He orders these diamond bracelets, a dozen at a time, from Cartier. To him, they’re trading stock.”
“Like beads and mirrors?” Judy suggested. “As used by the Conquistadores to buy Aztec gold?”
“Exactly.” Lili’s expression was offset by her bizarre makeup; she had spent the afternoon trying to copy Mistinguett’s makeup; her guide photograph lay among scattered cosmetics on the low, red marble table.
“You’d better get that stuff off your face or you’ll be late for the concert.” Judy picked up the brass poker and prodded a falling log back into place.
“True.” Lili stood up, stretched and headed for the bathroom. “Won’t you need this makeup?” Judy called after her, meaning get this mess out of my sitting room.
Mark said, “She likes being untidy, you should see the state she left my place in.”
“So what does a little mess matter? The reason Lili wanted to move in with me was so that our relationship could
develop.” Softly, she touched Mark’s long, tapering, brown fingers. Gently, Mark pulled his hand away.
“Tom told me that having Lili living here with you, Judy, could be playing with fire; it might prejudice the lawsuit.”
Judy neatly replaced the poker on the poker stand. “We’re never going to get to know each other properly over restaurant tables and in hotels.” She turned as Lili appeared, glorious in dark-green shot silk and opal earrings. “I’m off.”
Lili’s carnation scent lingered in the sitting room as the front door slammed. Mark wished that he, too, could leave. It’s a classic double bind, he thought miserably: if I leave, then Judy will take it as rejection, and if I stay, the whole thing will shortly explode in our faces. Here we sit, sipping Perrier on top of an emotional time bomb. Surreptitiously, he sniffed the carnations and couldn’t help imagining Lili’s gold-skinned body as she emerged from the tub.
* * *
Lili let herself into the apartment and unclasped her green velvet cloak. They hadn’t gone to bed yet, she could hear Judy’s earnest voice saying, “…But why, Mark? Why have you tried for four hours, in various indirect ways, to get me to ask my daughter to leave this apartment?”
“For Chrissake, don’t you understand, Judy?” Unseen, Lili heard Mark’s weary pleading, and her hands halted on the gold clasp.
And, suddenly, Judy did understand. “Of course! I must have been blind! You’re in love with her, aren’t you, Mark?” Her voice was hard. “I must have been blind!”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Judy.”
“Too bad, sweetheart, you just did,” she flashed back at him. “Men always say they don’t want to hurt you, when they’ve just dealt some woman a death blow.”
“I don’t want to hurt Lili, either. She trusts me. I don’t want to upset her life, or your life, or your life with Lili, or my life.” Mark tried not to raise his voice. “To Lili, I’m the only man she knows who isn’t trynig to get into her pants.”
“Except that’s what you want to do, isn’t it?” Judy demanded.
There was a pause, then Mark said in a low voice. “If you want the truth, I don’t think any man could resist Lili’s extraordinary sexuality.”
Lili caught sight of her reflection in the dim silver depths of an elaborate Louis XV mirror. What is it, she thought, what is it that I have in me that casts this spell, this curse, on almost every man I meet? What is it? I can’t see it. Why can’t I switch it off?
As if echoing her thoughts, in the living room Judy shouted, “I can’t see it, and neither can any other woman. That’s why it’s so maddening to see you men all making fools of yourselves over Lili.”
Gazing at her reflection, Lili realized that she was tired of being a sex object, tired of being considered a male plaything, tired of being idolized by both sexes—unknown men because they desired her and unknown women because they desired to be like her. Lili realized that her fatal attraction was, above all, fatal to herself.
“Does Lili know you feel this way about her?” Judy was trying to control her voice, because she had to know the answer to her question.
“No,” Mark answered, “and I don’t want her to know.”
“What does she feel about you?”
“I think she trusts me.” He paused. “I think she sees me as a brother.”
“Are you and I living in the same century?” Judy suddenly yelled, “Brother, indeed!”
“I’m not going to threaten the only shred of family security that Lili’s ever had.”
Judy interrupted him bitterly. “Well, that just makes it perfect.” Her voice was vicious. “I’m losing my magazine, my money, my job; then you try to fix things so that I’ll lose my daughter and my lover into the bargain. And to top it all, you’re full of sympathy for
her
, not me.”
Mark shouted back, “Look, I don’t want Lili. I want
you
. But I want you like you used to be.”
Judy heard the pain behind his words and realized that Mark was telling the truth when he said that his passion for Lili was something that he didn’t want.
“You’re difficult to sympathize with, Judy.” Mark finally found an exterior focus for his anger. “You’ve changed since I met you. You were such fun. Ambitious, hardworking, successful, and tough—sure. But fun. You were kind to
people and strong. You gave me support and self-confidence.”
“Now, I’m the one who needs support,” Judy wailed, suddenly out of control and frightened.
Suddenly, Mark was able to crystalize his feelings and put them into words. “You seem to have lost your own self-confidence.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t recognize you any more. You taught me that real self-confidence isn’t put on every morning like a silk shirt, to impress the outside world. Self-confidence is something that’s built on knowing what you can do and what you can’t do. Now, you seem to have forgotten that. What’s got into you?”
“What’s got into me?” Judy was suddenly quiet. “I’m terrified that I’ll end up like my mother, feeding the cat and watching the neighbors and waiting. I don’t want to be powerless like she was, just sitting helplessly in the middle of her own life, waiting for it to end.”
“There’s a lot to be said for that sort of life.” Now Mark was angry. “At least that sort of woman isn’t jealous of her own daughter.” He was unable to resist the urge to hurt the suddenly vulnerable Judy. “You used to say that jealousy was the penalty of thinking only about externals. You used to say that there would always be younger, more beautiful women in the world. You used to say that jealousy never troubled a self-confident woman.”
“So now I know I was wrong!” Judy shouted. “Do
you
want to know how it feels to become a mother when you’re my age and then suddenly find that your baby is one of the most beautiful women in the world?”
In the hall, Lili didn’t want to hear any more but she didn’t want to leave. Mesmerized, like a frog in car headlights, she felt unable to move.
“Do you
really
want to know what it feels like to be Lili’s mother?” Judy continued. “It feels as if I’m slowly becoming nobody! It feels as if I’m becoming the Invisible Woman! Little by little, I’m losing my identity! Very quickly, I’m losing the business that I spent twenty years building up. So I’m losing my job, my status, my money. I’m facing financial and professional disaster and disgrace. And I’m desperately
afraid of failure—all because I’m Lili’s mother.” Her voice cracked. “Everything’s slipping away and I’m frightened, Mark.” Too late, she was finally telling her lover what was on her mind.
Lili stood up and tiptoed to her room, tears running down her face. She didn’t want to listen any longer, as the two people she cared for tore their relationship to pieces—because of her.
* * *
Judy perched in front of her breakfast counter sipping her high-energy drink—the juice of an orange, a teaspoonful of honey and a whole, raw egg; it was blended every morning for her breakfast, and tasted nicer then it sounded. Force of habit had compelled her to get up at her usual six o’clock, but this morning there had been no reason to linger because Mark had moved out the night before, with his clothes stuffed into a khaki duffel bag. He had been exhausted and angry because Judy couldn’t understand his predicament. As Mark saw it, he was being falsely accused of disloyalty, when he had tried to be truthful and faithful.