Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (4 page)

T
HE MORNING AFTER
Trevor’s phone call, Eadie awoke to find herself in bed with her personal trainer. She didn’t usually let Denton stay the night, and when she awoke, she lay very still, trying to accustom herself to the unfamiliar sensation of waking up next to someone, trying to figure out how she had managed to get herself into this predicament. She was pretty sure it had something to do with the amount of scotch she had consumed the night before. She was pretty sure it had something to do with the fact that her husband was sleeping with his goddamned legal secretary. Letting Denton Swafford stay the night was not something she had planned on, and was sure to complicate matters. Still, she thought, turning to look at the sleeping Denton, who lay on his back with one well-muscled arm thrown over his head, what was done, was done. She might as well make the best of it. She poked him in the ribs with her finger.

He moved slightly and opened his eyes. He turned his face toward her and grinned. “Morning,” he said, his hair falling boyishly over his forehead.

Eadie yawned and rolled over on her back. “I’ll take mine black,” she said.

“What?” He raised himself on one elbow. He was adorable, but he knew it, which kind of killed the whole effect for Eadie.

“My coffee,” she said. “I’ll take it black.”

Denton was her latest attempt to get Trevor’s attention and circumvent the boredom and inertia that inevitably set in when she wasn’t working. She had heard Lee Anne Bales going on about him after a doubles match at the club, and she had thought, Why not? Spending five hundred dollars a month on a personal trainer was just the kind of thing to send Trevor Boone’s blood pressure soaring. Denton had shown up at her house with his bag of equipment and his charts and his notebook and she had taken one look at him and immediately decided on the exercise routine that was best for her. So far he hadn’t complained.

Outside in the street a tourist bus chugged by, its exhaust plume billowing in through the partially opened windows with a smell of diesel and burnt rubber. Faint music drifted from the traffic stopped at the light. Eadie lived in the home built by her husband’s great-great-grandfather along a street of equally impressive old antebellum homes.
Southern Accents
had done an article on the “Gracious Old Homes of Ithaca” a few years ago, and now busloads of tourists drove down from Atlanta to gawk at these fine examples of Southern graciousness. From time to time Eadie liked to appear scantily dressed on her balcony to give the tourists something else to gawk at. Standing on the porch of that fine house with the tourists gazing up at her in admiration and devotion, Eadie Wilkens Boone, last of a long line of gypsies and itinerant house painters, was reminded just how far she had managed to come.

As a young girl, Eadie had never wanted anything except to go to Paris and be a starving artist, but Eadie’s mother said no, the Wilkenses had been starving for generations; it was time one of them made something of themselves. Eadie was extraordinarily pretty, even as a child, and her mother had entered her in beauty contest after beauty contest, driving her to Birmingham and Mobile and Atlanta. Because she did not care at all about winning, Eadie won them all. She won because she had an arrogant and careless deportment that made her stand out among all those eager and desperately servile young girls like a serpent in a chicken yard. Her insolence was irresistible.

At fifteen she won the Miss Snellville Beach contest; at sixteen she was named Miss Boll Weevil; and at eighteen she was smart enough to realize her looks were her ticket out of Ithaca and poverty via a pageant scholarship to the University of Georgia. Two years later, she’d returned to Ithaca as Mrs. Trevor Boone.

Now, nineteen years later, the Boone House was hers. Old Mrs. Boone’s high-ceilinged rooms, once filled with overstuffed mahogany furniture and oil portraits of dead ancestors, were filled with Eadie’s giant fertility goddesses. She liked to look around the house and see them scattered like the monoliths of Easter Island. They made her feel powerful. They reminded her she was a woman who could do anything she set her mind to.

In the street below, the tour bus chugged away with its cargo of enthralled tourists. Eadie lay back on her pillow and yawned and stretched and looked at the clock. Denton took her stretching as an invitation, but she rolled away from him and said, “You need to get going. It’s almost nine o’clock.” She was supposed to meet Lavonne Zibolsky for lunch to discuss the damn firm party that no one wanted to attend, much less plan. If it weren’t for the fact that Lavonne was one of her best friends, Eadie wouldn’t have agreed to help. Eadie wasn’t even going to the party now that Trevor and his pubescent legal secretary would both be there. Eadie was quiet for a moment, considering this. The clock ticked steadily. A damp breeze heavy with the scent of wood smoke blew through the room. She rolled over and faced Denton again. “What are you doing next Saturday night?” she said.

He reached his hand out to cup her breast but she pushed it away. “I don’t know,” he said, grinning. “I’ll have to check my appointment book.”

She imagined the shocked expressions of the crowd as she entered the party. She imagined the drama of the moment. She imagined Trevor and Tonya, stunned and running for cover. Eadie smiled at this pleasant vision. “You’re going to a party,” she told Denton, having just decided. “Put it on your calendar or in your book or whatever the hell you have to do. You’re going.”

Denton put his arm under his head and stared intently at the huge, headless torso that stood in front of the opened window. “Just what exactly is that thing?” he asked, frowning. It was Eadie’s newest piece. She was rather proud of it.

“You tell me,” she said, looking fondly at the goddess. Having decided to crash her husband’s firm’s party, Eadie could relax now. She had a plan. She only wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. “What is it?” she said, pinching Denton’s thick bicep. Each sculpture was unique and yet each carried the same features; huge pendulous breasts, bulging bellies, headless torsos.

“Well, I’m not sure.” Denton’s handsome brow wrinkled. He stuck his lower lip out and squinted his eyes slightly. He had the slack, perplexed look of a small boy asked to solve a complex algebraic problem in his head. “I’m not sure but it makes me feel sad.”

“Sad?” Eadie frowned and sat up on her elbow. Anyone else lying beside Denton in bed would have thought him adorable, but Eadie felt nothing but a growing sense of irritation with his lack of intelligence and artistic vision. “Why in the world would it make you feel sad?”

“I don’t know.” He sat up in bed and wrapped his arms around his knees, sucking his lower lip, his eyes narrowly following the curves of the goddess. He chewed his bottom lip. He tilted his head. “It looks kind of like a sad walrus or a seal,” he said finally. “Like one of those seals you see in
National Geographic Magazine.
The ones that lie abandoned on the ice waiting for some Eskimo to come and beat them to death with a club.”

Eadie stared at his silly handsome face. She felt as if someone had driven an ice pick into her chest. Her breath seeped out of her punctured lungs and collected in her throat like poison gas. She wondered at the possibility of sustaining a lasting relationship with a stupid person. She wondered if Trevor would be able to do it.

“I think it’s a seal,” Denton repeated, grinning.

“Well, I guess that’s why you’re not paid to think,” Eadie said, and rolling out of bed, she went to get ready for her lunch appointment with Lavonne Zibolsky.

CHAPTER

THREE

L
AVONNE’S MEETING WITH
Nita was scheduled for noon, so she arrived at the Pink House Restaurant at eleven forty-five. Lavonne prided herself on her ability to be early for any appointment. It was one of those things she did really well. Now that her daughters were nearly grown and no longer needed her, now that Leonard was well-established in his Big Important Career, the things that Lavonne did really well had been whittled down some, but she clung to them stubbornly. She was punctual. She was precise. She could add columns of numbers in her head. It was a small list, but for the time being, it would have to do.

She had lain awake most of the night worrying about the party. Lavonne didn’t like to fail at anything, even something she didn’t really want to do, and somewhere between the panic attack that set in when she imagined telling Leonard and Charles Broadwell that she hadn’t found a caterer, and the pleasant time she spent imagining herself running away to the beach, she had decided she would no longer worry about the party. She would do the best she could, and if the dinner turned out to be a disaster, well, too bad. If Leonard and Charles wanted to get mad at someone they should get mad at Charles’s reptilian mother, Virginia, who had decided at the last minute to bail and dump the party on the wives.

This early morning revelation had been noble and courageous, but the reality, of course, was that in the cold hard light of day, Lavonne was still worried. She hoped that the meeting with Nita would be productive. She hoped that this feeling of heaviness in her chest, this shortness of breath, would go away once she and Nita had had a chance to discuss what they must do. But when she saw Nita pull to the curb outside the restaurant and climb wearily out of her car, Lavonne’s hopes plummeted like a spent rocket and she realized Nita would be no help whatsoever. Nita’s face, in the bright slash of winter sunlight, was pale and haggard. There were dark circles beneath her eyes.

Anyone who had known the lovely, luminous girl Nita had once been would not have recognized the woman now climbing out of her car. She had been a secretary at Boone & Broadwell when Leonard first joined the firm, and had been secretly dating Charles Broadwell for three years. In those days there had been a radiance about Nita, a good-hearted optimism that affected all who knew her. But sixteen years of marriage to Charles Broadwell had tarnished that brightness. Nita was still an extraordinarily pretty woman, with her slender figure and large gray eyes, but there was a faded quality to her now, like old cloth, as if she might be slowly wearing away.

She came into the restaurant looking forlorn and bent forward at the waist as if she dragged something heavy behind her. Looking at her, Lavonne had a sudden memory of her mother struggling to carry a basket of wet clothes to the clothesline on a wintry day.

“Sorry I’m late,” Nita said, sliding into a chair.

“You’re never late,” Lavonne said. The memory of her mother gradually faded. She raised her hand to get the waiter’s attention, and as he began to make his way across the crowded room she leaned forward and said to Nita, “I can see you didn’t sleep last night worrying about this damn party. I’m telling you, though, I have it all under control. You don’t need to worry about a thing.”

Nita smiled but she didn’t say anything. It was true that she hadn’t slept much last night, but it had nothing to do with the firm party. She had dreamed she was being chased by little blue fish. She’d spent all night swimming in slow motion, trying to escape the shiny blue piranhas before they ate her alive. The dream had left her tired and depressed. “Is Eadie coming?” Nita asked, slipping her purse beneath the table.

“I don’t think so.” Lavonne lifted her glass and sipped her tea. “It’s just you and me.”

Nita thought,
Well, not exactly.
She didn’t have the courage to tell Lavonne that Charles had insisted she invite her mother-in-law to the meeting. Lavonne would find out soon enough and in the meantime, maybe she’d be able to eat a little something before Virginia arrived.

T
HEY HAD JUST
ordered lunch when Eadie Boone showed up. She swept into the restaurant wearing dark sunglasses and a long white knit dress with high-heeled sandals. Over in the corner a group of tourists quit looking at glossy brochures of Ithaca and looked instead at Eadie. She stood by the hostess desk waiting for everyone to get a good look at her. Eadie was aware that the entire town had been gossiping about her and expecting her to do something desperate after Trevor’s latest infidelity. It was hard to be confident when the whole town was against you, but Eadie was used to it by now. She liked a challenge. She had spent her whole life proving that she was up to any obstacle fate could throw in her path. So far she had overcome poverty, a tragic childhood, and loneliness. Handling a wayward husband was nothing compared to all that. She saw Lavonne and Nita and waved.

Lavonne was glad to see her. Eadie looked pretty good considering her husband had left her and her life was rumored to be in ruins. Lavonne had always assumed the Boones would make it, they’d been so crazy about each other, and their marriage, although unconventional, had seemed to work for them.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” she said to Eadie as she sat down.

“You sounded desperate on the phone,” Eadie said, grinning. Now that she had decided to crash the firm’s party, she felt helping Lavonne plan the fiasco was the least she could do. Not that she had any intention of telling Lavonne about her party-crashing scheme. Lavonne would just try and talk her out of it, and Eadie was too far along to change her plans now. She knew this party might be the last chance she had of convincing Trevor Boone that he still loved her, before he made the mistake of his life and filed for divorce.

“I guess I am pretty desperate,” Lavonne said, thankful that Eadie had shown up. No one knew how to plan a party better than Eadie Boone.

Lavonne had been going to Boone parties for years. The first Boone party she’d attended had been a “get acquainted throw down” the Boones had hosted to welcome the Zibolskys to town. Lavonne had thought Eadie the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen, and the most genuine. She had thought Eadie was wasting her time in Ithaca, Georgia, when she could be out in Hollywood making movies. In those days Eadie and Trevor had a lot of bohemian friends from Athens and they’d come down on the weekends for wild parties that kept the rest of the town scandalized. It was only the fact that Trevor was a Boone, and that still meant something in this town, that kept Eadie and Trevor from becoming social outcasts.

“Hi Nita,” Eadie said, settling her purse under the table.

Nita gave her a little smile. She was playing with her fork, tapping it against the table like she was sending a telegraph, some kind of frantic S.O.S.

Eadie leaned forward and peered intently into Nita’s face. “Honey, I’m worried about you,” she said. “Are you feeling okay?”

Nita stopped telegraphing with her fork. She plucked idly at her hair. She had decided last night that she would stop reading romance novels, and she had awakened this morning to a feeling of hopelessness and pessimism about the future. Where once there had been color, now there was only drab black and white, and without her rousing adventures of love and sex on the high seas, in castles, in teepees, in harem tents, to distract her, Nita was being forced to take a good hard look at her real life. And she didn’t much like what she saw. “I’m just tired is all,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” Eadie said, looking at her suspiciously. She had tried to talk Nita out of marrying Charles Broadwell. “He’s a control freak. He’s a snob. He’ll make you miserable.” But by then Nita had already dated him past the time she would have felt comfortable breaking it off. Going together longer than two years implied something deeper than casual dating, or at least it did in Nita’s code of behavior, and she had felt bound by social convention and by the fact that he had defied his own mother to become engaged to her. There had been nothing else she could do but marry him.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” Lavonne asked.

“Cut his brake line? Poison his soup? Push him down the stairs?”

Nita flushed and looked at her hands. “Let’s talk about something else,” she said.

The waiter came to take her order and Eadie said, “I’ll have a glass of your house merlot and a chicken salad plate.” She leaned forward on her elbows and looked around the table. “Am I the only one drinking?”

“I never drink in the middle of the day,” Lavonne said. “I have to keep my wits about me.” Her dress strained and creaked like a sail in a gale wind. She wondered how she would be able to eat and breathe at the same time. She wished she hadn’t quarreled with Leonard this morning over wearing the dress. She wished Leonard hadn’t said something stupid that turned wearing the dress into a big challenge.

Eadie took a piece of paper out of her purse and handed it to Lavonne. “Okay, here’s my advice for the party,” she said. “I wrote it all down so you can follow along with me,” she said, pointing to the neatly numbered items on the page. “I went ahead and called the tent and awning place.” The party was held every year in the Broadwells’ back-yard beneath a huge white tent. The waiter brought her a glass of wine and Eadie smiled at him and went on. “The awning people said there must have been some kind of a mix-up because somebody had called and canceled the tent. I know the manager personally and I talked him into reinstating the order ahead of the Donaldsons’ wedding so you don’t need to worry about that. You can get the tablecloths and the tables and chairs there, too. Nita, here’s the name of the guy who carves the ice sculptures. He’s expecting your call. Just call him and tell him to carve whatever shape you want. I always order flowers in bulk from the Plantation Greenery and they’ll make up centerpieces for the tables. If you can’t find a caterer, call one of the restaurants in town—”

“I already did that,” Lavonne said. “No one can do it on such short notice.”

“Okay, then call the deli manager at the Piggly Wiggly and order a whole lot of party trays and take them home and put them on your best silver. Then call the Salty Dog and order a frozen margarita machine. Trust me, once the tequila starts flowing, no one will notice or care where the food comes from. And for Christsakes get a disk jockey. Don’t hire that goddamn string quartet Virginia hires every year. Nothing kills a good party quicker than classical music.”

Lavonne looked at Eadie like she might be a genius. “My God, I hadn’t even thought about the tent,” she said. “I just assumed Virginia had ordered it.” She hadn’t thought about the ice sculpture or the flowers either. “I don’t know about the margarita machine though,” she said to Eadie. “The only one who ever rents a margarita machine is you and look how wild your parties get.”

Eadie tapped her fingers against the table to give Lavonne a few minutes to think about it. She smiled sweetly and said, “Do you want your guests standing around critiquing the food or do you want them down on the floor gatoring to ‘Gimme a Pig’s Foot and a Bottle of Beer’?”

“Point taken,” Lavonne said.

Nita played nervously with her silverware. Eadie smiled and closed her purse. She hoped Lavonne would remember later how much help she had been in planning the party and forgive her for the scene she was planning on creating. It was unfortunate that the party-crashing had to take place on Lavonne’s watch, but it was unavoidable. Eadie lifted the glass of merlot to her lips, frowned, and then set it down with a sharp clanking sound against the table. “Oh shit, what’s she doing here?”

Lavonne swiveled around to see who Eadie was staring at. Nita glanced up, her eyes skittering away from the front door, across the rose-colored walls, and coming to rest finally on the pine-planked floor.

Virginia Broadwell stood at the hostess desk. She saw Nita and began to make her way across the crowded restaurant, a small slim woman with a spine as straight and rigid as rebar. She nodded slightly, regally, to people she knew, ignoring those she didn’t.

“Ya’ll, I’m so sorry,” Nita said, still looking at the floor. “Charles made me ask her.”

Virginia reached the table and stood waiting for the waiter to pull out her chair. She smiled pleasantly at Eadie and Lavonne, but it was obvious she didn’t mean it. “Hello, Eadie,” she said, sliding into her seat.

Eadie picked up her wineglass. She thought,
Hello Satan.
She said, “Hello, Virginia.”

Virginia nodded. “Lavonne.”

“Virginia.” Lavonne had disliked Virginia Broadwell from the moment she first saw her presiding over a meeting of the Ithaca Garden Club, smiling in her false, pleasant manner and politely squashing the suggestions of the new members like the benevolent dictator she was. Virginia was a snob, a fact that made her greatly appreciated in the small, closed social set of Ithaca, Georgia. Her great-great-grandfather’s property had been nothing more than an overgrown island in the middle of the Black Warrior River, his slaves no more than a handful of ragged, scrawny men who would hail the passing steamboats for food. Virginia’s great-grandfather had lost the island in a card game. Her father had worked for the railroad. The old-moneyed aristocracy of Ithaca laughed at Virginia. They laughed at her snobbish manners, and her big house filled with animal trophies, and her dead husband, the judge, who was himself an upstart, his own grandfather having been nothing more than a tenant farmer.

Virginia was ridiculed by the old aristocracy, but she was revered by the people she detested the most, fellow members of the Ithaca Garden Club and the Junior League, many of whom hailed from places north of the Mason-Dixon but who, once settled in the old mansions lining Lee Street, became even more fiercely loyal to the ideals and prejudices of the Old South than their native-South neighbors. Tacky Yankee Corporate People, Virginia called them. They were the scourge of the new South, Virginia maintained, worse even than the carpetbaggers had been. She had never forgiven DuPont for opening up a plant on the outskirts of town ten years ago and bringing with it prosperity and droves of Tacky Yankee Corporate People who came from nothing yet lived in big houses, drove expensive cars, and sent their children to the best private school in town.