The Last Girls (49 page)

Today Jane thinks of driving downtown for lunch so she can catch at least a glimpse of Fontaine, their youngest, her favorite. Fontaine and her Japanese husband, Tommy Chiba, own a popular sushi bar down at the Shockoe Slip. Three months pregnant, Fontaine runs the cash register, wearing a kimono. Tommy Chiba cuts the fish. Fontaine has told Jane that each chef has his own sushi knife, which no one else is ever allowed to touch. Jane imagines Tommy Chiba's sharp knife slicing into tuna. She shivers. Best to stay home, make herself a tuna salad sandwich, unpack another box of china as the afternoon light moves across her mother's lovely Oriental rugs.

Busy
Suzanne St. John
alternates between her condominium at River Road Plantation and the lovely apartment on Chartres Street in New Orleans where she has lived alone ever since David Maynard, her husband of sixteen years, left her for his personal trainer. An estate attorney, David is a dry and predictable man who never showed a single sign of leaving her before he just up and did it. He never showed a sign of getting a personal trainer either; he imported wine by the case, and loved his étoufée. Now Suzanne can see him any morning she chooses to look through the plate glass window of Gold's Gym across from her parking building. He's running on a treadmill, watching a television suspended from the wall above him, eyes raised as if in prayer. This suggestion—that he has found some meaning in it all—infuriates Suzanne. She feels very much alone. Suzanne and David never had children, as he already had three, from his first marriage, when she met him. These children visited in the summers and at holidays, but Suzanne is not in touch with them now. Nor does she have close friends. And as the head of River Road Corporation, she cannot confide in any of her employees. She doesn't have time to go on trips, join clubs, or take a course in order to meet new people. But she doesn't see any reason why she should feel so alone at this stage of her life. So something else has come into her mind. In secret, in her office during the day, or late at night, at home, she has found herself clicking onto those personals sites. Why not? What's wrong with that? Soon she will answer an ad, and then something will happen to her.

Whoever thought a nomadic, urban creature like
Ruth d'Agostino
could ever settle down so happily on this ramshackle Florida farm out here in the middle of nowhere? Up before dawn, walking down the sandy road to feed the Charolais cattle, three dogs romping around her feet, Ruth whistles a little tune through her teeth as the sky grows light. She has been astonished to find this rolling, grassy plain in central Florida, with occasional trees that rise up like billowing smoke. It's like another country here.

A former bond trader, Ruth has never married. She buried her longtime lover (colon cancer) four years ago in New York. Then she almost ran Lane down while rollerblading in Central Park, occasioning coffee. Lane was only in the city overnight, for an art opening. Ruth took a little, much-needed vacation. Three months later she returned to pack and move to Miami, where Lane held a faculty position. When Lane's father died, they took over the family farm, against all advice. But Lane is painting better than ever, and Ruth can manage all their business on the Internet. She could live anywhere, really. Now she leans against the split-rail fence and watches the sun come up red as a blood orange. Rain later, this afternoon. She calls the dogs, heads for the barn, gathers the eggs.

When Ruth gets back to the low, tin-roofed house, the smell of coffee fills the kitchen. Ruth leaves her clogs at the door and walks barefoot across the smooth terra-cotta tiles to the sink where Lane is running water.

“Tim called,” Lane says. “Lucy's gone into labor.”

“When?”

“Last night. They're on their way to the hospital right now. He'll call later, of course.”

Ruth squeezes her shoulder. Tim, Lane's youngest, lives in Louisville. Ruth puts the enamel pan of eggs on the counter and pours herself a cup of coffee. She has just sat down at the kitchen table and opened the paper when Lane says, “Oh, Ruthie!” with a certain tone in her voice. Lane turns from the window and holds the blue bowl out
so that Ruthie can see it, too: a double-yolk egg, its yolks shot through with red like the sun, each of them perfectly round, tightly and perfectly joined. “Just look,” says Lane. The sun is in her hair.

Dr. Mimi West Worthington,
49, of 11 Hobbyhorse Circle, Winston-Salem, N.C., died Wednesday, March 12, 1995, at Baptist Memorial Hospital following a brief illness. She was born April 5, 1945, in Silver Spring, Md., to the late Frank and Elizabeth West. She graduated from Mary Scott College in 1966, and from dental school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1971. Following a postdoctoral fellowship, also at UNC, she moved to Winston-Salem where she entered private practice at Forsythe Dental Care, remaining active there until her sudden death. She was a member of Grace Street Methodist Church, serving in many capacities including Sunday School teacher and Mehtodist Youth Fellowship leader. She was elected to membership in the Xi Psi Phi Dental Fraternity and the Academy of General Dentistry. She served as head of the Winston-Salem Dental League. One of her joys was providing dental care to needy children at the Forsythe Saturday Clinic, which she started. A devoted mother, she is survived by two sons, Patrick West Worthington, a student at the University of Colorado in Boulder; and James Justin Worthington of Boone, N.C.; a sister, Mrs. Laura Miller of Baltimore, Md.; a good friend, Michael Ridge; and a multitude of devoted friends and patients. Funeral services will be conducted at Grace Street Methodist Church on Saturday, March 15, at 2 p.m., followed by burial in Evergreen Cemetery. Memorial contributions may be made to the Forsyth Saturday Clinic, the American Cancer Society, or the Grace Street Methodist Church.

(But what of her ex, not mentioned in this yellowed clipping? or her
older son's diabetes? What of the men she loved, the books she read, or her famous beef carbonnade? What about how she swam at the Y on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and played tennis with the same three women for fifteen years? What of that time when she and Michael were hiking in Arizona and the sun came up and all the earth turned red?)

Her years at Mary Scott were the exception in
Lauren DuPree
's quiet life; now, she marvels at them, as if they had happened to somebody else. A shy child who stayed mostly at home with her frail, bookish parents, she returned to Mobile after college and has lived here ever since, taking care of them and of her blind uncle Bernard who lived in the garden house now completely covered in wisteria, as well as her alcoholic sister from time to time and her sister's children (beloved nephews!) at various points in their lives. It may not seem that such a sheltered life could be interesting. But au contraire it has been filled with joy and, yes, love; Lauren feels we are here for a purpose, to seek God's plan for our lives. In the poorer quarters of the city where she has long worked as a public health nurse, Lauren is considered a saint.

Oh, but she's
not
a saint, for she once loved a man with all her incandescent heart; however, he went away to England for graduate school, returning only to break the engagement. That man's daughter, now a young matron, came up to Lauren on the street long after his death and said, “He always loved you, you know,” which filled her with wild sorrow rather than the pleasure she's sure the daughter intended. Well, never mind. She has her work, she has her little dog. And God's purpose has been further revealed since her parents' deaths.

They were very rich; she's giving it all away. To charities and to individual persons she knows who are in need, and to strangers who show up on her doorstep looking for money. She gives it to them in spite of her nephews' injunction. There are so many good causes and
needy people in the world, and not enough money to go around. The more she gives away, the lighter and smaller she feels. She is finalizing plans to give this house to Pansy's church; Pansy was her parents' housekeeper. It will be used as a shelter for women and children. Lauren loves the idea of children running through this courtyard, up and down the stairs, along the iron balconies. She will hear them. She will live here, too, in the garden house with Smoky, her little dog, taking up less and less room.

My name is
Bowen Montague
and I am an alcoholic. I grew up in the Belle Meade section of Nashville, Tennessee. My father was a Fugitive poet and my mother was a dissatisfied aristocrat with impossible expectations who drove everybody crazy, so that we children all left home as soon as possible, for prep school and then for college. But yet I repeated her life, returning to marry well, open a gift shop, and finally have a daughter, a life that might have sufficed well enough if our daughter had not been murdered at age twenty, the summer after her sophomore year in college. Murdered! Missing for weeks, then found raped, strangled, in the woods near Percy Priest Lake. Never solved, though in the investigation it became clear that drugs were involved and that she had led another life with people of whom we had had no knowledge. Or had we? How much did we know and
not know?
This tormented me. I felt I must know more than I thought, that at some point I would remember something, and things would click into place. I drove the streets looking into the faces I encountered, wondering,
him?
Is he the one? I kept her room exactly as she had left it, though the things said about her during the investigation bore no relation to this room, our life. They said terrible things. My husband wanted to move away, but I could not, and so he moved without me; and I started drinking sherry and then switched to
vodka, and sold the shop. Soon I rarely left the house. I rarely ate. Finally my parents and my brother did an intervention, putting me into rehab. By then I was almost dead, skin and bones. I hated everybody. It took me a long time to come around.