And even though no one’s asked her for an opinion, since when has that ever stopped her from nurturing it, pampering it, coaxing it to be wild, angelic, deathly allergic to compromise? Being however, a woman long-used to buoying herself in the choppy seas of male domination, Mary’s antennae are well-tuned to the nuance of social intercourse in a wide variety of circumstance, and so while she feeds her prejudices generously she pauses now and again at the kennel gate and muffles their yawping as needed.
It is a very sober Mary we speak of. Mary drunk is something else again.
Alistair has had his feelings hurt and nurses his anger like a beloved toothache. He has made it known that Mary owes him an apology. Like waiting on a personal sign writ golden in the clouds by God.
The immediate setting is Mistress Patricia’s graveled, curving, covered driveway, late afternoon, on a Sunday in early spring. The subject was Astrology As Bullshit and Alistair’s new girlfriend, Jessie, a devout stargazing Wiccan, has taken an Effingham full frontal, while the unfortunate Alistair has been left pocked with shrapnel from both females.
Mary, difficult to read even with crib and surtitles, is walking in squares, following some private pattern on the zodiac tiles. Patricia’s proud of her things, and not least these polished rectangles of blue and white (with lead-lines of black or red), bought in Athens and price-tagged to an obscenity of riches. Mary only knows what half of them stand for and Jessie’s irritating tutorial is what set her off. Three earlier glasses of wine oiled her insults and everyone loitering away from the main bash in the house had laughed, including foolish Alistair. Thus encouraged, Ham whipped Wit for a cruel and hyperbolic ride. Jessie, used to worshipful attendance to her words, however misty, however Rivendell-Lite, hinted at a spell, a curse, some dark retribution to be shortly called down on the tipsy asshole’s pretty little black-maned head. Mary didn’t laugh, nor smile (as some at the gathering did, but only some, as opinion was quickly dividing like sheep from goats) and walked through Jessie’s angry aura, invading her space until their breasts were a thumb’s width apart, and dared her to go ahead. To the disappointment of some, the bafflement of others, Jessie did not swoon nor dissolve in tears but leaned in, as if to buss her cheek to Mary’s, and was seen to whisper something unintelligible at that distance, before drawing back. Mary cocked her head to one side and said:
-We’ll see.
And then, taking an offered glass of wine from the hand of some mild and hopeful predator, she was back to walking the squares that half-mooned out from Patricia’s sturdy front door. From inside the house was heard the chant and rhythm of a recording of Orf’s arrangement of the Carmina Burana, a theme to lubricate the hostess’s impending orgy and a soundtrack not yet done to death by Californian directors too cheap to commission original scores. The door was now cracked for admittance, or expulsion, and the traffic into the Babylon of River Oaks thinned the number of those outside.
This was Alistair’s first invitation and he was loath not to play and be played but Jessie was in a fume of wounded pride and was heading for the car, the quick sway of her hips, the high tension of her shoulder blades demanding that he follow. His young witch was a walking inventory of things a pliable, treacherous junkie like himself could never hope to deserve. The disciplined manner in which she doled out pleasure stroked the bruises on his wrists to a fresh ache. The sunlight fading into caught spangles in her chaotic sin-gold tresses; the memory of her nude and moonlit dances in the courtyard outside his window; her insistence that they finish with her on top; the provocative naughtiness which spilled from her lips, in a language that was ersatz Tibetan, pseudo-Gaelic, and puro Hollywood; her look now, as she glared back up the driveway in fierce, bra-less profile: all these and more cupped his loyalties and stiffened his affections and by the time he had wheeled the car from West Gray onto Kirby he had composed the first paragraph of his renunciation of Mary.
Would it have changed his mind to know that Mary, five hours and some minutes later, left the orgy while still in progress, feeling ill and sorry and worrying her regret like a loose tooth faintly felt through the gauze of wine, the cotton wool of the blue pills she’d been hand-fed while manacled?
She left, pleading the truth, an urgent or at any rate long-delayed appointment with someone special (someone ambivalent and rich, famous for the disturbance of their tastes) at the Warwick Hotel. There was that baffle of trees hanging along the short stretch of Montrose between the Contemporary Arts Museum and the fountain where Montrose got taken for a leeward ride by freewheeling Main Street. And in that shade the heat seemed to muffle all sound, and still all movement, blocking out the sun and giving back only a sense of rain just passed or rain about to fall. Mary crossed the street and went through the stunted peninsula of the Fine Arts, the quintet of lonely sculptures looking more shut-out and homeless each time she saw them. She was hoping the meeting at the Warwick would go better than the one at the Galleria a week ago. She hadn’t even spent the money from that one, and the memory of the carpet leading up to the quiet elevator bank (a single fairy tinkle before the maw opened) was still giving her the shakes.
Caught by the sudden downpour in the carport of the Warwick Mary bore it for as long as she could. But when the wraithlike wretch of a woman, thin as fright and steaming with the reek of wealth, sullied the style of the refugees with a comment implying their much-mocked love of boots and sandals was concomitant with ineptitude in the mastering of laces and buckles, Mary could bear no more.
-And what conclusions might one draw from those hideous and affected clunkers you’ve housed your talons in? Eh, sport?
A marble column fingered its earpiece and loomed above her, blocking further abuse and commanding:
-Move away from the Duchess, bitch.
And Mary stepped back and off the curb onto the sloping cobbles of the drive, into the downpour that couldn’t drown her however loud the gush and roar of its fretwork. She caught a glimpse of herself in the revolving door beyond, first one then another, a small herd of smiling Marys and she wondered, through the prancing waterfall of black and white, whether this was where the treacheries ended, the betrayals brought to a stop, and wonderingly noted that the whore’s fee smoldering in her vest blazed up as clean as the final withdrawal from the last account.