Spoiled Page 12

  When there was nothing left to do for the horse, she sat in the cab of the truck, her ankles resting through the open window. She flipped through Kim’s comic book. It was violent and stupid—the kind of thing a boy would read. Leigh cast it aside. She pulled down the driver’s side sunshade to block the late afternoon sun. Clipped to it were some photographs of horses. They were old and dirty to touch, in the rusty, overly bright colors of the seventies. No Pony Clubber, Mrs. Murray, riding bareback, with feathered hair and cutoffs. What was it her father called the woman? A real battle-ax. Leigh gave a laugh, aloud, and laughed again; she felt very droll, seeing the humor in the situation.

  For a long time, it seemed, she watched the particles of dust in the path the sun made. Eventually she remembered the cooler in the back of the truck, and one by one, she ate all of the cookies out of the bag.

  AT LAST THE Murrays returned, leading the bay gelding between them, the reserve-champion ribbon fluttering from his headstall. That was the extra delay—they had been waiting for the awards to be given. Leigh rolled down the window and stared at Mrs. Murray, daring the woman to meet her eyes, but Mrs. Murray did not look at her. When they got close, Mrs. Murray said, “We’ll make him a bran mash tonight, ay, Kimmo?” And she put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “He deserves it, hah?”

  “Yeah, Mom.” Kim seemed glad of the embrace; she was smiling faintly and looking at the ground.

  Leigh banged out of the cab of the truck and stood against the door, her arms folded across her chest. Mixing a wash bucket for Piper, Kim glanced furtively at her. The sharp smell of the liniment made Leigh feel it was intolerable to be excluded and when Kim began to wash the bay, Leigh said, “I’ll scrape him.”

  “I’ll scrape him, Kimmo,” Mrs. Murray said.

  But Leigh had the scraper in her hand.

  “G’head, then,” Mrs. Murray said gruffly, turning away.

  Leigh began to follow Kim’s hasty sponge, scraping water from the bay’s coat.

  “What happened?” Kim mumbled. “You just didn’t want to ride?”

  “It was silly, I know,” Leigh said, raising her voice so that Mrs. Murray would hear her. “I guess I just felt like it wasn’t our day, you know?”

  NO ONE TALKED on the way home. This time Leigh got shotgun and Kim took the middle. She fidgeted the whole way, reading her comic, sniffing, to show how she suffered. Neither Mrs. Murray nor Leigh paid her any attention. Mrs. Murray kept her eyes on the road; Leigh looked out the window, keeping up her air of pleasant resignation. She looked once at Mrs. Murray’s profile, when Mrs. Murray was looking in the rearview mirror to check on the horses. It came to her then that, more than anything, more than angry or shocked or disappointed, Mrs. Murray was simply baffled by her behavior. Leigh had introduced some sickness, or perversion, into Mrs. Murray’s life, she saw, which heretofore it had never known.

  “I think I’ll make Rye a bran mash, too,” Leigh said when they were nearly at her house.

  At first she thought Mrs. Murray wasn’t going to answer, but a minute or two later the woman told Leigh to make sure it wasn’t too hot. “Put some molasses in so he likes it,” Mrs. Murray said.

  “I will,” Leigh said. “I’ll sweeten it up.”

  The Murrays dropped Leigh off. Kim and Mrs. Murray lowered the ramp, and Leigh backed the gray carefully off the trailer, thanking them many times for the help, for the ride. When they had closed up the ramp and Leigh was leading Rye away, Kim’s horse whinnied from inside the trailer. Rye raised his head, pricking up his ears to listen, and he seemed to be considering what he had heard. But he didn’t say anything back. It was as if the horse were above all that, above bothering with any kind of a qualifying comment. Holding him at the top of the driveway, Leigh watched the rig get under way. Kim’s face appeared out the passenger window, looking back at Leigh, sardonic. She waved something—Leigh’s green ribbon, the sixth place from the equitation class. Leigh had forgotten to take it with her. Kim waved it—“Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye”—as the trailer went down, down to the end of the driveway. Then they took a left turn and were gone around the corner, and the chirping of the crickets began to fill in around the noiseless hole the Murrays had made.

  Leigh turned Rye out in the field. She stood beside the house and watched the horse roll in a favorite grassless spot, then wander to the trough to get a drink. He raised his fine head, water dripping from the slack lower lip. Who, me?

  Leigh could hear noises from inside the house, and then “Lees? Is that you?”

  She reached up to brush the grime off her cheek with the back of her wrist. It was the end of August and it was still hot out, even so late in the day. Even her face was hot. Her head felt as if it were buzzing on the inside, just behind her eyes. Angrily she told herself that it was nothing different—it was always like this at the end of a show: This time of day just broke you down.

  “Lees?” Leigh’s mother called again. “Honey, are you there? I must have fallen asleep.”

  For a second Leigh couldn’t speak she was so enraged, but then, in the background, she heard her father’s voice. “Is that Lee-lee?” he said. “How’d we do?” and when her parents came to the door together, Leigh said, “Great! Great! Kim did really well, of course, and I’m just so glad I’m going out on a good note, you know?” She followed them inside the house.

  Eden’s Gate

  “THESE ARE THE specials for tonight,” sighs the waitress, and she props a chalkboard against a ladderback chair with a long-suffering air, as if Jessica and Josh have requested some onerous exertion on her part. Famished after the laughably long drive over from the B&B on Route Twenty-five, Josh notes the attitude, as well as the young woman’s ridiculously large breasts, dismisses the former as a local intolerance for outsiders—that is, for rich people—and tries to concentrate on the food. It’s the kind of place, so Jessica told him on the way over, where you get a choice of fries, rice pilaf, or a baked potato with your main; where the French onion soup will come in a “crock;” where the waitresses, in “colonial” gray shirtdresses and white pinafores, lifers all of them, will mother them and call them—both of them—“sweet-hat.” She offered up these proofs of authenticity in a tone of such triumph that Josh sensed that L.A.—and by extension himself—was being indicted. But now this martyr girl who can’t be any older than they has appeared (albeit wearing the costume), and the entrées have been tarted up with Thai dipping sauces and herb-infused oils and—here it comes—a reference to “how our chef prefers to do it.” So now it’s Jessica’s turn to take it personally. Hands clasped in her lap, she listens much too intently, the look on her face so ominously pleasant that Josh loses track of the choices as he tries to remember where, in his girlfriend’s elaborate hierarchy of grievances, slights from service people fit in: More egregious than men at dinner parties failing to draw her out about her career? Less, perhaps, than insufficient groveling from Sandy, her agent? He’d like to think that her irritation has something to do with what’s at stake tonight. Despite the many conditional advances and retreats from both sides, she can’t be completely sure (can she?) that he’s bought the ring. For the tenth time since they left the B&B, his right hand feels inside his blazer pocket and closes around the velvet box from Tiffany’s. He’d like to go on holding it, if it didn’t look weird.

  “… seared sea scallops with a celery-root remoulade.” The young woman mispronounces the last syllable, giving it a long a, and Josh, embarrassed for her, gives her an encouraging smile, which he then has to hold, idiotically. When finally she comes to the end of her list, the girl does something unexpected: Instead of bustling off, she boldly meets his eye. It’s one of those direct looks that are so wildly presumptive Josh doesn’t have the presence of mind to repudiate it before she’s gone, walking across the room with a tarty, self-satisfied smugness.

  “Oh, my God, I know her.”

  “Yeah?” says Josh eagerly, leaping at this unexpected conversational salvation.


  “Susan O’Hare—how crazy,” Jessica says, somewhat disingenuously, Josh thinks. After all it was she who chose the inn for tonight’s dinner—“the only gig in town, trust me,” she’d assured him, when he told her he wanted to go somewhere nice on Sunday night of the long weekend, when the wedding they flew out here for, of his writing partner, Rich, would finally be over. The town, in the southwest corner of Massachusetts, is called Maidenhead. And though she hasn’t been back in a decade, Jessica spent four years in its eponymous—blissfully eponymous—girls’ boarding school.

  “Susan fucking O’Hare. I really can’t believe it.” Seeing that she’s determined to milk it, Josh steels himself for another boarding school anecdote—the weekend has been rife with them—in which he’ll have not only to show interest but also to hit upon the appropriate reaction (laughter? pity? consternation?).

  “They used to call her ‘Hairspray,’” Jessica says and, as Josh takes a sip of his water so as not to fidget more obviously, she adds absently, with just the same vacant inconclusiveness, “because when she was giving a blow job to the drama teacher he supposedly came all over her hair.”

  Josh spits violently into the glass. “Jesus. Now, that’s refreshing.”

  Their eyes meet and they both turn, merrily, in their chairs to have another look at the girl. Their waitress is standing before the hearth at the end of the room, gloomily uncorking a bottle of wine. Despite her finesse at the task—the cork pops neatly out after an expert twist—she admits no pleasure in it, her eyes fixed on the wallpaper on the opposite wall (chipper-looking red and yellow roosters) as if to say this, too, shall pass.

  She’s too severe to be pretty, but, Josh acknowledges, taking another glance, that squeezed-into-her-dress voluptuousness isn’t exactly a turn-off. Her heavy red hair, coiled now into a bun, is the dark chestnut variety, not the strawberry; Josh suspects she’s vain about it—and about her tits—despite the attitude.

  “I always think of her when I hear that Lou Reed song, isn’t that funny—now, here she is.”

  “Was she in that singing group, too?” Josh asks, opening the menu, thumbing the pages to find the booze. “What was it called? Twelve Little Girls with Surprisingly Big Tits?”

  “Twelve Little Maids,” Jessica says huffily, “and no, she wasn’t.” With a dismissive look at the list of wines, Josh shuts the menu again. “Let’s just get the most expensive bottle they’ve got.”

  “She couldn’t sing—she couldn’t sing a note. But we used to act together. We both did the plays.” Jessica looks quickly at Josh then, appraising him perhaps, and when she speaks it seems it’s the first time that night that her voice hasn’t been pitched to solicit a particular reaction from him.

  (The fact is, he often gets the reaction wrong, responding, for instance, “God, that sucks,” as he did absently at the conclusion of one such good-old-days anecdote in the car tonight, his attention monopolized by the dead-black, snow-banked February roads, the crap steering of the rental car, when he was meant to say, in admiration, “Wow, did it really?” [The story in question concerned her dorm room window in her sophomore year. It had apparently been left open during Christmas break and then stayed frozen that way till the March thaw. When she said “frozen,” Jessica punched the word a little, as if in meteorological reproach to L.A., whose weather, nine years out, she still maintains—aloud, anyway—a moral uneasiness with.])

  But now, without any inflection at all, she says to him, “She was much better than me.”

  Josh nods, seeming to absorb this. Then he says gravely, “Was she much better than you at giving head, too?”

  “Seriously, Josh!” Jessica cries. “I wept the night I saw her in Macbeth. I ran behind the schoolhouse and I leaned up against this tree and I literally bawled my eyes out because I knew I would never be as good as Susan O’Hare. It was, like, the moment I knew.”

  “And now she’s a waitress and you’re famous,” Josh supplies, yawning, deciding on the flank steak, which comes with the best-sounding sides—fried onions, sautéed mushrooms.

  Jessica fixes him with implacable brown eyes. “A, I’m not famous, you’ve got to stop saying that—”

  “And B, she’s not really a waitress?” he says glibly, and inside his pocket he runs his index finger along the gold indent that separates the two halves of the ring box. It’s nothing dramatic or cheesy he’s got planned. No bended-knee prostration or diamond to be spooned up in the chocolate parfait. Instead he imagines some version of the walk under the cold night sky of her beloved evergreens, snow crunching obligingly underfoot (the result, as they’ve been told to repeated, comic effect this weekend, of a major storm the week before), and her hard blond dissatisfaction clinging to him for life. He glances impatiently around the room, takes in the low-beamed ceilings and wide-board floors, the pewter tankards lined up in graduated sizes along the hearth mantel—the unwitting local diners, modest, in their dress khakis and fleece vests, and he has the sense of anticipation that he imagines might precede a bold crime; he has the notion that the place itself will be marked and changed for good. After 250 years, the Colonial Inn of Maidenhead, Massachusetts, will never be the same.

  “Forget it,” Jessica is saying airily. She examines her menu with consternation. She would like to play at giving him the silent treatment, but fortunately, Josh knows, she doesn’t have the willpower. “Go ahead: mock the waitress. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Oh, come on—”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” she interrupts—and he can hear the triumphant note in her voice as she chances on a specious shortcut to the moral high ground—“because you never had to work.”

  “Right,” says Josh. “That’s right.” A not insignificant element of his desirability she seems to find the particular fact—on the days that it doesn’t strike her as fatally damning.

  “Anyway, that’s not true,” Josh says suddenly. “I taught sailing two summers.”

  “Had to work, I said,” Jessica says a little too quickly, and the rage in the remark seems to surprise even her. She takes a gulp of her water, and her eyes dart around the room in a detached avian manner, as if to distance herself from it. Barbs like this continue to spring from her lips, despite her success, despite everything. They seem to pick fights on their own when she, as she has frequently averred these last couple of months—her career finally on the trajectory she’s wanted and worked for her whole life—has no complaints about her life. (She makes the remark, Josh has noticed, in the tone of someone marveling at her capacity for goodwill: Do you know I gave five thousand dollars to charity this year? Do you know I have zero complaints about my life, Josh?)

  Thinking it’s about time to regroup—start setting the tone for later—Josh reaches across the table, palm open. “I’m sorry I didn’t have to work,” he says solemnly. “I’m sorry I had dollar signs monogrammed on my bathrobe pockets. Underneath it all I was really just a poor little rich kid crying out for love and affection.”

  Jessica notes the hand, raises her eyes, and impassively scrutinizes his face. “Susan?” she says abruptly. “Susan O’Hare?”

  USUALLY SHE HAS good timing—it’s something the casting directors cite when she reads for a part. But tonight she’s off. The girl was heading back to the kitchen it seems; Jessica has to haul her back, calling shrilly now, “Susan? Susan O’Hare?! It’s Jessica—Jessica Lacombe!”

  There’s a ripple through the dining room. A middle-aged couple look askance at them in the opaque way of older, country people—not ready to excoriate her personally, the way a peer would in L.A. or New York, but startled, simply, by the unpleasantly loud noise of her shout, as if a heavy truck had rattled by.

  “You recognize me, right?” Jessica says, with an anxious little laugh, when Susan stands above them once again. She means, of course: Do you recognize me as a former acquaintance? But Josh hears as well the innocuous display of someone new to fame gauging her public: Do you recognize me as someone who h
as a growing presence in film and television? The new pilot won’t shoot till March, but there was The Sticks, last year’s canceled show that the critics loved, the scene in Eden’s Gate with Tobey Maguire at Sundance—it won’t be long, he thinks, not for the first time …

  “Jessica,” the young woman says. She draws the name out in the patronizing tone a bad shrink might affect, her voice so blasé that Josh thinks she must have recognized Jess earlier and planned this reaction. “Jessica Lacombe. How are you?”

  Jess falters, agonizingly. “I thought it was you!” She clears her throat. “I told Josh, we’d probably run into some people I knew. We came in Thursday on the—the overnight flight,” she says, apparently rejecting red-eye at the last minute. “Josh’s writing partner—his—his colleague from work, got married in Salisbury. Of course, we had to drive over here for dinner, say hi.”

  Josh lets her fumble on keeping up the pretense of camaraderie—he’s damned either way, experience tells him: If to refrain from intervening is not to care about her, to come to her rescue is to condescend.

  “I was just telling Josh, oh, my God, Susan O’Hare was the most amazing actress.” Jessica slaps her palms on the table in a gesture that’s evidently meant to be a cheerful punctuation to this remark but instead looks awkward and odd. Josh is surprised she’d go there; she can be so guileless sometimes, so naïvely self-deprecating it backfires—redoubling the envy.

  Susan lets the compliment pass with a magisterial silence, as if she’s awaiting permission to speak, as of course she would, Josh thinks, considering that they’re the paying customers and she is but a lowly service person. A knife slides excruciatingly to the edge of the table, clatters to the wood floor as Jessica grabs ineffectually at it. “But, gosh, it’s been forever,” she says, stopping herself—just—from bending to the floor to retrieve it when Susan makes no motion to do so herself. “How are you?”