You know that sister, the one you’re always having to bail out, buck up, pull along. And maybe she’s not the most brilliant person on the planet, maybe she was born pretty and has been able to coast along, pretty well, on what God and her momma gave her. She’s no feminist, she has no career. She makes you want to tear your hair out sometimes. Delete her number from your phone, unfriend her on FB. But when she’s really in trouble, you rally one last time.
Which is what Livia is in the midst of doing in this Installment XXVII of our serialized little guilty pleasure of a novella. She’s come all the way to New Orleans, she’s definitely all in, she is going to help. But that doesn’t mean she can’t be just a little annoyed. And it’s okay if you are too, Bad, Bad Lovers, after reading this. It’s totally allowed. Danae definitely does not think the purpose of bootstraps is for the pulling up of one’s very own self.
And if you’re wondering how in the world we got to this sad impasse, you can take yourself all the way back to the Beginning Of It All by clicking right here.
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Picture Perfect
Livia and Danae were seated in Danae’s living room. It was after six. There were early evening shadows, blues, bruise colors (Danae, she’d told Livia, had had dark bruises for two weeks under her eyes after her visit to the plastic surgeon’s office). The shadows hovered, waiting to take possession of furniture, paintings, bookshelves. Livia suggested they turn on a light.
“Oh, sorry…” Danae put her glass down. They were drinking gin and tonics. Danae ignored her coaster, depositing her glass right onto the defenseless surface of the teak-wood end table. “I don’t usually turn them on until it’s time for dinner.”
Danae’s hand disappeared beneath the tastefully beige shade of a lamp, her slim wrist executing a precise turn. The result was a soft, hesitant light that threw half of Danae’s expressionless face into shadow. But Danae’s face, since the surgery, was invincible to shadows, from whatever direction they might come. She no longer, to Livia’s relief, strove to present a full-face view to her interlocutor. That particular obsession of her sister’s had been especially trying.
With the aid of the lamplight, Livia saw that the salon had been redecorated since her last visit, mauves and dusty pinks replaced by subtly varied shades of brown, beige, a touch of ochre, the occasional pillow or object of terra cotta. Danae must have a new decorator. “I like the new colors in here, Danae. It’s nice, relaxing.”
Danae looked about her as though seeing the room for the first time. “Thanks. Bretton gave me the money to do it for my last birthday. Thirty-nine.”
~
On the last day of each month, when the mail came, there were magazines. Aunt Pearl would stop whatever chore she was performing, plump her round body onto the tattered cushions of the sofa in the sitting room and hurriedly leaf through the glossy pages. If a new idea for window-box gardens or a recipe caught her eye, she would study it intently for several minutes, filing it away in the prodigious archive of her memory. She never saved cuttings–her house was cluttered enough as it was, she had no use for silly little scraps of paper.
Then came the moment Danae awaited with an anxiety that would have astonished her great-aunt, had she known. Pearl would get up from the sofa with a determined little push, as though to announce her decision to return to her gardening or cooking, and carelessly push the magazines aside. And there they would lie, their shiny covers bright against the faded fabric, until Danae, confident that Pearl had forgotten all about them, would start forward from the red armchair, where she’d been watching without, she hoped, appearing to do so, and snatch them up, hugging her treasures to her chest.
Despite the monthly and entirely predictable repetition of this sequence of events, each time her fingers touched the cool, slick paper, each time she felt the hard, slim rectangles bend in her tight embrace, Danae was jubilant, and breathless with guilt, as though she’d just robbed a jewelry store. Running up the stairs to her room, she saw open before her an endless vista of the hazy hours she would spend looking at the magazines (hours that Pearl said should be spent outside drinking the fresh air into her lungs).
She read the magazines on her bed, with its comforter splashed with daisies, diffused sunlight filtering lazily in through the thick leaves of the oak.
The articles were about important topics, such as how to keep your husband interested in your marriage. She did read the articles, they might be useful in the future, but most of her time on the bed with the stolen magazines was spent drinking in the images. Perfectly appointed sitting rooms and luxurious baths, recipes made of things whose names she couldn’t pronounce, Cointreau, roux, bouillon, bouillabaisse, crème-de-mênthe. Ideas for flower arranging, even origami–all part of the shiny-paper elegance of the life she would have when she grew up.
Danae had a special pair of scissors with her name engraved in cursive script on the inside of one of the handles, a gift from the Aunts on the first birthday she’d spent on the farm. She kept her scissors wrapped in tissue paper in the top drawer of her night table. They were only for the magazines; she didn’t want to dull their edges. They were alone in the drawer, except for a cut-out photograph of a handsome, dark-haired man dressed in an expensive suit. He was drinking coffee out of a tiny cup, sitting at a tiny table.
There were other tables too, with other well-dressed people sitting at them, but as the image moved away from the handsome man, the other figures became blurry. It was night and there had been a beautiful lady sitting next to him, dressed in furs and jewels, but Danae had cut her out of the picture.
After contemplating the images on each page, Danae chose her favorites and painstakingly cut them out, taking care not to make any nicks or tears along the edges. She then pasted them into the scrapbooks Aunt Pearl brought her from the Five and Dime in town, no questions asked. Danae grouped the images into rooms–the rooms of the house where she would live with the handsome man in the photo.
The rooms would be so beautiful, so perfect, that he would never want to leave.
~
More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.
Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…
Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.
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