This cannot end well. Of course it can’t. But that’s in a week or two. For the moment, just be glad we’re back, Bad, Bad Lovers, we’re back back back! A week off for novel maintenance, over in another corner of the writer brain. Across the ocean, in a haunted hotel. But good things come to s/he who waits: herewith, Installment XXI (that is indeed twenty-one, Bad, Bad Lovers, we have officially come of age) of our scrumptious little serialized novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). We’re still on the porch with Marta and the priest, and there’s still that nagging sense of something not quite right. If the hair’s standing up along your forearms, you’re the sensitive type, and you should know that your ornery arm-hair is not wrong.
If that hair ain’t standin’ yet, it will be soon.
And if it don’t ever, there’s something wrong with you.
So dig on in, by all means, and if you’re not quite ready to taste the bitter, there’s some leftover chocolate tarts on the counter. Long’s your soul’s not the lost twin half of Livia’s you should be good to go. And if you’re really in need of sustenance, you can always go back to the very beginning by clicking right here.
~
Mulberry Wine
But Marta wasn’t sweating. She looked cool and fresh–the skin around her nose was a little shiny, but her forehead was dry. Father Clanning could feel himself moist and clammy inside his cassock, watching Marta rock gently back and forth in the rocking chair, lazily observing the sky’s preparations for sunset, unimpressed. And unperturbed, by all appearances, at the silence that had settled in between them; she made no attempt to pick up the flimsy thread of conversation he’d left hanging. A listless breeze had come up; Father Clanning felt grateful for it as it touched his cheeks. As though it were tired, but not entirely averse to doing a kindness, so long as it didn’t have to go out of its way.
There was a scent, too, flowers, or fruit, maybe; he was uncertain, as about so many things. Elusive, it came and went, sometimes faint, sometimes aggressively present, almost tangy in his nostrils. Maybe wafting under the eaves on the fitful breeze. But no, it was too close, it had to proceed from somewhere within the semi-enclosed space of the porch. Finally, there. The sweet smell was not generated by Marta’s body. Something he had considered, remembering blond Alice’s surprisingly musky scent. Perhaps dark women like Marta emanated a floral scent. A scent that would seem to sit more comfortably with the clarity of white skin and crystal blue eyes.
No, the scent did not emanate from Marta herself–body warmth, did, though, and he could feel it every time he moved an inch further to his left, so he shouldn’t do that, though he did, just once more. The scent might not come from her, but it came from close by. From beneath her chair, to be precise, fanned up toward his nostrils on the minute gusts of breeze produced by the motions of her rocking. In search of the source of the smell, Father Clanning’s unsuspecting gaze stumbled over Marta’s feet and got stuck there. So small and perfectly formed, the dainty toes a little dirty, they could easily have belonged to a child. A good excuse to continue looking at the feet: he had to wait for the rocker to tip backward, several times, in order to see what was underneath it. A glass, he finally made it out, a glass with a bit of amethyst-colored liquid clinging to the bottom, behind it a curiously shaped bottle, three-quarters full with the same amethyst-colored liquid. It looked thick, syrupy. The bottle had no label.
Marta had followed Father Clannning’s gaze with her golden-brown eyes (the fact that the old man’s watery eyes had lingered over her feet had not escaped her). She met that gaze blatantly as he looked up, embarrassed, knowing that she had seen him. The glass, the bottle; the dainty, dirty feet were there, as though protecting the objects half-hidden beneath the chair.
“I put it all under there when I saw you comin’ up. Thought maybe priests didn’t approve of that kinda thing.”
She raised a Greta Garbo eyebrow and turned the malicious smile that threatened to spread across her lips into a pout. She hadn’t even bothered to ask him what he was looking at (the feet–they led up to ankles, the glass–there was only one; the bottle). Father Clanning half-smiled, sheepish; she had found him out. But also glad he could drop the pretense. He feigned a long look at the bottle, as his eyes traveled once more from instep to ankle and back again.
“Mulberry wine. Homemade. Not by me, though, don’t worry.” A laugh, it was harsh, it hurt his ears, he hadn’t been expecting that. “Can I get you some?”
Marta put her hands on the arms of the rocking chair, to push herself up, out of it. The loose folds of the dress tightened hard across her full breasts. Father Clanning swallowed uncomfortably (breasts, straining beneath flimsy fabric, a glass, its interior cavity filled with wine and Marta’s eyes questioning).
He did want one. A drink. He wanted a drink. Even though the wine was surely warm. He wanted whatever she was having. Whatever she chose to give him.
She didn’t wait for his answer but, smiling to herself–she knew, she knew–disappeared into the house. An unhappy little smile, Father Clanning thought, what could possibly make such a superb creature unhappy? He listened hard, disappointed he couldn’t hear the sounds of those bare feet, only a little dirty, on the wooden floor of the hall leading back to the parlor (the mulberry wine was kept in the parlor).
She returned more quickly than he would have imagined possible–he could only picture her moving slowly, languidly—with the delicate stem of a crystal wine glass held between her fingers. The nails on her hands painted the same color as those on her feet, the polish on the right thumb chipped. Her smile was the Reims angel, the Mona Lisa. Enigmatic and teasing, perhaps mocking. He tried not to stare at the glass as it was filled, at the hand with its pink nails (like those on her feet). When he tasted it the wine was bathwater-hot, sweet and cloying, just as he had imagined it. He didn’t know why it tasted good, in that heat, in the mugginess of the early evening with only the fitful breeze to cool things. But, before he knew it, he was well into his third glass.
They conversed, Marta and the priest, amiably, in low, unrestrained voices, about the heat, about Pearl’s culinary talents, about how Marta was trying to save up enough money to move to the city–not Baton Rouge, but New Orleans.
~
Danae and Livia were watching Marta’s seduction—because that’s what it was; they might not know the word yet, but they knew what they saw when they saw it—of Father Clanning from the window seat, just to the left inside the door. They’d giggled when they first saw him chatting with their mother, with that look on his face that all men got when they talked to Marta, somewhere between menacing and stupid. He didn’t look like that at church.
When the door banged open, even though they’d known it would, and that Marta would come inside to get a glass for the priest, because they’d heard the whole thing and seen it too, they started and held their breaths. She’d surely see them, sitting there in the false twilight of the unlit hallway. She’d be furious, say they were always listening to things that didn’t concern them. “Concern” was one of Marta’s grown-up words. She had a few others, and when she used them, Livia knew that she was invoking her adulthood, their lack of it–hers and Danae’s–and her fed-up state with having the two of them to consider as she planned her life.
They were each wearing one of their new school dresses. School wouldn’t start for another two months; usually, the dresses were not to be touched before the first day of September, and it was only June, but Marta had been especially eager for them to make a good impression on the priest. Danae had hissed to Livia as Aunt Pearl was helping them dress an hour earlier that they had to look nice for the priest because Marta didn’t want him thinking she needed to go to mass, too. Livia snickered. Danae always thought of wicked things to say, true things, things that Livia sometimes thought to herself, but it was always Danae who said them. Pearl looked away, but Livia had seen her smile all the same.
Danae’s dress was blue. The blue looked darker than it was because it would be night soon. There was a belt at her waist–Marta had said to Pearl that she might as well show it off since she was getting one. Danae, tall, statuesque Danae. No one would ever suspect Marta was old enough to have a daughter in her second year of junior high; all Marta would ever say was that she had started early. She would never tell anyone, not even Danae or Livia, how old she was.
Something in Livia, a thing recently awoken but not yet able to fully speak for itself, knew that, if Danae were a little older, she could sit outside on the porch with the priest and mesmerize him just like Marta was doing, and offer him wine. He would drink the wine if Danae gave it to him; if the offering were held out by her own hand, Livia wasn’t so sure.
And Danae would be able to get money out of him, just like Marta. Because it was perfectly clear what their mother was up to. One of Marta’s favorite axes to grind, those dirty old priests squirreling away all their money–they never had to spend a dime. Everybody always cooking them supper, and they didn’t even have to buy clothes, they just wore those awful old cassocks all the time. She wouldn’t mind being a priest herself for a while—this always after her third glass of mulberry wine, or fourth—so she could squirrel away some money. What wouldn’t she do if she could squirrel away some money.
~
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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