Mike. Sure, you can come stay with me if you want to, but I’m such a single-minded son of a bitch when I’m going good: well, you know that. It’d be no fun for you at all. Look, why don’t you go on home, do like Annie says, mend your fences with the old man, see your sister and your friends, renew old ties and all, get some perspective on things? It’s a great solution for the next two or three months, till you can find a new place and I can sort of get … a leg up on things. Then, when you come back, we’ll have the whole fall …”
“You are a sorry son of a bitch, Derek,” Mike said. “But you write good books about women. I always wondered how you did that. There must be quite a little stable of us around here somewhere, all on our ownlittle tapes. Or is it floppy disks now? Well. Sorry to leave before the literary fete ends, but you’ve undoubtedly got enough to go on from here. I’m sure just the right resolution will present itself, when the time comes.”
“Jesus, I always knew there was probably a world-class bitch somewhere under all that ladyhood …”
“Fuck off, Derek,” Mike said.
She left Manhattan three days later on a late morning Delta flight for Atlanta, and as the L-1011 circled back out over the sandy hook of Long Island and the glittering sea off the Hamptons and turned to the South, she thought with a small, cold smile that she had had to take the jitney in from Sagaponack after all.
12
“I SN’T THE NEW AIRPORT SOMETHING?” D EE D EE SAID GAILY . “I bet there’s nothing like it in New York.”
“There certainly isn’t. It beats even London and Paris and Rome,” Mike said, with an enthusiasm that she did not feel. She ached with sleeplessness and the physical effort to control the anxiety, and her wrinkled linen skirt and silk shirt were rapidly drying into corrugated ridges in the arctic breath of the big Pontiac’s air conditioner. The temperature when they had come out of the Atlanta terminal was ninety-one degrees at 1:00 P.M . and climbing steadily, and she had been wet through her underclothes to her skin when they had finally gained the car, prudently parked in the airport’s faraway economy lot.
DeeDee’s eyes disappeared into the folds of flesh surrounding them as she squinted at Mike, and her small scarlet mouth tightened. She said nothing, but her silence rang in the stale, chill air. Mike knew she had affronted DeeDee with her talk of foreign airports; she had meant to offer her sister the gift of incomparability for her hometown, but she knew she had sounded as if she were place-dropping.
“Not that I’ve seen much of those,” she added, andfelt the newly familiar stab of annoyance at herself and her sister. She had been placating DeeDee since her arrival and was not quite sure why. She had never done so before.
She looked at DeeDee again, the glance hidden behind large, shielding sunglasses. It was hard not to look at her. DeeDee was immense. She still looked out of the beautiful blue, black-fringed eyes that Mike remembered, but the rest of her face was a travesty of the pretty, rose-flushed young woman she had been when Mike went away; was at once comic and pitiful, like a child’s scrawl of stolen cosmetics on a melting snow woman. The pink flush was now round circles of magenta blusher on the apple-knobbed mounds of her cheeks, and her delicate, small flower mouth had all but disappeared in the folds that ran down from her pert nose. That nose, once Mike’s despair and envy, was almost porcine now in all that lapping flesh, and the skin itself was the peculiar grayish blue-white of old snow.
The face rode atop an amorphous body that hove from side to side as DeeDee walked. She wore a powder blue polyester pantsuit and chalk white beads that flew up and down on her bosom, the astounding cleavage of which reached nearly to the last of her chins, even in the modestly cut polyester shell sweater. Sweat and talcum and a transmuted perfume rose
“You are a sorry son of a bitch, Derek,” Mike said. “But you write good books about women. I always wondered how you did that. There must be quite a little stable of us around here somewhere, all on our ownlittle tapes. Or is it floppy disks now? Well. Sorry to leave before the literary fete ends, but you’ve undoubtedly got enough to go on from here. I’m sure just the right resolution will present itself, when the time comes.”
“Jesus, I always knew there was probably a world-class bitch somewhere under all that ladyhood …”
“Fuck off, Derek,” Mike said.
She left Manhattan three days later on a late morning Delta flight for Atlanta, and as the L-1011 circled back out over the sandy hook of Long Island and the glittering sea off the Hamptons and turned to the South, she thought with a small, cold smile that she had had to take the jitney in from Sagaponack after all.
12
“I SN’T THE NEW AIRPORT SOMETHING?” D EE D EE SAID GAILY . “I bet there’s nothing like it in New York.”
“There certainly isn’t. It beats even London and Paris and Rome,” Mike said, with an enthusiasm that she did not feel. She ached with sleeplessness and the physical effort to control the anxiety, and her wrinkled linen skirt and silk shirt were rapidly drying into corrugated ridges in the arctic breath of the big Pontiac’s air conditioner. The temperature when they had come out of the Atlanta terminal was ninety-one degrees at 1:00 P.M . and climbing steadily, and she had been wet through her underclothes to her skin when they had finally gained the car, prudently parked in the airport’s faraway economy lot.
DeeDee’s eyes disappeared into the folds of flesh surrounding them as she squinted at Mike, and her small scarlet mouth tightened. She said nothing, but her silence rang in the stale, chill air. Mike knew she had affronted DeeDee with her talk of foreign airports; she had meant to offer her sister the gift of incomparability for her hometown, but she knew she had sounded as if she were place-dropping.
“Not that I’ve seen much of those,” she added, andfelt the newly familiar stab of annoyance at herself and her sister. She had been placating DeeDee since her arrival and was not quite sure why. She had never done so before.
She looked at DeeDee again, the glance hidden behind large, shielding sunglasses. It was hard not to look at her. DeeDee was immense. She still looked out of the beautiful blue, black-fringed eyes that Mike remembered, but the rest of her face was a travesty of the pretty, rose-flushed young woman she had been when Mike went away; was at once comic and pitiful, like a child’s scrawl of stolen cosmetics on a melting snow woman. The pink flush was now round circles of magenta blusher on the apple-knobbed mounds of her cheeks, and her delicate, small flower mouth had all but disappeared in the folds that ran down from her pert nose. That nose, once Mike’s despair and envy, was almost porcine now in all that lapping flesh, and the skin itself was the peculiar grayish blue-white of old snow.
The face rode atop an amorphous body that hove from side to side as DeeDee walked. She wore a powder blue polyester pantsuit and chalk white beads that flew up and down on her bosom, the astounding cleavage of which reached nearly to the last of her chins, even in the modestly cut polyester shell sweater. Sweat and talcum and a transmuted perfume rose
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