Читать книгу Catch 26: A Novel - Carol Prisant - Страница 9

Frannie left so early for her hair appointment that she had time to kill, so she stopped by her favorite store. Still, crossing Aunt Teeks and Uncle Junks’ parking lot, she found herself explaining to the Stanley in her head for the umpteenth time, that she never spent much, really. Nice little things for the house, mostly: an antique cup and saucer; a dented brass warming pan once; a figurine; and if she was really lucky, every now and then, a painting. She loved paintings best. Especially of mothers and children.

And yes, she told that mental Stanley, I know what that means!

Closing Aunt Teeks’ jingly door behind her, it struck her, not for the first time, that thirty or forty years ago, antiques shops smelled like old people’s hatbands and mildewed attics. Now they smelled of lemon-scented furniture polish and, God … was that incense? No, just a terrible perfumed candle on the desk of a young man she’d never seen before. Minding the store for Sally, she supposed, although he seemed transfixed by the computer on his desk and barely looked up as she entered.

Frannie ventured a modest “hi” and a perfunctory smile that was meant to indicate her sincere hope of avoiding conversation. She really had only a half hour before her appointment.

He looked up at last and returned her smile. “Hi. How are you?” He’d closed his computer. Oh, dear.

“I’m good. In a hurry. On my way to an appointment. Just thought I’d stop by to see what Sally’s got in lately. I haven’t been in for a while.”

“Well, you just go right ahead and have a look around. Sally had to go to Ladue for a house call. But a lot of new things have come in recently. And if you want to see something, just ask.”

He bent to the reopened laptop.

Frannie moved deeper into the familiar shop and scanned its pegboard walls. She invariably checked the paintings first.

Over in the far corner. That, she thought. That looked new.

But from here, she couldn’t really see what it was. It might be just a reproduction. She thought she liked the frame, though. Kind of voluptuous. Darkened old gold with … too many chips for Stanley to let her live with? She picked her way through rocking chairs and side tables.

Close up, she could see it now, and it definitely looked like an old oil painting. Unusually dark, though, with a great many trees and several figures – really a lot of figures! And the whole thing was obscured by a uniform, caramel-like crust, so that even the parts that were obviously flesh were dense with a murky brown. But that had to be a good sign, Frannie thought, trying to edge closer. It had been hung above a squat china cabinet. Too high for her. Were they biblical characters? Gods? She looked around for a stool, found an old metal thing and placed it in front of the cabinet. Carefully, she stepped up.

Now she could make it out.

They weren’t gods at all, she was pretty sure. They were people, but only a few of them, half-seen through the bushes and trees, appeared to be dressed. In classical garments. Most of the figures, now she squinted, most of the figures were naked. Even the men. Moistening her index finger while covertly watching the boy at the desk, she swiped it across one large male figure. She was right. They were naked. And dancing. Some were – could they be drunk? And those four or five squatting men were, what? Rolling dice? But mostly, leaning away a bit, she could suddenly see, mostly they were making love. Having intercourse. Right out there in the open. And strangely, for a second or two, the scores of intertwined legs and arms and bodies actually seemed to be moving. Doing impossible, fascinating things.

Wait. Wait! She gripped the cabinet’s marble top. She had to be imagining this. She’d been doing a lot of that lately: reading sex into things when really nothing was happening at all. She felt mildly aroused now, though.

Stupid old woman.

Frannie fumbled in her handbag, found her glasses and stood on tiptoe for a better look. Buttocks and breasts and oh, yes, here … here was a couple wound together on the grass, and over there … another, halfway behind that tree! They weren’t moving anymore. She must have imagined it.

But all of a sudden, something in Aunt Teeks felt very wrong. Unnatural and wrong. Frannie yanked the glasses from her nose and stared around her. She was alone. No one else here but the boy, and he was lost in his machine. She felt faintly cold, however, and the light in the shop had somehow dimmed. Queer. And was it snowing outside? She peered through the windows. No. But March was a little late for snow, wasn’t it? Uneasy, she turned once again to the picture.

But now there was something about it that reminded her of … of what? Of something she’d seen once at school? Because it was really beautifully painted, she thought. Or at least, all of the hands were well done, and she remembered once reading – though it was probably untrue – that carefully rendered hands were one of the ways you could spot the work of a genuine artist. Each face was quite different from every other, too. That had to mean something. It was really well done, Frannie thought, smiling to herself, because it was lovely to find her art history alive and intact after so many years.

All of a sudden, she knew she had to own it. But as she began to reach for the price tag, she very distinctly felt that the young man at the desk was looking. And no doubt laughing at the old gal falling all over herself to check out the sex. She wouldn’t turn his way to see, but, stepping cautiously off the stool, Frannie smoothed the front of her good navy coat, adjusted its belt and moved a few feet off to devote a minute or more to a neighboring landscape. Narrowing her eyes and tilting her head from side to side, she scrutinized the canvas as she thought an art expert might. In case he was looking.

Could the naked picnic be an Old Master?

Weren’t all the good ones in museums?

But what did Frannie Turner know about art, actually?

Also, why would a genuine Old Master be in a Clayton antiques shop? Would a painting this good, this old, actually show up here, in this shopping mall? And what’s more, if it was really an Old Master, why hadn’t someone already bought it? Like Sally. Sally was the kind of dealer who prided herself on knowing everything about everything she sold. So if this thing was genuine, why hadn’t Sally already sold it or taken it home for herself?

Abandoning the depressing landscape, Frannie stepped up on the stool once again and reached for the yellow tag dangling from the frame. Leaning sideways, a little, she squinted to see: $3,500.00.

Well! That was why!

Ruefully, she left the stool, pushed it aside, removed a green glass vase from a nearby table and held it up to the light. She wasn’t looking at the vase, of course. She was thinking. If Sally hadn’t claimed that painting for herself, it was probably a reproduction of some kind. A photograph or a print of a genuine painting, most likely, fitted into this handsome old frame.

She was just deciding to go back and feel the surface to see if it felt smooth, like a print, or three-dimensional, like an oil, when her coat sleeve fell back and she caught the time.

She was going to be late.

Hurriedly, she stepped back on the footstool and ran her fingertips across its surface.

The painting felt rough.

So it hung in her mind as she pushed open the scarlet-framed glass door of The Hair House. Unhappily, she wasn’t moving fast enough to avoid her own reflection in the glass. Matronly, she realized. And tense, somehow. Really tense. Which seemed odd, considering how much she was looking forward to this.

Directed to a shiny pink bench by, yes, a twelve-year-old receptionist, Frannie tried to seem interested in last-week’s tattered People.

But at 2:35, as she was beginning to rehearse a courteously worded complaint, the receptionist trilled, “Mrs. Lerner? Randi’s ready for you? Just follow Ashley to the back?”

“Turner,” Frannie corrected softly, as, from nowhere, one of the several blonde girls appeared. This one was swinging a plastic water bottle in one hand and clutching a small sparkly phone in the other. She led Frannie to a curtained alcove.

“You can take your things off and leave them in there, Madame.” The girl sucked deeply on her bottle, looking neither at Fannie or ‘there.’ When you’re ready,” she added, daintily replacing its screw-top, “Randi will see you over here.” With one black-and-yellow-patterned fingernail, she indicated a closed velvet curtain just down the hall.

Frannie ducked into the cubicle and emerged in minutes, still tying the fastenings of the gown into the square knot she’d learned from Stanley’s sailing phase. With her pocketbook firmly on her arm, she crossed the hall and, still a little nervous – for no reason she could think of – she parted the heavy curtains.

The booth was considerably bigger than she’d expected it to be. Really spacious, in fact. With unusually patterned pink wallpaper (animals of some sort?) but far too many glaring lights. At its approximate center, an adjustable pink-leather chair on a pedestal faced a handsome Rococo mirror, beneath which were several French cabinets, all painted pink, and leaning against these cabinets, her scissors in hand, was Randi.

She wasn’t what Frannie had expected, either.

Randi was breathtaking.

All of six-and-a-half feet tall, she somehow seemed even taller. That’s what “majestic” must mean, Frannie thought.

She was thirty-ish, maybe, or younger. Or older. A widow’s peak punctuated a classic, heart-shaped face with wide-set, cat-green eyes, high-bridged nose, pillowy lips turning down ever so slightly at the corners – à la Hepburn – and not a trace of lipstick. None at all.

Frannie moistened her own dry lips.

Capping the whole effect was her hair: a gingery, bright red. Thick and wavy, it fell loose to her shoulders in ribbons of fiery soft curl.

Venus stood there, letting herself be looked at.

All fake, Frannie thought unkindly, blinking against the light.

Sour grapes, she rebuked herself, because. No. That nose. Those lips. Had to be real. Were real. And that hair had to be real, too, not just because of the eyebrows – an identical coppery hue – but because of that redhead-creamy skin. Not a freckle on it, either, Frannie noted. And all that along with a long, long neck, toned, slender arms and a wraparound cherry-red smock that more than suggested the body beneath: high breasts, wasp waist, wide hips, full thighs and slim (unstockinged) calves. Shiny and smooth, those calves; faintly muscled, like a runner’s. Narrow feet, too, Frannie saw, bound by strappy red sandals, metal-studded. With skyscraper heels.

No one looks like that, she thought hopelessly. No one’s that perfect. No. This Randi was someone out of nineteen-fifties Hollywood or a bad novel. But what was she doing here? Cutting hair? Why wasn’t she on magazine covers or doing the five o’clock weather?

Venus moved. And spoke. A level, alto purr.

“Mrs. Turner?” She searched Frannie’s face. “I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you.” She extended one child-soft hand.

“Oh Randi, thank you so much for seeing me so quickly. I know how in demand you are, and oh God, I couldn’t believe my good luck in getting this appointment. Thank you so much. I really mean it. I really appreciate this.”

She was babbling. She hated babbling.

“In fact,” Randi responded, smiling warmly, seeming not to notice, “when they told me it was you, I juggled my schedule. Because when I did your friend Arlene, you know – she told me about you – how you’d been girls together, how you’d both decided to ‘grow old gracefully’?” (Had that perfect lip curled?) “So I was really anxious to meet you in person. Why don’t you sit right here?” She indicated the pink throne.

“To meet me? Why?” Frannie asked, relaxing her too-substantial self into the chair. The seat gave softly. It was a little slippery.

“Oh, just because.” Randi answered. Soundlessly laying her scissors on the counter, she reached for a small black rattail comb and ran just the tip of one tapered index finger along its row of pointed teeth. Her nails were unpolished, virginal ovals. “Because it seemed you might be just the sort of challenge I like.”

“I did? It did?”

What on earth could Arlene have told Randi to make her seem like a “challenge”? Should she be flattered? Or offended?

“Let’s just have a look, then.”

Randi pushed herself away from the counter, stepped toward Frannie in one fluid move and then she was behind her, running the fine black comb through her hair. It pulled a little, once or twice, but it didn’t hurt. It felt almost soothing, actually … sliding smoothly down to the ends and back, down to the ends and back. Obscurely, Frannie felt cherished. Beloved. She sensed her eyelids beginning to droop.

“Nice hair. Not too thin, considering your age.” She heard the voice as if from a distance, and glancing up at the mirror, watched Randi watching herself as she combed her elderly client’s hair.

Smooth, and smooth again. Silk. She drifted away to that painting.

“This is a terrible cut for you, though, Mrs. Turner. Too severe. And aging, don’t you think?”

Aging. Behind half-closed eyes, the child in Frannie suffered a hurt, and for a moment, she couldn’t reply.

“So how would you like to look?” Randi asked.

Her eyes flew open.

How would she like to look?

In the mirror, she compared their reflections. Above her own face … lined and pasty, framed by her sparse and badly dyed hair, Randi’s great gorgeousness glowed. It didn’t glow. It burned.

This room, though. It was terribly bright, wasn’t it? Frannie looked down as, just off-center in her breast, she began to feel an alien something stir. Something she was terribly afraid of. It was only a kind of a … pang, at first. Then a bubble. Then a swelling of … oh God. Of yearning. It was yearning. She scrunched up her toes in her sneakers and reflexively smoothed her skirt to keep the intrusive thing down, and yet, panicky now, because she sensed it wouldn’t stay down, she distracted herself from the thing with a comma of hair on the floor’s clean white tiles: some little thing the broom had missed. And she’d opened her mouth to mention the hair, when she heard herself say, rather loud, in a voice that was nothing like her own, “I’d like to look young.”

“Young?” Randi grinned brilliantly as Frannie looked into their suddenly blurred mirror-image.

Oh God. Even her teeth were perfect.

“You mean younger than you are, Mrs. Turner?”

A balloon in her throat burst to flittered shreds and the terrible thing gushed out.

“I’d like to look young. I’d like to look young like the girls outside. Like you. I’d like to, you know … have a figure again. And these liver spots gone. I’d like my hands not to have all these … veins.” She fought down a childlike urge to sit on her hands. “And nice teeth like yours, but all my own. I mean, yes, it would be wonderful to be beautiful, too.” She tried to smile. “But more than that, maybe, I’d like to be young like girls are today. To have a job. Be paid. Be … sure of myself. Empowered, that’s the word! And attractive to men again. Oh, attractive to men! Even to sleep with anyone I liked.” She reddened, but Randi, seemingly transfixed by her own reflection, hadn’t noticed. Which was fine. The last thing Frannie needed at this moment was to be looked at.

“But almost more than that.” She fixed her eyes desperately on that curl, but nothing could stop her now. She was talking fast, too. To herself? To that spiral of hair? Certainly not to this fantastic creature behind her. And here it was, all in a rush … “I want more than anything in life, before I die, I want to find a man who’ll love me as much as I love him. Who’ll love me even more than I love him, perhaps. ” She lifted her head and found Randi’s sad eyes in the mirror now. Watching her.

“And one other thing.” Her heart seemed a fist of loss and pain, her lips felt dry and numb. “I wanted – want – to have a child.”

Omigod. Omigod. Despairingly, Frannie looked down at those ropy, capable, hands of hers, now clutching her skirt, now clutching her bulging thighs. Was this really her? Or was it some other her? And where was all this other stuff coming from? And in front of a stranger! Her face was all wet with saliva and tears. With both her hands she tried to rub it dry. She wanted to retch in shame.

Randi, watching her in the mirror now, leaned down and cupped Frannie’s shoulders in her hands. Her touch was welcome, yet intrusive. Frannie tried not to shrink away.

But Randi didn’t notice. Or noticed and didn’t care.

“Would you like something to drink, Mrs. Turner?” she asked, concerned. “I hate to see you so upset.”

Upset? That didn’t begin to describe all that Frannie was feeling, all that she’d vomited up. What she’d really like to drink wasn’t – well, it wasn’t likely to be in the icebox – no, the refrigerator – of The Hair House.

“Yes, I would,” she said in a second voice that wasn’t her own – this one, quavery and elderly— a voice that seemed sad in this all-too-intimate space. She swiped at the last of her tears and straightened, clearing her throat and attempting a laugh. “I’d love a vodka and tonic.”

Randi winked conspiratorially, then knelt in a singularly graceful motion and opened a cabinet door beneath the counter.

“Don’t tell them outside.” She giggled, brushing away her brazen hair. “I happen to have exactly that. Right here.”

Triumphantly, she rose and placed a sparkling cut-glass tumbler and an icy bottle of Grey Goose on the marble countertop. The two clinked slightly, and were followed shortly by a small bottle of tonic and a bright wedge of lime. Randi turned to pour the syrupy liquor into the tumbler, then squeezed the lime between finger and thumb and added the tonic. She watched as Frannie shakily took the drink, and then she spoke in a voice that sounded huskier than before.

“I actually do understand, Mrs. Turner. And I’ve been studying you since you first walked in and, you know, I can help you so much more than you can imagine. Because I agree: you could do with a real change. Not precisely a makeover, though. And definitely not your conventional makeover. That’s so hackneyed, like the type of thing they do on reality shows, you know? And not my style, in any case. What I think you really need is … a kind of vacation from yourself.”

Frannie had been sipping at her vodka. It was much too strong and far too early in the day, but it was helping.

“Yes, I might have several interesting things in mind for you, Mrs. Turner. But this morning – for now – let’s just begin with the hair.” In the mirror, Frannie saw Randi approach the chair again, the rattail comb in hand. She was smiling affectionately at Frannie’s reflection as she resumed her hypnotic combing. “Let’s just start with this hair.”