Say You're Sorry Read online

  The gas can exploded then, and flames engulfed her dress, her hair, her face.

  She reached one twisting hand toward the revolver, where she’d dropped it on the table. Maybe it still wasn’t too late. But it was. For Loubella had loaded only one bullet in the chamber. She’d known that whether she fired it or Blanche did, one was all she’d want or need.

  The curtains were on fire now, the rugs, the sofa, the bed, the walls, the floor. And in the midst of it, caroming from one small room to another, from door to window to door, was the fireball that was Blanche. That didn’t last very long, though. Soon she dropped and writhed, white teeth showing and glimmers of bone, as beautiful Blanche, blackened like a redfish, fried and crisped and barbecued to a turn, just a little before midnight on this evening of July the Fourth.

  Wish You Were Here

  Ask Lydia Soniat what she hated most about summer vacation. Ask her the last day of July while she was packing the car. She’d push her damp dark curls off her pretty face—even prettier than she was twenty years earlier as a debutante and Queen of Mardi Gras—kick a tire of her husband Clay’s Mercedes, and drawl, This son of a bitch, I think.

  It wasn’t the car, of course. A four-door top-of-the-line dark green 560 SEL, one in a line of perennially new sedans Clay ordered from Tar Heel Import Motors in downtown Raleigh as if he were renewing a magazine subscription. Though, in truth, she much preferred the little blue Mustang convertible she’d had for fifteen years—ten years before Dr. Clay Prescott, a very handsome (and successful) nutritionist visiting New Orleans for a medical meeting, had first had her. In the garden shed in the midst of a cocktail party at Dr. Taliferro’s big old house in the Garden District, after far too many Salty Dogs.

  No, it wasn’t the car. What she hated was the packing. Every summer Clay’s list of essentials grew longer and longer. Now dressed in white tennis shorts, she stood glaring at this year’s list, her lean strong legs planted wide in their driveway as if to prevent her from being bowled over.

  And every year at the end of August as she repacked the car for the drive back to Raleigh, which she’d never be able to call home, she asked the same question: Clay, why don’t we just leave all this stuff down here?

  Down where? he’d counter in that monotone he adopted when he really wanted to be a pain in the butt, which was often.

  Down here in Hilton Head where your mother has rented us a place each August for the past five years. Down here in the Orange County of the South, where you have an orgasm every time you face off three other Mercedes at a four-way stop. Down here in the middle of the Rolex, tennis bracelet, and yacht club wars.

  But where would we leave it, he’d drone in the same monotone, ignoring her sarcasm. We’ve taken a different place each year. (He didn’t add, Always trading up. That was a given.)

  At your mother’s, Lydia would finally scream. At your mother’s goddamned wedding cake of a house in historic little old Beaufort, half an hour from the beach. The one you bought for her, restored for her, keep up for her so the two of you can pretend she’s Southern gentry instead of a retired schoolteacher. Leave this crap in one of those goddamned guest rooms whose door she’s never darkened.

  Oh, no. Clay couldn’t impose on Mother.

  But with her…. “Darlin’,” he’d started up just last week. When Clay wanted something he got more Southern, reminding Lydia of the Yankee actresses in Steel Magnolias. It was enough to make your skin crawl. “Darlin’, you don’t mind getting our things together, do you, just this once more? I’m so busy at the clinic….” Then he’d trailed off.

  She sat now atop her one large suitcase and stared at our things, thinking how if she did it right this time, she could squeeze in her paints and canvases instead of scratching around for new supplies down there. Also thinking about Bali. She really liked the idea of Bali. The beautiful masks. The dances. The Balinese were all artists. Or Borneo. And she wasn’t too old yet to go trekking in Nepal. Sweat trickled between her breasts inside her sports bra.

  “You don’t get over in the shade, you gonna give yourself sunstroke.” That was Susan, her next-door neighbor, tennis partner, and best friend.

  Best friend in Raleigh, that is. Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill, the famed Research Triangle, where Clay had dragged her off to from New Orleans. Home of the Prescott Clinic, his wonderfully successful (until recently) fat farm.

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m some idjit,” Lydia said to Susan who stood next to her now, holding up one small square hand to block the blistering sun.

  Susan saying, “I don’t know why you don’t get Mattie to do this. Or at least stay in the garage.”

  “I have more respect for my help. Besides, who else could ever figure this mess out? And I have to spread it out before I can fit it all in—it’s like a goddamned jigsaw puzzle.”

  Susan kicked a carton with the toe of her tennis shoe. “I see you’re taking the veggies.”

  “Oh, yes. The no-sugar, no-salt, no-fat, no-taste canned carrots, peas, corn, and spinach. As if the vegetable stands on the island won’t be overflowing with corn and tomatoes.”

  “Tomatoes! See, I knew there was something you liked about it down there. Of course, I always thought you were crazy—whining about having to leave Raleigh in this heat and spend August lying around at the beach. Watching those strong young lifeguards.” Susan shivered in her little white tennis dress at the very thought.

  “I tell you what. You pack up this car, drive all day nonstop, spend a month of afternoons waiting for Clay to finish up on the golf course and come home and entertain Mother Prescott who always ‘drops by’ just when my painting gets going. You do that and I’ll stay home and screw Robert.”

  Susan giggled. “You’d hate screwing Robert.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s boring.”

  “Honey, it all loses its shine after awhile. Even with Moby Dick. Though, I must say, occasionally he still—” And then she stared off, chewing on her bottom lip like it tasted good.

  Susan giggled again. Lydia had never made any secret of the heroic size of her husband’s equipment and the pleasure they enjoyed when he got around to making the effort.

  Now Lydia leaned up against the side of the dark green Mercedes, then jumped. “Owh! That’s hot. Let’s go inside, swap some lies.”

  “You got any iced tea?”

  “Long Island iced tea?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Lydia squinted at the stainless steel and gold sports watch Clay had given her for Christmas—a not-so-subtle reminder that he’d rather she were outside getting some exercise than inside making art. What did he care if her work had so piqued the interest of a New York gallery they were giving her a show in the fall?

  “Almost noon,” she said. “Time for a pop. Especially today. Maybe it’ll give me the strength to deal with Clay’s four suitcases, his golf clubs, three boxes of books and journals he’s never gonna read, the towels, pillows, sheets, cotton blankets—”

  After the shimmering outdoors, it was dark and cool inside. They walked to the back of Lydia’s two-story whitewashed brick house—planted among ancient towering trees in Old Raleigh—to a glassed sunroom where Lydia grew hibiscus, palms, and banana trees and pretended she was in New Orleans. Lydia mixed their drinks at a wet bar and they settled into wrought iron chairs with bright yellow cushions.

  “I can’t believe you’re taking linens,” Susan continued. “You’d think if you paid ten thousand dollars rent a month—”

  “That was two years ago. It’s fifteen this time.”

  “Fifteen thousand dollars! Jesus! The ex and I bought a house for that when we were first out of college. Clay’s really gone around the bend.”

  “My dear.” Lydia dropped into her best imitation of a Hilton Head “society” real estate agent. “‘That’s nothing for a place in a good neighborhood on the water. Why you know those people on the other side can’t even see the beach for the co
ndos.’ Clay eats that stuff up.”

  Lydia, who had no money of her own, came from that stratosphere of old New Orleans society where cash wasn’t nearly as important as blood. Nor was she was much impressed by either. On the other hand, Lydia was used to creature comforts, which she’d grown up with before her father’s fortune had dissolved like a teaspoon of the sugar, upon which it had been built, stirred into a cup of hot coffee.

  Comforts, yes. Ostentation, no. She’d married Clay for the former—that and his sexual prowess and charming manners. Recently all three seemed to be on a downhill slide. In fact, Lydia had suggested to Clay that if things weren’t going so well at the clinic and they were in a tight, maybe they ought to forget about Hilton Head this summer. That had made him mad, even less sexy, and less charming.

  Susan still couldn’t get over it. “All that dough, and the linens aren’t included—”

  “Have you forgotten who we’re talking about here? Dr. Clay Prescott does not sleep on other people’s sheets, period. Eat other people’s food, if he can possibly avoid it. And he’s been threatening to have a little outhouse built on wheels to pull behind the car—you know, like a boat—so he won’t ever have to squat where other people have.”

  “Lydia, you’re joking.”

  “Why would I make up stuff about Clay when the reality is so bizarre?”

  “Do you really think he’s crazy?”

  “I think all men are crazy. Not that they can’t be fun, especially if you like to dance. And a lady does need an escort. But they’re basically mad, and you are too, if you take them seriously.”

  “You think it’s their hormones?”

  “Definitely their hormones.” Lydia took a long pull on her drink. Then held it out and stared at it as if it had tea leaves in the bottom, could tell her the secrets of the universe. “And their generally selfish and feckless dispositions.”

  “They’re not all feckless.”

  “All of ’em I’ve ever married’ve been.”

  “Well, maybe you’ve just had a run of bad luck.”

  Then they both hooted with laughter, because, if you counted Clay as a failure, which Susan definitely would, Lydia was batting zero for three.

  Paul, Lydia’s first husband, a lawyer and her childhood sweetheart, left her a big house in the Garden District but no money to keep it up when he drove off drunk into Lake Pontchartrain with his arm around a redhead. Cleve, her second, was a state senator who frequently didn’t make it home past the hot-sheet motels on Airline Highway between the Capitol in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. And he’d had to give back what was left of his ill-gotten gains when they sent him off to serve a little time for accepting payoffs from the oil companies.

  But Lydia was still fond of him. “You know,” she said now, “Cleve was so funny. I do love a man who can make me laugh.”

  That was Susan’s cue. She stood up, lurching a little because they were now on their second drink, and Susan, who was a chronic dieter, had eaten neither breakfast nor lunch. She poked out her stomach, tucked her chin, raised one hand preparatory to doing her imitation of Cleve Cowthran—whom she’d never met.

  “No man, woman, or child, or dog is safe in the state of Louisiana while the legislature is in session.”

  Lydia’s laughter was silvery. “You never get a New Orleans accent right, but then nobody does. And that’s true, too, about nobody being safe. Even more so now. Those idiots in Baton Rouge, if it isn’t abortion they’re outlawing, it’s music. Last year they tried to abolish the dirty blues.”

  Susan shook her head. “Place sounds insane, incestuous, and incredibly decadent. I never understood why you’re still so fond of it.”

  Lydia enumerated the reasons on her strong thin fingers. Everything about Lydia was strong and thin, the way Clay liked them.

  “One, we New Orleanians all love decadence. Two, I was born there. Three, my mother was born there. Four, my grandmothers were born there. Five…”

  “This is gonna go on about seven generations, isn’t it? Which is why you think New Orleans is the South—and North Carolina isn’t. We’re too far north geographically and too impoverished genealogically.”

  “Not to mention culturally. And gastronomically. You ever hear of anybody coming to North Carolina to eat? To dance? To party? Except for college kids, people come here to lose weight. Hell, it’s easy.”

  Susan wouldn’t be baited. “Your family only counts as one. Decadence is two.”

  “Okay, okay. Three, I grew up there, as did everybody in the whole world I love—except you.”

  “And Clay.”

  Lydia just gave her a look. “And four, New Orleans is different from any other place on earth. It’s funky and it’s grand and even though it’s fallen on hard times and it can be very snobby, it’s, well, like the lady said, he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s my son of a bitch.”

  “Is that how you feel about Clay?”

  Lydia thought about that for a minute. “Most of the time. And then he does something so incredibly sweet, it reminds me of how he used to be. When he brought me roses every Saturday. Gave me a present on the fifteenth of each month, the anniversary of our first get-together out in Dr. Taliferro’s garden shed.” Lydia’s face softened with a faraway look.

  And Susan was jealous of her friend’s past, if not her present. “I hate your guts.” She held out her glass. “Hit me again.”

  Lydia made herself another, also. Or, at least, made a show of doing so. But just like the first two, her glass contained no alcohol. For today, Lydia needed all her faculties.

  “You wanta know why I hate you?” Susan continued.

  “Because I’m so cute. And if you keep talking like that, I’m gonna cut you out of my will. Not a single lifeguard.”

  “Because you’re smart. And talented. And skinny.”

  “Men don’t care about smart or talented. And you’d be skinny too, if you lived with Dr. Fat. Fat,” she intoned seriously, “is the enemy.”

  “Hell, it’s easy for you. I’m always going to have these thighs.”

  That was true about Susan’s thighs. But it wasn’t true that Lydia didn’t have to work hard at keeping trim. One of her favorite lines was that when she turned forty a year ago and her metabolism died, she’d scattered its ashes in the parking lot of the Dunkin’ Donuts. “Besides tennis, you know I go to the gym every single day, which I despise. As much as I love sweets.”

  But when they married Clay had insisted she give up Baskin-Robbins, Häagen-Dazs, fudge brownies, Bananas Foster, Crème brulée. “And I couldn’t have bread pudding at the Bon Ton even if I did go back home.”

  “What I never understood is why you don’t—go home.”

  “It’s too painful. I could never leave again.”

  “And, why you let Clay bully you into this stupid vacation every August if you hate it so much. Why don’t you go off somewhere on your own? Or with me?”

  Lydia shrugged. Clay counted on her going. She and Susan had been over this same ground a million times. And they both knew the answer. You made your bed—you made compromises.

  That’s what marriage was. Compromises. Adjustments. In exchange for, in her case, financial security, companionship, good sex occasionally.

  She and Susan had both hoped, each time, for enduring love, but had learned to tote up and value the alternatives. Besides, as Lydia said, you struck out three times, it was likely you’d marry a facsimile of the same son of a bitch again.

  “Well,” Susan sighed, “most days it’s worth it. And God knows, in between engagements, I absolutely hated being an extra woman. A town like this, no one invites you to nothing. Hell, we don’t. Maybe it’s different other places…New York….”

  “You know what Clay really hates?” Susan looked up, Lydia’s tone was so strange. “He really hates it when we’re down there in August, when I’m not painting, I’m out on the front porch—that’s the one non-negotiable, a front porch—writing postcards.”

 
; “So?”

  “I write them to everyone I’ve ever known back home. Hundreds of them, to all the people I miss and long for.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They all say the same thing.”

  “You can drag out a punch line longer than anyone I know.”

  “Wish you were here, that’s what they say.”

  “So what? That’s a perfectly normal, if incredibly banal, thing to write. Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”

  “I never say the Having a wonderful time part. It really frosts him.”

  It really did. She thought about that later, after Susan had gone home to take a nap and recover from her Long Island iced teas; they could play tennis later. Those postcards, a symbol of Lydia’s discontent, made Clay livid.

  She wondered: Was that one of the reasons he was having her murdered? Maybe. That and her life insurance policy which paid out two million dollars.

  *

  In the Sunset Motel on Highway 401 on the outskirts of Fuquay-Varina, seventeen miles south of Raleigh, Dr. Clay Prescott really was having a wonderful time, though he wouldn’t be sending any postcards. An absolutely kinky wonderful time.

  Well, kinky for him.

  First of all, he was in bed with someone who wasn’t his wife.

  Second, that someone, a wealthy young woman named Janine, a former patient who’d relapsed, was FAT. Not just fat. FAT. She was fat-lady-in-the-circus fat with delicious breasts bigger than his head and an ass the size of an easy chair. For easy rocking, he said to himself, as he did just that.

  Third, and kinkiest of all, the bed was littered with those little Styrofoam containers from McDonald’s. They had just scarfed down two big bags of salty greasy yummy things with cute names Clay had never even heard of. And now they were wallowing in the remains on Clay’s sheets from home. He hadn’t been able to go that far.

  “How much longer now, dumpling?” the woman beneath him asked.

  “I didn’t think you ever wanted me to stop.”

  “Not that, silly. You know.” She paused delicately.

  He sighed. “Trust me. I told you I’d dump her. But these things take time. We can’t get too restless.” Nor he too careless. He had to watch what he said to Janine in the midst of the passion and the french fries.