Annabel - Kathleen Winter [68]
“What’s her name? Dolores?” Jacinta asked. “It’s not Dolores, is it?”
Joan said, “I can’t remember her name in the movie, but her real name’s Bo Derek.”
“I don’t see how anyone can go to see movies in that ratty old cinema in Goose Bay,” Jacinta said. “Half the time they put the last reel on first or the projector breaks down altogether.”
Eliza said, “You know what really pisses me off about that movie?”
“Um,” said Joan, “could it be the fact that the only thing that happens in it is they play Ravel’s Bolero ninety-nine times and the women have no personality, just a number given to them by men like prize pigs at a county fair?” She took a swig of her Oban.
Jacinta said, “I want to ask you something.” The third glass of wine was for her the magic glass. At a Christmas party or an evening out with other families, she had two glasses. The third glass was the glass that floated her above. She did not have that glass as a rule, but this was not a night when the rule applied. “I know you’re having sex with your husband again,” she said to Eliza. “I know all about the leopard-skin boots and the Valium. What I want to know is you, Joan, you’re not on Valium? You’re not on anything that artificially enhances your sex drive?”
“My what?”
“I just want to know if anyone besides me here looks at an erect penis as a ludicrous object all of a sudden.”
Joan looked at Jacinta as if she were finally seeing the light.
“I mean, I have no problem with Treadway. As you know, he is a good man.”
“Yeah, he’s that,” Joan said.
“He’s a really good man. I figure if I can’t get along with him, I might as well go crawl off by myself into a little hole somewhere.”
“But you don’t want to have sex with him.”
“It’s menopause, right? I mean, one month I was ‘Hello Mister Penis, how are you tonight, happy to see you in all your cheery Mister Penisness. Good job, Mister Penis, yes, I like you.’ Then the next month, ‘Whoa there, bucko, you most ludicrous of creatures, what in the name of God do you think you’re trying to do? Go near my vagina? Get in it? Why would you want to do that? Oh, most ridiculous idea.’ If it wouldn’t have mortified Treadway I’d have burst out laughing.”
“Valium will fix all that.”
Joan settled into the cushion with the needlepoint windmill on it. “I didn’t need menopause. One night when I was twenty I looked at Harold and his cock was a nose, his nipples were eyes, and his little bush of hair was a woolly moustache.”
Eliza spit pina colada on the floor. Harold walked around Croydon Harbour a neat little man. If you had to explain to an alien what a human man was like, if you wanted the straightest, neatest definition, you might pick Harold Martin as your example.
“From October to July,” Joan said, “he never takes his insulation off.” She had explained to them that Harold had made himself an undergarment out of house insulation, the silver kind that has a layer of bubble wrap between two layers of foil. Harold tied this around his torso with Velcro. “So the effect is enhanced.”
“I don’t mean to ridicule my husband,” Jacinta said. “I’m just sorry that I seem to have gone through a gate and he’s still on the other side.”
“What’s on your side?” Joan asked.
“I’m hanging around the gate looking back at my husband, waiting for him to even see the gate. He just thinks it’s another part of the fence.”
“Don’t you go feeling sorry for him,” Joan said. “You think he’s puttering around there in the dandelions in the same old field, but he’s not. You think he can’t see where you are, but he can. He can see just fine. He just isn’t talking about it. Rest assured, though, that if you passed away tomorrow, Treadway would suddenly become the liveliest man in Croydon Harbour. You would look down from your new home and be amazed. You’d say, ‘How come he wasn’t like that when I was with him?’ He would suddenly become everything you’ve wished him to be