White Oleander - Janet Fitch [159]
She ate salt on everything and was always drunk by three. She certainly didn’t feel sick because she wasn’t going to college and making something of her life. She lay in the sun and gave the workmen hard-ons while she could.
“You get boyfriend, you stop worry,” she said.
I didn’t want to tell her I had a boyfriend. Hers.
She turned on her side, her large nippled breast falling out of her bikini top to the workmen’s vociferous approval. She hiked her top up, which called forth more excitement. She ignored it all, rested her head on her hand. “I been thinking. Everybody has license plate frame from dealer. Van Nuys Toyota, We’re Number 1. I think, we buy license plate frame, you paint nice, we get maybe ten, fifteen dollars. Cost us dollar.”
“What’s my cut?” I derived a perverse satisfaction in knowing the right moment to say it. I had arrived on Ripple Street, the paradise of my despair.
THE DARK GREEN Jaguar sedan parked in front of the plumbing contractor should have tipped me off, but I didn’t put it together until I saw her in the living room, the explosion of black curls, her bright red lipstick I recognized from the news. She wore a white-trimmed navy blue Chanel suit that might even have been real. She was sitting on the green couch, writing a check. Rena was talking to her, smoking, laughing, her gold inlays glinting in her mouth. I wanted to run out the door. Only a morbid interest kept me in the room. What could she possibly have to say to me?
“She like the salad set.” Rena looked at me. “She buy for friend collect Tiki everything.”
“It’s the latest,” said the woman, handing the yellow check to Rena. “Tiki restaurants, mai tais, Trader Vic’s, you name it.” Her voice was higher than you’d think, girlish for a lawyer’s.
She stood and held out her hand to me, short red nails garish against her white skin. She was shorter than I was. She wore a good, green-scented perfume, a hint of citrus, almost like a man’s aftershave. She had on a gold necklace thick as a bike chain, with a square-cut emerald embedded in it. Her teeth were unnaturally white. “Susan D. Valeris.”
I shook her hand. It was very small and dry. She wore a wide wedding band on her forefinger, and an onyx intaglio signet on the pinky of the other hand.
“You mind if Astrid and I...?” she asked Rena, wagging her wedding-banded finger between the two of us. Eeny meeny miney mo.
“It’s not problem,” Rena said, looking at the check again, putting it in her pocket. “You can stay, see if there’s anything else you like. Everything for sale.”
When we were alone, Susan D. gestured to the green couch for me to sit down. I didn’t. It was my house, I didn’t have to follow instruction. “How much did you give her?”
“Doesn’t matter,” the lawyer said, taking her seat again. “The point is, you’ve been avoiding my calls.” To my surprise, she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her Hermès Kelly bag, which I recognized from my Olivia days to be strictly genuine. “Mind if I smoke?”
I shook my head. She lit up with a gold lighter. Cartier — the gold pleats. “Cigarette?” she offered. I shook my head. She put the pack and the lighter down on the cluttered table, exhaled into the afternoon light. “I don’t know why I never got around to quitting,” she said.
“All the prisoners smoke,” I said. “You can offer them a cigarette.”
She nodded. “Your mother said you were bright. I think it was an underestimation.” She looked around the crowded living room, the bentwood hatrack and the hi-fi and the records, the beaded lamp and the fringed lamp and the poodle lamp with the milk glass shade, the peasant woman with the orange scarf, and the rest of the artifacts in Rena’s thrift shop. A white cat jumped into her lap and she quickly stood up, brushed off her navy suit. “Nice place you got here,” she said, and sat back down, glancing for the location of the hairy interloper. “Looking forward to graduation? Making your plans for the future?”
I let