it seemed, ever since having been featured in “Flirty and Under Forty: Ten Omaha Beauties to Watch” in O! La La, a “fine living” women’s magazine, alongside Ashley’s friend Viv and a gaggle of other pretty businesswomen and artists, many of whom Ashley knew one way or another, given the basic small-towniness of the metro area. In addition to her work at the bookshop, Peach belonged to an experimental performance troupe that put on productions at midnight at the Rubberneck Theatre, a black box around the corner from the bookstore. Peach had looked stunning in the magazine’s glossy pages, posing on the stage in a Louis Quatorze—looking chaise, dressed to the nines beneath a painting of a pudgy odalisque naked but for a peacock feather. Now her elegant blond upsweep kept showing up in the mail, pasted by the stalker onto pages torn from pornographic magazines.
“Shouldn’t I find the guy in the story sexy, at least?” Peach asked Mrs. Bloom. “I hate the things he says to her.” Peach’s erotica seemed to have an autobiographical bent, explicitly detailing an affair between a late-twentysomething actress and a married ad exec. In the section she’d turned in to the workshop the week before, the actress started receiving pornographic collages from a stalker.
“But that’s the point!” Mrs. Bloom said, raising her hands folded prayer-like, the shiny fabric of her caftan rippling with her movement. She then grabbed fistfuls of her wild, finger-in-a-socket gray hair and laughed and tugged as if gone mad from the class’s stupidity. “The love affair between Baby and Professor Slick is erotic in its anti-eroticism. I’m toying with language that is purposefully appropriated from the pornography that has oppressed every goddamn woman in this room,” and Mrs. Bloom jabbed her finger in the air, pointing accusingly at each woman in the class, her armload of bracelets jingle-jangling, “and every goddamn mother of every goddamn woman in this room. The culture has, yes, finger-banged us all until we lost all sense of what felt right. My erotica is an erotica of the damaged.”
Mrs. Bloom’s impromptu oratory sounded nearly convincing, but Ashley was certain she was merely scrambling to defend her ineptitude, to blow smoke up everybody’s skirt in order to distract them from the fact that she didn’t know any more than anyone else about how to arouse a woman.
“I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel anything for the characters,” Peach said. She shrugged. “My heart doesn’t go out to them.”
“Your heart?” Mrs. Bloom said. “Who gives a shit about your heart?”
“Mrs. Bloom, please,” Ashley said. Her wedding ring clink-clink-clinked against the wine glass, and she said, sotto voce, “Peach is going through a very rough time right now.”
“I’m fine,” Peach said. “Don’t worry about me.” She took a cigarette and a lighter from her purse and headed to the apartment door for the smoke break she always took at some point during class.
“Oh, you don’t have to go out in the cold, Peach,” Ashley said, feeling motherly. “Just go in the kitchen, crack the window an inch.” Every semester, Ashley came to cherish her students despite their rampant lack of talent. And she loved the all-too-rare moments when the class devolved into a group therapy session, with students breaking down, cracking up, wigging out. As the instructor, she’d take the role of therapist, sometimes even dressing how she thought she would dress if she truly was a doctor in an office—she might put on unintimidating low-heeled shoes or grandmotherly cardigans with fresh tissue tucked into the cuff and at the ready for sudden crying jags.
But no one cried this afternoon. The class stubbornly moved forward with discussion of Mrs. Bloom’s stultifying text.
“Personally, I really admire this piece,” said the one man in the class. He wrote stories with little tricks to them, like backward sentences that had to be held up to a mirror to be read, or invisible ink that required a brushing of lemon juice for the words to appear. “I think I understand what you’re doing,” he told Mrs. Bloom, “and I think it’s really something. It’s really pretty Nabokovian when you think about it.”
At the evocation of Nabokov’s name, Mrs. Bloom inhaled deep and gently waved at the air, as if stirring and savoring the perfume of hothouse flowers. “Oh, that Vladimir,” she said.
Mrs. Bloom’s excerpt was from a novel she had titled Lolita’s Baby, in which Lolita’s teen daughter was following in her mother’s footsteps in a big way, road-tripping across the debauched U.S.A. to be deflowered over and over.
What if Mrs. Bloom sold her rotten book? Ashley wondered. It annoyed her, all the fiction lately published that took minor characters from major novels, or dragged classic heroes and heroines kicking and screaming into other eras and circumstances, all those latter-day Mrs. Dalloways with newfound lesbianism, or Heathcliff reconceived as Jack the Ripper. Meanwhile, Ashley’s second erotic novel, about a randy chocolatier, had been rejected by her editor. Sales of her first novel had been too weak, she’d explained, initial expectations too high.
The man seemed poised to prattle on more about Nabokov when Ashley’s son, Ashley, who they all called Lee, stepped from his bedroom, his ears plugged with the buds of his iPod. Lee didn’t seem to be enjoying his music, slump-shouldered as he was, his flip-flops slapping against his heels with every lethargic, it’s-the-end-of-the-world step forward. All winter he’d worn only a jean jacket when out in the cold, and maybe a drafty thrift-shop scarf rescued from the scrap pile and slipped around his neck. Lee, at seventeen, seemed always to be gunning for a wicked bout of tuberculosis or pneumonia to fit with his self-portrait of the artist as a young man. He’d been in his room all day working on a semi-autobiographical graphic novel—his forehead and fingertips were lightly smudged with blue India ink.
“Don’t forget about tonight,” Ashley said, dismissing the class early. She’d invited everyone but the lone male to the Sugar Shop party. She’d declared the party “girls only,” though she did find him to be a tad girly. He had sky-high cheekbones and wore expensive, immaculate suits that he got at a discount from the department store where he worked as a window dresser.
Ashley didn’t like how Lee seemed caught in the man’s sights. These days, ever since Lee had come out of the closet, Ashley found herself evaluating the sexual orientation of every man she met—young and old—married and unmarried. Ashley had nothing against gays, of course. It just breaks a mother’s heart, she thought. Part of her wanted for her son the life she herself had been so determined to avoid, the life of simplicity and Sunday-morning services and potlucks with good neighbors, the life that her mother, gently stewed every day by four, her wiglet askew, had tried so hard to thrust upon a young, unimpressionable Ashley herself.
Lee could easily attract predators, Ashley worried, chicken hawks, older intellectuals for whom he would satisfy some almost-legal Death in Venice fantasy. One early afternoon before Christmas, she had taken Lee out for a late lunch at a trattoria called Nicola’s. For her salad, the chef had built a tiny snowman from mozzarella, a thin strip of fresh basil as his mouth, some cloves for eyes. Their waiter had a pretty face, and she kept sneaking glimpses of him. Then she noticed that Lee was staring at the waiter too, and she couldn’t stop watching Lee watch him. Then she noticed a man her own age at a nearby table who seemed unable to take his eyes off Lee. She found herself staring at the man who stared at Lee who stared at the waiter. She tried to determine what exactly had the man so enraptured. Lee’s pout? The curls that fell to the nape of his neck? Or was it simply that look of distraction on Lee’s face as he sat staring openly, unconcerned and unembarrassed, at the handsome waiter?
After the last of the students left, Lee sat on the floor next to the coffee table to tear at a braid of cinnamon loaf and to pour himself a glass of merlot.
“I don’t think I really want you drinking wine, sweetie,” Ashley said.
Lee
