Dirty Diana

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

—

“I don’t know which is more depressing, a fifty-seven-year-old man trying to be twentysomething, or a twenty-four-year-old who still lives at home.” L’Wren sighs and swerves into the highway’s carpool lane. She’s terrible at talking while driving. I grip the side of the beige leather seat.

“This is my family but they’re like roommates, ” L’Wren says. “Plus Halston. My baby girl is six-going-on-sixteen. She keeps asking me to google ‘Harry Styles, no shirt.’?”

“L’Wren! Don’t make me laugh!” Jenna shouts from the back seat. “My filler will mess up.” She presses her hands into her cheeks as if to hold them in place.

L’Wren peers at Jenna in the rearview mirror. They have been friends since high school, and now we all have daughters the same age. “You’re allowed to laugh after you get Botox.”

“It’s not Botox, it’s filler. The derm said don’t exercise or move your face too much for twenty-four hours or the filler could shift.”

“Jesus. Are you getting your filler in the H.E.B. parking lot?”

“No. Stop it.” Jenna almost snorts. “Dr. Laredo. She did Raleigh’s lips that you loved so much.”

At the mention of Raleigh’s name, the three of us go quiet. We sit in the hum of the air-conditioning as L’Wren speeds down the highway. We’re on our annual trip to Roundtop, a massive antiques show south of Dallas. Our first trip was five years ago when we were all in the same Saturday morning Mommy and Me class. L’Wren surprised Jenna and me with a babysitter. She suggested we ditch class and take a mini road trip instead.

Jenna clears her throat. She pokes her head between us, blond curls bouncing. “You could have worse roommates. At least Liam’s like a live-in babysitter, right? He must help y’all out.” Liam is L’Wren’s stepson and is usually too stoned to be of any real help. He’s more of an affable presence. “And at least your husband still has all his hair.”

“Oh, that’s so cute, do you really believe that?” L’Wren asks. “That Kev hasn’t lost hair? Do I need to remind you about last summer? The hair plugs?”

I stifle a laugh.

“Diana, do not feel bad for laughing.” L’Wren turns to me, fully taking her eyes off the road. “True, he can’t help that he’s losing his hair. But. Nobody made him wear that beret. ”

“ Ohh, ” says Jenna. Things often occur to her a few beats late. “I forgot about the beret. Huh. I thought he was going through like a European midlife crisis.”

“What the fuck is a ‘European midlife crisis’?” L’Wren asks.

Last summer, L’Wren’s husband, Kevin, wore a hat for every occasion. Oliver and I even spotted him wearing a hunting cap while taking an outdoor shower at their Memorial Day pool party.

“He did kind of made it work,” L’Wren says, tenderly. “But, poor thing, he had to change the bandages on all the little follicles all the time.”

I flip my mirror down and look at my face in the morning sun, studying the skin beneath my jaw, something I’ve never paid much attention to. There are circles under my amber eyes, but at least my hair is cooperating in long, tamed waves. I pull my skin tight to my ears like a homemade facelift and imagine painting a smoother version of myself with a shiny strip of forehead and a pair of newly puffed apple cheeks. I crinkle my nose, smiling at my own ridiculous expression, then drop my hands, but not before Jenna catches me. I pretend to check my lipstick, dabbing a finger across my mouth.

“And now good luck getting Liam to cut his,” L’Wren says.

I flip up the mirror. “Who cares how long Liam’s hair is?”

“I think it’s why he got fired.”

“Who got fired?” Jenna asks.

“Liam,” says L’Wren. “Honestly, I didn’t even know you could get fired from an internship. Don’t they have to pay you something before they can fire you?”

I happen to know Liam wasn’t fired. He just stopped showing up. But I don’t say this. I shift in my seat and feel the recorder still in my pocket. I quietly slip it into my purse as L’Wren continues to vent.

“I thought, it’s an ad firm, it’s creative, maybe he’ll like it? He was miserable. But, lord, we all hated our jobs at some point, right? That’s why they call it ‘the Sunday Scaries,’ right?”

When Liam moved in with them a year ago, I thought L’Wren’s head might explode. For someone like L’Wren who has a habit of collecting strays—cats, rabbits, lizards—having her stepson move back into the house was remarkably disruptive. But L’Wren quickly formed a deep affection for him. He confuses her, but in a way she seems determined to decode.

She sighs loudly. “I want him to be an artist, if that’s what he wants. I just want him to be an artist with ambition, you know?”

A red Maserati cuts us off. L’Wren lays on her horn but doesn’t slow down. “Maybe I’ll just buzz that head of hair in his sleep…”

Out the windows, gentle rolling hills covered in bluebonnets and dotted with grazing horses give way to fields of towering sunflowers and I’m only vaguely aware of my friends talking around me. My mind drifts to the old canvases I’d found in the closet. Those poor bluebonnets I tried to paint. They really looked like something had chewed on them. Then I think of the box of tapes and the sketches I’d found. I can’t remember if I’ve ever shown the drawings to anyone. Even Alicia. For a while, both she and Barry would ask how the new book was coming every time we spoke. But eventually they both seemed to forget about it too.

As if her ears were burning, my phone rings and it’s Alicia. I hit decline and send her a quick text.

Call you tonight!

I wonder if I should play her one of the tapes. Or just mail one to her out of the blue for fun.

“How about you, Diana?” L’Wren asks.

“What’s that?”

“How often do you and Oliver have sex?” L’Wren says this so flatly she might be asking me how often I floss. “My mother called to tell me all about an interview she read with Madonna, who says the key to a healthy marriage is sex three times a week.”

“With your husband?” I ask.

“Diana!” Jenna giggles from the back seat.

“No—” I can feel myself blush. “I just meant, is Madonna even married?”

“Every magazine in my mother’s house is a Good Housekeeping from like twenty years ago. But you get the point,” L’Wren says. “How often?”

“Mmm.” I narrow my eyes, as though I were working it out. A prickly hot sensation spreads down my neck at the memory of the last time Oliver and I had sex. A date night. It was an unseasonably warm evening, so we sat outside at Delmonico’s and then quickly regretted trying to eat pasta in the heat. We pushed around the food on our plates, drank too much white wine, then fumbled with our cash when it came time to pay the babysitter. Upstairs in our bedroom, we peeled off our clothes and had quick, sweaty sex. Oliver felt good inside me, he always did, but still I felt a need to speed things along. “I want you to come,” I whispered in his ear. “Now?” he asked. “Like this?” “Yes, just like this.”

“Jenna…” L’Wren taps my thigh to be sure I catch this. “Tell Diana how often you and Charlie do it.”

Jenna counts off the days on one hand, flashing her lavender-tipped French manicure. “Four times a week, unless one of us or the kids is sick. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday is sex, and Sunday is a hand job because I’m totally spent.”

“Wow,” I say. “Four times.”

“You know blue balls isn’t a real thing, right, Jenna? No man in his fifties needs to climax that much!” L’Wren says.

“Well, Charlie is forty. Plus, it’s like exercise,” Jenna says. “You don’t always want to do it, but then you do it, and you’re glad you did. And Charlie is so much easier to be around afterward. It’s like wearing out a puppy.”

“Ha.” L’Wren laughs. “True.”

“Should we stop and pee before Roundtop?” I ask her.

L’Wren looks at me, then presses her turn indicator. “Jenna, feel free to take Mondays off from now on—you’re making the rest of us look bad! Kev and I are every other Friday.”

“We’re about the same,” I lie.

“But you and Oliver don’t have to schedule it in. You’re an artist, it just happens…”

“Spontaneous sex,” Jenna shakes her head. “Can y’all imagine?” Hard to tell if the idea excites her or horrifies her.

“It’s what you do, right?” L’Wren crosses two lanes for the off-ramp. “What happens if you stop having sex with your husband? Somebody else starts having sex with your husband.”

“Mm-hmm,” Jenna nods her head solemnly. “Like Raleigh. So sad.”

Again, the car goes quiet at the mention of Raleigh’s name and I’m not sure what I’m missing. “I thought Raleigh cheated on her husband, not the other way around?” I say. Why do I want to score a point for Raleigh? I hardly know her, beyond seeing her at school dropoff and birthday parties or making small talk on the sidelines at our kids’ soccer games.

All I can think is no one talks about how mysterious marriage is. The three of us in this car have bonded over every intimate detail of pregnancy and motherhood. “I know you’re not supposed to look at your vagina right away,” Jenna confessed about giving birth, “but I couldn’t resist. I took a mirror into the hospital bathroom and almost passed out. It wasn’t even the right color, y’all.” But I have no real idea of what it’s like inside either of their marriages. How do they fight? What’s Jenna like when she’s really angry? Now I know exactly how often she has sex, but what could I learn that’s not jotted into her iCal? Does she enjoy sex with Charlie? Does she orgasm?

I know how important sex is to a marriage—there is no shortage of essays about this topic—but it’s like, the more important I’m reminded it is, the less enjoyable it becomes. And these days, when I think about sex with Oliver, I get a fluttering, panicky feeling, like I’m inviting trouble. Like I’m knocking on the door of a haunted house and waking up the ghosts inside. Oliver and I have never talked about having a sex life. We just had it— have it. And maybe Oliver likes sex more. And wants it more. So I try to not overthink it. And then I overthink thinking about it until it becomes like a living thing that I alone am draining the blood out of.

“I heard she didn’t cheat just once,” Jenna says, still talking about Raleigh. “I don’t know if it’s true— so don’t say I said it —but apparently it was ongoing, like five different men.”

L’Wren lets out a low whistle. “Sweet Jesus, I can barely get on my Peloton and she has five different affairs?”

“And Dustin’s getting the kids in the divorce,” Jenna warns. “Sole custody. And the house.”

—

The antiques show grounds are muddy from days of rain. There are swampy puddles to pick our way around, and half the SUVs in the parking lot seem to be using their four-wheel drive for the first time. There’s usually a sort of uniform among the shoppers—this year’s most stylish, including L’Wren, are wearing knee-high boots with a rugged sole and an oversize buckle. The rest of the uniform is mostly unchanged—sundresses and denim jackets and cowboy hats. Oversize sunglasses. Heart-shaped charms on gold necklaces. I pull my own denim jacket closed against the late-morning breeze.

Inside the tents, the smell is strong, a mixture of cow poop and sharp, floral perfume. Other than finding a one-eyed senior cat a new home, nothing makes L’Wren happier than scoring a bargain. It’s easy to get caught up in her joy. As a threesome, we wander the booths, sipping white wine from plastic cups, looking at beautiful things, feeling more and more buzzed and floaty as we go, even if most of the stuff is indistinguishable from all the other stuff and totally out of our price range.

L’Wren stops at a dealer selling nothing but farm tables. “For the kitchen? What do you think, Diana?”

“You told me not to let you buy anything bigger than a breadbox.”

“But look at this one! Where is it from?” she asks the dealer.

“France,” he says, looking bored.

L’Wren eyes the price tag and I take the chance to head to the other side of the show, where the deeper bargains live. Even the food is cheaper—corndogs and slushies instead of kale Caesars with overcooked chicken. I buy myself a funnel cake and eat it slowly. I run my hand across what Oliver has taught me is a Heywood Wakefield rocking chair. “How much?” I ask the harried young woman who is still unloading her truck.

“Sorry, I got a late start.” She wipes the sweat from her forehead with the back of her work glove. “I’ll take fifty bucks for it.”

I peek under the cushion and find the Heywood label, which means the chair could easily fetch a thousand dollars, maybe more. I sit in the chair and rock gently, hoping for a minute that it’ll share its stories—the books read in it at bedtime, the gossip shared over sweet tea on a wraparound porch.

“The chair is worth much more,” I tell the woman.

“Really? I bought it at an estate sale. It was surrounded by junk.”

“Ask for at least a thousand. You’ll probably get it.”

I stop to buy a pair of onyx and gold candlesticks for the dining room and a vintage Kantha quilt for Emmy’s bed. I’m heading back to find L’Wren and Jenna when I see a picture that takes my breath away.

It’s a black-and-white photograph of a tiny ski resort town in the summer. It’s a ghost town, totally devoid of tourists and the locals who keep it running. In the foreground, there’s a horse—a young dappled palomino, tied up outside an empty café. Something about the mood feels clandestine, like the secret beauty of this town happens when no one else is around.

“Excuse me.” My mouth goes completely dry. “Hi…excuse me.”

The dealer, a red-faced gentleman sweating through a plaid shirt, turns. “Can I help you?”

“That photograph. Could you tell me who the photographer is?” But I already know.

“You have a good eye. It’s…” He stalls for time so he can remember the name. “A New Mexico kid, a real cowboy of a guy.”

I smile. Jasper would love to hear himself referred to as a cowboy, I’m sure. The dealer flips his reading glasses from the top of his head to the tip of his nose to make out the signature. “Jasper…” He can’t make out the last name so he just mumbles something beginning with a G . “Do you know his work?”

“I do.” My voice shakes. “Yes.”

“It’s signed,” the dealer says. “Incredible opportunity, really.”

“How much?”

He stares at me. “Six hundred,” he says. “No charge for the frame.”

It’s more money than I planned to spend today but the photo is worth much more than he’s asking. I pull out my wallet and when he hands me the picture, I’m surprised how heavy the frame is. I unpack the quilt I’ve bought, wrap it around the frame, and fit everything back into one bag.

I wander the booths aimlessly. I can’t focus on anything but the piece of Jasper that I’m carrying. The tents are getting more crowded and hot and suddenly I feel woozy. A woman selling chandeliers pulls out a plastic folding chair. “You all right?”

“Thanks,” I say, dropping my head between my knees. “I forgot to eat breakfast.”

It was a mistake to buy this photograph. I’ve worked so hard to stop thinking about Jasper and now a piece of him is back.

After some deep breaths, I thank the woman and then find a stand selling bottles of water. I’m next in line when I hear L’Wren let out a high-pitched squeal. “Jenna! Jenna! ”

Still holding the heavy bag, I push through the crowd in front of a row of booths. Jenna is doubled over laughing, holding two plastic cups and splashing wine everywhere.

“Help!” L’Wren calls. She has one leg straight in front of her and is using her heel to drag herself forward. Her other leg is stuck behind her, up to the buckle in mud. Jenna puts a cup in her mouth and tries to pull with her free hand.

“Diana!” L’Wren cries with relief when she sees me. “I’m stuck in the mud!”

I hitch my shopping bag higher onto my shoulder and drape one of L’Wren’s arms around my waist and Jenna gets under the other one. “On three,” I say. “One, two…” L’Wren grunts so hard she lets out a teeny fart. Jenna snorts and falls backward. She lands on her butt, then throws up her arms and cries, “My filler!” And then we all lose it, laughing until we’re crying and covered in mud.

—

By dusk we’re standing in the parking lot with a farm table, a pine armoire, three boxes of barn lighting, and two rugs. L’Wren is waving down a white cube truck. All three of us cringe as the truck scrapes a VIP Loading Only sign. Liam leans his head out the window, his unwashed hair hanging over his eyes. “Sorry!” Then he takes out two traffic cones, honks twice, and pulls down on an imaginary rope, giving us a long-haul truckers’ salute.

“Ladies.” He hops out of the truck wearing a Death to Capitalists hoodie with mismatched socks and Adidas slippers. Liam is somewhere between too young be the brother I spent my childhood praying for, and too old to be my misfit son, but since the day I met him, he’s felt like family. Like the cousin you gravitate toward at the family reunion and together you avoid everyone else at the party.

He takes a long look at the three of us still caked in mud. “Jesus.”

“Liam!” L’Wren hands him an armful of bags. “I owe you. You don’t mind dropping off Jenna’s armoire, do you?”

“Nope.”

Two guys from the antiques show help muscle everything into the truck. Liam and I watch as L’Wren and Jenna buy the last of the wicker baskets from the dealer next to the parking lot and toss them into the back of her Range Rover. “A thank-you gift for Liam!” L’Wren hollers.

“Awesome!” Liam gives her a thumbs-up. “I definitely need more wicker in my life.” He glances at me, then down at my muddy knees. “I have so many questions.”

“I’ll give you…two.”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “Was there, like, a mud-wrestling part of the day? And did you win?”

“Yes. And obviously, yes.”

“Last question. Is any of this crap yours?”

I pretend to study him closely. “I’m sorry, are you trying to buy a wicker basket off me? How many is too many, Liam?”

He laughs and reaches for the bag holding Jasper’s photograph. “I can put that up front if you want.” I know this is the sensible choice. To place more distance between me and my ghost from the past.

“That’s all right,” I say. “It can ride with me.”

We thank Liam for taking our stuff and pile into L’Wren’s car. In the back seat, I pull out my phone and text Alicia.

You’ll never believe what I bought today.

Before I hit send, I imagine our long back-and-forth. I quickly delete the text and decide to call her later instead.

I rest my head against the window, clutching Jasper’s photograph to my chest the entire ride home.