When Venus Fell
“For a lot of months I looked at my own home but didn’t see it,” Gib replied. “Since you’ve been here I remember how pretty it is.”
He carried the crate into the kitchen. “Well, well, the adventurers return,” Ruth said. She had stayed to help prepare for the opening weekend, now only ten days away. “We swore y’all had gone skiing or been hijacked by aliens.”
“I seen some black helicopters a week ago,” Ebb added darkly.
I looked at Gib’s shuttered eyes and nearly choked. “We were snowed in,” he said. “Two days of bad take-out pizza and bad stay-in cable TV.”
“I see.” Ruth looked unconvinced. Isabel and Min gazed at us curiously.
“Vee!” Ella hurried into the kitchen, brushing snow from the hem of her coat and long wool skirt. Carter was beside her. She was rosy and glowing, pink cheeks, green eyes, and black hair combining to make a stunningly vibrant impression. She halted and stared at the small wooden crate sitting on the kitchen table. “That’s from the warehouse? Is it ours? Oh, Vee.”
I went over and put my arms around her, then whispered “yes” in her ear. I held her because she did exactly what I expected: she trembled and began to cry. She got herself under control and listened joyfully as I told her what I’d seen. She insisted I tell her every detail about the furniture. She called Gib over, hugged him, and cupped his hands in hers. “You’ve honored us so much. You’ve given us back something intangible—not just heirlooms or sentimental belongings.”
“It was my pleasure,” he said with courtly grace.
I took a small book, its old cover frayed and faded, from my purse. I held it out to Ella. “Our grandmother Akiko’s poetry collection,” I said.
She took the book with tearful awe and opened it. “ ‘They tell me I have no place next to you,’ ” she read slowly, “ ‘but the feather follows the spirit of the wind.’ ” She shut her eyes, then pressed the book to her heart.
• • •
Just as Gib promised, a moving van showed up a few days later containing the contents of Ella’s and my childhood home—the only real home we’d known until we came to Cameron Hall. She and I spent hours prowling over the belongings, talking and touching and occasionally crying about it all. “You’ll have your choice of furniture for your house,” I told Ella. “Our own furniture, things from our family.”
“Oh, Vee! I can’t take all of it.”
“I only want the piano.”
“When you decide what else you’d like you can pick pieces to take to the cottage.”
“All right.” There were times when I actually allowed myself to imagine the best. I wanted to believe Carter and Ella were a permanent couple.
And I wanted to believe I could stay with Gib, no matter what.
Gib sent everything but the piano to a rented storage warehouse in Hightower. “I want to put my piano in the front room of the cottage,” I told him. “I know I’ll be cramped, but I have to have it there. Please.”
He turned to Carter and Jasper. “Get your back braces and your hernia belts,” he said. I watched happily as they helped Gib ease the old baby grand through the cottage’s door.
That night, when I played my own piano for the first time in ten years, Gib pulled a chair close by and listened for hours, unmoving. Memories were a sweet addiction I had to hear to survive. The piano had suffered. Its legs were scratched, it was woefully out of tune, and the middle-C key stuck sometimes. But that didn’t matter.
I played until I was damp with perspiration and my hands ached. Then I bowed my head against the backstop and slumped in relief and sorrow.
Gib helped me up, then picked me up and carried me into the bathroom. He filled the big whirlpool tub and helped me undress, then guided me into the tub and sat on the wide rim, rubbing my shoulders. “I owe you a favor,” I whispered.
“Play the piano naked for me on New Year’s Eve,” he said.
I laughed. He simplified the emotional issues, the sexual issues, everything. I loved him for that.
“It’s a deal,” I told him.
Twenty-eight
Opening day arrived. The sky was full of low-hanging, lead-gray clouds, and the weather forecast threatened snow. The temperature was just above freezing at early afternoon. “Oh, this is a bad sign,” Isabel fretted, looking out the window at the sky as she carried fresh flowers to a desk in a corner of the main hall.
“No one’s called to cancel,” Gib said sternly. He double-checked the dial tone on the desk’s large console phone, as if he couldn’t trust it. Min sat down and spread her hands atop the small wooden box that was used as a file for the guest registry. It was stuffed with alphabetized index cards clipped to credit-card invoices. “I wish they’d all cancel,” she said.
I walked into the music room, adjusting lamps, then fiddling with the cut flowers in a ceramic bowl atop the piano. Olivia and Bea were huddled on a worn leather couch. A large scrapbook lay on Bea’s broad lap. She turned the pages slowly, while Olivia gazed at them. Olivia raised her head and beckoned me with a small, queenly gesture. “Take yourself away from your nervous piddling,” Bea ordered, “and come see what’s important.”
Biting my tongue, I sat down on the couch at Bea’s other side. Olivia planted a fingertip on a scrapbook page filled with snapshots. I caught my breath.
The pictures were of Mom and Pop at the opening of Cameron Hall. The page contained a gallery of images from the stories Gib had told me about that special weekend—Pop seated at the piano, with Mom standing beside him, smiling as she sang some song I wished I could hear. I stared at a photo of Mom in her yellow sun-hat, breezy polka-dot blouse, and pedal pushers, posing in the Hall’s sunny courtyard with five-year-old Gib standing straight and stoic beside her. Ruth pouted from her seat in a toy wagon Gib pulled. Mom cradled Isabel—a brown-haired baby—in her arms.
“Nice,” I managed to say around the knot in my throat.
Olivia wrote on a notepad:
Your parents are here again, hopeful and happy, in spirit and form, because of you and Ella. I’m sure you’ll make them proud, and us as well.
“I intend to,” I said stiffly. She had even enlisted my dead parents in her determined efforts to preserve her family, her home. I’d never admit it openly, but maybe my service to her and my devotion to Gib were the only way Mom and Pop could rest in peace.
“Pray, Venus de Milo,” Ruth ordered. “We need all the help we can get. Even yours.” Everyone was gathered for a benediction in the library, with Hoss and Sophia officiating. It was noon; there wouldn’t be time for any more family meetings after guests began arriving.
I leaned close to Ruth and whispered, “I’ll pray for you to stop bellyaching and predicting this weekend will be a failure. Are you sure you’re not Emory’s secret daughter? You sound just like him.” I leered at her melodramatically. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re Emory’s secret love child and Joey is your twin.”
Ruth glared at me. “Why, look who’s suddenly become the Cameron cheerleader. Now there’s a phony transformation if I ever heard one. You should take a lesson from your sister. If you’re going to pretend to care about this family, at least be consistent about it.”
I opened my mouth to barbecue her with a few choice words, but Sophia waved her ring-decked hands for attention. She pointed to Hoss. He cleared his throat. “Let us bow our heads,” he intoned. But as Hoss recited the benediction I peeked across the room at Gib, who also gazed at me while everyone else’s eyes were shut.
He gave me a look that made me want to find some private place with him and pull the window shades. Even as Hoss somberly invoked divine support for the inn and the family, Gib and I traded the silent, reckless music of our alliance. We were wild, besotted with each other, and during the past week we’d used that obsession to avoid worrying about the future. “I can either concentrate on the inn or on you,” he’d said one night after we’d dragged ourselves to the cottage following a brutal day of last-minute chores. “B
ut not both, thank God. Right now all I want to do is lock the door and get us both naked.”
“I’ll lock the door,” I said. “I’ll take your clothes off. Then you can undress me. Voilà.”
Now, while replaying the explicit details of that night and others we’d shared, I glanced at my sister’s angelic face. She clasped Carter’s hand. Her lips moved along with the prayer. Carter had his eyes closed dutifully, but he circled the tip of his forefinger atop Ella’s hand with sensual intent.
I frowned at him and Ella but fought a tide of guilt, all too aware that I was a hypocrite for condemning their impulses when I’d given in to my own.
• • •
At two o’clock, we were all spruced and polished, waiting for the imminent arrival of the first guest. I wore a gold blouse and black slacks, the most demure outfit I’d owned in years. Gib had put on a pin-striped shirt and gray trousers. He had gained some weight back and no longer needed the leather suspenders he wore, but he knew I liked them.
Min paced the front hall. Gib and I waited with her. She was trembling. “I’m not ready,” she said. I patted her hand and didn’t admit my own stomach was full of butterflies.
Gib put his arm around her, though he didn’t seem relaxed, himself. “Minnie, did I ever tell you about the time the President’s teeth fell out?”
“No. I’m sure I’d remember that.” We both gazed at Gib with wan curiosity.
“We were in Moscow. We’d left the President’s hotel, we were in a motorcade headed to the Kremlin. The President was about to go on Russian television with Yeltsin and give a major speech. His partial plate popped out. All four of his upper front teeth. He couldn’t get the partial back in. The leader of the free world was about to make a major television appearance in Russia, and he looked like an old boxer who could spit watermelon seeds.”
“What did you do?”
“I said, ‘Sir, I can find ways to stall this motorcade for thirty minutes while we get some dental cement.’ He said, ‘No, son, give me your glue.’ Because he knew I always carried a little tube of heavy-duty household glue. To make a long story short, I glued his false teeth back in place and the Russians never knew the difference. Now that’s grace under pressure, Minnie.”
She smiled gently. “So you’re saying if the President can meet Russians with his false teeth glued in, we can greet a few harmless guests for the weekend?”
“You got it. I’ll be right here next to you. I know I’m not Simon, but I’ll do my best.”
She hugged him, then reached out to me. “Thank you for being here, too.” I nodded awkwardly and squeezed her hand. She sighed, brushed the front of her brown dress, and straightened her shoulders. “Ready,” she said.
We heard shrieks and strange running noises outside on the cobblestones. Gib bolted to the front doors and flung them open. “Goddamn,” he said softly. The entire herd of British pigs scrambled past and headed for the front lawn. “They rooted a hole under their fence,” Isabel called as she darted after them. Ella followed her gamely, waving to me with the end of a fringed plaid scarf she wore With a plaid jumper.
Carter galloped into the yard on his gray gelding. He slid the horse to a stop inches from the pigs. “The Manchesters are here! They drove by the barns to visit! They ought to be here any minute!”
Our first guests, of course. They had perfect timing and formidable credentials. Sissy Manchester was a travel correspondent for a dozen major southern newspapers; her husband, Casper, wrote a column titled “Inn-Side View” for a prominent regional-history magazine. “I’m trying to think what Simon would do,” Min said quietly. “He’d laugh. But I can’t.”
Gib swung into calm crisis-command mode, calling to Carter, “Wait here and help me with the Manchesters’ luggage!” He gestured brusquely for me to follow him. Then, to Min, “Minnie, you stay here at the doors and smile as if we chase pigs every day.”
“It’s beginning to feel that way,” she answered.
We hurried into the courtyard. Gib pointed. “You flank the pigs that way; I’ll take the other side. We’ll help Isabel and Ella corner the herd out there by the box shrubs.”
I made a wide arc to the right, waving my arms. “FeeMolly was right about the little bastards,” I called. “I wish I had her meat cleaver at the moment.”
Gib strode to the left. “I can see that headline on the first-weekend reviews. Entertainment at Cameron Hall Now Includes Pig Massacres.”
Carter leaped off his horse and blew a kiss at Ella, who had scooped up one of the miniature pigs in her arms. “Why, ma’am, your baby is my spittin’ image,” Carter teased. She laughed. I scowled past him at the point where the main drive curled out of the forest. We had no time for Carter’s flirtations. I wanted everything to go well.
Gib and I assisted as Ella and Isabel started gently coaxing pigs into a corner hemmed by shrubs. But then Shag and several other dogs loped around a corner of the Hall and happily dived into the pig population. Pigs scattered in all directions.
Ella held her hapless porker against her chest as a hound reared on his hind legs and nosed the pig in the fanny, at the same time raking Ella’s hands with his paws. “Get down, dog, get down,” she ordered with no effect. The already hysterical pig squealed like mad. Gib and I ran to Ella. He pulled the dog away and I grabbed the pig out of her arms.
As if on cue the small, squirming, offended pig squirted watery brown pig shit. The pungent stream arced across the front of my gold blouse and down the right sleeve of Gib’s dress shirt. We stared at each other. A smell like a thousand acres of rotting Louisiana swamp rose from us both. We heard the distant sound of a car. “Oh, dear,” Ella said, and covered her nose.
It was hopeless. The Manchesters, the first and most influential guests of the grand reopening, the symbolic embodiment of the approvals that would honor Simon but also gently push him into the past, arrived in their big blue Mercedes as Gib and I stood there doused in pig excrement. They were neatly clad in matching ski jackets, plaid shirts, brown slacks, and loafers with fringed tongues. They had the look of well-fed gourmands, but more than anything they resembled Phyllis Diller and Bob Hope about to set out on a hike along the back nine of a Palm Springs golf course. They gaped at Gib and me.
Min went to them, a smile pasted on her ashen face, her hands extended. “Sissy. Casper,” she began. “How nice to see you again—”
One of the loose pigs bolted out of the shrubbery and nearly knocked Sissy Manchester down. She staggered against her Mercedes, then plucked a miniature tape recorder from her purse. “I was attacked by a pig,” she said into it.
Casper pulled a large professional camera from a bag and began snapping pictures of us.
“Next week we’re having miniature pork chops,” Gib said.
By evening the Hall had a full quota of paying guests. Their luggage had been carried to their rooms, and a shaky but warm welcome had been offered by Min to the guests who came after the Manchesters—whom we greased with champagne and pastries as quickly as possible. There were tears and kind words from many of the longtime guests, but ultimately they made it clear they’d come to survey the inn’s new management with professional thoroughness. They soon sprawled out over the house and the back decks, into the woods on the hiking trails and off to the stable to select horses for weekend riding jaunts.
I showered and scrubbed myself, then, with no time to go back to the cottage for clean clothes, I donned a pink-silk pantsuit outfit Ella loaned me. It was two sizes too large. I looked like I was wearing pajamas. I hid behind the piano and played Chopin while high tea was served in the library that afternoon.
Gib disappeared then returned looking fresh-scrubbed, dressed in clean clothes and smelling of excess cologne. I switched to Broadway show tunes for the cocktail hour, during which I drank four cups of coffee and massaged my tired hands. The guests filled the tables in the elegant main dining room and a second, more intimate room that Simon and Min had converted to an additional
dining space over the years. I was glad for the long dinner break.
Meals at the Hall were served family style in huge bowls and platters. The feast would take a good two hours. “Still the best nouvelle southern cuisine in the region,” I heard one guest sigh as I passed the dining-room door. FeeMolly’s famous reputation remained intact and glowing after a year’s hiatus. Outsiders didn’t know she was a homicidal maniac, or that FeeMolly probably thought nouvelle was a liberal word meaning expensive. She might be right.
As dinner progressed I washed highball glasses and straightened the self-serve bar in the music room. Ella and Isabel had been pressed into service as wine stewards.
Gib had disappeared into the inner mazes of the Hall—those dim, claustrophobic service alleys some old mansions harbor between the main rooms. Several guests complained that their room thermostats weren’t working. Wearing a bulky toolbelt, he emerged from a narrow service door in the back hall as I went past with a tray of freshly dried wineglasses for the music room’s bar.
“Hello, gorgeous, when did a looker like you start wait-ressing in this hallway?” he quipped, just as his belt snagged the corner of my tray. We collided, toppling four glasses onto the floor. One bounced safely on the rug, one smacked the leg of a sideboard, cracking off its glass stem, and the other two shattered.
“At least we’re not cleaning up pig crap,” I said wearily as we squatted together, picking pieces of broken glass out of a dignified old Turkish rug. Gib pulled me to him for a kiss.
“I swear I still stink,” he said. “But I put on a gallon of Carter’s Old Spice.” I wound my arms around his neck and kissed him back.
“Oink,” I answered. “It’s your imagination.”
“I don’t think so. The woman who produces the Travel South cable-channel show sidles away from me every time I go past her.” He hesitated. “But maybe she’s repulsed by this.” He nodded toward his maimed hand.