Lust, Loathing And A Little Lip Gloss

“It’s a shame I can’t stay for the actual event,” Leah said, although we both knew she was grateful for the exclusion. Scott had explained that the number of people in attendance had to be an even number and if Leah took part in the proceedings there would be eleven of us. Leah couldn’t have handled the quiet meditative atmosphere of a séance anyway. We were both sure that spirits could not be summoned, which meant that any communication with the dead would be imaginary. The imaginings of other people cannot be monitored or predicted and Leah didn’t like events that she couldn’t control.

“At least you’ll get to taste the appetizers. Enrico promised me he’d make enough so that you could bring a few home with you.”

“Sweet of him.” She glanced at the metal hands of my walnut-finished clock and the smooth skin between her eyebrows wrinkled in disapproval. “He should have been here by now. We want to make sure that we have time to clean up after any last-minute preparations before the guests arrive. Nothing undermines a party as quickly as a messy kitchen.”

Clearly the parties Leah attended were a lot tamer than the ones I went to. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon,” I said sweetly.

“Mmm, well, since we can’t do anything else until he arrives, let me take this moment to give you your housewarming gift.”

“Housewarming gift?” I repeated. Visions of Pottery Barn throw pillows danced in my head.

She grinned and crossed to the large UPS box she had placed on my window seat. Full of props and decorative items upon her arrival, I had assumed it was now empty. But from it she pulled out a carefully wrapped large rectangular gift.

The paper was a pale gold and gleamed in the dwindling light coming from the window. I found a weak spot and pierced the paper with my fingernail then tore into the wrapping. Shreds of gold fell to the floor like oversize confetti.

And when the covering was gone I was left with a black-and-white photograph of myself as a little girl. My hair was the same unruly challenge it was now and my features hadn’t changed much, but the eyes of the child-me lacked the cynical skepticism that I had cultivated over the years. It was me in my own age of innocence. My arms were wrapped around the neck of the man who gave me that hair. His own curls were cut short and a cluster of them embraced his chin in a well-trimmed beard.

“Thank you. I forgot about this picture,” I whispered, although this very photo had graced our mother’s dresser for at least ten years. “I’ll have to find a good place for it.” I turned it over and touched the cool black metal that held the photo in place. A silver wire stretched from one side to the other, waiting to be draped over a nail.

“There, over the side table with the other pictures,” Leah said without hesitation.

I looked at the newly mounted images on the wall. There was a small picture of a blue jay swooping down to snatch a peanut out of my friend Mary Ann’s hand. Next to that a framed newspaper article, the first critical review my work had ever received. I had highlighted the words highly enjoyable and then blacked out but at times trite. Then the nighttime picture Dena had taken of our friend Marcus, his hand extended up into the air so that it looked like he held the moon in the sky. There was also a picture of Leah holding Jack shortly after his birth. In that picture my mother bent over the swaddled infant, her lips shaped into an exaggerated kiss. But all these people were alive. Even the review referred to a book that I still had access to. What I held in my hand was a tribute to a man who was gone. It felt like the Sophie-child in the picture was laughing at me, saying, “Remember this? Remember what it was like to touch him? Remember what it was like to feel safe?”

I did remember, and it made me heart-achingly sad and I had no desire to hang my grief on my living-room wall.

Leah waited a respectable amount of time for me to come up with an excuse for why the picture shouldn’t be placed with the others before taking it from me and holding it up above the fireplace. “Fine, we’ll put it here. He’s been gone for twelve years, Sophie. It’s time you said goodbye to the man and hello to your memories. Besides,” she glanced at the staircase and pressed her full lips together as if working out some complicated equation, “he belongs here. I don’t know why, but it just feels like some part of him should be here.”

“Some part of him?” I repeated. “That sounds like the premise of some part of a poltergeist movie.”

“Not literally a part of his body, but this.” She pressed the picture against the wall and admired it. “This belongs here.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“There’s nothing to think about. Give me a hammer and a couple of nails.”

“I only have one left,” I said. “Wait ’til I go to the hardware store later this week. You know how hard it is to hang a picture straight with just one nail.”

“Well, we’ll just have to try to make it work. Bring me the one nail.”

I suppressed a couple of swear words and reluctantly brought her what she asked for. I turned away as the hammer struck the nail and reached for my cell phone. Leah was right about one thing; Enrico should have been here by now. He picked up on the second ring.

“Yes?”

It took me a second to respond. Enrico had always been warm on the phone and the question he had used to replace a greeting jarred me. “Enrico?”

“Yes?” he said again, this time with even less patience. Behind me Leah was banging the hammer in a quick but steady rhythm.

“Um, it’s Sophie Katz. I was just wondering if you were on your way?”

“What? Is it so late? I did not realize.” I could hear his irritation, but whether it was directed at me, himself or something else was anybody’s guess.

“Sooo, are you? On your way, I mean?” I didn’t want to be pushy, but he was only one of nine people coming over and the only food I had in the house was made by Kellogg’s.

“Yes, I come. Things have happened that are not so good, but still, I come.”

The pounding of the hammer stopped and I turned to see Leah’s handiwork. The frame was crooked, not horribly, but enough that anyone looking at it would note the imperfection. Last time I had spoken to Enrico his English had been similarly imperfect, but now it was considerably worse. Was he drunk? Tired? Or were the “things that had happened” so disconcerting that he had literally forgotten how to speak English? “Enrico, is everything okay?”

“No, everything is not okay. Today I am…how do you say…I am haunted. Yes, this is right, I am being haunted by the past.” His voice sounded weak and far away. He must have been speaking into the phone, but I had a feeling that he was really talking to himself.

“Uh-huh…so when you say haunted, do you mean that something you’ve done has come back to haunt you? Or do you mean that you’ve been visited by Casper or one of his not-so-friendly associates?”

“Casper? The cartoon character? Are you mocking me?”

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “That was insensitive.”

“What—? But…you fucking bitch!”

“Excuse me? That was totally uncalled for!” I waited for Enrico to explain himself, but instead he must have thrown the phone down on the ground. I heard it clatter against a hard surface and in the background I thought I heard another noise—a squawking, like the sound of a distressed bird. “Enrico?” I yelled. “Are you still there? You owe me an apology!”

But he said nothing. I heard another squawk, a loud thump and then the line went dead. “He hung up on me!” I snapped.

“Well, what did you expect?” Leah shrugged and adjusted the frame once again. It was still crooked, but now it leaned toward the left rather than the right. “I heard your end of the conversation, Sophie. You were flippant with him.”

“I was trying to engage him in friendly banter! And he didn’t just hang up on me, he also called me a fucking bitch!”

“That’s extreme,” she admitted. “But…well, he is a chef. You know how they are—artistic temperaments and all.”

“So what are you saying? That it’s okay to call women you’ve never met before bitches as long as you can make a good pâté?”

“No, of course not, but—Where’s Jack?” We both looked at the empty couch. I immediately scanned the room for Mr. Katz and sighed in relief when I spotted him on the window seat. At that moment Jack came toddling out of the bathroom, buoyant and seemingly unharmed. “Mommy, Mommy! Auntie Sophie has sandbox and she hides chocolate in it!”

“A sandbox?” Leah threw me a questioning look.

“Um, noooo, but I do keep Mr. Katz’s litter box in there.”

Jack’s mouth spread out into what might actually have been a shit-eating grin.

“Call poison control!” Leah snapped.

“But there’s nothing in his teeth,” I pointed out.

“I save it,” Jack explained, still beaming. “See, I save for dessert.” His little fist removed and offered a cat turd to Leah, who stumbled back, aghast.

“Put it back,” she screeched, “before you get some kind of weird cat disease!” She grabbed his arm and dragged him back into the bathroom, screaming something incomprehensible about antibacterial soap. I went to the doorway and watched her scrub his hands as he struggled to free himself.

“What if Enrico doesn’t show up?” I asked.

“Waiters on Wheels,” Leah said, too busy to look at me while she spoke. “Call and have them deliver appetizers from Sassi. But call him back first and try to smooth things over. Apologize to him for being insolent.”

“Are you kidding me? He called me a fucking bitch!”

Jack giggled and jumped up and down. “Auntie Sophie has potty mouth!”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Well, I’m not the one who tried to eat out of a litter box.”

“That’s it, we’re leaving.” Leah swooped Jack up in her arms and headed for the door, pausing briefly to retrieve her jacket and purse from my coatrack.

“Don’t go,” I pleaded. “If Enrico doesn’t come there will only be nine of us and we need ten. You could be part of this.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. Why don’t you call Mary Ann, I’m sure she’ll come.”

“Mary Ann’s in Italy. She scored a killer assistant makeup artist job for Milan’s Fashion week and when she’s done with that she’s going to take a few extra weeks to do some Cathedral hopping around Europe. You, on the other hand, are right here. Come on, Leah, it could be fun.”

“Sophie, I love you, but I absolutely refuse to make merry with a bunch of people at a séance.”

“Fine, but if they call up the ghost of Emily Post you’ll be sorry!”

“Emily Post isn’t dead,” Leah yelled over her shoulder as she walked out.

I watched her carry my nephew down the stairs like a sack of potatoes. As a general rule I preferred to limit my time with the two of them to a couple of hours a week, but now I would have done almost anything to get Leah to stay. Bad things happened in threes, the unpleasantness exponentially increasing in severity. I was counting Enrico’s obscenities as one and I had a horrible feeling that bad thing two and three were going to pop up before the day was done.

I tried to call Enrico back, but all I got was the steady and grating pulse of a busy signal. He had seemed so normal when we talked on other occasions, but apparently he had a dark side. I ordered food from his restaurant and it was delivered within an hour. After setting it up there was nothing to do but sit on the window seat and watch the colors of a sunset try to struggle through the dense fog. When the sky finally went black my doorbell rang. I hadn’t seen anyone walk up the steps. At that time I had been focused on my cat curled up on my lap. I pushed him off and he repaid me by dragging the tips of his claws across my thighs. It was exactly six-thirty. Whoever had come was punctual.

I opened the door unsure if I was going to be greeted by Kane, Scott, Venus or a stranger. But all those predictions were wrong. The man in front of me wasn’t Kane or Scott, but I did know him. His pointed goatee and piercing eyes had made an impression on me years ago.

“Jason Beck,” I exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

Dena had so many exes it was hard to keep track of them all, but Jason had been more memorable than most. Perhaps it was his penchant for velvet (right now he wore velvet jeans and an open, untucked white dress shirt over a T-shirt that read Chaos Rules. But as original as his look was, it was his belief in vampires that had held my attention. Jason thought that Anne Rice was not a novelist but a biographer, and that Count Dracula was a lot more than a dead SOB who had earned himself a dubious place in Transylvanian folklore.

“You’re the Sophie who’s buying this house?” he asked, sounding just as surprised as I was.

I looked past him at the empty sidewalk and the silent street and tried to find the logic in our meeting. “You didn’t know I lived here?” I asked. “You came—to visit the house?”

“I came for the Specter Society meeting.”

Of course. I nearly slapped my forehead in a vaudeville demonstration of my own idiocy. “They told me a Jason was coming,” I said. “I have your name on a place card, but I would never have guessed it was you.”

“And I never could have guessed that you would be hosting a séance. You’re not a believer.”

I smiled wryly. “You want to know if I’ve ditched my…what did you call it? Oh, right, my spiritually closed-minded, excessively materialistic world view.”

Jason smiled and cocked his head to the side. “Have you?”

“It’s a long story,” I hedged. Scott had insisted that all of the members of the group must think that I’m a believer, but Jason had come through for me in the past, and despite our years of separation I counted him as a friend. I didn’t lie to my friends.

I ushered him inside. He walked to the center of my living room and stared at the table. A cold breeze tickled the back of my neck, and I felt my skin prickle with goose bumps. For a second I thought the temperature had dropped for no reason, but that of course was not the case. I had been so overwhelmed by the surprise of Jason that I had forgotten to close the door behind him. I turned to do so, but my doorway was no longer empty. Framed by the streetlight was a character from the musical Hair. At least that’s how she appeared to me. Her mountains of untamed curls fell to her waist and her rainbow rayon skirt grazed her ankles, revealing Birkenstocks and pink toenails.

“I’m Amelia,” she said, not waiting for my question, and without warning pulled me into a hearty embrace and pressed her lips against my cheek. “Thank you so much for inviting us into your home!” she gushed, then broke away and skipped to where Jason stood. She pressed herself into his back and encircled his waist with her arms. “Whoa, this is one of the fanciest séance tables I have ever seen! Who are we trying to summon? Rockefeller?”

“My sister helped me put this together.”

“Leah,” Jason said and I saw the spark of memory twinkle in his eyes. He had never met Leah, but had heard about her from both me and Dena. More to the point, he had heard tales of her devious offspring.

I closed the door and led them to the food and wine. Before I had even finished pouring the first glass the doorbell rang again. I excused myself and went to welcome my next visitor. This time it was Venus, Scott and Kane. Venus was boldly ignoring the weather by going coatless in a knee-length pencil skirt and an asymmetrical sleeveless top made of a material that resembled crinkly paper. Her hair was pulled into the same low ponytail she had worn on our first meeting. Kane was less adventurous in chinos and a wool sweater that had the look of being handmade. Scott looked like Scott—well dressed, hair purposely and attractively disheveled, an impish smile. Later I would notice that he only aimed his smile in my direction when Venus had her back to him.

It was Venus who said hello first as she stepped inside, letting her massive presence ooze into every corner of my home until the room was so full of her that I wondered if there would be enough space for the rest of us. She raised her arms, her fingertips touching like a ballerina preparing to dance. She then gracefully spread her arms wide, inhaling deeply. But that’s where the dance ended. She coughed and brought her hands to her flat chest. “This is all wrong.”

“What’s wrong?” Kane asked anxiously. But Scott didn’t seem perturbed by her announcement at all. If anything he looked bored.

“The arrangement of the furniture,” she explained. “The feng shui—it’s not right.”

“My mother never decorated in accordance to feng shui,” Kane snapped. “And she still felt the spirits.”

“But she didn’t see them,” Venus said evenly. “She didn’t know how to direct the energy of the house.”

“There were reasons why the spirits couldn’t come to my mother.” Kane stepped in front of Venus, invading her personal space. “But those reasons had nothing to do with interior decorating. Feng shui means nothing to those in the world beyond.”

A light laugh escaped her lips. “Kane,” she said, cupping his chin with her workmanlike hand. “You are not an expert in these matters. You can barely summon your own dog, let alone a ghost.”

Kane didn’t move and for a second I thought that Venus might be in danger. I shot a questioning look at Scott. He no longer looked bored, but neither did he seem to have any intention of intervening.

But then Kane stepped back, just out of her reach. They continued to stare at one another, not speaking. From the dining room I could hear Amelia’s cheerful chatter, and then she rushed into the room, her eyes dancing with a vivacious energy that seemed incongruous with the mood of the other guests. “Hello!” Her salutation echoed in the silent room. Then she went around to each of the three new arrivals and gave Kane and Scott the same hug and kiss she had given me. Kane tolerated this with what appeared to be strained patience, but Scott clearly enjoyed the close female contact and their hug lasted a half a minute too long. It was Amelia who broke away first. She then smiled nervously at Venus. “Did you get a load of that séance table?” she asked, her joviality suddenly seeming a little forced. “Those candles are beeswax, Venus. I haven’t seen anything this fancy since the last time you hosted an event.”

“You weren’t at the last event I hosted,” Venus said.

“No, but I was at the one before that.” She then turned toward the male guests. “Come to the dining room. Enrico outdid himself this time.” She paused right before disappearing back into the dining room and tilted her head in my direction. “Where is Enrico anyway? Did he go out for the perfect wine or something?”

I winced. I hadn’t yet told them that while the food was from Enrico’s restaurant it wasn’t actually made by Enrico. I wasn’t entirely clear on where I stood with Kane, but I was pretty sure that I was on Venus’s shit list. If she found out that Enrico and I had exchanged words she would blame me for his absence, even if I was the one in the right.

But before I could figure out how to address the situation the doorbell rang again. I sent up a quick silent prayer that it was Enrico, but to my disappointment it was a family of three. The man introduced himself as Al and the woman and Goth teenage boy as his wife, Lorna, and son, Zach. Three more names from my place cards.

They were a family, but as far as I could tell the only thing that unified them was proximity. The man was a clean-cut blonde with thinning hair. He wore a polo shirt and chinos and he appeared more resigned than happy to be there. His son was a whole other story. His hair, his clothes, his nails, all colored black. Even his eyes were outlined with a harsh black eyeliner, made all the more dramatic by his white powdered face. Around his neck he wore a velvet ribbon choker, and I was tempted to reach out and see if its unraveling would result in decapitation.

But it was the woman who interested me. Like her husband, she wore chinos and her cotton shirt was a pale pink. Her hair was a graying brown and cut neatly in a style that you would expect to see on the stereotypical suburban homemaker. Totally normal, yet, on her, the outfit, the haircut, even the mild-mannered smile, it all seemed like a costume: her hair too thick for such a neat cut where it should have been long and unruly, her skin too olive for the light-colored clothing, the determination in her eyes too strong to gel with the timid pink of her lip gloss.

But I didn’t say any of that. Instead I just ushered them in and closed the door behind them. Jason reentered the living room, a glass of red wine in his hand. “Looks like almost everybody’s here,” he said. “As soon as Enrico shows up we’ll have ten.”

This was the time to tell them. Venus already suspected something was amiss. I could tell by the way she was looking at me, her stare hinting at an underlying hostility.

I cleared my throat and went to the place card that bore Enrico’s name, fondling it like it had some kind of voodoo power that could call him forth. But of course that didn’t work. “I don’t think Enrico is coming,” I finally said.

“Not coming?” Scott asked. “But hasn’t he already been here? Isn’t he the one who brought the food?”

“Um, no. I ordered the food from his restaurant. See, I talked to him earlier today and he seemed a little…out of sorts.”

“How so?” Venus lowered herself onto my armchair with practiced casualness.

“He said he was, um, haunted.”

“Haunted!” Kane was immediately by my side, encasing both my hands in his. “Did he see something? Was he visited?”

“I…I don’t know. He just said he was haunted and that things were not so good.”

“Whoa, okay, this is really heavy,” Amelia said, taking a moment to examine each of our faces to make sure we all shared her sentiment. “Maybe he summoned something and he can’t make it go away. Maybe we should take this party to him and see if we can be of help.”

There was a chorus of protests although Kane and Scott both remained silent.

“I know Enrico better than the rest of you,” Venus said, her eyes still on me. “If he wanted us in his home he would have told us to come.”

“But maybe he didn’t think we’d accept the invitation,” Kane offered. “After all, he must know that some of us blame him for Maria’s departure from the group.”

“I didn’t say he would have invited us,” Venus said evenly. “I said he would have told us to come. There is a very big difference. Enrico may or may not have been aware of your feelings, Kane, and they are your feelings, but whether he was aware of them or not he would have still expected us to yield to his celebrity.”

“He’s a chef!” Amelia said with a laugh. “Not a movie star.”

“I think people in San Francisco like chefs more than movie stars. They’re more real,” Zach said. It was the first thing I’d heard him say and his voice sounded too young and innocent for his somber attire. I tried to get a sense of his age. It was hard to gauge considering all the white powder covering his face, but my guess was that he was around fifteen.

“Maybe we should just give him some space,” Lorna said softly. “Of course, there’s still the problem of our number. Someone will have to leave.”

Lorna leaned over and put a hand on Al’s knee. “I know you don’t really want to be here, darling. Why don’t you go get a beer at that pub you used to go to? The one around the corner. What’s its name again?”

“Jax, but I’m not going anywhere,” Al said shortly.

“But I just thought…”

“I know what you thought, but you were wrong,” he snapped. “Now is someone else going to leave or are we going to call this damn thing off?”

Lorna seemed to shrink into herself and Zach scowled at his father.

“I guess I could—” Amelia began, but she was interrupted by the doorbell. “Maybe it’s Enrico!” she exclaimed and rushed to see.

When she opened the door she revealed a woman dressed head to toe in Calvin Klein with her hair cut in a severe, short style. She peeled off her overcoat and threw it into Amelia’s unexpecting arms. “Tell Enrico I’m here.”