Alison Lurie - Last Resort

“I believe you,” Molly said, though unconvinced.

“Mom told him she thought he should get them trimmed before he went on television, but Bob wouldn’t. He really loves his eyebrows. Sometimes he kinda pets them, like this.” As she demonstrated, Molly observed that Barbie’s own blonde eyebrows were more or less vestigial.

“Well, it must be nice to be married to someone like that,” Molly said, thinking how little she herself would have enjoyed it.

“I d’know. The thing is, I keep letting him down. I don’t mean to, really, but—” The toast snapped up: she started, flushed.

“Here.” Molly slid the butter toward Barbie.

“It’s—Well, like there’s this thing with food,” Barbie went on. “See, when I was about fourteen I stopped eating meat. I’ve always loved animals, and it just like didn’t seem right anymore, you know? But then about a month after we were married, we were at a thousand-dollar-a-plate barbecue, and this journalist asked if something was wrong with my steak, why wasn’t I eating it? So I told her why, and she put it into her newspaper. Mom was furious. She said, why couldn’t you just have said you weren’t hungry, or you were on a diet?” Holding the lid of the English china butter dish, which had a cow on it, she looked at Molly helplessly.

“Why should you have done that?” she asked. “There’s nothing wrong with being a vegetarian.”

“Well, but there is sometimes, sorta. I mean, for a lot of people, in cattle country especially, if you don’t eat beef it’s an insult. It’s sorta like, unpatriotic.” Barbie giggled sadly. “The trouble is, when anybody asks me something, I don’t think first, I just kinda tell the truth, you know?”

“I can see that might be a handicap for a politician’s wife,” Molly said. Becoming impatient, she took the two slices of toast away from Barbie, buttered them, and set them on a plate.

“Oh, thanks. I’m sorry, I’m so stupid today—”

“Why don’t you pour yourself some coffee?” Molly suggested, pointing to the electric pot, which was more than half full. When her arthritis was bad, as it was this morning, she didn’t try to lift the heavy, slippery glass container, but scooped the hot liquid out with a soup ladle. She was reluctant to demonstrate her method in front of strangers, even as inept a stranger as Barbie Mumpson.

“Oh, thanks.” Barbie poured, then sat down heavily at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee to which she had added large measures of sugar and half and half. “Hey, this toast is yummy.”

A child, that’s what you are, Molly thought. “Maybe you should learn to tell an occasional white lie,” she suggested in a neutral voice.

“Yeah, that’s what everybody says.” Barbie sighed. “Only I mostly can’t think of any. But it’s not just that.”

“Mm.” Molly lowered herself into a chair.

“It’s—” Barbie chewed toast. “The thing is, everybody loves Bob so much, so naturally he just has all these opportunities.”

He cheats on you, Molly translated. “I see.”

“So then these things happen. Mom says it’s my own fault. She says I don’t know how to hold my husband’s interest.”

“Really.”

“I’ve tried, honestly. I read all these kinda weird books, and I went to Dallas and bought this silver lace camisole and panties set that the saleswoman at Neiman-Marcus swore was the latest thing. You wouldn’t believe what they cost. Only when Bob saw me he went into a laughing fit and said it looked like I got myself caught in a spiderweb.”

“That wasn’t very nice,” Molly said, making an effort not to laugh herself, or even smile.

“No,” Barbie said, as if surprised. “I guess it wasn’t.” She blinked fast, as if there were something in her eye, then swallowed. “What it is, see, there’s this person called Laverna he knows. She’s very glamorous, she used to be a showgirl in Las Vegas. When Bob was running for Congress he swore it was all over, and we were going to start a new life together in Washington. But then last month I found out Laverna was in Washington too, because I called up the number he left with his receptionist and she answered.”

“Ah,” Molly said, this time more sympathetically.

“Bob said it wasn’t like that. He said, didn’t I think Laverna had a right to visit our nation’s capital, like any other patriotic American? I said yeah, okay, but what was he doing at her place at ten o’clock at night? Then I started to cry, and he said, ‘Baby, you’re hysterical. Why don’t you go back to Tulsa for a while, get ahold of yourself?’ So I bought a plane ticket and went on home.”

“Mm.”

“I was crying the whole time, the flight attendant kept bringing me Kleenex. I told Mom it wasn’t any use, I wanted a divorce. But she says I should think it over for a while. And she thought I should get out of town, because she didn’t trust me not to break down and blab to some journalist, like I keep doing. And besides, then there would be somebody to come to Florida with Aunt Dorrie. It was sorta killing two birds with one shot. Mom likes that kind of thing.”

“She likes to kill birds,” said Molly, who had begun to form a negative opinion of Barbie’s mother.

“Yeah—What? No, it’s a, what do you call it, a proverb.”

“Really,” Molly said, managing to keep her voice neutral.

“So what do you think I should do?” Barbie gazed wide-eyed at her.

“Well.” Molly paused. For most of her life she had been considered an artistic and delightful lightweight, and people seldom asked for her opinion on serious matters. But once she became elderly, she was assumed to be wise—perhaps a survival from an earlier age, when simply to live into old age suggested that you were both shrewd and lucky.

“Mom said before I do anything drastic I’d better be sure. She says most men are like Bob. Eventually they run around on their wives, if they get the chance. She says I should think about my future, what it would be like without him. And there’s no guarantee I would do any better next time, at my age.”

“Really,” said Molly, to whom Barbie seemed scarcely out of adolescence. “What is your age?”

“I’m thirty-six. And it’s probably true what Mom says. I mean, if I leave Bob I can forget about ever living in Washington again and being the wife of a prominent person.”

“If that’s what you want from life,” Molly said. Barbie, staring into space, did not respond. “So what will you do now?” she asked, as mildly as possible.

“I d’know. I’ve got to think about it. Mom says if I decide to stay with Bob, she’ll tell him he has to treat me right.”

“You think that’d have any effect?”

“Yeah, maybe. After all, Bob owes her. Once we were engaged, Mom got behind him in a big way. She raised a lot of money for his campaign, and got him some real professional staff and advance people.”

“I see.”

“Anyhow, she says we’ve got the upper hand now, because if people find out about Laverna it could really hurt Bob’s career, especially on account of he has a lot of born-again-type constituents.”

“You mean she would threaten to tell his constituents about Laverna,” asked Molly, in whose mind a less and less favorable picture of Myra was taking shape.

“Yeah. Well, probably she’d just tell the media, that’d be faster. But she says if Bob listens to reason, she’ll get rid of Laverna for good.”

“Really? How could she do that?”

“I d’know. But I guess she could if she wanted to. She knows people who can do things for her. She probably knows some even in Washington.”

Molly stared at her guest. Was it possible that this naïve young woman was talking about the planning of a murder? “People who do what kind of thing?”