John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

And Kath’s biggest coup was to arrive at the event with one of the artists. She paid the ticket for a prodigy, a pretty girl young enough to be her daughter.

Kath introduced the girl, Dory, as “my date for the evening.” When someone asked, she made it clear that Dory was a housemate. Might as well be the talk of the night.

Kath wouldn’t cling to the youngster, either. In the three years since she’d at last gotten out of her marriage, she’d made a few runs at this crowd, the money crowd, and she’d learned who she could count on for the least hypocritical reception. She introduced the girl to a few of those — heteros, but not entirely tongue-tied in Kath’s presence. Then, alone, Kath found a table beneath the auctioneer’s podium. She set down her bidding paddle and made it over to the art work up for auction. Local stuff, varied in size and splash, it was strung like a Miracle Mile halfway round the function room. Only after she’d checked the first several pieces against the descriptions in her program did the woman allow herself a look back at Dory.

The girl was as much an eyecatcher as Kath. Dory’s skirt was carhop-retro, a cherry electricity well above the knee. She’d topped that off with a rockabilly shirt, a spangled tornado across its back; plus, God knows why, she’d torn away the sleeves. Did she want to call attention to her skin? That indoor skin, white, chilly? Kath suffered the chill; she dropped her chin.

Oh, Kath. Oh, didn’t she get off on teasing the heteros, throwing around a word like housemate . The fact was, she’d never touched the girl. Kath had never come closer than sitting in a heap outside the youngster’s bedroom door, buzzing with insomnia.

By this time she’d even come up with tricks to help through the worst of the infatuation, the mania; an old woman has her tricks. Now, raising her eyes once more, she forced herself to picture how Dory would lose her looks. The girl had a mill worker’s thick trunk, and those upper arms were already as much pudge as muscle. Tonight’s event generally brought out a more hammered shapeliness.

Tonight was a fundraiser, a benefit for a proposed performance center in downtown Corvallis. The small Oregon city had one sizable hotel, the hotel had donated its largest basement room, and the space looked nearly filled to capacity. Clusters of auction-goers sidled past each other, exchanging smiles over their shoulders, while champagne stewards in starched coats circled outward from the rollaway bar. Nonetheless there was almost no one with a beer belly, no one with saddlebags over the hips.

In the Willamette Valley, the money crowd stayed in shape. Kath had seen more than a few of these people at the Fitness Center. She’d seen them hesitate between the Nautilus machines, heaving, doubtful, and then press on, no match for the social pressure. What other means of proving they’d made it did these people have? In the Valley, what wasn’t farmland was suburb, suburb without a city attached, without a place for the more oddball glitter. You wouldn’t find a colored face at the auction (other than in Dory’s piece, a portrait), none of the Asian or African or Middle Eastern influence that supposedly carried weight in the faster-moving markets. The Valley was high-tech pastoral. Dory’s getup had the women fiddling with their shoulder pads. And if a man found himself near the girl, he preened, cocking a knuckle at one hip and showing off a belt line crunch-trim. For a moment the people around her were nothing but a bunch of performing dwarves.

Kath downed some champagne, hiding in the cup. She had to watch it on these mean thoughts.

She turned back to the display, while others fell in beside her. The work was hung salon-style, crowded between the hinges of the room’s unfolded partition. Nonetheless whoever stood next to Kath would concentrate on their program, keeping their elbows to themselves. She would have thought it impossible to move around in a sardine-tin like this and not at least bump a few elbows. No wonder she had mean thoughts. Only once did someone say hello, one of her so-called friends from the Clinic, and the man immediately asked about her children.

He flexed his mouth, but you couldn’t call that a smile. Kath lifted her chin, showing off her shoulders and pecs.

“Oh,” she told him, “I keep the kids at Christmas-card distance.” She was divorced and remade.

Then came Dory’s piece, in the corner. Kath couldn’t bid on it; the girl had made that a condition of coming. Dory had wound up sleeping with her subject, a married man, a father. God knows he must have seemed fascinating, a surgeon born in Morocco. Plus Dory had worked in pastels, which required repeated sittings, long hours together. Even tonight Kath had to admire the layered effect, like a winepress in which the grapes bulged yet froze, forever just at the point of bursting.

The back wall held more, making sixty items all together. Dory’s piece however had left Kath distracted, frowning.

“Who does these landscapes , anyway?” This was a stage voice, practically in her ear. “Do they have cars?”

Kath turned, frowning. But this was Leo Farragut, one of her patients, one of the terminal cases. He sounded more rheumy since last time.

“I’m asking, Mizz Wick. Do they have cars?”

Her face relaxed. “I believe most of our artists can afford cars, Leo.”

“Oh yeah? Real cars? American cars?”

She opened her stance, the gargoyles clinking at her waist. “You’re saying you find our offerings a tad precious? A tad, oh — out of touch with the hurly-burly?”

“I hear the Japs now’ll sell you a car like this one.” Leo raised a discolored finger towards a lithograph, a beige heron taking off over swoozy reeds. Every curve in the picture was a Coca-Cola wave. “They got a car that just floats out there.”

“Not really.”

“I’m telling you. The thing’s made for a painting like this, it never touches the ground at all.”

“We live in an amazing country, Leo.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Japan.”

She chuckled, her cup to her naked breastbone. Above the man’s ears, his grinning, his shaved head wrinkled. Cases like Leo had come her way a few times before. While she filled out the prescription forms they would stand around hitching their belts, loudly up front about their dying. Gal, let me tell you about bad. Gal, it’s got me nailed to the wall . This when Kath had to work in a cubbyhole — the Clinic didn’t allow much room for a physician’s assistant. Nonetheless whenever Leo or one of her other terminals went into their act, playing cowboy past the graveyard, Kath found herself cheering them along. She let them strut all over her cubbyhole. Now she made a fuss over the man’s hat, a stiff and short-brimmed black fedora.

“It’s a rapper’s hat,” he said. “All the little black kids wear ’em.”

“Looks like Bo Diddley to me,” she said. “Bad to the bone.”

The couples within earshot smiled wanly, not quite risking eye contact.

“Bo…Diddley?” Leo asked. “Where’d someone like you ever hear about him?”

“You remember my friend.” Kath kept her tone sprightly. “The singer.”

Of course he remembered. Kath’s story had all but made the headlines— -Mother Of Two Dating Feminist Folksinger . Her husband had actually found someone to serve her with papers at one of the woman’s concerts. Kath was using a little stage savvy of her own, here: Leo, let me tell yon about bad. The old man, give him credit, said nothing stupid. His nod and his grin remained decent.

“Say, Leo,” she said then, “have you got a table yet?”

The two of them had to circle the room to pick up his bidding paddle, and then they slowed down for hors d’oeuvres. But Kath didn’t mind the additional averted faces and uptight elbows. She enjoyed — though appropriately jaundiced about what she was doing here, her debutante’s ball for one — a mounting excitement. Under the stage lights, the auctioneer appeared enlarged, a Rockwell centerpiece in bow tie and suspenders. Around him the volunteers running the show fretted over clipboards and wads of champagne scrip.