Devils in the Sugar Shop Read online

  Ashley

  I don’t know, really, if ‘finger-bang’ is quite the phrase you want to use on page nine,” Ashley said as everyone looked to her for comment on the manuscript up for discussion, a novel excerpt by a sixtysomething eccentric named Mrs. Bloom.

  Ashley knew she should tread lightly—Mrs. Bloom owned the Omaha Street, the money-hemorrhaging alternative news weekly for which Ashley’s husband, Troy, worked as an editor and writer, a newspaper campaigned against by zealots offended by its back-page ads for strip clubs and hookers. Mrs. Bloom frequently seemed precipitously close to an emotional edge. “Isn’t finger-banging what high school boys do to high school girls? Shouldn’t it be, y’know, something more sensual, since the story is from the young woman’s point of view?”

  “Unless she’s just too young to know what feels good,” said a chubby woman who wrote erotica featuring the celebrities on Match Game from the 1970s—gameshow orgies with Nipsey Russell on Betty White, Orson Bean on Fannie Flagg, Charles Nelson Reilly on Richard Dawson. Ashley smiled at the woman, relieved that a student in the Writing Erotica for Women class had finally stepped up to discuss what was sexy. The characters in her students’ stories seemed graceless in bed, and she suspected that a down-and-dirty back-and-forth on what the students themselves might truly find stimulating would be of the most value to them.

  Ashley actually knew nothing about women’s erotica, and she felt she knew even less about what other women found to be at all erotic. She’d published her erotic novel after having had her mainstream literary novel widely rejected. An editor at a commercial publishing house had decided she liked it but found the book’s few timid, peek-a-boo sex scenes to be exactly what it needed more of. She’d recommended Ashley take her tale of the cocktail set and give it a good, dirty kick. The literary world was ready for some respectable porn, the editor had said.

  Before that, the only brush Ashley had ever had with fiction intended mainly to titillate had been a story about a lusty ballerina she’d read when babysitting at the age of fourteen. After the McKenzie kids had conked out for the night, she’d snooped through Mr. McKenzie’s vanity, spritzing herself with his eau de cologne, slipping her fingertips through the fly of his Fruit of the Looms. After taking a hair from his comb and twisting it around her pinkie, Ashley had found, tucked in beneath his Izods, an old copy of Oui, a wank mag for gents.

  She now remembered little about the ballerina because what had made her feel so dizzy as she thumbed past the photos of a nude blond woman with an afro, of a black woman named Pepsi wearing only an ermine cap, was the fact that she had invaded Mr. McKenzie’s most private world. She’d held in her hands not just a wellworn copy of Oui coming loose at the staples but a raw element of a grown man’s sex life, a grown man who smelled of Brut, who had little razor nicks on his neck from a sloppy shave, who had big hands with hard skin, long lady-like eyelashes, breath fragrant with the lemony scent of a few sips of a Seven-and-Seven.

  “Mrs. Bloom,” started another woman, who was writing a novel about two lesbian antiporn activists, “you make mention of something that’s ‘itty-bitty,’ and also something that’s ‘teensy-weensy.’ You have to watch that, I think. It’s too . . . cutesy-wootsy.”

  That, to Ashley’s disappointment, was the typical level of discussion in the workshop—the students futzing over the arrangement of adjectives. Ashley had hoped the recent change of venue from the strip-mall community college to her apartment in the Old Market, the overstuffed sofas and throw pillows, the lilies on the windowsill, the midday wine, would give the class a much-needed slap of intimacy.

  She emptied the rest of the merlot into her glass, then excused herself to step into the kitchen for another bottle as the class continued to dissect Mrs. Bloom’s soft porn. Ashley was anxious to get started planning the Sugar Shop party she was having that evening—she had sweet red peppers to roast and a roasted-tomato gazpacho to make. She even looked forward to deveining the shrimp (Deveining? she stopped to think. Or do you just vein a shrimp?) and to breaking down in a flood of tears as she chopped a Vidalia onion. That would be Ashley’s notion of the truly erotic: a day devoted entirely to her kitchen.

  When Ashley returned to the living room with two freshly uncorked bottles of wine, she found that the workshopping of the story had grown heated. One pursed-lipped woman objected to the fact that the female character was so child-like. But that woman herself wrote about age-indeterminate pixies who spent their days and nights flitting naked from pink poppy to pink poppy, making love on a petal or on a leaf, white pollen snowing down upon them.

  But it was Peach, the twin who co-owned Mermaids Singing, Used & Rare, who was making the most noise. Peach had been cross, it seemed, ever since having been featured in “Flirty and Under Forty: Ten Omaha Beauties to Watch” in O! La La, a “fine living” women’s magazine, alongside Ashley’s friend Viv and a gaggle of other pretty businesswomen and artists, many of whom Ashley knew one way or another, given the basic small-towniness of the metro area. In addition to her work at the bookshop, Peach belonged to an experimental performance troupe that put on productions at midnight at the Rubberneck Theatre, a black box around the corner from the bookstore. Peach had looked stunning in the magazine’s glossy pages, posing on the stage in a Louis Quatorze—looking chaise, dressed to the nines beneath a painting of a pudgy odalisque naked but for a peacock feather. Now her elegant blond upsweep kept showing up in the mail, pasted by the stalker onto pages torn from pornographic magazines.

  “Shouldn’t I find the guy in the story sexy, at least?” Peach asked Mrs. Bloom. “I hate the things he says to her.” Peach’s erotica seemed to have an autobiographical bent, explicitly detailing an affair between a late-twentysomething actress and a married ad exec. In the section she’d turned in to the workshop the week before, the actress started receiving pornographic collages from a stalker.

  “But that’s the point!” Mrs. Bloom said, raising her hands folded prayer-like, the shiny fabric of her caftan rippling with her movement. She then grabbed fistfuls of her wild, finger-in-a-socket gray hair and laughed and tugged as if gone mad from the class’s stupidity. “The love affair between Baby and Professor Slick is erotic in its anti-eroticism. I’m toying with language that is purposefully appropriated from the pornography that has oppressed every goddamn woman in this room,” and Mrs. Bloom jabbed her finger in the air, pointing accusingly at each woman in the class, her armload of bracelets jingle-jangling, “and every goddamn mother of every goddamn woman in this room. The culture has, yes, finger-banged us all until we lost all sense of what felt right. My erotica is an erotica of the damaged.”

  Mrs. Bloom’s impromptu oratory sounded nearly convincing, but Ashley was certain she was merely scrambling to defend her ineptitude, to blow smoke up everybody’s skirt in order to distract them from the fact that she didn’t know any more than anyone else about how to arouse a woman.

  “I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel anything for the characters,” Peach said. She shrugged. “My heart doesn’t go out to them.”

  “Your heart?” Mrs. Bloom said. “Who gives a shit about your heart?”

  “Mrs. Bloom, please,” Ashley said. Her wedding ring clink-clink-clinked against the wine glass, and she said, sotto voce, “Peach is going through a very rough time right now.”

  “I’m fine,” Peach said. “Don’t worry about me.” She took a cigarette and a lighter from her purse and headed to the apartment door for the smoke break she always took at some point during class.

  “Oh, you don’t have to go out in the cold, Peach,” Ashley said, feeling motherly. “Just go in the kitchen, crack the window an inch.” Every semester, Ashley came to cherish her students despite their rampant lack of talent. And she loved the all-too-rare moments when the class devolved into a group therapy session, with students breaking down, cracking up, wigging out. As the instructor, she’d take the role of therapist, sometimes even dressing how she thought she would dress if she truly
was a doctor in an office—she might put on unintimidating low-heeled shoes or grandmotherly cardigans with fresh tissue tucked into the cuff and at the ready for sudden crying jags.

  But no one cried this afternoon. The class stubbornly moved forward with discussion of Mrs. Bloom’s stultifying text.

  “Personally, I really admire this piece,” said the one man in the class. He wrote stories with little tricks to them, like backward sentences that had to be held up to a mirror to be read, or invisible ink that required a brushing of lemon juice for the words to appear. “I think I understand what you’re doing,” he told Mrs. Bloom, “and I think it’s really something. It’s really pretty Nabokovian when you think about it.”

  At the evocation of Nabokov’s name, Mrs. Bloom inhaled deep and gently waved at the air, as if stirring and savoring the perfume of hothouse flowers. “Oh, that Vladimir,” she said.

  Mrs. Bloom’s excerpt was from a novel she had titled Lolita’s Baby, in which Lolita’s teen daughter was following in her mother’s footsteps in a big way, road-tripping across the debauched U.S.A. to be deflowered over and over.

  What if Mrs. Bloom sold her rotten book? Ashley wondered. It annoyed her, all the fiction lately published that took minor characters from major novels, or dragged classic heroes and heroines kicking and screaming into other eras and circumstances, all those latter-day Mrs. Dalloways with newfound lesbianism, or Heathcliff reconceived as Jack the Ripper. Meanwhile, Ashley’s second erotic novel, about a randy chocolatier, had been rejected by her editor. Sales of her first novel had been too weak, she’d explained, initial expectations too high.

  The man seemed poised to prattle on more about Nabokov when Ashley’s son, Ashley, who they all called Lee, stepped from his bedroom, his ears plugged with the buds of his iPod. Lee didn’t seem to be enjoying his music, slump-shouldered as he was, his flip-flops slapping against his heels with every lethargic, it’s-the-end-of-the-world step forward. All winter he’d worn only a jean jacket when out in the cold, and maybe a drafty thrift-shop scarf rescued from the scrap pile and slipped around his neck. Lee, at seventeen, seemed always to be gunning for a wicked bout of tuberculosis or pneumonia to fit with his self-portrait of the artist as a young man. He’d been in his room all day working on a semi-autobiographical graphic novel—his forehead and fingertips were lightly smudged with blue India ink.

  “Don’t forget about tonight,” Ashley said, dismissing the class early. She’d invited everyone but the lone male to the Sugar Shop party. She’d declared the party “girls only,” though she did find him to be a tad girly. He had sky-high cheekbones and wore expensive, immaculate suits that he got at a discount from the department store where he worked as a window dresser.

  Ashley didn’t like how Lee seemed caught in the man’s sights. These days, ever since Lee had come out of the closet, Ashley found herself evaluating the sexual orientation of every man she met—young and old—married and unmarried. Ashley had nothing against gays, of course. It just breaks a mother’s heart, she thought. Part of her wanted for her son the life she herself had been so determined to avoid, the life of simplicity and Sunday-morning services and potlucks with good neighbors, the life that her mother, gently stewed every day by four, her wiglet askew, had tried so hard to thrust upon a young, unimpressionable Ashley herself.

  Lee could easily attract predators, Ashley worried, chicken hawks, older intellectuals for whom he would satisfy some almost-legal Death in Venice fantasy. One early afternoon before Christmas, she had taken Lee out for a late lunch at a trattoria called Nicola’s. For her salad, the chef had built a tiny snowman from mozzarella, a thin strip of fresh basil as his mouth, some cloves for eyes. Their waiter had a pretty face, and she kept sneaking glimpses of him. Then she noticed that Lee was staring at the waiter too, and she couldn’t stop watching Lee watch him. Then she noticed a man her own age at a nearby table who seemed unable to take his eyes off Lee. She found herself staring at the man who stared at Lee who stared at the waiter. She tried to determine what exactly had the man so enraptured. Lee’s pout? The curls that fell to the nape of his neck? Or was it simply that look of distraction on Lee’s face as he sat staring openly, unconcerned and unembarrassed, at the handsome waiter?

  After the last of the students left, Lee sat on the floor next to the coffee table to tear at a braid of cinnamon loaf and to pour himself a glass of merlot.

  “I don’t think I really want you drinking wine, sweetie,” Ashley said.

  Lee took a sip, then held up his glass. “Then take it away from me,” he said. Ashley sighed, took the wine, and sat on the sofa, the glass on one knee, the bottle on the other. Lee picked up one of the Sugar Shop catalogs fanned across the tabletop and read aloud, with a TV announcer’s inflections, “Lady Godiva Lickable Glitter, $19.95. Perfectly safe for all-over body décor, Lady Godiva Lickable Glitter subtly sparkles, filling your next romantic evening with starlight. Whether you spray on or sprinkle, this glitter pinkens and delights. Quick and easy application (and removal), whether using on your own or with a friend! Available in these exotic flavors: Amaretto, Chambord, Ambrosia, and Crème de Bananes.”

  “Want to help me get ready for the party?” Ashley asked Lee. “Peel some apples?”

  “I have to go meet Peyton at the thrift shop,” he said. “She’s on her way back to Omaha.”

  “Peyton didn’t tell me she was coming home this weekend.”

  “It wasn’t planned. She just called me from her cell phone a little bit ago, all upset,” he said.

  Ashley took a sip of the wine. “Yikes. What? What is it?”

  “You don’t really sound all that concerned to me,” Lee said.

  “I said, ‘yikes,’ didn’t I?” she said. Peyton had been in a state of panic since infancy. Since going away to college last fall, six hours from Omaha, her cries of wolf had grown quite pleasantly dim.

  “She’s mad at Dad about something.”

  “Really?” Ashley said, intrigued. Everybody mad at Dad. Hop on Pop. “What?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me. But she must be super-pissed, because she keeps calling him by his full name. ‘Troy Allyson.’ ‘We have to have a talk about Troy Allyson.’ I’m meeting her in a few.”

  Ashley knew better than to ask to tag along. For years she’d been jealous of Lee and Peyton’s close-knittedness, mostly because, growing up, Ashley and her older sisters had only ever conspired against each other, hoarding secrets, telling lies. Her childhood had been a hotbed of three misbehaved girls manipulating their parents’ piddly affections.

  “I could take you kids out for a late lunch,” Ashley said, slowly holding forth the glass of wine, inching it toward Lee, tempting. “Pot roast at Upstream.”

  Lee shook his head at the wine glass and, speaking with his mouth full of cinnamon loaf, said, “I’m on a hunger strike. Food is toxic.” He went to the closet for his thin, death-defying jean jacket. “Besides, you have your pervy little party to get ready for.”

  “Maybe I need to cancel it,” Ashley said, “under the circumstances.” One of Ashley’s favorite things to do was cancel plans at the last minute, leaving her with a few hours of unexpected time.

  “Nope,” he said, opening the door.

  “Oh, Lee Lee Lee Lee, pleeeeease put on some real shoes,” Ashley said. “You think you’re only killing yourself with those flip-flops in the snow, but you’re killing your mother is what you’re doing.”

  Lee pulled a pair of Converse sneakers over his sockless feet. “You never dress for winter either,” he said, sneering, and Ashley said nothing more as he left. She leaned back in the cushions of the sofa, drinking the rest of the wine, warmed by the fact that her son, who’d grown so distant in recent weeks, still cared enough to point out the failings they shared.

  Peach

  Peach could hear that the rest of the writing students had left Ashley’s apartment, but she continued to sit in a rickety wooden chair next to the partially open window, blowing her smoke out
, sipping dregs of cold coffee from a china cup she’d found on the kitchen counter. Troy, Ashley’s husband, Peach’s secret lover, always cooked his coffee to a deep black in a dinged-up percolator his grandmother had owned decades ago, and Peach could sometimes taste the acrid bitterness of it on his breath.

  “Class dismissed, sweetie, but take your time, relax, just finish your cig,” Ashley said, stepping into the kitchen. “Oh, but don’t drink that slop, it’s the worst. Never touch the coffee in this house.” She took the cup away from Peach, then poured her a glass of wine.

  The coffee felt thick in Peach’s throat, and she now found it hard to swallow. She noticed her cigarette and its smoke shivering with the shaking of her hand, so she put it out in the ash-stained saucer on the windowsill.

  Troy had no idea that Peach was enrolled in his wife’s class. He always spent Saturdays at his office, where he put in six or seven days a week as an editor at the Omaha Street, outlining everyone’s social obligations, playing to the fires of liberal angst. Every week, Peach read the dire thing from cover to cover in the hopes of getting to know her lover better, to divine something personal from his stories about city council zoning ordination scandals and children sick from licking poisonous lead monkey bars in a park.

  Ashley sat at the kitchen table with a colander of apples and a paring knife. “Did you ever play Truth or Dare?” she asked, peeling, and the sound of the sleet that salted against the windowpanes ran a chill up the back of Peach’s neck. She wanted to take a drink to calm herself, but her hands were shaking even more, gently sloshing the wine in the glass. What am I doing here? she thought. I’m no good at this sort of thing. No Truth, please.

  “Yeah,” Peach said. “I guess I did.”

  “‘Finger-bang’ made me think of it,” Ashley said. “I’m thirteen, fourteen, sitting in an old, leaky, inflatable pool with my friend Deedee, our bikini tops off, reading the dirty parts from my mom’s Harold Robbins novels out loud to each other. We thought we were pretty hot stuff. We started playing Truth or Dare, and I dared her to go ask the neighbor’s lawn boy if he’d ever finger-banged a girl. I just remember thinking it seemed like, I don’t know, the height of dirtiness or something. Finger-bang.” Ashley froze mid-apple, lost in memory.