Playing for laughs
Lauren joked that her aunts once told her never to spend her principal. Everyone chuckled. She added that one of these aunts once declared that new furniture is bought only by people who don`t have family. Laughter all around. Another aunt was quoted as saying that God made accountants so that ”ladies” didn`t have to balance their checkbooks. This was a real knee slapper.
I was miserable by the time the meeting ended. It wasn`t the silly pretentiousness of it, but rather that I was confronted by something I`d suspected but had managed to avoid. Lauren is crazy. Lauren doesn`t have any aunts.
Lauren has developed a reputation as a wit in the financial arena. Those anecdotes about her acerbic phantom aunts-I wrote them. They weren`t meant to be funny.
Lauren recently signed a purchase agreement on a summer cottage. She`s spent a year looking for the right one. It needed to be roomy, yet small enough to avoid any charge of flashiness. It needed to have some claim to English design. It needed a yard dotted with trees, and gently sloping to the lake. She told me she had dreams of that lawn: Adirondack chairs (what else?), painted white, and cozily grouped for conversation. She said she wanted it to look so . . . what was the perfect word? Yes, that`s it: genteel.
She planned to decorate the cottage in the English `country look.` She favored a store in Chicago; its catalogue of English `country look` outshined the many others. She`d charge this stuff and at 21 percent interest, pay for it at her `convenience.`
I mentioned the furniture in her garage, but she said it was already promised to Charles`s son. I think it`s important to know that Charles` son is not in dire need of furniture. He is only 11 years old.
I hadn`t see Lauren in a couple of months, but last week we had dinner in a restaurant. We were in a restaurant because it was part of the usual dreary scenario: Lauren calls asking for help with her budget, always offering to take me to dinner.
It was during one of these fiscal emergency dinners that she revealed her biggest secret. She said she had ”endured a childhood of linoleum and formica!” I had no idea what she was talking about. She twisted the napkin and said that her father was not in medicine as she`d told me; but was, in fact, a vitamin salesman.
I couldn`t think of much to say-seeing nothing inherently wrong in linoleum or formica-but told her she was lucky; after all, some people had fathers who were hit men. She said, ”Yes, that would be worse.”
She was nervous, always is when money is the topic. She mentioned the cottage only in passing, had more pressing things on her mind. She was broke and had just come from selling an antique gold bracelet (discreetly, of course; no one is to know), to cover the final payment on the Doulton china. The department store had been crass enough to call and dun her. Could I imagine it? Frankly, I could.
We went on with the meal. The phone company was threatening to cut off her home phone. Her disability insurance was about to lapse. The employees at the shop were lobbying for a raise and Lauren simply couldn`t give them one. The waiter came by and Lauren perked up long enough to tell him that she just adored the place, liked it so very, very much since she`d rather not eat than eat from ugly plates. I remembered the red plastic plates back in the rented room. The waiter smiled and bowed with a flourish. He quickly returned with complimentry drinks. He bowed yet again. Lauren remarked that we`d have to leave him a nice tip.
I`d seen a newspaper headline that morning announcing that chintz was soon to be passe. Such a headline could bring about a crisis, but apparently she hadn`t seen it. I felt absurdly grateful.
Extracting the truth
She said something `bad` was going on. She pushed her food from one side of the plate to another. She leaned close and whispered. She was having to wrestle with the humiliating possibility that it might be necessary to cut back on ”life-sustaining luxuries,” and maybe even on groceries, to cover the payments on those botanical prints. I realized that, just like all the other times, I would be picking up the dinner check, and taking care of the nice tip for that insipid waiter.
I said there was no such thing as a life-sustaining luxury. She fidgeted with her strand of pearls. I could tell she was exhausted and was sorry for what I`d said. I gently suggested that she try to return the prints to the store. Tears welled. ”Store?” she said. ”Those came from an antique dealer.”
We spent hours on her budget. Papers were in little heaps across the flower-patterned carpet in the sun room. When I left I took the Doulton china with me. I rummaged in the crocodile portfolio for my checkbook and she said, ”You still have that old thing?” When I handed her the check, she said,
”Thank God, I`d begun to hate those stupid dishes. Anyway, I have the depression ware. You`ve seen it. Service for eight. A lovely shade of blue.” The money was enough to redeem the house. She hadn`t made a mortgage payment in three months and was a few days shy of foreclosure. She lost several hundred dollars on the china, all the interest she`d paid the store;
but she refuses to think in such realistic terms.
She wanted me to buy the flower-patterned carpet. ”It`s only three months old,” she said. ”All wool and hand-hooked in Europe.” What? The rug was three months old?
”But Lauren,” I said, ”that means you bought it at the very time you couldn`t make the house payments.”
Charles tells me that Lauren has backed out of the deal on the cottage;
she says there is a problem with the deed. He also thinks it nice that Lauren gave me the Doulton china. She confided that those dishes had been in her family for ages, simply ages. Such a generous soul, he says, is our friend Lauren.
I wanted to ask Charles what he really thought, if he`d swear that
”generous” is the word he meant to use. But instead, I asked if Lauren mentioned which family member gave her the dishes. Aunt Bea, he thought, the one she talks about so often.
Yes, Lauren`s Aunt Bea. There was mention of Aunt Bea the night we did her budget. I could barely stand it, and had to keep myself in check. I had a vision. I`d fling her overdue bill and yell, ”Lauren are you stark raving mad? Aunt Bea is MY aunt.” Her hand would fly to that strand of pearls. She`d blink. She`s shatter like a piece of glass. She`d say, ”Oh!” She`d carry on as though nothing had happened.
A loyalty test
Listening to Charles gave me a headache. I lay on the couch. I couldn`t stop thinking of the day he`d broken down and sobbed to me that Lauren had never loved him at all. They had almost married and I was happy for him that they hadn`t. I remembered meeting him, opening the door and seeing him standing there with Lauren. By the end of the evening I fancied Charles. Later I came to love him. I thought about standing on the porch and watching the two of them leave. Lauren wrapped her arm around his and glanced back and smiled and waved to me. I knew what she had done.
She must have guessed that I had ideas all my own concerning Charles. She had left the portfolio on my porch early the next morning, giving me something she didn`t want. It was wrapped in pale paper-green, the color of envy. She also guessed that I would push my desire for Charles to the side.
Lauren, in her way, is a keen observer. It was Lauren who once remarked, as though pointing out an unaccountable flaw in my character, that betrayal is not within my range. But she was wrong. I betray her now, by writing this. Who would care?-no one but Charles and myself.
I thought I might take those dishes, by Doulton in the famous willow pattern, out to the hill behind my house and see what sort of frisbee they`d make. No, no. I wouldn`t do that. But I would talk to Charles; it was time for us to talk. And what of Lauren? What could I do about Lauren? I didn`t think I could take for much longer the weight of her craziness. I didn`t think I was capable of simply abandoning her.
My headache was worse. I hauled the crocodile portfolio onto the couch and found some aspirin. Eventually I drifted off to sleep. My last thought was of Lauren. If she ever went out looking for herself, she`d be gone a long time.
