Lance had returned, was plucking his phone from the counter. He lifted his hand in a silent wave; Lisa returned it. Victoria tilted her head but otherwise did not acknowledge Lance. They had never fought, but they had never loved each other, either. Lisa supposed she should be grateful that their relationship, if not intimate, was peaceful.
Lisa took a sip of her coffee. It was cold. Victoria seemed lost in thought. Well, Lisa had plenty of her own to think about. Her daughter who was beaten. Abused. When her own husband would sooner cut his hand off than lay it on Lisa.
Lance was cheating on her. With, Lisa was almost certain, Patsy Olsen. Patsy had thick, bluntly cut silver hair. She was pretty and a decade older than Lisa. It was the way things had gone in their marriage for a very long time. But it wouldn’t go on for much longer.
Victoria was now talking about volunteering and a woman they both knew who headed a committee. “Can you believe it?” she asked, her voice mildly outraged.
“No,” Lisa said, though she didn’t know what it was she couldn’t believe. Their rhythm, long established, was off today. She glanced at her watch.
“We better get moving,” Victoria said, smiling. Lisa was amazed at her daughter’s happiness. Or if not happiness, light-heartedness. That she could grin, her big, pretty teeth flashing against her dark lip gloss. That she could utter such meaningless platitudes: “Mom.” Less a name than a command. “It was only the one time. I promise.” When Lisa knew for a fact she was lying. And anyway, it was never just the one time. Not in life. Not in any part of it.
Lisa patted herself dry after her shower. Her hair, her face, her throat. Lingered on her stomach, which grew softer and softer as the years passed. She wasn’t a vain woman, which was lucky, because age had loosened the skin at her throat, creased her forehead, freckled the backs of her hands.
Victoria was vain, and so was Lance. Vain men were easier to be with. Easier to understand and anticipate and stay ahead of. So were women, for that matter.
Victoria’s vanity had propelled her to her mother’s house the week before, to borrow a pair of diamond earrings for a fund-raiser that night. She hadn’t wanted to miss the annual Azalea Trail opening party. Black tie, and Victoria was going to wear her strapless dress and the ruby drop earrings. She and Lisa had talked about it. That was one of their favorite things to do together — shop. Plan their clothes, as they called it.
But then Victoria had to change her outfit, and thus her earrings, at the last moment. “It doesn’t look good,” she’d said, which Lisa didn’t believe for a moment. Because she’d seen the dress — it was flattering — but also because of the catch in Victoria’s voice. Victoria’s voice so rarely caught. The new dress featured an elaborate yet modest neckline.
The old dress was strapless.
Lisa glided through the day. She’d been squirreling away money for years, which wasn’t as hard as it should’ve been. Now it didn’t pay to be a cardiac surgeon, but when Lisa first married Lance, eighteen years ago, it had. A surgeon rarely touched a heart anymore, unless performing a transplant, and those, too, were rarer and rarer. Now cardiologists tended to the heart, with highly technical, nearly mundane procedures that had robbed cardiac surgeons of both money and fame. Houston had always been so famous for its heart surgeons, and now correcting an arrhythmia was as simple as threading a line through a groin to ablate the errant piece of the wildly beating heart. Denton Cooley had lived in River Oaks, of course. He must be turning over in his grave. Lance had trained with him, long ago.
It had happened to Lisa last year: an ablation, due to an arrhythmia that would not correct itself. The most painful part of the procedure had been the shot that numbed her groin.
Lance had been fucking someone else while she was at the hospital. An outpatient procedure. It killed Lance, that handling the heart had become so ordinary.
But Lance didn’t cheat because he was no longer considered a god who cracked open human chests and held beating hearts in his hand. Who knew why he cheated? Lisa only knew why he didn’t, and the distinction was important to her, if no one else. He didn’t cheat because of her, Lisa. He did it because he was an animal. And for years, Lisa had looked the other way. And she would’ve continued to look the other way had Victoria not shifted at a certain angle that morning, allowing Lisa to glimpse the nasty bruise covering her daughter’s armpit.
Such a strange place to hit someone. She knew immediately what it was. She’d raised Victoria to be better than this, the victim of such a cliché. It was like something out of the movies. He was beating her on private places, so no one would see.
And Victoria — she was so strong. Just last week she had forcefully but somehow gracefully made a hostess sit them by the window at Brennan’s. Lisa had followed her daughter through the restaurant, feeling proud. It was difficult to reconcile the two halves — the Victoria who moved through the world with such authority, and the Victoria who allowed herself to be hit. Lisa felt like her brain was splitting in half. Seeing the bruise, she’d cried out, as if in pain.
She, not Victoria. She’d wanted to kill him.
Victoria had watched her mother. She’d seemed unsurprised by her reaction.
Lance came home for lunch, which he did sometimes. He liked to surprise her.
“Busy morning?” he asked while assembling two sandwiches. One for him, one for her. He was thoughtful.
He was good with his hands. Spread mayonnaise on the bread deftly, in one neat motion. Pulled out Lisa’s chair while holding both plates — wide, white — in his free hand.
“Remember, we’re going to Lake Austin,” she said. “The spa.” Lance nodded. “For a week. Will be so nice to get away.”
“You deserve it,” Lance said absently. He ate slowly, methodically. He would leave part of the sandwich on his plate. Lisa would not have married Lance if he hadn’t owned this house, this house she would be sad to leave. Built in the thirties, updated every decade. It was the perfect house, both old and new, charming and convenient. Heart pine floors, sunrooms attached to every bedroom, a porch that went on for miles.
Nobody deserves anything, she thought.
She went for her regular walk at dusk. Homes in Tanglewood were expensive, expensively kept. She passed the Spanish-style villa with the red-tile roof, the white Tudor, the new three-story brick that looked like a university in miniature. Tasteless, but she saw the appeal. Building something bigger, bolder. More.
She saw the outlines of her neighbors in their kitchens. Mothers, nannies, maids. Lisa knew no one very well, though she’d lived here for years. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood to host block parties. Even if it had been, she wasn’t the kind of woman to attend them. She and Lance were nominally social, but her husband’s proclivities made things thorny. She was never sure who he’d fucked. Or wanted to.
She had Victoria. Victoria who had gone to the University of Texas and pledged Tri Delta even without the benefit of a mother — or any family member — who was a legacy. She was a first-generation college student, but no one who met her would ever guess. Victoria didn’t even think of herself that way, because Lisa had never let her. Money had paved the way, to be sure. Lance’s money. But Victoria knew how to move through these crowds, even though this — these gilded houses, these manicured lawns — was not her birthright.
In a month, it’d be too hot to walk at night. Lisa would have to get up with the chickens. A saying of her mother’s. It was too hot now to walk. She did it anyway. She tripped over a piece of crumbling asphalt and looked up at a window, just in time to see someone — a nanny, a mother — grabbing the outline of a child by his or her arm.