My Best Man by Andy Schell (unputdownable books .txt) 📗

Jacqueline and filling her little shot glass.

“Where’s that?”

“It’s in the Middle East, right, Harry?” Amity says. “Right,” I say. “It’s not a peninsula though.”

Jacqueline complains, “I just was trying to explain what a peninsula is. When you have like this piece of land that juts “

“OK, Jackie that horse is never going to get across the finish line! Forget about peninsulas, girl. You and me need to be taking our lessons from the queen,” Amity tells her, getting back to business. She downs her vodka and shudders as if she’s having an orgasm. “She was an American girl, a Princeton grad, architecture, and she knew exactly what she was doing. God, I wish I could have concentrated in school. I just wanted to fuck the professors.”

Of course I immediately think of the professor story Randy told me. And realize, in her own way, Amity is confessing the truth. We laugh and snort our Stoly. Jacqueline snubs her cigarette out and lies down on the hardwoods. “So how is she the Queen of Jordan Almonds?”

Amity’s eyes flash with intrigue. “The king divorced his first two wives, and his third was killed in a helicopter crash, so they say.”

“What do you say, Amity?” I ask, fascinated that she always seems to have a take on things.

She’s been reading Wired, the biography of John Belushi, and

she’s taken to raising an eyebrow, one of his famous moves. It makes whatever she says seem more significant. “Those divorces were getting too expensive. He did something to that helicopter!” Left brow high.

“Sugar in the gas tank?”

“Probably, man,” Jackie says, doing leg lifts. “Who’s gonna know? Who’s gonna check it out? He’s the king.”

Amity continues with her lesson. “Lisa Halaby, the American girl, was his architect on a project, and she worked some kind magic on him and got him to marry her. She worked it big time.” “You’ve been doing your homework,” I say.

Amity looks at me with mysterious conviction. “Harry, it’s a fairy tale life. I love fairy tale lives.” She stands up to head for the kitchen and accidentally releases a little fart. “Oops,” she regally, like Queen Noor. “The queen has spoken.”

Jacqueline and I lose it.

In Amity’s white Ford Granada that is nearly as old as Volkswagen, Amity and I head down Northwest Highway Northpark Mall. Even though it is gray and rainy, Amity with her sunglasses on. She points out the many Mercedes, Ja and BMWs zooming around us on the four-lane road.

“A person’s car is a reflection of his lifestyle,” she says ously. Then she yells, “And look at this piece of shit we’re in! People are going to think we’re homeless!” She laughs screams and swerves into the fast lane.

I hold on to the door handle. “Homeless people don’t cars, Amity.”

“They do in Dallas!”

Somehow I believe her.

“Who sees your house?” she asks. “Nobody if you don’t ask them over. But everybody sees your car. A man can live in a as long as he’s driving a Mercedes.” Mer-sigh dees

While on the subject of cars, I tell her about JT, the BMW salesman who struts his stuff at the gym.

“You know he’ll let you do it!” Amity says. “Buy a car from him; then break it in by fucking him in the backseat.”

“I don’t need a new car.”

“Well at least go on a test drive,” she urges, eyebrows raised. It’s not a bad idea.

She pulls the Granada into a parking space at the mall, cracks her window, and decrees, “Power nap!” Then she reclines her seat, shuts her eyes, and within thirty seconds she’s asleep. Out. Completely dead to the world. And I sit there, while the rain drizzles down, and she Z’s out. I’m not tired, so I watch the studly valets in red jackets park the Mercedes and BMWs of large-haired, starving ladies wrapped in fur coats to shield themselves from the blustery, arctic, Texas spring days that sometimes dip below fifty degrees. Burr. They need those fur coats, in case their German sedans malfunction, and they’re stranded on the side of the road during a blue norther. Sure, they have car phones, but it’s hard to dial when you’re freezing and the chances of breaking a nail are greater under stress. Though my mother is the Kansas version of these women, there’s something a little more lifelike about her. Maybe because she lacks the hokey accent.

“Out!” Amity blurts, springing up like a corpse from a coffin.

“Ahhh!” I say, grabbing my heart. “You scared the shit out of me!”

“Power nap’s over! Out of the car!”

I feel at home as we head down the escalator, past the mannequinlike saleswomen who use their ring fingers (because all a ring finger does is hold a ring, so it’s cleaner and less stressed-out, Amity claims) to smooth eye re firmer onto prospective clients’ hopeful faces, and into the Mid-Life Cafe, as Amity calls it, where she orders a tuna salad on loose leaf lettuce, so I do too. My mother

used to take me on trips to Kansas City to shop at department like this, until my father told her to stop or I’d turn out queer.

I notice Amity sits taller in her chair at Maxwell’s than she at home. Taking a cue from her surroundings, she reapplies lipstick. First, she uses her white starched napkin to wipe off red stain from her lips. By the time she’s removed the old her napkin looks like a blood-soaked tourniquet. Then she opens a compact to access a mirror. Using a ruby-colored pencil two darker than her lipstick, she lines the outsides of her lips, expandin their borders by following the cosmetic manifest destiny. Then takes the actual lipstick and sensually fills in her lips with a that resembles M&M red dye #2. Then she takes the tournic and blots her lips several times, making it bloodier still. She by doing a final check in her little, feminine purse mirror.

Then the food comes, and she wipes it all off and eats.

And when she