Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(69)
She likes the miniature Chuckies, much of the time; she wishes they would talk to her. Be careful what you wish for, said Tobias when she shared this thought with him. Number one, once they start talking they might never shut up, and number two, who knows what they’d say? He then launched into an account of one of his past affairs; long past, needless to say. The woman was ravishing, with the breasts of an Indian goddess and the marble thighs of a Greek statue – Tobias is given to archaic, overblown comparisons – but every time she opened her mouth such banalities would emerge that he would almost burst with repressed irritation. It was a protracted and stressful campaign to get her into bed: chocolates were involved, in a heart-shaped golden box, the very best quality, no expense spared. Also champagne; but this had not made her more willing, only more fatuous.
According to Tobias, it was more difficult to seduce a stupid woman than an intelligent one because stupid women could not understand innuendo or even connect cause with effect. The fact that a pricey dinner ought to be followed, as the night the day, by the compliant opening of their peerless legs was lost on them. Wilma has not considered it tactful to suggest to him that the blank stares and cluelessness might well have been acting on the part of these beauties, who would not be averse to a free meal if all it cost them was a widening of their huge, dumb, heavily fringed eyes. She remembers confidences exchanged in ladies’ powder rooms, back when they were called “powder rooms”; she remembers conspiratorial tittering, she remembers helpful how-to hints exchanged concerning the gullibility of men, in between the lipsticking of mouths and the pencilling of eyebrows. But why upset suave Tobias by revealing all this? It’s too late for such inside information to be of practical use to him, and it would only tarnish his rose-tinted memories.
“I should have known you back then,” Tobias says to Wilma during his chocolates-and-champagne recitals. “What sparks we would have struck!” Wilma parses this in silence: is he saying that she’s intelligent, and therefore a quick lay? Or would have been then. Does he realize that a more easily offended woman might take this as an insult?
No, he does not realize. It’s meant to be a gallantry. He can’t help it, poor man, being partly Hungarian in origin, he claims; so Wilma lets him prattle on, divine breasts here, marble thighs there, and doesn’t comment crisply on his redundancies – as she might once have done – when he relates the same seduction over and over. We have to be kind to one another in here, she tells herself. We’re all we have left.
The bottom line is that Tobias can still see. She can’t afford to be annoyed by the irritating physical attractions of stale-dated stunners as long as Tobias can look out the window and tell her what’s going on down there in the grounds outside the imposing front door of Ambrosia Manor. She likes to be kept in the loop, insofar as there is one.
She squints at her big-numbers clock, then moves it to the side of her head where she can get a better view. It’s later than she thought, as always. She fumbles around on the night table until she locates her bridge and slips it into her mouth.
The little people, waltzing now, don’t even break stride: her fake teeth are of no interest to them. Or to anyone, come to think of it, except Wilma herself and possibly Dr. Stitt, wherever he may be now. It was Dr. Stitt who’d convinced her to have several of her about-to-splinter molars Roto-Rootered out and then to get the implants installed – fourteen or fifteen years ago, that must have been – so she’d have something to attach a bridge to, supposing she needed it in the future. Which he predicted she would, because her teeth, being pre-fluoridation, would shortly be crumbling away like wet plaster.
“You’ll thank me later,” he’d said.
“If I live that long,” she’d replied with a laugh. She’d still been at the age when she’d liked to make death into a conversational flippancy, thus showing what a lively, game old bird she was.
“You’ll live forever,” he’d said. Which had sounded more like a warning than a reassurance. Though maybe he was only anticipating future business from her.
But now it is later, and she does thank Dr. Stitt, silently, every morning. It would be dire to be toothless.
Smooth white smile inserted, she slides out of bed, feels with her toes for her terrycloth slippers, and shuffles her way to the bathroom. The bathroom is still manageable: she knows where everything is in there, and it isn’t as if she can’t see at all. From the corners of her eyes she can still get a working impression, though the central void in her field of vision is expanding, as she’s been told it would. Too much golf without sunglasses, and then there was the sailing – you get a double dose of the rays from the reflection off the water – but who knew anything then? The sun was supposed to be good for you. A healthy tan. They’d covered themselves in baby oil, fried themselves like pancakes. The dark, slick, fricasseed finish looked so good on the legs against white shorts.
Macular degeneration. Macular sounds so immoral, the opposite of immaculate. “I’m a degenerate,” she used to quip right after she’d received the diagnosis. So many brave jokes, once.
Putting her clothes on is still possible as long as there aren’t any buttons: two years ago, or is it longer, she weeded the buttons out of her wardrobe. There’s now Velcro throughout, and zippers too, which are fine as long as they’re end-stop zippers: slotting the little thingy into the other little thingy is no longer possible.