Men and Dogs (7 page)
Authors: Katie Crouch
C
HARLESTON HAS GONE quiet on Hannah. The town where she grew up—a small, Easter-egg-colored city that baked in white afternoons—used to constantly buzz with voices. Walking by a friend’s house, you could hear the clatter of silverware or Dan Rather on TV. But since she’s been away, everyone seems to have outfitted their houses with double-paned glass windows shut tight and sealed. The only sound she can hear on this warm fall afternoon is the collective hum of ten thousand air conditioners.
Yet, standing on the sidewalk in front of the DeWitt House, Hannah is greeted with an oddly pleasant feeling of possibility.
She can head west and lose herself for a few hours in the labyrinth of houses west of Legare Street; or she can turn north and head to the shops of King Street, where she might purchase some wine, maybe buy a new clingy shirt to aid her campaign to get her husband to think she’s worth taking back. But instinct pushes her toward Charleston’s grandest walk: a stroll along the harbor on East Bay Street. Crossing White Point Gardens to the Battery, she then heads east, pausing to look at the Legares’
old house on Atlantic Street.
Another family lives there now, a nice family from North Carolina, Hannah’s heard. When she was in high school and living in the DeWitt House, she’d sometimes see the new inhabitants playing in the yard. They were just babies then, so Hannah thinks they are teenagers now. She squints at her old bedroom window, looking for the head of a girl, maybe—a nice girl in her senior year of high school with lots of boyfriends. But the room is dark.
She jams her hands into her pockets and moves on,
up East Bay, then to Tradd Street. So far, her walk has gone quite well. No one recognizes her, and if they do, they don’t stop to talk. Her hip and rib ache only moderately. It feels good to be out. She crosses Church Street, then Meeting. A few blocks down, she stops in front of the place she hasn’t yet admitted she’s going—a modest single house on Tradd with a classic
Charleston side porch.
Hannah is fairly sure Virginia doesn’t live here anymore. She hasn’t asked her mother; she’d rather drink used battery acid than ask Daisy the whereabouts of Virginia or Warren Meyers. Anyway, according to DeWitt’s diatribe, there’s no way a high school music teacher could afford a three-bedroom house South of Broad these days. And yet! Look at that battered beast of a station wagon in the driveway, the one proudly wearing a make music, not war bumper sticker. There are her ugly pottery wind chimes, clinking in the persistent fall breeze; those are her gaudily painted geranium pots; that is her bird feeder,
almost empty and crusted with bluish-purple droppings. Hannah doesn’t know why she’s here. And yet, her finger seems to be on the bell.
In seconds, she’s awash in the familiar: dogs barking, a screen door slamming, the heavy pounding of bare feet.
“
Hush,
puppies! For Christ’s sake, be quiet.”
The door flies open, revealing the mother of the boy Hannah used to love.
“Hannah!” Virginia exclaims and falls forward, enveloping Hannah in her purple hippie blouse and apricot-scented, long gray hair.
“Hi,” Hannah says, extracting herself.
“Come inside!” Virginia holds the door open. The dogs—a disintegrating terrier and something brown and matted whose origins would lie somewhere in between rat and sheep—pool around her feet.
“Where are the retrievers?” Hannah asks.
“Dead. I finally got caught up in the breeders-are-bad thing. Just go to the pound now.”
“They’re nice.” She pats one of their oily heads. “I can’t believe the other dogs are dead.”
“It happens. I haven’t seen you in years. Not that I mind a surprise visitor. I love it, so long as it’s someone as interesting as Hannah Legare.” Virginia leads Hannah into the house and motions for her to sit in her old spot, an overstuffed green chair with down-filled seat cushions. “Hang on. Let me get you some lemonade.”
Hannah looks around. Same white walls, same rough-hewn tables and chairs (Virginia spent some formative years in Santa Fe),
same Jasper Johns prints Hannah could never make sense of. Nothing, it seems, has been moved. Virginia returns with two glasses of yellow-green liquid.
“Here, this should do.”
“This house hasn’t changed at all.”
“Well, we put a new coat of paint on the outside. You know. If it isn’t broken, don’t pay people to fix it.” Virginia sits back down. “How’s your good old stepdad?”
“Boisterous.”
“Ha! Love that man. And your mother, I s’pose, is fine.”
“Yes.”
“You’re too skinny.”
“I am not.”
“And you’ve done something terrible to your head.”
“I fell.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure, Virginia.”
“Not that new husband, is it?”
“What?”
How could Virginia know about her latest disaster? Is she suddenly on speaking terms with Daisy again? They’ve hated each other ever since Hannah dated Warren—Daisy’s loudly expressed opinion being that Warren was too “boring” for Hannah, and that it was a poor match.
“He didn’t do that, did he?”
“Oh.” Hannah can’t help laughing at the thought of it. “No! He’s as violent as a baby duck. I fell off a balcony.”
Virginia looks at Hannah over her glasses. “You fell.”
“Mmmm.”
“Off a balcony.”
“Well, I was trying to find him. My husband, I mean. . . . He’s been seeing someone else.”
“Ah.” Virginia takes a sip of lemonade and makes a face.
Hannah pauses. “Yeah, but I was seeing someone else before that. More than one someone, actually.”
Virginia looks thoughtful. “Sounds like my attempt at marriage.”
“Was that too much information?”
“What I like about you, Hannah Legare,” Virginia says, “is you always pretty much tell me what’s on your mind.” She smiles,
showing her still-white teeth, and plays with a dangly turquoise earring. “Remember when you told me you had a crush on Warren?”
Hannah’s face grows hot.
“I helped, remember? I invited you to dinner and told Warren to walk you home.”
“Yes. I remember. You were very nice. Thank God you liked me.”
“I liked you a lot.”
“I can’t even believe I did that. Maybe I could stand to hold a few things back.”
“No. Absolutely not. That’s the way boring people act. And we’ve got enough boring people in this town.” Virginia wraps her arms around a pillow. “So? Want to know about Warren?”
Yes, please. Every detail.
“Not really.”
“
Really
not really?” She pushes her glass away. “Just came over for the stellar refreshments?”
“I was walking by,” Hannah says. “But yeah. I also sort of wanted to hear about Warren, I guess, in a masochistic kind of way.”
“That’s my girl. Well, he’s married.”
“Oh, I know.” In an odd twist of too-small-town fate, Warren’s wife happens to work for Hannah’s brother as a vet tech. “Of course I know that. I sent them a set of red wineglasses.”
“How polite. You really are Daisy’s daughter.”
“How was the wedding?”
“It was a wedding. A Charleston one. Big. At the Boat Club. Two hundred white people dancing to a black band.”
“It doesn’t sound like something Warren would like.”
“It wasn’t Warren’s wedding. It was Jenny’s wedding. Warren was just there.”
“Well, it sounds nice.”
“They’re happy. They live on Colonial Lake in a house her parents bought them. And he’s over at Grace.”
“That’s great,” Hannah says, trying to sound genuine. “How long does divinity school take?”
“Three years. Then an internship.”
“I never expected it.”
“Think
I
did?” Virginia plays with the fringe on the pillow. “I gave the boy his first joint as a fifteenth-birthday present. But he loves it. And it’s probably better than the writing.”
“I actually read his book.”
“How’d you find it?”
“I don’t remember.” This is an enormous lie. Warren’s book,
The End of the End,
had a tiny run at a university press. As soon as she heard about it, she obtained the title, tracked down an editorial assistant at University Press of Mississippi, and bribed him into sending her three copies in the mail. Hannah even brought one home with her in her suitcase.
“Did you like it?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Well. I didn’t like the part about the girl leaving the protagonist under a rock.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“And she didn’t have to look exactly like me. Or have my name. Or have to
die,
for God’s sake.”
Virginia throws her head back and laughs. It feels like warm, clean water.
“You left him, sweetheart. You completely dropped the kid. And he’s a Southern hard-ass. Thinks he’s James Dickey.”
“James Dickey as a minister?”
“He had to get back at you somehow.” She shifts in her chair. “Anyway. That was all a long time ago. I’m glad you’re here to chat with me. I’m glad I’m alive and well here to chat with you. Jesus, I just turned sixty.”
“Sixty is the new fifty.”
“Enough,” Virginia says. “I hate that talk. Can’t people just get old anymore?” She draws her legs up under her. “Oh, Hannah.
It’s . . . hard seeing you. All this church. I have to be so good all the time. And Jenny’s just . . . well, you’re so much more . . .”
“She’s prickly. Trust me. I know.”
A flash of guilt crosses Virginia’s face. “Oh, she’s all right, though.”
Come on, Virginia. Just be on my side.
“How are the kids?”
“Beautiful. Of course. But that’s the thing about Jenny, isn’t it? She’s the prettiest girl in town. They’ve got two gorgeous daughters. Little blond, blue-eyed girls.”
“Huh.”
Hannah didn’t think this would bother her. So few things do. It never bothered her when she stopped getting letters from Warren,
or when he refused to see her on her visits home, or even when her mother told her Warren married the lint-brained pretty girl from high school. None of that bothered Hannah except hearing about his children. Their existence, oddly, bothers her very much.
“He adores them. You should see him with them. He’d give his life.”
“Virginia.” This comes out more curtly than she intended. The silver-haired woman straightens. Hannah holds up her glass of murk.
“Do you have anything stronger than this?”
Virginia smiles and takes the glass to pour her guest a more fortifying drink.
Hannah thinks about them all—Virginia, Warren, and Jenny White—on and off for the rest of the day. It’s irritating, how they continue to hijack her thoughts. In order to distract herself, she sits on her flowered, canopied bed (the very bed
DeWitt’s grandmother died in, as no stick of furniture could ever be bought new) and writes some halfhearted e-mails to her sales reps. The numbers are down in all of her territories, a fact she knows is largely her fault. It’s been months since she’s been able to show interest in what her staff is doing, and, left to their own devices, it appears that they’ve been spending a large amount of salaried time flirting with one another and deconstructing the latest episodes of
Gossip Girl
.
SweetJane, the company Hannah and Jon started together, is an overpriced line of luxury sex toys. (“Get it?” Jon likes to say to investors. “Sex is now a luxury!”) The company was originally Jon’s idea. The notion came to him after they’d been living together awhile. The sex, he said, was getting boring. In an effort to solve this—Jon is a solver—he decided to buy Hannah a vibrator. But his search was fruitless; he found his shopping experience so unsatisfying that he came away empty-handed,
save for some upscale lubricant and a nicely illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra.
“I wanted to get you something nice,” he said. “But then I was at Good Vibrations. All of these
hippies
worked there”—Jon is a staunch hippie hater—“and all they had was this crappy purple plastic.” Hannah and Jon looked at each other, eyes wide, realizing instantly what he had done. For months, they’d been searching for a new business idea. Biodeisel stations, too messy. Oxygen bars, too stupid. And now he had found it.
There were no sex toys
for rich people
. And hence, SweetJane (Jon’s shout-out to Lou Reed) was born.
Creating the brand was surprisingly easy; Hannah basically just merged Southern taste with all-purpose raunch. The latter she approached like a true Stanford MBA, hiring call girls as consultants and paying them by the hour to participate in focus groups. Satin hand ties or silk? (Silk.) How tight should the handcuffs go? (Not very.) What are butt plugs, and are they something rich men would buy? (They buy them on the sly. Don’t bother.) In the end, they came up with a full range of products:
massage oils, candles, and blindfolds. The most popular item by far, though, is the signature platinum vibrator. Looking less like a penis than a cigar out of some space-age humidor, it sells for a cool $575, $625 engraved.
And the money. Money! SweetJane made Hannah and Jon lots of money. Of course, at the time it seemed impossible
not
to make money. They started the company in 2004 . The post 9/11 dip was officially over, and there was money everywhere—the kids at Google and Facebook and Oracle didn’t know what to do with it all.
San Francisco Magazine
ran an article on Hannah and Jon (“How the Bright Young Things Do It!”), and suddenly everyone wanted to invest in their dildos.
They made a profit within a year, within two had paid their investors back and then some.