Madam Tellier's Lover (Part One of Three) Read online

Chapter Two:

  Beulah Landon

  When Adrienne was young, she’d dreamt about being in love. She’d watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the broken-down old black-and-white television in her parents’ living room on the bayou. She sat cross-legged in front of the television screen, so close that her eyes hurt a little. She’d sucked her breath in with a sharp feeling, almost like a knife, when Snow White’s true love woke her from the sleeping curse.

  She wondered, if she could get someone to kiss her while she was sleeping, whether maybe she’d wake up in a different house? On another continent, maybe? She’d always been fascinated by British accents on re-runs of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Maybe she’d wake up in London.

  But then there was the question of who she’d get to kiss her. She didn’t have any neighbors, and she didn’t go to school. Her mother said she didn’t need to.

  As the years went on, the days seemed to grow longer, as if the nights were mingling with them, and she never really woke from her sleep. So she kept on searching for someone to wake her up.

  The closest she came was Beulah Landon. She met her in a restaurant where she was doing a piss-poor job waiting tables. She dropped half a dozen trays every night, and she never went back to see if anyone wanted refills. She probably would have been fired within a week, if Beulah hadn’t shown up.

  She was forty-six at the time. If Adrienne could have thought of one thing to say to describe her, she would’ve said she looked like Bette Davis. Her dark shoulder-length hair was permed, and it shone like obsidian under the restaurant lights. Her black eyes were large, soulful, and cruel. Her skin was white as milk, her lips red as strawberries.

  She was no Princess Charming – but she was rich, and beautiful, and it was a nice set-up, at first. She treated Adrienne well, bought her lots of nice things, and kissed her passionately. She told her there was no reason why they couldn’t live together.

  “My husband’s dead,” Beulah said, “and good riddance. My bed gets awfully lonely, you know. But then – it was lonely when he was in it, too. I would have much rather done without him, actually. But then, if I had, I’d be destitute. If you haven’t learned it yet, girl, you’ll find out soon enough. There’s a price for everything.”

  Beulah lived in a big plantation house just south of New Orleans. It was surrounded by acres of unspoiled land, tall majestic trees, and marble balconies. When she asked Adrienne to come and live there, Adrienne felt like she’d died and gone to heaven.

  But nothing on earth is very much like heaven.

  Before they moved in together, Adrienne and Beulah met several times a week at a hotel in New Orleans. Beulah paid well for their time together. Somewhere along the way, though, the middle-aged woman seemed to grow attached to her twenty-something companion.

  Adrienne hadn’t known about her children. There were four of them. Simone, the head viper, was the wife of a high-powered executive. She wore extremely tall high heels, wielded them with grace, and might have been a paid assassin in a previous life. Darren, her brother-in-arms, was a handsome gynecologist married to a meek socialite whom Adrienne was sure he abused. Rock – Simone and Darren’s lackey – was a bouncer at a nightclub. He had muscles worthy of his name, always dressed in black, and had a double-digit IQ.

  Then there was Penny. She was a social worker in the city, she’d never had time to get married, and she spent more time thinking about other people than about herself. But she couldn’t make up for the other toxins that had been secreted from Beulah’s womb.

  Simone and Darren hounded Adrienne relentlessly, and Rock trailed them around like a cocker spaniel. To them, she was the worst sort of gold-digger. To begin with, she was living off of their mother like a blood-sucking leech – and, to make matters worse, she’d turned her into an evil homosexual.

  Adrienne voiced her complaints about Beulah’s children; but Beulah said, “What the hell do you want me to do about it? They’re my goddamn kids. It’s not like I can throw ‘em in a sack and drown ‘em.”

  Beulah was often tired in the evenings, and she wasn’t one for nighttime romance – but she was an amorous morning lover. It was hardly ever six o’clock, and the rays of dawn hadn’t always come to shine against the wide glass bedroom doors, when she reached for Adrienne, and pulled her close.

  “The day will start soon,” she said to Adrienne. “On the one hand, I have nothing to do – but on the other hand, there’s always too much to do.” She’d look deep into Adrienne’s eyes, as the sunlight began to pour into the room. “Will you make me forget about all of it?” she’d ask quietly.

  It was a sweltering morning in early August, and they woke a little later than usual. It was Sunday, and they’d had too much to drink the night before. Beulah had attended a charity auction, and Adrienne had been on her arm the entire evening.

  That was one thing about Beulah. She didn’t give a damn what people said about her. And people said some damned awful things about her.

  “What does it matter to me?” she asked after the auction, while she was undressing in front of a full-length mirror in her bedroom. Adrienne was lounging on the California King behind her.

  “No matter what they say or think,” Beulah went on, standing completely naked in front of the mirror, and examining a new freckle on her breast, “it doesn’t affect me any. None of their words detract a single red cent from my bank account. They’d like it if they could do that, oh yes they would – but it’s out of their reach.”

  She glanced back at Adrienne with a promiscuous grin. “And so are you,” she added.

  She strutted over to the bed, and threw herself down beside Adrienne. “That’s a big part of it, after all,” she said, reaching to play with a stray lock of Adrienne’s hair. She’d worn it a little longer in those days, so that she could pin it up, if she wanted to.

  “They’re jealous of me,” Beulah said. “The rich men wouldn’t dare to bring their mistresses to dinner, because none of them look like you, anyway.”

  “Is that why I live here?” Adrienne asked curiously, looking towards the dark glass panes of the bedroom doors. “Because I’m the prettiest hooker you could find?”

  Beulah didn’t answer. She just kept playing with Adrienne’s hair.

  “I wasn’t a hooker before I met you,” Adrienne said, feeling like she needed to make that clear.

  “I guessed as much,” Beulah answered simply. “And you don’t have to call yourself a hooker. I have more than enough money – and I paid you to please me. It’s no great sin.”

  She leaned forward, and wrapped her arms around Adrienne. “It’s been such a long night,” she murmured. “I’m very tired. I want to sleep – but let me kiss you first.”

  She pressed her cheek to Adrienne’s, nuzzling against her gently. Up to that particular moment in her life, Adrienne couldn’t remember ever feeling a safer, more pleasant sensation than that of Beulah Landon’s smooth, alluring face so close to her own.

  Beulah fixed her face in front of Adrienne’s, her mouth slightly open, breathing gently against Adrienne’s lips. “You want to know if I love you,” she said plainly. “But I don’t love anybody. I don’t even love my own damned children. Penny’s a good girl – but she got tired of me a long time ago. I couldn’t keep up with her. The rest of them are a pool of sludge.”

  She looked into Adrienne’s eyes, her face hardly half an inch away, her left arm hooked around Adrienne’s back. “My heart’s an old, cold thing,” she went on, running her fingers through Adrienne’s hair. “It doesn’t know how to love. But then – if I knew what the word meant . . .”

  She thrust herself forward, and kissed Adrienne hungrily. Adrienne held her tightly, with a dizzy feeling in her head, and an angry butterfly in her stomach. She ran her hand down Beulah’s back, pulling her closer, caressing her thigh.

  “If I did know what love meant,” Beulah whispered, pressing her forehead against Adrienne’s – “I might say that it felt lik
e you.”

  That was the first time they made love at night. When they fell asleep, it was a long, drunken slumber – and when they woke on Sunday morning, they made love again. Adrienne didn’t understand the love part of it, and she was sure Beulah didn’t either, but she knew that she didn’t want anyone else’s hands against her skin.

  Unfortunately, when they were about halfway into it, the bedroom door swung open. And Simone walked in.

  “Jesus, Mama!” she cried. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’d thank you not to take the Lord’s name in vain,” Beulah said blandly. “Not under my roof, anyway. What you do outside of it is your own business.”

  She fixed Simone with a cold glare, propped up on the mattress with one elbow, the white sheet draped over her breasts.

  “You’re one to talk about God,” Simone said drily, throwing her dark hair over her shoulder, and sighing in a very martyr-like way.

  “Why?” Beulah asked. “Because there’s a woman in my bed?”

  Simone looked at her mother in disbelief. “What more reason do you need?” she asked.

  Beulah sighed, and lay back against the pillows, drawing the sheet over her shoulders. “You’re ridiculous, Simone,” she said simply. “Your husband cheats on you every weeknight – weekends during Mardi Gras. He don’t think too much of you, baby girl. But you let him in your bed, night after night. Who knows what he’s bringing into it? It’s a mystery, my girl.”

  Darren walked in, then, his hands in his trousers’ pockets, his black tie perfectly straight. The sight of him made Adrienne nauseous, for some reason.

  He ran a hand through his well-oiled hair, and glanced at his sister with a nonchalant expression. “No need for Playboy this morning, I guess,” he said, grinning at Beulah and Adrienne.

  “Stop being a pig,” Simone barked with a grimace. “We have to do something about this.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?” he asked. “Throw Adrienne out the window? No doubt it’d be a lot of fun – but don’t you think someone would come asking questions?”

  He looked at Adrienne, tucked up beside his mother beneath the sheet. “There would be a lot of blood,” he said simply. “On the sidewalk, I mean. People would ask questions.”

  He glanced pointedly at Simone, and added, “I don’t like questions. Besides – she’s not worth it.”

  Adrienne wasn’t stupid enough to think that returning his joust would do her any good. It would only amuse him. So she just stared at him coolly.

  “Ah!” he said. “She’s a tough one, Mama, I’ll give you that. Probably one of the only whores who can hold her own with you.”

  Beulah threw herself back on her pillow, and flung an arm over her eyes. “Good Lord Almighty,” she muttered, more to herself than to anyone else. “Why am I constantly tormented by these wicked children of mine? No doubt they’re more like me than I’d care to admit – but it still seems like an unfortunate cross to bear.”

  “Stop being so melodramatic, Mama,” Simone said with an irritated sigh. “You should have been an actress, I swear.”

  “There was no need for it,” Beulah returned wearily, with her arm still draped over her eyes. “I was rich enough.”

  She dropped her arm, and propped herself up on her elbow again. “Speaking of which,” she said in a peremptory voice, “I’m sure you didn’t come waltzing in at the crack of dawn just to inquire after my health. If that were the case, you probably would have waited till breakfast, so you could at least get some free food out of it.”

  She glared at her children, and demanded, “What do you want?”

  They lost a little of their mettle, at that, and started to fidget. Simone ground the stiletto of her black high heel into the plush white carpet.

  “We want to talk about the will,” she said, obviously trying to sound stern. “Every time we bring it up, you change the subject. We thought that if we came early enough –”

  “You’d have a harder time changing the subject,” Darren interrupted with a crooked grin.

  “Jesus, Darren, will you shut up?” Simone barked.

  “Whatever you say, sis,” he returned lightly.

  Simone looked back at Beulah. “Listen, Mama,” she said. “This is important. We’re not trying to make light of your situation –”

  “My situation!” Beulah exclaimed, uttering a wild laugh. “Is that what you call it? I only told you about it two weeks ago – and now you’re swooping down like vultures, trying to pick the flesh off of my living bones.”

  Adrienne looked at Beulah curiously, but Beulah didn’t return her gaze.

  “If you don’t want to have nightmares about seeing your mother naked,” Beulah said to Darren, “then I suggest you turn around.”

  He turned around obligingly, his hands in his pockets, whistling an old Bing Crosby song.

  Beulah threw off the sheet, and got out of bed. Her scarlet robe was flung over the arm of a white chair by the bed, and she went to put it on. Then she picked up a pack of cigarettes on the nightstand, pulled one out, and placed it between her lips. She lit it quickly, and took a deep drag before turning around to face Simone.

  “You can look now, boy,” she said to Darren.

  Darren turned back to face her, still whistling.

  “Shut up, Darren,” Simone said.

  “Whatever you say, sis.”

  “All right, then,” Beulah said, exhaling a cloud of smoke, and glaring at her children. “You want to talk about the will. What the hell is there to talk about? I’ve already left everything to the four of you. Nothing to charities – they’re not my style. You each get twenty-five percent of all there is. What more do you want? Do you want to throw in a clause that will leave my body to science? There’s no money in that, I assure you.” She sighed, and took another puff of her cigarette. “If there were,” she said in a faraway voice, “I would have given them your father’s.”

  Simone sighed impatiently, and stamped her tiny foot. “We’ve already tried to tell you what we want. The most important thing is – well, it’s Penny. She’s already said she doesn’t want your money. She says Daddy only got it by exploiting coal miners till they died.”

  “I can’t say that she’s wrong,” Beulah returned absently, grinding her cigarette into an ashtray on the nightstand, and crossing her shapely arms over her chest.

  “That’s not the point,” Simone huffed, looking like she couldn’t care less about dead lignite miners from the past. “The point is – if you leave her a quarter of the money, who knows what she’ll do to it? She’ll probably leave it to some charity for coal miners in South America.”

  “Yes – that’s more Penny’s style,” Beulah said, lighting another cigarette. “She’s better than all of us put together.”

  Adrienne lay uncomfortably in the bed, her back propped up against the headboard, the sheet wrapped tightly around her chest. But she couldn’t see how to escape. Darren was staring at her with a malicious expression, and hatred was oozing from him like snake venom.

  She looked around for something to cover herself with. She saw her silk nightgown lying on the floor by the bed, and she reached down to grab it.

  Darren’s black loafer stomped down on the nightgown, narrowly missing her fingers. He grinned wickedly.

  “Move,” Adrienne demanded in a cold voice.

  “Make me,” he returned childishly, still wearing that evil smile.

  “Damn it, Darren,” Beulah said with a sigh. “It’s no wonder I named you after your father. You’re just as bad and nasty as he was.”

  “Don’t talk about Daddy that way,” Simone snapped.

  “Oh, good heavens, girl,” Beulah said, frowning sadly. “Your daddy was a demon sent straight from hell.”

  She swiveled her head towards her son, and barked, “Get your damned foot off of that.”

  He stepped back reluctantly, and Adrienne snatched up the gown, sliding it on behind the sheet. Then she prac
tically leapt out of the bed, making towards the door.

  “Stay,” Beulah said imperiously. “You don’t have to go, just because they make you feel uncomfortable.”

  Adrienne stopped in her tracks, not really wanting to stay, but not wanting to displease Beulah, either.

  Simone glanced at Adrienne, and flipped her hair in a superior manner. “I don’t want to talk about this in front of her,” she said to her mother.

  “What would you like me to do?” Beulah asked. “Send her into the garden to plant flowers? She’s not much of a gardener – and it’s a little late in the season, anyway.”

  Simone looked as if she were about to have a fit. “You’re not taking this seriously, Mama,” she complained. “You never take anything I say seriously! Will you just listen to me?”

  “I’m listening,” Beulah replied, adopting that absent tone again, and puffing on her cigarette.

  “We think you should take Penny out of the will,” Simone said. “And we think you should let us handle Rock’s share. He’s an idiot – he’ll spend it all on cocaine within a year. Leave half to me, and half to Darren. We’ll give Rock what he needs.”

  “Will you, now?” Beulah asked in an amused voice. “Well, that explains why your loyal hound dog of a brother isn’t here.”

  “It’s not like that, Mama,” Simone whined. “We just think it’s the best way, is all.”

  “Ah!” Beulah exclaimed, stubbing out her cigarette again. “I’m sure you do, my dear.”

  The room was quiet for a few moments. But suddenly, Beulah’s casual expression changed, and she looked like she was in pain. She paced in front of the window, pushing the heel of her hand into her chest.

  “Beulah?” Adrienne said quickly, rushing towards her from the opposite side of the room.

  “Mama?” Simone cried.

  Darren didn’t say anything. He just watched with a bored expression, and then glanced down at the shiny toe of his shoe. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, and bent down to rub at a spot on the black leather.

  Adrienne took Beulah’s arm, and Beulah leaned against her gratefully. She wasn’t usually so gracious when it came to people helping her – so Adrienne knew that she must be feeling poorly.

  “Get out of here,” Simone hollered at Adrienne. “We’ll take care of her.”

  “She’s not going anywhere,” Beulah snarled. “If anyone’s leaving, it’s the two of you.”

  “Is that an order, Mama?” Darren asked.

  “Yes,” Beulah replied, speaking very quietly now, as if she were having trouble getting the words out.

  “All right, then,” he said breezily, turning around on his heel, and strutting out the door. “Talk later,” he called from the corridor. “Kisses.”

  “What a God-forsaken asshole,” Beulah muttered.

  “Jesus, Mama!” Simone cried again.

  “Watch your damned mouth,” Beulah said, more loudly now.

  But the strain of these words seemed to be a little too much for her. She looked into Adrienne’s face for a brief moment, but then pushed her away, and collapsed to the floor.

  “Everyone keep away from me,” she gasped. “And get the hell out of my house, Simone.”

  “Call the doctor!” Simone cried, presumably hoping that Darren would hear her. “Mama’s dying!”

  Adrienne always wondered how she’d felt when she said those words. Was she happy, because she was coming into her fortune – or was she disappointed, because Beulah hadn’t altered the will yet?

  Despite Beulah’s command, Adrienne was about to try to go to her – but it was too late. Her head had rolled to the side, and her wide-open eyes were motionless and glassy. Her last breath had come and gone like a flash of lightning.

  Feeling helpless, Adrienne looked to Simone, and asked, “What happened? What was the matter with her?”

  Simone watched her coldly for a moment, but then shrugged, as if she didn’t care enough to put on a show of despising her anymore. She walked to the nightstand, took one of the cigarettes out of the pack, and lit it. She took a long drag, and said, “Something to do with her heart. It’s not all that surprising, though. It’s not like it ever had much going for it, anyway.”

  She turned around, and walked out of the room on her black stilettos. Adrienne could hear them clicking all the way down the marble-tiled corridor.