Strings Attached: Book 1 of the Venus as She Ages Collection

By Gay Walley

In her first novel, Gay Walley weaves two stories into a seamless narrative - a woman's quest for love, and the drunken, vagabond childhood she endured with her father.

Raised on a barstool, Charlee spends her youth drinking in the dark dives of New England and Montreal with a father who flees from woman to woman. As an ad

• Language: English
• Publisher: IML Publications LLC
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955314022

Book preview

Prologue

I want to know why, as I begin this story, I want to call my old lover who does not love me. I want to dial his phone, which he never picks up, he has a whole life separate from me, you know, mysterious and wide as the night, and then I want to go to every bar on the Lower East Side and find him, standing tall and surrounded up at the bar, drinking his beer from the bottle, and I want to drag him out, pull his cotton sleeve from a shirt that I know his aunt gave him, pull at the woolen vest he always wears, I want to pull at him, I don’t care if his clothes rip, I want to use all my force and just drag him out. He’ll go because he’ll think they think poor guy, she’s crazy, and I don’t care, I want to get him out on the street, away from the bar and the glowing people dining together and making promises together and hinting at things together, I want to get him alone in that hot night with just a street lamp lighting us and I want to force him, make him stand there and see there is no choice. He’ll stand there pained and skinny, clenching himself because this time he’s run for good. He’ll close his eyes when he looks at me, why, why won’t she just leave me alone, why doesn’t she just go away, and I want to punch him right then, hard on the nose as he stands there wishing me away, punch him for not loving me, and then push his chest in, as if he’s weak, push him for the way he never moves softly toward me.

1

There’s a boat coming toward us, screamed Charlee in the car.

Maybe her vision was not so good anyway, because she felt a little sick from the cigar smoke’s growing interior fog. It was nighttime. She and her father had been driving all day; they had left Montreal for the back roads of Vermont.

Her father enjoyed going to another country, as he would say, for a drive. He felt sort of powerful, she thought, going through customs, telling the men in their uniforms that he and his daughter were just out for the day. Back that evening. They would be waved through. Her father answered the customs men’s questions with a secret smile, his dark eyes unfocused, as if he had something to hide and he dared them to discover it.

Charlee shuddered, sitting beside him, at this smugness her father drove away from the customs with. As if he had fooled them. She shuddered because she knew he was not hiding anything. The smugness was her father’s imaginary accomplishment.

There were no other cars on the road. The trees slid by, full, white, and heavy with snow. Charlee and her father had watched the sun occasionally slip through the grey sky, only to finally see it fall down the car rear window. The snow hadn’t let up since they left the second stop.

Her father liked to drive and stop in little canteens, have two quick scotches. I don’t have a drinking problem, he said, although at ten she had never thought to ask. As far as she was concerned he was a nearly perfect man, difficult and selfish as probably all people must be, but big and capable of such original things as going to another country for the afternoon, and of having people from all walks of life, in gas stations, bars, customs, businesses, think he was someone special. This solitary man who was above, really, joining in crowds. You never see me sit, he explained, like an American, for hours in a bar. I have two scotches and then leave.

Years later, she knew his pattern only served a compulsion never to be known, and years later she added up those stops to twenty-six scotches a day.

They’d stopped six times today. She’d had Cokes, admittedly, but she was the one seeing an ocean liner on the road coming toward them. She cracked the window a bit for air.

I don’t hear any foghorns, her father said, and sort of harrumphed to himself. He brought the cigar back to his mouth and puffed so the sides of his mouth stayed open. Like a fish with gills.

Daddy, I feel sick.

All those Shirley Temples, Cokes, and cherries. It’ll be a damn sight better when you start drinking real drinks.

Daddy, I really do feel sick. She put her head back on the seat, her hair felt damp and limp, and her shirt was starting to get wet. Some barmaid, a long time ago, when she had eaten too many oysters and sipped too many pink ladies, had told her to put her head down. She put her head down.

The boat is passing, he said.

And she slowly raised her head up, opened the window full throttle to help with the clamminess, and fearfully, who cares what happens next, looked out the front windshield.

Oh, I see, she said, it’s a snow plow.

The large blades make it look like a boat, he laughed.

She felt that type of dizziness that makes other people’s words sound a long muffled way away. She didn’t want to hear him. He could, you know, get annoyed at her asking what blades did he mean, weren’t they right in front of their bloody eyes? He might tell her she’s the one with a drinking problem—what with seeing boats in the middle of the road. He might use it to elaborate his theory that women have no damn hope of logic, honesty, or common sense. He might forget that she asked and sit in what seemed like pouting silence. He might even drive onto the curb as he explained what the blades do, watching her carefully to see if she understood, as he would say, what the hell he was talking about.

Yeah. She lay back exhausted. They were silent in the snowy night for what seemed a long time, she lying back on the seat, putting her small face up against the coolness of the car window, he driving confidently and surely on the snowy back roads. Daddy? Daddy, would you mind putting the cigar out?

And here’s where it always confused her. Here’s where she could never trust herself.

She turned to him and he was silently, happily even, stubbing his cigar out.

Slowly she began to feel good again. The dizziness passed. Why don’t you go to sleep if you’re tired? he said.

Don’t you want company while you’re driving?

You can sleep. I’m used to going for long drives alone.

When?

I used to do it between marriages. To make myself less lonely. Get in the car and drive somewhere. Talk to the people in the pubs.

Marriages. Charlee couldn’t stand his current wife. As far as Charlee could make out, her father couldn’t stand her either. My advice, Charlee said, is to take long drives while you are married. Right now.

What do you think we’re doing? he said.

She sank back into the seat, a private sneaky feeling of warmth quickly flooding and just as quickly leaving her, that he had chosen her to go driving with her, rather than his wife. Their team was stronger than the other team.

She lay back, content in the car. He would get them back to their house. His thin, brisk, chain-smoking wife would be annoyed they were so late. He would sit down in the living room and drop cigar ash onto the old couch. Charlee would go to her room, without a word to his wife. His wives, for some deck of cards she didn’t deal, were never her friends. Barmaids were, a little bit. Nobody really of the grown-up sector. He had the big job. Generally, he was pretty good at it.

And her eyes closed, she had eaten too many cherries, her head fell back onto the car seat, and she dreamed of a big man in a jacket, a man who never took off his jacket, a big man who followed her everywhere, always watching her, sometimes smiling, sometimes just roaming by wherever she was, and he wouldn’t go away.

2

Now, I too, love to drive alone. I am great company to myself when I drive this way. Old friends come to realizations, the dead return as bards on lawn chairs, lovers find each other, and me, with movie-like conviction, all this happens just as the sun is setting, a red sky, and I take my hands off the steering wheel and clap in delight, so positive am I that love and mystery will come to me. I feel young, beautiful, the world is promising and the feeling is so strong that people passing by in their red or black Camaros and Monte Carlos smile at me as if they, too, are sure it will all come to me.

So it was on one of those Sunday evening drives, one of my casual five-hour drives, when I’m moving along, pretty secure in my encapsuled world, that I reached to the back of the car and pulled the picture out of the bag and brought it to the front seat. I propped it up against the passenger door.

It is a child’s drawing in charcoal. I found it yesterday in one of my suitcases. I am so impressed with it. My ex-lover drew it when he was a child. It’s of his father who scares him. The lines are strong. I brought the picture with me for company, to keep what was between us alive.

Later I put the drawing into a grey envelope and sent it by messenger to my ex-lover’s apartment. I wrote a note that said, I love this drawing. But you should have it. I framed it so it will last. I love you, etc.

I called him and said, I’m sending you your birthday present. Are you going to be home?

Is it alive? he asked. He sounded truly frightened. He knows I would never do anything purposefully cruel. I winced at this thought because I have done so many things unpurposefully cruel. Is it an elephant? he asked.

Yes. So you better clean up your studio. Have lots of peanuts. They can eat you out of house and home.

What is it? I love to hear the child’s play in his voice.

Wait and see, I said. And then Peter’s excitement made me sad. After all, it’s not a splendid gift. It’s a memento, and we are split up. Well, it’s not much really. Just something you should have. Call me when you get it.

I call him before he calls me. I want him to know that I am not playing with him. That I am attentive. But the impulse to call is not attentiveness; even I know that it’s panic.

Did you get it?

Yes.

You’re not offended I returned it to you? I ask.

No, he says. Where’s my signature?

On the back. You can take it out of the frame, if you want to. I change the subject. What did you do on your birthday?

I worked fourteen hours. Then I went to a restaurant alone and had dinner. It was awful.

I had driven out of town that night on purpose so I would be far away, far from my silent phone. Why didn’t you call me?

Scared.

Of what?

The hurricane.

I say nothing. I am silenced. It is true. I feel my body slump in defeat. Doesn’t he know I don’t want to make hurricanes, that they are my own special combustion? I am capable, like anyone else, of making beauty and peace and love. I am not a bearer of ill winds.

Well, maybe we’ll have a coffee sometime, he says.

I am confused. This is the first time he has said that.

Did you hear what I said? Would you like to? Have a coffee sometime? he asks.

I become meek, insensible. Yes, I squeak out. Not because I am humbled or so grateful for this slight opening of the door. But because he took control. For a second, I do not have the concrete activity of twisting, prostrating myself outside his closed door.

Yeah, okay, I say, all fogged up. I hang up.

I get a little fire, a slight erotic tingle, when I think to myself, Oh, he didn’t mean it. He said it to get off the phone. I don’t know what I will do if he, this man I have longed so painfully for, should call me and ask me out for a coffee.

II

I need my allowance, Charlee said to her father. She was sitting next to him at the bar. There were just four stools, it was a bar in a motel, they went there all