Lipstick Jungle

Lyne reached over and started fiddling with the dials on the middle console.

“Excuse me?” Victory said.

“Just wondering if this car has air-conditioning.”

“It does, but I hate it. Even if it’s ninety degrees out, I drive with the windows open.” And to prove her point, she opened the windows, blasting Lyne with warm air.

* * *

THE WEEKEND WASN’T A total disaster until Saturday evening. Up until then, Lyne had been doing his very best to show that he too had a different, more relaxed side, but that may have been partially due to the fact that there was no cell phone service within a thirty-mile radius. On Saturday morning, they went to a local agricultural fair, and instead of looking at the rabbits and roosters, Lyne kept looking at his cell phone. “How can you not have service up here?” he asked. “I’ve used this phone on a remote island off the coast of Turkey, but I can’t get service in Connecticut?”

“Darling, that is so boring,” Victory said. “Complaining about your lack of cell phone service. You’ve got to let it go.”

“Okay,” Lyne said. He gamely stuck his finger into a rooster’s cage, and was immediately pecked. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his finger. “What kind of a place is this? No cell phone service and killer chickens.”

“Let’s go check out the tractor pull,” she said.

“In these shoes?” he asked, lifting up one foot. He was wearing expensive Italian loafers.

“Hey, watch out,” called a woman in fancy dress, who was sitting astride a horse. Lyne jumped to the si

de, stepping in some kind of manure, which Victory immediately surmised was from a cow. Lyne smiled gamely, only looking down at his shoe about every fifteen seconds.

“And now, here’s John in the five-horse garden master, making his first attempt to pull four hunnerd pounds,” the announcer said over the loudspeaker.

“I love this, don’t you?” Victory asked.

She looked to Lyne for confirmation, but he seemed to have suddenly disappeared. Damn him, she thought. He was just like a child who was always running off and getting lost. She crossed her arms. She wasn’t going to look for him. He was a grown-up and she wasn’t his mother.

She watched the tractor pull, her irritation and panic over what might have happened to him increasing by the minute. And then she heard the announcer say, “Here’s Line, or Lynn, can’t figure out exactly how to pronounce this fella’s name, making his first attempt at four hunnerd pounds . . .”

It couldn’t be. But it was. There was Lyne, sitting astride a tractor, grinding the engine as he attempted to race it across the muddy track. He made it to the finish line and she cheered, thinking he was so competitive, he couldn’t resist entering any sort of contest.

Lyne made it into the semi-finals, but was eliminated when smoke started coming out of the engine of his tractor when he was pulling eight hundred pounds.

“Hey, did you see that, babe?” he said breathlessly, full of himself. “I sure showed those local farmers a thing or two, eh?”

“Where did you get the tractor?” she asked.

“Bought it off some farmer for ten thousand dollars.”

“What the hell are you going to do with it?”

“What d’ya think?” he said. “I gave it back to him. He’s my new best friend. Told him next time I come up here I’m gonna come to his farm and ride it.”

That night, she made a roast chicken for dinner. Lyne couldn’t stop talking about the tractor pull, and how he’d beaten the pants off some of the locals. She thought it was funny, until she started making gravy. Lyne, still taken with his performance in the tractor pull, insisted on butting in, claiming that he knew a great recipe for gravy from his mother. He poured red wine into it, and then Worcestershire sauce. Suddenly, Victory had had enough. She screamed at him, and for a moment, he stood there, stunned. Then he threw the spoon into the sink.

“How dare you?” Victory said, picking up the offending utensil. She shook it in his face. “You cannot behave this way in my house.”

“Fine,” he said. “You seem to want to be alone anyway, so maybe I’d better leave. I’ll call Bumpy and tell him to pick me up.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” she said.

It took Bumpy two and a half hours to get there; in the interval, they barely spoke. She tried to eat the chicken, but it tasted dry and got caught in her throat. This was the moment when they should have made up, when one of them should have apologized, but it seemed that neither one of them could be bothered to make the effort. “It’s probably better like this,” she said to him, when he finally walked out the door.

“Whatever you say,” he said coldly. He had retreated back into his indifferent billionaire shell, and she had put him there.

“You broke up over gravy?” Wendy exclaimed later, on the phone.