Beautiful Kate by Newton Thornburg Page A

more tablespoons of sugar. Then he was ready again for Toni.
    “Never thought the day would come when I’d be abused at my own table by a trollop.”
    Not quite sure of the word, Toni gave me a quizzical look. But before I could say anything, Junior jumped in, the soul of helpfulness.
    “Trollop as in whore,” he said. “A woman who sells herself.”
    Toni was still confused. “Well, what’s that got to do with me? Who the hell’s paying me for anything?”
    “What do you do for your keep?” Jason asked. “Besides sleep with a man?”
    Again Toni turned to me. “Do we have to take this kind of crap? Aren’t you gonna say anything?”
    Jason laughed contentedly, rattling his phlegm. “What can he say? He’s being kept too. Which means you’re a kept man’s kept woman.”
    In a quarrel Toni is like a ten-year-old boy, all fight and no style. So I was not surprised as she leaned across the table now, practically snarling at the old man.
    “Yeah, well at least we don’t stink! And we don’t spit all over everybody else!”
    Chuckling and winking at me, Junior was having a fine time. But he apparently felt that my discomfort was not sufficiently acute.
    “This reminds me a little of Mama’s funeral, when Greg came back here with his heiress wife. You two didn’t exactly hit if off either, did you, Jason?”
    The old man made a face. “What a pretentious woman that one was!” he snorted. “They fly here in a chartered jet and rent a limousine. And no room in this house was good enough for her, no sir. She and her kept man here had to stay in that new motel near Aurora.”
    “My kind of woman,” Toni said.
    But Jason was not listening. “Why, every little thing she did, she had to have a special outfit for. When I chided her about it, she said it was her duty, that it was the duty of the rich to spend a lot of money to keep the peasants employed.”
    “You don’t think she was kidding you?” I asked.
    “Kidding! That woman didn’t have any sense of humor at all. If she did, she wouldn’t have married you, a penniless ‘writer’ of movies.”
    And so on, ad nauseam . I really don’t know why I bother to record these pleasant little family gatherings, since they are all so much alike. By now I imagine you are only too well aware what meager love and understanding are lost between Jason and me. And I see no prospect of it ever changing. I do find it interesting, though, how hung up he still remains on the subject of Ellen Brubaker, my “Santa Barbara millionairess.” One would think that my first wife, Janet, and our two daughters, Susan and Tracy—Jason’s own grandkids—did not even exist for all the interest he shows in them, and this despite the tale I told him about my being sued for their nonsupport. In point of fact, Janet remarried almost a decade ago, bagging a prosperous Orange County realtor, and the girls have grown up secure and comfortable, happy with their lot as future USC coeds and Young Republican homemakers. For all that, they are truly lovely and I miss them more than I care to admit. But let me just mention them to Jason and a few seconds later he is off and running on the subject of my “millionairess.” I guess it’s simply the idea of all that money that fascinates him, money I married and shared for almost five years—and money very like that which he himself grew up with in Chicago, and then lost, thanks to my grandfather’s improvidence.
    For the most part, though, all he can do is speculate on the character of my marriage to Ellen, probably because I never have told him much about that relationship, figuring that his dour imagination already gave him enough ammunition without my giving him any more. But I do wonder how he would react if he knew that in the last years of our marriage I received an allowance from Ellen; or that I once fell fully dressed into the Biltmore pool while taking a drunken poke at her; or that she was forever kicking me out and changing