Words & Dreams (Book 1 of Smithers Family Saga)

Chapter 35

"So what did you think?" Eugene said, eying the way his sister looked after the two who left.

"He's a very handsome janitor," Yvette said. "Dresses like- a man without much style. But you can tell he doesn't care. It's sexy."

"You said before the idea of it was repellant," Erica said. "A man without style. Must have been just last week you said it."

"Not those exact words," Yvette said. "But a man who would date Dollie, and a janitor; you'd think he'd have the decency to feel ashamed. But he doesn't. That's what makes him special."

"Special?" Erica said.

"You don't agree?" Yvette said. "Violet, don't you think they looked good together?"

"They did," Violet said. "But I'm biased riffraff."

"Oh no," Yvette said. "You'll tease me for my teasings?"

"He was a handsome guy," Eugene said. "I hope it works out okay."

"They did look good together," Erica said, annoyed that Yvette had asked Violet and not her.

"I- I think we shouldn't put too much into it," Eugene said. "What if the fact that we're talking about them gets out and back to Dollie? Yvette isn't exactly secretive."

"If you only knew!" Yvette said.

"Don't be a man," Erica said, turning to her brother.

"Excuse me?" Eugene said.

"Don't be the rational dweeb who comes in," Erica said, "who suddenly tells women how to feel. Like a little gossip is wrong."

"I don't think I'm doing that," Eugene said. He turned to Violet, sure that his wife would support him. "Am I?"

Violet looked away at his slightly blank face, thinking he still can be stupid, and then she turned to her husband and said, "I'm afraid they're right, honey."

"Oh," Eugene said and Violet could tell he was processing this as new information, as if wondering how much harm he'd caused by interacting this way in the past. She knew, that as the room was full of others, he couldn't talk to her directly. She'd humored him in the past: other women tended to fawn over him as they did to the words of any attractive man who was being relatively 'sensible' in the same way that men fawned over the feelings of attractive women, suddenly humoring ideas they would have considered absurd in the past.

"I suppose you're right," Eugene said. "I just want her to be happy."

"She can be happy," Yvette said, "and we have our gossip at the same time. It's not like... unless, you, Genie, are one of those mystic freaks that believes what is said can affect someone by a sort of indirect telepathy on the other side of the world; in which case I need to pay a gypsy to brush the blood of a goat over your naked body in a magic sigil, and then  I have to paint you under the light of a full moon-"

"Easy, Yvette," Erica said. "He's- eww- my brother- and his wife's right there."

"I was merely offering up my services, should he be the proper archetype of a naive sort of spiritualist, to paint him truly, as a primal shaman."

"You're turning me on," Violet said. "Better switch the subject, or I'll have to learn to paint. And make my husband suffer through my pale imitations."

"I come here," Eugene said, "to be reunited with my wife, and see my sisters, and suddenly a Frenchwoman is coming in tell me I ought to get naked, stereotyping the Romani people, who've suffered under European-"

"Oh, shut up, Genie," Yvette said. "If you're out of the lamp and wishing, I'll be the stopper. Call me bigot, and I'll call you a big git!"

Yvette was known for her puns, despite her Frenchness and the fact that they often made no sense. If there were a language composed entirely of puns, Erica once said, Yvette would have learned it, and gained the fluency of a native speaker.

"It's fun, having the family together," Erica said.

It was strange to Violet, to see the odd role that Yvette forced Erica into. Yvette became the top of the hierarchy, not by exceptionalism, though she was certainly that, but by an entitlement and force of personality; the latter allowing the former. 'It's fun, having the family together,' could just as easily have been a sarcastic comment made by Dollie, yet it was not.

"I'm thinking of getting another valet," Yvette said, as if the conversation which had been taking place were of no consequence, and she had the natural right to start another. 

"You've been saying that for years," Erica said.

"Hah!" Yvette said, "I mean it this time. Since my last valet failed me-"

"You tried to sleep with him," Erica said.

"And he slept with me," Yvette said. "A gay man. A disgrace to his kind."

"You paid him his paycheck," Erica said. "What else was he supposed to do?"

"That sounds exploitative," Eugene said.

"Uh, the blah blah talk of Americans," Yvette said. "A man, so close, and always touching you. What was I supposed to do?"

"Contain yourself," Eugene said. Then: "Did you really have a valet?"

"It was in Europe," Erica said. "When I met her. Though she had her original valet then."

"God rest his soul," Yvette said, and she crossed herself, a Catholic woman by culture, even if she never went to church.

"It was in Denmark," Erica said, "that I met Yvette. I remember the guy following her- I'd just left a party in a large manor- and I assumed she'd forgotten something, or that the man was stalking her. I tapped her on the shoulder and asked her if she forgot something, and she explained the situation to me."

"I believe I asked her out to breakfast," Yvette said, "and the two of us chatted."

"Not three?" Erica said.

"No," Yvette said. "Two. He and I were one. And he had the decency to be quiet, only speaking when he had something truly witty to say, that was his own. Other valets, they'll rob you of the joke one of the conversationalists is about to make, or they say something dull, that makes you pity and resent them."

"Did he die?" Violet asked.

"Heavens no," Yvette said and grasped at her chest like a hammy stage actor. "I should die myself- despite our separation. No. He met a man."

"Gay?" Violet said.

"The man my valet got with? I certainly hope so."

"I meant the valet," Violet said, "but I suppose that answers my question."

"To think," Yvette said, "that I should have to bear the sight of him putting on another's suit jacket, when he had once done my make-up. Rouge there, mascara there; you know how it is," she said knowingly, as if any of them had any idea of what it was like to have a personal attendant.

"I suppose this man your valet married had money," Eugene said, as if to torment her.

"Not as much as my valet," Yvette said.

"She paid him well," Erica said.

"How-?" Eugene began.

"So what are you looking for in your next valet?" Violet said.

"First," Yvette said, "he must be devoutly homosexual. Pleasing to the eye, yet not so much so as to tempt me. At least homosexual enough to resist my advances."

"And-?" Violet said. She knew Yvette expected shockwaves from her audience, but they all gave her nothing.

"He must know when to talk and not to talk. If I want to gossip, we gossip. He must be educated, and must also know at least three languages."

"How would anyone with those qualifications be in a position to be a valet?" Eugene said.

"It worked out once well enough," Yvette said. "But let us look at my paintings," she said.

"They're good," Erica said. "At least the ones I've seen.

"Of course," Yvette said, "but others, I am not so sure," she said, and this was geniuine. Whatever superiority she felt in herself, somehow could come out as humility when in reference to her art. As if the art itself was the sublimation of the feelings of inferiority that lesser people might have.