1) This, Vesithia LaRue said, is not living. Decidedly. Not. Living.
Ms. LaRue was in the bar of a Chinese restaurant, where she was sitting straight as a pin at a corner table and bathed in an almost infernal red light. Though she was a non-smoker, she had the mannerisms and dramatic demeanor of someone who was smoking cigarette after cigarette.
With her long fingers dangling from impossibly thin wrists she was drawing slow, continuous circles with a pink plastic straw in a drink that was the color of an exotic and idealized lagoon.
Vesithia’s table companions had been reduced to silence by her churlish mood (which was increasingly her prevailing mood). To venture even the most innocuous comment was to invite a withering lash from her acid tongue.
In a story that she often related, Vesithia explained that her name was that of an imaginary flower that had come to her mother, Estelle LaRue, in a dream.
Do not think, Vesithia was now saying, do not dare think for even one moment, that I have been wounded. (Everyone at the table –and, in fact, everyone of Ms. LaRue’s acquaintance– was decidedly of the opinion that Vesithia had, in fact, been badly wounded.)
Although, Vesithia added after a moment, I suppose that boredom, if it becomes terminal, would have to be classified as a type of wound.
Eventually, in timid response to one of the conversation’s earlier tangents (or, more properly, one of the fragments of Ms. LaRue’s halting and ongoing monologue), one of Vesithia’s companions ventured, “I feel certain that the body retains some memory of every encounter it has ever had with human hands.”
Hogwash, Vesithia said. Utter fucking hogwash.
If there was one phrase that defined Vesithia LaRue (and in truth there were a great many), it was, “I strongly disagree.”
As strident and forceful as Ms. LaRue could be –and she could be very strident and forceful indeed– she never, ever resorted to outright exclamation, although the temptation to insert exclamation points after her utterances was nonetheless irresistible.
2) Vesithia LaRue had a dog. It was smallish and ordinary-looking, the type of dog of apparent mixed breed that one was likely to encounter at any dog park or animal shelter. So ordinary looking was Ms. LaRue’s dog, in fact, that her mother, Estelle, had once referred to the animal as a “generic sort of dog,” a description that Vesithia pronounced “unpardonable,” and which led to a protracted estrangement between mother and daughter.
Estelle LaRue was now (fairly recently, in fact) dead, but while she had been among the living there had been many such protracted estrangements with her daughter, all of them caused, the older Ms. LaRue would contend, by small misunderstandings.
Vesithia LaRue had a long history of misunderstandings large and small –of misunderstanding others and being herself misunderstood. Many, if not most, of these misunderstandings were the result of her insistence that others abide by her own version of the truth, a version of the truth which might charitably be described as peculiar.
Vesithia would claim, for instance, that her smallish, ordinary-looking dog –which, owing to her characteristic inability to make up her mind, was called either Pronto or Presto– was an African Dancing Dog. This, she asserted, was an extremely rare breed, and had once been on the endangered species list. Vesithia had acquired the dog, she said, on a trip to Nigeria.
Despite the animal’s purported breed, no one could recall ever having seen Pronto (or Presto) dance. Many people, however, had heard the dog bark. What it was apparently lacking in dance skills, Vesithia LaRue’s little dog more than made up for in the noise-making department.
The creature’s incessant barking had, in fact, prompted Ms. LaRue’s eviction from a half dozen different apartments.
3) Vesithia LaRue had been born Vesithia LaRoach, a name that had been for her a torment of longstanding. It was, she would tell her mother from a very early age, insufferable. It was unpardonable, egregious, and an affront to someone of Vesithia’s refined sensitivity.
These words Vesithia had learned from a book called Thirty Days To A Larger Vocabulary, which she had stolen from the library at Blanche Patch Middle School, along with another book called The Golden Keys To Self-Improvement. There was a chapter in this latter book –“If You Don’t Like Yourself, Be Someone Better!”– that Vesithia had revised in her mind to “If You Don’t Like Yourself, Be Someone Different!”
Toward this end –her goal was to be someone entirely different– Vesithia was determined to change her name. Her nickname at Blanche Patch Middle School was “The Roach,” and hearing these words hurled at her every day by cruel schoolmates, Vesithia would tell her mother, had left her permanently, irrevocably scarred.
“But, dear, it is your name,” Estelle LaRoach had told her daughter. “There is not a thing in the world you can do about it.”
Vesithia knew that in this, as in so much else, her mother was mistaken, and the day she turned eighteen years old, with money she had made working at the perfume counter at the Younker’s Department Store, she had applied for a legal name change for both her mother and herself.
The elder Ms. LaRue knew that it was pointless to resist her daughter in any matter on which she had set her mind, and so reluctantly went along with the change. In time, she would eventually admit, she had come to appreciate her new name.
4) In my private moments, Vesithia LaRue would say, I cannot deny that I feel my soul to be an unspeakably forlorn place.
Vesithia was not in the least bit reluctant about making public the many feelings that were incubated in her private moments.
Despite her frequent insistence that she had not been wounded, it was generally assumed by all who knew her that Vesithia LaRue had, in fact, had her heart broken by Roland Thames Trempeleau, a postal carrier and classical music composer whom she had met once upon a time at a Mensa meeting.
Roland Trempeleau, Vesithia was fond of recounting, had wooed and courted her with “elegant zeal and uncommon ardor.” Roland had been a perfect gentleman, and he had been –or so Vesithia would claim– unabashedly smitten with her.
I have been swept off my feet, she would often report in the early days of her tempestuous yet wholly covert courtship with Roland Trempeleau.
Whether people were inclined or disinclined to believe these reports varied a great deal, but it was nonetheless undeniable that no one who had ever been subjected to Vesithia’s breathless accounts of her affair had ever so much as laid eyes on the man, let alone made his acquaintance. They were, however, told that Roland Trempeleau had a habit that drove Vesithia absolutely wild; whenever he checked his wristwatch, it was said, Roland would jerk his whole body upwards, roll back on his heels, hunch his shoulders dramatically, and then raise his right arm, cocked at an extreme and exaggerated angle, in front of his face.
Vesithia would often provide public demonstrations of this ritual, and it was, she claimed, the sexiest thing she had ever seen.
Alas, Roland Thames Trempeleau, once such a perfect gentleman, had in the end been revealed as just another cad, this after he purportedly abandoned Vesithia for an “internationally renowned cellist with a major American orchestra.”
To reveal any more information than this, Vesithia would insist, would be indiscreet.
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