The Other Woman 
Desperate Housewives
Three things were a given in Austin’s high society in 2003: Marriages were on the rocks, pills were taken straight up, and ties to the Bush White House were the most intoxicating drug of all. An exclusive excerpt from Sarah Bird’s new novel, How Perfect Is That.
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(Page 2 of 3)
I whirl around, making sure that the sunlight catches my custom-fitted Zac Posen in just the right way. “Kip-Kip! Wow, you look amazing.” Amazing is how most of Kippie Lee’s crowd think she looks. With her long, straight, expensively bleached hair and long, straight, fastidiously starved body, K.L. has always modeled herself after Jerry Hall. Now, however, she has whittled herself away, to the starved, holding-on-by-a-thread look of a fellow sister in desperation. Her doll-baby bright-blue eyes glitter a little too intensely; her size 1 Pucci frock hangs a little too loosely. Kippie Lee appears to be in the crisis phase with a straying husband when she is in danger of giving him what he wants most and making herself disappear altogether.
I point to her shoes and squeal, “You got the Chanel croc heels! I was so going to get those exact heels.”
Kippie Lee tips her left shoe from side to side, examining it as she recalls, “God, they made me wait, like, two months before . . .” She catches herself and stops suddenly; my feint into friendship has failed. Once again all business, Kippie Lee yanks open the compactor, and her mouth drops in horror as she reads the name on the wrapping I was trying to hide.
“Sam’s Club?” She points to the trays of food waiting to be presented to the cream of Austin society. “This is what you’re going to serve?”
“No, no, of course not.” I pirouette to shield the trays of Sam’s taquitos I’d planned to slip through customs as petites tournedos béarnaise à la mexicaine.
“Blythe, you promised me a true fête champêtre, a classic English garden party. The menu we agreed upon was amuse-bouches, to include, but not to be limited to, mustard-seed-crusted tuna loin with an herb-coconut sauce and quail stuffed with goat cheese.”
I hold up a finger to silence Kippie Lee and furiously punch numbers into my cell phone. “Guillaume, bonjour. Comment va avec les amuse-bouches?” I pause, nod thoughtfully, and throw out an occasional enthusiastic, “Bien, très bien!” as I listen to the dead silence of a dead cell phone whose bill I haven’t been able to pay in months. I snap the cell shut and announce triumphantly, “My staff is putting the finishing touches on the tuna loin even as we speak.”
“Are those . . .” Kippie Lee snags a flower from one of the buckets I bought from a street vendor on the way over. “Carnations?” She might as well have asked, Used toilet brushes?
“What?” I squint with irritation at the flowers. “Oh, damn, Les Fleurs du Mal messed up my order. Don’t worry. I’ll get it sorted.” I purposely say “sorted,” not “sorted out.” Dropping the occasional anglicism—“one off,” “brilliant,” “chuffed”—has a nice distancing effect. I work my thumbs and forefingers as frantically as a pachinko player as I simultaneously punch a text message into my phone and juggle to keep the dead screen out of Kippie Lee’s sight.
“Blythe, you promised masses of peonies and lilies and many sets of the Dix family antique Royal Winton china in the coveted Dorset pattern. And croquet. You said there would be croquet.”
I can recall nothing about this Victorian fantasy I apparently painted, though I do like the croquet flourish, and answer smartly, “A staff member just called to say he has secured the precise croquet set used by HRH and that he is on his way right now to set it up. I’ll check to make sure he has it.”
Before I have a chance to make a pretend call on my pretend phone about the pretend croquet set, K.L. begins manhandling the smudge pots I picked up at Family Dollar, then spritzed with Glade. I pluck it out of her hand and quickly change the subject. “Kip-Kip, if you had given me the advance we agreed upon, I could have—”
“You know I wanted to, but Hunt put his foot down.”
Now we are on very thin ice indeed. The major reason that poor Kippie Lee is hosting this or any other party is to silence the rumors regarding trouble here in the starter castle. Rumors about how Hunt Teeter, Miss Kip’s philandering asshole of a husband, has been getting the kind of cleanings from his nubile young dental hygienist that left Happy Rockefeller a widow. Unfortunately for K.L., though, if you want to throw a big the-marriage-is-fine party, El Hubbo has got to put in an appearance. Ominously, Kippie Lee had not been able to wrangle Philandering Asshole into making so much as a cameo. And, in the end, she was forced to settle for this, the all-gal-pal weekday garden party.
“Well, without an advance—”
“Duncan and Cherise told Hunt that they were not completely in love with what you did for her opening.”
“Duncan and Cherise Tatum? The Tatums were mad about that event. I perfectly matched the food to Cherise’s remarkable show of button art. Cunning pieces. Little button men holding little button hearts out to little button women. Button dogs lifting button legs on button fire hydrants. Button girls chasing button butterflies. I picked up the motif perfectly and served a complementary buffet every bit as fanciful. How perfect was that?”
“You served Eggo waffles, Necco wafers, pepperoni kebabs, and circles of bologna on Ritz crackers.”
“Yes! Wasn’t it inspired? Buttons? Circles? Circles of life, circles of friends, circles of food. They adored it.”
“They stopped payment on the check.”
“All right, Kippie Lee, I’ll level with you. A few of my events might have been the tiniest bit less than flawless after”—I pause before going on to identify the Damocles sword hanging over K.L.’s head—“the divorce.” Waiting for a gush of sister feeling to well up, I blink back tears that I don’t have to summon so much as simply stop fighting for one second. “Well, a woman really finds out who her true friends are.”
Kippie Lee takes a second to imagine all her friends drinking Belmontinis at the Belmont without her and a few drops of compassion do actually moisten her arid expression. I push this tiny opening. I’d heard that even though Hunt Teeter’s firm had made one fortune on legal prestidigitation when the venture capital money flowed to the dot-commers, then another fortune when it was rerouted through bankruptcy court, his wife’s extravagance was rumored to have been the final straw, the one that caused him to stray. What Kippie Lee’s three-teardown Xanadu had ended up tearing down was her marriage. I decide to play that card. Sniffing, I go on bravely, “I guess, though, what I miss most is my house. My home.”
Kippie Lee puts her hand on her mouth, suppressing the horror that rises at the thought of losing the house that has cost her so much.
“I mean, of course, I could have stayed on”—I raise a born-again finger toward Pemberton Palace—“up there. But it brings back too many memories.”
Kippie Lee places a hand on my arm.
Bingo! The buttresses are flying again. This is my opening; I have to scoot through it while I can. “At least George and Laura have stayed on my side.”
“The Bushes?”
“Yes, we visited them so many times at Kennebunkport. Gathering of the clans, all that. Forty-one and Junior.” I press my index and middle fingers together to symbolize the closeness between Trey’s father and the forty-first president of the United States. “Bar is begging me to do something clambakey for her this summer when the whole gang gathers. You didn’t hear it from me, but . . .” I glance around the empty kitchen and Kippie Lee leans in. “Bar hates Peggy. Loathes her. When Bar was doing fundraisers for Planned Parenthood back in the Texas years, Peggy was on the board, and it got so bad that Bar had her banned.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Kippie Lee drags herself back to the matter at hand, though with considerably less vehemence now that I have again reestablished my White House-insider status. “Okay, but the votives?”
I look down and pretend once more to read a message on my cell phone. “Jean-Philippe just texted. The votives are on the way, Kips.” I turn my nervous hostess around and give her a gentle push. “Now, you, my little goddess, all you have to worry about is making yourself even more fabulous than you already are. Scoot, scoot, scoot.”
Kippie Lee leaves and I slump onto a hammered-copper bar stool. After sitting for a moment, I notice that I can’t catch my breath and that my hand resting on the two-inch-thick textured-glass countertop is trembling with a palsied rattle I cannot control. With a macabre syncopation, my right eye starts twitching. I put my twitching hand against my twitching eye and feel my spastic colon tick like a time bomb.
Pausing only to grab my silver Fendi hobo, I rush out. I’m cracking and have to find sanctuary before the meltdown. Thank God for K.L.’s adoration of Texas’s first and still most glamorous celebrity-socialite, Becca Cason Thrash, who has thirteen powder rooms and two bedrooms in her 20,000-square-foot Houston home. Thirteen to two. The ratio mesmerized Kippie Lee, who believed that it held the secret to earthly happiness. When she tried to duplicate it, however, her husband put his foot down. “What the hell do you think we’re running here?” Hunt had demanded. “A potty-training academy? Four is the absolute maximum number of crappers I will allow.”
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