Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Red had then announced that he had always wanted to be a marine and enlisted within the hour at an Ocean City recruiting office, and they left at noon for Parris Island, South Carolina, in the white Jaguar that had been Farrell’s high school graduation present to his son. Between them, they had fifty-five dollars and fourteen cents. When he wired his bank in Princeton for funds, Red discovered that his father had closed his account, and a furtive phone call home at an hour when he knew his father would be at work yielded only the two hundred-odd dollars that his mother had in her household account. She promised, still sobbing, to wire it as soon as they let her know where they would be living, or Lucy would be. Red would live on base in conditions he had not known existed. Given their combined assets, Lucy’s first married home was the Flamingo Motel, located two miles outside the base on a pitted two-lane blacktop road, backed by a savage, mosquito-spawning low-country marsh. The Flamingo did not have a pool. It did not even have air-conditioning. By the time Red’s first paycheck came and she found a tiny cinder block efficiency apartment in nearby Beaufort, she was welted all over with festering bites, and had dropped six pounds from her elegant greyhound’s body.

  There had followed, for Red, boot camp, officer candidate school at Quantico, Virginia, an invitation to the elite and dangerous Army Ranger School at Fort Benning, and finally, a tour of duty as a second lieutenant at Camp Pendleton, California. For the spoiled and indolent son of a very rich man, Red took to it all like a pintail to water. Whatever recessive outlaw genes underlay his smiling, sleepy rages and scarlet lapses into brutality came surging to the fore during the grueling hours of basic training and the stylized savagery of ranger training, and Red at last found his level. It was not nearly so refined as the one he had occupied for the first twenty-one years of his life, but the constant adrenaline high of danger and mastery and the small, select society of his murderous peers more than made up for the loss of creature comforts and privilege his father’s money had bought him.

  Red found that he was as good at being a golden killing machine as he had been at being a rich boy. And he liked it a great deal more. It gave him a focus and a license that all the civilian years of his life had not. By the time he was twenty-four years old he was as totally assimilated into his new persona and world as if he had been born to it, and Lucy hung there with him, a silver and ebony fly in an elite and lethal amber.

  I don’t know precisely how her new life was for her, or what she thought about it. As she had done with the hated little girls’ school when she was small, she refused to talk to me about those first months as a marine bride, traipsing from South Carolina swamp to sun-blasted Georgia plain and finally to that barren Quonset hut on the high ocean plains of southern California, scoured by the merciless sun and punished by the Santa Ana winds. She never did, to my knowledge, tell anyone about them and her silence spoke for itself. To sensitive, imaginative Lucy Bondurant, quivering with life and terror and bravado and vulnerability like a tuning fork, uprooted from the only refuge she had ever known and the few friends and family who were all she had; no longer the devil-may-care, supremely desirable will-o’-the-wisp who tormented and titillated a generation of sweating Jells, but now merely a thin, mosquito-bitten second lieutenant’s wife at the rock bottom of the Marine Corps social pecking order, it must have truly been what her silence proclaimed it to be—unspeakable. But there was nothing of that in her voice during that first telephone call, and it was only much later that I began to think what indeed her first year as Mrs. Nunnally Chastain must have been like.

  “Why don’t you wake up Red and party with him?” I said on that June night in 1960, when the first call came. “As I recall, he was always in the forefront of the better parties of our generation.”

  “Red’s been out for two weeks slithering through the swamps with a knife between his teeth, garroting rattlesnakes and blowing up yuccas,” she said, giggling, and the liquor flashed in the giggle, too. “He’s in training to overthrow Cleveland.”

  “Then who were you partying with?” I asked.

  “His C.O.,” she chortled. “Perfectly adorable little old Texas boy named Rafer Hodges. Captain Rafer Hodges, U.S.M.C. Seven feet tall and towheaded as a yard dog, and with a tattoo that says ‘Semper Fi.’ I’m not going to tell you where it is. Only his platoon and his wife and I know that.”

  “And where was this wife?” I asked carefully. This sounded like more trouble. I did not know why I was surprised.

  “At home polishing his saber, I guess, or sleeping the sleep of the just. Where she said she was going when she stormed out of the officers’ club after old Rafer danced with me for the fourth time straight. She really pulls rank, Gibby. Six other senior wives toddled right out behind her. What the hell, it just left that many more marines to party with. And I out drank them all. Think of it, Gibby, I drank seven marines under the table in one night!”

  “Lucy, you are going to absolutely fry yourself with those women if you don’t watch it,” I said despairingly. “You can’t behave in the service like you did at home. You’ll be an outcast and Red’s career will be down the drain. You must know that. Is that what you’re trying to do, wreck him with the marines?”

  “Oh, shit, Gibby, you’re still a prick, aren’t you?” she said, sullen now. “Those women were squiffed to the eyeballs themselves. I’ll be good from now on, and charm their pants off them, and they’ll forget it in no time.”

  “Tell me something,” I said. “Why are you drinking so much?”

  “Because,” she said, “it makes everything special.”

  “Luce, you haven’t even been married a year. You shouldn’t have to drink for things to be special. Even if you hate the life out there, there’s Red; you don’t hate Red. My God, you went with him for five years before you married. You must love him.”

  “Red’s changed,” she said briefly.

  “How?” I asked, not wanting to hear it. Those dark fingerprints…

  “Oh…I don’t know. No way and every way, really. He’s…totally absorbed in the rangers; sometimes he doesn’t even come home when he could. He and some of the other guys will go out for days at a time into the desert, with just knives and a couple of matches, and come back stinking and filthy and drunk and happy as larks. And he doesn’t much want to party and dance at the club anymore, and you know how he used to love that…but mainly, Gibby, it’s just that he doesn’t understand me. I know now that he never did.”

  I could have told you that five years ago, I did not say.

  “You’re not the easiest gal in the world to understand,” I said instead.

  “You understand me, Gibby,” she said softly. “You always did.”

  Presently she hung up, and I lay there in the bleached, clamorous New York dawn, troubled, trying to imagine the truth of Lucy. Later, I put it together: The absences from the meager base housing, more and more frequent, longer and longer, while Red slipped into that literal country of lost boys, the U.S. Rangers. Later, the tours of sea duty, long months on end. Lucy left behind, knowing no one but marine wives, who disliked and distrusted her for her beauty, her high spirits, her Southern exoticism and the dangerous shoals of mischief and more than mischief they sensed just below her vibrant surface. Their husbands and their husbands’ superiors, much taken with her reckless dash and splendid looks, and in some cases downright smitten, but sensing in Lucy Bondurant Chastain the stuff of reprimands and toppled careers. A few disastrous evenings at the officers’ club in which she drank too much, flirted too brazenly, slipped outside with too many crew-cut young officers. A few equally disastrous teas and receptions in which she wore outrageously provocative clothing and said “shit” in the hearing of wives much her senior. And so she found herself a literal pariah, on that hot and unimaginable coast, alone both in her home and away from it. And the phone calls to New York, over the course of that hot summer, began in earnest.

  The pattern was always the same: the late-night burr of the telephone, th
e deep, in drawn breath as the dragged comfortingly on her cigarette, and then her voice spinning across the country to me, rich and low and thick with all our shared history: “Hey, Gibby. It’s Lucy, honey.”

  And there would follow the gleeful recounting of her latest escapade, and what she had said to whom in the commissary, and how she had that fool of a captain lifting bumpers out in the officers’ club parking lot, and how she had shocked that old trout, the rear admiral’s wife. She was usually drunk, and always, under the glee and high spirits, there ran a litany, a near frantic dirge, of loneliness and something more, something high and silvery and skewed. The calls came closer and closer together, and by the end of the summer they were coming almost every night.

  About the middle of August the tales of Red Chastain’s drunken and abusive behavior toward her began, and she would sometimes sob plaintively over the telephone, frankly drunk herself more often than not, and began to beg me to come out to Pendleton and rescue her.

  After each of the first of these calls I had called her back the next morning, when she was clearheaded and sober, and each time she laughed her warm, infectious laugh and told me not to pay any attention to her, she couldn’t hold her liquor worth a damn anymore. So I did not, after a while, worry quite so frantically about her, and listened to the next call with a reasonable amount of skepticism. But the calls continued, and each time she sounded so genuinely frightened, and so desperate, that fear for her and rage at Red would come flooding back, and I would find myself in the same old stew of Lucy-begotten agitation I had simmered in for much of my life.

  Sarah visited me several times that summer, and each time she was witness to one of Lucy’s late-night calls. She would fall silent when they came, and her lashes would slip down over her great amber eyes, and her mobile mouth would tighten, but she never said anything about them.

  On one such evening, something I said—or did not say—must have alerted Lucy to the fact that Sarah was in the room with me, because she said, “Oh, am I interrupting anything, Gibby? Like coitus interruptus, I mean? I can always call you back. But no, I guess not. Sarah no coito, does she? I swear, Gibby, if you marry that girl, you’re going to have to get you one of those rubber dollies from Japan with the hole that the guys take on sea duty, because you sure aren’t going to get any from little Miss—”

  I hung up on her, hot-faced and furious, and Sarah looked at me curiously, but I did not, of course, tell her what Lucy had said. It was insulting and outrageous, and Sarah had already suffered enough from Lucy Bondurant’s capricious tongue. And besides. Lucy was right. Despite the closeness we felt for each other, and the hours and days we spent alone in my apartment, and the real, aching sweetness and passion of our kissing and petting, Saran and I had not made love. We almost had, many times, both of us wet with sweat and fairly shaking with need for each other. But we had not.

  I think we were both a little ashamed that we hadn’t. Our times together seemed made for physical love. The grand scope and boundless largesse of the city itself fairly shouted for a grand passion to match it. New York in that last golden time before the sixties began to corrode was made for lovers. All around us, both in Manhattan and in Atlanta, the marriages and beginning pregnancies of our peers spoke of what Sarah’s fierce grandmother, old Milliment, called sanctified joy. I think the bottom line, for Sarah and me, was that our joy was not sanctified. Absurd as it seems now, in my set at that time you did not casually sleep with, and risk impregnation of, the girl you planned to bring into your ordered and strictured world as your wife. And whole and fully passioned adults as Sarah and I were, we were denizens of that world first. Though we had not talked of marriage with any formality, we both assumed that we would take that step only after Sarah had her year at the Sorbonne. In that suspended and time-stopped summer of 1960, marriage seemed far more than a year and an ocean away.

  We did try. Once or twice Sarah simply did not pull away from me, and we lay naked and joined but for a last crucial inch or two of scalding space. And once I actually entered her. But her little gasps and moans turned abruptly to cries of real pain, and I withdrew, cursing myself and her and our parents and the South and all the generations of women from out of both our histories who hovered over us on my narrow iron bed, crying “Stop! Shame! Wrong!”

  Afterward, Sarah sat up amid the coiled covers and wept in shame and frustration.

  “Oh, Shep,” she cried, “who the hell am I? Am I a lady or an artist or a cockteaser, or what? I’m not a complete anything! I’m not even a good wanton!”

  After that, I did not let things get so close again. I was often the one to pull away. For us, we agreed, waiting was the right, if not the comfortable, thing. We agreed on everything in those days, shared all that we had. All we seemed to lack was a grand enough passion to get us properly fucked, but I guess that lack was in its way a lethal one. For myself, I despised my status as a virgin, feeling that it made of me both an emotional and an actual neuter. But a deep well of fear stopped me from seriously considering sex with anyone but Sarah. I had not, perhaps, actually had a woman, but I had had that desire and lost it to my cousin Lucy all those years before in the summer-house behind the house on Peachtree Road.

  The week before she was to leave for Paris, in early September, Sarah spent a final weekend with me. Still blamelessly based at the Barbizon, she nevertheless spent all but a scant six hours of sleeping time with me that Friday night and Saturday, and at ten o’clock on Saturday night, after a day of soaking up enough galleries and museums and walking and looking and munching and hand holding and furtive kissing to last us the nine months until she came home again, we were just sitting down to a takeout pizza and a bottle of Chianti when the telephone rang. We both knew, with radars sharpened by impending separation, that it was Lucy. Sarah did not speak.

  “I’ll cut this short,” I said, reaching for the telephone. Sarah still said nothing. She nodded.

  But I did not cut it short. Lucy was calling from the apartment of one of the other marine wives at Pendleton, and between her incoherent sobs and the other girl’s indignant breaking in, it took me nearly an hour to get from Lucy that Red had blackened her eyes and cut her lip and locked her out of their apartment, and had threatened to split her skull if she came back in.

  “Oh, Gibby, what should I do? He’s awfully drunk; he could kill me,” she wept. Her voice was slurred with liquor and the damaged mouth.

  “Call the MPs, Lucy,” I said, fear and outrage at Red swamping and drowning my anger at her call. “Don’t mess around with him. Just call the MPs right now.”

  “I can’t,” she wailed. “They don’t bother the rangers. Everybody knows that. It’s like a club, or some kind of conspiracy. Nobody bothers the goddamned almighty rangers! They’d put me in jail instead!”

  “They don’t have any jurisdiction over you, Luce,” I said. “Listen, are you drunk, too?”

  “Maybe a little,” she sniffed. “But that doesn’t give him the right to beat me up. Listen, Gibby, you’ve just got to come. You’ve got to get me out of here….”

  At last I soothed her, and extracted a promise from the other wife that she would call me in the morning and tell me how things stood then. I knew that my concern for Lucy was audible; I could feel it thickening my voice like river silt. I put the phone down and turned to Sarah, who had not stirred from her chair. Her face was very white, and the high color in her cheeks burned even brighter, but her expression was mild and questioning.

  “She’s in awful trouble,” I said. “He’s beating her regularly. He’s hurt her pretty badly this time. She wants me to come. I really ought to go.”

  And Sarah exploded.

  “If you go out there, Shep,” she said between clenched teeth, the sherry eyes all pupil and spilling angry tears, “you’ll have her for the rest of your life. It’s what she wants. She always has. You’re a fool if you can’t see that. And maybe it’s what you want, too, no matter what you think or say. But it’s not wha
t I want. And I won’t have it. I’m not going to share you anymore with Lucy Bondurant! I’m not!”

  And she frightened herself so throughly with her outburst, and her hurt was so deep, that Sarah, whose mannerly tears I had seen perhaps three times in our entire lives, burst into a storm of weeping. She ducked her chin down and crossed her arms over her chest and rocked back and forth on the spavined sofa, crying the square-mouthed, heartbreaking sobs of a suffering child. I had never in my life seen Sarah so abandoned, or heard her make such sounds.

  The sight of her pain burst inside me like a rocket, purging me of Lucy and her three-thousand-mile tendrils of woe, and I moved over and took Sarah into my arms and pressed her so hard against me that I literally stifled the sound of her crying. But the great, racking, silent sobs continued, and a hard, continuous trembling, and I laid her back on the sofa and put my long body over hers, trying with every pound and inch of me to stop the terrible trembling and the cries, to scourge the anguish out of her.

  “Don’t, Sarah, don’t, don’t,” I whispered into the drenched and matted hair, into her ear. “Please don’t…”

  “Oh, Shep, do it now!” she cried out into my own ear—and I did. Without thought, without qualm, without regret, without consideration for the pain she must feel, or the fear, I shucked her out of her clothes and went into her and plunged there, back and forth, back and forth, and felt her settle around me and find my rhythm and ride with it, and felt her hips rise and fall and quicken and her legs clench my back, and heard her great, hoarse cry as we came together and my own cry escaped me—a cry of gratitude and simple relief and a joy as old and deep as the world.