Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “Clarisse, Paloma,” Harlan says, “this is our new mistress.”

  Clarisse takes Addie’s hand and presses it. “We were so worried when the Nina miss the tide.”

  There’s an intensity in her address that makes Addie reflexively draw back. At close view, the strong planes in Clarisse’s face recall Paloma’s, but they have a European cast inherited, no doubt, from her father. She looks Spanish or Sicilian, and Addie, who has been called beautiful in her day and tried—with small encouragement from her aunt and their milieu—to mortify her pride in it, has the rare experience of feeling, in this woman’s presence, plain. Clarisse is a great and striking beauty, with a widow’s peak on her clear, high brow and full, expressive lips. But her cheeks and throat have a mottled flush and, in her eyes—which are a strange, pale brown, almost yellow—there is a glassy, febrile shine.

  “We got to see the river in full sun,” she says. “I hope the delay hasn’t put you out.”

  “The delay?” Widening her eyes, Clarisse now laughs a loose, lax laugh. “¿Entiende, Mamá? The delay has put us out!”

  “Silencio, muchacha,” says Paloma, with a grieved expression.

  “Pero, es divertido, ¿no?”

  Paloma puts her hand on Clarisse’s arm in a calming or restraining way. “You are welcome, niña. He aquí su casa…. Consider this your home. We wish you every joy.”

  “How is Father?” Harlan asks.

  “Very weak. The doctor is bleeding him again.”

  And now Addie notices that on the plate—what she took, before, for food—are leeches, four of them, glistening and plump, somnolent with being fed, amidst scattered drops of watery, pink blood.

  “We have been so curious,” Clarisse says to Addie, like a child with a new pet she can’t let go. “We have heard so much. Harlan tells us poems. Your hair of gold. Your eyes. Su sangre azul.”

  Paloma spits in her left hand and swift as thought—too swift to be opposed—thumbs a cross on Addie’s brow. “Forgive me, niña,” she says, her stare so grave and forthright that Addie merely blinks, astonished, and cannot take offense.

  Clarisse laughs and laughs at this. “¿Qué, Mamá?” she says. “¿Piensa mal y acertarás?”

  “You’re drunk,” says Harlan with disgust, at the very moment the thought occurs to Addie.

  Opening her fan the slightest bit, Clarisse touches Addie’s arm with it, a gesture as precise as a scientist adding reagent to a titer. “He is severe with me,” she says, smiling the disciplined smile of a coquette. “This is how we know him, like un viejo, an old man, gruff and tired of life, and then, one day this winter, he come back from the race a boy reciting verse again. You are so good for him, I think. We are so glad you are here.”

  “Thank you,” Addie says. “That is a lovely comb.”

  “This?” She touches it. “My father gave it me.”

  “Count Villa…Urrutia.”

  “Urrutia,” Clarisse corrects, rolling her rs. “Harlan has told you something of my history. I am flattered. Would you…? Allow me….” When she removes the comb, a tress falls across her shoulder like a soft, black lash. “As a wedding gift.” As she offers it to Addie, Paloma stops her daughter’s hand.

  “¿Por qué no, Mami?”

  “Porque lo digo yo. Go attend the guests.”

  “Thank you, but your mother’s right,” says Addie. “It’s far too much. The party is your gift to us.”

  “It is to your liking?”

  “Everything is lovely.”

  “Except the cake,” says Harlan. “I thought I asked for Sumter.”

  Clarisse now frowns for the first time. “I tried—all day yesterday—but I could not remember. I saw it just that one time from the boat. My hands made what they knew.”

  “It is the opera in Havana, I believe?”

  Looking back at Addie, Clarisse smiles and her eyes narrow a degree. “Yes, Tacón’s.”

  “Why did you choose that?”

  Addie’s question seems to take her by surprise. Clarisse considers with a quizzical expression as a silent beat elapses. Having no ready answer, she turns to Harlan, as though maybe he might know.

  Atop his head, not just seed pearls, but mature ones whose cost would be impossible to estimate, have formed. They are rolling down his temples now, together with the brine of all the oysters and the water of the seas where they were bred. His eyes, his hazy, ginger eyes, for once are clear—clear and furious. Addie has the strange, specific thought that he is someone else, a man she’s never seen before. The man she knows—who courted her and whom, last week, she married—is one she’s never thought about as handsome, yet this one, standing in the hall beside them, is more than handsome, he’s beautiful, radiantly beautiful, with the spiritual beauty of one in pain. And this radiant stranger, without so much as a glance at her, says, “Excuse me, I must see about Louisa’s ride,” and turns and walks away.

  Addie looks back at Clarisse. She has no choice. “It is nothing, niña,” she says with jeering sympathy, “an old joke between friends.” And now the mask has dropped. Clarisse’s eyes, her yellow eyes, burn and simmer, they glow like stoked coals that come to life and die and resurrect themselves again. The pain and hatred in them shock Addie to her core, but there’s no mistaking what they are. “But, Mami, let me have those,” she says, reaching for the plate. “I’ll take them away. They are disgusting, no?”

  “I will see to it,” replies Paloma, holding fast.

  “Él me pidió que lo hiciera,” Clarisse says sharply. “He asked me, Mamá, not you. ¿No es cierto?”

  Paloma hesitates and then lets go. “Disponga de ellas correctamente. Póngalos en el río.”

  “Sí, Mamita, sé qué hacer.”

  “Donde hay corriente,” Paloma calls as Clarisse walks down the hall, “y luz del sol en el banco.”

  “Sí, entiendo, in the river, on the sunny bank.”

  When she’s gone, Paloma turns to Addie. “Forgive her, niña. She means no harm. She’s had too much to drink. We’re glad for you, but it is a hard day for her.”

  “Why, Paloma?” Addie asks. “Why is it a hard day for her?”

  Paloma’s stare does not retreat. Her expression is that of someone greatly burdened, without subterfuge, powerful, direct, and sad, someone watching a disaster unfold that she is not afraid of but is powerless to stop.

  With a swift and unexpected gesture, she puts her hand—which is long and narrow, like her son’s—tenderly on Addie’s cheek.

  “Pobrecita,” she says, “you have come to a dark place.”

  THIRTEEN

  In the parking lot, as they strapped the children in, Claire refused to look at Ran.

  “What?” he said to her across the luggage rack, when they finally closed the doors.

  “Don’t ask me what. You know what.”

  “No, really, Claire, what? I quit writing in the middle of a song this morning and took the kids so you could get to work; I found a rotten sill in the kitchen wall and called the excavator—he’s coming in the morning, by the way; I made dinner, picked them up at school, came to the party, shook Marcel’s hand and went the extra mile and invited him to supper; I did everything you asked and more.”

  “I’ll say. Including getting tanked and calling him a nigger in front of the whole school.”

  “I didn’t call him nigger, I said, ‘Hey, nigga.’ There’s a difference.”

  “Is there, Ran? I think the semantic subtleties were lost on your audience.”

  “My audience…” Ran’s eyes furred like coals. “You know what, Claire? I love you, but sometimes you’re so pure of heart and righteous…” He bit his tongue.

  “What?” she said. “You’d like to rough me up? Give me one in the old piehole? Bang, zoom, to da moon, like your old man did your mom before she bailed?”

  “You bitch,” he said. “I never touched you. Did I ever touch you?”

  “No, you never did, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,
and even when it does, it has a tendency to roll back eventually.” Even as this left her mouth, Claire knew it was unfair. But having allowed herself to hope—again—having listened to his claims he’d changed and had a “come-to-Jesus” with himself, she was bitterly disappointed and spitting mad. More than angry, she felt burned. And now the words were out there in the world and past recall.

  “What I was going to say,” Ran said, “is that I love you, but sometimes I don’t like you very much.”

  “That blade cuts both ways.”

  They faced off, in dire country now, a place they’d visited before, which neither had expected to return to. Or had they only hoped? Ransom felt especially bemused. Each step he’d taken through the day had been aimed at reconciliation, the correction of past wrongs; each had seemed innocent and natural—how had they led here?

  “Tell me something, Claire,” he said. “When you look in the mirror, can you honestly tell yourself that you, Claire DeLay from south of Broad in Charleston, who grew up with a black maid and servants, are one hundred percent politically correct and certified error-free, that there’s no lingering trace of racial prejudice in your own heart?”

  “Yes, Ran,” she answered without hesitation, “I honestly think I can.”

  “That’s interesting,” he said. “That’s interesting as hell. Because if you and Deanna and all your new pals inside, if every white college-educated liberal in the whole United States is as pristine and enlightened as you are, or think you are, then why is race still tearing us apart?”

  “I don’t know, Ransom. Maybe you should write an op-ed piece.”

  “Maybe I will,” he said. “All I know is, fifteen, twenty years ago, way back in the bad old days, when it was me and Cell and James and Ty, two black guys, two white, backstage at three thirty in the morning breaking down the mixers and the amps, we called each other ‘nigga’ this and ‘nigga’ that and passed a joint, and everyone was laughing, we felt close. Now the word’s off limits and everybody minds their p’s and q’s, but no one’s laughing anymore. It’s hard for me to see the big advance. Where did everybody’s sense of humor go?”

  “I don’t know, Ran. I think little girls getting blown to bits in church on Sunday mornings might have put a crimp in it—that and black men getting lynched with their cocks stuffed between their teeth. I think the joke lost something in translation across two hundred years of slavery and another hundred of Jim Crow.”

  “If so, let the Hugers and DeLays pay reparations. I don’t know who my grandparents were on my mother’s side much less anybody further back, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that no Hills owned any slaves. While you and Marcel were at prep school, I was mopping floors in a black church. But I was someone in New York when you were just another pair of pretty wannabes at music school. I took Cell in the band because of you, and he toured with us two years making better money than he’s probably making now. Then when we were on the cusp of breaking out, right when I needed him the most, he quit. Why, I never understood. I didn’t want him to. How much more am I supposed to owe the guy?”

  “And while you were being such a saint and altruist, you screwed him over ‘Talking in My Sleep.’”

  Ransom’s whole expression dropped. “So that’s it!” He slapped his forehead with his palm. “Stupid me—of course! He wants a piece of the RAM action—is that what he said?”

  “We’ve never talked about it.”

  “Never? Come on, Claire.”

  “Read my lips, Ran, never, not one word.”

  “That’s what it is, though. It has to be. He’s pissed.”

  “You could hardly blame him if he were.”

  “How many times do we have to do this, Claire? I wrote that song, all six verses, every line and every word in every line. I came up with the concept, the music….”

  “It also has a chorus, as I recall. Yours was ‘But all it ever was was talk / And talk is cheap.’ Cell and I changed it to ‘But all it ever was / Was talking in our sleep.’ We made that up from scratch. Whole cloth. It changed the song. You know it did. We wrote it on the F train coming back from Coney Island one day while you were in the city doing…whoever you were doing then.”

  “Hey,” he said. “I was at a business meeting, Claire.”

  She gave him a hard look not wholly lacking in compassion. “Don’t try to kid a kidder, sweetie. I know where you were.”

  Ransom took a beat. “Okay, I made mistakes, Claire. I admit I wasn’t perfect. I never said I was. But that was a long time ago, and I’m here to try to rectify. In the end, it was one line. One. And anything I ever made off my music and my book was share and share alike with you, wasn’t it? I think Cell got more from RHB than RHB got back—but if I screwed him, bottom line: so did you.”

  “Or maybe you screwed both of us.”

  Ransom blinked and shook his head. “Jesus. Jesus Christ. So that’s what all this is about.”

  “Actually, Ransom, what this is about is the fact that you called Marcel ‘nigga,’ and embarrassed him—and me.”

  “You know I’m not a racist, though,” he said. “At least look me in the face and say you know that in my heart I’m not.”

  She looked him in the face and said, “I don’t know what’s in your heart. What I know is that if it has long ears and goes hee-haw most people will feel justified calling it an ass. They won’t look any further or really give a shit what’s in your heart.”

  “But you aren’t most people. You’re my wife. You have to care. Don’t you know what’s in my heart?”

  “Truth?”

  He hesitated only slightly. “Truth.”

  “Once upon a time, I thought I did, but now I’m not so sure.”

  His expression turned forlorn. “Then who knows, if not you? I thought we were supposed to know that for each other, Claire. I thought that’s what this whole thing was about, for you to know what’s in my heart like I know what’s in yours.”

  “I’m not sure you know what’s in my heart either, Ran,” Claire said, speaking what she’d only thought before. “And as for ‘supposed to,’ we passed that on the fly ten years ago. And not just us. Everybody does. We weren’t singled out. You’re just late catching on.”

  A certain look came into Ransom’s eyes, the sad and soulful one that always made Claire think of Mel, the time she went to Killdeer right before the wedding. She’d heard so much about him, yet when they finally met, the big bad monster turned out to be a lonely, sick old man with a lost look in his fierce, watery blue eyes, the look of someone whose drunks and rages were just ineffective protests against a sense of beatenness he’d accepted somewhere so far back that he’d forgotten there was any other way to be. And even if Mel glimpsed it sometimes, before he got too deep into that first glass of 20/20 in the front seat of the Thunderbird, he no longer had the energy, and probably not the wish, to change. Ran—whatever else you said of him—had always had that energy and wish, and if he had some Mel in him, he’d fought against it, too. Claire saw him fighting now, and she did not know what she felt, except she didn’t want to see him lose.

  “Okay,” Ran said. “I’m sorry. I apologized to Marcel. I apologize to you. Just don’t give up on me, okay?”

  The sudden plaintiveness of this, and its sincerity, wrenched her. “I never have.”

  Seeing her fighting sudden tears, Ran took encouragement like a cornerback who intercepts the ball and heads for the opponent’s goal. “Okay, I haven’t done too hot so far, but at least I’m trying,” he said. “We’ve still got the evening, and tomorrow is a brand-new day. If I can cut back on my percentage of errors and add to my percentage of success, before long you’ll have yourself a model husband, DeLay. Before you know it, I’ll be Jesus fucking walk-on-water-roll-back-the-stone-and-find-the-Bad-Boy-risen Christ!” His grin was the victory dance in the wrong end zone.

  Claire’s expression was the silent field. “Ransom, did you take your meds?”

  His face lost all its muscle tone
.

  “Ransom…”

  “Are you kidding? You don’t think I’m fucking with the recipe?” His expression was like Charlie’s, caught red-handed in the jelly beans.

  In Claire’s face, experience vied woefully against belief. “That’s important, Ran. That’s number one on the must-do list.”

  “Can’t it be the to-do list, Claire? The please-do list? You know about my little problem with authority.”

  “Deal with it.”

  Ransom’s jaw squared, but he managed a salute. “Yes, ma’am, Miss Claire.”

  And off they went.

  FOURTEEN

  There’s something just beneath the leaves. It shocks you when you touch it with your hand, but at first it’s easy to convince yourself that you imagined it. In the interval it takes to blink, your life has changed, but it takes time, inevitably, to realize it, and more time still before you dig it up and find out what it is.

  For Addie, the blow is so sudden, swift, and hard she can’t be absolutely sure that she’s been hit. Only tomorrow, or tonight, will the soreness and the bruise appear as evidence. And in this state, half stunned, like a somnambulist, she follows Paloma through the closed doors to the library, where Percival, attended by his physician, lies on his chaise, as though in state.

  Beside him, on a small table draped with a white cloth, several candles burn, their flames reflected in six or seven gilded sherry glasses filled with water. These are arranged around a larger glass—a snifter—in which an iron crucifix is half submerged, and there are white carnations in a bowl and a half dozen tintype portraits.

  As they come in, the doctor, rolling down his sleeves, looks up and smiles with pressed lips, the way physicians smile when there is something to be faced. Percival’s robe is open on his breast, which is as smooth and white as marble. Against it, several black leeches—recently applied, still small—throb silently at their work against the lapis-colored veins. The patient’s face, which is one of great refinement, is lifted toward the ceiling in an attitude of suffering calmly borne, and the slanting sunlight through the window casts shadows in the sockets of his closed eyes, suggesting statuary even more. His head is noble, heavy, overlarge, almost equine in its length and strength of bone, and seems somehow inconsistent with sickness, age, or death, and, in truth, he seems less old than ruined.