Net of Jewels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “He’s okay,” she would answer. “He’s fine. Yeah, he’s just fine.”

  It was sometime that summer that I discovered Freud. “Read Freud,” Derry had told me. I had taken to calling her on the phone when I was especially unhappy or had a bad hangover or got in the mood to dream of wisdom or courage or a life that was not pervaded by Cape jasmine and sex and gin. “Read Freud, read Jung, read Margaret Mead. And don’t drink so much, Rhoda. It clouds your brain. It makes you dumb. You’ll never solve your other problems until you quit doing that.”

  “I’m going to. I’m really going to. I’m going to quit until my birthday. [I’m only going to drink on Saturday nights. I’m never never drinking again on Sunday afternoons. I’m only going to drink at parties. I won’t drink before five o’clock in the afternoon. I won’t drink until we go to the coast. I won’t drink anything else after this one drink, this last night, this one final party.]”

  I am going to find out about Freud, I decided one summer afternoon. I went down to the Alexandria Public Library and found the books and spread them out on a table and began to try to read them. Okay. There are three parts to the brain. The ego, that’s the part that talks to itself. The id, whatever that was. The superego, that sounded like my daddy, maybe.

  I sat at the library table, desperately trying to concentrate, to understand. What did it mean? I didn’t know. I couldn’t guess. I looked around me. A poor mangy-looking lot of people were in the room. There was one tall man with glasses who looked as if he might want to talk about Freud but I didn’t think I should risk it. He might follow me home. No, I would figure it out for myself. I read it through again. It was beginning to make some sense. I envisioned a phenomenological head. A large ugly egg with veins in it. It was divided into three parts, this superego, like my father, this ego, like the thing I call I, whatever that meant. I was I, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I? Anyway, the third part was the id. The id was like a fairy or something. It was the crazy part. I didn’t like it. I closed my eyes, thought as hard as I could, trying to penetrate the mystery of the mind. All I could see were coils of flesh, flesh and maybe bones, so thick, like intestines, or liver. How could it think? What does it do? How does it do it?

  All of a sudden I thought I was going to suffocate from the dusty smell of the books and the dust all over the library floor. The library was too hot, there were too many people and not enough air.

  I closed the books and stacked them up on the table and made my escape through the door. I went out onto the sidewalk, out into the burning hot summer day. The sun beat down on me, a zillion bolts a minute. It poured down upon the cars and sidewalks and trees and camellias and Cape jasmine bushes and crepe myrtle trees. It poured down upon my hands and arms and sandaled feet. The same sun had shone on ancient Greece, on Italy in the time of the Caesars, on me when I was a small child in the Delta, on me when I was twelve and lost a baseball game by striking out. It had shone on Freud when he thought up all that stuff and on the dinosaurs and where I was standing for millions of years. It had shone on Malcolm and me the summer we ran away to get married. It was still shining, that much was sure, but all the rest was lost in myth. I did not know where I was, in any way. I want a drink, I decided. I’ll talk Klane into staying and I’ll go get Hilton and we’ll go out to the country club and order some hot hors d’oeuvres and a gin martini. I have to have some fun. Life is short and then we die. We die and don’t even know what’s up there in our brains. It’s just some stuff like gray toothpaste. We don’t even know how we got here or what will happen to us. I don’t have anyone to love me. I just have Malcolm and he hates me. He thinks my hips are big. He thinks I’m fat.

  Chapter

  30

  “I wish you would go to a psychiatrist, Rhoda.” It was Derry talking to me on the phone a few weeks later. “I gave you the name of that man. Did you lose it?” I could hear her losing interest in the conversation. She had started being short with me when I called her up. She kept telling me things to do and I never did any of them and she was getting tired of having me call her up all the time.

  “I definitely am going. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Derry. I know you’re tired of me calling you up.”

  “I’m busy this morning, Rhoda. Call the doctor whose name I gave you. You can’t figure it out by reading books. You have to have some help.”

  “I’m going to. I really am. I’m going to call him this afternoon.”

  “Call him now. Call him when you hang up.”

  “Okay. Goodbye. Thanks for taking time to talk to me. Derry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you heard from Jim?”

  “I’m going to be seeing him next week. We’re going to a meeting in Washington. He’ll be there.”

  “Tell him I said hello. Will you do that for me?”

  “Of course I will. Call the doctor, Rhoda. Get some help.”

  “I will. I promise. I’m going to. I really am.”

  One morning in August I finally called him. Malcolm had gone to a seminar in Atlanta to find out new things about time studies and I had spent the week getting drunk with Robert Haverty every night. We had gotten so drunk the night before we had broken all the crystal water glasses filling them with scotch and trying to use them for a piano. Finally the card table we had them on had collapsed on the stone-floored porch.

  As soon as I woke up the next morning I called the psychiatrist Derry had told me about. There was an opening that afternoon. I put on my best dress and went down to talk about myself. “I drink too much,” I said. “I do things I don’t want to do when I get drunk. I broke all the crystal water glasses. My husband’s going to kill me when he finds out.”

  “If it causes you problems, you should quit.”

  “It makes me fight with him. We don’t like each other very much anyway. Well, we like to sleep together, but that’s about all. So I want to quit, because I want to make our marriage work.”

  “Yes.”

  “Besides, I broke all those glasses.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I almost drowned the other night. He’s been gone for a week and I’ve been drinking with Robert Haverty. He owns the newspaper here. His father died and left it to him. He’s so rich. He has a yacht. Anyway, we went out on Speed McVee’s boat on the river and I almost drowned. I dove into the river to show off and I couldn’t swim against the current. They barely saved me. I mean, I’m a great swimmer. I meant to swim the English Channel. It’s all I thought about when I was young. I swam the two-hundred-yard freestyle in two fifty-nine point five in college once. I mean, I was really good.”

  “How did you almost drown?”

  “I jumped in in my bathing suit at eleven o’clock at night. Speed is Robert’s cousin. They both dove in and dragged me back. The captain was furious. He said he’d never take the boat out with me on it again. He was really mad at me and he was mad at Robert.”

  “Is Robert married?”

  “Yes. But he’s in love with me. Everyone’s in love with me, except my husband. I think he hates me. He thinks I’m fat. No matter how thin I get, he still thinks I’m fat. He used to have this girlfriend in Atlanta. Pepper Allen, she looks like a boy. I bet she doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds. I think he’s still in love with her. I think he wishes all the time he’d married her. He only married me for Daddy’s money.” I was starting to cry. There was a box of Kleenex on the doctor’s desk and I got up and got a piece and began to cry into it.

  “Well, that sounds pretty bad. I don’t blame you for feeling bad.”

  “I want to quit drinking. I read about this stuff in Time magazine. Antabuse. If you take it, you can’t drink. I want you to get me some. I really need it. If I don’t stop, it’s going to ruin my marriage and I’ll have to go home and live with my folks again. They drive me crazy.”

  “I’ll give you some Antabuse if you can take it. You’ll have to have blood tests done at the hospital and we’ll have to wait for the results, but if you
can tolerate it, I don’t mind trying. You’ll have to be sure all the alcohol is out of your system. Can you quit for two weeks for me, Rhoda?”

  “Sure. I can do anything. I’m going crazy with things the way they are. I’m not an alcoholic. I only drink to have fun.”

  “Well, don’t have any more fun for two weeks and get the blood tests done. Can you come back on Thursday?” He pulled a notebook out of his desk and began to look at his appointments. “My nurse is gone for a few days. I have to do this myself. Yes, Thursday at two. Can you come then?”

  “Sure. Whatever you want me to do.”

  “What do you fight about besides him saying you’re fat.”

  “He’s jealous of me. He never lets me have any friends. He thinks I want to sleep with everyone.”

  “And do you? Want to?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Men are herd animals. They project their desires onto their wives. They think you want to do what they want to do.”

  “I don’t think he thinks about anybody else, except Pepper Allen.”

  “Well, that’s good. Here. Take this over to the hospital and get the tests made and I’ll see you Thursday then.” He stood up. He smiled at me. He was very old, at least fifty years old. I didn’t even want him to desire me. I didn’t even want to sleep with him.

  I went by the hospital that afternoon and had the tests made and ran into Dr. Williams in the hall. He put his hands on my waist and told me to come by his office after work someday.

  “What for?” I looked up into his balding bespectacled kindly face. “What would we do?”

  “Just talk awhile. I like you, Rhoda, don’t you know that?”

  “Sure I do. I’ll never forget you helped me when Jimmy was here.” I backed away. His power was getting on me, drawing me in, a sort of smell of power. I usually found such a thing seductive but today I was concentrating on stopping drinking and being good.

  “Is Klane Marengo still working for you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Be careful of her. She’s been in trouble with the law, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Well, she’s the only maid in town who can keep Little Malcolm out of trouble. She’s wonderful with my children. She loves them. She loves me. Her husband’s out of jail. He got out last week. They can’t help it if sometimes they have to steal.”

  “Just be careful. Well, call me sometime. Here’s a number that will answer if the office doesn’t. After hours or on the weekends.” He handed me a card with a phone number written on it. I took it and put it in my purse.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for giving this to me.”

  I went home in a wonderful mood. Doctor Williams was in love with me. I was going to quit drinking. Robert was coming over. Maybe Speed was in love with me too. Malcolm was out of town and I didn’t have to cook dinner for three more days. Best of all, I had a new mauve linen dress and there was a party at the country club that night to wear it to.

  I pulled into my driveway, singing to myself. Klane came out the kitchen door with Jimmy in her arms. Little Malcolm was beside her carrying his guns.

  “I got to get on home,” she was saying. “I can’t stay any longer today, Rhoda.”

  “Oh, I’m going to a party tonight. I thought you’d stay till the baby-sitter gets here.”

  “Not tonight. I got to get on home. We got a whist game tonight and I got to cook a roast.”

  “You could cook it here. Well, okay, go on then. I don’t care.” I got out of the station wagon and kissed the children and kept on talking as we walked toward the house. “Guess what, I’m quitting drinking. I really am. I’m getting these pills that if you drink while you’re taking them you can die. So after that, I know I won’t drink. But first I can’t drink for two weeks. Malcolm, you little angel. Give your momma a kiss.” I knelt beside him and hugged his powerful little body into my own. The shells from his bandolier cut into my skin. He let me kiss him on the cheek, then ran away. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s just showing off. Well, that’s good news. If you stick to it.” She was walking into the house, picking up her pocketbook off the shelf. “I’m leaving, Rhoda. I got to get out of here.”

  “Okay.” I had hoped I could get her to bathe the children before she left, but there was no stopping Klane when she was set on leaving. I went inside and put a record on the record player and began to dance around the room. Jimmy began to dance with me. I picked him up and danced him around the kitchen table and out into the polished hall. Klane had done the floors. This day was getting better and better. This day was so good it deserved a drink. I started toward the kitchen cabinet that held the scotch, then stopped myself. I picked up the phone and dialed the newspaper office to talk to Robert instead.

  “I can’t have a drink for two weeks. What am I going to do?”

  “We’ll come get you early,” he said. “What time can you get ready? We’ll go out early and have dinner at the club before the party. Can you be ready by six?”

  “I’ll see.”

  I made it all night without drinking a single thing. It was the first party I had been to since I was fifteen at which I didn’t get drunk or at least very tipsy. It was strange and made the evening stretch out into an eternity. At twelve we dropped Hilton off and took the Havertys’ baby-sitter home. Then Robert took my baby-sitter home, then he came back over to have a drink with me. We put Errol Garner on the record player, “Conceit by the Sea.” I had never been to California, but I knew it from the music. It was beautiful cliffs with the sea below and Robert and me driving along a mysterious road in the moonlight, close together in the front seat of a Karmann Ghia. Both of us madly in love, no children, no problems, no doctors or mosquitoes or worries of any kind. Just Robert and me, rich and madly in love, driving forever up the California coast on our way to someplace great to drink wine and eat dinner.

  In real Alexandria, Louisiana, I took off my clothes and we began to make love on the living room floor. “Oh, Robert,” I said, “it’s so good. It feels so good. You’re so good at it.”

  Of course, it really wasn’t good. It wasn’t half as good as the passion Malcolm and I lavished on each other in the long sexy married nights. But the music was good and my imagination and the power of the money Robert had inherited was taking care of the rest.

  “Let’s go to bed,” I said. “Let’s go do it on the bed.”

  We moved into the bedroom and lay down upon the bed. About that time a mosquito bit me. I got up and turned on the lights and began to swat mosquitoes with a house shoe. For some reason Robert decided that was hilarious. He sat up and began to laugh uproariously while I killed at least ten mosquitoes, leaving their bloody carcasses all over the white-painted walls.

  Then I turned off the lights and got back into the bed and began to laugh with him. We fell asleep still giggling.

  * * *

  At three that morning the phone rang. It was Klane. “Delmonica’s dead,” she said. “Delmonica’s not moving.”

  “What? What’s happening?” I sat bolt upright in bed, groping for the switch on the lamp.

  “Delmonica fell on a knife I was holding. We was playing whist.”

  “My God. Have you called the police?”

  “No. I was hoping Malcolm might come over. Is he there?”

  “Mr. Haverty’s here. Robert Haverty. You used to work for them. . . . (Robert, wake up. It’s Klane. Wake up. Somebody’s dead.)” I shook his shoulder. “Wait a minute, Klane,” I said. “I’ve got to wake him up.”

  “Where’s Malcolm? Is Malcolm there?”

  “What’s going on?” Robert sat up on the bed. I handed him the phone. “It’s Klane Marengo. There’s somebody dead.”

  “Klane, it’s Robert Haverty. Tell me what happened.” She told him and he listened, then he said, “I’ll be right there. Don’t touch anything. Tell everyone not to touch anything. Call the police, Klane. I’ll be there by the time they are.” He was o
ut of bed, pulling on his clothes. I got up and turned on the overhead light. The mosquitoes I had killed were all over the wall above the headboard of the bed. The bedclothes were half off the bed, the candles were burned down into their saucers. I found a robe, put it on as Robert dressed. “What should I do?” I asked. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No. Yes, call Hilton and tell her I passed out on the sofa. Tell her I’ve gone down to the project to help Klane. What did she say to you? I couldn’t understand the story.”

  “She said someone fell on a knife she was holding. It was a whist game.”

  “Who was it?” He was buttoning his shirt, tucking it in.

  “Her cousin Delmonica. She’s been flirting with Klane’s husband.” I stood by the door. He finished his shirt and put on his socks and shoes. Then he walked out into the hall. I followed him to the door. “Call me,” I said. “Call me as soon as you find out what’s going on.”

  When he was gone I turned on the lights in the living room and picked up the records and glasses and ashtrays. Then I went out on the porch and began to collect Coke bottles. I went in and out from the porch to the living room to the kitchen, cleaning up. When I was finished with those rooms, I went into the bedroom and gathered up the candles and took the sheets off the bed. I made the bed up with pink-and-white-striped sheets and pillowcases. I swept the floor with a broom. I hung up all my clothes. Then I went into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. While it was brewing, I took a shower and washed my hair and began to get dressed.

  When I finished dressing, I walked out into the yard to see if the newspaper had come. Malcolm’s car pulled up to the curb and he got out and walked past me into the house.

  “Where’d you go last night?” he said. “I called at twelve-thirty and the baby-sitter said you were at a party. Who’d you go with?”

  “How did you get home? I thought you had to stay till Monday.”

  “I drove home last night. They need me back here. Where’d you go? Who’d you go out with?”