Grammaude put a plate of eggs and bacon in front of both of us and sat down. I was surprised to see a glint of tears in her eyes.
“You’ll have your dinners with us until your check comes,” she said, “and no arguments. And I’m going to send Sukie Duschesne over with a few things for the house this afternoon. She’s the young woman who helps me out this summer; her parents have been friends for many years. I’m sure she can spare a few hours a week to help you with the cottage or will know someone who can. You can’t get any work done and keep up that huge old house by yourself.”
Most of the young men I knew would have automatically protested that Grammaude really mustn’t put herself out on his account, but Warrie Villiers didn’t. He simply said, “I would greatly appreciate that, Mrs. Chambliss. My mother said you were an extraordinary woman, and she’s right. Unlike Tennessee Williams’s lovely Blanche, I have not always been dependent on the kindness of strangers, but I am grateful to be dependent on you for a while. You will, of course, permit me to run errands for you in return and perhaps see to your lawn, or whatever else I can do.”
“Nonsense,” Grammaude said. “I have someone to do that. Let me feed you dinner strictly for the pleasure of your company. As I said, your grandmother was the best friend I ever had, and your mother is one of the most vivid memories I have of these summers.”
He smiled. “She says the same of you. She says you taught her a great deal. I believe she was a special friend of your son’s?”
“Yes,” Grammaude said, getting up. “Pass me your plates, you two, and I’ll give you a refill. Your father, Warrie: are you in touch with him?”
“My father is dead,” he said neutrally. “He died in an auto crash in the Dordogne when I was seven. His family—my grandparents—are not so fond of my mother, nor, I think, of me. We do not see them. They send money under the terms of my father’s will. I think it causes them great pain to do so. I don’t quite know why; it’s not a lot, and they are very rich. I do wish Maman could have gotten along better with them, but there you go. It was not necessary to please when she was that age, and now that she is…more mature, shall we say, she only cares to please adolescent racing car drivers. But I think she has not given up on the Villiers lucre; she has me studying finance and hopes that I will become a banker and be taken into both the family firm and the family bosom.”
“And do you like finance?” Grammaude said.
“About as well as I like…what do you call them? Root canals,” he said. “Finance! Zut alors!” It was the first French expression he had used, and he used it with such comic wryness that Grammaude and I both laughed aloud. It became a watchword with the three of us in the weeks that followed. “Zut alors!” we would cry when something surprised or delighted us. Much did, that summer.
I fell in love with him on that first day, of course. Looking back, it seems inevitable that I would. Untouched as my heart might be, except for the cold void where Mike Willis was not, which I simply refused to look into, my mind and body were ripe for involvement and intensity, and my shuttered heart was hungry for it without my awareness. The time had come, had had to come, when Grammaude’s nurturing love was not enough. I had tended my tomboy persona with something near desperation that summer; I had applied for and gotten a position as assistant steward at the yacht club and spent long hours every day doing the sort of scutwork the senior steward would not touch. But all the traffic with boats and lines and tarpaulins and tide charts and kitchen trash and storm debris could not mask the kind of supple, budding greenness that clung about me. I can see it now, looking back. I could not, then. It must have been a bad time for Grammaude. Nothing had ever come easily to me. She must have known that this first love—for she could not but have known that it was—would not either. And no matter how he charmed her and made her laugh, and how much the vulnerability under his cool matter-of-factness touched her, and how deeply she felt that this estrangement from this place of his birthright was her fault—though I came to know this only much later—there was much about Warrie Villiers that troubled her. I could read it in her eyes all summer, though she spoke of it directly to me only toward the end.
It wouldn’t have mattered what she said. Older and wiser women than I would have found it nearly impossible to withstand that combination of vulnerability and sensuality. I didn’t have a chance and didn’t want one. Physical readiness aside, Warrie Villiers did with that first conversation what no other young man of my acquaintance could have possibly done precisely because he was unlike any young man of my acquaintance. He was the very antithesis of all the boys in Retreat whose companionship I had so fiercely abjured; he brought with him from Rome no baggage of the kind I had learned to fear. When I looked at him and listened to him I saw no ghosts and felt no frissons of recognition and heard no old resonances at all. I saw only him, Warrie, as new as morning to me, with no sharp history between us.
He was as far removed from Mike Willis as it was possible for a young man to be. None of that grief and loneliness could spill over me from Warrie. Nothing of Mike could live in his aura.
At first he talked mainly to Grammaude. He came, as she had asked, almost every evening and shared supper with us, and we talked…or they talked and I listened, content simply to sit in the fire and candle light and watch and listen. He did not stay long; he went back to Braebonnie by nine, and I went to bed in the big back bedroom and lay watching the light in the window upstairs that I knew was his, feeling his presence on my very skin, there just over the piled stone wall. He worked late those nights, and worked the whole of the days, or I assumed he did. I never saw him down around the yacht club, and the overheard talk from the old women in the porch rockers told me that try as they might to lure Amy Potter’s handsome French grandson for cocktails or luncheons, he politely refused them, saying he was swamped with work on his thesis but expected to finish up sometime later in the summer and hoped he might accept their kind invitations then. I learned he was adjudged a catch.
“It’s too bad, Maude, that Darcy is so young,” old Mrs. Stallings said to Grammaude at the Fourth of July tea; I heard her from the kitchen. Grammaude had gone to the yacht club as her guest; she had not kept her club membership after my grandfather had died. She would not, she said, sit on the porch and rock as a matter of policy. I learned to sail in the little Beetle Cat she bought me, but I used my Uncle Petie and Aunt Sarah’s membership. Grammaude went near the club only once or twice a summer, and then usually on the arm of old Micah Willis and in the company of his son, Caleb, and Caleb’s wife, Beth.
“How do you mean, Marjorie?” Grammaude said that afternoon.
“Well, of course I mean that with him right there it would be a match made in heaven if she weren’t too young,” Mrs. Stallings said. “After all, you’re the only people he’ll talk to. And such a sweet irony, him Amy’s grandson and all, and really so much more suitable than the Willis boy. We’ve all said so. Of course, I know how you’ve always felt about Elizabeth—”
“No, you don’t, Marjorie,” Grammaude said sweetly. “You’ve really no idea. And of course Darcy is too young; she’s only seventeen, and he’s twenty-three. It’s much too big an age gap. Thank goodness he doesn’t feel that way about her at all, and I don’t think she pays any attention to him.”
By that time I paid nothing but attention to him, and my grandmother knew it. My face burned in the kitchen of the yacht club as it burned at night during dinner, when he smiled over at me. As it and my whole body burned in the nights when I lay awake watching his upstairs window.
But all his talk was for my grandmother, and most of his attention went to her. The six years’ difference in our ages and the vast gulfs of difference in our experience lay palpable between us.
Gradually, though, his talk reached out to include me, and his attention lay lightly and softly on me, and the evenings around the dinner table in Liberty became something else. Now I was part of a circle of three that laughed together, told irre
verent stories about colony people, talked of the small world of Cape Rosier and the larger one outside it. The gap in our ages narrowed. He teased me about the Irish; I teased him about the French. We both teased Grammaude about being a southern belle. Though I changed each evening from my disreputable steward’s togs and bathed and dressed as carefully as I could, and began to experiment with makeup, I was dizzyingly careful not to reveal how I felt about him, and he gave no indication at all that he thought of me in any way except as the pleasant third person he had dinner with each evening. I really believe Grammaude came to be lulled and soothed as the nights passed and no evidence of catastrophe presented itself. Once she let us wash dishes and went upstairs to bed, and within a week or so it became standard practice. And still nothing changed between Warrie and me. And still I lay in the dark, in the nights, and burned all over.
One evening in mid-July he came for dinner with a great tawny puff of a young cat in his arms. It was wearing an enormous red bow made from yarn, and it had on its face such an expression of delighted surprise that Grammaude and I cried, together, “Zut alors!” And so Zut he became, later, as I have said, changed to Zoot because of his extravagant leggings.
“Is that creature for me?” Grammaude said that evening, a smile tugging at her mouth in spite of her efforts to be stern. Nobody could be stern around Zoot when he was a teenage cat. He was simply too cheerfully, rambunctiously pleased with his world and everything in it. He never met a human being he didn’t like, and the sentiment was usually reciprocated. Grammaude, not a natural cat fancier, was kneading the moss-soft fur under his chin as she spoke, and Zoot was smiling in transported pleasure.
“No. That creature is for Darcy,” Warrie said. “I saw him sleeping on a shelf at the general store, and he looked so much like Darcy O’Ryan that I burst out laughing on the spot and then had to explain because Mrs. Sylvester was working up a real snit at me. I said I had a friend who looked just like that, and she said she hoped my friend was a better mouser than that cat; he was doing such a bad job she was going to take him to the county animal shelter. I couldn’t have that. It would be like having Darcy put to sleep. So I had no recourse, don’t you see? It’s fate.”
“It’s blackmail,” Grammaude said, but she was laughing. Zoot reached out a fat paw and patted her cheek in little butterfly pats. She held him out to me.
“Go suck up to your mommy,” Grammaude said. “I’m on to your wicked ways. Honestly, Warrie, I’m glad you didn’t get besotted with a pig or something.”
“Moi? Un cochon?” Warrie said, wiggling his eyebrows. I reached out my arms and Grammaude put Zoot into them; he felt as light as a bag of feathers under his flamboyant coat. He nuzzled up under my chin and closed his eyes and began to knead my arm with his huge soft paws.
“You silly cat,” I said in joy. “I love you.”
Grammaude went upstairs, shaking her head, and Warrie and I started on the dishes. I ran hot water into the pan and he scraped, and neither of us looked at the other. Something was fizzing up like ginger ale in my chest, and I thought I might laugh or cry or simply shout aloud with happiness.
Zoot sailed up onto the sink and sat immobile and imperial, regarding us with enormous bronze eyes. Then he reached a paw into the pan of water and solemnly flicked a spray of it across Warrie’s face. We both dissolved into laughter, and I threw my soapy arms around Warrie and hugged him. He stood still for a moment, and then he put his arms around me and pulled me to him so hard I felt my breasts flatten against him and felt his ribs under my fingers. He was tall; my face fit just into the hollow of his throat. I could feel a pulse hammering there, and the heat of him through his shirt.
I lifted my face up and he kissed me, a long, slow, open-mouthed kiss. It was not the kiss of a friend. It was unlike anything I had ever felt, or dreamed of feeling. I remembered only much later that I had only been kissed once, and then by Mike Willis. This was not like that.
Finally he lifted his head and looked down at me. I thought I could still see the print of my mouth on his. My heart was hammering so fast that I could feel it in my throat.
“You just aged five years,” he said huskily.
“Is that old enough?” I whispered.
“For what?” His voice was just as low. It sounded…dark.
“For anything. For everything.”
“Be careful, Darcy,” he said.
“I don’t want to,” I said.
He went home soon after that. We finished drying the dishes and attempted to be light with each other once more, and on the main did pretty well, but of course something else, this whole other thing, lay trembling in the air between us. He touched me on the cheek and started to say something and then didn’t and went out of the kitchen. I stood staring at the closed screen door, Zoot cradled purring and kneading in my arms, and then took my cat and went to bed. I even went to sleep, Zoot curled along the length of me, purring in the dark.
But I might have known I would not sleep the whole of that night, and I didn’t. I woke about two hours later, and knew without knowing how that he was outside my window; when I got up and tiptoed to it, I saw that the close velvet darkness was broken by the red tracery of his cigarette. He sat on the stone wall that separated Braebonnie’s lawn from Liberty’s, and he was so close I could smell the pungent smoke of his Player’s and almost feel the displaced air from his body.
I ran on tiptoe through the kitchen and out the back door and around the house and came up to him. He said nothing, but opened his arms, and I went into them silently in my soft T-shirt and nothing else. He held me close but loosely, tracing the line of my body from waist to thigh absently with one hand. I trembled all over as if with a chill.
“You’ll have to ask,” he said presently. “I don’t rush women. I won’t rush you.”
“I’m asking,” I said, drunk on his touch.
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Then…what?”
I put my face into his chest and held on for dear life, feeling as though I were stepping off the face of the world into a bottomless abyss. Terror and wanting shook me as a huge wind would do.
“Show me…something French,” I whispered.
And he picked me up in his arms as if I had been a child and took me into Braebonnie and laid me down on the big sofa before the dead fireplace, and he did just that. And it tore and savaged me, and flamed me from my mouth to the soles of my feet, and turned my bones to jelly and my muscles to sponge and my blood to lava, and lifted me shrieking to the top of the highest hill in the world and swooped with me down into red nothingness as if a great bird had me fast in its beak. I cried and sobbed and shouted and laughed aloud; I pounded him with my fists and grasped him with my legs and ground at him with my hips, and once bit his mouth until blood ran, and when he came pouring into me and I exploded in fire and nothingness, I heard myself shouting aloud, “I am too old enough! I am!”
Presently he lay beside me, sweat drying on our bodies in the chilly wind off the bay just beyond Braebonnie, smoking one of his cigarettes. He had not spoken since we finished, but I could still remember the things he had said to me, and I to him, and I went hot with embarrassment at the memory of them. There was no moon, and except for the light from his cigarette, when he drew on it, I could not see his face. I wondered if I had bored or disappointed him; he must have known it was my first time and I had not known what to do. Finally, in a voice that sounded, in my ears, impossibly young, I quavered, “Was I…okay? Was that right?”
He took a long drag, and then he laughed.
“Right?” he said. “Zut alors!”
After that I was lost.
“I will never rush you,” he said that night, afterward as he had said before. “I will never push you. Tonight shouldn’t have happened; you’re only seventeen. They probably have laws against that here. And you should have told me it was your first time. They probably have laws about that too.”
I did not repl
y. Could he not tell? I thought men could, somehow. There had been blood. Was there blood every time, then? And could he really think I had done that awful, glorious thing before and he couldn’t tell?
“So we won’t do it again?” I said in a small voice, not looking at him.
He laughed, and ruffled my hair. “You are a little cochon. I didn’t say we wouldn’t do it again. You are delicious, and I am besotted with you. But if we do, you’re going to have to ask. As I said, I don’t push.”
“Then I’m asking.”
“Not tonight. Go home and think about your sins. Oh, God, I didn’t mean it like that,” he said, for I must have looked stricken. I know I felt it. “It’s no sin when it’s that good, Darcy. God made us as we are, and I believe he meant for us to enjoy it. But enough is enough. I’ll walk you to your house. You must be very careful going back in. Your grandmother would put you in a cage and shoot me.”
I did as he said. I knew he was right about Grammaude. Guilt rose and flickered, but it was very faint, and it did not last. Surely, surely, she must know this glorious fire. She had, she had told me over and over, been very much in love with my grandfather, and she had been just my age when she met him. But somehow I did not think they had done…this…until they were married.
At the stone wall he stopped.
“I’m not going to come any farther with you. If she sees you, you can just say you couldn’t sleep and went for a moonlight stroll,” he said.
I looked at him. All I could see was the white flash of his teeth and a white glint that must have been his eyes.
“Are…will you still be coming for dinner?”
“Of course. Nothing has changed. A man still has to eat. You mustn’t act any differently, though.”
“No. But…Warrie?”
“Yes?”
“What will happen next? I mean, how will we—”
He put his arms around me and held me close and traced a line with his finger from my forehead down over my breasts and to the hem of the T-shirt. His finger felt as if it had been dipped in fire.
Colony Page 48
