“Every jewel has a flaw or two,” she says smugly.
“He was pretty close to being a ten, though.”
Every time she mentions how wonderful he was I want to puke. Why am I such a jerk? I had a good marriage. In the last few months though, thanks to a conversation with Sarah, I’ve begun to realize it wasn’t as perfect as I liked to think it was, but it was a lot better than I deserved. Yet it’s probably normal to idealize a dead spouse. It’s a hell of a lot easier to get along with a memory than the reality of someone’s day-to-day irritating habits.
“Death’s a pisser, isn’t it?” I say, still feeling out of sorts.
“What did Woody Alien say about it—that it was the hours that bothered him?” I laugh, knowing I am sounding needlessly cruel.
“Who else is still around that I knew?” I ask, wondering if the entire town is in Paul’s hip pocket.
“I’ve got my high school annual in the hall,” she answers and rises to get it when I nod.
I look out the kitchen window into the backyard and notice the dark shapes of two magnificent trees, one pecan and the other a magnolia.
How do people in places like west Texas and New Mexico stand to live without real trees? Nothing in nature is more satisfying. Could I live over here again? I don’t know. Angela returns with a dark gold book and sitting down again across from me, slides it across the table.
“I keep forgetting you’re not in there.”
“Thank goodness,” I say, glad I don’t have to be confronted with what thirty years has done to me.
“You were handsome!” Angela exclaims.
“And you’ve hardly changed.”
“That’s silly,” I say, turning to Angela’s senior class. Actually, I am flattered beyond belief. I know she’s lying, but maybe not too much.
“Is Gary Holt still here?” I ask, looking at a picture of a boyhood friend who went through the University of Arkansas and then returned to Bear Creek to run his father’s Ford dealership.
Angela shakes her head.
“Almost a year ago he sold it and moved to Memphis to become an
Oldsmobile dealer. The day they left, Martha told me Cary didn’t want them to be the last white family in Bear Creek.”
Damn. Gary’s family had lived in Bear Creek since it was founded after the Civil War. When people like him begin to move, you know the town is in trouble. With the aid of the yearbook I ask about others I would have graduated with, and Angela helpfully provides a running commentary on their whereabouts. Surprisingly, several are still in or around Bear Creek. Despite the economy, a few whom I knew fairly well have flourished: Jeff Starnes is one of only two physicians in the county; Darby Nails has a CPA business that has offices all over the Arkansas Delta, John Upton farms and owns several businesses, including an insurance agency downtown.
“If you had come to any of the class reunions,” Angela reminds me, “you’d still know everybody.”
I look at John’s picture and wonder how much information he would give me. He and I had been inseparable in junior high before I got shipped off to Subiaco. Each year I would hang out with him during the summers, though our relationship never quite recaptured its adolescent intensity.
“I always had ambivalent feelings about this place,” I confess.
“Rosa was so dark that I was afraid somebody would make a crack about her.”
“If your daughter really looks anything like her, any remark would have been out of envy,” Angela says, not denying the possibility.
“Your mother was so proud of you when you joined the Peace Corps. She thought you were going to save the world, too.”
I tell her, “She would have been delighted if you and I had gotten married even though you were a Yankee. Of course she didn’t know what we were doing in the backseat of her car.”
Angela laughs selfconsciously, and suddenly I feel a sexual charge in the room. She shifts in her seat and studies the place mat in front of her.
“I would have married you,” she says solemnly, “but you never asked.
Though it worked out for the best for us both, how come you never did?”
I look at the top of her head, now bent, and see a small but unruly patch of gray hairs. It has taken her more than a quarter of a century to ask this question, and I still don’t know the answer.
That last summer I loved her as much as I was capable of, but how much was that? My head obsessed with the sacrificial lives of the saints, and the rest of me one unrelenting sex hormone, there wasn’t a lot of room left for single-minded devotion to one girl, however idealistic her mind and rounded her ass.
“I was too young; you remember I was pretty callow back then.”
She shrugs.
“Do you realize you were the only person I ever preached to? I guess I
felt safe with you.”
Angela has begun to worry a spot on the mat with her ring finger. A modest diamond glints in the overhead kitchen light. At this moment an orange and black cat pushes through a tiny door by the kitchen window and leaps onto her lap.
She strokes its back and coos, “This is Baby Dave.”
“Hello, Baby Dave,” I say, wondering what we do now. I’m not sure what Angela needs or even wants. For reasons I do not understand I am attracted to her again as much as I was when I was eighteen. Why? Is it simply nostalgia for lost innocence?
“Am I so middle-aged crazy that I think I can capture that again? In her passionate, arrogant way, Angela embodied ideals I had never encountered. But what is delicious about her now is that there is not even a trace of self-righteousness in her. I can only conclude she is what she seems: a complex, mature, enormously appealing woman my age, and one I can understand, given enough time.
Baby Dave leans back against his owner’s diaphragm and begins to purr.
“Gideon,” Angela says, using my Christian name for the first time, “I’d very much like for us to be friends. I’m still half-crazy right now.”
I know what she means. To get through the day, you have to repress.
But sooner or later, the feelings and memories, bittersweet and painful, come at all hours of the day and night.
“I understand,” I say, truly sympathetic as she drops Baby Dave to the floor and begins to cry again.
I must not take advantage of her, but I don’t stop myself from getting up from my chair. Awkwardly, I reach down and hug her while she sobs against me. Her face against my cheek is burning hot. Knowing I shouldn’t, I kiss her.
For an unforgettable moment she begins to respond but almost immediately pulls back.
“Will you leave now?” she asks, her voice barely a whisper.
“I need you to do that for me.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, backing away from her. This isn’t the time to admit that I would like nothing more than to take her back to the bedroom she shared with her husband for almost thirty years.
Yet, what would be so wrong about that? I cared for her once, and already I’ve begun to do so again.
At this moment the phone in her kitchen rings.
Watching me carefully as if I were a shoplifter about to walk out with a bag of cookies in a 7-Eleven, Angela picks up the phone, and her somber expression changes to a smile.
“Hi, Mrs. Petty, how are you?”
How can that woman still be alive? If it is the same person I think it is, she was an old woman when Hannah and I were children picking up acorns in her yard. Now she apparently lives across the street. I hear Angela ask her if she remembers me. I am in town and stopped by to see her. As Angela talks, I look out the window and wonder if the old snoop has been trying to spy on us.
Small towns. I have forgotten what it was like.
Every move I make here will be documented and recorded. After five minutes Angela shakes her head and more or less hangs up on her, explaining to me that she would be kept on the phone for hours. Of course, she remembers me. I was the Pages’ only son who went off and married that ni
gger woman from Haiti or someplace.
“You know you can’t hide anything here,” Angela says, primly, not sitting down again. She still wants me to go.
“I’m surprised that as soon as she noticed your car, she didn’t try to stumble over here on her walker. She can’t get up the porch, though.
By the way I forgot to tell you she says she remembers you peeing in her backyard when you were five years old.”
I laugh, not willing to leave just yet.
“It must have been too regular an event for me to remember,” I say, marveling at Angela’s ability to kindle desire in me. Yet it shouldn’t surprise me, for it was always like this between us. I try to read her
expression, but I can’t.
“Would you like to go out sometime?” I ask, hoping I don’t sound too plaintive.
“You need to go,” she says firmly, coming over to me and taking me by the arm.
On her front porch with her yearbook under my arm I notice paint peeling above the door.
The house could almost be considered shabby. I wonder if she’ll have to take out another mortgage if she intends to stay in it. I hug my suit coat to me against a brisk cold wind that has arisen since I’ve been inside.
“So what happens now?” I ask, not willing to pretend there was no chemistry between us.
Angela points with her chin past me.
“I’ll be answering a lot of questions about you.”
I turn and look across the street to see movement behind a curtain.
“This place is creepy,” I say.
“I can’t believe you stayed.” I wonder how many people know I was here for a couple of hours Thanksgiving weekend. Sarah and I didn’t see anyone other than a black octogenarian female who lived in public
housing for the elderly. Angela hasn’t mentioned it, and with other things on my mind, I haven’t either. If I asked her, I’m sure she wouldn’t divulge the reason I was here.
“I need to figure out what just happened,” she says dryly, “before I can begin to worry about the last thirty years.”
“I know you do,” I say, wondering if she feels anything for me at all.
Angela could continue mourning for Dwight for months or even longer.
Given my history, I couldn’t complain if she did.
“Obviously, I’d like to see you again,” I say awkwardly, trying to forget how hurt Amy would be to hear these words coming from my mouth.
“But as friends, okay?” she says, warily, hugging herself in the cold.
I nod.
“Then what about meeting an old friend for breakfast Saturday morning?”
I ask, deciding to spend the night in Bear Creek tomorrow night instead of driving back home after the arraignment. We couldn’t get more innocent than that.
Angela considers for a moment, visibly hesitates, but finally says, “Okay. I’ll meet you at eight at the Cotton Boll. It’s out on Highway 1 towards Helena.”
“Where’s a decent place to stay?” I ask. Her boys’ rooms are vacant, but I doubt I’ll get an invitation.
“The Bear Creek Inn on 79 toward Clarendon isn’t supposed to be terrible,” Angela says, not even pausing to consider inviting me.
As the afternoon gloom of the Delta fades into blackness and I begin to put miles between us, I wonder what I am doing. Can we really just pick up where we left off thirty years ago? Should we even try?
Getting it wonderfully wrong, Rosa, exasperated by my stubbornness, used to scream, let sleeping dogs die. Maybe I should take her hint and try to keep the past buried. In the swampy soil of the Delta, however, six feet isn’t always enough. Though it seems as if I have a good handle on my hometown, I have a momentary feeling there may be ghosts I don’t want to see.
Tired by the drive home, I glance at my watch.
Nine o’clock. If my greyhound and I are going, we need to get out of here.
“I think we’ll just go on and sleep at the house tonight.”
From the opposite end of her couch, my girlfriend exclaims, “You don’t have any heat yet!”
“It’s not too bad,” I say. Actually, it is supposed to get down to thirty tonight. How could I buy a house whose heating system goes out the week after I signed the papers? It passed inspection, and the sale
closed a week ago, but three days ago when I flipped the switch, it never even turned on, and the pilot light was blazing like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
“It’s supposed to be fixed tomorrow.”
“It’ll be too cold for Jessie,” Amy protests.
“She doesn’t have a coat for this weather.”
I stare at my dog’s powerful haunches. More like a lightweight brindle-colored jacket. I sigh.
Guests wear their welcome out sooner than dead fish any day in my experience. The hitch is that Amy has longterm plans for us and seems willing to endure any indignity we can heap on her.
Jessie has just taken a dump on her carpet.
Maybe another night will cure that kind of talk.
“This is what it would be like for us,” I say, throwing in her face our fifteen years age difference.
“Except in a few years it would be me instead of Jessie you’d be cleaning up for.”
Amy wipes Jessie’s nose, which is about to drip, on the sleeve of her warm-up as if she were the harried mother of a two-year-old.
“I’d get you some diapers,” she says, not cracking a smile.
“And then I’d stick your butt in boiling water a couple of times.
That’d help you remember.”
I laugh, knowing Amy is okay about the carpet if she can joke with me.
“See, Jessie,” I say, leaning over to inspect a small raw spot on her leg, “there are ways to get your attention.” “Not hers,” Amy says pointedly.
“Yours.”
I glance around her apartment and am reminded how little we have in common. Besides the age difference, Amy and I have radically different tastes. When she decorated my office she toned down the art she selected, but on display in her apartment, a two-bedroom in a gray brick structure just off the Wilbur Mills freeway, are drawings, paintings, and photographs, rarely, if ever, seen in a state where most of the inhabitants (myself included) are more at ease with art done by the numbers in Norman Rockwell style. Here, Amy has just redone her apartment by hanging life-size nudes on all the walls. A couple of men, too—one, a guy with a penis the size of a boa constrictor that has just finished a good lunch.
This new phase is weird and embarrassing. I look up at a photograph of a Marilyn Monroe lookalike on the opposite wall. She has a safety pin running through her left nipple.
“What does it make you feel?” she asked me when I saw this particular photo for the first time. Nausea, I whispered, fascinated even as my scrotum tried to retract inside my body. I’m all for having my consciousness raised, but does it have to be a twenty-four-hour-a-day job?
“What does your mother think about this stuff?” I ask tonight. I can’t imagine having friends over for dinner and having them try to pretend they aren’t dying to get home so they can get on the phone and gossip about the horror show on Amy and Gideon’s walls.
“She lasted about twenty minutes and then turned around and left,” Amy admits. Dressed in a green and blue warm-up suit that fits her like a glove, and with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, Amy looks like a teenager instead of a serious collector of sadomasochistic art.
“My new stepfather thinks I’ve lost my mind. God knows what Daddy would have thought.”
Poor Mr. Gilchrist. A retired factory worker from a paper mill in Pine Bluff who died only a year ago, he must be spinning in the hottest rung of hell for having allowed his only child to desert the South and accept a scholarship at a fancy school on the East Coast. First, his daughter wasted his hard-earned money on an art history degree at Princeton, and now she has the nerve to stain his memory by exhibiting the results on her walls.
“Who was that guy, Mappl
ethorpe?
Didn’t he do some statue of a man pissing into another guy’s mouth or
something just totally beyond the pale? When is his exhibit getting up here?”
Amy rolls her eyes. I may not be educable.
“I don’t think he’s in my budget for next month.” She reaches over and pats my leg.
“It’s okay for art to make you uncomfortable, even scare you.
It’s how we grow.”
I make a face. She sounds so damn condescending.
I didn’t just swing down out of the trees, and she knows it. On the other hand, if we got married or even lived together, it’d be my place, too. What would Sarah think of this? She’s gotten a lot more liberal in the last year, but this stuff would embarrass her. She thinks Amy is too young for me, anyway.
“I don’t mind a little growth, but I think Mapplethorpe’s stuff would prematurely age me.”
Amy chucks Jessie under her chin.
“I realize now who you named her after.”
I get it. Jesse Helms, the right-wing senator from North Carolina who messed with the federal arts budget.
“You artist types claim to be so open-minded,” I point out, “but as soon as somebody disagrees with you about something, you start calling people names.” Hardly role models for us hicks in the boonies.
“I just get so irritated with the attitude,” Amy lectures, “that art is supposed to be immediately absorbed like some comic book. Do you realize that when somebody goes through a museum the average length of time spent on each exhibit is about eighteen seconds?”
I nod, more than happy to keep the conversation on this level. Some U.S. Supreme Court justice, hopelessly muddled, endeared himself to future generations of law students by confessing in a written opinion that maybe he didn’t know what obscenity was, but he knew it when he saw it.
“People know what they like,” I say, knowing I sound hopelessly provincial.
“They don’t have to study it for a lifetime. You either respond or you don’t.”
Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement Page 6
