by Lee Smith
“You do not.” Anna was as sure of this as she had ever been sure of anything. She backed up against the wall.
“You wanna bet?” Now he was grinning at her through his black moustache. “I built this lovely house for my lovely cultured princess bride who has now run off with the kids’ fucking shrink, pardon my French, who never even liked the goddamn house anyway, preferring the place in Maine which is just as goddamn cold as she is. So the divorce is final this weekend, and she got this house. She got all the houses.”
“But the cleaning service—,” Anna started. “You can’t just—”
“So I didn’t tell the cleaning service I was coming, all right? I can’t be bothered with every goddamn thing. Besides, I don’t even know the name of the damn cleaning service.”
“Merry Maids,” Anna said automatically.
“Oh yeah? And who are you? Little Miss Merry Maid?”
“Actually I’m a writer,” Anna said. She couldn’t imagine why she’d said it.
“Sure you are, honey.” He threw his big head back and laughed, a laugh so contagious that Anna found herself smiling too before she remembered that she was furious.
“I’m going to call the service,” she said.
“No, you’re not. You’re going to have a drink with me. I came down here to drink, and I’m still drinking. I’m a long way from through.” He climbed out of bed stark naked and walked over to the wet bar. He had a huge dark hairy torso with scars running all over it and thick white legs. The scars were raised and puckered like somebody had squirted toothpaste on him.
Anna turned away. “Put your pants on,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Besides, it doesn’t even work.” He turned his back and she stared at his hairy ass while he poured two tumblers full of scotch and handed one to her.
“Lou Angelli,” he said, clicking his glass against hers. “Angelli’s Delis, maybe you’ve seen them? All up and down the east coast, mostly Florida and New Jersey. My story is, I went public too soon. You’re a pretty thing,” he went on. “I don’t mind a big girl.”
“Please!” But Anna was drinking the scotch.
“Don’t I know you from someplace?” He gave her a broad wink.
“I doubt it,” she said, and of course it was just a line, but the funny thing was, she felt she did know him from someplace. She recognized him. Somehow they were two of a kind. “I’m Anna Todd,” she said. “Now put your pants on,” and he did, and they sat out on the deck and drank until Mrs. Baggett from the cleaning service, along with the island’s one policeman, Harry Renfro, arrived to evict them.
“I sure am sorry, Anna honey,” he said. She played bingo at Harry’s church on Tuesday nights.
“Oh, that’s okay,” Anna said cheerfully, sunburned and drunk.
“You’re fired,” Miss Baggett said.
“Bitch,” Anna said. Then she and Lou cracked up, staggering along his wife’s deck. Harry gave them a ride back over to the Flamingo in the cop car, turning on the blue light and siren at Anna’s request. She woke up after noon the next day with the worst hangover she’d had since college—dry-mouthed, heart pounding, terrified that she was back in the hospital and none of it had happened at all. But then she looked over and there was Lou, lying on his back in her own bed with one huge arm dropping all the way down to the floor. She kept on looking at him.
Her door opened just a crack to reveal Miss Bette’s sharp-nosed old face. “Anna, is that a man?” Mrs. Bette said in a loud stage whisper, over the sound of the window air conditioner.
“Yes,” Anna whispered back.
“Good.” Miss Bette shut the door.
Anna showered and brushed her teeth and took four Anacin and put on her yellow sundress, wincing when the spaghetti straps touched her shoulders. She made coffee on her hot plate and got her manuscript out from under the bed while Lou slept on. She read what she’d written so far. Not bad, she thought. Or, bad. But bad enough? Anyway, it beat reconstructing families. Hers could never be reconstructed, face it, none of her families could ever be reconstructed, so she might as well write books where it all happened again and again just the way it was supposed to: boy meets girl, sparks fly despite the mad underlying attraction, et cetera, et cetera, until it all ended happily ever after, again and again and again.
In this book, her heroine, a missionary schoolteacher, comes to the mountains to do good but encounters a wildly dangerous, darkly handsome moonshiner who won’t let his brilliant crippled daughter attend school. Her heroine, Rosalie Peach, puts on a little bonnet and kicks the old mule into a spirited trot heading up Devil Mountain to confront him. A shot rings out—
Lou sat up. “Jesus,” he said.
“How do you feel?”
“Like shit. I feel like shit.” But he was grinning at her. He had a snaggle tooth, which she had always found attractive in a man.
She put down her pen. “It really doesn’t work?” she asked.
“There are other things to do,” he said, and they did them all afternoon, coming downstairs finally just as Miss Bette’s last story of the day was going off the TV. “Well, hello, look what the cat dragged in,” she said.
“I can cook,” Lou said.
“Cook, then,” Miss Bette said.
From then on, nothing was ever like it was supposed to be, except in Anna’s books, where everything was. Lou and Anna never married. They stayed on at the Flamingo for her first three books. Lou shopped and cooked and cleaned while Anna wrote, reading each day’s section aloud to Lou and Miss Bette (and whoever else happened to be staying at the Flamingo) in the late afternoon while thunderstorms raced across the ocean and they all drank Ramos gin fizzes whipped up by Lou. Some of the guests got so involved in the story that they stayed on for days. Miss Bette was a devastating critic, always right. She said the first one, Mountain Magic, was “entirely too arty,” and sure enough, it was rejected by Sunset Romances on those very grounds. Anna took all the symbolism and semicolons out, and it was subsequently published by another publisher, Heartline Books, under the title Devil Mountain Man. Anna wrote a sequel, Return to Devil Mountain, which had a supernatural angle, and then Come Home My Heart, which made them rich.
They paid off the Flamingo and went to Europe, which led to Toujours Toulouse and ¡Arriba! Baby which was translated into eleven languages, making Anna famous. Upon their return, they sold the Flamingo property to a German developer for a fabulous sum of money, buying the apartment in New York, the condo in Vail, and a wonderful old house in Key West which needed a lot of work.
This is where they found Robert, a decorator: in the Key West yellow pages. Robert had spiky peroxide-blond hair and beautiful manners; he was a Southern boy, from Charleston. He took care of their houses while becoming a massage therapist on the side. He was very gifted. Lou handled the money while Anna wrote the books and made personal appearances. She hired an assistant (Della Rosen, with tortoiseshell glasses) to make reservations, shop, answer the phone, and deal with the mail. Della saw to it that every fan heard from Anna personally. Depending on the tone and the degree of intimacy claimed in the initial letter, Della sent Response A, B, or C, beginning, respectively, “Of course I remember you”; “The life of any writer is such a lonely one, how heartwarming it is to hear from a reader like yourself, and to know …”; or “Alas, we may not meet!” Anna endorsed a line of cosmetics, then scarves.
After a while, Lou hired a financial manager named Martin Dean Marquette who had come to Key West for a Merrill Lynch convention and never left. Martin Dean Marquette took care of all their business for them, wearing a jeans skirt. Lou took up art. He specialized in wacky copies of famous paintings by modern masters, changing their signatures accordingly: Loutrillo, Loucasso, Loutrecht, Loualt … Above each signature he put his trademark black moustache, two quick strokes of the brush. Soon these paintings became collectible; then they were all the rage. Lou opened his own gallery on Duval. They bought the house ne
xt to theirs on Margaret Street, erecting a tall bougainvillea-covered pink picket fence around the entire compound which eventually housed not only Anna and Lou but also Robert, Della, Martin Dean Marquette, Miss Bette and her private nurse, and one of Lou’s daughters with her illegitimate child, Susannah, whom they adored. Guides on the conch train pointed out the “House of Romance,” as they called it, on sightseeing tours. If Anna happened to be working when they came by, she’d trail a pink chiffon scarf at them from the window of her tower study.
But Anna got Lou for only twelve years. Since his heart attack, she has never had another man although she has imagined a slew of them, romantic hero after hero, as she must, to support her entourage. She was with Lou on the satin sheets in their big round bed beneath the turning ceiling fan on the day he died—too young, at sixty-four—while making what passed for love.
Mile 265.5
St. Francisville, Louisiana
Thursday 5/13/99
0842 hours
COURTNEY SLIPS INTO A denim sundress with a smocked bodice, then snaps a denim band over the crown of her straw hat. There. She applies clear red lipstick which is always so cheering. She straightens her shoulders, adjusts her hat. She has been looking forward to St. Francisville, where she has signed up to tour the antebellum plantations Oakley and Catalpa. The rest of the town is supposed to be very pretty as well; there’ll be a lot to photograph. John James Audubon lived here in the 1820s, tutoring children at Feliciana plantation; here he made more than eighty paintings of birds and wildlife. It still looks wild out there even now, jungly and snaky. And it’s hotter today than expected—already eighty-five degrees and it’s not even 9 A.M. How did they ever do it, all those plantation ladies in the hoop skirts and the crinolines with their waists pinched in until they looked like wasps, like hourglasses—hourglasses marking time, counting the silver, waiting to die. Oh dear. Whatever is wrong with her this morning? Gene Minor has no business talking to her like that.
But she really must call Hawk this very minute before she does one more thing; she really cannot evade her responsibilities any longer. For once, she gets the outside line on the first try. Far away at Magnolia Court, somebody picks up the ringing phone, but says nothing. “Hello?” Courtney asks. She can’t tell if anybody is there or not.
“Courtney?” Oh God, it’s Hawk after all, the one person she hasn’t talked to since this trip started, actually. The center of the action, the still point of the storm. “Courtney?” he says again. His firm voice sounds exactly the same. He sounds fine.
“Hi, darling,” she says. “I’m so glad I caught you. We’re docking at St. Francisville right now, so I’m off for a morning of photography. It’s getting hot, though. There’s a big difference between North Carolina and Louisiana weather, let me tell you. It’s a lot more humid down here.”
“So are you having a good time? Enjoying it?” It’s unlike Hawk to be so solicitous.
“Oh yes, it’s wonderful, but you would have hated it, you’re too type A. It would have been too slow for you. Though there is a fitness center and there are a few people jogging around the deck every morning including Russell Hurt, you’d like him anyway.”
“Who?”
“Russell Hurt. He’s married to Catherine Wilson, don’t you remember her? He’s the only man in our group, actually. I think he’s enjoying it, though—well, they’re enjoying it—” A lady never lets a silence fall. Miss Evangeline’s motto rings out in her head like a bell.
“I remember Catherine Wilson,” Hawk says when she finally lets him speak. “Pretty girl from Birmingham. Got married the summer after we did, left the church in a horse and buggy.” Hawk chuckles. Obviously, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with him, if he can remember all this. Maybe Ellen Henley is just as prone to exaggeration as Vangie.
“That was her first wedding,” Courtney says. “Hawk, how are the tests going? Has the doctor said anything?”
“Hell, you know, they never say anything. It’s a power trip, basically. They take off all your clothes and strip you of all your dignity and then they ask you a lot of stupid questions and insult you and you pay thousands of dollars for the privilege, thank you very much. That’s the way it works.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Oh, stuff like what is your mother’s maiden name, or who is the governor of this state? What is today’s date? What is your birthday? You wouldn’t believe these questions, what a waste of a man’s time.”
“But what kind of tests, Hawk?”
“You name it, I’m taking it,” Hawk says. “EKG, MRI, CAT scan, PETT scan, pee in the cup, blood tests up the wazoo. Close your eyes and touch your face. Jesus Christ.”
“Well, you certainly sound like your old self, at any rate. But they must have said something . . .”
“So far it’s inconclusive, that’s what the guy said, Dr. Famous Fucking Levinson. A lot of the tests haven’t even come back yet, of course, but so far, based on the best of his famous fucking expertise, it’s inconclusive.”
“But what does that mean?” Out her window, Courtney sees people streaming onto the landing and into the two waiting buses. Oh well. There’s no help for it now. Courtney sits down on her bed. “What did Dr. Levinson actually say, Hawk? Doesn’t he have any idea what’s going on?”
“Oh, sure. The guy’s full of ideas. Maybe head injury, maybe stroke, maybe frontal lobe disorder, maybe thyroid, maybe meningitis, maybe depression . . .”
“Depression! Oh, surely not.” Hawk is the least depressed person Courtney has ever known.
“Don’t be too sure,” Hawk says somewhat mysteriously. “Guys like me, we’re falling like trees all over America, but nobody’s there to hear us yell when we go down.”
Courtney can’t quite make the connection.
“Just read the statistics,” Hawk goes on. “Who do you think is eating all this Prozac?”
“Dr. Levinson didn’t put you on Prozac, did he?” Courtney has never heard of anything so ridiculous.
“Sure, Prozac and a bunch of other pills. One day you’re a man, the next day you’re a laboratory,” Hawk says. “But he really won’t know much until next week. I’ve got an appointment on Thursday afternoon.”
Thank God, she’ll be home. “I’ll go with you,” Courtney says, feeling better immediately, though she doubts that he’ll actually let her do it.
“Great,” Hawk surprises her by saying. “That’d be just great. And when are you coming home?”
God. What is wrong with everybody? The schedule has been up on the refrigerator for weeks. “Monday night,” Courtney says for what seems about the tenth time.
“And when does your plane get in?”
Look at the schedule, she thinks. “Seven-forty,” she says.
“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t I pick you up at the airport and take you out to dinner? What do you say? Just the two of us. No reason to rush right home, am I right? I’ll see if Tom can give us a table at the Starfish Grille. You can tell me all about the trip.”
Just the two of us? Years before, Courtney used to dream of Hawk saying something like this to her, but then she stopped dreaming of it, and now, it’s funny, but this is the last thing she wants to hear, the very last. Her heart starts beating too fast.
“Baby? Have we got a date on Monday night?” Hawk pauses, clears his throat. “This thing has got my attention,” he says.
“I’ll be looking forward to it,” Courtney sings, “and you take it easy in the meantime, you hear? I hope Mary Bell is taking good care of you.”
“Mary Bell is driving me fucking crazy.”
Courtney laughs. She puts the receiver down and gathers her things; her heart is still beating too fast.
COURTNEY KEEPS UP A lively pace in spite of the heat and the road’s steep grade into town. What was it Miss Evangeline used to say? Horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glow. Well, she’s surely glowing today!
Theatrically beautiful lilies bloom in the swam
p down the hill to her left; she stops to take her camera out of its case and focus it, using the zoom lens. Click: the deep freckled pink lilies have dark mysterious centers, black stamens. When photographing flowers, Courtney likes to fit several into the frame. She’s not going after anything sexual, no weird Georgia O’Keeffe stuff. She catches a monarch butterfly on a yellow flower, which pleases her, click. A white egret stands like a ghost in the murky water near the shady bank, click. And then click again as it skims the blue flowers, rising over the swamp. She’ll call this one “Bird on the Wing.” Really this is the most satisfying aspect of photography, the way you can stop time, freeze action forever within the frame. Courtney hastens up the hill, dripping sweat, feeling faint, as if her period is about to start, only it’s not of course, she’s got her pills timed so she won’t be having it in New Orleans as it is not conducive to romance. She attains the top of the hill.
St. Francisville is chock-full of beautiful homes surrounded by live oaks draped with Spanish moss, just the way they’re supposed to be. Inviting porches hold wicker furniture and languid green ferns. Everybody on the street nods and smiles, friendly: people down here know how to act, which is not always true back in redneck North Carolina. Courtney snaps first one house, then another. She’s glad she missed the bus; this is much more fun. She decides to focus on fences, as there are so many different kinds of pickets, some of them very original. She can frame them all alike and hang them in the hall, six or eight of them, say, in a nice little grouping. Click. Click. Click. Courtney circles the town, stopping in the Button Shop for more film and some lemonade. She buys a brooch made out of antique buttons for Mary Bell, even though it’s much too expensive. A lady doesn’t care what it costs. Click, old men on the bench; click, old lady tourist scratching her butt, Gene will get a kick out of that one. She will not think about Gene. Click, the guy from the boat in the red muscle shirt stands before a house that he would never be invited to enter, not in a million years. She’ll name this one “Louisiana Irony.” Click, the dusty road starting back down the hill, click, the beautiful little United Metho-dist Church, she grew up Methodist before she became an Episcopalian to marry Hawk. She won’t think about him either.
