My mom, Elizabeth Bowden (she kept her name, unheard of when she married in 1960), was second to none in the goodness and brains department. I held the photograph and whispered so softly no one could have heard my voice: “Where are you now, Mom? I need you. I need you now like I needed you then.”
Before I could begin to cry, Don’s head appeared around the doorjamb. When he saw I was at my desk, he entered and leaned against the wall, hands thrust into his pockets. He was handsome in a scholarly way, not librarian-y but preppy. Salt-and-pepper hair, stylish glasses, natty tweed jacket—you’d have guessed he was an editor at a big-time New York publishing house. He was a curator like me, but he also helped develop collections, which I did not do. Don was sweet and a dear friend, five years my senior. We’d had sex once. The benefits way. I made that clear at the outset. It was fine and all, completely comfortable, but I didn’t want an inner-office affair because those invariably end either badly or in marriage and I didn’t want either, then or now.
“Really nice choices for the exhibit,” he said.
“Well it’s not as if you didn’t do most of it!”
“Yeah, but you got the cool stuff. Where did you find that interview with Dick Cavett? I didn’t know that even existed.”
“Dante helped me find it. And he also knew how to get a digital version we could run on our equipment.”
Dante was a thirty-two-year-old assistant curator, of Italian descent as his name implied and his looks confirmed: the kind of deep brown eyes where you can scarcely see the pupils. Skin that looked tan in February. Long, dark, thick, glossy hair. Now he was someone I was seriously sexually attracted to, though he desired exactly nothing of me. More than a decade between us, and I didn’t want to embarrass him or me. He made no overtures, so I let the lust—that’s all there was, he wasn’t my type in any other way, the always-texting-type youngster—I let my lust smolder and die out.
“He’s down there now, just so you know,” Don said, and I didn’t know if this was a soft jab—reproach for not being in the room myself—or if he really did mean to assure me all was well. Could he sense me trembling inside? As he develops collections, he’s not my boss but he is one rung higher on the ladder of what is a very bureaucratic, hierarchical department. At least one of us always had to be in the room, with all that valuable archival stuff out. You’d be amazed by what people will steal—it’s appalling.
“We still on for the movie tonight?” Don asked.
I’d forgotten. We had a date.
“You know, I’m not really feeling up to it tonight. Can we make it a rain check?”
I expected he’d smile and say sure, as he and I had both done in our long years as colleagues. But a look of consternation came over him, even discouragement. So much so that it surprised me. He looked like a little boy for a few seconds. But he rallied and said, “Of course.” Then, “Everything all right?”
I looked around at the objects on my desk, for no reason other than to avoid Don’s eyes. “I’m just not feeling myself today.”
“Are you ill?”
“No, I don’t feel ill, I just feel … I don’t know … not myself.” And now I had to look at Don, because he left the wall and came over to my desk and planted his butt right on the edge of it next to me—which would have been perfectly fine and always welcome … on any other day. Mine was a large desk, but we were still close. I pushed my chair out a little and swiveled so that I faced him directly.
Now he looked away. “Well, it was kind of yourself that I was hoping to talk about tonight.”
“Me?”
He turned back to me and looked into my eyes to drop the bomb. “Well, us.”
I said nothing, and he waited for me to absorb the fact that something was coming.
“Grimsley, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. A lot. We’re getting old. We’re going to die. And I don’t want to die alone.”
He paused to see if I wanted to say something. I didn’t.
“I know we both love each other as friends. I’d like it to be more than that. I’d like us to be partners in that love so that maybe it would grow.”
“Holy Jesus,” I said and took a moment to swallow. “Is this a proposal?”
He waited long enough for my heart to get up to a hundred twenty beats before saying, “No. Yes. No.” He looked toward the window. “It’s an idea is what it is. And it’s a serious one. I’d like us to share our lives.”
“Look, you know I’ll cook you dinner most any night of the week. Often have!”
“Yes, many lovely dinners, every single one, every one without exception, I’ve enjoyed immensely. And exactly why I’m asking you to consider my proposal—the enjoyment of a meal shared with you. If I needed a cook, I’d hire one. And no it’s not that either—I know what you’re thinking.”
I wasn’t, he was ahead of me here, but now that I was thinking about it, I very much didn’t want to be.
“Though I hope you’d acknowledge that we are compatible that way as well.”
I stood immediately, so abruptly that Don stood, too, and we faced each other. “Dear friend,” I said. I must have closed my eyes and shaken my head. I simply had no words. “Don.” I breathed hard. “This is just something … I can’t even begin to—”
Rude or not, I didn’t know what else to do but leave. Walked out on him, mid-sentence. My own mid-sentence. I heard him mutter, or moan, “Oh God,” when I was out the door. Poor man, he must have felt humiliated; I’m so sorry for that. But I couldn’t think about him at that moment. I couldn’t.
Where could I be alone? I wasn’t allowed to leave. Trish Davitt, the head of my department, my boss, wouldn’t allow this—a real stickler for details and time clocks (read, bitch, but you didn’t hear it from me). The stacks. No one would be in the stacks today. I could be alone there. I all but ran down the steps, into 103 Perkins, strode behind the desk—a new girl, didn’t even remember her name, was manning the desk but probably tooling around on the Internet since no one was working or researching here today. I went two stacks in to the very back, where excess Blackmore archives had been shelved (ones we wanted to show but didn’t have room for) so that if, on the off chance Trish appeared—and she was precisely the sort of person who had a knack for appearing exactly when you least wanted to see her, such as now—I could at least pretend I was looking for something related to the exhibit.
I leaned my head against a shelf. I wanted my mind to go blank for a while, hoping three minutes of blackness might reboot the system.
“Grims? Hey, man, you all right?”
Dante had found me. I’d dropped to one knee, arms crossed over that knee, head down. Kind of like you see football players do when Coach says a pregame “Clear eyes, full hearts” and all that.
He was squatting to my level and I looked up blankly.
“Seriously, you all right?”
“I just, I just got dizzy for minute.” I stood.
He touched my throat, my jugular to be precise, then touched my forehead. He used to be pre-med and he knew I knew this, so it wasn’t odd or forward.
“Really, Dante, I’m fine.”
“Okay.”
And then we stood, and we stared at each other for an inordinate time—he was really good looking. I finally had to say, “I assume you came here for something?”
“Oh right!” he said and grinned. “Trish asked me to find some chapbook of poems Blackmore published in the 1950s. Damn, I knew I was going to forget the name.” He actually scratched his head, digging his fingers into that gorgeous floppy black hair—there must be a reason we do this, scratch our head to think. Finally, squinting, he said, “Something about a lily.”
“Weren’t you at the service? Weren’t you paying attention?” Unembarrassed, he shrugged his Gen-X shoulders. “It’s called Lily of a Day, 1956,” I said, relieved to have a work issue to solve, though solved too quickly. I turned to the top shelf where it would be. He moved next to me to help me look. He wasn�
�t pre-med anymore, but he still had that Type A I-can-find-it-before-you-can!-win! mentality. Our hands touched as we each reached the thin volume simultaneously. Tie! He was a gentleman and let me remove it. I handed it to him.
He smiled warmly, a little longer than was necessary, I thought. Then he said, “Thanks, you’re awesome,” and departed.
I now knew where I had to go—not to be alone but rather to be around strangers. The Mary Duke Biddle Rare Book Room and the exhibit. I had to focus on work. That I could do. I power-walked down the hall on Dante’s heels.
The room was crowded with strangers, thank goodness. I loved working the room at these things. People always asked a lot of questions and I knew the answers; I all but dared people to stump me.
Don had returned, glanced at me, and then looked quickly back to whomever he was speaking to.
What we curators do is stroll, and look, stroll and look, in the altogether too-quiet hush of the room. I stopped at a couple bent right angle over a photo album.
It was a young couple, local—judging from the man’s accent as he whispered to his companion. They hovered, arms behind their backs, intensely interested in little Danny Blackmore in short-legged overalls pulling a wooden wagon, with dog Spot in the back, along a dusty backwoods path; there he is in the back row, fifth grade; there he is, the dashing Lothario, arriving for his freshman year at Duke, dressed in a khaki suit and narrow tie.
The man looked to me and said, “Can we turn the pages?”
“I’d be happy to turn them for you,” I said, and did. You never know, he could have been eating a brownie at the reception down the hall.
The Mary Duke Biddle Rare Book Room was outfitted like a Victorian living room, heavy on the maroon and brown damask, with formal sitting chairs, coffee tables, and side tables, lit a dim yellow by several lamps and sconces. On the tables, and in a couple of glass cases, were manuscripts of first drafts, journals, and letters to and from people as diverse as Vivien Leigh, W. H. Auden, and Nelson Mandela; citations and medals—he’d won seemingly everything available, save for an Eagle Scout Badge and the Nobel Prize, which probably irked him, since one of his friends and contemporaries, Toni Morrison, had got it. I once heard him say, “The Nobel Prize is a great honor, of course, but I’m told it steals a year of your life just to handle the flood of correspondence and invitations.” He had an ego the size of Texas; he’d have bathed happily in such a theft. Blackmore was an obsessive keeper of photo albums, as any self-respecting narcissist is, and we had a couple of these set out on which people doted.
I bent to turn another page for the local couple, but nearly tore the page out of the book when I felt two hands on my waist. Two hundred twenty volts would have yielded a milder result.
Em stood back, now a big grin on his face, which turned quickly embarrassed.
“Wound tight!” he said at normal volume in what was a library-quiet room.
I must have given him my how-dare-you, or hands-off bitchy look because he was clearly taken aback. And I, I was just not myself.
“That’s not a Grimsley I ever knew!” he said, his smile returning.
I turned back to the couple I’d been helping and excused myself.
“You snuck up on me,” I whispered. And yes, I definitely caught Don pinching his chin as he stared at us.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to,” Emerson said. “I was glad to see you. I didn’t know if I’d lost my chance.”
“Your chance at what?”
“To see you. To talk. I’d like to know who you’ve become.”
“I’m just me, I’m afraid,” I said, trying my best to sound casual. “Only more so.”
“When do your duties here end?”
I checked my watch. “We start rustling folks out in about thirty minutes.”
“I’ll be at the reception. Will you find me there? Do you have time to talk?”
*
I could scarcely believe how little changed he was at forty-three. His skin remained smooth, the whites of his eyes bright, and apparently every strand of hair he’d ever grown remained glossy and fixed to his scalp. And he was, as ever, completely at ease with himself.
When I found him in the reception off the main lobby talking to some beautiful woman, probably one of his actress friends from LA, he turned and he, well, he beamed at me. He completely undid me. He hugged me again, an easy hug that was so natural it calmed me, strangely, and I felt like myself for the first time since seeing him. Sort of.
“Let’s go,” he said. He bid his beautiful friend farewell and actually took me by the arm to stroll us through the lobby and out into the lovely spring air.
We sat on the stone bench immediately outside the front doors of Perkins.
Emerson removed his jacket and laid it across the bench beside him. He leaned back on the support of his arms, hands on the edge of the bench, long legs extended forward, ankles crossed, black wing-tipped shoes highly polished. I sat like a prim old maid beside him, as if to hold off the bizarre events of this day, hands in my lap, knees locked together, and my short dress feeling several sizes too tight in the hips.
“Apologies,” he said, “for the abrupt departure in the chapel. I honestly don’t know what happened. I ran around to the side of the chapel, sat on the steps, and cried. Hard. Just bawled.”
“No need to apologize. We all have to grieve.”
He sat forward abruptly. “Hm.” He put his elbows on his knees and stared at his own hands as he wrung them. “Is that what it was?”
“You hadn’t grieved, obviously. He was an important man in your life, one of the most important men in your life. You’ve lost something really big, you needed to let yourself grieve.”
“I wonder, Grimsley. That’s the thing. I didn’t feel any grief, not coming out here, not during the ceremony, not big grief. He was very old. Daniel Blackmore lived a long and happy life, well into his eighties, died peacefully from what I heard. If it was grief, I need to know what I was grieving for.”
I felt my insides unwinding, returning to something like myself. Em put me at ease, as he had managed to do on so many emotional occasions when we were students. What a pleasure and surprise. We’d always loved talking to one another but it was as though no time had passed.
I said, “If not grief, then what?”
He looked at me hard, as if the answer were in my eyes, then he turned and said, “Shame?”
“What have you done you wouldn’t have anyone know?”
“Is that the definition of shame?”
“You’re here this one day—I’m guessing—and flying out tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“So here I am.” I held my arms out wide, proof. “Use me. I’m your confessor. Unburden yourself to a friend who still cares about you but is unconnected to whatever life you’ve made. Tomorrow, you’ll be gone, and we’re not likely to see each other again.”
This was all true, but the last part of it quaked me not a little—the truth of it, the finality, our mortality. There was little reason he’d have to return to North Carolina. This was the last I’d ever see him.
So here’s what I did. I wasn’t myself, as I’ve been saying. I took his shoulder, the far one, and pulled it toward me so he was facing me. I put my nose to his neck and breathed in. I smelled his hair. I licked the skin of his neck, just above the collar. And I pulled away.
And I had to laugh. “You should see your face!”
“What did you just do?”
I had to talk, no time to think my way out of this one.
“I can smell and taste shame.”
He looked at me dubiously. “What did you discover?”
Here I told the truth. “That you’re still you. You haven’t changed one iota in all this time.” I paused. “And I know you had no shame back then!”
He snorted lightly, smiled a little, but was still bothered, I could tell. Me, my blood was thumping in my neck.
If you’ve ever returned to a special place from
your youth, what you notice first is the smell, how smell more than anything launches you back in time. It’s not the sight of an object, a remembered rock, or tree, or a cornice or an old settee, not the sound of a church bell or a dinner gong. It’s the smell of a place that registers deep in your animal psyche. I visited Charleston shortly after Daddy died, found my old home, knocked and asked to visit. Nice married couple, versions of my parents, pre-kids. I remembered the house from my seven-year-old perspective. How small the rooms seemed now. The shape of the upstairs hallway and the curve of the banister. I remembered but I did not feel them. Decades of other people’s lives had been lived out in them, thousands of meals cooked, and so the house did not smell the same.
But I ventured out to the garage and it was here—where the smell of gasoline and motor oil and cut grass mingled permanently—that a shiver ran down my spine and I became that seven-year-old girl. I was her again, found her again deep inside me. Which is why, I later understood, I’d returned. I was searching for that girl, I loved that girl, missed her and simply wanted to be with her for a few minutes before surfacing to the present.
And that is what had happened just then, when whatever it is that makes up a man’s scent entered my brain: I was my twenty-year-old self, just for that moment and, God, did it feel good. I didn’t need to taste his skin, the way I’d needed to smell it—I’d just wanted to, and it was right there, clean, no cologne, just soft savory skin. I love skin. And that cavern of hunger I’d felt in the chapel when we’d hugged, it yawned even wider, a big black mouth of physical want.
In Short Measures Page 3
