Nancy could see him reaching far back on the dusty shelf for his opium mix. Kendal Black Drop. The words beat on her ears.
That evening after dinner, Nancy and Jack walked down Stock Lane to look at the stars. They wandered out into the soccer field. Tiny Grasmere was sleeping, but a faint stream of music and laughter seemed to emanate from the mountains, or maybe the moon. The moon was hornéd, as it was in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The hornéd moon, an image Dorothy had contributed.
Coleridge often walked the fourteen miles from Keswick to Grasmere to visit Dorothy and William. In her journal, Dorothy wrote that she and Coleridge took this very walk, along Stock Lane. They walked from the cottage to the church in the moonlight. She wrote of lingering in the garden later with Coleridge, after the others had gone to bed. To Nancy, the spare notations resonated with desire.
Nancy and Jack stood in the soccer field, gazing up into the night sky. Nancy’s mind was busily adjusting the details from Dorothy’s journal to this spot. She felt the sorrow of separation and unrequited love and romantic obsession—all of life’s romance blowing like a cyclone through those lives two centuries ago, when they were innocent of time.
“I don’t think I could live this far from a city,” Jack said. “But I like this climate. I don’t have any sinus trouble here.”
“Good.”
“What about your guys?”
“What?”
“The poets. Any sinus trouble?”
“Coleridge had to breathe through his mouth.” She laughed. “But his worst trouble was his digestion.” She paused, trying to remember one of his descriptions. She said, “He wrote in a letter that he had been bathing in the sea and it made him sick. He said, ‘My triumphant Tripes cataracted most Niagara-ishly.’” She spoke slowly, to get the syllables right.
He laughed. “Your pals are starting to be real to me.”
She squeezed his hand. “They’re here, like ghosts.” She could feel them, young people struggling with the future.
The air was damp but not biting. They crossed the road to Dove Cottage. The windows were dark. Nancy imagined Coleridge stopping there in the rain, wanting solace and comfort from his friends; arriving late, past midnight, he was wet and anxious after his long tramp over Mount Helvellyn in the rain. Probably he needed to spew out all his ideas and affections—the treasure trove of a young genius, thrust forth like a hostess gift. His was a mind that never stopped whirling and somersaulting. Nancy imagined the stone floor in the front room, wet with the rain Coleridge brought in, and the urgent glee of his voice slamming the walls and the low ceiling. A man whose voice was music.
In the dark, by the garden gate, Nancy and Jack huddled together, his arm tight on her shoulders. He had come across the ocean for her.
“I missed you,” she said. “I want you back.”
“I want you back,” he said. “But where? Where will we live?”
“I don’t know. Where can we live?”
VII
More Love Lives
I am interested in how characters handle their limitations, especially those who glimpse unprecedented possibility. Anticipation, fear, anxiety, and gladsomeness merge at the thought of greener pastures, as seen through a knothole.
I don’t have messages. I avoid issues, themes, and symbols. Those may be there, but they wouldn’t be without the furniture and clothing of the story itself. More important to me is the sound of the language and the details. I am trying to get at what something is like—what it feels like, not what it means. Style and story should match, the dancer and the dance inseparable. A story is not reducible. Fiction is, above all, stories, not guidebooks or the ornamental takeaways of symbol and theme. Sometimes hearing a fly buzz means there is a fly in the room. And you need a fly swatter.
—BAM
Memphis
FROM Love Life (1989)
On Friday, after Beverly dropped the children off at her former husband’s place for the weekend, she went dancing at the Paradise Club with a man she had met at the nature extravaganza at the Land Between the Lakes. Since her divorce she had not been out much, but she enjoyed dancing, and her date was a good dancer. She hadn’t expected that, because he was shy and seemed more at home with his hogs than with people.
Emerging from the rest room, Beverly suddenly ran into her ex-husband, Joe. For a confused moment she almost didn’t recognize him, out of context. He was with a tall, skinny woman in jeans and a fringed cowboy shirt. Joe looked sexy, in a black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped out to show his muscles, but the woman wasn’t pretty. She looked bossy and hard.
“Where are the kids?” Beverly shouted at Joe above the music.
“At Mama’s. They’re all right. Hey, Beverly, this is Janet.”
“I’m going over there and get them right now,” Beverly said, ignoring Janet.
“Don’t be silly, Bev. They’re having a good time. Mama fixed up a playroom for them.”
“Maybe next week I’ll just take them straight to her house. We’ll bypass you altogether. Eliminate the middleman.” Beverly was a little drunk.
“For Christ’s sake.”
“This goes on your record,” she warned him. “I’m keeping a list.”
Janet was touching his elbow possessively, and then the man Beverly had come with showed up with beer mugs in his fists. “Is there something I should know?” he said.
Beverly and Joe had separated the year before, just after Easter, and over the summer they tried unsuccessfully to get back together for the sake of the children. A few times after the divorce became final, Beverly spent the night with Joe, but each time she felt it was a mistake. It felt adulterous. A little thing, a quirky habit—like the way he kept the glass coffeepot simmering on the stove—could make her realize they shouldn’t see each other. Coffee turned bitter when it was left simmering like that.
Joe never wanted to probe anything very deeply. He accepted things, even her request for a divorce, without asking questions. Beverly could never tell if that meant he was calm and steady or dangerously lacking in curiosity. In the last months they lived together, she had begun to feel that her mind was crammed with useless information, like a landfill, and there wasn’t space deep down in her to move around in, to explore what was there. She didn’t trust her intelligence anymore. She couldn’t repeat the simplest thing she heard on the news and have it make sense to anyone. She would read a column in the newspaper—about something important, like taxes or the death penalty—but be unable to remember what she had read. She felt she had strong ideas and meaningful thoughts, but often when she tried to reach for one she couldn’t find it. It was terrifying.
Whenever she tried to explain this feeling to Joe, he just said she expected too much of herself. He didn’t expect enough of himself, though, and now she felt that the divorce hadn’t affected him deeply enough to change him at all. She was disappointed. He should have gone through a major new phase, especially after what had happened to his friend Chubby Jones, one of his fishing buddies. Chubby burned to death in his pickup truck. One night soon after the divorce became final, Joe woke Beverly up with his pounding on the kitchen door. Frightened, and still not used to being alone with the children, she cracked the venetian blind, one hand on the telephone. Then she recognized the silhouette of Joe’s truck in the driveway.
“I didn’t want to scare you by using the key,” he said when she opened the door. She was furious: he might have woken up the children.
It hadn’t occurred to her that he still had a key. Joe was shaking, and when he came inside he flopped down at the kitchen table, automatically choosing his usual place facing the door. In the eerie glow from the fluorescent light above the kitchen sink, he told her about Chubby. Nervously spinning the lazy Susan, Joe groped for words, mostly repeating in disbelief the awful facts. Beverly had never seen him in such a state of shock. His news seemed to cancel out their divorce, as though it were only a trivial fit they had had.
“We were
at the Blue Horse Tavern,” he said. “Chubby was going on about some shit at work and he had it in his head he was going to quit and go off and live like a hermit and let Donna and the kids do without. You couldn’t argue with him when he got like that—a little too friendly with Jack Daniel’s. When he went out to his truck we followed him. We were going to follow him home to see he didn’t have a wreck, but then he passed out right there in his truck, and so we left him there in the parking lot to sleep it off.” Joe buried his head in his hands and started to cry. “We thought we were doing the best thing,” he said.
Beverly stood behind him and draped her arms over his shoulders, holding him while he cried.
Chubby’s cigarette must have dropped on the floor, Joe explained as she rubbed his neck and shoulders. The truck had caught fire sometime after the bar closed. A passing driver reported the fire, but the rescue squad arrived too late.
“I went over there,” Joe said. “That’s where I just came from. It was all dark, and the parking lot was empty, except for his truck, right where we left it. It was all black and hollow. It looked like something from Northern Ireland.”
He kept twirling the lazy Susan, watching the grape jelly, the sugar bowl, the honey bear, the salt and pepper shakers go by.
“Come on,” Beverly said after a while. She led him to the bedroom. “You need some sleep.”
After that, Joe didn’t say much about his friend. He seemed to get over Chubby’s death, as a child would forget some disappointment. It was sad, he said. Beverly felt so many people were like Joe—half conscious, being pulled along by thoughtless impulses and notions, as if their lives were no more than a load of freight hurtling along on the interstate. Even her mother was like that. After Beverly’s father died, her mother became devoted to “The PTL Club” on television. Beverly knew her father would have argued her out of such an obsession when he was alive. Her mother had two loves now: “The PTL Club” and Kenny Rogers. She kept a scrapbook on Kenny Rogers and she owned all his albums, including the ones that had come out on CD. She still believed fervently in Jim and Tammy Bakker, even after all the fuss. They reminded her of Christmas elves, she told Beverly recently.
“Christmas elves!” Beverly repeated in disgust. “They’re the biggest phonies I ever saw.”
“Do you think you’re better than everybody else, Beverly?” her mother said, offended. “That’s what ruined your marriage. I can’t get over how you’ve mistreated poor Joe. You’re always judging everybody.”
That hurt, but there was some truth in it. She was like her father, who had been a plainspoken man. He didn’t like for the facts to be dressed up. He could spot fakes as easily as he noticed jimsonweed in the cornfield. Her mother’s remark made her start thinking about her father in a new way. He died ten years ago, when Beverly was pregnant with Shayla, her oldest child. She remembered his unvarying routines. He got up at sunup, ate the same breakfast day in and day out, never went anywhere. In the spring, he set out tobacco plants, and as they matured he suckered them, then stripped them, cured them, and hauled them to auction. She remembered him burning the tobacco beds—the pungent smell, the threat of wind. She used to think his life was dull, but now she had started thinking about those routines as beliefs. She compared them to the routines in her life with Joe: her CNN news fix, telephoning customers at work and entering orders on the computer, the couple of six-packs she and Joe used to drink every evening, Shayla’s tap lessons, Joe’s basketball night, family night at the sports club. Then she remembered her father running the combine over his wheat fields, wheeling that giant machine around expertly, much the same way Joe handled a motorcycle.
When Tammy, the youngest, was born, Joe was not around. He had gone out to Pennyrile Forest with Jimmy Stone to play war games. Two teams of guys spent three days stalking each other with pretend bullets, trying to make believe they were in the jungle. In rush-hour traffic, Beverly drove herself to the hospital, and the pains caused her to pull over onto the shoulder several times. Joe had taken the childbirth lessons with her and was supposed to be there, participating, helping her with the breathing rhythms. A man would find it easier to go to war than to be around a woman in labor, she told her roommate in the hospital. When Tammy was finally born, Beverly felt that anger had propelled the baby out of her.
But when Joe showed up at the hospital, grinning a moon-pie grin, he gazed into her eyes, running one of her curls through his fingers. “I want to check out that maternal glow of yours,” he said, and she felt trapped by desire, even in her condition. For her birthday once, he had given her a satin teddy and “fantasy slippers” with pink marabou feathers, whatever those were. He told the children that the feathers came from the marabou bird, a cross between a caribou and a marigold.
On Friday afternoon after work the week following the Paradise Club incident, Beverly picked up Shayla from her tap lesson and Kerry and Tammy from day care. She drove them to Joe’s house, eight blocks from where she lived.
From the back seat Shayla said, “I don’t want to go to the dentist tomorrow. When Daddy has to wait for me, he disappears for about two hours. He can’t stand to wait.”
Glancing in the rearview mirror at Shayla, Beverly said, “You tell your daddy to set himself down and read a magazine if he knows what’s good for him.”
“Daddy said you were trying to get rid of us,” Kerry said.
“That’s not true! Don’t you let him talk mean about me. He can’t get away with that.”
“He said he’d take us to the lake,” Kerry said. Kerry was six, and snaggletoothed. His teeth were coming in crooked—more good news for the dentist.
Joe’s motorcycle and three-wheeler were hogging the driveway, so Beverly pulled up to the curb. His house was nice—a brick ranch he rented from his parents, who lived across town. The kids liked having two houses—they had more rooms, more toys.
“Give me some sugar,” Beverly said to Tammy, as she unbuckled the child’s seat belt. Tammy smeared her moist little face against Beverly’s. “Y’all be good now,” Beverly said. She hated leaving them.
The kids raced up the sidewalk, their backpacks bobbing against their legs. She saw Joe open the door and greet them. Then he waved at her to come inside. “Come on in and have a beer!” he called loudly. He held his beer can up like the Statue of Liberty’s torch. He had on a cowboy hat with a large feather plastered on the side of the crown. His tan had deepened. She felt her stomach do a flip and her mind fuzz over like mold on fruit. I’m an idiot, she told herself.
She shut off the engine and pocketed the keys. Joe’s fat black cat accompanied her up the sidewalk. “You need to put that cat on a diet,” Beverly said to Joe when he opened the door for her. “He looks like a little hippo in black pajamas.”
“He goes to the no-frills mouse market and loads up,” Joe said, grinning. “I can’t stop him.”
The kids were already in the kitchen, investigating the refrigerator—one of those with beverage dispensers on the outside. Joe kept the dispensers filled with surprises—chocolate milk or Juicy Juice.
“Daddy, can I microwave a burrito?” asked Shayla.
“No, not now. We’ll go to the mall after-while, so you don’t want to ruin your supper now.”
“Oh, boy. That means Chi-Chi’s.”
The kids disappeared into the family room in the basement, carrying Cokes and bags of cookies and potato chips. Joe opened a beer for Beverly. She was sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette and staring blankly at his pocket-knife collection in a case on the coffee table when Joe came forward and stood over her. Something was wrong.
“I’m being transferred,” he said, handing her the beer. “I’m moving to Columbia, South Carolina.”
She sat very still, her cigarette poised in midair like a freeze-frame scene on the VCR. A purple stain shaped like a flower was on the arm of the couch. His rug was the nubby kind made of tiny loops, and one patch had unraveled. She could hear the blip-blip-crash of video games
downstairs.
“What?” she said.
“I’m being transferred.”
“I heard you. I’m just having trouble getting it from my ears to my mind.” She was stunned. She had never imagined Joe anywhere except right here in town.
“The plant’s got an opening there, and I’ll make a whole lot more.”
“But you don’t have to go. They can’t make you go.”
“It’s an opportunity. I can’t turn it down.”
“But it’s too far away.”
He rested his hand lightly on her shoulder. “I’ll want to have the kids on vacations—and all summer.”
“Well, tough! You expect me to send them on an airplane all that way?”
“You’ll have to make some adjustments,” he said calmly, taking his hand away and sitting down beside her on the couch.
“I couldn’t stay away from them that long,” she said. “And Columbia, South Carolina? It’s not interesting. They’ll hate it. Nothing’s there.”
“You don’t know that.”
“What would you do with them? You can never think of what to do with them when you’ve got them, so you stuff them with junk or dump them at your mother’s.” Beverly felt confused, unable to call upon the right argument. Her words came out wrong, more accusing than she meant.
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