by Terry Kay
There were several letters announcing conferences and twelve Christmas cards sent to him by former students, all giving him updates of their lives—their work, their spouses, their children—and all thanking him for his influence. One, a girl he had known as Olivia DeFoor, wrote: You showed me the beauty of words. I want you to know that I am almost finished with a novel and if it is ever published, it will be dedicated to you. He remembered the girl as vivacious and dreamy, a child of wealth, and one of the rare students who had surprised him with her insight. He had guessed she would marry a man of means, have her children, spend her time in social clubs, and perhaps, one day, would become a generous benefactor of Raemar. Her catch-up note proved him wrong. She was a teacher of underprivileged students in a Pittsburgh ghetto, her husband a software programmer for the government.
Her note made him think of something Marie Fitzpatrick had said to him in one of her letters: Never judge me, Cole Bishop. You have no idea who I am.
On impulse, he called Tanya Berry.
Where are you? she asked. I tried calling you at your home a few minutes ago.
He told her he was on campus. Checking on things, he said. Did you get what I sent?
That’s why I was calling, she replied. I think I know your problem.
And what’s that? he asked.
You’re in love this woman. Always have been.
I’m not sure you’d call it that, he said.
That’s because you’re a man, she insisted. What men know about love, you could put in a thimble.
Is that a professional remark? he asked.
Are you paying me? she replied.
I hope not, he answered.
Then I can say whatever I damn well please, can’t I? she said.
Good point, he told her.
So, here’s what I think, she said. Personally, I mean. I think I now know why your marriage to Holly failed. My God, compared to Marie Fitzpatrick, Holly was a mannequin. Her only worth was to pose in semi-expensive and sometimes-tacky clothing.
He laughed easily. Another good point, he said.
Now hang up the phone, she ordered. Go home. Get back to work. I want to get to the part where you make love to the woman.
He laughed again.
At his home, with Tanya’s remark about his former wife still fresh in mind, he searched through the letters from Marie, selected one, opened it and read:
Dear Mr. Bishop,
Let me review the letter I received from you today. You say you have become engaged, at the age of 37, to a woman named Holly, described by you as being pretty, lively, intelligent and, most important, patient. You want my blessing, out of friendship, for this glorious event in your life.
Are you an idiot? You want my blessing to marry someone with the ridiculous name of Holly? I can see her now. She looks exactly like Barbie, and she’s just as dumb, regardless of your fawning description of her spectacular intellect. How many years will it take for you to realize that I am the only woman—and, yes, damn it, I am a woman—who could possibly enhance your miserable life? Here’s what’s in store for you, big boy: you will amble along year after year, bending to Holly’s inane blithering, until you become nothing more than an echo of who you used to be, or could become. And then—surprise, surprise—she will kick your highly educated but sorry ass out the door and run away with some street bum packing muscle and wearing a face like Burt Reynolds. Just do me a favor: don’t ever mention her name again, unless it’s to tell me you’re divorced. My God, Cole, when will you ever learn anything about women? Don’t you understand there’s always danger behind slow blinking eyes and puckered lips? Do you not know the cooing sound a woman makes in her throat is as lethal as poison? No. No, you don’t. You live by a code that makes you want to be a gentleman, an innocent. What you don’t understand is how vulnerable that makes you. Holy God in heaven, sweet Mary, mother of Jesus, I feel sorry for you. I wish I had never met you.
He closed the letter, held it between his fingers.
He could feel the smile resting on his face, and with the smile, a stinging of his eyes. Of his litany of regrets, his failed marriage carried great pain, yet he had been relieved when it ended. Still, it puzzled him how something begun in joy and passion could become so lifeless and bitter.
The death of tenderness was a lingering death.
SIX
That night, at nine o’clock, he resumed his writing.
December 21, night
I have had a satisfying dinner of a single hotdog folded into loafbread and covered with a chili concoction from a can. Hot tea with it. A bachelor’s dinner. An eccentric’s dinner. Tonight is the night for the Christmas cantata at the United Methodist Church. I had promised to attend, but remembered it too late. Yet, even if I had not forgot it, I likely would have stayed at home. A big-flake snow is falling, the kind that seems to make whispers on its way to the ground. And the truth is, I want to stay with this writing of Marie Fitzpatrick. It is becoming a mild obsession, which should not surprise me. Tanya Berry warned that such a possibility was likely. I am eager to rush ahead, to get to those moments that changed me—or branded me—yet Tanya has urged me to take small, cautious steps rather than a blind leap.
“You need to remember the details,” she said. “The details matter.”
I know she is right. It was something I had to consider in writing about Joel Chandler Harris.
Football practice on Monday afternoon was little more than jogging and bragging about winning the game that had left me bruised and Corey Johnson with his arm in a cast. Corey watched us from the bleachers, with Alyse Lewis sitting beside him. From first period English, the sweet taste of gossip at Overton High School had been about Corey and Alyse making up on Saturday. Alyse had looked at me only once during the day. It was a look of pleading, and I had nodded imperceptibly, telling her that our kiss was held in secrecy. A smile, like the nervous flicker of a bird’s wings, had thanked me.
After practice, Corey appeared in the field house.
“Hey, Cole,” he said, “I hear you’re making a move on the Kotex Queen.”
I laughed, pulled my practice jersey over my head and began unlacing my shoulder pads.
“Naw, I’m serious,” Corey continued. “Wormy was telling me about it. Said she walked off the field with you after the game.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She wanted to know how bad you were hurt. She’s been lusting after you.”
“Don’t blame her,” Corey countered, “but I got all the lust I can handle.”
I remembered Alyse’s kiss and the thought of it caused a smile.
“Got a deal for you, Cole,” Corey said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Ask her out for a date.”
“Are you crazy?” I said.
Corey grinned and motioned with his head for Art and Lamar and Wormy to crowd around him.
“We been talking about it. You take her out, Cole, and we’ll put twenty bucks in the pot,” Corey said smugly.
I laughed again.
“Twenty-five bucks,” Lamar offered.
I shook my head and threw my shoulder pads into my open locker.
“Thirty,” Corey said. He added, “And that’s it.”
“Cole, I’d date a three-legged duck for thirty bucks,” Lamar said. “Good God, I’d date Wormy and I’d wear the dress.”
“Com’on, Cole, she ain’t that bad looking,” Art said. “Everybody knows she’s got great tits, and if she ever put on some makeup and dressed like a normal girl, you might even be able to take her out in public.”
The Dare, I thought. The Great Dare. It was like standing on a mountain cliff and having someone urge you to nudge closer to the edge. The Great Dare was always electric with fear. Always.
“Well, Cole?” Wormy pressured. “Thirty bucks.”
I sat on a bench and began to unlace my cleats, knowing the only way to stop the badgering was to forestall it and to hope it would simply vanish. “I’m sti
ll too sore to think about it,” I said after a moment.
“Maybe? You saying, maybe?” asked Corey.
I made a small shrug with my shoulders, a habit I had when wanting to avoid answering a question.
“He’s saying, maybe,” Art exclaimed. “That’s good enough for me. Tomorrow, boy. You got to tomorrow, but here’s some advice: you turn us down, no telling what sort of grief you got in store.” A deep grin cut across his mouth, showing the dimples that Sally Dylan found irresistible. “No sir. No telling.” He turned and walked away.
I did not know if it was the money or the dare, or if the money and the dare had simply given me an excuse, yet that afternoon, driving home from school, I turned my parents’ car suddenly, impulsively, onto Church Street.
Better to ask her at her home than at school, I thought.
I slowed the car to a crawl, asked aloud, “What am I doing? I’ll never live it down. Never.”
I glanced at my watch. It was almost five.
I wondered if she was in the garage, teaching her class. A cool caking of perspiration was on my forehead.
“I’m an idiot,” I said.
I pushed my foot against the accelerator and moved past her house, glancing at the yard. I saw no one.
I remember turning right on Candler Street, then right again on Howard Street to Beggs Street, and from Beggs Street back again on Church Street. The car was barely moving.
I thought, What am I afraid of? She’s just a girl.
And then I saw them. Marie walking from the garage toward the house with a tall black boy trailing her. The children were tugging to him, chattering.
I braked the car to a stop and glanced in the rearview mirror, checking for traffic, saw nothing. My hand flicked to the gear shift and I shoved the gear in reverse and began to back the car down the street. At a driveway, I cut the wheel sharply, felt the rear of the car rise up. My hand yanked the gear shift down and the car shot forward, turning left.
I wondered who the black boy was, wondered if Marie had learned about him from the maid who worked for her mother. I guessed the boy was fifteen, maybe older. It was hard to tell. I wondered if Marie had talked about me, saying I had refused to help teach her afternoon-children. It wasn’t true. I had not refused. She had not given me a chance to consider it.
I would have helped.
I was certain I would have.
This is what I thought: whoever the boy was, he would be terrified of Marie Fitzpatrick. Talking to Marie Fitzpatrick would be like talking to a foreigner, or an outer-space alien. She would rule him, pound him senseless with her words and with her arrogance.
I felt sorry for the boy.
I did not know it then, not clearly, but I do now, at this age: It was not the dare or the money that persuaded me to ask Marie for a date, though I would hide protectively behind that ruse, knowing it provided me with a fall-back of acceptance from my teammates.
I decided to ask Marie for a date because I could not forget my sadness over how we treated her.
It happened on the following Monday, after a morning of aggravation from Corey and Art and Lamar and Wormy. At lunch I told them I agreed to their terms.
“But the minute she accepts, I want half the money up front, non-refundable. When the date’s over, I want the other half,” I said.
“You got it,” Wormy replied eagerly. “When you gonna do it?”
“Now. But when none of you are anywhere in sight,” I answered. “Otherwise, the deal’s off.”
A magician could not have made my teammates disappear as quickly as my threat.
It was thirty minutes before typing class.
I knew Marie would be on the elementary school playground, swinging in the swings, or she would be in the library, reading. The playground, I decided. The day was too bright, too autumn warm, to be inside.
I knew also that I was being watched by teammates from behind cars and the corners of buildings as I strolled across the schoolyard, but I could not see them.
Get it over with, I thought.
I saw her from the fence that surrounded the playground. She was alone at the swing set, twisting the ropes of a swing into a coil and then, lifting her feet from the ground, lazily uncoiling. She seemed oblivious to the yelping of first graders playing a game of tag near her. I glanced back over my shoulder, thought I saw Wormy duck behind a tree, then I started down the slope of the playground.
Marie looked up as I approached. “This is my territory,” she said. “I don’t allow squatters.”
“You can have it,” I told her. Then I said: “Why do you come down here, anyway? This is where the first-graders play.”
“They’re the smartest people in the school,” she answered.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“They are,” she countered. “They don’t know things; they imagine.” She looked at me curiously. “I’ll bet you were a great first-grader, Cole Bishop. I’ll bet you imagined everybody insane.”
I thought of the stories I had told as a boy, outrageous tales cobbled from books I had read. To the men of Dodd’s General Store in Crossover, the community of my childhood, I had been called a marvel. “Rather listen to that boy than go see a moving picture show,” the men had said with laughter.
“I don’t know,” I said after a moment. “That was a long time ago.”
“What happened? Where did you lose it?” she said.
“Who said I’d lost it?”
“I did. It’s plain as day. You’re just like everybody else now. You’re just a dreamer and a talker. Imagining is more than dreaming and talking. Imagining is being.”
“Sometimes you have to change,” I mumbled weakly.
Marie laughed cynically. “Oh, God,” she sighed. She gazed at me. “Were you looking for me, or did you come down to sign autographs for future little Panthers?”
“I was looking for you.”
“Why?”
I could feel a chill spill down my shoulders. “I wondered if you’d like to go out sometime.”
“All right,” she said casually. She pushed out of the swing and started walking toward the school.
“Wait a minute,” I called. “Don’t you want to know when?”
“Whenever you want,” she said without stopping, without looking back.
“Saturday night,” I said. “About six.”
“Fine with me.”
Strange. As I was typing the above I remembered something Marie later confessed to me about that day. She did not return to school for the afternoon session. There was no reason. Typing class was a waste of time, especially since she could type eighty-five words a minute, and no class in school bored her as much as history, which, to her, was little more than a celebration of the Civil War. She found it amazing that so many heroes had been created out of so much disaster.
Still, she told me in a rare expression of admitting to a foolish act that it was not her dislike of typing or history that caused her to walk away from Overton High School and to stroll aimlessly along the streets of Overton.
I was the reason.
Asking her for a date.
She knew it was a set-up, of course, rightly assuming a boyish dare was involved, something initiated by my teammates—idiots, she called them. Something that would involve money.
At first, it angered her, and then she found amusement in it. As long as she knew what it was—the nonsense of fools—she was not bothered, for she knew we were no match for her.
In her telling of it she found herself that afternoon in front of Hendley’s Department Store, gazing at a window display of dresses and skirts and blouses. The dresses and skirts and blouses were draped over headless body forms, leaving the impression—for her, at least—that only a headless, mindless person would be interested in them. She told me she thought of listening to the chirping of the girls of Overton High School, making their squeals over some new garment worn by one of them. So much chirping, it had the sound of excited parrots in a pet store
she had often visited in Washington.
She opened the door to Hendley’s and walked inside, and from the back of the store she heard the singing voice of Sheila Hendley, “Be right there.”
“It’s all right,” she called back. “I’m just looking.”
“Looking is the first step to finding,” Sheila trilled.
I remember her saying to me in a laughing way, “That woman could have talked the snake into eating the apple.”
Meaning, she bought an outfit.
At home, she closed and locked the door to her room and then she undressed and took the skirt and blouse from the Hendley Department Store shopping bag and fit herself into them. She said she stood for a long time before the mirror of her dresser, gazing at herself. Sheila Hendley had praised the soft yellow of the blouse and the forest green of the skirt, saying it was her favorite blend of colors, saying it in such a whisper it sounded like the confession of a tender secret. And maybe that was why she had purchased the skirt and blouse, she reasoned—Sheila Hendley’s praise, her words giddy, a faint cigarette scent hiding in them like a delicious sin. To Marie, if no one else in Overton had found his or her place in life, Sheila Hendley had.
She also admitted that she had wondered if I would be shocked if she wore the skirt and blouse for our set-up date.
“And then it struck me that you weren’t worth a new skirt and blouse,” she told me. “If you wanted to date a mindless body form from a department store window, you could date Sally Dylan.”
It was one o’clock, morning of December 22, when he stopped writing and emailed the words to Tanya Berry.
SEVEN
He was still asleep when Tanya called.
What time is it? he asked.
Almost ten, she said. Get up. I’m coming over.
Why?
I want to talk to you.
Now?
Yes, now, she said irritably.
