Sweet and Low

by Nick White

  Maggie often claimed she had refused countless requests from national magazines to do photo spreads of the interior of her bookstore when it first opened. When she bought it (at auction and presumably for a song), the house was all but condemned, the splintery walls and floors crumbling into themselves like stale bread. She completely gutted the inside and restored the rooms on the first floor to the appearances of an upper-class home of the late 1940s, furnishing them with stained-glass lamps, dark oak coffee tables, hard-cushioned couches with claw feet, and—in what must have once been the dining room—a baby grand piano, shining like a new car, side by side with an ancient and clattery cash register that Maggie insisted on using to do business. Each wall had a built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcase crowded with books—new and old, best seller and classic alike—shelved in no particular order. “Alphabetizing,” she was wont to say to her customers, “kills the mystery. Let the book find you, darling.” The second floor housed all the first editions and rare finds; she was more particular about these, keeping them behind glass cases under lock and key. The attic was Maggie’s living area. “Not nearly as swank,” she had assured me, though I had never been invited up there to see for myself.

  The night of the anniversary party, I expected to be ignored by most of the people attending: boozy intellectuals who care more about what witty joke they can come up with than they do about meeting new people—least of all someone like me, a burned-out high school teacher/clumsy librarian/wannabe writer. Perhaps the crowd was more diverse than all that, and I simply wasn’t in the mood to give them much of a chance to prove me wrong. The point is, there was free booze, so I helped myself to that and ignored the hell out of everybody else. By the time Maggie found me, I was squatting on the floor in a room that looked like it had once been a study or an office and was now the closest thing the bookstore had to a children’s section. At some point in the night, though I can’t recall when, I retrieved a glossy copy of Goodnight Moon and began to read it aloud to myself.

  “You, sir,” Maggie said, pointing her finger and drawing closer. “A birdy tells me you think you’re a writer.” Her words oozed out of her mouth in a slow assembly line of exaggerated syllables, and I was immediately glad to realize she was drunker than I was. Otherwise, I’d have been intimidated by her and the way she stood over me, swaying, her gray dress drifting up her long body like smoke. “It’s in my blood,” she told me, plucking the book from my hands and carefully sliding it back into the shelf above my head, “to foster and care for the likes of you.” And she was dead serious. Before the night was over, she had introduced me to the current director of the board of trustees at the university, an easily romanced tree stump of a man. He was quick to inform me, after Maggie had left us to chat, that the curator of the Author’s house had just retired and suggested I put in my application for the position, claiming if I was good enough for Maggie, then I was good enough for him.

  A week later, they hired me—her word carried that much weight.

  Like many small towns, this one had its bevy of local luminaries, and Maggie, only thirty, had established herself as one of the most notable. She claimed, I would later learn, to be a distant relation to the Author, purporting to be a member of his east Tennessee line—“a distant branch.” Eager for anything concerning the Author, the town took her at her word (though some persnickety genealogists did express doubt) and began touting her as something of a living landmark. After its opening, her bookstore was added to the list of other official stops on the Great Author Tour, which was held every third Saturday and Sunday of the month. Her connection to her “Old Uncle,” as she called him, bestowed upon her bookstore more panache than it would have otherwise garnered by itself even though it was already strategically located in the Author’s childhood home, which helped to ensure—many believed, including me—its overwhelming success.

  Her bloodline must give writers like Holcomb ideas about legacy and whatnot. I know because, well, it gives me the same ideas too.

  * * *

  —

  AT SOME POINT DURING THE WALK, Holcomb laces his meaty arm into mine and begins to pontificate. Before tonight, we had never been in the same room; nevertheless, he seems intent on telling me the most private aspects about himself, like he’s trying to stranglehold me into an intimacy he knows I want no part of. For some time, he goes on and on about the feeling that passes over him when he first wakes up in the morning. “Those bright few seconds,” he is saying, “I lie there in my bed and am not myself. I am not Bradley Holcomb, but just—I don’t know, you know?—pure animal, pure need. Need to piss. Need to fuck. Need to—to . . . be. Really incredible, and disheartening, when my ego clicks back into place and I remember who I am.” Here, he pauses, gives me time to reflect, squeezes my arm. “You know what I mean?”

  No, I tell him, I don’t.

  His face is splotchy. Which doesn’t surprise me since he drank three glasses of scotch before we left the bookstore.

  He asks me what I’m currently working on, and I tell him that it’s a story about my gay uncle. Eyes wide, he says, “My god, aren’t we all!” Then, perhaps now bored with me, he glances at the pair of women in front of us, their heads tilted together. “They’re discussing us, you know,” he says to me, winking.

  His arm finds its way around my neck. “Can you feel them ahead of us?” he asks quietly. “Their warm bodies moving, the pumping of blood?”

  My silence makes him laugh and prompts him to put me in an awkward headlock. “Les belles dames sans merci!” he says, and Maggie and Gilly stop and turn around.

  In trying to remove his arm from around my neck, I unintentionally engage him in an impromptu wrestling match. We roughhouse in the street, both of us gasping and coughing like much older men.

  “You’ll hurt him,” Maggie says, and I’m not sure if she’s talking to me or Holcomb. Gilly, meanwhile, clicks her tongue disapprovingly, and says, “Gentlemen.”

  As if directed, he releases me, and somehow both of us lose our footing at the same time and tumble down the shallow ditch beside the road. The women laugh at us, the beautiful noise filling up the darkness. It’s almost midnight, and the houses on this street are quiet and seem closed off to us, their occupants fast asleep by now, and the sound of Maggie’s and Gilly’s laughter must be apparent only to the lightest of sleepers, resonating on the outermost boundaries of their consciousness. On the wet ground, flat on my back, I imagine how both wonderful and sad it must be to have such a dream, a part of it true and never knowing about it.

  Holcomb’s the first to rise. Looking up at the women, he places his hand over his heart and closes his eyes. “I met a lady in the meads,” he shouts. “Full beautiful—a faery’s child, her hair was long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild!”

  Gilly steps to the edge of the ditch. “You shut that up—you’ll wake the world.”

  “Aw, baby doll.” Holcomb clambers up to the road and reaches for her, but she slaps him away. He shrugs and goes for Maggie, hoisting her over his shoulder and spinning her around and around. I scurry up the ditch and reach them about the time Holcomb and Maggie have stopped spinning and are, instead, kissing. On the mouth. Right in front of us.

  I look at Gilly. “This is bullshit,” I tell her. She smiles and shrugs, as if to say, What can you do?

  Ignoring us, Maggie and Holcomb don mock-serious expressions and, gazing intently into each other’s faces, appear to speak in a new way that doesn’t require words. Then, coming to some agreement between themselves, they straighten their backs, clasp hands, and begin to dance. In fact, they tango—gleefully moving in the direction of the cemetery, Holcomb humming a Spanish lullaby along the way to keep them in step.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE GREAT AUTHOR TOUR, the guides save the Death Trace for last. Here, visitors are treated to a small footpath that curves through the woods beside the Author’s house to a
low-level scrub of land near the river. In the dry summers, the ground is not much more than a circle of dust and red clay, but when the heavy rains come in spring and fall, the river spills into the woods and floods the Death Trace, turning the trail into a swampy pond.

  Reports of what happened to the Author on the trace vary. Here’s the one I believe: One stormy night in March, a loud clap of thunder spooked Bathsheba from her stable. Hearing her desperate whinnies as she trundled into the woods, the Author took off after her. The water had already reached his knees by the time he made it to the brush, but he kept on, sloshing down the path, calling out Bathsheba’s name. He found the old girl tangled in the briar patch at the end of the trace. Her left hoof was broken clean off, and the river water was rising up around them at an alarming rate. He anchored down beside the beast in the muck, and together they faced the storm. The next day, after the waters had receded, his maid found them tangled around each other. No one knows exactly why he stayed with the horse. Scholars blame depression. Romantics, heartache and loneliness. Many in town say it’s foolish to dwell on the motives of a drunk.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN GILLY AND I catch up to them in the cemetery, they have transitioned from the tango to a spunky fox-trot around the Author’s tombstone. The night’s warm air feels denser among the graves, almost as if the mix of concrete and tombs and old bodies has congealed it. A few live oaks, with their swaying feathery tops, form a canopy and blot out the stars, leaving us, if it were not for a few nearby streetlamps, in complete darkness. Gilly and I sit cross-legged on the ground at the foot of the Author’s grave. We have been defeated, the two of us, but Gilly seems more at ease with the loss than I do. She begins to sing, rocking her head back and forth, and the song is something French and sad. Maggie and Holcomb’s dance slows, turns into something intimate and unbearable to watch.

  “Why are we still here?”

  Gilly stops midsong and taps me on the wrist. “She said I could have you if she could keep him for a little while longer.”

  I meet her eyes, and we laugh, her face mostly obscured in shadow.

  “Don’t I get a say?”

  She kisses me. “Do you want one?”

  I don’t answer. Instead, we return to watching the couple as if they were characters in a play. Holcomb whispers something into Maggie’s ear, and as she lifts her head to listen, the light from a streetlamp catches her face, and I see how, at that moment, she appears so achingly happy, the sheer brilliance of it nearly knocks me out. I know she’s forever lost to me.

  Bottles of whiskey and bourbon circle the base of the tombstone. Gilly gestures to them, and says, “My mother would find this behavior offensive.” At first, I misunderstand and think she’s referring to Holcomb and Maggie. “My mother wrote a book about the Author. She’s the one who discovered his liquor of choice was Four Roses Bourbon.” She waves her arms at the booze. “Not this down-market swill.”

  This talk frustrates me. She frustrates me, I realize, in a way I can’t quite understand. So I nod to her husband, intent on picking a fight. “He seems pretty pleased with himself.”

  “Pleased?” She considers the word. She blinks and finally shakes her head. She snatches a clod of dirt and throws it at the tombstone, knocking over a bottle of Jim Beam. “Yes, he’s pleased. Pleased to be here. Pleased with his book, yes. Pleased to have a wife who’ll allow him to fuck just about anything he wants. But with himself? No—and there’s the sadness of it all. With himself, he’s never pleased.”

  She undoes her wasp’s-nest tangle of hair, and blue-black curls suddenly fall about her shoulders, framing her face. “That urge,” she says, “to create, to make something out of nothing—it’s liable to trample over everything else. Best not to make a fuss. To let it pass on through.”

  I don’t know what she’s talking about. I tell her so.

  “You write. You must know the feeling, the selfishness.”

  I shake my head.

  “Ah, well, maybe you are not a real writer then. Maybe you are like me, one of those who likes the idea of being a writer but not the actual work of it.”

  “Oh, brother.” I look above me to see if I can make out the steeple amid the network of branches and leaves, but it’s not there. Like the stars, it’s blocked. A few steps away, Maggie shifts herself in Holcomb’s arms and bends over the tombstone. He’s careful and almost tender as he pushes up her skirt with one hand and braces her slight body with the other.

  I move to kiss Gilly, but she stops me. “The girl,” she says hoarsely. “She doesn’t see that Holcomb can’t control himself. That he’ll fly away. I’m worried for her.”

  “The fuck you say.”

  “No, really. He won’t be good for her.”

  In front of us, Maggie holds on to the sides of the tombstone; Holcomb’s fingers grip her shoulders, and his hips rise to meet hers. Then he settles himself deep inside her. Their moans start softly at first. Gilly moves closer to me but mumbles something to herself—a poem or perhaps a prayer. I’m not sure. She allows me to kiss her this time, and I push her flat to the ground and cover her body with my own.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THE AUTHOR’S DEATH, scholarship on him grew to an unprecedented, fevered pitch. He had many biographers, but none of them were as persistent as Dr. Lane Douglas. She grew up in a city on the West Coast, reading the Author’s gothic tales of the Deep South. They consumed her. When finished with his novels and his collected and uncollected stories and the few vagrant poems here and there, she moved to the books about him and his work. Here, she hit a snag. The books, to her estimation, were unsatisfactory in scope and analysis—especially the material about his personal life. She had troubled over every word he’d ever written and felt these “scholars” had only glimpsed the artist—unlike them, she saw the man in full and was desperate to know even more: his favorite color, the way he made his bed. Everything.

  She studied at good universities, earning a doctorate in literature by the time she was twenty-five. Her dissertation on the Author’s treatment of female characters in his early novels won her the respect of her committee and was published by a large university press. After an ill-fated dalliance with a fellow graduate student, which left her bloated with pregnancy, she took a tenure-track position at a small liberal arts college in New Orleans—not the best of options, to be sure, for someone with her qualifications, but she had her reasons for honing in on this place to live. Her next project would focus on the wife of the Author. This woman had lived the rest of her life in the Garden District after leaving him, and Dr. Douglas was determined to unearth the mysteries surrounding her, this strange librarian the Author had chosen to love. That would be her life’s work—to understand the workings of the heart of one of the greatest artists of our time. Perhaps she believed her discoveries would alter the very bedrock of criticism surrounding the Author. Perhaps she thought that if she understood the type of person the Author had loved then she might know if he could have ever convinced himself to love someone like her. Eventually, Dr. Douglas gave birth to a screaming baby girl, a lump of warm skin that never inspired the maternal instinct, if such a thing exists, which Dr. Douglas strongly doubted.

  As it turned out, the wife of the Author kept few records, rarely wrote letters, and made very little impression on the people in her neighborhood. Somehow, she had managed to fade out of existence without disturbing too much of the world around her, which must be recognized as a feat in itself. In the end, Dr. Douglas’s dogged persistence turned up very little. A safe-deposit box was discovered, but it contained only some unimportant knickknacks: a silver dollar, some tattered gloves, and—perhaps most perplexing—a postcard from Sweden with the word soon written on the back of it in what was undoubtedly the Author’s hand. After years of fruitless research, Dr. Douglas began, in her hopelessness, to hate New Orleans and the quaint college
full of addle-brained students who braved to enroll in her classes, and—to some degree—she even began to hate her daughter, who was always there in the background of her mother’s life needing something from her, something she couldn’t wholly give without resentment.

  Gilly says her mother went for many years like this, full of spite. Until, that is, a writer showed up one day at their door. Gilly was sixteen, and he was burly but articulate: a Virginian. He claimed that he’d read her mother’s “insightful” book on the Author and realized that she, Gilly’s mother, knew more about writing than any other person alive. He charmed them both, and her mother, it was no surprise, superimposed her obsessions with the Author onto him, this little upstart. She nurtured the young writer in every way: She gave him long, detailed notes on his writings and invited him to move into their small flat and, eventually, share her bed. “And we were a family,” Gilly says. “For a while.” But the problem with the happy years in a life is that they move by too quickly and rarely make it into the story proper.

  When it became clear to the college that Dr. Douglas would not produce another book, they quietly asked her to leave, denying her tenure. About this time, one of Holcomb’s stories was accepted for publication by a well-respected magazine. Within months, he was offered a job teaching creative writing at a university.

  “Not just any university either,” Gilly tells me. “But his university—the Author’s. And Holcomb didn’t ask us to tag along.” Gilly and I are now alone, in my bedroom, the night after our trip to the cemetery. We stink of each other’s bodies and need a hot bath. But she’s telling me so much, opening up so freely, that I can’t bring myself to move. She tells me about her mother as if she’s been waiting her whole life to talk about her, as if I’m the one person in the world she has chosen to listen. “My mother became desperate again when he left,” she says, and I rest my head in her lap.