by Rick Bass
How durable would the gift be? Should they have guarded it more carefully? They cannot be blamed for thinking it was indestructible, beyond the ability to just fade away.
In Pine Bluff, there was a handsome small-town lawyer, hard partier, heavy drinker, and womanizer, Tommy Russell. He started hanging around Maxine during her downtime between tours. She thought he would settle down, would stop chasing other women, would love only her, would stop drinking, would provide her daily and nightly with what she was missing, not being up on the stage. She was wrong.
MARRYING TOMMY
ONE OF THE THINGS she's noticed about getting older, about being so old, is not what she would have expected—the cascade of memories—but the opposite phenomenon: a vast forgetting. Sometimes it feels like a walling-off, the creation of one compartment after another, into which she sequesters one imperfection after another, until finally her mind has become a house in which every room has become filled, every closet jam-packed, every drawer stuffed with all that she does not want to remember and never wanted to have happen.
She doesn't know what the source of her talent is—she understands she'll never know that, until maybe right at the end—but she has come to understand the nature of the talent, which is the ability to inhabit, with grace, the blank spaces between old established things. To fill that empty space with the sound of longing and, paradoxically, the sound of assurance—of calm satisfaction.
There never really was any assurance, but that was what people wanted to believe.
Maybe there had been some assurance. Maybe there had been calm satisfaction, too—fragments of it, at least, that she accidentally walled off in trying to cover up all the disappointments or mistakes.
Carefully, some days, she begins to go back into some of those walled-off areas to search for those little moments in the missing years that she overlooked, passed by or never noticed. The good that went unacknowledged, and that got shoveled over with the bad.
Was she moving too fast to notice anything, in those middle years, or was she simply too drunk? My God, she thinks, if I could have those thirty or forty middle years back, I could have been somebody, I could have done something. Not Raymond- and Norma-worthy, but something. Not perfect, but better than I was.
In a fight, she always went straight to the biggest person in the room, the one who could do her the most harm—getting in an argument with the president of a record company, or the owner of a regional network. She didn't back down from anyone. She couldn't bear to think of being frightened of anything.
She opens one of the most distasteful walled-off areas. She remembers Tommy. She remembers the wedding, remembers what she thinks might have been brief satisfaction, though even now she's not quite sure, and looks back at it as if watching an old movie with no sound, a film in which she thinks she recognizes one of the women as herself, younger but no longer quite young.
She's been so careful to keep the unpleasant and even horrific years of her marriage—what a dumb-ass idea that was! why didn't someone stop her?—walled off that she covered it all up, good and bad.
Why work so hard to get rid of something only to then risk bringing it back? It makes no sense, and she wonders if she's dying, if this is what happens near the end. Perhaps certain chemicals begin to dissolve those walls so that all those hoarded or safeguarded disappointments come spilling back into the rest of the architecture. Or maybe a person doesn't have to be dying for it to happen. Maybe the disappointment and bitterness begin to rot and fester and ferment once all the storage space is jam-packed. It creates a sweet acid that begins to slowly erode the integrity of the structure that housed that disappointment until finally one day all the walls are gone and life comes flooding back.
Is this what it's like for Bonnie? Maxine wonders, and for the ten thousandth time she wonders why Bonnie gets to be so damned happy all the time, while she, Maxine, has to always carry the heaviest load.
She's not envious of Bonnie, she tells herself. That would be a bad thing. You're not supposed to be jealous of a sister. That's common, and she's anything but that. She's mostly just amazed, is all. She marvels at how Bonnie—and, for that matter, Jim Ed—got all of it while Maxine got none of it.
Courage. The box, the compartment, is spilling out now, so why not open it? She's too tired to run from it and there's nowhere left to go anyway. She moves closer to the spoils, curious, having almost forgotten that which she worked hard to forget.
She's fidgety, but is surprised, for as the first wave of swamp muck comes oozing over her ankles—vaguely warm, as if made that way by some innocuous chemical activity, like blood or urine, or the sea in sunlight—she can find in the ferment none of the terrible memories she's been keeping boxed up, but instead something interesting, something positive. It is a thing that, as best as she can tell, is mildly pleasant, bittersweet, and she considers the recollection with no small amount of suspicion.
Is it a trick, and why hadn't she noticed it the first time it went past?
She hadn't been looking to get married when she met Tommy Russell, a small-town lawyer working in the big city of Pine Bluff, pop. 28,000, some fifty miles north of Sparkman and Poplar Creek. She hadn't even been looking to date anyone, not steadily; her primary relationship was touring, singing, and songwriting. Anything else, and anyone else, would have slowed that down.
He was good-looking, though that couldn't have been all of it; she had seen handsome men before. Was he more handsome than Elvis? Certainly not, but handsome enough, and possessing a flair, a confidence—a sharp-edged self-awareness that, back then, she never imagined could hurt her. Tall and dark-haired, he had something else, a devilishness, and it was an old story: his attentions flattered her. It seemed to her that when the two of them were together they drew more attention than she did when alone. It wasn't like having Jim Ed and Bonnie on either side of her, but it was almost like that. He filled all available spaces with himself; he summoned attention.
He was a hard drinker but that had seemed like fun at the time, and there were few in her world who were not. Even Bonnie and Elvis would party with them on the road, though they were both pretty good about being able to make a drink last much of the evening rather than gulping it down. Bonnie was, anyway; there were some nights when Elvis was a gulper already, though others when he remained in control, merely took the smallest sips.
But that was Elvis, and it's Tommy whom she's trying to remember. All her life she's taken great pains not to speak ill of him, though there was so much about which she could have: the drinking, the chronic unfaithfulness, the verbal abuse. The source of so much of her great unhappiness during those middle years, or so she believed for a long time. An unfairness, a burden no one should have to carry, though he is long gone now, died ten years ago, carries no burden whatsoever; though still, she has kept all that toxic brew closed off.
What she sees and remembers now frightens her, however, for in the remembering, she sees it just as she saw it then: wonderful, exhilarating, intoxicating. She had thought it had been all misery and woe, and to realize now that for a moment, however brief, it wasn't, unsettles her; as if, given a second chance, she would make the same mistakes all over again.
For their first date, he took her to see a case he was arguing. A man had been accused—rightly, it turned out—of embezzling from the governor's office, then blackmailing the governor and his staff with details of various affairs. It was a big case, and there had even been threats against Tommy's client's life—bodyguards were present at the trial—and it thrilled her to see the power Tommy commanded, with not just the jury, judge, and spectators as his audience, listening intently to every word, but a further audience as well, call it the scales of justice or even God, with fate in the balance, fate held in Tommy's outstretched hands as he argued, pleaded, cajoled, scolded, declaimed.
Tommy won the case, and two weeks later, at a party, asked her to marry him, and she said sure, yes.
Bonnie, of all people, tried to ta
lk her out of it. Her little sister! What did Bonnie know of love? It turned out she could not have been more right, but even now it rankles Maxine that Bonnie had given such counsel. As if, in her crush with Elvis, Bonnie thought she already knew everything there was to know of love. She had been right and Maxine had been wrong, but still, it rankles her.
The memory, however, has been modified while in storage. Maxine remembers the pride—a franticness in her heart—when, upon announcement of the verdict, Tommy shook his client's hand quickly but then sought her out, came straight to her, and with all eyes still on him. He had left his client too quickly in his eagerness to come see her, and his client trailed after him, moving through the throng.
Maxine heard the man expressing his thanks, mixed with disbelief—it had been clear to Maxine, at least, that they had had him dead to rights—and she was surprised by both the brusqueness and the essence of Tommy's answer.
"There's no need to thank me," he told his client. "I would have worked just as hard for the other fellow." He paused, his dark eyes almost black, and with adrenaline still surrounding him, dense and palpable. "I would have nailed you to the wall," he said, and the man withdrew his hand, wilted back into the crowd.
Maxine had totally misread things that day. She had not considered Tommy's anger to be that of self-loathing but had instead thought his was an anger of righteousness, that he judged and disapproved of his client.
She had not known sourness or ferment that day, only hope and admiration. There had been a power in the courthouse, and she had been a part of it, swept along with it, and best of all, for the first time she hadn't had to produce that power to keep things moving or get people to hear her. It was just happening, as if that was its natural and due course.
Was this how it was for Bonnie with Elvis? She imagined that it was.
She won't go so far as to acknowledge that such a thing might not have been healthy or the best possible course for Bonnie. But remembering her immense mistake and the decades of consequences, she experiences a glimmer of understanding of one of the people whom she should know best in the world but who is in so many ways her opposite.
Maxine peers into the box further, and is further surprised: there is only mild pleasure. The torment is gone. Where is the poison she had expected—where is the putrefaction? Has some bizarre alchemy occurred across the many years—one that has rendered, completely unbeknownst to her, disappointment into beauty, venality into integrity, loss into gain?
If so, what a double waste: the waste of the initial rotting, and then the second waste, in failing to witness the alchemy of rot back into sweetness. As if there are some in the world who simply cannot win for losing.
But for a while, there was nothing but winning. Be damned, she thinks. I will get back to that.
Neither she nor Tommy ended up being able to control much of anything, much less the directions or outcomes of their lives—but they put on a beautiful wedding. It's strange, she thinks, that she has the courage now to look back, and stranger still that she should see that it was beautiful.
The ceremony itself was a big church wedding at the Baptist church in Memphis, but it's the reception afterward that she's remembering. One of Tommy's bosses owned an estate north of town—there was no other word for it but mansion —and the wedding party went there after the ceremony.
Blue barbecue haze lay like fog over the green rolling hills, and the music of fiddles and banjos and mandolins drifted from beneath the big canvas tent set up for the musicians, of which it seemed there were hundreds. Guitars were leaning everywhere, and country people from the hills, identifiable by their informal dress—Maxine's people, in clean slacks and clean shirts and old leather shoes shined—wandered the grounds, rarely conversing with the attorneys and judges who stood in clumps and clusters, in their suits. Seen from afar, it might have looked like a battleground, with the two opposing armies arranging in slow combat, and the blue smoke from the barbecue appearing like that from cannons. The musicians' tent a gathering place for generals, and even the sleek horses that grazed in the fields beyond looking like the saddleless mounts of cavalry. A few men and women lounged on the hillsides with their straw hats pulled over their eyes, and from a great enough distance, it might have seemed that they were the first casualties of a skirmish that was only beginning.
There were, however, clues that it was not a war. Small children moved among the horses, petting them and feeding them handfuls of summer grass. Women walked arm in arm with other women, young and old, not as if in assistance of the injured, but as they had once done in a time before the war. And to such a faraway viewer gifted also with the ability to hear all sounds, no matter how delicate or muted, that spectator would have seen the band of chefs in their starched white aprons and high, billowing hats, looking like surgeons at first, coming out of one of the tents, carrying glinting knives and silver platters.
The pride and officiousness of the chefs as they carried plates to the long buffet table would have indicated to the viewer that maybe it was not a war after all, but merely a great feast, and when one of the chefs, after much consultation, was given the honor of ringing the great iron bell out in the yard of the mansion, the peal of it would have rolled out to that distant audience, and would have found freedom and a certain style in the great loneliness of space between that spectator and all those gathered below.
As the clang and ringing of the bell traveled across that distance, the sound waves would have spread out into greater and more relaxed amplitudes, then would have begun to waver and shimmer in their inevitable disintegration—the sound acting like a living thing briefly in possession of spirit and soul, but susceptible, like all else in the world, to the inevitable decay and sheer mechanical reduction wrought by friction and time, and with the listener feeling starved for more, as he or she first detected that wavering, that unwinding of the perfect sound as it began to first loosen, thread by thread.
Before that, though—just before that—there would have been perfection. Across the uncompromised and sculpted space of the landscape itself, the sound waves would have found a brief synchrony with the shapes of all the things below and over which they traveled.
The slopes and curves of the sound would have followed the slopes and curves of the hills, would have flowed gently left and right of any obstacles such as boulders or trees. There would have been a greatness to the sound, a fullness, in the freedom of all that space, and as the resonance of it filled the listener and began to act within the listener himself, there would have been confusion; for even though the sound of the bell was just now reaching the listener, the bell ringer had already turned his back and was walking away.
How long was it good before it turned bad? A month with Tommy, or six weeks, before she realized her mistake, but clung stubbornly to hope?
"There's not a skirt he won't chase," Bonnie told her. "You're not going to change him. He's just marrying you because you're famous. If you ever stopped, he'd be gone in a week. He'll be gone in a week anyway. Please," Bonnie said. "I know he's fun but you don't have to marry him."
There was still time for Tommy to get better. Hell, there was a whole long lifetime in which things could get better. Maxine laughs quietly, marvels at what she has found in the box. It was atrocious, it was unbearable, but for a long while she had withstood it. And look, now: she had been mistaken, it had not been all bad. Why hadn't she been able to enjoy what she enjoyed? Why had she let the imperfections corrupt all the goodness?
Who in her life ever told her she wasn't good enough, besides herself? It certainly wasn't Birdie. Every day of her life, Birdie doted on her; informed all her children that the sun rose and set on each of them. Tommy told her with his actions that she wasn't good enough—prowling after other women whenever she went out on the road. But he was just a two-bit fucker, she sees that now; at eighty, she sees what Bonnie saw at twenty.
Was it Floyd who told her? She doesn't want to acknowledge this, and though they fough
t like cat and dog, she doesn't ever really recall him saying those words You're not good enough. Maybe he did and she has plastered those words over in the gerrymandered architecture of her life, but she doesn't think he did. What she remembers is the pride—perhaps, too immense a pride—he took in their sudden success.
She remembers the fights, but he was her father: he loved her. There were times when he withheld his love, times when he turned away and was isolated from everyone, was only pretending to be present, with either his merry drunkenness, or his belligerence, or his sullenness, or despair, or euphoria. His mercurial moods were amplified by the bottle, and with the radiant waves of those moods suddenly and in no way echoing or imitating the contours around and beneath him— the family. Calm or raging, when he drank, he was center stage—and maybe it was that simple: when he drank, he wasn't quite himself, but was a performer of sorts, and in that manner, withheld his truer self from them all; and in that withholding, he told her, told all of them, You're not good enough—I choose drinking instead of you.
But did anyone actually ever speak those dreaded words to her out loud, or did they come from within?
Floyd was born in 1895. Parts of three centuries separate the then from the now, the beginning of his life and the trailing-away of hers, and yet the sound wave of him, the disturbed energy of his presence and actions in the world, will not fade. A hundred and fifteen years separates where he began and where she is now, and what she remembers when she thinks of her father is not so much the fights of adolescence over control and suspicion, boundaries and rebellion, or his heroic labors in the forest, trying to scrape together a living, but the quiet dark spaces of early evening, the relative silences when he would come in from the mill, smelling of sawdust and diesel, and would go to the cabinet and take down his bottle and pour his first small glass of whiskey.
