Spirit of the Place (9781101617021)

by Shem, Samuel

  “Maybe I could stay?” Orville said.

  “You will sometime.” Turned on, she shivered—and then doubted. “Won’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  · 13 ·

  Howdy, partner,

  Boca’s great. Babs shops & we play bridge with a nice couple Wolfgang and Kenni Vista from Altoona, PA. (“If God’d wanted to give America an enema,” Wolfy says, “he’d stick it in Altoona.”) They’re starting a trip around the world. Weather great. Starbusol working even at low doses. Be back a little later than planned. Keep the good virgins of Columbia happy—all three of ’em. Heh heh.

  Yr frnd, Bill

  This oversized postcard, picturing on the obverse side a glorious sunset framed by a palm tree swooping up from a beach like an exhaust trail from an exploding missile, was dated December 17. It had arrived the day before Christmas. When Bill’s expected date of return to Columbia had passed, Orville tried to call him. There was never an answer at the condo. Liberated from caring for the Columbians, Bill had no need for an answering machine.

  The troubling thing for Orville was that Bill had mentioned no clear date for his return. And Orville was superstitious about dates. December 17 was a particularly auspicious one: at exactly 10:35 A.M. on Thursday, December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hill, Kittyhawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright took man’s first flight, 120 feet in twelve seconds. Bill writing on the eightieth anniversary of this great day for mankind seemed ominous to the other Orville now. Even the headline in The Columbia Crier—BOARD TO DEBATE CHICKENS AT KINDERHOOK LAKE—couldn’t cheer him up. His thought? Don’t bet against the chickens. But who cared. He was in love.

  Despite the holiday-season carnage in Orville’s practice, he and Miranda were seeing each other as often as possible. They told each other their life stories—the censored versions that you tell to non-first loves. He told her about Lily and the hamster—the scientific proof of his sterility. He said nothing about his conversations with his floating mother and nothing more about Celestina, whom he’d come to realize was also a floater. Ever since the day in the freezing cold outside the library when he’d read Miranda a piece of a Selma letter and she’d said it didn’t seem all that bad, he’d known that it would be a mistake to talk to Miranda about Selma at all. Lily had always despised Selma and maintained that one of the reasons their marriage had fallen out of the sky was that Selma was always there, always sticking her nose into things, trying to control them. After seeing Miranda’s reaction to the letter, Orville vowed never again to let Selma into this love affair. He promised himself that he’d never talk about her, never even tell Miranda when he had gotten another one of Selma’s letters. In his mind there was now a big KEEP OUT MOM sign on the door. Selma would be his secret.

  Miranda told him about her tragedy with her daredevil husband and about her move up to Columbia from Boca Raton. But she never talked about her polio and kept everything to do with Selma a secret—not only the letters but also how Selma had told her what a “saint” her son had been, staying by her side during that long summer of her hellish disfigurement and recuperation. As Orville and she got closer, each time she sneaked into Columbia to mail a new Selma letter, she felt a little strange. But what could she do? It was, after all, a good deed. While she thought it strange that he never again mentioned his mother, that was okay, too—it kept Selma out of it.

  Every time they had been together, Cray had been with them. Orville’s Hi, Crays were still met with silence and downward glances. Now, on Christmas Day as Orville drove out to Miranda’s with Amy to exchange presents, he felt a sense of relief. He’d gotten coverage from a local surgeon until midnight, trading Christmas Day for New Year’s Day, and Miranda had arranged a sleepover for Cray at Maxie Schooner’s. Finally they would have time alone.

  As the weeks went by, Miranda struggled with the romance. There was a physical fire between them, and she loved the way that, despite his shyness and doctor’s cynicism, he had a remarkable energy, a real interest in and responsiveness to her, and to history, big and little. But with the blossoming attraction came doubt. Over and over she would hear a small voice inside saying, I doubt it, I doubt it. The doubt was about whether or not he was sincere, and about why he never brought up the fact that he was leaving in August. She knew from her past the risk of doubt, how her doubt isolated her from the person she doubted, from the person’s world, from the world itself. It had happened with her husband, from their first meeting at the Gasparilla Inn on Boca Grande. He had courted her, reassured her. She resisted. Finally she had let go of her doubt. But now she was alone. In the four years since his death, she’d come to see that when he promised to stay safe for her and Cray, he lied. Stunt flying, safe?

  With Orville she felt she couldn’t just jump in. The voice inside kept saying, He’s leaving, right? The cost isn’t just to you but to your son. Eventually Cray will respond and say hi to him. Once you say hello, you face the terror of saying good-bye.

  When Orville and Amy arrived that Christmas afternoon, Miranda felt a surge of happiness. “I’m so glad you came, Amy,” she said. “You must be nervous about tonight, opening night and all?”

  “Not really. Greenie Sellers says that if something goes wrong, it’s right, and if it’s too right, it’s all wrong. Shakespeare’s text doesn’t count—’cause it’s postmodern.”

  “Poor Shakespeare!” Miranda said. “This is my son, Cray. Cray, this is Amy.”

  “Hi, Cray. What a wicked good tree! My parents don’t believe in Christmas.”

  “They don’t?” Cray asked, his eyes wide. “What are they, Grinches?”

  “Jewish. We can’t even like utter the name . . . um . . . Jesus Christ.”

  “But Jesus was Jewish, right, Mom?”

  “Until he converted, yes.”

  “This is so neat, Uncle O. My first-ever Christmas. Show me everything, Cray!”

  Miranda was delighted. Over the past several Sundays spent with Amy working for the Worth, Miranda had fallen a little in love with her. And Amy had responded to her with the full force of an eleven-year-old going on sixteen who’s found an alternative to her mother. She told Orville, “Mom and Miranda are like two different species!”

  The presents were presented. Orville gave Miranda a pendant on a gold chain, a gold whale with a diamond eye. She gave him a facsimile of a Shaker book published in New Lebanon in 1823, Gentle Manners: A Guide to Good Morals. Amy thought this a riot, snatching it and reading aloud in her stage voice a passage about “Life as a Moral Essay” and also from “Sixty Rules of Civility,” by General George Washington.

  “Scoff at none,” she read archly, “though they give occasion.”

  “Scoff at none,” Cray mimicked. “Scoff at none! Yuck!”

  “And listen to this!” Amy said, turning to the inside cover. “To Dr. Rose, in gratitude for your gentleness walking with me in love. . . . Uh-oh. . . .” Amy stopped, mortified. “Sorry. It’s personal, right?”

  “It’s okay, Amy dear,” Miranda said, blushing. “Here’s your gift from us.” A first edition of Stanislavsky, Volume 1: On Acting. Amy squealed in delight and clasped it to her heart theatrically. Orville gave Cray a video of Jungle Book, “to keep for your own.”

  They sang a few carols and drank some mulled cider, and then it was time for all of them to go, Amy to the theater and Cray to the Schooners’. Cray gathered up his sleepover necessities—clothes and a teddy and a Babar and the Jungle Book video. He hoisted his backpack and a smaller wicker basket shaped like a duck. As they were putting on coats and boots, he pushed Miranda forward toward Orville, hiding behind her.

  “Go on, Cray,” Miranda said. “You give it to him yourself.” Cray vehemently shook his head. “But it’s from you, not me.” Another no. “Okay.” She handed Orville a card.

  “Hey, thanks, Cray. It’s beautiful. I love it very much.”

  Cray said nothin
g. But then he peeked from behind Miranda’s pants and for a split second made eye contact with Orville, who was so touched that he made sure not to show any sign of it, so as not to scare the boy off. Miranda felt joy, then doubt, but was left leaning toward joy.

  Later that evening, as Miranda and Orville walked together down the aisle of the decaying Opera House on lower Washington, they created a stir. They were together in public for the first time. Penny waved them over to sit with her and Milt, greeting both of them warmly. Milt greeted them coolly.

  “Unreal,” Penny whispered to Orville. “Amazing!”

  “What?” he whispered back.

  “Maybe you’re getting socialized! Mom said she’d die before she saw it, and she did. But I always said all it would take was the right girl.”

  “I thought you said Miranda’s the wrong girl.”

  “To Milt, yes. Me, I’m agnostic. And hey—Faith Schenckberg she’s not.”

  As the lights started to fall, the Schooners entered—grandly, smiling and waving. Both looked gorgeous, Henry in his crisp white naval officer’s dress uniform and Nelda Jo in a silky red gown suspended by spaghetti straps, making her seem, to Orville, a live advertisement for whatever she ate or drank or did aerobics to or had surgery on. And was it patriotism or lust, he wondered, astir in the pants of the sturdy men of Columbia? The Schooners smiled deeply at each other, as if they’d just that day fallen in love.

  Miranda bent forward and talked across Orville’s lap to Penny. “Don’t you feel great when you see two people smiling at each other like that?”

  Penny thought hard about this. “No,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I feel great when they both turn and smile at me.”

  The lights went out. A Midsummer Night’s Dream went on. Sort of. The Fairies were Hell’s Angels, the Lovers were Kabukis, the Rustics were gay. The play was cut severely, and it was hard to understand who was who and what was what.

  But Amy was game, playing the Queen of the Fairies, Titania. She was the only child in the play, and Orville was touched to see her stand up so bravely and sweetly in front of the crowd. She seemed to have a natural flair and voice for it. When Titania caressed Bottom (dressed as an ass), somehow the innocent sincerity of her voice and her lines—for who of us, Orville thought, has not been fooled in love?—brought a hush to the audience.

  “Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.

  Fairies be gone, and be all ways away.

  So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle

  Gently entwist; the female ivy so

  Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.

  O, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!”

  Miranda, holding Orville’s hand, caressed it, and snuggled into his neck.

  At that tender moment, however, the action shifted to a biker entering on a real Harley, and the rest of the spectacle left the audience puzzled and disgusted.

  But then the New York antique dealers “got it.” A murmur sped through the crowd: “It’s all a joke—on us!”

  The play lasted forty-two minutes, which seemed to Orville and Miranda more like two hours. The New Yorkers leapt to their feet for a standing ovation.

  Milt said to Orville, “Forty bucks an hour to that fucked-up dwarf Greenie Sellers for lessons in royal bullshit like this?”

  In the receiving line, Amy asked them, “How’d you like it?” Orville and Miranda said that both the play and she were great.

  “Yeah? Really?”

  “Really,” Orville said. Miranda nodded.

  “Cool! And did ya hear? They’re talking about taking it to New York!”

  Orville shook the tiny Sellers’s hand. He’d known Greenie as a boy, a misfit sent by his rich parents to prep school in Tokyo, and from his office—a man expert in phantom complaints, but for a menagerie of veneria to make a profligate Venetian proud.

  “Grazie, grazie,” Sellers said, for some reason speaking only mock Italian. “Por della granda apprecionissimo del’arte. I am feeling so good, but not at all well, dottore. So overwhelmed, così confuso!”

  Back at Miranda’s house they stoked the woodstove and sat together on the couch in the low-beamed living room, sipping brandy. They stared at the glowing grate and talked over the boneheaded production. Orville stroked her neck and shoulders, her face taking on a glow as he did. With both of them still dressed up, Orville felt like a teenager at a prom, wanting her desperately but worried about going too far too fast. She, too, now that the physical was so present between them, felt shy. But she also felt that if they didn’t get naked soon she would burst.

  Their words took on the false tone that words carry when the sensual world starts to take over. As they finally kissed, a spark bit both their lips—the static electricity in the dry room—and they laughed together. Gingerly, like chastened but diligent students bent on completing what they had begun, they kissed again through the diminishing static, their alonenesses giving way to their hungers.

  Miranda rose and took Orville’s hand and led him toward the narrow stairway. Unused to drinking, she tipped a little. He, also tipsy, steadied her, his arm quickly around her waist. Face-to-face, bodies pressed together, they saw the yearning in each other’s eyes and then their lips were on each other’s lips, tongues on tongues, with a sudden tenacity. A bolt of excitement zinged up from his toes to his skull and bounced back down. He unbuttoned her blouse and slid it from her shoulders and, the stairs too much to think about, helped her gently down to the rug, his dim sense of her lameness bringing a nurturance to his passion. He took off his clothes, she her pants. Nuzzling her neck he reached around and undid the clasp of her bra and helped her shrug it off and was lifted by the swell of her breasts in the almost-dark of the neglected fire. His fingers felt the silky roll, and then his lips, as lightly as in imagination, the plumped-up tips. Putting his arms around her, his palms against the strong latissimi of her back felt a murmur—she was telling him that she was losing herself fast and wanted to prolong, savor, hurry.

  Hands around his neck, Miranda felt the curly hair of his chest against her breasts. She felt him with her, the with-ness catching her up like on a curl of a wave in the Gulf. But then he stopped.

  His hand was on her withered leg.

  Under his fingers he felt the sharp shin bone and the wasted muscle mass, and couldn’t help but sense the story of this person he was beginning to love and the sadness of that story and the anger at that sadness. He felt as if he were facing the juxtaposition of the body and the human, the doctoring and the loving, which he’d been trained to split apart from the first cadaver on. God, this child’s withered leg! Despite himself, his doctor’s mind attuned not just to the person but the patient, not just to the beloved body but its history: symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, years of bereft parents doing everything for her and her trying hellishly hard, brave beyond belief, the physical therapy and fear of never walking again, the electron micrographs of the virus itself and the photos of Dr. Jonas Salk.

  Miranda sensed his shock. She took his hand, still resting like a question on her shin, and brought it gently to her lips, then to her breast—an answer, of sorts, to her first suffering. Her other hand caressed his cheek, sought out his lips.

  “Shouldn’t we talk about it?” he asked.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “I want to.”

  “I don’t.” She nuzzled his ear, rolled his fingers on her nipple. She kissed him again, his mouth more hesitant now. She stroked his belly.

  “I may, uh, need to,” he said.

  Her touch went lower, onto his penis. “Uh, well, Dr. Rose, I happen to know that you don’t.”

  He laughed, and, relieved, clicked pretty much into the erect sexual, though her fragility stuck in his mind like an allergy warning stuck in the front of a patient’s chart. He balanced between his sexual power and that brittle tibia and fibula passing in X-
rays before his eyes.

  But Miranda had spent a good part of her life living that X-ray and learning to gauge the limits of that fragility, learning to read the fear of it in others. So she took the initiative and tried to tell him by her touch that she was holding on to that X-ray a lot tighter than he ever could and that she wouldn’t fracture anything—not a bone, not her son, not her soul—for pleasure. She took his hand and moved it over her good hip and down along her inner thigh to that moist pungent place so ready for him after all the weeks of foreplay. Then she straddled him and rose up and with a sigh began to move, riding that curling wave.

  “Oh God,” she whispered, “hurry!” She started to stifle a cry but then realized what she was doing and shouted, “Cray’s not here! No one can hear us!”

  “Yeah!”

  She rocked on him harder and screamed happily, lustily. He, too, let go, screaming. They howled like two animals, the two caged finches answering. And then she settled down on him feeling as if she were settling into a warm bath of just plain love.

  He felt her settling as if she were two people: one, on his chest, a strong, pliant, firm-breasted, vibrant woman; and the other, on his leg, a spare and fragile girl. With a rush of tenderness he had started to think he was too worn-out for, he took the woman and girl to his breast, to his life.

  Just as they were dozing off, she spoke. “Great whales, eh?”

  “Yes, sweetness, great wet whales.”

  His beeper roused him at two in the morning—the delivery ward, something urgent. Miranda hardly stirred as he rose and searched out his clothes and nuzzled her good-bye. In the low glow from the embers his eyes made out her alabaster face and firm shoulder and he filled in that blaze of hair and the red grape nipple. He sighed happily and walked out into the icy night that couldn’t touch him—not until his butt hit the ice cube seat of the Chrysler, making him cry out with shock, happy shock, because just then it was merely a part of being alive.