When he came in with coffee for me and a drink for himself, I pointed at the photo and said as brightly as I could, “Yours?”
He sighed and sat down beside me.
“Yeah. Beth and Carrie. They live in California now with their mother. I don’t see much of them unless I go out there. It’s not working out very well.”
There was bitterness in his voice. I had never heard it before.
“Why did you get divorced? I mean, if you did,” I said, and blushed furiously. Why could I not stop my tongue? This was not my territory now.
He was silent for a while, and then he said, “Yeah, we did. I guess it was because it was sort of—what came next. You know, you meet, you marry, you have children, you get divorced….”
I did not say anything. There seemed nothing to say. It was too late; too much lay between us; we had gone so far down such widely divergent paths….
I looked up at him helplessly.
“Who did you marry, Thayer?” he said.
“I married an Irishman. His name is Aengus O’Neill. He’s a professor of Celtic mythology at a college here. Coltrane. He’s writing a book now.”
“Children?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t have any children.”
He studied my face and then said, “What’s your husband’s book about?”
“I don’t know anymore,” I said. “I don’t see him very often.”
And to my horror I began to cry.
We sat in the big room until the lights of the city began to bloom, and by the time the sky had darkened completely I had given him most of my life after him. I could not stop the words, except the part about the baby—his baby, ours—and the subsequent illness that had left me barren. I knew that that would be simply too painful for him to hear and for me to say. Later. It could come later….
But there could not be a later. How could there be? There should not even have been this much, this afternoon.
I stopped talking. My tears had dried, though several tissues around me on the sofa were damp balls and my voice was a drowned croak. I did not think I could have possibly drawn Aengus clearly enough for Nick to understand him, all that complexity, all that passion now skewing so inevitably toward obsession. All the very real magic that once had shimmered around him, and still sometimes did. It was I who had lost the magic, not Aengus.
After a time Nick said in a low voice, “We shouldn’t be sitting here talking about this.”
“I know,” I said, tears starting again. “Of course we shouldn’t.”
“I mean… we should be catching up on what we did today. We should know what we did all those years. We should have done it together.”
I moved jerkily on the sofa. It was time for me to go. It was way past time.
“I have to go home, Nick,” I said.
He did not urge me to stay. He said, “I don’t know yet exactly what I should do about this, but I think I have to do something. I can’t… know you’re so unhappy. I just can’t. We should talk more; maybe I should meet him….”
“Oh, please, Nick.” I cried softly. By this time we were standing by my car in the parking lot and he was holding the front door open for me. His face was tired and sharpened; there was anger in his voice. He seemed decades older.
“Please don’t feel you have to do anything.” I almost wept again. “I shouldn’t have unloaded all this on you. My God, you get a lot for your nickel with me, don’t you? I can work this out. Aengus and I can. You’ve got your own row to hoe. And I haven’t really been fair to him; he’s so much more than all that….”
Nick put his hand over mine on the steering wheel. I could feel him on every inch of my skin. Safety. His touch was, as well as so many other things, the warm, engulfing feeling of safety.
“I’m here for several more weeks, Thayer. We’ll figure something out. Just don’t go away again. Promise me that.”
“Where would I go?” I said, putting the car into reverse to back out of the parking space. My foot trembled on the pedal.
“I’ll see you soon. I want you to call me when you have some free time. If you don’t call before long, I’m going to call you. I mean that, Thayer,” he said.
“No,” I said. “You can’t call me. I mean that.”
“Thay…”
I looked at him. Tears stood in his eyes. In the neon-flashing lights of the underground parking garage they shimmered; a tiny trickle started down one sharp-planed freckled cheek. Grief and guilt flooded me, and I felt, suddenly, a cold emptiness deep inside me where our baby had so briefly lived.
“Oh, God!” I cried out, and stamped down on the accelerator. My car shot accidently backward. I slammed it into forward gear. I did not look back.
I snapped the bubble in place before I even got out of the garage. Outside it the entire world howled and hammered and shrilled. Inside it there was the old, soothing peace. Just outside the globe the faces of the two men who had defined me loomed close. They were talking. Talking. Talking to me.
It was not the time to hear them.
When I pulled the car up into my cool, green-tunneled driveway, I saw that a light on the third floor was on. Aengus was home, then, but his study door was closed and I knew that he was oblivious to all but the old ones who moved with magic through dark air. He did not hear me.
I slipped into bed without washing my face, clicked off the bedside lamp, and buried my head under the creamy linen pillows we had gotten for a wedding present. I still can’t remember who gave them to us.
CHAPTER 17
I woke late the next morning and scrambled, sleep stunned, out of bed before I realized that it was Saturday and I did not have to go to the bookstore. I sat back down on the edge of the bed and shook my head hard, several times. I had not thought, when I had slipped between the covers last night, that I would sleep at all, but I had, deeply, not waking once, until five minutes ago. Aengus was not in bed beside me, but he seldom was this late. I wondered if he had slept on the sofa in his office, as he sometimes did when he worked or read late. I thought I would get up and go and find him, but the world was still heaving and rolling like a ship’s deck under me, and I sat back down and stared into the gloom of the big bedroom. I thought if I got up and turned on the lights and opened the drapes the room would flood with morning light and my thoughts would slide back into their ordinary morning progression of Let’s see, what do I have to do today? Who am I going to see? Do we have anything special planned?
But I did not move. For a long time I wanted absolutely no sense of the day and what it held. After last evening’s time with Nick, I did not think there could be any more ordinary days. But neither could I imagine what there could be in place of them. I could not think at all.
“Maybe I’ll sleep a little longer,” I said to myself, and was preparing to slide back under the covers when I heard the Volvo’s engine start up outside. I leaped up and ran barefoot down the stairs and out through the veranda to the driveway, my nightgown fluttering around me. Aengus saw me and stopped backing out of the driveway. He opened the window on his side and leaned out and grinned at me.
“Who have we here, fluttering like a butterfly in her shimmy at nine o’clock in the morning? I wasn’t sneaking out; I just didn’t want to wake you. I thought you must really be tired; you were dead to the world.”
I put my hand out tentatively and touched his arm. It was warm and still a little damp from his shower. There was a cup of coffee in the holder between the seats. He reached up and covered my hand with his. I drew a deep breath. It was truly Aengus, Aengus in the morning as he always was, with lines smoothed out of his dark face and his blue eyes clear. I could already smell the sun on the pines and feel it on my bare shoulders and arms. I smiled; I could feel the smile trembling a little on my mouth.
“Morning,” I said. “Where you going?”
He reached out and smoothed the hair back from my face. I knew it was wild and tangled.
“Up to camp,” he said.
“I’ve just about finished the book. I started the last chapter early this morning. I want the boys to hear it before I finish. The last chapter of anything always carries the payload. By the way, where were you last night?”
“I ran into a friend of mine from camp when I was at the library,” I said. “We spent longer than I meant to catching up.”
It was precisely what I’d meant to say: the truth and no more. There had seemed to me no reason for Aengus to pursue it, and I doubt that he would have if I hadn’t felt my mouth opening and words tumbling from it: “He has an apartment in the old Findlay building around the corner from the library. We went there because there wasn’t anyplace to sit in the library and it was so hot….”
Aengus said nothing, and I pulled my arm away from the open window of his car and said, “I’ve got to get dressed. I can’t stand around all day out here in my shimmy.”
“What was his name, your friend from camp?” Aengus said in a smooth, polite voice. I sighed, not because I thought he’d make a thing about my having seen a male friend but simply because I did not feel like standing in the sun explaining the whole thing. That had been last night. This was this morning. Last night was over.
“His name is Nick Abrams,” I said. “You know who he is. I haven’t seen him since the summer before college. He’s an architect in New York, and he’s down here to do some stuff for the Olympics. Housing and things…”
“Oh, yes. The sainted Nick Abrams. He keeps cropping up, doesn’t he?” Aengus said. “I think I’m on this program thing with him next week. The mayor has asked some of the people from the represented countries down to see what we’ve got in the way of facilities for families and I’m representing camps for kids and doing some kind of program with some of the boys. Your guy’s name is on the list; I guess he’s showing off some of his housing.”
“That’s terrific,” I said, smiling at him. “You didn’t tell me.”
“I just forgot. All Big Jim’s doing, of course. It’s next Thursday night at that little amphitheater out at Cantwell Park. You have to come; it’ll be another chance to catch up with your friend.”
“Of course I’ll come, but not because of him. Because of you and the boys. Do you know what you’re doing yet?”
“Probably something from the book. We’ll decide today, maybe. I think we can make something really special of it.”
His face glowed. I had not seen that light lately.
“I miss you, Aengus.”
“I know. I’ve been away a lot. But it’s ending, and I think this book is going to be important for us. I truly believe it is, if these kids are any indication. Can you and Carol find something to do tonight? We’ll take next weekend and go somewhere special. Maybe up to Gatlinburg or over to Cades Cove. I’ve never seen either.”
“Oh, Aengus,” I said, “not more mountains. Not for a while. Could we maybe drive down to the beach?”
“I don’t see why not. Lean in here and give me a kiss. I’ve got to be up there by ten thirty. I’ll call you tonight after the reading and let you know how it went.”
“Please do. I feel like I don’t even talk to you anymore.”
“Well, after camp is over I can arrange to talk your ears off and you’ll be sorry you ever said that.”
He kissed me softly and fully on the mouth, and I swallowed a huge lump in my throat.
“Of course it’s Aengus,” I said to myself picking my way over grass stubble edging up between the bricks. “My husband. Aengus. The man I love, the man I chose. The man who chose me. I did nothing at all yesterday but run into an old friend.”
By the time I had showered and dressed it was almost noon and Grand’s bubble was firmly in place again. I would make something special for tomorrow night, I thought. I’ll ask Carol and maybe the mayor and his nice wife. I ought to ask Big Jim and what’s-her-name, too, but I’m not going to. Aengus sees enough of him up at camp.
I got into my little Mustang and started the engine, smiling at the obedient, throaty purr. It was six years old but immaculate and shining with new green paint. It had been Big Jim’s son Markie’s car until his father had bought him a new Porsche on his eighteenth birthday, and I had been grateful when Big Jim passed it on to Aengus, who passed it on to me.
“I’m not driving Big Jim’s little boy’s cast-off car,” he had said stubbornly. “But we need one for you and this one is in good shape. It sort of looks like you.”
“How so?”
“Oh… neat. Curvy. Aerodynamic. Sporty. This old Volvo makes you look like the Salvation Army coming to collect cast-off furniture. It would any woman.”
“And it doesn’t you?”
“I don’t care what I drive, as long as I bought it.”
“Well, I have no scruples about that. I think it’s a great little car.”
And it had been.
The next Thursday night I sat with a crowd of perhaps five hundred people on the uncomfortable old wooden seats of the small amphitheater at Cantwell Park. It was tucked behind a much larger one, one that seated perhaps five thousand people, where great occasions of municipal state took place, and traveling road companies of popular musicals, and sometimes even productions of the Metropolitan Opera. I remembered live elephants and horses and chariots pounding thunderously over the stage; my father had taken me to see Aida when I was small, and I never forgot it. Magical, those great panniered and jeweled beasts, their gray hides somehow gilded, with people singing ecstatically from their swaying backs. Magical, too, the painted chariots sweeping in behind them drawn by matched pairs of horses in feathery headdresses, dust rising from their golden hooves, with a dense green canopy of Georgia oak leaning over them and above them a great moon sailing alone in an indigo sky. And over it all, glorious music swelling to the stars…
I never forgot that night. This smaller amphitheater just behind the big one was even more deeply sunk into the woods, yet from it you could hear the faint blatting of automobile horns and see, in the distance, the nimbus of Atlanta. I realized, sitting there in my VIP seat beside the mayor’s smiling wife, that this was its magic, this very proximity of our everyday world, encasing this place like a fairy egg but unable to seep into it. Here, the incredible, the unimaginable; just outside, home and comfortable banality waiting for us.
The audience was an appreciative one. They clapped and smiled and nodded when the mayor announced that this evening he was proud to be able to show our international visitors some of the amenities that awaited families from their countries who would be visiting Atlanta. I don’t know how many nationalities were represented that evening, but it was definitely not an Atlanta or even a Georgia crowd; besides the flow of conversations in many languages, there were spates of dignified clapping and laughter and murmurs of “ahhhhhhh” and much nodding and smiling at one another. No one whistled between their teeth, favored us with Rebel yells, or wriggled and whispered loudly when boredom set in. These people, as the mayor made plain, were here to find out what was available in this storied southern city for their countrymen to live in, eat, drink, look at, listen to, and amuse their children with. Most of them knew Atlanta only from Gone with the Wind and seemed pleased to encounter no enslaved pickaninnies and booming cannon. They would, said the mayor, see plenty of hoopskirts and pillared mansions, and that seemed to feed the GWTW thirst.
We had seen displays and film clips from the movie people; sampled restaurant fare from every sort of eatery, from barbecue (“Ah, bobbycoo!”) to the city’s most elegant victuals; watched a panorama of sports vignettes, from the Atlanta Braves, to the Falcons, to the myriad Little Leagues, tennis, sailing, skating, boating, swimming, amusement parks, fairs and festivals, and house and garden tours. (“Scatlitt!” a young girl’s voice behind me cried when the hoopskirted hostess of a palatial local home bared her teeth for the camera.) By this time the crowd was utterly captivated with this paradise of the Deep South; even I was clapping until my palms stung.
“And when your athletes co
me to compete, here, in part, is where they’ll live,” the mayor’s voice intoned. “I give you one of our country’s most renowned young architects, Mr. Nicholas Abrams, himself a Georgia native, and the unparalleled housing he has designed for them.”
The stage lights fell and a solo spot illuminated a lectern. My heart slid into the icy pit in my stomach. I was appalled. I’d known he would be here; it hadn’t, by this time, seemed to matter too much. It would just be Nick, showing off the houses that had been captured on the untidy rolls of paper and crumpled sketches I had seen in his dining room.
Just that.
But this was going to be more. My heart and stomach knew it before my brain did. The lectern was empty, and then Nick walked onstage from out of the darkness and stood in front of it, hands in his pockets, smiling at us. I felt rather than saw the smiles all around me. He wore a seersucker suit and a rather rumpled tie, and his shock of dark hair, lit by the overhead lights, hung as usual a bit over his eyes. His teeth flashed white and his rangy frame seemed to sprawl a little, and for some reason he was utterly irresistible. You could feel the wave of low laughter move through the crowd; it was affectionate laughter. I drew in my breath sharply. It was as if he stood floodlit on a stage for no one but me; the crowd around me faded away and I looked down at the man I had loved and fancied that he looked up only at me.
“He’s attractive, isn’t he?” the mayor’s wife whispered. “My husband thinks very highly of him. I believe he’s trying to lure him down here permanently.”
“He’d be a great addition,” I said pleasantly. My face burned in the dark.
Burnt Mountain Page 22
