Maggie Pouncey

by Perfect Reader (v5)

  “I’d been close to her family—they were almost like surrogate parents—and then I wasn’t, and now since I’ve been back in Darwin, we’ve gotten back in touch, and anyway, they want to meet you,” Flora said. “Madeleine and Ray—Georgia’s parents. They’ve invited us to dinner.”

  Paul’s dimple appeared midcheek, in the sudden, magical way that it did. He was smiling at her. “So, this is getting serious?” he said.

  “What is?”

  “You and me. You’re getting serious about me.”

  “Why, because I told you?”

  “Because of this dinner. Taking me to meet the almost parents.”

  Was he really finding a way to make this about him? But Flora couldn’t help it: She laughed; she played along. “Don’t get any funny ideas,” she said. “I’m just using you for the free legal advice.”

  “What about my ass?” he said, pulling her on top of him. “I thought you were using me for my finely toned ass?” This was one of their jokes. Paul, one of those lanky men, his long body two parallel lines, a piece of linguine, with no ass to speak of.

  “That, too.” She reached her hands under him. “Your legal advice, your ass, and your dimple.” She kissed him on the dimple.

  “Let’s face it,” he said. “It’s a winning combination.” He slipped her tank top off her shoulders, then stopped and looked at her again, looked at her like her face was an endless bewilderment. “My sad Flora,” he said. “What am I going to do with you?”

  As the dinner approached, it loomed, a mistake. A day after she’d invited him, he’d reciprocated, inviting her to meet his dad and sisters, so that was nice. But she’d left too much out. On the drive there, she said, “Please don’t mention the accident.”

  Paul’s face flashed irritation. “So many secrets with you,” he said. “How could I mention it? I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Just don’t,” she said. “And maybe don’t mention my dad, either.”

  “Are you sure you want me to come, Flora? Are there any topics I have your permission to broach?”

  But she couldn’t say, couldn’t explain. She tried to smooth the wrinkles between them. “You know Darwin. Where grudges stick to the ribs like porridge.”

  They pulled into the driveway and Paul bent his head to examine the bright salmon of the house through the windshield. “Weird color,” he said.

  “I think it’s pretty,” Flora said, defensive. An inauspicious start to the evening.

  She was relieved when Ray announced the cool night warm enough to cook outside. She wanted to talk to Madeleine alone. Grilling was no casual recreation for Ray—natural wood, not charcoal, timing very sensitive. And even in Darwin, gender rules decreed that where there was meat being charred, there were men. Ray and Paul monitored the smoldering briquettes, the steam from their breath the miniature of the smoke from the grill, and in the kitchen Madeleine and Flora chopped mushrooms and peppers, tofu and lamb into neat squares for the brochettes. When Flora went out to bring the men each a glass of wine, they were on the innocuous topic of tennis. Did Paul play tennis? She didn’t even know.

  “Very cute,” Madeleine half-whispered to Flora as she came back in. “And tall. I see why he caught your eye.”

  “You don’t think it’s too weird—the way we met? Through my dad’s will?”

  “Well, of course it’s weird, Flora. But who cares? Something about him reminds me of your father, actually. The way he carries his body—that elegant slouchiness.”

  “Great, Madeleine. There’s an image I don’t need.”

  “Hey, these things are important. We’re drawn to the familiar. Don’t underestimate the value of narcissism.”

  “Believe me, I don’t. But isn’t that maladaptive, to be drawn to the familiar? Shouldn’t the preservation of the species drive us to look for mates who are completely different from us? You know, to avoid incest?” Flora had been reading Darwin’s letters, as her father had months before. Darwin had insinuated himself into her daily life, the way people in books did. Darwin—the most present man in her life these days. Who understood more about species and their survival than anyone around him, and still married his first cousin; who wrestled to reconcile his faith and his science until his beloved daughter Ann died and faith no longer served.

  “We shall now hear from our Evolutionary Biology Correspondent,” Madeleine said, deepening her voice to sound like a news commentator. She held the eggplant she had been about to slice in front of Flora as though it were a microphone—an old family joke the McNair-Wallachs brought out when anyone waxed authoritative on a subject of which she knew nothing: the Science Correspondent, the Foreign Policy Correspondent, the Ancient Cultures Correspondent.

  “That reminds me,” Flora said.

  “That reminds you?” Madeleine said, eggplant still in place, laughing.

  “Yes, I’m serious, listen.” Madeleine lowered the eggplant. Flora wanted to tell her everything; she’d wanted to for weeks. Madeleine didn’t like Cynthia; Madeleine would be on her side. “Cynthia Reynolds wants to host a reading of my father’s work. She’s found an editor, and she wants to publish it, too.”

  “The criticism? The Hardy Boys? Hasn’t that already been published?”

  Flora smiled, surprised by Madeleine’s memory: Her father’s name for his main men. “No, there was more, more writing than just the scholarship. There were poems.”

  Madeleine did not look surprised. She was nodding, as if it made perfect sense. “He’d always wanted to write poetry, hadn’t he? And he finally did it. That gives one hope for the future, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t?”

  “No, it does, it does. Only they’re complicated—the poems. Beyond autobiographical, they’re intensely private. They’re hard.”

  “So you don’t want to have a reading. You don’t want an editor.”

  “It’s not that. I do, I think. I just don’t want to do it now. I need more time.”

  “And Cynthia understands that?”

  “I wish there were no Cynthia.”

  Madeleine’s face scrunched into a smile. She ate a bite of yellow pepper. “Your father had a good life, Flora. He accomplished a lot. It shouldn’t be a child’s job to make sure a parent gets all he wanted out of life in death. That’s not your job.”

  Flora skewered a lump of tofu. “But isn’t it? As his literary executor.”

  “If you want to know what I think, I think it was selfish of him to appoint you. You’re young, and still sorting out what to do with your own professional life—you shouldn’t have to sort his out, too. It makes it impossible for you to move on, and ultimately that’s what you need to do.”

  Flora had asked for this, known what she was getting. She felt disloyal. Also grateful. There was one thing more she wanted to ask Madeleine, about the poem “The Wizard,” but she stopped herself. It belonged to the forbidden past. “You don’t think I’m avoiding the inevitable?” she asked instead.

  “So what if you are? Speaking of evolutionary traits. Avoidance has served a range of species admirably for millennia. Avoidance often starts out adaptive. Only later does it become neurotic.”

  Flora rested her head on Madeleine’s shoulder. The firmness of the shoulder, the softness of the arm, for a second it was home. How much easier would it be if this really were her family, if she were the daughter bringing her boyfriend home to meet Mom and Dad? Madeleine gave her arm a quick squeeze. The men called out, the grill was ready. Flora lifted her head and relinquished Madeleine from the moment.

  At the table, Madeleine told them about a student in her Freud seminar she was convinced had come to class stoned three times in a row. “My question is,” she said, emphasizing each word, “why bother coming? It’s insulting. Does he think I don’t know what being high on dope looks like? Does he think I’m that old and out of it? Or does he think it’s okay, it’s cool, it’s so like whatever, dude?”

  Ray
focused on his food. Flora feigned shock. “I’m sorry—did you just say ‘like whatever, dude’?”

  A reformed hippie, Madeleine had become rather strict. She explained that the same thing happened every semester—some student who riled her with his or her rudeness, or the slovenliness of his or her work, or a more general pattern of childishness. Previous years’ infractions included baseball cap wearing, lack of teeth brushing and all varieties of limited hygiene, inappropriate cleavage bearing, lateness, and a phantom vibrating cell phone. “I’m not their mother,” she said. “Why are they always looking for a mommy? I bet they don’t pull this stuff with their male professors.”

  “Maybe their male professors aren’t watching them like hawks,” Ray said. He winked at Paul, who received the comment with excessive pleasure.

  “Maybe the kid’s just sleepy,” Flora offered in defense of the most recent case.

  “That’s what Ray said.” Madeleine glared at her husband. “You guys are such softies.”

  “Or,” Flora added, “maybe he has some terrible debilitating illness and it’s medical marijuana. Maybe he has to smoke to deal with the pain.”

  Madeleine jerked her head back, as if to get a better look at who the hell Flora really was. “Cheerful, Flo. Now I have to stop feeling annoyed at the kid and start feeling sorry for him?”

  “Or, maybe …,” Flora teased.

  “Enough! Enough! I see I’m not going to get any sympathy from you.”

  “For a stoned freshman? No, I don’t think so.”

  Ray changed the subject: “Has Madeleine told you what I’ve been working on, with your alma mater, Flo, Darwin Regional High. The school, that is?”

  “No, what is it?”

  “A meditation course. I’m helping to organize it.” In recent years, Ray had become a dedicated student of meditation. The way some analysts could trace their lineage back to Freud, Ray’s teacher at the Darwin Transcendental Meditation Center was only two steps removed from the Maharishi—one of the many things, Ray said, connecting him to John Lennon. “It’s going to be offered in the cafeteria after school, once a week. Meditation, yoga, pranayama. There’s a lot of interest in the school system. In the wake of school shootings and rising dropout rates. There’s a lot of activism in reducing stress, and violence.”

  “Interesting that sort of thing is allowed, and yet someone raises the notion of school prayer, which might accomplish similar goals, and everyone goes berserk,” Paul said. He’d been quiet throughout the meal, busily chewing, and the three of them paused in their eating and stared at him.

  “You think there should be mandatory school prayer?” Flora said. “But which prayer? Whose prayer?”

  “But Paul does have a point,” Madeleine said. “Where does one draw the line between traditional spirituality and spirituality in this nebulous ‘healing’ form, between ‘mindfulness’ and prayer?”

  “Madeleine thinks it’s all hooey,” Ray said.

  “I don’t think it’s hooey. Or what I think is hooey is not the act itself but the notion that one can solve the problem of school shootings with heavy breathing. That’s a fantasy. An understandable one. But a fantasy nonetheless.”

  “At God, I think. One draws the line at God,” Flora said. She waited for Paul to defend himself. He refused. “That’s the difference between what Ray is doing and school prayer.”

  “Anyway, it’s going well,” Ray said.

  “All this talk of reducing stress and violence. It’s so American, isn’t it?” Madeleine said. “Do other cultures talk about these things?”

  “We have a different kind of violence here. It’s a real problem,” Paul said.

  “Do people ‘go postal’ abroad? Or is that coinage and pathology ours alone?”

  “Sometimes violence seems like an excellent way to reduce stress,” Flora said.

  “You don’t mean that,” Paul scolded.

  “I’m afraid she does,” Madeleine said lightly. “Don’t let that sweet face fool you.”

  “Everything’s delicious,” Paul said.

  “It’s the grill,” Ray said, happy to talk food. “Works like a charm. Thanks for your help out there.”

  The dining room light fixture was an upside-down colander Georgia had painted during her Bloomsbury phase. Paul, Apostle though he was, seemed not to notice. The tablecloth of layered ivories, Madeleine had woven in college. The transporting thinginess of things. Flora felt herself reach the moment of too much wine. She met the moment, and surpassed it. The plates were cleared, and they moved to the futons in the living room for dessert—homemade lemon bars and espresso. Flora stuck with wine.

  Madeleine asked Paul about his practice, how he found the legal woes of Darwinians.

  “It’s mostly divorces, a depressing number of divorces,” he said, as was his line. “Divorce and real estate.”

  “That pretty much sums up my life,” Flora said. Everyone ignored her. Did he not believe in divorce, this Paul? Did he believe in the sanctity of marital misery and all that? School prayer? Good Christ. Was he a hypocrite for all the premarital sex? Was every ejaculation not a release but an agony of guilt? What variety of believer was he? And Esther Moon, too, with her out-of-wedlock baby and her sexy gold cross, like a hand gesturing toward her breasts. Was Christianity in Darwin another twenty-first-century trend, a regressive rebellion like the kind enacted by stay-at-home moms?

  Paul asked Ray and Madeleine where they liked to hike. They told him about their favorite spot, out by the reservoir, where sometimes in winter they went cross-country skiing at night. They talked headlamps. Talk of headlamps led to talk of camping. They talked tents.

  “I bet this one has never so much as set foot inside a tent,” Paul said, flirting, oblivious.

  “Zipping myself into my room for the night?” Flora said. “No thank you.”

  After dessert, she followed Ray upstairs while Paul helped wash up. A transaction had been discussed ahead of time. He gave her a plastic bag with three finely rolled joints. “This stuff is smooth,” he told her. “I got it from the number two dealer in the state. I met him at the center.”

  “Who’s the number one dealer?”

  “I could tell you. But then I’d have to get you stoned so you’d forget about it.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. She loved his corniness. They were standing side by side in Georgia’s old room, where he kept his stash, now an appliance hospital, a vestigial, ruptured room, with Madeleine’s broken loom, a neglected treadmill, a dusty radio, unplugged, a vacuum cleaner, a few half-filled boxes. From the top of one, an old rodent aquarium jutted. Dim light came in from the hall. Flora could not see the color of the walls.

  “Can you believe that school prayer business?” she asked him.

  “Don’t be so hard on the guy, Flo. People think differently. But it doesn’t make them idiots. He’s had such a different life experience from yours.”

  “What’s next? Book banning?”

  “Is he really saying anything so extreme? He seems like a nice guy to me, a smart guy. Why don’t you talk to him first, then make up your mind. You’ve always been so quick, so definite.”

  Had she? Sluggish and vague seemed more accurate. It was surprising, foreign when people described you to yourself. One deceived constantly, with no intention of deceit.

  A reasonable suggestion, Ray’s—talk first, then get mad. But in the car, on the way not home, as there was no home, but back to Paul’s rank apartment, Flora turned mean. Maybe it was the wine. But they had all been so unfailingly polite, so politic when Paul voiced his opinion, which now struck her as ludicrous. It had started drizzling, and she began to sing: “I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my plastic Jesus sitting on the dashboard of my car.” She put her feet up on Paul’s dashboard. He looked at her and shook his head. “I don’t care about bad behavior, long as I got my plastic Savior….”

  “You’re in a pleasant mood,” he observed.

  “Do you
actually believe,” she said, “and by ‘you’ I mean all of you, that if I don’t accept Jesus Christ as my personal Savior, I will burn for all eternity in the fires of hell? Is that it? The nuts and bolts, so to speak?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That my father currently burns there now?”

  “We can’t know what he believed right at the end, can we?” So like the lawyer to ignore the larger point and zero in on the technicality. The matter of what the dead believed was not one worth arguing.

  “I mean, is that the kind of believer you are?” she asked. “What is the point of believing in such a punitive God?”

  “Flora, are you listening to yourself? Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow, when you’re a little less hostile.”

  “I’m not hostile. I’m hoodwinked. I was sleeping with an evangelical without knowing it. I think I had a right to know.” That was the thing. You didn’t know anyone, other people constantly revealing themselves to be aliens.

  “You make it sound like evangelical Protestantism might as well be syphilis.”

  “Yes, quite—a spiritually transmitted disease.” She felt extremely articulate, anger rendering her smooth and sharp and silver-tongued.

  “I’m not a fundamentalist, Flora. Not that I have to defend myself to you. I believe in God, but not only in God. My sister is gay and I love her and accept her.”

  “How large-souled of you! And who are you, exactly, to accept her?”

  “I’m saying it’s not an issue for me—I’d think you’d know that. I’m not as narrow-minded as you’re suggesting. Really, I’m not as narrow-minded as you are. You realize you’re who people have in mind when they complain of the liberal elite?” He turned from the rain-stippled windshield to look at her accusingly. “You Darwinians who preach tolerance to families of any and all configurations. Transgender, fine, wonderful. But Christian, God forbid.”