“Well, you know where I live.” She smiled. “I have to go.”
She walked to the edge of the grass, the sidewalk, where there was a trash can, and looked back at him, perhaps fifty yards away, standing under the spotted shade of the tree. Lifting the trash can lid, she held the remains of their lunch over the opening. Then she released them with suddenness, spreading her fingers wide, as if to express her exact feeling. The wrapped parts of half-eaten sandwiches dropped out of sight. Slowly she replaced the lid, raised one hand slightly to wave at him, then turned and walked away.
4
She began combining her nonclass days and weekends to visit colleges in the Carolinas and Tennessee; she had received news that she was accepted into graduate programs in drama at four of them: the Universities of North and South Carolina, Duke, and Tennessee at Knoxville. These were applications she had sent out early in the fall, and now, because it was expected, she wrote the representatives of each to say that she would reach a decision soon. The truth was, she couldn’t bring herself to think of committing to any of them. A kind of inertia had set in, a growing, nameless apathy.
In early May, just before graduation, Sheri called her from Oxford, Mississippi, to say that she was thinking of getting a divorce.
Lily thought she must be joking, and said so.
“Does this sound like I’m joking?” Sheri said, in a level voice, sniffling into the static of long distance. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Damn, you don’t need me whining at you now.”
“I’d be hurt if you didn’t call me with something like this,” Lily said.
The other sobbed, and took a moment getting hold of herself. Then: “I think every last one of the sons of bitches is fucking crazy. I mean I dated the son of a bitch off and on for five years. And he comes home one night drunk and wants me to look at a damn sex video with him. We’re supposed to go to his parents’ house for dinner and he comes in drunk, with this tape. We’re living with my parents, for God’s sake. I mean, he’s in so tight with my parents—”
“Do your parents know about the—the sex video?”
“Hell, my father drinks with him. It’s not just the movie. It’s everything. My father’s offered him a damn job. You know, wanting to be the good father-in-law, and all that stuff. And Nick’s parents treated us like shit at the wedding. Two really screwy people like that picture Grant Wood did. You know the one? So I was thinking maybe if we could move in somewhere—you and me—you’re not doing anything after you graduate, are you?”
Lily was surprised to hear herself say, “Actually, no, I’m not.”
“Why don’t you come down and at least visit? There’s a good community theater group down here.”
They spent the next few moments talking about the possibility, Sheri would take her for a tour of the delta, and they would go down to New Orleans, where she had some friends. They could use up the whole month of July, just having fun and not thinking about troubles with members of the opposite sex.
Talking about it made the possibility seem already accomplished. It was a pleasant thought. Lily entertained it with an enjoyable sort of drifting in her soul, listening to her friend go on about warm days and the Gulf.
When she got off the phone and looked out over the green acre of grass—the people out there, two young men tossing a Frisbee, a couple sitting on a blanket, sunning themselves, a girl jogging, wearing a white bandanna and listening to a Walkman—she suddenly felt a terrible chill. It raked through her, an inward blast, a tossing. Something in her mind seemed to buckle. She looked at the room with its sprawl of books, and then she began trying to put everything in order, working on in spite of an increasing sense of suffocating exhaustion and emptiness. This was not panic; this was the abyssal non-feeling of death. The dead freeze inside kept up, and finally she lay down on her bed. She had been putting off thoughts about leaving here, and it came to her now that what her life had become—this repetition of classes and study and work and aloneness—was unbearable, and that it had been that way most of the time, for most of the year. How could she not have perceived that the routine she had fallen into—no, worked out, carefully and meticulously planned—was really a withdrawal, a pulling into herself so profound that her two brief interludes with Tyler were no more than surfacing for air in a process of drowning. Now, understanding it, there was no one she could call, no one she could feel comfortable calling.
Home.
The word had no meaning. She saw herself as having gone out from a shoreline. Yet it was a paltry kind of going, she realized, and this contributed to her sense of suffocating apathy; this wasn’t West Africa, or some group of uncharted islands in wild seas. It wasn’t even the Gulf of Mexico. This was her own little protected existence, in a college dormitory that she was afraid to leave. She couldn’t shake the sense of catastrophe that clung to every surface of the life around her.
The evening sky reddened, and made strands of fire out of the long clouds near the edges of the hills beyond the square. Against her rising despair, she left the room, and went out into the cooling spring dusk. In a little pub across from the Rotunda, she saw some people she knew, but they were in couples, and so she sat at the bar and ordered a Coke. No one else was alone. Even the bartender had a waitress to talk to. Lily drank the Coke, and watched them. She had not even taken the trouble to ask where Tyler Harrison lived. Her own thought of him, in this aloneness, made her angry with herself. She finished the Coke, paid for it, and went out. It was growing dark. She walked along the street and looked into the windows of the shops. At another bar, she ordered a whiskey, and when the bartender carded her, they joked about it a little. For less than a year, she had been old enough to order the drink. But then she changed her mind, and had a soda water. He brought it to her, and she couldn’t finish it. She left this bar, and walked back in the direction of her building. The strains of music reached her from somewhere, and she heard scraps of conversation and laughter.
5
Scene:
Open stage. Mary Kingsley at a desk, at center. A girl, twelve years old. Light on her. She is writing. As she writes, we hear her voice, but it is the voice of the grown woman:
MARY
There was always merriment when Uncle Henry was around. Uncle Henry never announced himself, but would walk right into a room, as though he was perfectly confident that the people he had come to see would be engaged in some worthy pursuit, would not be talking evilly about anyone or doing anything they would not do in the light of his presence. And his presence was like light, because he was full of stories, and liked to make up rhymes, and he read to me from the Brownings, and from Dickens, too, when I could get Mother to rest comfortably. And when Father was in the house, the two men talked into the hours before dawn, and I loved to lie awake in the sound of those voices.
She looks up, and now gets up and strides across the stage, hands clasped behind her, speaking above us, past us.
How old was I? Six, and seven. Very small. The fragrance of the tobacco pleased me, as did the sense that I might be carried by those voices to faraway places. My father spoke of the side of the family he was not speaking to, Uncle Charles with his aristocratic wife, and his airs. There was something between them, troubling them, and I was too young to be able to decide how I felt about it. I liked it when my mother closed the shutters on the windows that looked out into the garden behind that house, liked the sense of cool dark it gave me, moving through the rooms. This was Highgate. Father had moved us there when I was a baby. Charley had been born there, in 1866, when I was four. It was a gloomy place. The Baptist bells tolled periodically, counting time. I lost the sense of minutes or hours. Days and months and years, turning the pages of books, looking at the pictures, waiting for the next communication from the world, from the great distances…
6
IN THE ROOM, Lily lay dry-eyed on the bed and watched the darkness lessen with the car lights moving in the street, then grow deeper again as the cars went on. She h
ad written Sheri’s number on a little piece of torn paper. She got up, closed the window, and changed her clothes. She wished she could get the panic to stir in her; that had been something to feel, at least. She couldn’t stand up to this negation; it was like an awful storm, a wall of blinding wind, and she felt again the urge to get out, to move. All the reading and study, the harmony of those hours, taking everything in as though it would be of some use to her—it was all nothing, now. Annulled. She had come to a dead stop, and she couldn’t decide why this should have come to pass now, with classes about to end, and everything accomplished. I am not in love with anybody. Fuck romance. Fuck it all. Putting the paper with Sheri’s number on it into her purse, she opened the door to the room and stepped out.
Here was Dominic.
She experienced a wave of gratitude, and almost walked into his arms. In the next instant, she thought of how awful it would be to afflict him with herself as she felt now. This friend, especially this one, whom she had first met on what turned out to be the last day of her childhood.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” Dominic said, “if somebody cut Siskel and Ebert’s thumbs off? Then they’d have to say, ‘Two stumps up. Way up.’”
She laughed in a bitter, helpless, hysterical spasm.
“Hey, girl,” he said, reaching to take her arm. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Nothing—exactly.” She walked past him, but he followed, keeping a little behind her, and leaning forward when he spoke.
“Lily, hey. Come on—this is me. What is it? What’s happened?”
She stopped, put her hand on his chest, and took it away. “I’m a little sick of myself, Dom. And you don’t want my company right now, believe me.”
They went down the stairs and out into the square together. She had no idea where she was headed.
“Hey,” he said. “I’ve had a revelation about Frank Capra. You remember the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life, when the angel’s given George Bailey his wish and made it so he was never born? And he’s running in the snow and it isn’t Bedford Falls, it’s Pottersville? The town and the world are complete hell, right, because George was never born. And there he is, running madly in the snow, in hell, except that it’s jazz coming from the joints on either side of the street. Great jazz, too. And people are all having a high old time on it. Jazz. Great lively American music. Nightclubs. Fun. Think of it, in Capra’s vision, that’s hell. What do you think? If he wasn’t a prig, then he pandered to prigs, right? It’s the most fucking ubiquitous movie ever made and so the whole country’s full of prigs.”
It was the kind of thing he had said to divert her before. She stopped again. “I didn’t go see the play again. Where have you been, anyway? I haven’t seen you anywhere since that night.”
“I’ve been in the play,” he said. “I’ve been attending to my own caving-in reality. Hey, I know. Why don’t you officially designate me your ‘listens-to-her-troubles’ person? We could go on one of those talk shows. I can see the heading flash on the screen: ‘Listens to her troubles, but gets no love from her,’ sort of thing. Huh?”
She gave him a smile, but kept on.
“Where are we going?”
She stopped at the corner, where there was traffic. He stood with his hands in his jeans pockets and whistled, and when she glanced at him, he pretended not to be watching her. “Dom,” she said. “God, I’m sorry. I’m not fit company now.”
“Hey, don’t apologize. I wasn’t expecting company on this corner, but there’s plenty of room.” He turned from her and whistled again, then stopped and stared. “Why don’t you tell me about your Mary Kingsley play? You still working on it?”
“Not much.”
“Stuck, huh. Me, too.”
She looked at him. “Are you writing something?”
“A novel?” He said it with an expression of doubtful questioning, as if it were a flimsy excuse that he didn’t expect her to believe. “I’m writing about this guy who follows a girl around and gets her to show him how much he annoys her.”
They went across the street and on, toward the Rotunda. Down from this was a row of bars and restaurants, and without planning to do so, they went into the Mexican Café. The waitress who seated them knew him. He ordered a burrito, and Lily ordered a salad. They ate quietly. It occurred to her that one worked hard and hoped for some kind of respect and admiration from others, but that the admiration itself was not very comforting to have; there was something cloying about it. Dominic lit a cigarette. His skinny hands shook.
“Dom,” she said. “You really were wonderful in the play.”
“Ask anyone,” he said.
“Well, it’s the truth. And you’ve been such a good friend.”
“Aw, shucks, you turn my head.”
“I do mean it,” she said, sounding more irritated than she was.
“Okay.” And for the first time his expression was serious. He blew smoke at the ceiling, and sat back. There was a nervous energy, almost a jumpiness, about him. His left leg was moving, a pumping motion, up and down. He drummed his fingers on the table.
“Are you going on to graduate school?” she asked him.
“I stopped going to class about a month ago.” He had been majoring in history as well as drama, and had been keeping a high average in both. He had often flashed the papers he’d done, with the marks on them. It was a point of pride with him.
“For God’s sake,” she said. “Why?”
He blew more smoke. “The whole thing started to look rather, uh, what is that word. English word. Fu-tile. Yes, that’s the one.”
She waited for him to go on, but he just sat there smoking the cigarette. “I have this—this awful blankness,” she heard herself say. “I can’t feel anything.”
“Senior syndrome,” he said.
“Oh, Christ, don’t belittle it with psychobabble.”
“I’m not belittling it,” he said, amiably. “I’m reducing it to size.”
They were quiet. Other people came into the restaurant, and Dominic waved at them. “Guys from the newspaper office,” he said to her. “I know them.”
“Friends?” she said.
“Well, not as such.” He smiled, but there was something rather broken and unhappy about it.
“Tell me what you mean,” she said.
“Nothing. You’re the one who’s depressed.”
“Is that what this is? The word is utterly useless to describe this.”
“Well, and I am your friend and I’m worried about you. A little worried.” He put money down to pay for the food, insisting on it, and when he looked at her, she thought she saw something both hopeful and sad in his eyes.
She touched his hand, meaning it as simple friendly affection, but realizing as she did so that it would be interpreted differently.
He stood. “Lily, if you could think of me—” His face froze. She had never seen him so serious. It came to her that she would only make her way out of the dark by getting out of herself; she wanted surcease from herself, from the trackless emptiness under her skin.
“Walk me back?” she said.
7
THEY STRODE BACK past the Rotunda, and on to her dormitory. On the stairs he fell, and barked his shin. He kept apologizing.
She was thinking how strange it was that she would end her virginity with Dominic of all people, a friend for whom she felt no sexual attraction at all. At her door, while she fumbled with the keys, he bent over and massaged the hurt place on his leg. The door opened, and he straightened himself, seemed to attempt standing taller. He was as pale as the walls.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“Yeah. I’m flying, can’t you tell?” He sounded frightened to her. His eyes were wide. His expression could have been surprise, or even wonder.
“Hey,” she said. “This is new to me, too.”
She hesitated only a moment. In the little space of darkness inside, with the door closed, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him.
He was surprisingly soft to the touch—his shoulders and back were fleshy, as though not quite formed. His mouth tasted of cigarettes and garlic. She let go, and reached for the light switch. He was somewhere behind her. The light came on, too brightly illuminating the disorder of the room. He had moved to the other side, against the wall. He was wringing his hands, looking at everything.
“Hey,” she said. “Are you all right? Look.” She held out her hands, which trembled slightly. “I’m scared, too.”
“Oh, God—I think you’re the most wonderful thing on earth.”
“It doesn’t have to be love, Dom.”
He seemed disheartened. “You don’t love me?”
“You’re my dearest friend,” she said.
“It’s just—” he began. “I do love you. I do. I know I do because I’m shaking like a fucking leaf.”
She turned the light off and moved toward him. The clutter of the room was a problem—there were books and papers strewn across the floor, and clothes on both beds. She tried to get this all out of the way, and he stood frozen at her side in the dark. When she had cleared her bed, she turned to him again.
He said, “Do you want me to take my clothes off?”
“Okay,” she said.
He didn’t move.
“Dominic?”
“Are you going to take yours off?” he said.
She removed her blouse, her bra. It was too cool in the room. She got in under the blanket and removed her jeans and panties. She felt him near her, removing his own clothes, and she thought of married couples, her parents, the quality of light in the living room of Ronda Seiver’s house. It stopped her.
“What?” he said.
“Come close,” she said. “Hold me.” There was a spinning sensation at the pit of her stomach. Dominic sat down on the bed, and she reached and felt the fleshy skin just above his hip. He was all goose bumps, shivering.
“I have rubbers,” he said, with enormous urgency in his voice. “I bought them a month ago.” She waited for him to put one on. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s cold.”
Hello to the Cannibals Page 9
