“I didn’t know that.” She rifled through a small sequined handbag. “Be back. Bathroom.” She was always rifling. Rowan watched her speak to one of the waiters. She was sleek and long. As she laughed, he noticed her wide-collared blouse open at the neck, her olive skin glistening where her collarbone protruded. Her silk pants sweeping the tops of her feet. Swishing back and forth. When she sat back down, he said, “This is a beautiful hotel.”
Patty sipped her martini. “So, your grandfather built this place?”
“He knew John Sprunt Hill, the man who built it. They went to UNC together. In 1935, John gave it to the university.”
“Big gift.”
After her third martini, after flirting with their waiter (who was barely twenty-one), Patty condescended to Rowan. She told him the particulars of the presentation, adding, “Don’t slouch. Don’t talk money,” as if he would, and then, clutching the edge of the white tablecloth with her long nails, like eight perfect drops of strawberry candies, she said, “Upstairs. I have to show you something.”
On the way to her suite, she leaned against him in the elevator. “Once we get the patent it’ll revolutionize sales.” Dropping her head back onto his shoulder, she smiled.
What should he think? What was she doing? She’s flirting with me, and I like it. I like her mouth. I like her mouth when it’s shut.
Walking down the corridor, Rowan’s feet sank into the deep red carpeting. But he had a conscience. He had a sense that he shouldn’t be doing this. He thought about sweet innocent Millie—only two years younger than Patty. He thought about Mary. He’d lost all zest for that woman.
Once inside the suite, Patricia picked up two brown-wrapped chocolate chip cookies from the chest of drawers. “Complimentary cookies.” She dropped onto the queen-sized bed with her cookie.
Patty’s suite was elegant. Atkins and Thames had spared no expense. Rowan loved this place. He always had. If he could, he’d take up permanent residence in the Carolina Inn, with its antebellum plantation house decorum, the antiques, the intricately patterned wallpaper in deep reds, beiges, and forest greens. He walked toward the window, his eyes fixed on the moss green drapes. The moon full through the upper-right pane.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“Is what what?”
“Is that what you had to show me? A cookie?”
She stood and kissed his cheek, her breath smelling of dark chocolate, and handed him the other unwrapped cookie. She said, “Don’t you like cookies?” She put his hands on her hips. “Come on—you like cookies.”
He said, “I’m married,” and thought of Millie. Those pink lips. How her thighs gripped like a vise around his waist.
“I didn’t ask if you were married. I asked about the cookie.” He walked backward away from the window and she walked toward him. Catching up, she pinned the backs of his knees to the bed’s edge, giving him a small kiss—a taste of chocolate. He kissed back. In addition to chocolate, she smelled like jasmine. If he let go, if his knees wobbled, if he fell back—and all it would take was a nudge—then he’d surrender. He liked cookies. She put her right hand on the back of his thigh and he dropped to the bed. It was quiet now. Rowan metaphorically waved his white flag.
Perched on his elbows, he watched her untie one of his shoes and then the other. Those strawberry-candied hands. He watched the way she intentionally swung her hair from shoulder to shoulder, the way she licked her lips. She pulled off his socks and draped them over his shoes, which she’d set side by side, laces tucked. Everything this woman did was deliberate.
She straddled him on the bed. A strand of her blond hair stuck to his bottom lip. He said again, “I’m married.”
She said, “I like that.”
It turned out that Patty was right about Rowan’s additive, about his contribution to Atkins and Thames. (Patty was seldom wrong.) Within three months, papers were signed. Their deal was legal. Rowan sat across from Franklin Thames himself, the old white-haired man smoking a cigar, offering Rowan a menthol smoke from his gold-plated cigarette case—an antique from the 1930s.
“I don’t smoke cigarettes.”
The old man laughed. He leaned forward and pulled a cigar from his shirt pocket.
Rowan slipped the cigar into his jacket. “I’ll save it for later.”
The two men were alone, Thames having excused the other members of the board. He said, “Just between you and me and Rick and the other chemists …” He laughed again. A jolly old man. A rich old man. “… your additive is going to double our sales. Rick says it’s entirely tasteless. No one will know the formula’s changed. Hell, no one knows the formula.” The old man puffed his cigar and leaned back. “No one will ever again be a ‘part-time sometimes’ smoker.”
“Good news for us.”
“You have no idea how good.”
But Rowan knew. The zeroes on the first check issued to him by Franklin Thames were evidence of his additive’s contribution. No more sometimes smokers, those smokers the board of Atkins and Thames dubbed “dabblers.” Those smokers unwilling to commit. With Rowan’s additive, no more dabblers.
Rowan never smoked cigarettes. He found them vile. Sitting in the board room that warm May day across from Franklin Thames, Rowan convinced himself that he was doing nothing wrong. People had always smoked and would always smoke. The fact that his additive, the QR66 formula, tripled the effects of the already addictive chemicals in the Atkins and Thames cigarette, all twelve flavor combinations, was irrelevant. No one put a gun to anyone’s head and forced him or her to smoke. Besides, Atkins and Thames funded elementary school reading initiatives, after-school and preschool programs for at-risk children, Santa Families, cancer research, and canned-food drives for church-sponsored homeless shelters. Atkins and Thames did more good than harm.
Three months later, in August, the same month that Becca was struck by lightning, Patty Heathrow left a note on Rowan’s desk:
Rowe,
I’ll be a half hour late.
Patty
Rowan slipped it into the front pocket of his denim jacket, which he tossed on the ottoman before hurrying upstairs to dress for dinner.
There was nothing incriminating in those lines, so he would forget the note that his wife would find two days later, that she would stash in her jewelry box because she’d never heard of this Patty and this Patty had addressed this note to “Rowe,” not Professor Burke or Mr. Burke or Rowan.
By the time tall, lean Patty with the golden pixie hair extended her hand to Mary in Barnacle Bob’s, Rowan’s musings of a one-nighter or a two-weeker, these trysts that were an impossibility in his mind four years ago, had grown into a full-blown affair, a perfect affair because to his thinking there was no risk.
When he and Patty met over the years, whether it was in Chapel Hill or in Richmond, she showed no interest in clinging to him or belonging to him. She wanted nothing from him. When he suggested more time together to appease her, and because he felt guilty about the affair with Millie, she said, “We spend enough time together. Do you want me to stop liking you?”
In February 1979, two years after the affair with Patty began, as Becca finished her first successfully landed round-off cartwheel in gymnastics, Rowan sat across from Patty in the Paris Steak house in Richmond, Virginia. His mother-in-law was dead a week then. Outside the restaurant, a mean February wind blew, and through their booth window Rowan watched the wind sweep and swirl a cellophane cigarette wrapper. Even inside, where a fire roared, the wind chilled Rowan. He didn’t like death. No one did, he knew, but he didn’t like the three days he’d endured listening to his daughter question the existence of God and spirits, listening to his wife rant about apologies she was owed from the dead. It made him uncomfortable. He raised his coffee cup. “It’s been two years this month.”
Patty shrugged and looked back at the newspaper in front of her. “Let’s not make it a big deal.” He’d bought her a gold locket for their anniversary, and he felt for the jewelry b
ox in his pocket.
She said, “If you bought me something, I don’t want it. I like to pick things out myself.”
“Got it.” He left the locket in his pocket and felt stupid thinking that this affair between them required such gestures. He looked out the window again, at the dark expanse of parking lot and the tiny white cigarette butts dotting the paved landscape. Cigarette butts were now his bread and butter.
Against his better judgment, Rowan was falling hard for Patty, because she asked nothing of him.
Two months later, after Mary caught him in bed with Millie, he told Patty what happened.
“You’re screwing the babysitter in your wife’s bed!”
“Normally we meet in the garage.”
“That’s sick, Rowe. Something’s wrong with you.” They were in bed at the Madison Hotel, and Patty pulled the comforter up under her arms. “Is Mary going to divorce you?” She didn’t wait for him to respond. “Your wife’s either stupid or insane.” Patty fluffed her pillow and rolled onto her side, facing away from him. “Or both.”
“I’m sleeping in the garage.”
She rolled over and faced him. “Alone, I hope.”
He laughed.
“Does Rebecca know?”
“I don’t think so.”
They lay in silence that morning, Patty staring down at the bunched-up comforter tucked around Rowan’s waist. Rowan stared at her draped figure. He said, “Mary’s stupid and insane.”
“You like them young.”
“Are you jealous?” He kissed her forehead. “I like you, Patty-Cake.”
“I feel bad for your daughter.”
“Becca’s fine. Don’t talk about my kid.”
Despite his initial feelings about Patricia Heathrow—mainly that she was a bitch—he never perceived her as a threat to his family or his career. She seemed unmoved, unaffected by his affairs. Her only concern regarding his family (when she showed any concern at all) was for his daughter, the “odd” girl she saw haloed in snapshots. She occasionally joked, “You could sell Rebecca to the circus.” In her announcer’s voice she said, “Introducing … Lightning Girl.”
They were lovers and nothing more. In Rowan’s mind, they had an understanding. Without expectation, there would be no scene. No tears. No disappointment, but on one occasion, when they’d planned to meet at Poe’s Pub on a Saturday night before he drove back to Chapel Hill, this understanding was blurred for Rowan.
Patty didn’t show up.
She didn’t telephone the pub with an explanation, and he imagined the worst, the most dramatic tragedy. He sat at the bar until well past eleven, with the regulars crowding him in their coarse denim and greasy leather, the smoke from their cigarettes coating his new Ralph Lauren sweater, and he pictured Patty dead on a road somewhere. He saw her tumbling across the pavement like Jessica Lange in The Postman Always Rings Twice, her blond hair pink with blood, her lean arms and legs splayed across the double white lines. He was worried and told himself to stop imagining the worst. He phoned her six times that night, but because of their understanding, their no-strings-attached rule, he didn’t go to her apartment.
Patty called his hotel the next morning to say she’d had a bad headache. Maybe it was her tooth, but she hadn’t felt well. She was sorry.
He said, “I called you. Why didn’t you call Poe’s?”
“I had a headache.”
“I was worried.”
Again with the headache story.
Patty was no ditzy blonde. She never missed a beat. She was the epitome of common sense and organization. Headache or not, she would have had the wherewithal to phone, but he let it go. He’d see her again, but not for a while. He’d let things cool down. He’d spend some time with Becca. Maybe she’d like to come to Richmond with him: a father-daughter getaway. He’d ask.
For four years, Rowan didn’t know he was being played like the snare drum that Patty Heathrow had played in high school. He didn’t know that by the time she was in the eleventh grade, Patty rarely missed a beat or dropped a drumstick. Not her. Not his Patty-Cake. She won first place in regionals with her flam paradiddle-diddle and her perfect fifteen-stroke roll. She learned to play the snare in the sixth grade. She played thumbs down, and it took four years before she won her first competition. She had practiced her sixteenth notes on a pillow to build up speed in her left hand before switching to wood, before touching the sticks to the drum. She was meticulous and disciplined. She knew how to play to win. You don’t rush things. Rowan didn’t even know she was a percussionist, let alone that he was being brilliantly played. Sitting in Barnacle Bob’s, watching Patty shake his wife’s hand, he was anxious to talk to Patty alone. Rowan knew this was no coincidence. He thought he knew what Patty was doing, what she was trying to do, but then he thought that he never knew what Patty-Cake was doing, and that made him want her all the more.
Excerpt from
THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS
“I’ve worked outdoors my whole life and I’ve never been struck, and then one day, the sky so blue, not a cloud anywhere, and my wife, Darlene, brings me a glass of water. The lightning hits her. I saw it. It entered through her back and out her left heel. She survived, but she can hardly remember my name, and we’ve been married twenty-four years. She walks with a limp, and sometimes calls me by another man’s name. The other thing is, she’s got this awful scar on her back where the lightning entered, and we know when it’s going to storm now because her back will start to hurt real bad and she’ll take to her bed.
I am glad Darlene survived. I only wish that I was the one who got struck.”
Account by Patrick Fitzgerald, rancher
[20]
Merry Weather, 1978
Buckley sits alone in the common area of Hawthorne Dormitory at the University of Arkansas, thinking about the past—his mother and Clementine, and sometimes the reverend and his grandmother. He remembers his mother, half the woman she had been, her skin fatless and sagging in yellowed pouches off her bones. Clementine giggling and drunk, calling him Scott. Clementine saying “Ah.” How she would “Ah” and “Ah” and “Ah,” and how she would say it softly, like she was in ecstasy and she was the happiest person he’d ever known, and how she would say “You need to relax. You’re just a kid, for Christ’s sake.” Buckley’s stepfather, the Reverend John Whitehouse, said, “No man nor woman should be loved more than the Lord.” Buckley’s mother’s breathing fainter, the skin swinging from her arms and drooping from her knees. How he loved his mother more than any lord. How he loved Clementine more than any lord. How the nitrates in Vienna sausages and pork rinds will make you mean, and he sees the summer squash nose of the reverend, puffy and bumpy and red, and he imagines he’s pulling that nose out of one of those big jars, his hand in the cold liquid, digging for it like it’s a red-hot sausage, and someone shouts, “Loser,” and he sits up on the tattered sofa and the past is gone. His dorm-mate Cliff plops down beside him.
“Have you got it?”
“What?”
“The questions for the exam. Shit, man! The questions. Are you jerking off?”
“Yeah, man, right here.” Buckley shuffles through the papers, which are damp and crinkled on the sofa.
“You made my fucking day.”
Buckley stole the questions from Dr. Cooper’s desk, mimeographed the two sheets, and replaced them within the same hour. Though he knows he’ll be expelled—if caught—he doesn’t care. To tell the truth, he’s got nothing to lose.
At three o’clock he waits in the dark, windowless corridor outside Dr. Jack’s office. His appointment’s for three-fifteen, but he’s not supposed to be late again. He’s been warned. He’s lucky he wasn’t expelled already, but there’s no pre ce dent for such behavior, nothing in the code of conduct about standing on top of a university dorm with a TV antenna during a thunderstorm. Buckley apologized. How many times? A hundred, and yet he’s here waiting for Dr. Jack to once again ask him about his cl
asses, about his family, about the antenna and the rubber gloves and Martin Merriwether. Does he feel responsible for what happened to Martin? It’s implied that he should feel responsible.
Buckley rooms alone now. He’s still in the dormitory because that’s part of his scholarship, but he has a private room, and Tad, Martin Merriwether’s replacement, is always dropping by, poking his head in, forcing his way into Buckley’s corner of the world to make sure everything’s “on the up-and-up,” because ultimately, the new resident assistant explains, he’s responsible for the safety of the residents. Doesn’t Buckley understand these things? And Tad has no intention of putting his life at risk to help Buckley. According to Tad and the rest of them, Buckley is a problem. He’s to be watched.
Buckley explains to Dr. Jack, “It’s impossible to make someone get struck by lightning.” Sure, thinks Buckley, there are models and drawings and diagrams and pictures of lightning strikes, but there’s never been a case where someone made lightning strike somebody. Or somebody else, he should say. Buckley imagines some poor sap with an electrical rod duct-taped to his torso on top of the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower and chuckles inwardly. It’s ludicrous. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“Of course not,” agrees Dr. Jack, who sits across from Buckley in a squeaking leather chair. There’s no sofa, just Dr. Jack and his junky old wooden desk, his steno note pad, and beyond that, a filthy window beaded and streaked with late-summer rain. “Not directly.”
Buckley tries to think of something else to say, because he’s always wanted to be a team player and he’s supposed to talk, to tell how he feels. That’s why he’s required to be here. To get it all out in the open. He retrieves a dusty paperback from his satchel. He licks his pointer finger and opens the book to page three. “According to Dr. Schwartz, only twenty percent of people struck by lightning actually die.” He holds the book Lightning Statistics open for Dr. Jack.
The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors Page 18
