Softspoken

by Lucius Shepard

  The books contain page after page of cramped script detailing the growth of the Bullard family tree, material of no greater interest to Sanie than those interminable daisy chains of “begats” found in the Bible. The first of them records Bullard history into the mid-seventeenth century, when Henry Bullard, wounded during the Seven Years’ War, sailed with his wife Nora to America, and there took possession of a land grant awarded for his courageous service. The second and third are devoted to the spread of the family in the United States. Basically more of the same, but with one distinction. In the margins next to some of the names are scribbled dates spanning a period between 1987 and 1996, the year Rayfield died. Certain names are annotated with multiple dates, and some of the dates end with question marks. Madeleine Bullard (1854-1882), the great-great-granddaughter of Henry and Mary, has fourteen such dates crammed together beside her name and three of them—November 29, 1989; July 12, 1992; October 26, 1993—have question marks appended.

  Sanie’s puzzling over these marginalia when she hears Jackson calling to her. His voice holds a questioning tone and by this she knows he’s dipped deeper into the handbook of marital tactics. He’ll act the penitent, draw her into a superficial discussion of their problems and, in the process, his penitence will morph into tender concern. Does she feel all right? Is she having migraines again? Thus implying that her fit of stubbornness is a result of a physical problem, some female thing for which she’s not responsible. It’s an out he offers her. He’ll inundate her with false sympathy—though he won’t perceive it as false—until, weary of it all, she apologizes for the accident of gender. She gets to her feet, tiptoes to the door of the sitting room, shuts and locks it.

  She remains on edge even after he stops calling. Unable to concentrate, she sets the book aside and dozes in the chair. Noises from the next room wake her. Muddled, she can’t unscramble them, but as her head clears she understands that Will and Allie are making love. Throbbing monkey love, by the sound. Sanie would never have expected it, but Will’s a talker. He gives instructions, offers profane endearments and compliments, dialogue straight out of an old porno flick. Allie responds with spacey cooings. It’s as if Goldilocks and Papa Bear are having a fling in the woodland cottage. Sanie can’t imagine the levels of fantasy necessary to transform Will into this bedroom Godzilla. Fifteen minutes go by. Twenty-five minutes. She grows wistful, remembering the last time she fucked for that long. With a geology grad student, her freshman year at Carolina, six months before she met Jackson. Thinking about it gets her aroused. After thirty-five minutes she wonders, What if they’re at it all night? But at the forty-two-minute mark, Allie yields up a broken, swooning cry and Will disgorges a mighty grunt. She can hear them talking afterward, moving around the room, boards creaking under their feet. And then silence. It’s like a little fire has gone out, and Sanie, still aroused, unbuttons her cut-offs, just the top button, and slips her right hand down into her panties. She’s wetter than she realized, and when she touches her clit, a warm wave lifts through her body and for a second she worries someone will hear, that Jackson will pound on the door, but she doesn’t want to stop and soon the cut-offs and panties are around her ankles and she slips a finger inside herself to collect her oils, bringing them forth to rub onto her clit, rubbing feverishly, and she needs him inside, she aches for him, the “he” that sometimes has a face, sometimes not, but he isn’t ever there enough, he’s not enough there, so she imagines his cock, she licks it and takes the head in her mouth, and it’s hard, thick, hot, yet almost weightless on her tongue, like it’s made of balsa wood, and she wants him to come on her breasts, to massage his sperm into her nipples, and it gets all crazy and disjointed, images, urges, her hips thrashing, and before long she’s biting the name of Jesus in half to stop from shouting it, and digging her fingers into the arm of the chair, belly heaving, legs splayed and stiff until the finishes, and then she presses her thighs together, keeping her right hand in place, and draws up her knees, trying to hold onto the heat, the involvement, the feeling that’s ebbing from her. She’s shocked by the intensity of her orgasm, by how quickly it happened. Usually it takes her a while.

  She dresses hurriedly, her haste fueled by guilt over this imaginary, impersonal infidelity, and by the cold. These plantation houses were built to keep things cool, and sometimes, even in the summer, they can be uncomfortably so. And, too, she has the feeling that she’s being watched. She’s grown accustomed to constant oversight from living with Jackson, but this has engaged her spider senses, set the back of her neck to prickling, and she’d swear that a mysterious figure is standing behind the bookshelves, peering through a hollowed-out edition of The Firm or Christine. Louise, perhaps. Wearing a monk’s robe over a bustier. Sanie can’t quite laugh it off. All buttoned and tucked, she unlocks the door and peeks out. Will’s room is empty. As she crosses the room, she catches sight of several objets d’amour on the floor beside the bed. A large vibrator, a finger-sized pink vibrator covered in wartlike bumps, tubes of flavored lubricants, discarded packaging bearing the name The Anal Intruder, and, still in its unopened box, half-obscured behind a sun-glazed plasticene panel, something green and pointy and menacing. She kneels and takes a peek. It’s a toy figurine, an alien monster with tentacles and a fearsome visage and even more fearsome potential than the Anal Intruder. Curiously enough, it seems not at all out of place, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a little squad of grotesque superheroes arranged in a ragged line, a fresh recruit brought up to reinforce the survivors of a battle.

  ELEVEN

  Every war should have a name, but Sanie can’t come up with one for the war that’s been initiated between her and Jackson. The War of Cheerful Grins would be superficially descriptive, as would the War of Scrupulous Politeness. But there’s nothing superficial about their conflict. As the days pass, and they’re all basically the same day, her acting chipper, Jackson acting unconcerned, brittle smiles and brief, glib exchanges, he in his study, her off running errands or down at Snade’s or hiding out in some obscure portion of the house, she realizes that she’s fighting for her life. Often when driving into Edenburg, an image of Jackson in denial mode will come before her mind’s eye, and she’ll bang the heel of her hand on the steering wheel, punch the dash, make some ineffectual gesture of frustration, and say, Jerk! Fucking control freak! Something that serves to encapsulate his essence. Then she firms her lips, drives a little faster, formulates a plan. She’ll withdraw half their funds from the bank, head back to Chapel Hill, collect her clothes and possessions, and be off again that same day. She’ll spend the night in a Virginia motel and the next day she’ll drive straight through to New York, where she can stay with friends, begin a life of substance. No matter what she does, it’ll be more substantial than fetching coffee, doing laundry, picking up his dry cleaning, his copies, dropping off his library books, cooking, hosting dinner parties for people he wants to impress…She can’t recall at what point during the ten years of the relationship she made the transition from determined young woman to kitchen drudge/gofer/business accessory/sexual appliance, but it’s evident that Jackson conditioned her, slowly wore her down with his passive aggression. There will be time later, she thinks, to analyze her imperfections, to assign her portion of blame. For now, while her head’s above water and she has a view of the marriage unimpeded by guilt, it’s essential that she put some distance between them and get clear of his influence. Yet as always, when she reaches town that day, she does not go to the bank, she does not drive to Virginia or New York, she performs her several wifely duties, checks the mail, picks up Jackson’s prescription, does some essential shopping at the Piggly Wiggly, where a person costumed as Mr. Pig (butcher’s apron, dress shirt with red stripes, black bow tie, and plastic pig head) is cavorting about the parking lot and attempts to thrust upon her a tray of noxious-looking appetizers; and then, instead of going straight home (as expected) to deliver the mail, medication, and so forth, she engages in a minor act of rebellion and sto
ps in at the town’s sole concession to modernity, a coffee shop called The Great Bean, bright and clean and smelling of exotic blends, which occupies a glass storefront on Edenburg’s main drag and is run by two sweet souls in their early thirties, Levi and Andy, who dispense designer caffein and pass the time listening to jazz and are, it’s said, gay. An affection for jazz is considered one of the seven signs of the homosexual in these parts, the cliché no less odious because, in this case, it’s accurate. Levi greets her by name, speaking like he’s got a candy mint under his tongue, and, as he makes her latte, says it sure looks like rain.

  Sanie takes her double tall mocha to a table by the window and stares mournfully out at the Doodlebug, a sundries shop across the street, a view segmented by ancient parking meters sticking up from curbs so high they have steps, watching a pedestrian passage of farmers, lean, leathery ones with nicotine-stained fingers and baseball caps, and fat ones with sunburned necks, pale as the hogs they butcher, wearing sunglasses and khaki trousers with EZ-Fit elastic waistbands, and matrons towing complaining kids, and teenagers roughhousing as they approach the Tastee Freez, and a wizened old geezer with gray hair, greaser sideburns, and a comb protruding from his back pocket, who glances behind him fitfully as if worried that he’s being tailed. A perverted version of Norman Rockwell, Hell on Goober Street, and she’s trapped in an air-conditioned bubble inside it. Shame wells up in her, hot and galling. She can’t believe how weak-willed she’s become. It’s useless to blame Jackson; it’s her who needs fixing and she hasn’t a clue where to begin. She takes out her pen and notebook, hoping writing will help her focus, but she’s got too much on her mind and she continues to stare out the window. Levi slips a new disc into the changer and a solo alto sax wails. Ornette Coleman’s “Sadness.” The first time he played it, she asked him what it was called. She liked it—its soaring, plaintive melody captured her mood. Now he plays it whenever she stops in and she’s come to hate it for the very same reason she once liked it. The sky darkens and a scattering of drops freckles the sidewalks. She’s been there half an hour and she’s written a single word: “rain.”

  A black man steps out of OC’s Pool Room adjoining the Doodlebug, and lights a cigarette. He’s followed in short order by Frank Dean, dressed in a green T-shirt and jeans. Sanie perks up. He scans the street, fixes on her SUV, says something to the black man, who laughs; then he jogs across the street as the rain falls harder, heading for the coffee shop. By the time he hits the door, it has increased to a downpour and he enters dripping.

  “Hey, there,” he says, a little breathless. “I been hoping I’d run into you. Let me get some coffee.”

  She’s still angry over the way he treated Jackson at the Boogie Shack and, as she listens to him putting in his order, joking with Levi, she grows angrier yet because he’s so affable, so easy around people, something Jackson has to work at, and she’s attracted to that quality, attracted to him, and, with everything else that’s going on, she doesn’t want to deal with the attraction; in fact, she resents him for it.

  “Sorry about the other night,” he says. “Your husband caught me off-guard. I don’t usually let stuff like that get to me.”

  Sanie’s response is clipped, hostile. “Stuff like what?”

  Frank Dean shoots her a quizzical look. “Like the other night at the bar.”

  “Oh, that.” Sanie makes a gesture as if she’s flicking crumbs away, and has a sip of her latte.

  “I’m not gonna let you stay mad at me,” he says after an interval. “Just because your husband and I got to acting like a couple of dogs, that’s no reason to get all bent out of shape. Men are prone to act that way around women. He was being territorial and I was an asshole. So how about we put that behind us and talk about, y’know, the weather or something.”

  His reasonable approach turns down the flame of Sanie’s anger a few degrees, yet it gives her another reason to be angry. How dare he be reasonable? She needs anger as a defense.

  “Football. You’re a southern girl, right? You must be able to talk football. What’s up with the ’heels? Is North Carolina going places under Coach Bunting?”

  “Oh, yeah. Scary places.” She clamps her lips, but it’s too late. She pictures her anger dropping like the mercury in a cartoon thermometer, going down so fast it yields a funny sound, a fwwwp, and grows an icicle off the bottom.

  “I never have understood,” he says, “why with all the politically correct bullshit going on, why nobody’s ever gone after the name, Tar Heels.”

  For several minutes, they debate whether or not “tar heel” primarily refers to a person of mixed race or to the fact that North Carolina once commercially produced sizable quantities of pitch; then they debate which is the stronger football conference, ACC or SEC. No longer seeking to forestall the conversation, Sanie tries to prolong it, and she tells him in more detail about the ghost voice, her peyote trip, the strange notations in Rayfield’s journals.

  “Know who you might want to ask about all this?” Frank Dean grabs her pen and notebook and scribbles on a blank page. “Janine Morrison. She’s working now, but you can give her a call and set up a time to talk. She was Rayfield’s secretary for a while. She told me about some weird stuff happened to her. I bet she’d be glad to tell you what she knows.”

  Their conversation loses energy, then, allowing the sexual tension to become more palpable, an actual pull, and Sanie recognizes that they’ve reached a point where it would be natural to nudge things in a more personal direction, and she has an urge, an almost overwhelming urge, to tell him about the marriage, its lusterless depths and scummy shallows, like a lake whose feeder source is drying up, but she understands that would be prelude to a deeper involvement, making a date to meet again (just coffee, of course), or, and this is not inconceivable to her, going to a motel and smoking up the sheets for an hour or two, until—in a panic—she realizes what she’s done. She says nothing to dispel the awkward moment, stares down at her hands, notices she’s started chewing her nails again.

  “Well…” He peers though the blurred window. “This isn’t going to let up anytime soon. I got to get back to the shop.” He comes to his feet and smiles at her.

  She smiles back and makes a pale joke. “You’re dressed so neatly, I thought this must be your day off.”

  He glances down at his clothes. “I had a meeting at the bank. To discuss my so-called finances. Once I get into old lady Brainard’s transmission, I’ll soon be restored to my usual grungy state.”

  He sidles to the door, hangs beside it, and this is the point at which the motel becomes possible. All she has do is to say, “Wait, I’ll walk out with you,” and stand in the doorway for a second or two, looking up at him, and he’ll say hesitantly, “You wanta go somewhere for a while?” and she’ll nod, less hesitantly, and that’ll be that.

  “Okay. I’m gone.” He opens the door and, the instant before he runs out into the rain, adds, “Don’t get wet, now.”

  She suspects he may be kicking himself for the subtext of this unnecessary caution, or maybe he half-intended it. One way or the other, it doesn’t matter. After just a cup of coffee, it’s plain now—if it wasn’t already—that they have a lot of subtext.

  TWELVE

  In the rainy twilight, almost dark as night, the spirits of the house seem to be oppressed, and the corridors, lacking the supernatural luster she’s applied to them, have a dead feel, like tunnels burrowed by long-gone termites through the half-rotted wood, and the lamp shades, the wallpaper, every cloth surface, are clammy to the touch, permeated with damp—even the light appears water-damaged and weakened, incapable of reaching into shadowy corners it once illuminated. The study door is shut, a seam of lamp glow beneath it. Relieved at being able to avoid a confrontation, she places Jackson’s pills on the floor outside the study and goes upstairs. Voices issue from Will’s room. He and Allie are doubtless getting set to play Galactina and the Space Invader—she imagines Will in his boxers, the toy alien in hand, ab
out to apply it to Allie, who pretends to cower. Sanie goes into her room and sits on the edge of the bed. As the walls close in, her mind retreats to the precincts of the no-tell motel toward which she and Frank Dean might have sped, but she stamps out that spark before it catches. Though she’s been tempted on several occasions, she’s never engaged in an affair, and she’s not prepared to do so now, this despite the close call earlier that afternoon. Best not to indulge in fantasies. There must be a reason she’s stuck in the marriage, something aside from security and creature comforts and her weakness. A contractual obligation, or some thin loyalty she must satisfy. She needs to comprehend that reason, she thinks, before she can leave. For days, she studies on the problem, but either a solution doesn’t exist or else it’s beyond her ability to perceive. She does a lot of staring out the kitchen window, analytic thought crumbling into daydreams.

  The rain continues, August turning to September, and the gloom in the house begins to feel perpetual, a lunar twilight, damp and chill. She cuts short her trips into town, staying clear of Frank Dean, of all but the most perfunctory interactions; she limits her visits to Snade’s Corners, but doesn’t cut them out entirely. She needs a place where she can breathe and be herself, where she can kick back and listen to Gar gossip, make a joke and have someone laugh at it, and, though it strikes her as a little odd that she can’t find this in the marriage, she’s taken refuge in a generalized condemnation of men, a bumper-sticker feminism, and concluded that every marriage has the same level of dysfunction and thus essentially the same character. Otherwise, her conversations are confined to brief chats with Will, who spends much of his time with Allie, and flinty exchanges with Jackson. Their war goes on, but its intensity has diminished. They pretend, as perhaps they have always done, but the pretense of intimacy has fled. She reads. DeLillo, Grisham, Ozick, and, an irony, locked away in her own manor house, the Brontës. Now and again she hears the ghost voice, but she’s grown accustomed to it and it no longer has the power to surprise or intrigue—it might as well be a moth batting its wings against a window. She sits long hours in the kitchen, hoping for her muse to alight, notebook and pen at the ready. One afternoon, while she’s slumped at the kitchen table, Louise, wearing a flowered housecoat and slippers, bangs in through the door, stops, retreats a step, hovering beside the sink, consternation writ large upon her pudding face. Sanie examines her coolly, then looks down at her notebook, at the words scribbled there, and says, “Do what you need to do. I won’t bother you.”