Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend

by Robert James Waller

  He owned four glasses. All of them were in the sink, dirty. He washed one and pulled an ice cube tray from the refrigerator.

  Jellie walked slowly past his desk, trailing her finger along the edge of it. Above the desk were notes and two snapshots. One of the pictures was her standing by a stone wall in Ireland. The other was a yellowed, curling, black-and-white shot of a young woman in a long dress and a bearded man in a dark turtleneck sweater, jeans, and sandals. She stared at the second photo and recognized the eyes. “Is that you?”

  He looked up from the counter where he was fixing her drink. “Yes. A long time ago in Berkeley.” He poured Jack Daniel’s and handed the glass to her. “The woman’s name was Nadia. She’s an implacable feminist now—was starting to become one then, in fact—works for the National Council of Women. We exchange notes at Christmas.”

  Jellie didn’t say anything. She read the words typed on the computer screen: In this place I hear the quiet rasp of things as they used to be. I come at dawn, I come at nightfall, and all the hours in between. I come to hear the rustle of twilight robes and songs from the time of Gregory. I come because old things live here, things I understand without knowing why.

  “Is this something you’re writing?” She sipped on her whiskey and pointed at the screen.

  “Yeah, I keep fiddling around, thinking I might have a novel inside me.” He set the bottle of beer he was drinking on the counter.

  “Do you?”

  “Maybe. It’s harder than I thought it would be. Writing the academic stuff and essays, you’re always bound to reality. So far I’m having trouble dealing with the freedom to make up anything I want to say. It’s kind of strange—in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it.”

  “Justifiable lies,” she said. “I suppose that happens sometimes in real life, too.”

  “If you’re a relativist it does. And maybe now and then if it’s absolutely necessary to cushion someone from a world gone too harsh and bitter.”

  In the far corner of the room was an easel folded and leaning against a window. “Do you paint?” Jellie asked.

  Michael grinned, shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “I try. I know a guy named Wayne Regenson over in the art department. He and his wife periodically fight like hell. When that happens he drops by for a little male support, which I’m not very good at, but better than nothing, I suppose. In return he’s been trying to teach me oil painting. It’s coming real slow. Real, real slow. In some ways, though, it can be a lot like mathematics—true mathematics—the same feelings in your brain. The elegance of saying much with little, bringing together left-brained technique and right-brained shapes.”

  “Like the long-range jumpshot, too?”

  He thought for a moment. “Yes, that too.”

  “Is this one of yours?” She was looking at an oil painting, framed and hanging on the wall. It was a group of black, vertical lines sprouting slashes of green and a ribbon of yellow winding away from the viewer, back into the vertical lines. Farther and farther the streak of yellow wound, disappearing then in a splash of red.

  “Yes, it’s the only one I can bear looking at. Actually I kind of like it.”

  “So do I. Does it have a title?”

  “I call it Butterfly Gone.”

  Jellie tipped her glass and took a serious drink of Jack Daniel’s. She turned and looked at him, then out the window. In the hard, south light of November, he noticed for the first time the early lines of age coming to her face.

  “This seems very strange, Michael. All our talks, our resolutions about right and wrong… all of that.” The university band was marching down the street a block away, playing the fight song, “We will go undaunted, hear our cry, hear our cry.” Jellie Braden watched the dark curling leaves of late autumn stir and begin to tumble across the grass as a light breeze came in from the west.

  Michael always remembered how she had looked that morning in Cedar Bend, staring outside at the things of autumn. Still looking out the window, she’d reached up and taken the elastic band from her pony-tail, shaking the thick black hair loose and long. She’d looked over at him then, the gray eyes soft and no longer like an arrow in flight, saying, “I’m a little shaky. It’s been a long time since… well, a long time.”

  “When are you expected home?”

  “I have the day. Jimmy’s attending a reunion of his fraternity on campus. They’re all going to the game and out to dinner after that. All that arm punching and male bonding was more than I could think about tolerating. Besides“—she smiled—“there were the ducks.”

  In midafternoon they heard the roar of the football crowd from the stadium. The sound of it came faintly over tapes of Cleo Laine ballads and sweet obscurities whispered in Tamil by Jellie Braden on an autumn afternoon in the high latitudes.

  “If God lives at all, God lives in moments like these,” a man had once said to her. And she had said that to Michael Tillman in English, looking up at him, touching his face with her hands, loving him and missing that other man and sometimes confusing the two of them even though she didn’t want to on that afternoon.

  Michael looked down at the pulse of blood in her throat, at her eyes widening as she arched her breasts and belly toward him, eyes looking first at him and then straight upward as India rolled within her and time went back to the high country of an older land where dark hands had moved over those same breasts and a voice had commanded her, “Wider now, Jellie, wider still, everything, Jellie. Give me all of you, and I’ll give you back yourself when we have finished.” And in the high country she had screamed aloud in some combination of fear and pleasure. And she had done that once more in a bed in Iowa, then turned the scream into a dwindling, involuntary cry for all the things she had once felt and now felt again with another strange man who lived in his own far places.

  Michael had a sense that day she was feeling and doing things not attributable to her life with Jimmy Braden. It was obvious this was a woman who had gone before into sensual frontiers where he was sure Jimmy never ventured. Something about how nakedness did not bother her. Something about how she moved freely and uninhibited beneath him and with him, how she touched him with hands that were practiced and surprising in what they did. Something about the directness of her words when they first lay on the bed, still dressed, and she had pulled back from him, smiling. “I seem to remember it’s necessary for me to take off my jeans if this is going to work out in the best possible way.”

  Later, with post-football game traffic moving along the streets outside, he fetched beers for them. When he came back into the bedroom Jellie was sitting on her knees, legs under her. She’d grinned at him, hair hanging in disarray above her breasts. He lay down beside her, and she touched his chest. “It was worth the wait,” she said quietly. Malachi lay in the doorway, head on his paws, brown eyes turned up toward the bed. Casserole sat on the dresser and licked a paw.

  Michael ran his hand slowly along Jellie’s body. “Now it seems worth the wait. It didn’t seem that way while waiting.” He raised up on one elbow. “One of my many quirks is I get crazy hungry after making love. How’s a toasted cheese sandwich sound? That’s about all I have.”

  “Make three, and we’ll each have one plus another to share.” She leaned over and kissed him. “My secret passion is fried potatoes with a little onion mixed in. You got potatoes, motorcycle man, big fresh ones?” She smiled. “Out in the kitchen, I mean.”

  “I got potatoes, Jellie-Who-Sometimes-Talks-Raunchy-in-the-Afternoon. I also got onions and lots a beer.”

  “We’re in fat city. You cook the sandwiches, I’ll handle potatoes. Deal?”

  “Deal. Do we have to get dressed, though? I love seeing you naked.”

  “God, no. Given what I suspect—what I hope—will go on after we eat, that’d be wasted effort.” She bounced off the bed. “On to the naked kitchen for naked lunch, then. Who said that, naked lunch? I should know. William…”

  “Burroughs. OP wi
ld and woolly William S. It’s the title of one of his books.”

  “Get out the bread and show me the potatoes, Captain America. I’m starving, too.”

  Two weeks later she was gone. She’d had surges of guilt about Jimmy. So had Michael. Jellie cried once, thinking of it. “How can I be so callous and yet not care I’m being callous? I want you so much nothing matters, not guilt or anything like that.”

  But something had gone wrong in her marriage. It had been there for a long while, and the semester in England had underscored it, brought it into hard, sharp relief. Michael asked if that was merely rationalization to salve over what the two of them were doing.

  She shook her head. “I keep thinking of the word inertia. Sometimes, I think people stay together because of inertia and not much else. I have the feeling Jimmy and I are riding a tired horse, but we just keep going on because we don’t know what else to do. Jimmy wants to be a university administrator, a dean or something, and I can’t get very excited about that, about being a good little administrator’s wife. I told him I want to finish my master’s, go on for a Ph.D., and find a teaching position. He only said it would be difficult for both of us to find jobs we want at the same university. We had a couple of bad arguments about that in England.”

  Michael let her talk, let her work through all of the complicated things she was feeling. In some ways, Jellie was a traditional woman. In other ways, she was the new and emancipated woman, intent on finding her own way in the world. All of that was difficult enough to sort out by itself, and now he’d entered the situation and cluttered it up even more. Though, when Michael mentioned that, she was kind enough to say he was not part of the clutter. But he was.

  Jellie had to go to Syracuse for Thanksgiving. Her parents had come out to Cedar Bend last year, so it was her turn to visit them. Jimmy’s folks were coming up from Rhode Island. She and Michael spent the entire afternoon together the day before she left, and he picked up something a little different in her behavior, something that started to haunt him.

  “Anything the matter, Jellie?”

  She looked at him lovingly. There was no question about how she felt, as far as he could tell. “No, not really.” He didn’t push it, figuring it would pass.

  Michael fiddled around over the long Thanksgiving weekend, counting the hours until Jellie would return. He fixed a tuna sandwich on turkey day and ate it while looking at the Polaroid of Jellie standing by a stone wall in Ireland. The computer keyboard was dusty, and the Shadow needed work, but he couldn’t find any motivation to do anything except jog in the mornings and think about her.

  On Sunday evening the department head called and asked if Michael could cover Jimmy’s econometrics class the next day. Jimmy had been delayed in Syracuse, some kind of personal emergency was all the department head knew. Michael went crazy, paced the floor, pounded the walls, Malachi and Casserole watching him in a kind of wonder.

  Monday night and still no word. He got the Markhams’ phone number from information and dialed it. Eleanor Markham answered. Jesus, it would have to be Mother Markham. Michael used the pretense he was covering Jimmy’s class and wanted some idea of how long he might be away. Shallow, transparent, but then he wasn’t thinking very well.

  Mrs. Markham was cool, very cool—brittle, in fact—and said Jimmy was on his way back to Cedar Bend. She had known something about Jellie and the motorcycle man a year ago. She knew a great deal more now, Michael had a hunch. She’d said Jimmy was on his way back. She hadn’t used both their names or a plural pronoun, indicating both of them were returning. Michael was screaming inside and wanted to ask about Jellie, but he had the clear sensation Eleanor Markham had no interest in talking with him about anything.

  He hung up and went absolutely wild in his head. The phone rang fifteen minutes later. It was Jimmy. He was back and wanted to come over. Michael said, “Yes, come right away, no problem, come as soon as you want to,” obviously overplaying it, but Jimmy didn’t have a feeling for that kind of stuff and missed it completely.

  He rapped on Michael’s door five minutes later. Michael knew there was serious business afoot, just by looking at him. No tie, rumpled clothing, hair askew. Not the Newport Jimmy Braden Michael had come to know.

  “Michael, something terrible has happened, and I don’t have anyone to talk to about it. I’m close to falling apart.”

  The voice inside Michael’s head was shouting, “Jimmy Braden, you fey little bastard, what’s going on? Where’s Jellie?” It was screaming loud enough for Jimmy to hear, but he didn’t because he wasn’t listening. Jimmy merely sat on a kitchen chair, put his head in his hands, and cried. Michael brought himself down—level, brother—get level, stay level, and ask the right questions.

  “Talk to me, Jimmy. What’s happened? Does it have something to do with Jellie?”

  He sobbed and moved his head up and down in the affirmative. Don’t panic, get the information, get to the bottom, omit the extraneous junk and side issues. “Where’s Jellie?”

  Jimmy looked up, crying hard, and got it out: “She’s gone to India.”

  “What?” Michael nearly shouted. “India? What the hell for? What’s going on? Get straight and talk to me, Jimmy. I can’t be of any help unless you do that. Why’d she go?”

  “I don’t know. We didn’t have a fight or anything. Saturday morning Jellie just said she had some things to think about and was going to India. Christ, Michael, I begged her, groveled, said whatever it was could be worked out, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She wasn’t mean or cold, none of that, just far away from all of us, thinking about something. It was an awful scene, an absolute hell. Her parents were screaming, my parents were screaming, I was stumbling all over the place, and Jellie was packing her suitcase.”

  “Okay,” Michael said. “We don’t know why she went, but do you know where she went? She once mentioned a place called Pondicherry, in the southeast. Is that where she went?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jimmy was sniffling again. Michael scrounged around for a box of tissues, couldn’t find any, went in the John and brought out a new roll of toilet paper. Jimmy ripped off a wad and worked on his eyes with it, his voice thick and wet, phlegm in his throat. He blew his nose and said, “I tried to find out where she went, but the airlines won’t give out that information on passengers. India’s a huge place, so it’s hard to say where she is, but, yes, she spent time in Pondicherry when she was there before.”

  Jimmy didn’t drink coffee or beer. Michael poured him a glass of orange juice, lit a cigarette, and went over to the Shadow, straddling it, arms folded. He looked up at the wall and saw the picture of Jellie hanging there, decided it wasn’t a good idea for Jimmy to see it displayed so prominently. When Jimmy went back to wiping his eyes, Michael took it down and slid it under some papers on the desk. Jimmy Braden sat bent over, elbows on his knees, at the same kitchen table where Michael had made love with his wife a week ago, scraping the salt and pepper shakers onto the floor as he laid her down. She was laughing then.

  “When did she leave, Jimmy? What airline was she taking out of New York?”

  “Saturday night. She left Saturday night. She took a flight out of Syracuse to Kennedy. Wouldn’t even let me or anyone else go to the airport with her and wouldn’t tell me what airline she was taking out of New York.”

  “Somehow none of this sounds like Jellie,” Michael said. Smiling, warm, caring Jellie. It didn’t sound like her at all.

  “I know it doesn’t. That’s what makes it so strange, Michael. It seems so unlike her.”

  Or maybe it isn’t, Michael thought. Maybe there are things about Jellie Braden none of us know, or at least that he and Jimmy didn’t know.

  “Jimmy, I’m going to ask you a question. You can choose whether or not to answer it. I don’t have to know, but I’ve somehow gotten this sense Jellie doesn’t like to talk about her India days. Did something happen to her over there?”

  Jimmy looked up. “Michael, I
can’t say anything about that. I’d tell you if I could, but I just can’t. I just can’t. Please understand.”

  Michael appreciated him for feeling that way and sticking to it. It would have been easy at a time like this to spill out the whole story, but he didn’t. Michael decided Jimmy Braden might be a better man than he’d given him credit for.

  “All right, then let me ask this: Do you think whatever happened to her in India had anything to do with her going back there now?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t imagine why, if she’s told me the truth about her time in India. Like I said, I can’t talk about it, but I guess I can say what occurred in India was over a long time ago, or at least I thought it was.”

  Michael needed time to think, be by himself and start working out the options. Yet he didn’t want to let Jimmy go home alone in this condition.

  “Jimmy, want me to arrange for someone to take your classes for a while, until you get yourself together again?”

  “No, I need to be doing something. I’ve never been good at just sitting around and thinking, at introspection. I’ve got to get myself squared away somehow, and maybe getting back to school will help. Jellie just needs time to think, I’m sure.”

  Michael lowered his opinion of Jimmy by an amount greater than he’d raised it a moment ago. Jesus Christ, he thought, don’t put up with this shit, man. Screw the university. Get on the first plane to India and start looking for your wife. Talk to her, try to sort it out. That was not the way of Jimmy Braden, though. He was going to lie back and take it, and hope.

  But Jimmy Braden had never changed the oil in a banker’s car when summer was high and the wind from the western lands was hot and made your greasy clothes stick to your body. He’d never stuck his head under the hood of an automobile and listened to the turn of an engine while his father staggered around with a flask in his pocket and yelled at him. And Jimmy Braden had never cut hard to the right and gone into the air with his knee swollen and twelve thousand crazed assholes screaming for and against him.