Carter Clay (35 page)

“Almost fell asleep myself!” Carter sets a Butterfinger candy bar on the counter along with his cup of coffee. “It was like I heard a click. Click, goes my brain, and then I feel a tire go off the road—” Carter laughs. He wants to chat with the clerk, and not just to help himself wake up, no, he wants to erase the look of alarm he caused on the clerk's face merely by entering the store. He wants the clerk to understand that he, Carter, is okay.

“I'm a Christian,” he says, and smiles, “born again, so I guess I shouldn't worry about cracking up on the highway, but I got to admit, I do—”

Sandy Lohafer nods. He feels dizzy. Unnatural.
Is this it? Is this going to he it?
Two months ago, another clerk was shot and
killed right behind the counter at which Sandy now stands. Sandy, coming on duty, was the one to find her. First he found her sandal—one of those thick yuppie flip-flops. She must have lost it when she tried to hide behind the counter.

“I just got married.” Carter looks out toward the van. “My daughter—I don't like calling her stepdaughter because it sounds like you're saying you don't like her as much as a regular daughter—anyways, sometimes I get the idea she thinks I'm a weirdo. Because I was in the war. That's part of it, I guess. Her real dad—he's dead—I guess he was against the war. Vietnam, you know, and he wasn't a Christian neither.”

“Oh, well. Kids.” Sandy means to sound like any commiserating father; it is the wobble in his voice, however, that encourages Carter to continue.

“She's in a wheelchair. I want to help her get out of it. I don't know what you think about the power of prayer”—he pauses to offer the clerk a chance to deliver an opinion on the matter, but then he sees how the man's upper lip and forehead glisten, and—reluctantly—to give the poor clerk Some relief, Carter takes his coffee and candy and returns to the van.

What is Carter himself able to believe on this particular night?

We're all sinners but we can choose to be good. God forgives us for past sins, and we'll be with God after death.

So he tells himself, but, in the same breath, his life pitches up against the hard possibility of Finis Pruitt telling all to Jersey and Katherine, and then his faith fails him, and he cannot see why God
would
forgive him.

What kind of God would forgive Carter the terrible damage he's done just the same as He forgives a kid like Jersey for, say, not much liking Carter?

“But, hey, don't go down that road, man.” He speaks the words aloud while Jersey and Katherine sleep on. “Ain't nothing for you down that road, man.”

He turns on the radio. Grabs at the spunky lyrics of a song on some cowboy station. Rain begins to fall, softly at first, then harder. Behind the noise of the rain, the van is almost certainly
making its threatening noise once more, and he wishes Jersey were awake so he could ask, “Do you hear that, too?”

It does not matter that the rest area where he finally pulls off is lit as bright as a stadium. He falls asleep instantly, and he sleeps hard until he wakes to that thumping on the back of his seat. Jersey, saying, “Carter, wake up! Wake up my mom so she can help me to the bathroom!”

Since their quarrel over Katherine and Jersey's trip to Arizona with Carter, M.B. and Patsy Glickman have done an excellent job of avoiding one another. Should eye contact threaten in the parking lot, M.B. can easily stoop to extricate a phantom pebble from her shoe. Patsy can always fuss with Princess, or gasp “Oh, dear!” as if she has just remembered an errand in the opposite direction.

So: so much for Patsy. There is no necessity whatsoever for M.B. to tell Patsy about the marriage.

Mistakenly, however, M.B. has assumed that simply staying away from Vineyard Christian would keep her safe from questions in that quarter. Thus, she is taken by surprise by Pastor Bitner's telephone call, which comes in the cool of the morning as she lays out her first hand of solitaire.

“I wondered where you'd all got to, Marybelle! Then I was over at Fair Oaks and they told me Katherine was gone and Carter had quit, and since I haven't seen any of you in church—”

“Oh, well, Carter and Katherine”—does she sound gay, pleased?—“they took off for Arizona, Pastor! They got married!”

The blood in her ears pounds so loudly that she finds it difficult to hear what Pastor Bitner asks next; something about Jersey, she thinks.

“Well, she's with them, Pastor, of course, but you got to excuse me now. My buzzer—”

As soon as she hangs up, she hurries into the master bathroom. Of late, several times a day, she has a bad taste in her mouth, a rotten taste and a smell that she pictures rising out of her gut like sewer gas.

“Good heavens!” she says to her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She offers the face in the mirror a friendly grimace. Pours herself an inch of Listerine. Gargles furiously. Swallows. That will kill the rot in her gut, right?

She takes a seat in Lorne's recliner. With the remote control, she turns on Home Shopping Network. The item under consideration is an exercise device called the Belly-Buster, and the smiling model gives the impression that using it to shape and flatten her waist and abdomen is entirely fun, fun, fun, but, damn it, M.B. is too old to believe the thing can be all that big of a kick to use if it gets results. If it gets results, she knows it must require effort.

Traitor.
Jersey called her that. And Kitty called her that once in the past. Maybe Kitty put the word in Jersey's head.

The hostess of HSN takes a testimonial telephone call from a woman who used the Belly-Buster with impressive results. So the audience can see the change the Belly-Buster made in the caller's figure, while the caller talks, the hostess sets out two mounted photos—before and after.

I'm trembling
, M.B. thinks; she holds out her hands, and watches them tremble.
My God!
Still, she would probably have been fine in a minute or two had the telephone not begun to ring again. Suppose it's Pastor Bitner, calling back to say, well, didn't M.B. think that perhaps Jersey ought to stay with her?

She will not answer, that's all. But, oh, just in case the neighbors hear the ringing and wonder why she does not pick up the phone, M.B. turns on the television, then darts into the master bath and turns on the faucet and also the noisy blow-dryer she uses on her hair. Pours a small glass of Listerine. Gargles. Swallows. Sings the song that is always closest to her heart, always handy. “I'm in the Mood for Love.”

Twenty-two rings.

That evening, after she has had a bit of wine, M.B. practices telephoning the house in Seca. To build confidence, she smiles as
she takes up the receiver. “You caught me off guard with your news.” That is what she will say. “Of course, I'm happy as can be.” And then she will ask, “Can I speak to Jersey?”

May I
?

She dials. Hangs up before the ringing begins. Dials. Hangs up. Dials again. She is as nervous as she was when Kitty came home from college for the first time. Combat boots, that was what Kitty wore on her feet, and her skin was brown as wood—except for her nose, which had peeled down to tender pink.
I don't eat meat anymore
, Kitty had written before her arrival, and M.B. could see, even before Kitty finished saying good-bye to the people who dropped her at the curb, that the girl who had come back would never again respect a thing M.B. or Lorne had to say.

For a very long time, M.B. allows the telephone to ring at the Seca house. Maybe Kitty and Carter and Jersey are at a restaurant? Out to dinner? That happy image, however, is immediately spoiled for M.B. by any detail she supplies (Katherine sitting like a lump, Jersey and wheelchair poked out in the aisle), and, anyway, in Arizona, in the summer, it is three hours earlier than it is in Florida. It is too early for them to be out to eat.

One more ring, and then one more.

After she sets the telephone back in the cradle, she pours herself a glass of wine, and wonders if she should call Sam Alitz. See what Sam Alitz thinks about Kitty getting married.

To fortify herself for that call, M.B. downs the last of her mug. The Home Shopping Network is now offering sweetheart lockets, gold with a diamond chip in the center.

Would Jersey like a sweetheart locket?

M.B. tries to imagine this as she pours another drink.

Just to have the drink ready, waiting.

It is Sam Alitz's voice-mail that says, “Hello, this is Sam,” but M.B. takes the recording for the real article and begins to speak—

“Oh!” she says when Sam's message speaks over her own. Then she waits until the beep.

“Sam, this is M.B. Milhause. Down in Bradenton. It's just”—for a moment, she cannot speak—“Kitty got married in Arizona,
and I wondered if you'd heard anything? Jersey's with her, and, well—I think I made a mistake, letting her go.”

The next afternoon, it is Patsy Glickman who telephones the Palm Gate Village president to let the man know that the Today's Date calendar on M.B.'s door has not been changed for two days, that the telephone is off the hook, and that Patsy would certainly
know
if her dear friend had left town.

The latter assertion is not true, given that the women have not spoken all week. In addition, it was Patsy herself—to make what she is sure is a bad situation more compelling to others—it was Patsy herself who set M.B.'s door calendar back an extra day.

Wasn't she justified when M.B.'s telephone has given a busy signal for the last twenty-four hours?

The president of the association arrives with a passkey. He is trim and tanned and wears a coral polo shirt that matches his Bermuda shorts. A good-looking fellow, Patsy thinks, but a cold fish. Note how he leans back on the wrought iron railing of the balcony: raises and lowers himself, getting in a little exercise during the emergency call.
Can we get this over with
? So Patsy interprets his clenched and tanned jaw—missing entirely the fact that the poor fellow is scared stiff that he will soon be called upon to view a corpse.

“Just let me check things out,” Patsy says. Almost immediately she returns.
She'll take care of things. Marybelle's just a little under the weather. He can leave.

“Patsy,” M.B. calls from inside the unit. “Where'd you go?”

“Coming,” Patsy says as she shuts off the television and its raucous sales pitch for fingertip-length beaver coats, and stops to set M.B.'s telephone receiver back in its cradle.

M.B. lies where Patsy found her: on the carpet of the master bath. Crying. The purple stain from her spilled glass of wine matches almost exactly the color of the great bump on her forehead and the swelling of the ankle exposed by her twisted bathrobe.

Patsy kneels on the carpet and takes M.B.'s hand. “I can probably get a doctor to come here,” she says. “Or I can drive you myself. What do you think?”

M.B. slowly scoots herself into a sitting position, her back against a bathroom cupboard. “Oh, Patsy. I don't even know where Katherine and Jersey are and—what if you hadn't found me? I'm so ashamed. Jersey hates me, and you think I'm awful, too. Don't you?”

“Awful?” Patsy laughs a little as she holds out her arms to help M.B. to her feet. “My dear, you're such a mystery, how could I tell if you're awful or not?”

A good question.

Up until this time, M.B. has tried to trick everyone—including her God and herself—into believing in the face she presents to the world. The effect produced by such a person, of course, is
never precisely
what he or she intends. No presentation can ever be perfectly controlled. Consider Finis Pruitt: Perhaps Finis was more successful as Rear End than Marybelle was as M.B. both because his role was more flamboyant and because he was a better actor. However, in Finis's case, his very success led him to overreach his thinly stretched resources, and, thus, he lost hold of his creation.

Another case: the pre-accident Katherine often wished her true self could be known as well as a character in a book to whom the author, and, thus, the world, had complete access; yet she could never entirely bring inner to outer without distortion.

As there is no perfectly opaque disguise, so there is no perfectly transparent display.

And the Katherine who wanted so much to present her true self to the world—whom did she choose for a mate? Joe Alitz. A person who elected to be mysterious; to say to the world, “You will never receive the entire me.” Interestingly enough, in this regard, a man like her father—though it would never have occurred to Katherine to compare beer-drinking, TV-watching Lorne to scientist Joe.

Of course, the Katherine who married Carter Clay is not the same Katherine who married Joe Alitz some twenty years and a life ago. That young Katherine was crazy for distant, brilliant Joe. At twenty, love was crazy. By the time of the accident, Katherine's definition of love had changed to commitment. In a sense, then, the life project Carter Clay received at the Turquoise Motel dovetailed with Katherine's more adult definition. The post-accident Katherine, however, does not know that she is Carter's cross. She would be unhappy in that most unromantic of roles.

As for Carter's view of himself: It is somewhat different from the views of themselves held by M.B., Finis, Joe, and the pre-accident Katherine. Carter, after all, holds out for the wondrous if painful possibility that God knows who Carter is even when Carter forgets. God will always know. And forgive Carter. And love him, too.

God did not even have to
strive
to love Carter after what Carter did on Post Road. Which put God at an advantage, of course. Carter is just a man. As a man, he has come to suspect that striving may be the best a man can do.