Four Spirits (52 page)

“My mother let me eat with my fingers and then suck on them. You can if you want to.” She smiled, challenging him. “I'll let you.”

“No, thanks,” he said, and he could feel himself blushing. He stabbed a shrimp with his cocktail fork.

“The forks are too cute not to use,” she said. “Three-pronged, like little tridents.”

He drank his wine too fast to appear suave. The kitchen had closed; their turnovers were waiting under the heat lamp. Six shrimp were not enough for him. He coveted hers. Shrimp had never been so delicious. They had never tasted so firm and succulent, fresh like the Gulf. He almost didn't want the sauce, though he loved horseradish. “This is one of the best restaurants I've ever been in,” he said, “ambiance-wise, company-wise, and food-wise.”

“Methinks you have a whiff of the Underworld about you.”

“Hades?” And the wine. More delicious with every sip.

“My favorite myth is that of Hades and Persephone,” she said. “When I was engaged to the first boy, we had a dangerous experience. Then we got engaged.”

“Isn't just living dangerous enough?”

Her blond hair was gleaming in the candlelight, with a beautiful up-scroll at the end, almost like a violin or an unfurling fern. She explained that Persephone got to live half the year with her mother, half with her lover: “the perfect balance.”

“Do you have a nickname?” he asked. Shadows played across her pale face.
He loved how the darkness of the restaurant isolated them. He quickly said, “I'd call you Fern.” He held out his hand to her across the table, but she didn't take it.

“Fern?” she repeated.

“Fern or Pheasant,” he said.

“Pheasant,” she said brightly. “I like that.” And her eyes danced.

And the turnovers were there. She'd eaten all her shrimp. None left over for him.

“I'll never forget this,” she said a little stiffly. “The night I first ate shrimp and drank wine.”

Lord,
he wondered,
where had those other boys been taking her?
Ed Salem's Drive-In? Across the front of Ed Salem's (always packed with cars), pink neon footballs blinked in series, simulating the arc of a pass. “Why is Vulcan's light sometimes green, sometimes red?” he asked.

“If it's red, somebody or some people have been killed in a wreck.” She spoke as though the life were draining out of her.

He reached his hand to her again, and this time she took it. Neither spoke for a moment, then he said quietly, “Let's eat this before the cheese sauce gets cold.”

He loved the sugary graininess of the sweet melted cheese, and the cherries were allowed to be authentically cherries, not mired in overly sweet goo. The pastry was flaky and flavorful—probably made with pure lard.

“My Jewish mother would be ashamed of the way I've eaten this evening,” he said soberly.

“No, she wouldn't,” Stella said. “She'd be glad you were having a good time. So would mine.”

They'd eaten everything, with incredible relish. Drained their glasses. His best move would be to stand up, to take her home now.

“Pheasants are heavy and slow moving,” she said, “when they rise.” She spoke solemnly. “They have beautiful plumage. Fit for nature and for art. Hat decorations, anyway.”

He nodded. She wasn't heavy. She was light as a wisp. With her fingertip, she swabbed up the last of the sugary cheese sauce sticking to her plate.

“My mother let me do this,” she said.

“Do your aunts?”

“No.” She smiled. “I wouldn't think of it.” She licked her finger.

If this were New York, he'd be mortified, but it was only Birmingham. Actually, he was pleased with her. She was childishly, eccentrically, at ease. Maybe that's what she was demonstrating.

 

WHEN THEY WERE ABOUT
to leave the restaurant, a young woman dressed in red stood up beside a table in the gloom.

“Stella?” she asked. And then, “I thought that was you.”

Then she was embracing Stella, in her faded pedal pushers and checked shirt. This woman was dressed appropriately, in a seductive sheath dress with a soft cowl collar dipping toward her breasts. Her dark hair and eyes were somehow fiery.

“This is Ellie,” Stella said, glancing at him out of the embrace. “We talk philosophy together.”

“Really?” he said.

“Where's Buford?” Stella blurted.

“This is our friend Neil,” Ellie said.

Neil stood up from his chair and shook hands. He, too, had a smoldering, fiery eye.
A good match,
Jonathan thought.

“Buford said for me to take her to see
Tom Jones,
while he was away. Great eating scene. Have you seen it?”

“It made us hungry,” Ellie said and tossed her head.

“We've been out at Miles College,” Stella said. “I teach there. Jonathan and I just met.”

“Did you?” Ellie asked. She seemed troubled.

“He's a brilliant pianist,” Stella explained. “Ellie's an actress, and she sings.”

“Your aunts will be worried about you.” Ellie smiled mysteriously. Jonathan thought he'd never met a more seductive woman.

When he offered Stella his arm to ascend the steps to Twentieth Street, she scampered up like a goat by herself.

In the Thunderbird, Stella said, “I guess I wasn't dressed appropriately for Dale's Cellar. I'm sorry. I should have changed.”

Jonathan asked her about Ellie, and she said they'd ridden the bus to town together the day JFK was killed. Then she said, “Everybody falls in love with Ellie. It's her warmth. Me, too.”

Jonathan replied thoughtfully, “But isn't she asking for trouble—going on a date when she's married?” He carefully kept condemnation out of his voice.

 

WHEN THEY APPROACHED
the aunts' house, Stella asked him just to turn the nose of the car toward the driveway and let the headlights shine up it, that they always came and went by the back. It would alarm her aunts for her to come in the front.

“Thank you,” she said. “I had a good time.”

No physical contact whatsoever in her farewell. Skimpy words.

A short-legged white dog trotted down the driveway to meet her, and she stooped to pet his head. She petted the dog passionately, like a child, and he wondered why he was stirred by her. It was her oddness, maybe. It made him feel less odd. Jonathan wished he'd thought to call her Pheasant one more time. His hand stroked the mohair seat cover. The wool, though fine, could not be nearly so soft as the wing of a pheasant.

TONIGHT, THIS ROOM AT MY AUNTS' SEEMS LIKE HOME.

I have found an anchor for my soul. It's in the music I love to hear, though I cannot perform it well.

Who makes the woeful heart to sing?
—to use the phrase of an old Methodist hymn. It's not Jesus. Another Jew. I blaspheme. Jonathan. But the heart, my heart, must beat erratic, if it is to beat at all. I embrace my irreverence, my perversity, my failures, my lopsidedness, that I may be lukewarm, that I may blow first hot, then cold. My inconsistency and uncertainty. The depth of my sorrow and the height of my hope.

I can love. And I do love. Jonathan B. Green. Let me write his name again: J. B. Green. J. Bernstein Green. Jon Green. His name is verdant as the earth. His hair is like flame. I'm crazy as a jaybird.

And he?

I know nothing of what he feels. But how could he play the piano like that if he didn't know my heart? Subtle as my mother, but masculine. Perhaps he doesn't know he knows me. Even the pressure of his hand when we shook hands—perfect.

I am thirteen years old! Not the age of a college graduate at all. Emotionally, I am thirteen, throwing stem glasses on the floor on a dare! But emerging into the beginnings of my adult life in spite of that. What was I in college? Nothing but a giant child. So sheltered and innocent I was disembodied.

I think of the Negro waiters made visible by their white coats. I relish the image of the interior of the restaurant. Its darkness ignites me. I could lick my
finger again to see if any of that grainy cheese sauce is left under the nail. I think of Manet's boudoir portrait of naked Olympia, lounging on a sofa, the dark servant behind her melding with the dark background. Flowers emerging. She staring boldly out of her frame. My eyes and ears are opened; my tongue has awakened—shrimp, horseradish, sweet, warm cheese and cherries. Ought to give me a bellyache! But it won't. I savor every mouthful again.

Before, I have been all mind. Smart enough, but so stupid.

I pause to read again what I've written.

 

AH, I SEE WARNING
flags: I am enchanted by his music (as I was with Darl). I don't really know him, nor he me (as it was with Donny). Too much faith and trust on my part in the Don relationship,
that anyone could love anyone of goodwill.
Too encompassing! I have grown more cautious. Simply more sensible, perhaps?

But Don did/does speak to my soul in his own way: his kindness. Kindness made colorful with wit. I needed Don's kindness, his willingness to sacrifice almost everything—I saw it in his devotion to Cat. And Darl would have died to protect me. I wanted a
chevalier.

Is it so easy to transfer love? As from Darl to Don?

It is if you're thirteen.

It is if love is only need.

But love is pleasure and delight, too. Wine and warm cheese sauce.

Make me fly!
—that's what the little girls begged Timmy Beaton to do.

And I will require it of any husband: make me fly. And he may require the same of me.

Will I someday, an old woman of sixty, look back on these ruminations and muse, “How on fire I was then.” Shall I ask, “And who was this Jon Bernstein—was that his name—Jon Green?” And “Did she (I) notice that Jon is a sort of variation on Don, and that
Don
starts with
D,
like
Darl
. And whatever became of
him
? Of them?”

But tonight I am not that forgetful creature of sixty. I am young and growing into my maturity, albeit belatedly. I shall have my life. My hand closes on it as surely as my fingers grip this pen. As surely I took up a cocktail fork this night, in a dark and seductive restaurant. (After I made the mistake of first using my digits and trying to cover up my lack of sophistication.)

How do I dismiss the warning flags? Darl and Don—who else were they, besides transcendently musical and supernaturally kind? Was there some lack in them as well as in myself? Darl was not weaned from his mother. His parents. And Don?

I don't know.

We reached out to each other on such a sad day, when Kennedy was killed.

I feel sad again. And Ellie? Is she troubled for herself or for me?

But I will not. I
will
not go sad.

I must note, briefly, that I was a coward today. I left the building when the bomb threat came. But is that being a coward? It's sensible. Probably Cat would not have stayed behind if I had not announced I was in love with Jonathan Green. She was refusing to abandon whatever was left of her ship. But why had she carried the gun to school in the first place? Her purse was heavy with it when we left the house.

I hope Cat will forgive me my fickle heart—or is it head?—my betrayal of Don. Ellie would.

Probably Cat will understand it all better than I do. I should never have told her Jonathan was hunchbacked and then dismissed such an attribute as a mere figment of my imagination. I cringe now at my cruelty.

 

SO SIMPLE, BLEAK EVEN
—the interior of a practice room. Stark and bare. I go through a door. We are just a piano and two thin people in a bleached room. One male with red hair and skinny arms. One female, flat-chested, with blond hair. It is only the music itself that is glorious and complex. Encompassing and fulfilling.

Perhaps Jonathan is really only an emblem. Not the person himself but the promise that there may be such a person for me. One whose essence speaks to mine. He inspires in me a faith in life. Life has treasures. There are fine restaurants where adults sample new food, are curious about each other,
without compulsion.

Independence, not engagement. Perhaps not even marriage. Just feeling. Nothing official. Ellie is my friend who understands the power of passion. She is not a college student settled in marriage. Not represented by a white blouse and a tweed skirt. She is a woman aflame with red.

What will come of my rush of joy? I feel incandescent, not red. And my flare
of brightness has its dark streaks. I look at Don's paintings hanging around me in this room. They
interest
me. I feel sympathy for the soul that emanated them. But I am detached. Kind Don, prescient Don, who gave me permission in advance:
You can stop this anytime you want.

Tomorrow I think the students and Christine are planning a sit-in. Gloria, my confidante, implied as much. I want to know Gloria, short and busty, I want to know all of them better. I have to work tomorrow. I can't possibly participate. I would stop them, if I could. Would I have the courage for protesting if I could go? I don't have to decide that. But I should quit this switchboard job. I've finished school and I should move on to find work that represents me. That promises the future.

Now I'm going to fold up this loosely woven summer blanket and put it away on the closet shelf. And, Don, forgive me, I must take down your paintings in this room. I will set them on the floor, turn their faces to the walls. The mind is a room. On my blank wall, I will imagine the bold stare of Olympia, engaging the world. Naked and unafraid.

For now, good night, dear old Self. I'll dream of pheasants, softly fluttering. Raising their heavy bodies into the air.