Authors: Billy Lee Brammer
“I’m ready, Sarah,” the little girl said, standing in the doorway in her bathing suit, “I’m ready for the swim.”
Sarah stood and moved toward Victoria Anne and put her arms around her. “Do you like it here, sweet?” Sarah said. “Do you like it here with Jay and me?”
“Yes, yes,” the little girl said, holding onto her neck. “I like it here with you and Jay … I want you to come sleep with me sometime. Daddy slept with me last night; I remember he came in and slept with me until Mommy came and they fussed and he left. Will you sleep with me tonight, Sarah?”
Sarah was trying to hold back the sobs from her voice … “If I can, Annie, if I can …” She took her suit and undressed quickly in the bathroom. There was a faint, last summer’s line of darkness running round her and she wondered if the new suit would —
“You’re beautiful, Sarah,” the little girl said in awe, standing half into the bathroom with her great sad eyes staring. “You’re so pretty all over.”
Sarah smiled back, but then she had to turn her head as the tears flooded her eyes.
J
AY MOVED AMONG THE
crowds of visitors, nodding his head, clasping hands, gripping arms, the names of near-strangers falling from his lips and Fenstemaker’s wisdom rattling round inside his head:
For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb and her mouth is smoother than oil
… He repeated it, trying to keep the words arranged as they had come to him, first from Hoot Gibson and then the Governor …
But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death and take hold in hell
…
The party is begun, he thought. At last, finally, begun. All these gay enchanting people, marvelous people, all come together, salt of the earth. It’ll be a nice party. Nass potty. What was it Sarah said? Be a man, Jay. Be a man, for God’s sake, don’t whimper — wipe your nose — like that. Be one like Arthur. There … he goes with another carful. Of people. Nass people. I’m upset. That you won’t get hold of yourself (people are looking). All these nice people are looking, Jay. Be a man!
But Sarah I forgot. I forgot how. Seems I used to know — why’d it slip my mind? All those places. Misplaced it. She’s just never been there with me in all those dark places. She just don’t know. What it’s like. I’ll tell you Sarah what it’s like, it’s — Well it’s — Well it’s really not so bad sometime, all cool and luminous. Like vaults and cellars and basement rooms. I lived in a place once, ancient bloodbrick downstairs crypt in Frisco; had a job at a dry cleaner’s just round the corner where I learned Oh God about the two-bath system for treating blue serge. Lived down there nights thinkin’ of Miss Vicki and the girl. It smelled awful, smelled of sewage, and you know what?
You get used to it. The smell, I mean. The other not at all. Be a man? She’s got that right — yes — that’s the trick — But not too large a one, and hulking. Otherwise it’s difficult to slip back into the womb of this gay-mad reminiscence. I should take Sarah sometime. We’ll go there, stroll down memory lane and — It’s all cool and mossy down there like I said and it could be made into a really gay place for the right sort of people. Look!
Here they come again in that old command car, they’re having a time.
What a time!
Lust not after her beauty. Neither let her take thee with her eyelids …
Let’s have a drink on that before this party gets too far gone, we’ve only seen the first of these nice people. Very earliest arrivals. Let’s get Greg and Shavers and Hoot Gibson, and there’s Mrs. Fenstemaker — hah yew, Miz Fenstemaker, me tew Miz Fenstemaker — and have a drink here beside the pool before the crowds make it impossible and Victoria Anne’s still sleeping upstairs. You know she damn near drowned today? Damn near. While all of us were inside drinking in that crazy solarium, I heard screams. Godalmighty they were awful. The screams. You ever heard child scream? Like death? She’d sneaked off for a swim and I was sitting there drinkin’ with all those nice people and trying to figure what’s on the Governor’s mind (he’s got a problem, I can tell, I got a gift) and I kept hearing them. The screams. And not certain what exactly it was, thinking it was just maybe the usual clangin’ in my head, I put my drink down and went quietly to see. Very quietly. Not wanting to be obtrusive, understand. Or panic. Or believe they were screams. And she was half drowned when I got there, damn near, and we stood sopping wet on that phony alabaster and had a good cry. Just the two of us. Hope it doesn’t give her the trauma, you think it might? Her teeth were chattering and she was still blue with cold when I put her into bed. I love her … And her love is better than wine … whine …
Ah, here comes that grand lady again — Nice time, Miz Fenstemaker? Jus’ fine, Miz Fenstemaker — and here oh boy come the Mariachis with the guitars and all that spangled stuff. Those spics are really — That old Mexican, wettin’ in the rain. Whatever happened to that fellow? I should ask sometime. But I know, I remember now, he picked cotton on my daddy’s farm and amassed a great fortune and went back across the river and bought the Emperor’s Palace. Old Max’s place. Including Carlotta’s mirrors. And all the silverware. And a purple swimming pool. Like Fenstemaker’s. I’ll have to tell Annie that story sometime, next time we sit shiverin’ together next to the three-meter board.
Here comes Sarah again — there she goes — thumping my jukebox heart. You’d like it down there Sarah, you really would, all green and grassy. We’ll leave tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll take the limousine or maybe that old stripped-down Army command job, and you and I and Annie we’ll remove, cut out, encamp elsewhere. Arthur won’t mind. Least he could do for young lovers. Leave this vale of tears. You like that? Nice phrase? I got a gift, honey, such a gift. So many gifts; so many tears (be a man!). I remember once how it used to be when (what was that old-fashioned expression?) I was a leader of men, way back the way it was when all of us were so goddam sure of ourselves. We were going to … Let’s see. Going to (oh, yes) usher in the new age of ecu … ecumenical progress and peace. How’s that Kermit? You heard any good applause lines lately? You been out hustling milk for the slum kids? And end the cold war, too, that’s right. Old Kermit. You old mad dog you, why’d you go off that way and hang yourself for? All bah yersef. You should’ve waited for the rest of us, or better still we should’ve found you a place here, a productive place in society as they say, shaved off that awful beard and cleaned your nails and got you some cordovans and some soft white button-downs. You’d have loved it, I know you would, you old mad dog, got used to it, adjusted, the way it was with me and that smell of sewage.
Those Mariachis! Hot damn see what you’re missin’, man they’re
great
and I’m going to dance cha-cha, if I can only (let’s see) where’s Sarah gone. Let’s — There she goes, too bad, all squared away with that Gregory person, old Gregory what’s-his. Well let’s see. Lots of people. Lots and lots of nice people. Niz pipple. And such a gay party, fabulous gay place really, and look there goes the actress, what’s her name (what bubes!), and there goes that wretch of her husband, estranged you know, he’s very estranged and very down and very out and the Governor’s wiper what’s more. The world owes him a living — one of those birds — and he doesn’t care for the one it has come up with currently. The living. Is easy. I’ll ask her, by God, I’ll ask her once more and dance with her not too close and perhaps, just possibly maybe perhaps she’ll act sensible about this divorce business and … my God! she smells good, the way it was the first time …
For there is no faithfulness in their mouth; their inward part is very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulchre; they flatter with the tongue
… I could very nearly forget the way it was afterwards, remembering the first time, with those paper lanterns coming on now and the sun all violet in the hills and Vicki’s sweet face suspended here for a moment. Poignant. I can’t stand it. Poinnnyant. Like that. Mischiefs of whoredom! Yea, on every hill and under every green tree she lay down …
Let her breasts satisfy thee. Let thy fountain be blessed and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Be thy ravished always with her love
… Where did it go, oh Jesus where did it all go? How did we lose beauty and honesty and innocence, and who the hell substituted this carrion of strident heat and human parts on us? It was Vicki who … It was Vicki she … Was it me? My own upper lip all these years? No matter. What matters is now, so look here and now Vic and be sensible about our mutual misunderstandings and — what’d she say? Grow up love and talk about something else (isn’t this a nice party?) and enjoy it while there’s time. Grow up? Now she’s on it too, and is everyone here a thousand years old or something? The hell with all that, I’m going back down to my vault, my crypt, my basement room. It’s cool and glossy down there like I said: green and mossy, with a river of old hope running through. I’ll go find Sarah, she’ll want to come, and Victoria Anne: we’ll take that stripped-down Army job and — Where is she, where’s she wandered off to? Where? With that Greg, with that nice people. Here beside me on the dance floor just a mile ago, last week at the apartment her dark skin burning … There they go, I see them
there,
just ducking into the arbor behind the wisteria blooms, those two together, I see them now, revealed just barely in the pastel light of the lanterns. Old Greg. Maybe he’s me! It ought to be. Beside her in the honeyed air. I ought to leave them there, my man arms pressing Sarah’s flesh. They ought to be left alone, those two, Sarah and me, but I like the picture of them together, her gray eyes lifted toward mine, favoring the kisses … I really can’t stand here gawking, though. I hear the little girl screams again; I’d better move along. Don’t they hear them? The screams? I’m coming, love, jus’ tread water or something while I wander through these crowds of niz people without causing too much commotion, I’m coming, like I promised, like the last time, so don’t stop screaming or I’ll know you’ve gone. Under. I can’t seem to get under this fence. Or through the field of bamboo shoots and new mown hay … the way … they photographed your momma in the nude. There’s a creek near here, I remember it as a boy of twenty-six, just over this rise and down — Ah! Home at last! Damn near broke my neck but I made it and it’s not such a bad place as mud flats go and a southeast breeze in summer. You can’t beat that, and it’s really very awfully nice to be back, and finally find myself.
“W
E’LL GO SEE DEAD
Man,” Arthur Fenstemaker said. “That’s it. I knew there was something I hadn’t shown you. Dead Man. Good Old Dead Man.”
The party ranged around them, people filling the downstairs rooms of the main house, pushing out into the softness of the night, trampling the carpet grass and slipping off into the fishpond, their numbers multiplying on the promenade and in the garden. Arthur Fenstemaker and his friends sat closely together on a second-story balcony overlooking the pulsing scene. Something had brought them together here in the middle of the evening — the Governor, Shavers, Vicki, Sarah, and Greg Calhoun — as old and good friends pulled toward each other to recount all those happy times of some forgotten year. Sarah thought of Mr. Thurber’s moth: “Who flies afar from the sphere of sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.” There seemed no escape from this time, this place, these people.
“Dead Man?” Shavers said. “What is this Dead Man?”
“Whatever it is I’m ready for it,” Vicki said. “People are beginning to grab downstairs.”
“Dead Man,” the Governor said, “is a friend of mine lives down the road. Old friend. He’s meant a great deal to me. Let’s go.”
They made their way down the back stairs and across a small patio between rows of high hedges. From either side came the sounds of the party; on the graveled drive they came upon Hoot Gibson and Mrs. Fenstemaker sitting together in an iron loveseat. The Governor roared his mock rage at them: “At it again! All the time behind my back …”
Hoot Gibson giggled and hiccupped. “Yew know bettah ’n that, Awh-thik!”
“He’s got the hiccups,” Mrs. Fenstemaker said. “The poor dear — he’s got them terribly.”
Hoot Gibson kept his mouth closed, smiling at them tight-lipped, the silent convulsions coming on him at regular intervals.
“A little walk,” the Governor said, “will put an end to Hoot’s distress. Come on … We’re going to see Dead Man.”
“Not now, dear,” Mrs. Fenstemaker said. “The caterers are cleaning up and I’ve got to supervise.” Hoot Gibson joined them and Mrs. Fenstemaker headed back toward the house.
They walked quietly along the hard road now. Vicki removed her slippers, and she and Sarah walked on either side of the Governor. Hoot Gibson, Shavers and Greg Calhoun were in back of them. The Governor suddenly remembered: “Jay — where’s Jay? I haven’t seen him since the afternoon.”
“Out on the dance floor for a while,” Sarah said. “I saw him once.”
“I danced with him once,” Vicki said. “He was hanging around those Mexicans when I left.”
I saw him once, I saw him twice, I saw him through the day, Sarah sang to herself. I must have seen him six thousand times, but mostly not at all. As through the wrong end of a telescope: minute, remote and inarticulate, his nice mouth flailing air. What had he been saying? Even the sound of his voice had faded from her memory. She could see his nice mouth and teeth, the half-moon scar on his forehead and the golden hair on his knuckles reflected in the sunlight — blinded by all the crazy touchstones of desire, she could see these things and not see Jay. He himself seemed to have retreated into some gray miasma of the soul. They had been together with the little girl earlier in the afternoon, strolling, just the three of them, through the silent gardens: Victoria Anne skipping ahead of them, returning and running ahead again. Be a man, Jay, she had said to him, be a man and quit mumbling your troubles to me. Be a man like Arthur; give me a cheap imitation if nothing else. Can’t you get a little of it through osmosis? So she won’t talk with you about the girl — you’re making no progress on the divorce. Don’t come to me with it — don’t ask me what to do. We’ll do something, work out a way, but don’t ask me why it can’t be better. I don’t know.