Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (8 page)

For an unforgettable moment she begins to respond but almost immediately pulls back.

“Will you leave now?” she asks, her voice barely a whisper.

“I need you to do that for me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, backing away from her. This isn’t the time to admit that I would like nothing more than to take her back to the bedroom she shared with her husband for almost thirty years.

Yet, what would be so wrong about that? I cared for her once, and already I’ve begun to do so again.

At this moment the phone in her kitchen rings.

Watching me carefully as if I were a shoplifter about to walk out with a bag of cookies in a 7-Eleven, Angela picks up the phone, and her somber expression changes to a smile.

“Hi, Mrs. Petty, how are you?”

How can that woman still be alive? If it is the same person I think it is, she was an old woman when Hannah and I were children picking up acorns in her yard. Now she apparently lives across the street. I hear Angela ask her if she remembers me. I am in town and stopped by to see her. As Angela talks, I look out the window and wonder if the old snoop has been trying to spy on us.

Small towns. I have forgotten what it was like.

Every move I make here will be documented and recorded. After five minutes Angela shakes her head and more or less hangs up on her, explaining to me that she would be kept on the phone for hours. Of course, she remembers me. I was the Pages’ only son who went off and married that nigger woman from Haiti or someplace.

“You know you can’t hide anything here,” Angela says, primly, not sitting down again. She still wants me to go.

“I’m surprised that as soon as she noticed your car, she didn’t try to stumble over here on her walker. She can’t get up the porch, though.

By the way I forgot to tell you she says she remembers you peeing in her backyard when you were five years old.”

I laugh, not willing to leave just yet.

“It must have been too regular an event for me to remember,” I say, marveling at Angela’s ability to kindle desire in me. Yet it shouldn’t surprise me, for it was always like this between us. I try to read her

expression, but I can’t.

“Would you like to go out sometime?” I ask, hoping I don’t sound too plaintive.

“You need to go,” she says firmly, coming over to me and taking me by the arm.

On her front porch with her yearbook under my arm I notice paint peeling above the door.

The house could almost be considered shabby. I wonder if she’ll have to take out another mortgage if she intends to stay in it. I hug my suit coat to me against a brisk cold wind that has arisen since I’ve been inside.

“So what happens now?” I ask, not willing to pretend there was no chemistry between us.

Angela points with her chin past me.

“I’ll be answering a lot of questions about you.”

I turn and look across the street to see movement behind a curtain.

“This place is creepy,” I say.

“I can’t believe you stayed.” I wonder how many people know I was here for a couple of hours Thanksgiving weekend. Sarah and I didn’t see anyone other than a black octogenarian female who lived in public

housing for the elderly. Angela hasn’t mentioned it, and with other things on my mind, I haven’t either. If I asked her, I’m sure she wouldn’t divulge the reason I was here.

“I need to figure out what just happened,” she says dryly, “before I can begin to worry about the last thirty years.”

“I know you do,” I say, wondering if she feels anything for me at all.

Angela could continue mourning for Dwight for months or even longer.

Given my history, I couldn’t complain if she did.

“Obviously, I’d like to see you again,” I say awkwardly, trying to forget how hurt Amy would be to hear these words coming from my mouth.

“But as friends, okay?” she says, warily, hugging herself in the cold.

I nod.

“Then what about meeting an old friend for breakfast Saturday morning?”

I ask, deciding to spend the night in Bear Creek tomorrow night instead of driving back home after the arraignment. We couldn’t get more innocent than that.

Angela considers for a moment, visibly hesitates, but finally says, “Okay. I’ll meet you at eight at the Cotton Boll. It’s out on Highway 1 towards Helena.”

“Where’s a decent place to stay?” I ask. Her boys’ rooms are vacant, but I doubt I’ll get an invitation.

“The Bear Creek Inn on 79 toward Clarendon isn’t supposed to be terrible,” Angela says, not even pausing to consider inviting me.

As the afternoon gloom of the Delta fades into blackness and I begin to put miles between us, I wonder what I am doing. Can we really just pick up where we left off thirty years ago? Should we even try?

Getting it wonderfully wrong, Rosa, exasperated by my stubbornness, used to scream, let sleeping dogs die. Maybe I should take her hint and try to keep the past buried. In the swampy soil of the Delta, however, six feet isn’t always enough. Though it seems as if I have a good handle on my hometown, I have a momentary feeling there may be ghosts I don’t want to see.

Tired by the drive home, I glance at my watch.

Nine o’clock. If my greyhound and I are going, we need to get out of here.

“I think we’ll just go on and sleep at the house tonight.”

From the opposite end of her couch, my girlfriend exclaims, “You don’t have any heat yet!”

“It’s not too bad,” I say. Actually, it is supposed to get down to thirty tonight. How could I buy a house whose heating system goes out the week after I signed the papers? It passed inspection, and the sale

closed a week ago, but three days ago when I flipped the switch, it never even turned on, and the pilot light was blazing like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

“It’s supposed to be fixed tomorrow.”

“It’ll be too cold for Jessie,” Amy protests.

“She doesn’t have a coat for this weather.”

I stare at my dog’s powerful haunches. More like a lightweight brindle-colored jacket. I sigh.

Guests wear their welcome out sooner than dead fish any day in my experience. The hitch is that Amy has longterm plans for us and seems willing to endure any indignity we can heap on her.

Jessie has just taken a dump on her carpet.

Maybe another night will cure that kind of talk.

“This is what it would be like for us,” I say, throwing in her face our fifteen years age difference.

“Except in a few years it would be me instead of Jessie you’d be cleaning up for.”

Amy wipes Jessie’s nose, which is about to drip, on the sleeve of her warm-up as if she were the harried mother of a two-year-old.

“I’d get you some diapers,” she says, not cracking a smile.

“And then I’d stick your butt in boiling water a couple of times.

That’d help you remember.”

I laugh, knowing Amy is okay about the carpet if she can joke with me.

“See, Jessie,” I say, leaning over to inspect a small raw spot on her leg, “there are ways to get your attention.” “Not hers,” Amy says pointedly.

“Yours.”

I glance around her apartment and am reminded how little we have in common. Besides the age difference, Amy and I have radically different tastes. When she decorated my office she toned down the art she selected, but on display in her apartment, a two-bedroom in a gray brick structure just off the Wilbur Mills freeway, are drawings, paintings, and photographs, rarely, if ever, seen in a state where most of the inhabitants (myself included) are more at ease with art done by the numbers in Norman Rockwell style. Here, Amy has just redone her apartment by hanging life-size nudes on all the walls. A couple of men, too—one, a guy with a penis the size of a boa constrictor that has just finished a good lunch.

This new phase is weird and embarrassing. I look up at a photograph of a Marilyn Monroe lookalike on the opposite wall. She has a safety pin running through her left nipple.

“What does it make you feel?” she asked me when I saw this particular photo for the first time. Nausea, I whispered, fascinated even as my scrotum tried to retract inside my body. I’m all for having my consciousness raised, but does it have to be a twenty-four-hour-a-day job?

“What does your mother think about this stuff?” I ask tonight. I can’t imagine having friends over for dinner and having them try to pretend they aren’t dying to get home so they can get on the phone and gossip about the horror show on Amy and Gideon’s walls.

“She lasted about twenty minutes and then turned around and left,” Amy admits. Dressed in a green and blue warm-up suit that fits her like a glove, and with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, Amy looks like a teenager instead of a serious collector of sadomasochistic art.

“My new stepfather thinks I’ve lost my mind. God knows what Daddy would have thought.”

Poor Mr. Gilchrist. A retired factory worker from a paper mill in Pine Bluff who died only a year ago, he must be spinning in the hottest rung of hell for having allowed his only child to desert the South and accept a scholarship at a fancy school on the East Coast. First, his daughter wasted his hard-earned money on an art history degree at Princeton, and now she has the nerve to stain his memory by exhibiting the results on her walls.

“Who was that guy, Mapplethorpe?

Didn’t he do some statue of a man pissing into another guy’s mouth or

something just totally beyond the pale? When is his exhibit getting up here?”

Amy rolls her eyes. I may not be educable.

“I don’t think he’s in my budget for next month.” She reaches over and pats my leg.

“It’s okay for art to make you uncomfortable, even scare you.

It’s how we grow.”

I make a face. She sounds so damn condescending.

I didn’t just swing down out of the trees, and she knows it. On the other hand, if we got married or even lived together, it’d be my place, too. What would Sarah think of this? She’s gotten a lot more liberal in the last year, but this stuff would embarrass her. She thinks Amy is too young for me, anyway.

“I don’t mind a little growth, but I think Mapplethorpe’s stuff would prematurely age me.”

Amy chucks Jessie under her chin.

“I realize now who you named her after.”

I get it. Jesse Helms, the right-wing senator from North Carolina who messed with the federal arts budget.

“You artist types claim to be so open-minded,” I point out, “but as soon as somebody disagrees with you about something, you start calling people names.” Hardly role models for us hicks in the boonies.

“I just get so irritated with the attitude,” Amy lectures, “that art is supposed to be immediately absorbed like some comic book. Do you realize that when somebody goes through a museum the average length of time spent on each exhibit is about eighteen seconds?”

I nod, more than happy to keep the conversation on this level. Some U.S. Supreme Court justice, hopelessly muddled, endeared himself to future generations of law students by confessing in a written opinion that maybe he didn’t know what obscenity was, but he knew it when he saw it.

“People know what they like,” I say, knowing I sound hopelessly provincial.

“They don’t have to study it for a lifetime. You either respond or you don’t.”

Amy shakes her head. Trying to improve me is irresistible.

“That’s what you think,” she says earnestly.

“But it’s like trying to judge a book when you don’t understand half the words.”

Is Amy like this with her clients? No wonder she isn’t making any money. She is so damn earnest about it.

“It’s over my head is what you mean. I can live with that. But I don’t have to have it in my house.”

Jessie, sensing she is forgiven, raises her enormous muzzle and gazes at Amy with her big, beautiful brown eyes as if to say, this guy is full of it. Seeing that I am shifting the focus of the argument, Amy ignores my dog and says to me, “I wouldn’t expect to have it out in the living room if it upset you.”

Is every conversation we have these days about us? When I bought the house, I thought she got the message that I wasn’t ready to get married. I take off Jessie’s collar. The tinkling of her tags is driving me crazy. Despite our differences, Amy and I seem to be wearing invisible magnets that have each other’s names embedded in them.

How to explain it? Months ago she told me that I reminded her of her father. For her part she has Rosa’s spunky personality and irrepressible good humor. Too, like some magical property that is essential to life but poorly understood, there is between us a steady sexual buzz, a ubiquitous all-purpose emotional Super Glue that can temporarily seal every crack in the relationship. This strange attraction to my aging, soft-putty flesh is, to me, another sign of her kinkiness. But women are generally strange creatures. What drives them to seek solace in such a ridiculously unsubtle and ultimately woebegone-looking organ? This relentless, instinctive preference for the obvious proves they have no more intelligence or self-control than we do.

And tonight, like so many others, we end our discussion in her queen-sized bed, leaving Jessie in her crate in the kitchen, a decision naturally questioned by my girlfriend. However, this confinement,

instead of being cruel, is an act of kindness.

Used to a lifetime in tight spaces, Jessie feels secure in there.

Freedom always sounds better than it is. I’m surprised Amy hasn’t turned that argument on me. I haven’t quite been honest with her, telling her that the reason I’m not hungry is that I was given a bowl of soup by an old friend whom I stopped by to visit in order to get information on the case. I don’t mention that I kissed this old friend or that she responded. Amy, who used to be in the Blackwell County prosecuting attorney’s office, has been fascinated by my account of the intrigues going on in Bear Creek and has listened in wide-eyed fascination at the description of my family’s treatment at the hands of Oscar and Paul Taylor. Why should I tell her about Angela? I don’t even know how I feel about her myself.

Amy’s bedroom is even more bizarre than the rest of the apartment, probably because, in addition to nudes on the walls, she has pictures of her family on the nightstand by her bed. Her father’s pinched face shows scarring on both sides, perhaps from acne as an adolescent. Bald, withered, he was already worn out at the time of this photograph, taken five years before his death from prostate cancer, but Amy assures me that emotionally, at least, he is still very much a force in her life.