Homeplace (33 page)

“I’d like that,” she said, raising her head in the lamplight and looking at him. He smiled. There was nothing in the smile of question or portent. He looked, simply, like a young man who had tasted the moment and found it exceedingly good.

S
AM’S APPOINTMENT WAS FOR A DEPOSITION FROM THE FIRST
of the surveyors the county had sent to the homeplace, and the firm’s office was in a shabby transitional area of Atlanta to the west of Peachtree Street, near the Greyhound and Trailways bus stations. Once it had been a respectable, if unimposing, area of small wholesale and manufacturing operations and family-owned businesses. In her childhood and teens Mike had walked these banal streets often, when she had come to and from the city on the bus with DeeDee or with Priss, who refused to drive her old Hudson Hornet in urban traffic. Then, the area had contained all Atlanta had and knew of ethnicity: a few yellow and black and coffee-colored faces peppered the sea of working-class white ones. Now, the streets were largely bare except for prowling bands of young blacks and the sheeplike flocks of passengers departing the bus stations and scurrying east toward Peachtree Street and safety. Even automobile traffic was sparse, and ran to creeping old junkers or astonishing vehicles Mike thought of as pimpmobiles. The freeway system, completed since she left the South, channeled traffic away from the area, and the few weedy and littered parking lots were only
half full. Sam nosed the Toyota into a space in a lot half a block away from the dun-colored, four-story brick building that housed the surveying firm, and helped her out. The late sun was fierce and the air was thick and wet and unmoving. It felt like New York in August.

“Want to come with me?” he said. “There’s probably a chair or something for visitors, and I don’t like leaving you around here. These are mean streets.”

“Are you kidding?” Mike said, lifting her head and sniffing the city like a stallion. “I’ve spent twenty years in Manhattan. And I’ve been in some of the meanest streets in America in my time. I’m not afraid of these.”

“My streets are meaner than your streets, huh?” Sam said. “Well, please yourself. I don’t feel like worrying about you. I should be about an hour and a half. Why don’t you meet me at the Parasol on top of the Sunbelt Plaza on Peachtree? Food’s not all that hot, but the view is spectacular, and there’s really not any place downtown that doesn’t cater to tourists. All the good stuff’s out in Buckhead, and that gives me a pain in the ass. Get us a table by the window and order me a Canadian Club and water and I’ll see you at six. What are you going to do, shop?”

“Walk,” Mike said. “I don’t even remember what it feels like to walk in a city.”

She did. She walked for miles, up and down and across the main thoroughfares of Atlanta, looking in windows and up at massive, beetling towers and down mirror-glass canyons. It wasn’t Manhattan; nothing was, but it was unmistakably and viscerally a city. As a child, being in downtown Atlanta in the late afternoon had had an eerie and alien quality to her; an emptiness, an aloneness that had nothing to do with the number of people on the streets, but everything to do with the stark, merciless dead light on the barren brick facades. Edward Hopper light, she had come to think of it. It came near to frightening her. Sometimes that doomed
city light still figured in her nightmares. Now, though, the skyscrapers rose so thick and tall that the downtown was washed in the permanent half-twilight of really large cities, and at the sunless street level the shadows lay thick and blue. Mike slipped into it like a sea creature sliding back into its element after long, gasping imprisonment on land. Her stride lengthened into the easy city lope that was so familiar to her that her muscles seemed to cry out for it, and her arms and shoulders felt almost nakedly light without the accustomed tape recorder case and the big Gucci bag. Feeling free and young and somehow released from a somnambulistic spell, Mike walked and walked and walked. Her sense of herself grew with every step. What have I been doing with myself all these weeks? she thought. This is me here, not that languid, tentative woman back there in Lytton. Bay needs to know about this woman; I have to show him this. And then she remembered the estrangement and the cold, stinging words, and shrugged impatiently. That could and must be fixed. She would call him in Boston when they got home and fix it. Enough of this silliness. Meanwhile, the whole city lay ahead, and the night.

They had drinks and an overpriced, underheated dinner at the big restaurant that might have been any panoramic restaurant atop any premier tourist hotel in any city in America, and Mike enjoyed it immensely. She talked and talked, as she had never talked to Sam or anyone else in Lytton; not about herself, but about her work and the places it had taken her and the things she had seen and the people she had met. She talked about books and writers and theater and artists and their hangers-on; she talked about Manhattan and its excesses and absurdities and enchantments. She giggled and gossiped. She laughed and gestured and threw back her head so that the silvery hair flew free around it, loving the weight of it and its silken swish against her
cheek, loving the feeling of the slender Italian shoes on her feet and the soft silk of her shirt against her breasts and shoulders, loving the good smell of smoke and stale-chill air and the Casaque that she had splashed on before leaving home; loving the jeweled net of the city winking at her feet, like his amused and approving green eyes on her as he listened. Off to the west a great purple thunderhead grew and spread like an anvil, and lightning forked silently to earth, and a faint mutter of thunder permeated even the thick gray-tinted glass of the great windows, and the primal energy of the storm seemed to slide somehow into her blood. Mike had had only two glasses of white wine, but she felt wonderfully, powerfully high.

“We’d better get back to the car before that thing breaks,” he said finally, signaling for the waiter and pulling out a bent American Express card. “I hate to interrupt you; I’d like to sit here and listen to you all night. But I don’t want to drown you, either. We’ll make some coffee when we get home and continue the conversation.”

Mike felt deflated and crestfallen. She had, she realized, completely dominated the conversation. He had scarcely said two words all evening. She did not want the evening to end; she did not want to go home … but of course he was right. The storm looked bad. And she could not remember if she had told J.W. about her father’s ten o’clock medicine. I’ve probably bored him silly, she thought, and felt the hated flush start up her neck.

“That’s more than enough about me,” she said ruefully. “There’s nothing now that you don’t know about me, and nothing I do about you. I’m sorry, Sam; it was rude. I guess I’m just high on being in a city again, and I needed to get away more than I thought I did. I usually don’t run on like this,”

“I know it,” he said. “That’s why I’ve enjoyed it so
much. It’s been like getting a present, listening to you talk about the things that matter to you. I’ve wondered what did. I might well have missed it if I hadn’t drug you into town and plied you with liquor.”

Night had fallen, and they hurried out into the thick, heavy darkness, feeling the wet breath of the storm approaching. By the time they reached the Trailways station the first great swollen drops were spattering on the hot pavements, and the neon-blinking streets were nearly deserted. A wind prowled high above their heads, and in the lightning flashes low clouds flew over. The parking lot lay two blocks away. It was obvious they were not going to make it.

“Come on in here,” Sam said, pulling her toward a tiny, horrendously filthy bar and lounge whose pink and blue neon gleamed evilly and wetly, like entrails in the rain. It was sandwiched between an abandoned theater supply company and an industrial laundry. Its windows were so thickly encrusted with decades of hopeless urban grime that she could not tell if there was anyone inside or not, but a smaller neon bar below the main sign said
OPEN!

“I don’t mind getting a little wet,” Mike began uncertainly; mean streets were one thing, but this kind of place looked like sure and certain trouble.

“Well, I do,” he said. “Come
on!”

The rain hit in earnest, frying straight down on the pavement and bouncing back nearly waist high, and a great fork of lightning split the sky, followed by a gigantic bellow of thunder, and they jerked open the torn screen door and tumbled inside.

The inside of the little bar was so dark that it was fully five minutes after they had groped their way to a torn and scarred leatherette booth and sunk wetly into it that Mike could see that it was empty except for themselves and a mountainously fat, pale man behind the bar at the other end of the room. She breathed a
sigh of unconscious relief. Her shirt was plastered so tightly to her breasts that she might as well not have it on, and the air-conditioning in the room was glacial. She crossed her arms over her breasts, and Sam got up and put his coat around her, and she drew it gratefully close.

“I’m not even going to argue,” she said.

“Canadian Club and two glasses of ice, please, and leave the bottle,” Sam said efficiently to the sluglike man who had oozed over to the booth as phlegmatically as if the likes of them came into the bar every day, instead of what must have been a steady clientele of winos and derelicts with welfare checks.

The man lapped and surged away and Mike said, “I’d really just rather have a glass of wine,” and Sam Canaday laughed.

“A, you need the whiskey, as wet as you are, and B, the only wine they’re likely to have in the house is Rolling Thunder Fortified. Knock you clear into Tennessee,” he said. The fat man reappeared with the whiskey and glasses and thumped the bottle down onto the table, and Sam poured them each a generous tot. “Drink up,” he said. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

The whiskey went down smoothly, burning in a pleasant, sinuous way, and he poured them another. He lifted his glass and peered into it.

“Somewhat austere, but a unique perfume,” he said judiciously. “Presumptuous but amusing, what? Well. Of all the gin joints in all the cities in the world, we have to walk into his. Can you hack it until the rain quits?”

“I like it,” Mike said, the whiskey a little secret well of mirth and well-being in her stomach. She felt warm and sequestered and tucked away, safe. The filthy little bar had, all of a sudden, the feel of a haven.

“It’s romantic, when you think about it,” she said. “In a Claude Rains kind of way. Or Jack Nicholson.
Don’t you think it has a certain go-to-hell air of romance about it?”

“I think it’s about as romantic as pigeon shit,” he said. “I hate to leave you alone, but I’ve got to go to the john, and I’d better do it while there’s nobody in here to hassle you. Wish me well. I’ll probably come back with herpes, or worse.”

He tossed down another ample slug of the whiskey, and poured Mike another, and rose from the booth. Mike thought there was just the faintest list to his walk. She herself had the feeling of being in a fun-house booth, hilarious and protected by a pane of glass. It was distinctly different from the bell jar.

We’re both sitting here in this lowlife joint getting drunk, she thought, sipping and giggling to herself. What on earth would DeeDee say? I can’t wait to tell her about it, our big night in the … what’s the name of this place, anyway? She leaned out of the booth so that she could see the flickering sign on the door, and turned her head as far around as she could so that she could read it backward. Cameo. The Cameo Lounge. Oh, my God, giggled Mike, clapping her hand over her mouth and shaking with silent glee. When Sam got back to the table she could hardly contain the bubbling laughter.

“What’s up?” he said, smiling at her.

“Sam, I know this place,” Mike chortled. “The Cameo Lounge. My God, it might as well be Sodom or Gomorrah. I used to think it was only slightly better than the gateway to hell; I was always told it was the first stop on the high road to perdition.”

He laughed aloud at her laughter and poured another drink from the diminished bottle. There were spots of color on his high cheekbones, and one lock of the pale hair looped down over his eye like a yellow comma. He had loosened his collar and removed his tie, and looked young and raffish and slightly dangerous.

“Who told you that?” he said.

“Miss Ora Campion. My Sunday school teacher when I was about ten and she was about one hundred and forty. Great, tall, rawboned old maid with a huge face like a cliff hanging up there, and a perpetual black cloud over her head. Eyes like an egg-sucking dog. She was forever going on about liquor and places that served it, and how the first sip was the first step on the road to the gutter and beyond. She always used the Cameo Lounge as her example … it must be thirty years old, at least … and somebody asked her once how she knew about it and she said she’d seen the young soldiers and sailors coming in here from the bus station and coming out again dead drunk and falling in the gutter. We always wondered what she was doing hanging around the bus station. Oh, I love it. I wish that old trout could see me now. She always knew I’d come to a bad end. I wish the whole Lytton United Methodist Church could see me. They thought so too, even if they didn’t say it as often as Miss Ora Campion.”

“Did you hate the church so much, Mike?” he said.

She looked at him. He was not smiling anymore, and there was something preternaturally focused in his light eyes that was not gaiety or liquor.

“No,” she said, the laughter seeping out of her as abruptly as it had risen. “Not then. Not when I was very small. Sometimes it was wonderful. Christmas, the hush and the sheer tender holiness of it, the waiting, and Easter … that first hymn at the sunrise service, when it was still dark and cold …
‘Up
from the grave he
arose
(he arose)/ With a
mighty
triumph o’er his
foes
(o’er his foes)’ … you could just taste the triumph. Almost shout with it. We did, in fact. But I always hated the Peace. All that hugging and squeezing and cheek kissing, when you knew nobody meant it. I guess it was my first brush with hypocrisy. That’s what I hate. The
awful hypocrisy of it. Love God, but hate the niggers. Well, you know, after that thing with old man Tait. I hope I haven’t offended you, by the way. I forgot what a big churchgoer you are. Somehow I just can’t reconcile you with religion, Sam.”