Lookaway, Lookaway (58 page)

Jerene set down her teacup and began quizzing Dorrie on her new duties if she were to be curator at the Gantt Center. Did she hear about the acquisition of drawings on paper by Romare Bearden, the most nationally famous of Charlotte-born artists, whose works were in the Mint as well as the Gantt Center? Was the Gantt Center up to providing a room that could preserve the drawings regarding heat, humidity, mold, the elements? But also Henry Ossawa Tanner—had she investigated where and when some work might still be acquired for the Hewitt Collection? Dorrie realized that Jerene knew an astonishing amount about art but her angle was purchase, scheduling exhibitions, negotiating the loan of paintings, restoration, preservation … Dorrie had been a little naïve to think that curating would be like a great big art history exam, all about appreciation and understanding the art. The museum world was not the academic world. She parried Jerene’s questions the best she could, and she correctly saw this as Jerene preparing her for that first interview, going through a checklist on what she had better get up to speed. Jerene wrote the recommendation letter. Jerene made phone calls. Jerene, Dorrie was to hear later, showed up at the Gantt Center as a Founder’s Circle contributor, making a $2,000 gift. Had that helped Dorrie? Dorrie did get the job.

When she called Jerene to thank her, she got Duke Johnston on the phone. He was very hard to understand. “It’d be luff-ully to see … you … again, my dear…” Duke was short of breath, and his voice had dropped to a lower register, but the worst of it was the sense of ragged exhaustion; it was an old man’s voice, not the buttery Southern baritone of old.

And then two more years passed by. Dorrie had flourished in the assistant curator’s job, and after her dynamic boss and mentor moved on to a cultural center in Anacostia, Dorrie was made one of the head honcho curators. The Center loved her and she loved the Center.

As an added bonus, she got to host evenings and galas and fund-raisers, and got on the circuit for other arts fund-raisers too—frolicking in a well-chummed sea of rich, powerful white ladies. She didn’t even bother with the long con anymore, the incremental seductions—she was a known Charlotte cultural quantity, was becoming a “character” people talked about, the out-lesbian Dorrie Jourdain. She swooped down upon heiresses and matriarchs, wealthy widows and silver-spooned spinsters, aggressive and flirtatious, and when she didn’t get a phone number or an assignation, she often got a contribution. Probably made these married old girls feel risqué and modern, writing a check with the sassy black lesbian leaning into them, a little close for hetero comfort—cheap thrills. And for every ten women she charmingly scared off, she got one or two who were curious, who arranged for a lunch date, who were slowly putting themselves into position for Dorrie to take charge and drag them the rest of the way over the line. Who knew so many white wealthy women could be curious about a butch (but with makeup, a softening touch here and there) dark-skinned black woman?

It was Barack Obama’s fault. Every white lady in town wanted to vouchsafe to Dorrie that, yes, she really really did vote for Mr. Obama. It almost made up for the monstrous, hysterical backlash of birth certificates and Islamo-Kenyan conspiracies and the Fox News–yokel uprising that shut down the man’s presidency before it began.

Hell, she cried too, when he got sworn in. And North Carolina, of Jesse Helms fame, in the electoral college went for Obama! Man, did she ever lose a bet with Annie (who never collected on it); Dorrie didn’t think the country would elect a black man. Look what the New South done up and did. Like her mama said, “George W. made such a darn fool mess of things that a white war hero couldn’t even beat a black man.” Best analysis of the Election of 2008 that she’d ever heard. She wondered if Jerene voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin. Dorrie decided that Palin would be a Jerene deal breaker—she represented a change of national tone worse than what Obama threatened, so she bet that the Republican former city councilman’s wife voted for Obama, too.

As the years passed, she wondered a lot about how Jerene was doing but that didn’t quite translate into calling or seeking her out for a visit. She saw Josh once a month and, if it was evening, that meant Nonso would be in tow (damn, he was getting more queeny and swishy each passing day), so she often proposed lunch when Nonso was at classes. Josh was getting older but letting it show; gray at the sides and in the beard stubble, thinning hair. He used to go on for hours about how he was off to Hair Club for Men if the thinning got any worse, but he didn’t seem to care now. Someone loved him just as he was. And Dorrie, exhaling, finally let herself feel happy for him.

And then, one autumn night, October 2012, there was the phone call. It was Jerene. Would Dorrie be so good as to do her a favor?

“Sure,” she said, still indebted for the recommendation letter. “I can get Josh along too, if you like.”

“No, just you will do. I’d like to discuss something with you. But there’s also a chore. I need you to pick up Gaston, my brother, at Douglas Airport.”

“I’m sure I’m free, Mrs. Johnston.”

“What did we agree to last time?” Dorrie wasn’t sure what she meant, it had been two years since she had last seen Josh’s mother. “You’re to call me ‘Jerene.’ We’re colleagues in the Charlotte art scene now.”

“Okay. Jerene.” Dorrie wondered why Gaston couldn’t take a taxi home. She knew in his final touching-bottom descent he had gotten a second DUI from the police and his license had been taken away. Just as the Charlottetowne Country Club had revoked his membership for some terrible public behavior.

“And I’d appreciate it,” Jerene added, “if you could come straightaway here, no stopping at bars or ABC stores.”

Ah, that was the rub, thought Dorrie. Bring him back sober.

So, she went to the airport where Gaston Jarvis’s evening flight from New York would land, he having left Zurich last night. But as for the soberness, that plane had already flown. Mr. Jarvis had been drunk when he got on the plane, drank heartily throughout the flight from his first-class perch, passed out from the expensive wine and the sleeping pills he had taken, and when they couldn’t rouse him after everyone had deplaned, just as they were about to call an ambulance, he stirred and stumbled to his feet.

Dorrie, who had gone to meet him, saw at once he was red-faced and drunk. Otherwise, he must have got healthy for some length of time: he was fifty pounds thinner, sleek, if jaundiced, in the face, his clothes looked good on him. Jerene called out, “Mr. Jarvis!”

“Do … do I know you?”

“It’s Dorrie, Josh’s friend? Mrs.—uh, Jerene asked me to come get you tonight. I was at Christmas Dinner with you about four years ago.”

“Don’t remember,” he mumbled. “You’re not the woman that … no, you’re not.”

It flashed through Dorrie’s mind that maybe he thought she was one of his alleged escort-service girls.
Not gettin’ in the stream,
she almost mumbled aloud.

They plodded to the Baggage Claim. “Are those your bags?”

They were. The last two left in the carousel. He took the small one and Dorrie understood that it was for her to lift the heavy one. They went outside to the curb of the terminal. Dorrie had parked some distance away and she could see that Mr. Jarvis wouldn’t make the journey, so she advised him to sit right here on this nice little bench, sit with his luggage, and she would be by in five minutes with her car.

Gaston muttered, “It’s cold … I’d forgotten North Carolina got cold.”

She went to the deck, paid the parking ticket at the booth and then entered the loop road that would take her by the Domestic Arrivals terminal. She pulled up just in time to see Gaston climb into a taxicab.

“Shit,” she said aloud, having failed her one and only Jerene-mission.

She followed behind the cab, waiting for the turn north on Billy Graham Parkway, but the cab went south, and then turned, and turned again … she was right behind them … and there they came to an ABC store, moments from closing.

“Oh no,” she said. She pulled up behind the cab who had been told to wait. She negotiated to get his bags out of the trunk, and soon Gaston emerged with a bottle of Dunlap’s Hundred. “Can’t get decent bourbon in Europe. Isn’t that odd, that there’s a Bourbon family, full of claimants to half a dozen European thrones, but you can’t get a decent bottle of the nectar named after them.”

He let Dorrie transfer his bags to her car, and paid the taxi driver. And soon they were back on Billy Graham Parkway. Dorrie asked if he wouldn’t like some coffee; he would not. He sipped freshly from the bottle, having shredded the wax seal with his house key, raining the debris on the floor of her car.

“I always knew something was screwy about that claim, my friend’s, my so so wonderful friend…”

Dorrie sighed. “Not sure I understand you, Mr. Jarvis.”

“Had a lot of time on my hands in this joint, in Switzerland. Lot of lakes over there. You go to a clinic, they wheel you out and make you look at a lake for an hour. Rest, they tell you. I mail-ordered myself a laptop and got to researching. That’s what I did.”

“Hard at work on a book?”

“Fuck books.”

“I’m going to take that as a no.”

“My research is right here. And you’ll want to see their faces when I tell them.”

Dorrie sped her way down I-85, then turned for the Brookshire Freeway. Gaston beheld the lit-up skyline of Charlotte as if for the first time.

“Almost pretty,” he mumbled. “When I was a boy there was none of this city stuff, none of it … All new people in this town.” Then after a cruise down Randolph from the city center, they turned for his street, and the big dark house surrounded by enormous trees.

“Home sweet home,” said Gaston. “I see my poor relations didn’t sell off my Porsche. Might as well have, since I won’t be driving anymore. Good God, who is responsible for the lawn service—this is a jungle out here.”

It was hard to see, since there was no porch light or streetlight; the house showed no signs of occupation, except for a dim orange glow in the living room. The Southern cacophony of insects overpowered the drone of the nearby thoroughfares beyond the ring of trees and the high brick walls.

Dorrie had never been inside Gaston Jarvis’s house; she’d heard from Josh and others about the famous emptiness of it. She indeed saw an empty room to the left with merely a phone on a small table and a chair in it. Jerene and Duke Johnston had brought some of their furniture from the old house and filled the living room, but the furniture looked dwarfed by the high ceilings and long room; the furnishings gave out before the room did. There was a fire going in the cavernous living room’s fireplace. The house was chill, colder—if possible—than outdoors. Had Jerene and Duke fallen so far that they were struggling to heat this house?

And then there was Jerene coming forward to give her brother a hug. Dorrie heard her say, “Oh Gaston. You reek of bourbon. I’d hoped you’d given it a rest.”

“I did give it a rest, Jerry. That’s why you dry out, so you can soak up again, or didn’t you know that about these so-called rest clinics.”

“How was Paris?”

“Same old tourist trap it ever was, but with more Ay-rabs and Africans than Frenchmen these days.” He turned to Dorrie, falteringly, and said, “No offense.”

And then there was Duke Johnston, emerging from the shadows. Well, the smile was intact. Dorrie first went over to hug him; he was a skeleton under his cardigan and cotton shirt. He leaned on an old-fashioned walking stick with a glass knob.

“Dorrie, you look wonnerful,” he said, not entirely able to rise to the harder consonants. “Gaston, old boy! D’you recognize this?” He meant the walking stick.

Gaston smiled. “A relic from our Arcadian evenings.” He hugged his old friend, briefly.

“Nice to see you up and around. Recovered.”

“I wun’t say recovuhed.”

Gaston held the Dunlap’s Hundred aloft. “Perhaps you’ll permit me to put this in the liquor cabinet where it belongs, since I know my sister has likely poured out all my fine collection, down some drainhole of temperance.”

“There wasn’t a bottle extant when I arrived,” Jerene said, arms crossed. “You left no drop behind, I assure you.”

Gaston left for the kitchen, leaving the others in the foyer. The three of them were quiet. What was there to say, with a drunken Gaston Jarvis back in their lives for the first time in years? Jerene glanced knowingly at Duke and then sweetly at Dorrie. Dorrie began an explanation about his taxi ride to the ABC store, and Jerene waved it aside. “Of course, if he’s determined to drink there is nothing to be done about it. Duke, I can’t see how we can stay here if he is going back to his old ways.”

“Certainly not, dear.”

Dorrie saw Jerene’s worry for her husband, and a weariness—to move again, to be like a vagabond, a charity case at her age. Dorrie looked away briefly, not wanting to see something private between them, but when she raised her head, Jerene Johnston was all serenity and extending her hand to gently take Dorrie by the arm. “Let’s go into the kitchen, make some coffee, and let the boys catch up.”

Gaston returned with a glass of bourbon with ice cubes in his hand. So much for retiring the bottle to the cabinet. “Hate to lose you, ladies, but Duke and I are going to get something straight. The big question is whether you both know it and have been faking it all these years, or whether it’s something you really don’t know.”

Jerene’s stare was a study of regal indifference. Dorrie would deplete her life savings never to have that aimed at her. “Gaston, I hear in your tone, you wish to argue about something and may I request that whatever it is be put off until tomorrow morning?”

“You don’t want to hear my news? My revelation? Or
will
it be a revelation? Heh-heh.”

“Oh, out with it. Get it over with.”

Gaston took a fortifying sip. “I always thought it strange. Some of the Johnstons down east. I used to see them when they came to my readings, down at the Manteo Booksellers, I’d get a big crowd down there. And I’d see, what’s her name, Mary Johnston? Maggie Johnston? Anyway, I’d always joke we were somehow connected, thanks to your marriage with Duke, but they never seemed to claim Duke. Very polite about it, considering. They never seemed to agree that he was really one of
their
Johnstons.” He laughed to himself, looking into his glass, swirling the ice around. “So I did a little homework. Wrote a few letters and sure enough. This Joseph E. Johnston brother who went off to Tennessee in the mid-1800s … he has nothing to do with Duke’s great-grandfather.”