Loonglow (2 page)

The day after Clayton Lee's eighth birthday, his sister Cynthia glanced up from the piano to find him standing in the doorway of the study. “Come here,” she called to him. “I want to show you something.”

Warily, Clay made his way to the bench. She slid over several inches and patted the hard surface next to her. After a moment's hesitation, he sat down.

“Look”—she placed his hands on the keys—“copy what I do.” She played a series of notes, then a chord. He studied her. “Come
on
,” she nudged, playing a simple melody. This time his fingers obeyed, faltering slightly. “Close. Try again.”

When their father came into the study thirty minutes later, he discovered his son and daughter earnestly harmonizing together at the keyboard.

“What's going on here?”

Clay stopped at his father's voice.

“
Cynthia!
” His father had never used such a tone before on his daughter.

She turned, sighing. “I'm teaching him to play.”

At this, Clay's father took hold of Cynthia's arm, pulling her out of the room before Clay had a chance to find out what she'd done wrong.

That night Cynthia crept into her brother's room when he was sleeping. Clay woke with a start to find her seated on his bed. “What's the matter?”

Her voice was cool. “He didn't come home last night.”

Clay sat up, rubbing his eyes. “Who?”

“Daddy.” The first time Cynthia had awakened to hear her father returning to their house in the middle of the night, she'd been ten years old; she had lain awake for hours, her blood racing. By the time she was twelve, she'd acquired the ability to awaken, instinctively, seconds before the sound of his even tread on the stairs.

“It's only a matter of time,” she went on.

“What is?”

“You'll see.”

Clay waited for her to explain herself. “What are you talking about?”

“Mark my words,” she answered ominously, then slipped away.

Dulcie Marshall Lee's son had inherited her full head of shimmering fair hair and delicate aristocratic features the years would insolently turn even more attractive than her own. From his father, Clay inherited a tongue capable of devastating unsuspecting targets and a deep appreciation for the curative powers of alcohol. Yet unlike his father, Clay found no need to postpone his pleasures. In no time at all he'd learned which drinks promised maximum effect with minimal evidence of their intake.

Every morning, Clay went swimming with his sister, doing all he could to goad her to rebellion. Afternoons he drank, to brace himself for family dinner; in the evening, he played piano for his mother's pleasure. (“Must you perpetrate that noise?” demanded Clayton, nearly the first words Clay recalled his father speaking.)

At seven, Clay realized his father didn't love him as his mother did, or as Clayton loved his fragile, high-strung daughter. At fifteen, Clay determined the cause of his father's loathing. His strong physical resemblance to his mother and his unwillingness to reform a temperament ill-suited to serious work served as constant reminder of what Clayton saw as his most ill-fated blunder, marrying the impulsive, insubstantial Dulcie Marshall. Nor did Clay's undisguised lack of interest in his father's money help matters (though Clayton still continued to augment his already considerable fortune in hopes of influencing him). Money was his father's chief asset, as charm was his mother's, but Clay cared little about the rewards of either.

The week after his fifteenth birthday, Clay met Charlene Watford, one of the richest girls in Tennessee and the daughter of one of his father's discarded mistresses. Sensing the discomfort such a liaison would cause his father, Clay immediately set about convincing her to be his childhood sweetheart. By the time he realized Clayton was less distressed than complacent about the match, however, it was too late; the course of their affair was irrevocable. Unknown to Clay, so was the deterioration of his relationship with his mother.

Charlene Watford was the Watfords' crowning achievement, “no mean feat in a community with as many perfect teeth as it has millions,” the Lees' housekeeper, Mona, had been quick to note. Charlene's relationship with Clay was based on little beyond nascent parental dreams of fair-haired offspring, yet even with a generous dollop of teenage lust, the romance had no future, for Charlene had a major flaw: she took life in deadly earnest. When they weren't making love in or out of doors, Clay tormented her with deadpan sarcasm, while Charlene analyzed the deeper meaning behind everything he said with a perplexed expression on her face. Clay had goaded Charlene Watford mercilessly, but she'd never caught on.

As the years passed, Clay's mother grew more distant, in tacit disapproval of his breach of loyalty. Dulcie Lee took his retreat into another woman's arms as confirmation that her son had indeed betrayed her to side with his father as she had always feared he would. No longer did he have time to play for or to drink with her. Nor would she allow any resumption of past intimacy when they did find themselves alone together. Once he realized how drastic the situation had become, Clay devoted months to trying to repair the breach, yet she remained aloof, impervious to all his efforts to appease her.

Inevitably, as both Clay and Charlene neared completion of their undergraduate degrees, the Watfords asked their daughter when she planned to marry “that damn boy.” Charlene suggested that as Clay was “weird” and “frivolous,” they might better turn their attention to waiting for pigs to fly. When Clay learned of this conversation, he called the Watford plantation. Mrs. Watford answered.

“Is it true Charlene says we're through?” Clay asked.

After an uncharacteristic silence, Charlene's mother confirmed that it was, adding that the entire family shared Charlene's opinion of him.

“I am sorry to hear that,” Clay said. “There's not another girl in Memphis who likes to fuck as much as Charlene, and I had no idea my tireless efforts were leaving her unsatisfied.” He hung up before she had the chance to offer him any sympathy.

When Clay returned full-time to the bosom of his family, he discovered that his father had mellowed toward him so considerably as to assume his son would join him at the legal helm of Lee, Barringham and Sparks. That he had no intention of doing so did nothing to thaw the chill of his mother's now-permanent indifference. All his efforts could not restore his former place in her heart.

Clay began toying with the notion of leaving home and going North, perhaps to New York City, where the preponderance of blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Jews would discomfit both his parents equally. “Child, you are crazy,” Mona said as he lay listening to Erroll Garner and dangling his feet off her bed. “What makes you think the world is ready for ‘the blond Duke Ellington'?” Before he could seriously explore this possibility, however, or investigate any other potential options open to him, his sister focused all attention on herself with an orgy of ill-chosen pharmaceuticals. As his parents' sanity and already shaky union foundered, Clay had to wonder if poor departed Cynthia had it better than any of them.

Walking unsteadily from the bar, Clay saw that a pre-pubescent youth was holding a girl of indeterminate years at knife point against an attractive building on Columbus Avenue. This conclusion to the evening's festivities seemed somehow fitting.

Clay had never actually seen someone held at knife point. Instinctively he stopped to watch; a dull thudding filled his chest as he braced himself for bloodshed. He searched his mind for some dramatic plan of rescue, but what little control over his mental functions he had managed to retain after discovering the beautiful girl in the restaurant had evidently vanished with her.

The boy, who must have been no more than thirteen, seemed a full-fledged product of the city's harshest influences, and though the girl appeared to be little more than an urban consumer with limited charms, Clay found himself saddened at the sudden tenuousness of her future. “Hey,” he heard himself call feebly. The boy glanced over his shoulder with a smirk that reinforced Clay's suspicions about his inability to meet the city's standards of heroism. Then, as both he and the boy caught sight of a police car drawing slowly across Columbus Avenue, the pre-teen took his knife from the girl's throat and bolted around a corner, leaving Clay to face her. With a toss of overly processed hair, she looked Clay up and down and then walked past him without a word. “That's okay,” Clay murmured. “Nothing to it.”

The remainder of his trip home was uneventful. Reaching his apartment, he unlocked the door with unsteady fingers and staggered onto his bed, yawning and stretching as he listened to the night's telephone messages.

“How's your progress, boy?” The first voice was his uncle's. (Clayton's brother Wynn had given Clay a month to come up with the outline of a project for a grant he'd scrambled up “to motivate the boy.” All that held things up was the slight matter of a theme: Clay was no closer to a topic than he'd been six months earlier when Wynn had first told him about the project. Not that the world would end if he forfeited the grant his uncle had arranged, Clay thought; the idea of someone giving him more money than he had already was too ludicrous to consider seriously.)

Wynn was still trying to convince him that the whole thing was symbolic. “… just the push you need,” the voice droned on, “to do something of value with your life.” Clay sighed, stopping the machine before his uncle finished. “Right,” he said. “That's probable.” That he might be of value to his ever-devoted parents, Wynn, the firm so busy seeing to the rights of famous addicts and deposed dictators on the loose was a winning concept, if one had a penchant for surrealism. He poured himself a modest cocktail and waited for inspiration to strike.

The next thing he knew, his slumber was shattered by the shrill ring of the telephone. The voice of Charlene Watford, who hadn't contacted him since he'd emigrated to New York, made the perfection of his evening complete.

Since Charlene had made no effort to see him when she'd first come to the city, two scant months after his own arrival, Clay had presumed her new life in Manhattan was too streamlined to accommodate a rude intrusion from her past; clearly she wanted all traces of life in the slow lane erased from her resume. Her decision to relocate to New York had been as unexpected as his father's earlier move to the East Coast branch of the family firm, but he'd hoped Charlene's choice of the most superficially glamorous city she could find was the final indignity he'd be made to suffer. The sound of her voice destroyed his theory.

“I'm calling to invite you to a premiere,” she announced. Culture? he thought. (He'd never known Charlene to show an interest in any activity that wasn't best undertaken in the nude.) Of a dance company, she went on to explain, whose choreographer she'd blown before he underwent The Change.

Her voice brought back a rush of memories. Resisting the urge to ask why she felt the need for weird frivolity or what she thought they'd find to say to one another after all these years, Clay murmured, “Day after tomorrow, then.” After a brief, intense exchange, he hung up, covering his head with the pillow. This time there were no further interruptions.

Two evenings later Clay discovered Charlene had grown lovelier and, if possible, more humorless than ever. He took her hand at the door to the concert hall, gazing into her earnest eyes. How was he going to get through the performance without snoring conspicuously and ruining all the good will between them? he wondered, following her to their seats. As if in direct challenge, the dancers instantly got under way.

After an interval of numbing (if well-orchestrated) banality, Clay felt his gaze begin to wander from the stage. He shifted in his seat, scanning the rapt faces in the audience. Several minutes passed before he found himself dumbfounded by a seemingly impossible discovery.

Four rows down from them sat the beautiful girl, like a recurring character in some Fellini movie. Was Clay doomed to see the specter of her glowing face wherever he turned? New York was obviously a mere handful of people surrounded by a great many mirrors. For no good reason, his heart began to pound. (What on earth was wrong with him?) To calm himself, he studied Charlene's face. (Would the woman's beauty startle him each time he saw her float by, he wondered, or would the vision begin to pall with over-exposure? There had to be some way to render her charmless, some way of breaking the brazen hold she had attained over him.)

“We'll go backstage, of course,” Charlene said once the dance fest had trembled to its heartfelt, brave conclusion. Clay glanced across the aisle for one last look. Yet minutes after Charlene reached the proud choreographer, the girl appeared as if on cue. Walking past them, she went over to greet the most striking of the dancers, a flamboyant black man whose every comment seemed to be driving his admirers into frenzies of appreciation. Every few seconds the girl would say something and the dancer's face would register shock, but before Clay could take in the dancer's reply, Charlene and her soul mate would have a new epiphany on art, drowning out all post-modernist conversation.

Then the dancer flung up his hands and shrieked, “Girl, you get the hell out of this room! We don't allow your kind here!” Taking her by the arm, he tried to race her out the door. She drew herself up to her full height, slinging an arm around his shoulder. He seemed to melt. Almost reverentially, he walked her toward the exit, where she kissed him goodbye, full on the mouth. (It was never too late to take up dance, Clay mused.)

Unable to help himself, he stole away from Charlene's ecstasy to join the other group, waiting nonchalantly until the dancer returned. Then, at a convenient lull in the conversation, he casually asked the name of the girl the dancer had walked out of the building.