One Heart (10 page)

“And you'd play with her, right?”

“No, no. I'd sometimes sit on the front stoop and watch her. And sometimes she'd tell me things.”

“So you left the little girl, James. Is she heartbroken?”

“She's got a father. I'll never be her father. Her father came over once a week and took her out on the town. He was a comedian. I mean he made his money that way, locally. Pie Pie loved him. He told her he was going to take her around the world when she was ten. She'll miss me a few weeks, but then she'll forget me. I'm no father to her.”

“I don't think you're real forgettable, James,” I said. “I don't think Gladys forgot you for a second.”

“I don't know why I even want to see her,” he said. “I might just want to say hello and good-bye. But I have to see her to know.”

“That's understandable.”

“Anything really
new
with her? Anything I should know? She ever go to night school like she always said?”

“Night school?”

“She always said she would.”

“Oh, that's right. No, no night school that I know of.”

“Would you say she was happy?” he wanted to know.

“No, James. I would never say that.”

“She talk about Ann?”

“Oh no. Never.”

“She talk about Wendell?”

“Maybe once or twice.”

Before we left the bar James played “Ring of Fire” on the jukebox, a song we all loved in the old days. Him, me, Gladys, maybe a man I was seeing, we'd all sit in that same booth singing.

We left that day before the song was even halfway through. James said he wanted some fresh air, and I knew that whatever he thought the song would do for him, it did something like the opposite of that.

He drove us down into the valley, asking me questions about my own life now. Was I happy? “Sure,” I told him. “Happy enough.”

“What's that mean?” he said.

“Can't complain,” I said.

“Go ahead and complain. You could do it if you tried.”

So I complained that maybe I was a little lonely now that Gladys was gone. A little out of sorts.

“I venture that's an understatement,” James said.

Maybe that was the sort of conversation that made me like James so much. You don't often find men who ask you to complain.

Men who know you well and know when you're making an understatement. Men who know you well enough to say, “So, Ivy, can I stay with you a while?”

“Sure you can.”

“Won't put you out?”

“Hell no, James.”

We were in the kitchen and James was looking taller than usual because of the low ceiling, and I was suddenly remembering him as a young man with bare arms and Wendell sleeping on his shoulder at Rehoboth Beach on a lazy gray day. We all left the beach that day just as it started to rain. Most of the other people ran off the beach headed for shelter, but we all walked slow as usual, and for a second I saw James had his face lifted to the rain and his mouth open. And Wendell opened his sleepy eyes, then went right back to sleep with his head on James's rainy shoulder, and a smile came to James's lips for just a moment, then was gone.

For a second I could see James the fifty-two-year-old and James the twenty-four-year-old at the same time, like both men were in my kitchen. The older man might have looked over at the younger man like he was a complete stranger, but I could see that James was still James and his best quality was still a kind of gentleness.

I fixed him some supper and gave him three glasses of ice water, and he ate and drank in silence while I sat and looked out the window, over at him, out the window, over at him.

He stood up after he was through and thanked me in a formal way and asked if he could go to sleep on the couch, so I went and got some clean sheets and a pillow and made it comfortable, and he took off his boots and lay down and fell asleep in about two minutes with his legs bent because he was too tall, and for a while I just stood in the doorway looking at him because I never saw a grown man sleeping in the dusk light, only children.

That whole first week James stayed was nice because he inspired me to fix the faucets and helped me repair the roof, which I'd been putting off for years. And one morning he even came down to the garden with me, not to work but to see what we were growing, which weren't much because the fall was coming, and the children all looked up at James and studied him. He smiled at them and said hello. “You people good gardeners?” he asked them.

“Yes,” they all said.

“Not afraid to get your hands dirty?”

“No,” they all said.

“I admire that,” James said. “From the looks of this patch of ground you all do a fine job.”

The little anorexic girl, Cassie Dean, stayed by James's side the whole morning, the two of them weeding partners, James just praising her ability and telling her about what a lousy weeder he was when he was her age, how he always ended up leaving in some roots. She finally took off her red plastic sunglasses, which I'd never seen her without. Her eyes were small blue jewels. She had a smile on her face and that was for James.

I like to remember James walking beside me toward the garden before the sun even came up, everything cool and dark and dewy, James in a T-shirt and jeans and his boots, stopping once in a while to pick up a stone and turn it around in his hand.

During this time Gladys called, and I told her James was here. I expected a big reaction and I thought she might start coming home. But she said otherwise, and I never mentioned it to James. I guess I didn't want to talk about her with him for a while.

In the evenings we'd go for drives together in the valley, which James loved and said he missed. I can't explain it, but the tires underneath us felt bigger than ever. We were way up high, almost floating down the road.

At the end of that week on one of our valley drives with the windows half open and the smell of red leaves in the car, James reached over toward my hand, and I wasn't too sure what he was doing so I didn't give my hand over to him. I just looked at his hand and did nothing so he took his hand back and put it on the wheel.

But after that my heart started pounding and it just got louder when I told myself to calm down, because there was a new feeling in the car and it dawned on me that James wanted to hold my hand so I reached out and touched his hand on the wheel and my throat swelled up. Without looking at me his hand slid off the wheel down to the seat between us and our fingers just linked up like they were old friends having a reunion.

I mean to say holding the hand of James didn't feel
new
, it felt
old
, like I'd held it a million times. I don't have an explanation.

So I'm riding along trying to breathe in the piney mountain air and trying to say to myself, this don't mean much, Ivy, you're just holdin' hands and bein' friends, honey, so why the racing heart, why's your throat swelled up, old girl, and why so warm? Warm in the face and the body?

That's all understatement, the truth is that just holding his hand that day in the car felt better than most anything I could remember. A pleasure in my body like a steady flame that got stronger when James took his finger and traced little patterns on my palm.

Maybe when he was tracing those patterns on my palm is when I said to myself, Ivy, this is more than friends.

Back at the house he helped me make the supper, which was fried chicken and a lot of nice vegetables. James cut all the vegetables up and sat at the table in his new-looking white T-shirt with a glass of beer beside him. I was at the stove and kept looking over at him, thinking he might look up and smile, but he didn't. And if he had, I would've looked away, since the air was thick and still with all our feelings.

I was frying that chicken saying to myself, Ivy, this is not your man. This is your sister's old husband. This is not your man. This is not your man. This is not your . . .

And another voice would come into my head that was more like the sound of the wind in the leaves, or someone saying, Shhhh.

And pretty soon I listened to that voice and got quieter than I'd ever been in all my life. The whole kitchen filled up with quiet that was coming from me and from James, so now you could hear every sound from the pots and pans like it was coming through a megaphone.

So we ate the meal together and still we didn't say a word, and now it was like we both understood that we shouldn't talk and break the spell.

After that meal we go out for a ride and end up in the valley and we walk way down to the very bottom of it. The sky was all thick with clouds like a hard rain was coming. Some of the mountains are hiding behind the clouds, some aren't. And James is talking more about pets now, about a man he knew with a dog who learned to steer the wheel of the man's Chevy. The dog would sit between the man's legs with its paws on the wheel and the man would tell the dog “left,” “right,” and the dog, who wore a Yankees cap, would steer just fine.

“The man never got into a single car accident,” James said as we went deeper into that valley. “I've been in three, myself. You think I should get a dog to do my steering, Ivy?”

“Maybe that would be just the thing,” I said.

And then we were down on the grassy ground in the darkness, no blanket under us, no stars over us, no hesitation left inside us.

We were good together, that's an understatement. James was a man who could make you forget yourself when he kissed you. He was a man whose weight felt good on you, like his weight was made up of things you wouldn't mind knowing. Some men, their weight feels all wrong, and even as they're making you feel good, if someone said, “Would you like to see everything inside his heart?” you know you'd answer, “No I wouldn't, thank you.”

With James I wanted to see everything.

The problem was the ghost of Gladys hovering over us or stretched out beside us so that any time I remembered myself I felt a burning in my heart and a need to sit up and say “Stop, I'm not Gladys.” But see, I never did sit up and say this, in fact I never sat up at all unless he pulled me that way. Ivy the rag doll.

So what happened, or what seemed to happen, was that the spirit of Gladys somehow slipped into my body. Now don't think I don't know that sounds mystic of me, me who thought I didn't have a single mystic bone in my body.

All I know is that while James was making love to me my own face felt like my sister's face. And when I cried out it sounded like her voice.

And after that first time James said, “I feel a bit worse off now than I did before. I'm not sure this is the right thing to be doing. Considering everything.”

I didn't know what to say to that because I didn't want to think. I just looked up at the dark sky above and tried to feel exactly like myself but I believe I wasn't sure what that was anymore. Though I did feel a bit like a patch of dry earth with a brand new stream running down through the middle.

*  *  *

One night in the middle of our love affair I made up some spaghetti sauce. All we were doing with our time was making love, and we weren't hungry at all, but we needed to eat to keep going. I stood at the stove on a warm fall afternoon making that sauce and feeling furious at James all the sudden.

Because he had this power over me no man ever had before. I had a hunger for him I never had for anything or anyone before. All I had to do was look at him and my whole body hurt from desire. He came into the kitchen and said, “Ivy, are you okay?” because he could feel my anger. Hell, Brent Quinn could probably feel it all the way up on his mountain. I kept stirring the sauce and said, “Fine,” but I snapped it out. So he leaves the kitchen. And I start pouring hot pepper into the sauce. I pour about three or four times the usual amount. Then I taste it. Then I add a little more hot pepper.

I served him his spaghetti and served myself some too and we sat at the table together. “Wow,” James said after his first taste. “Hot! Are you trying to kill me?”

“Maybe.”

I sat there and ate and felt angrier and angrier because all he'd have to do was reach out for my hand and I'd be leaving the table and following him to the bed. He knew this was the case too.

“What did you do, pour a whole jar of peppers into this sauce?”

I shrugged my shoulders. He smiled at me. I think he understood.

“So when do you think she might be coming back?”

“Oh, I don't know. If she knew you were here I imagine she'd come back if she had to walk across America on bare feet.”

“I don't know about that.”

“Maybe not,” I agreed.

Because who knew anything about all of this? Who knew what time had done to the heart of Gladys?

You might think I started feeling overwhelmed with guilt like any woman would have after sleeping with the long-lost husband of her own sister, but it didn't happen like that. The guilt was there, but it was like a little bad music in the background or an itch or sometimes at moments a knot in the chest, but it was not the main feeling at all. The main feeling was lovesickness as bad as a girl's, but not as innocent, and not with the same kind of promises for future lifelong happiness. In fact I felt the promise of doom. But it was love all the same. And there was this rudeness, this rude part of me that thought only of myself, and hurt. I never felt so bad or so good in my whole life. After we made love each night I'd lie there and talk to James and he'd listen for a while and then fall asleep and I'd lie there and look at his sleeping face for a while, then lie there some more staring up at the ceiling, then maybe walk outside, look at the sky, then come back in and toss and turn and finally sleep.

One day James slept most of the morning, and when he woke up he wouldn't look at me. He sat and ate breakfast at the table and neither of us said much, until he finally said, “I'm in bad shape.”