Rock of Ages (17 page)

At 51, against all conceivable odds, I was having the best sex I'd ever had in my life, even better than when Jeff and I were young. (He came too fast or I came too slow. Story of my life: bad timing.) Phil was like Indian summer for me, I thought—a warm, exhilarating respite before the big chill.

He might have been just a little overweight, but not much. He liked to tell me he was built for comfort and not for speed. I was more than comfortable with comfort.

I could have put him on a diet, but I didn't want to do anything to Phil Macomb that might have caused him anything but pleasure. I thought I owed him that much. And he was a working man, for Christ's sake. Anybody who spent all day actually making his living by the sweat of his brow ought to be able to eat a steak and a baked potato with butter and sour cream.

That Friday night, we'd ordered delivery pizza and drunk three or four beers each, and then retired to the bedroom. Beer never seemed to slow him down, but that night it did. We tried a couple of positions, lying there in the cool darkness, before he finally hit his stride on top of me with my legs thrown back as far as my poor old grateful body would allow.

And then he gave kind of a jerk, and I thought for an instant how strange that he was coming when I thought he was a good 15 minutes away.

He fell forward, pinning me there with my legs wrapped around him.

I called his name, and then I tried to get out from under. I couldn't, at first, with his lifeless weight such a sudden burden. He'd always been so strong, no doubt doing the equivalent of pushups when he was on top, and I never knew how big a man he was until he died on me.

It took me five long minutes to get free and took the rescue squad another 10 to get there, and by then, it was too late. I had kept meaning to take CPR lessons.

I'd thrown on a nightgown and bathrobe, but there was little I could do to preserve Phil Macomb's dignity, other than throw a sheet over him. I guess the rescue squad had seen worse. They handled it with aplomb, trying their damnedest to bring him back, but failing. I know one history professor at Montclair who supposedly died on the toilet. So, yes, it can always be worse.

It was strange, thinking of it later, how nobody but the rescue squad was there with me. He died at 10:17, but nobody from any of the neighbors' houses came over. They must have seen that something was obviously, terribly wrong. Riding off, in the back of the ambulance, I actually saw one of them, two houses down, looking out through the living room curtains.

Maybe they just didn't want to intrude, but it did make me feel a little strange, later on. It might have changed my perception of who we all were to each other. It might have made me realize that reciprocal dinner invitations, house-watching and drunken New Year's Eve parties had not necessarily bonded us all for life.

The next few days have been all but expunged from my memory. Somebody took care of calling people and getting them to call other people. Somebody took care of funeral arrangements for a man who had never given a moment's thought to such things, who was sure, as I was, that he and I would be together for decades. (Hell, we thought we'd still be having sex for decades. It's hard to go directly from “Your fantasy or mine tonight?” to “Burial or cremation?”)

Somebody took care of all the goddamned paperwork that won't wait sympathetically while you gradually became aware that you really have lost the love of your life, that he isn't coming back. It must have been me.

Montclair isn't that large a town. People are going to know things. Phil's family found out, somehow, that he had died in bed, and that he hadn't been sleeping at the time. And there was this sense of blame in the air, on top of everything else. I could feel it like the cold March wind whipping through that cemetery, where Philip Anson Macomb III was laid to rest among his father, his grandparents and apparently about every other Macomb who ever lived in or around Montclair.

It was a free grave site, waiting for a man who shouldn't have needed it for a very long time, so I accepted their offer, but there doesn't seem to be any place in that cemetery for me.

Georgia McCain Macomb, killer bride.

The breakdown, if that's what it was, was inevitable, I suppose. Friends tried to warn me it was coming, gently suggested professional help, tried to keep me from sitting around half the night with the lights out, just staring off into space.

… Like I've been doing this morning, when I see my father, or surely think I do.

Looking out the kitchen window, your view, across plowed-under corn fields and around the two chinaberry trees that stand defiantly if a little scraggly in an otherwise flat land, is of the backs of houses and the few commercial enterprises in East Geddie. Chain-link fences enclose cars and storage sheds long past any conceivable usefulness, rusting metal with no place else to go.

This early on a too-warm November morning, it all seems to be floating above a couple of feet of ground fog. I don't know if I have ever seen quite this exact scene before, in all the years I lived here. I never was one to bond with nature, though.

It does entrance me, and when I see the figure walking across it, left to right as if he were taking a shortcut through our field, going from nowhere to nowhere, it doesn't really seem odd, at first, just part of the same little tableau, laid out for my benefit.

In a few seconds, it dawns on me that the surreal and the not-real might be occupying my line of sight at the same time.

He does seem to be floating on the mist. I can't see anything lower than his knees. He's perhaps a hundred yards away, close enough to know it isn't Kenny, too far away to make a positive identification.

When he turns toward me, though, I know. He's looking right at me, and he's in better focus than he should be, considering the distance and my book-weary eyes.

He stands like that for a few more seconds, stock-still. Then, he turns and continues on his way. Toward the woods beyond the Rock of Ages, the fog has lifted a little, to more than head-high, and he walks right into it. I watch for another 15 minutes, until it clears, but by then there's no sign of him.

By the time Justin and Leeza come down for breakfast, I'm sitting at the kitchen table, holding a cold cup of coffee and staring at an interior nothing rather than an exterior one.

“Mom?” Justin asks, touching my arm.

I look up and ask him what he wants for breakfast.

He tells me that he and Leeza will just have some fruit and cereal.

“Are you OK?” Leeza asks. “You look, you know, a little pale. Can we fix something for you?”

I look at her and smile. She is a sweet girl, standing there so distended, looking so young that she appears to be wearing some kind of faux-pregnant Halloween costume, yet more outwardly calm than I could possibly have been the month before Justin was born.

She does mean well, I'm sure.

I tell her I've just got the November blahs. Nothing to be concerned about.

No reason to alarm people.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

November 21

Sunday dawns bright and promising. It's supposed to be nearly 70 degrees, almost a record.

When the phone rings, Georgia is trying to find something clean and decent to wear to church, chastising herself for not going to the cleaner's last week.

“Have you ever been canoeing?” Kenny asks.

She has. It is another memory to jump out and accost her, just when she thinks they've all been beaten back.

Phil finally cajoled her into going with him, to a stretch on a small river he preferred, between Montclair and the mountains. It had just enough riffles of just enough magnitude to be challenging but not life-threatening. The scenery, with hills on all sides much of the way, was so stunning that Georgia would often quit paddling and insist they move out of the stream so she could just look for a few minutes. A 12-mile trip that might have taken Phil Macomb four hours by himself took the two of them almost twice that long.

“If you aren't going to stop and admire all that beauty once in a while,” she asked him when he became impatient with her, “what's the point?”

He told her that he had done quite a bit of that the first hundred times or so he'd canoed the Little Bright.

“I could enjoy this stretch blindfolded,” he told her. “I could get by just on the smell and sounds. I know all the hills and rocks by heart. I see them, but if I stopped every time I saw something drop-dead gorgeous out here, I'd never get where I'm going.”

He told her he only paused when something had changed—a downed tree redirecting the current, a rockslide redecorating some obscure hillside, a new hawk's nest, flowers on a part of the bank where he'd never seen them before, their seeds washed up by the stream or dropped by some bird.

“Like new exhibits in one of your museums, you know?”

They'd done the Little Bright together half a dozen times in the two years before Phil died. She kicks herself now for every time she let him go alone.

Yes, Georgia tells Kenny Locklear, I've canoed before.

He wants to take her out on the Campbell River, south of Port Campbell.

Georgia demurs.

It isn't just Phil. She remembers the Campbell as a brown, torpid haven for water moccasins, a place used recreationally only by river-rat children whose parents couldn't take them to the ocean or a decent lake. As a child, she would watch from afar, horrified and fascinated, as they would swing into its foul broth from tree ropes or jump off the abandoned, half-submerged barge that sat below the Highway 47 bridge. One or two a summer seemed to drown in it.

She liked the Little Bright, once Phil had lured her into it, partly because it only resembled the Coastal Plains rivers of her youth in that both were wet. The Little Bright lacked the accompanying swamp, the earthy miasma that marked the Campbell, which boasted alligators not so many miles south of Port Campbell itself. A mountain-fed stream seemed less fearsome. You could see the rocks at the bottom, and though it might throw you from a canoe if you didn't respect its riffles properly, at least you could see where you might end up. To sink into the brown, catfish-infested Campbell was, to Georgia, to disappear from the Earth entirely with no hope of returning.

“You know,” Kenny says, “it really isn't all that bad. For one thing, all the mills closing was bad news for Port Campbell, good news for the river. It won't even be that muddy today. All that rain last week is somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean by now.”

She doesn't know why she finally agrees. Maybe, she thinks, she trusts others to decide what she should do, going on the premise that they surely must have more sense than she. She knows this is a problem, having seen it in enough of her friends over the years as bad luck or bad choices beat them down. Still, she thinks, it's just an afternoon on the river. And she could use a little fresh air, a little exercise.

She goes to church alone, sitting next to Forsythia Crumpler and trying to stay awake during the Reverend Weeks' sermon, entitled, the church bulletin says, “Giving Thanks Every Day.”

Georgia appreciates that the Presbyterians aren't as aggressively self-righteous as some of the evangelical churches she sees while running errands in and around East Geddie and Port Campbell, but her old church's quiet, sober mien has not exactly been the ticket for bringing in the multitudes, even from among the middle-class newcomers in the upscale development right behind it. Usually, the Baptists or the evangelicals beat them to the new families' front doors.

Georgia sighs as she looks around her at the old, familiar faces and the dearth of new ones.

She has promised Forsythia that she will go with her on Thanksgiving day to deliver meals to those who are even older and more feeble than the small crowd sitting around them this Sunday morning. She doesn't know why she agreed: There are few people living who enjoy visiting the sick and shut-in less than Georgia McCain.

She wonders if this is because her father and mother made her go with them on such visits so often as a child. She has memories still of the sour-food-and-urine smell of the cheap nursing homes where the very old were warehoused, staring open-mouthed and toothless as their minds and bodies deteriorated from neglect and yesterday's soiled garments dried (or didn't) on a clothesline outside.

She thinks it might be because she knows this is just the sort of place in which she might have let her own father rot away had he not elected to sit outside in the hot Carolina sun the last day of July 11 years ago and make his own fate, or let God decide for him.

Georgia wonders if she is just giving in to Forsythia Crumpler the way she gave in to Kenny about the canoe trip. She wonders if she isn't just giving in—or up—period.

Still, though, when it was explained that there just aren't that many “healthy ones” left to make the rounds—and Georgia realizes that her old teacher, even at her age, is one of the healthy ones just by being ambulatory—she feels powerless to refuse.

“Not all of them are in nursing homes,” Forsythia said. “Some of them that aren't, though, ought to be.”

“What about you?” Georgia asks, clumsily. “I mean, do you have any plans?”

The old woman shakes her head, tightly and quickly, and the subject is dropped.

“Have you had any more trouble with that Pooh?” Forsythia asks her after they have paid their respects to the pastor.

Georgia shakes her head.

“Have you?”

“Not the last couple of days.”

“Well, you tell me if he's a problem. I'll sic Kenny on him.”

“He's a good man,” Forsythia says. “You can count on him.”

Every time Georgia hears anyone from East Geddie talk about someone's dependability, she clenches a little, hearing in her own mind the unspoken punch line: “unlike you.”

Forsythia Crumpler probably means no harm or censure, though. She seems to have come around to a position of at least accepting her old student as she is.