Rock of Ages (23 page)

Her father looks over every minute or so to tell her to be careful.

Strangest of all, little Wallace is there. Georgia was only 10 when that Campbell and Cool Spring engine ended his life. He was in the second grade. She hasn't given Wallace McLaurin more than the most passing thought in many years.

Now, though, Wallace is before her, fully realized. She knows he soon will be dead. She knows everything, about Jenny and Harold and her parents, even as she is in the body of a little girl.

She begins crying, wanting everything to stay as it is, not wanting the losses about which only she knows. Her mother tells her she is acting silly, and the other adults try to console her, but even her father doesn't seem to take her discomfort very seriously. Wallace asks her if she will go and play catch with him—he did beg her to do that, she will remember when she awakens. He had few playmates around and was always eager for attention from her, an older child.

She goes outside. It is a sunny day; its brightness hurts her eyes. She can't see the rubber ball Wallace throws to her. After it hits her in the chest several times, she runs back inside, crying again.

When she re-enters the dark living room, only her father is there. She notices for the first time that he doesn't look as he would have when she was a child. He seems very old, the way she last remembers him. The other adults have vanished, as has Wallace.

She follows her father around the room. It is dominated by an old Curtis Mathis television set. Harold had bought one of the first TVs in the area. It has a frilly piece of embroidery on it, with the antenna box on top of that. There is a cheap, yellowish-brown plastic couch facing the TV, with two other unadorned straight chairs to the side. The room and most of the rest of the house are served by an oil heater. It sits in front of a fireplace that has been abandoned but never covered over.

Littlejohn McCain touches various object as he circles the room. Georgia continues to follow, expecting something, knowing it's coming.

Finally, he stops at the heater. He turns to her and smiles. It will remind her, when she wakes up, of how seldom he really smiled in life, choosing to stay deadpan even when he was saying something truly funny, his twinkling eyes the only giveaway that your leg was being pulled. Later, she thinks it might have been the bad teeth that were almost guaranteed in the pre-fluoride days she can barely remember. He was ashamed of his teeth. Of course. That's why he would hold his hand in front of his mouth sometimes, shyly, when something made him laugh. She never thought of that before now.

He bends a little to duck under the stovepipe as he steps behind the heater.

He stoops and reaches into the fireplace, touching the painted-over bricks. She can remember, when she awakens, exactly where he touched them. He motions for her to come closer, but she shakes her head. He looks disappointed.

And then, she is distracted by the sound of birds, millions of them, crashing into the windows, and she is dragged harshly and unwillingly back into consciousness by the Hitchcock movie she had started watching.

The dream's vividness will haunt her for the next 10 days. She can even remember the sounds of her mother's and father's voices as they talked, the smell of her mother's perfume.

She does not believe dreams carry any kind of mystic power. At best, she sees them, like any good academic, as a manifestation of the subconscious.

Lately, though, she has been running across her late father in some unusual places, and it is hard not to lump this dream into the same category as her conscious sightings, filed under Nervous Breakdown.

She has gone back to Montclair once since she left, to take care of a few business matters regarding Phil Macomb's estate and pick up all the things she didn't think to pack for her original flight. She had lunch with Cathy Rayner, assuring her old friend that she would be coming back, sometime soon. She went to see Hubert Lefall and had a short, uneasy conversation with him about her sabbatical and the chances that she would be back, “fit as a fiddle,” next September.

She wonders, lying on the couch and wrapped in a blanket, replaying the odd little dream, whether she is moving forward or backward, fitness-wise.

She hears a noise outside and thinks Justin and Leeza might be returning. It's Kenny, though, slamming the car door as he comes back from some errand or other. He seems to stay busy even in these dark days when the mere possibility of something growing from the cold, dead dirt seems out of the question.

She wants to see him, she realizes. She needs to talk to him.

He answers the doorbell on the second ring and ushers her in out of the rain. He still has his jacket on, over a work shirt and jeans. He's in his stocking feet. She's wet despite the umbrella, which turned inside-out on her in the brief run between their houses.

“I had this dream …” she begins.

He pulls her to him as she drops the sodden umbrella on his carpet.

“I've been having one myself,” he says, low and urgent. “It starts like this.”

For 20 minutes, they get no farther than the rug.

He kisses her long and deep, and she responds in kind, the two of them trying to devour each other. Georgia has always worried about things like her breath and her underwear in situations such as this, but nothing seems to matter now. They fall into a rhythm in which they are breathing only each other's breaths, as if they are giving each other artificial respiration. He runs his tongue into her ear and then—luck? skill?—discovers the place on her neck that has always driven her wild.

She doesn't even bother saying any of the obvious things she is thinking, has thought lately when she let her mind wander to this scenario.
This is so wrong. We shouldn't be doing this. What if someone sees us?

He begins removing her blouse, a button at a time, then unhooks her bra from behind with one hand while she fumbles with his shirt.

“We'd better go somewhere,” she gasps as her naked back slides across the floor, “before I get rug burns.”

“Yeah,” Kenny says, helping her with the shirt. “We ought to get a room. I think I know where one is.”

She knew, somehow, that he would be this good, if she let him. She wonders, as he slides slowly in and out, making it last, giving her three orgasms before he's even had one, if it isn't the forbidden fruit aspect that so turns her on. She knows that she will feel terrible about this, later, when she regains her sanity.

For now, though, she is along for the ride. It has occurred to her before that sex keeps getting better the older she gets. She wonders when that corner will be turned, too. The few men who have been open enough to talk about it indicate that it is the opposite with them. Another of God's cruel little tricks, she thinks. When they would have chewed through a chain-link fence to fuck us, we weren't really in the mood. Now, when we're more than ready, they'd rather watch a ball game half the time.

She wonders if this is the worst thing she has ever done, of a carnal nature. She never cheated on Jeff Bowman except to make a point. She did have a one-nighter during her second marriage, but Mark was so cold and self-contained that she didn't even think of it as being unfaithful, wondered if he would even have minded, except for the impropriety.

They lie there, after she has come as close to passing out as she ever has during sex. They've been in his bed for two hours, and he has spent almost all of that time stimulating her with his cock, his mouth and his fingers, usually a combination of the three. She has tried to reply in kind, and has made him come twice, which, although she has lost count, is at least a four-for-one bargain for her.

It is her experience that men, in this post-coital situation, do not stare back when you look deeply into their eyes. The remote control becomes a valued item.

Kenny, though, is different. Even as they exchange a very long, wet kiss, tasting themselves in each other, he keeps his eyes open, as if he is trying to memorize everything he sees.

“Do you know,” she says, when she comes up for air, “that I don't believe I have ever come that many times in a week? What planet do you come from? How in the world did your wife tear herself away from you?”

She has his face in her hands, and she leans back a few inches.

“I'm sorry. I'm getting way too personal.”

“Nah. No, you're not. I will tell you, though, it wasn't this good. Nothing's ever been this good.”

Georgia feels her face reddening, and laughs at the thought.

“What?”

“Oh, it's nothing,” she says. “I'm just thinking, I'm lying here in bed, buck naked in the middle of the afternoon with a likely blood relative who has just screwed me unconscious, and I'm blushing over a compliment.”

“It's true, though. Really.”

She resists the urge to tell him she bets he tells that to all the girls.

“Thank you. Thank you for—for all that—and thank you for telling me that.”

They talked, once before, about the likelihood of Kenny's late father being the son of Littlejohn McCain and Rose Lockamy Locklear. It was an awkward conversation, one Georgia wished she hadn't started.

Littlejohn's belief in this unpaid debt to Rose' family has made Kenny's homestead possible. That one time, Kenny told Georgia that there had always been rumors in his family concerning his fair-skinned father's provenance, the occasional slip of the tongue by some maiden aunt entrusted with all the secrets. The rumors only multiplied after John Kennedy Locklear inherited 160 acres from a deceased white farmer. He'd hear them second- and third-hand.

“Some things, though,” he told her, avoiding her eyes, “are best left alone. Littlejohn McCain was a good man, and he gave me what I had always wanted. Whether he's blood or not, doesn't make a bit of difference to me.”

“What now?” Kenny asks as they lie sideways facing each other on the big bed.

“Nobody, I mean nobody, can know about this. You've got to swear it, Kenny.”

He frowns and tells her she doesn't have to worry.

Shit, she thinks.

“Kenny,” she says, trying to say it just right, “you know it's just because we might be, you know, related, right? And how disgusting it must look for an old broad like me to be screwing around with a hunk like you. Nothing else. I swear to God. You don't think there's something else, do you?”

It can't be that, Georgia thinks. Not race, the thing she was so proud to have blotted from her world view. She believes she is able to look at a person as a person, period. When she lies awake nights weighing her virtues against her many faults, she always gives herself a couple of points for that one. Surely she can't be worried about the disapproval of a bunch of old ladies at a church she might never see again after the farm is sold. For all she knows, they might not care. Everyone, as Forsythia has surely taught her, has secrets.

Times change, although there is not one person of color at Geddie Presbyterian, there almost certainly never has been. When she and Forsythia were taking meals around on Thanksgiving, she asked who took food to the black shut-ins and needy, and Forsythia looked at her oddly and said she supposed the AME Zion church took care of them.

“It works well like that,” she said, a little defensively, Georgia thought. “If we thought someone wasn't getting fed, we'd feed 'em, but I think they'd like to take care of their own.”

Maybe that's so, Georgia thought. Maybe.

“You make everything too complicated,” Kenny tells her now. “You had a great time. I had a great time. Maybe we'll have a great time again. Believe me, I don't want everybody knowing my business, either.”

“Well,” Georgia says, “I surely don't want it to stop. I mean, I can live with a little guilt for that many orgasms. A lot of guilt, actually.

“And, you know what they say about old ladies like me.”

Kenny starts to tell her not to call herself old.

“They don't tell,” she says, “they don't swell, and they're grateful as hell.”

He is not a man to laugh long or loud, but he almost falls out of bed over this.

“I've got to remember that one.”

“Just don't tell anyone who told you.”

“Or where.”

She is stroking him while they talk, and soon they are at it again. Georgia can't imagine what the Almighty was thinking, making her love sex so much at an age when she surely shouldn't be bouncing all over some younger man's bed, pushing her diminished flexibility to the limit. Why wasn't it this good when she was young and athletic?

When she makes him come a third time and looks up from where her head rests against his hard stomach, he looks as wasted, as drained and satisfied, as she feels.

“I don't know,” she murmurs. “I don't know if I can keep from telling somebody about this.”

“Give it your best shot,” he tells her, pulling her up to lie on his chest.

She does remember to tell him about the dream, finally.

“Well,” he says, lying there, still looking at her, not even glancing at his watch, although she has sneaked a couple of peeks at hers, “people do have dreams. I mean, you've been thinking about Jenny and that house and your daddy, too. It's probably just the power of suggestion.”

“Maybe. OK, probably. But it seemed so real …”

“Georgia, I don't have a real strong leg to stand on here, with that rock out there drawing folks looking for a sign from their ancestors. But you're starting to worry me a little.”

Join the club, she thinks.

They are silent for a couple of minutes when she turns and looks up, resting her chin on his chest.

“Tell me something.”

“Tell you what?”

“If Pooh hadn't gone back to his truck like a good boy that time after the yard sale, what would you have done?”

He stares up at the ceiling, saying nothing.