Safe from the Neighbors (24 page)

The dunce cap, so long an object of ridicule, was originally designed by the thirteenth-century logician John Duns Scotus, who believed its conical shape would funnel wisdom into the gray matter of anybody who wore it. I must’ve had it on that night, even though the folks having their reunion looked over a few times and never cracked up laughing. I just sat there pondering what I’d do if Jennifer ever ended up like my mother. “I
guess it would depend on factors beyond my control,” I finally said, “like whether I could still move around and handle taking care of somebody. But honestly, what’s the point in what-iffing? I’m not in that situation. If I ever find myself in it, then we’ll see what I’d do.”

“I guess so,” she said. “Well, let’s hope that day never comes.” She raised her plastic cup. “To Jennifer’s health,” she proposed, turning it up and taking a swallow.

Our steak spilled off both sides of the platter and had to be at least two inches thick. Short Mann had made surgical incisions at various points, making it easier to tear the meat away from the bone.

After ordering more beer, I pulled loose a chunk of porterhouse that could’ve been a meal in itself and served it on Maggie’s plate along with a mound of home fries. Then I took a piece for myself, still leaving more than half of the steak on that big white platter.

We didn’t talk much while eating, just savored the meat. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded just how wonderful life’s finest moments can be, and whenever I consider the best times I’ve known, I always go back to that night at Mann’s with Maggie. I was eating a meal I couldn’t afford with a woman I couldn’t afford, either, with all her attention focused on me, and nothing ever seemed better. My notion to tell her our affair was over had dissipated, like a squall line that blows itself out. I would do it, I promised myself. Just not now.

The party next to us broke up about the time we finished eating. As they were leaving, I asked the waitress to bring us a carry out box, and we stuffed a huge chunk of steak inside. “I’ll let you have this,” Maggie said, “since you’re on your own for a while.” I started to protest—I couldn’t risk Jennifer finding that box in the trash can with mann’s eatin’ place written on the
lid in bright red letters—but she insisted, so I tucked it under my arm.

In the car, I gestured at the dashboard clock. “It’s not even nine yet. Any ideas?” I assumed we’d go over to her place and crawl into bed, as we had so many times in the last couple of months.

Instead, she said, “Let’s get a bottle of champagne and ride around.”

So I drove back to the highway and, at a liquor store on the outskirts of town, bought not one but two bottles of Freixenet and asked the clerk for a couple paper cups. I popped the first cork in the parking lot, stood the cups on the hood and poured them full.

“What do they do to you in Mississippi,” she said as I pulled back onto the highway, “if they catch you with an open container?”

“Confiscate it and drink it themselves.” This reminded me of a story I hadn’t yet told her. “An uncle of mine was sheriff up in Lee County,” I said, “back in the Fifties when the whole state was still dry. And he had a deal with the local bootleggers. He’d raid them once a month, take half of whatever they had on hand, then he and his deputies’d have a big party out behind the jail. Well, one year he decides to take my aunt and cousins to the Smokies on vacation, and because he’d miss his regular raiding day he hits all the bootleggers a couple days early.

“He heads off down into a holler where there’s this one old guy he’s been dealing with for a good fifteen years, and when the bootlegger sees him he whips out a shotgun and fills my uncle’s chest full of buckshot. Once he’s out of danger, my dad goes to visit him in the hospital and asks what happened. And he shakes his head and says, ‘Aw, hell, James, it was my fault. I should’ve just waited till we got back off vacation.’”

I tell the story often. It’s almost always good for a laugh, especially if I’m giving it to an outsider who likes seeing Southern
stereotypes confirmed. All I got from Maggie, though, was a faint smile, and that froze me in my seat. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just realized how insensitive it was, that particular story.”

“I’m
sorry. You wanted me to laugh, but I’ve got my mind on something else.”

“I know, thinking about what happened to your mom.”

We were coming into Leland, just passing Barsotti’s, for sixty years a good place for a cheap plate of pasta, when she let me have the laugh I’d been trolling for. She laughed so hard, and so long, that most of the champagne sloshed out of her cup. Some of it even got on me. I felt a damp spot near my right knee.

“You think that’s what I’m thinking about?” she said. “Tonight?”

I pulled up to the stoplight at the intersection of 82 and old Highway 61. “Okay,” I said. “So you’re not thinking about your mom, then why don’t you tell me what’s so funny?”

“The evening I came to your house for dinner?”

“Yeah?”

“You remember I left the table and went to the bathroom?”

I did remember because for one brief moment I’d thought about following her, under the guise of showing her where it was, hoping to take her in my arms and kiss her there in my own house. But for once sanity prevailed and I stayed in my chair. “Vaguely,” I said. “I’d had a lot to drink.”

“Well, I’m laughing because on my way back I decided to open the door to your bedroom. I couldn’t stop myself—I just wanted to see inside. But do you know what?”

The chill I felt had nothing to do with the champagne she’d dumped on my knee. “What?”

“It was locked,” she said. “Now, don’t you think that’s funny?”

S
HE’D CHOSEN MY SIDE
of the bed, which is where I found her when I stepped out of the bathroom. Her clothes lay neatly folded on the wicker chair, her flashy turquoise boots standing side by side on the floor in front of our closet. Her eyes were shut. At first I thought she was teasing me, pretending to be asleep, but then realized I was wrong. She barely stirred when I crawled in beside her.

I reached over and switched off the light, but I couldn’t sleep. I lay there listening and, every time a car went by, had to fight off a surge of panic. Jennifer hadn’t called or left a message, and that seemed odd since she always had before. When she’d gone to the conference in the past, of course, the girls were still home, and she couldn’t let an evening pass without speaking to them.

Earlier, while we sat on the living room couch and drained both bottles of Freixenet, still using those paper cups, I’d tried to stall the conversation, in hopes that before long she would say she wanted me to take her home. I might even have talked about the weather, which was unseasonably warm. The truth is I don’t remember what I said.
This is not a game
, is what I remember thinking,
this is her life
.

Lying there in bed I considered, for the first time in many weeks, just how difficult it is to keep a love affair secret in a place
as small as Loring. People know before you know they know, in the way we all know things without having any information. There’s a feeling in the air around two people who are focused on each other. Even if they don’t touch, even if they studiously ignore each other in public, folks pick up on it.

Our house was built in 1927. It’s one of those old Delta houses where there’s a skeleton key that fits all the interior doors. We used to use it to lock our bedroom door from the inside, but quit doing that after the girls got older because, as Jennifer noted, you can hear the lock turning from a mile away. I hadn’t even seen the key for years. So either Maggie was lying about the door being locked that night, or Jennifer had gone to considerable trouble in order to do so. If I’d had to wager, I would’ve bet Maggie was telling the truth.

All the stuff I’d just put down my throat—steak, fries, beer, champagne—threatened to come back up, and my stomach acid was churning. Every time I thought about Jennifer coming home unannounced—pulling into the driveway, slowly walking across the yard, climbing the steps and unlocking the front door—I wished that my existence could somehow be erased. That scenario, of course, didn’t account for Maggie at all, and for the first time I felt a great pity for her. I saw how much had been taken away from her, and knew that I’d soon become yet another mark in the loss column of her life. Anyway, I hoped that was all I’d be, that she’d go back to her big house in North Carolina, find someone else and forget about me.

In other words, I wanted to emerge from our entanglement guilt free. Doesn’t everybody? People want it up until the very moment their wish is granted, and then they really hate it that they meant so little to the other person, that he or she actually managed to get over the pain rather than die of disappointment. Illicit lovers are like ravenous nations, eager to retain the ground they gained at somebody else’s expense.

I lay there listening, determined to stay awake until the sun
came up, at which point I planned to get out of bed, go into the living room and hold a loud, fake conversation on the phone with one of the girls, then tell Maggie that they’d been involved in an accident in Oxford and I needed to run up there and check on them. I’d offer to drop her off at her place on my way out of town. Fortunately, I’d parked the car in the garage, so none of the neighbors would see me walking out the front door first thing in the morning with a woman most people in town would probably recognize by now.

I never experienced that misty moment when you know you’re about to fall asleep. If I had, I would’ve popped out of bed and gone out back to do calisthenics, whatever it took. I must have dropped off around 4:00, though, because I remember looking at the bedside clock at 3:47.

That’s what I thought when I woke up—that somehow I’d dozed off for a moment, that it was now maybe 4:00 a.m. But then why was it light outside? Why were birds singing? And whose voices were those that sounded like they were coming from the living room? I’d made damn certain to chain the front door.

My feet hit the floor like two sacks of concrete. Wildly, I looked around the room for my clothes, then realized I’d left them in the bathroom. I grabbed my robe off a hanger in the closet and pulled it on. Jennifer must have washed it recently, because the belt was missing, so I drew both halves of it together with one hand and swiped the other at Maggie’s foot, protruding from the covers.

Eyes still closed, she stretched luxuriously, her palms reaching up as if to touch the ceiling. In that instant, I think, I must have hated her. “Goddamn it. Wake up.”

She opened her eyes then, and whereas I still didn’t know exactly what was happening and why some young guy was saying, “Hey, this is a cool-looking house y’all got,” she sized up the predicament immediately. “It’s your daughters,” she said quietly,
sitting up in bed, then swinging her legs over the side and placing her feet silently on the floor. “Get out there and talk to them. And Luke? Try not to look like you just robbed a bank.”

“What about you?”

“I did rob the bank,” she said. “Just get out there and talk. Act happy to see them.”

In the hallway I tripped on a throw rug that had been in the same place for about twenty years. When I walked into the living room, the front door was open and Trish was there along with not one, not two, but three guys. One of them was about six-three and must have weighed damn near three hundred pounds. He had on faded jeans and an Ole Miss football jersey—number 92. The other two guys were carbon copies, standard-issue Ole Miss frat boys: khaki slacks, knit pullovers, scuffed loafers.

“Hi, Daddy,” Trish said. She’d arrayed herself on the couch in what Jennifer called her Jean Harlow pose: one long leg on the cushions, the other off, her chin propped up on an elbow. “Looks like you had some fun here last night,” she observed, eyeing the Freixenet bottles and empty cups on the coffee table.

“Mr. Buchanan came by,” I said. It amazed me how easily the lie rolled off my lips, especially since I had no idea I was going to say that. “He and I started talking about Hodding Carter and the
Delta Democrat
, and I opened a bottle.”

“This is what our dad does when he wants to be wild,” Trish told the guys. “He kicks back and talks about dead people.”

The guy in the jersey laughed. The other two just grinned like they were embarrassed, though it was unclear whether it was about me or themselves.

Candace strolled through the front door carrying one of those thirty-two-ounce sodas they sell at 7-Eleven. “Forgot this,” she said. The moment the big kid saw her, I knew what she meant to him. His whole face changed, and he looked astonished, though she couldn’t have been out of his sight for more
than a minute or two. His right hand rose, then fluttered helplessly in the air. You could tell he wanted to reach out and touch her, but not with her father in the room.

“Daddy,” she said, “this is Rick Bailey.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. May.” He offered that dangling hand and I was happy to take it, just to give him something to do with it. Such a big hand, and so helpless and sweaty.