South of Broad (16 page)

“And what did I do with that girl? The one you liked so much? The friend you came to love?” she asks.

“You answered the bell,” I say as I type. “You had a calling and a vocation, and you never questioned it or looked back. No one could stop you or stand in your way. The rest of us followed our destinies, the way most of mankind does. You grabbed hold of your own dreams of yourself. You rode it out of town, took it to the limit. Few people do that.”

Sheba lifts her hand above her, closes her eyes, and makes a motion as though she is erasing an invisible blackboard. “You make it sound noble. But you know that girl well, Leo. She considered acting to be a writ of the highest order, and there were times she was right. That girl became the toast of Hollywood. But then the crow’s-feet appeared near the eyes, her skin began its coarsening, and she could not laugh during close-ups because of three distinct lines on her forehead. I’ve never had a husband who didn’t suggest I have a face-lift. So the girl gets scared in the middle of the journey and gets so eager to please that she starts accepting every role they throw at her: bimbos and nymphomaniacs, shoplifters and anorexic soccer moms who turn into serial killers.”

“I thought that was one of your best roles.”

“The script was dead on arrival,” she says. “But thanks, Leo. Remember London?”

“Never forget it.”

“I played Ophelia on the London stage. I was twenty-four years old, and all of England went crackers when they chose this unknown American broad to play this suicidal Danish girl. All of you Charleston friends came over for the opening. Trevor flew out from San Francisco with his new lover. What was that boy’s name?”

“I think that was Joey,” I say.

“No, Joey never saw me in
Hamlet,”
she says. “I think that might’ve been Michael the first.”

“It was Michael the second. I never met Michael the first.”

“Whatever. Trevor changed boys like flip-flops in those days,” she remembers. “Do you remember the party you guys gave me after the first night? What was that restaurant?”

“It was called L’Etoile. I still go there when I’m in London. Remember when the reviews came in? The critics said there had never been an Ophelia like you before. Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier came backstage to congratulate you. It was one of the great nights of all of our lives.”

Sheba smiles, then darkens again. “Last year, the same theater called from London. This time they wanted me to play Gertrude, Hamlet’s bitch of a mother. I’m not yet a hag, Leo. Give me another year or two. Though I’ve abused them quite seriously, this face and this body can still play a young, beautiful woman with devastating wit and effectiveness. There are seven women more beautiful than I am in Hollywood today, but only seven. And I can bury most of those dwarves by the force of my personality and the power of my acting. Do I see the hag forming in this face? I do. I see everything in this face. Every flaw, every wrinkle, every imperfection that sneaks up on me as I sleep off a hangover or pretend to have an orgasm with the new Hollywood flavor of the month. I feel like I should approach every mirror with a gun in my hand.”

“Whoa, girl,” I caution. “We’re sliding out of great acting into melodrama.”

“I don’t need to act with you, Leo. That’s one of the reasons I’m back here.”

“You’ll be a beautiful old woman,” I say, looking up at her again.

She throws her head back, laughing. “I’ll never be an old woman. That is a promise. And that, sir, you can print.”

“What’s the real reason you’re back?” I ask. “Is it to check on your mother?”

“That’s one of the reasons. But there’s one other …” She trails off, and then the phone rings.

“Hello,” I say. “Oh, hey, Molly. Yeah, you heard right. She’s sitting right here in my office. Everyone’s going to meet at your house for drinks and dinner?” I place my hand over the phone and say, “Word’s out. You got plans for the night? Molly’s called the gang, and they’re all rallying at her house.”

Sheba says, “Tell her I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“She’d love to come, Molly. See you at six. I’ll tell her the guesthouse is ready.”

A knock at the door interrupts us again. I can tell the sheer weight of Sheba’s celebrity is about to overwhelm us. The moment of intimacy has come and passed out of both of our reaches. I yell, “Come on in.” The youngest journalists in the newsroom have summoned the courage to knock and ask me to introduce them to Sheba. Amelia Evans steps through the door first and says, after apologizing to Sheba, “Leo, I’m going to get fired if I don’t get an interview with Ms. Poe before she leaves the building.”

“Sheba, this is Amelia Evans, fresh out of Chapel Hill. Editor in chief of the
Daily Tar Heel
. Hottest young reporter we got. We’re lucky to have her. This is Sheba Poe, Amelia.”

“Is it true you dated Leo in high school, Miss Poe?” Amelia asks, before she gets permission to conduct the interview.

I can feel the tops of my ears burning as the blush catches my whole face off guard. I say, “No, we never dated. We were just friends.”

A grin of mischief crosses Sheba’s face as she watches my squirming. “Leo and his modesty! He just made love to me on his mahogany desk, and then he pretends we never dated.”

“This newspaper is too cheap even to buy the publisher a toilet seat made out of mahogany. Amelia, take Sheba to meet her fans in the newsroom, then interview her in the library. I’ll finish my column, then come get her. Behave yourself, Sheba.”

“Since he was a very young man, Leo always had the sexual appetite of one of the great apes,” Sheba says.

Ellen Wackenhut, who came to work in the newsroom the same year I did and who is now the science editor, hears the remark as she passes. She sticks her head in and says, “The sexual appetite of a great ape? What else haven’t you told me about yourself, Leo?”

“That I made lousy friends in high school,” I answer.

Ellen says, “What one word describes Leo in high school?”

Sheba pauses, then says, “Edible.”

“Get Nathalie,” Ellen calls out through the newsroom. “Where’s the food editor when we’ve got a homegrown story?”

“Newsroom humor,” I say to Sheba. “One soon tires of it. Get Sheba out of here, Amelia.”

“These people are fine. I’d like to work up here,” Sheba says.

“They’re journalists, Sheba. These are poor, desperate souls. Working for starvation wages that couldn’t keep you in makeup for a month.”

Playing to Amelia and rising out of her chair, Sheba says to me, “I never wear makeup, dear. What you think is makeup is simply great acting.”

A
fter turning in my copy, I meet Sheba in the employee parking lot, open the passenger-side door, lean in, and throw empty drink containers, fast-food wrappers, half-empty popcorn boxes, and a catcher’s mitt into the backseat. With a theatrical gesture, I motion for Sheba to enter. She gives it the once-over, then enters with that resigned look of a tourist who has just been offered a ride on the back of a mule.

As I turn onto King Street, she asks, more out of politeness than curiosity, “What kind of car is this anyway?”

“It’s called a Buick LeSabre.”

“I’ve heard of them,” she says. “Not a single soul I know owns one or would ever even think about buying one. Don’t you buy this kind of car for a servant? Or when you start getting social security?”

“I’m a Buick kind of guy. My grandfather sold them for a living.”

“I never knew that. That might be the most boring fact I’ve ever heard.”

“I have a wealth of boring facts,” I say. “What do you drive in Hollywood-goddamn-California?”

“I’ve got six cars,” Sheba says. “One’s a Porsche. One’s a Maserati. Four are something else.”

“Sounds like you’re not much into cars.”

“My new ex-husband’s nuts for them. He talked to them when he polished them.”

“Was he a nice guy? Before he started screwing starlets?”

She leans over and grabs my hand, a sweet and sisterly gesture. “I don’t marry nice guys, Leo. Surely you know that by now. And you haven’t exactly dazzled in your choice of women.”

“Ouch,” I say.

“You seen your wife lately?” Sheba is watching me carefully.

“She came back last year. Stayed for a couple of months. Then lost it again. We had some good times while it lasted.”

“You need to Aretha Franklin that girl,” Sheba says, then begins singing “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

“They made me take vows,” I say. “I took them seriously.”

“I’ve taken those same vows—lots of different times. They talk about richer or poorer, better or worse. That kind of crap. Those vows don’t say nothin’ about being padded-cell crazy, do they?”

“I knew there were problems when I married Starla, so I didn’t walk into that marriage blind. I believed in the power of love then.”

“You were innocent, Leo. So were the rest of us. But not like you.”

“But I’ve turned into the most sophisticated and worldly of men. I’m looked upon as somewhat of a Renaissance man here in this city.”

“How is your mother, Sister Mary Gonzo Count Dracula Godzilla Norberta?” she asks.

“I still let her into the morgue each night. Want to swing by and see your mother?” I ask her.

“I had lunch with my mother today,” Sheba says. “It’s getting serious, Leo. Just like you told me six months ago.”

“Let’s drop the subject of mothers,” I order. “Our friends are gathering South of Broad to celebrate your return to the Holy City.”

We drive beside Marion Square, with the old Citadel anchoring the border, the statue of John C. Calhoun grimly surveying the harbor from the highest pedestal in town. Sheba insists that we roll down the windows so she can inhale all the complex aromas of the city and I acquiesce, even though I consider the inventor of the air conditioner the equal of the caveman who invented the wheel. Beside me, Sheba snorts and breathes in the smells of the port city. “That’s confederate jasmine I smell. It’s low tide in the rivers. That’s the smell of the pluff mud.”

“All you’re smelling is carbon monoxide. The fumes of rush-hour traffic.”

Sheba looks at me. “What happened to the romantic in you?”

“He grew up.”

We shoot past Hyman’s Seafood and the slave market, which is crowded with tourists in Bermuda shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops, then we are stopped at the traffic light at the intersection called the Four Corners of Law. Catty-cornered is St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in its starlight whiteness and all the assuredness that good taste can bestow on a house of worship. I once got in trouble with the Roman Catholic bishop of Charleston for begging him, in print, to hire only Anglican architects whenever he felt like erecting a new grotesquerie in the Charleston suburbs. My coreligionists who worship in those toadstools wrote me hate mail for weeks, but their vitriol did nothing to make their churches prettier.

As I pull south of Broad after the lights change, the siren and flashing blue lights of a police car catch me by surprise. Instinctively, I look at my speedometer and see that I am traveling at less than fifteen miles an hour. I go quickly through the list of items that allow me to drive as a free South Carolina citizen without a criminal record—insurance, registration, tax receipt, license renewal—and I am certain I have taken care of these responsibilities in an efficient and timely manner, a rarity in my life.

“You didn’t moon that cop behind us, did you, Sheba?” I ask.

“If I mooned someone in South Carolina with my beautiful ass, there’d be lawsuits and fatalities. In L.A. only lechers and lesbians notice.”

“Sir,” a cop says as he approaches my car. “Put both hands on the steering wheel. Then slowly get out of the car. Let me see your hands at all times.”

“Officer?” I ask. “What seems to be the problem?”

“I’ll ask the questions,” the cop says. I can hear the black inflections softening the ending of every word he speaks. “Place your hands on the hood of the car and spread your legs wide. There has been a reported kidnapping of a well-known actress by a local sex offender.”

“Son of a bitch, Sheba,” I say. “It’s that living pain in the ass, Ike Jefferson.”

“Ike!” Sheba screams. She leaps from her side of the car, they rush into each other’s arms, and Ike spins Sheba in ever-widening circles, to the delight of the ladies who sell their tightly woven baskets of sweetgrass to tourists and locals alike. Ike has been a hero in Charleston’s black community since he was a young man, and it is not a surprise to the basket ladies to see him whirling the most famous white girl in recent Charleston history. Because it always terrifies me in the most primitive fashion to be stopped by the police, no matter how innocent I am or how bogus the encounter, it takes me several moments to stop my hands from shaking. I take my hands off the hood, only to have the baton of another cop poke into one of my kidneys. A female cop, I realize as I hear her harsh whisper. “Freeze, white boy. I think you were given a lawful order to place your hands on the hood of your ugly, white-trash car.”

“Don’t hit me with that stick again, Betty,” I say, “or we’re going to have a fistfight in the middle of Meeting Street.”

“Resisting arrest. Threatening a police officer,” says Betty Roberts Jefferson, Ike’s wife and a sergeant on the force. “You heard it, didn’t you, Captain?”

“I did,” Ike says. “Search his trunk, Sergeant.”

“I hope you have a search warrant,” I say. Of course, Betty puts one in front of my face, signed and sealed by Desiree Robinson, the first black judge in the history of the city courts.

“The worst year in American history was 1619,” I say. Sheba is laughing at me, still enfolded in Ike’s powerful arms. “First black slaves imported into the Virginia colony. It’s been downhill for the South ever since.”

When their cackling finally passes, Ike says, “Sheba, ride in my squad car with me. Betty, you ride with that cream-puff white boy.”

“Not until I give this girl a hug,” Betty says, turning toward Sheba. “Hey, Sheba, how’s my favorite white bitch?”

The two women embrace fiercely. Sheba says, “Betty, let me take you west. I’d have casting directors creaming all over themselves to put you on the silver screen.”