The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (21 page)

“Nothing has ever taken so much ass, as walking outta that bar, away from you. Going upstairs was like trying to escape a
gravity well. Then it was all—about seeing the number on your card and the message from the board, and realizing I’d seen
postings from you on the Net but like, fucked around? And there you were in front of me, like all kinds of inevitable.

“It was totally over. I was dressing up like I thought you’d wanna have me, and knowing that if you left, I’d be all, paging
you to come back. I could not
even
believe what I was doing, getting ready to offer myself to you, body and soul. Have a clue what that was like?”

Actually, I was running breathlessly to keep up. Then I registered the hopeless little laugh when she had confessed her name.
I saw her dressing herself, posturing herself to please, she had to have relived…

“When you pulled me back and wouldn’t let me get away, you made me feel it all again, but not the same. Then you reached down
and,
touched
me, and I came for you—right then, not once-removed! When you turned me over, oh, I loved your eyes! I saw you accepted that
I had given it all up, and it was as if I weren’t alone anymore.”

That hit me like a whiplash and my composure faltered. Pulling myself back together, it occurred to me how all of this combined
still failed to address the mysteries that had interwoven our paths. I suspected that she was aware of this. Her analysis
was the means by which she had been educated to rationalize her own feelings and circumstance.

In the face of what was happening to us, the thing that was coming to us on that pier, in a sea storming with primal forces
that could snuff out our little lives in a heartbeat, then more than ever she needed some parts of her life to make sense.
I could only wish that
mine
might. I turned my eyes to the boiling clouds. “The kinkiest thing about this may be me having sex with a psychology graduate…”

The attempt at levity was lost. She wrapped up her end without breaking stride, “When you were describing your experiences,
you didn’t pick up on my shock of recognition? I’m so up on you that I don’t think anything could turn me off.”

Recalling her thoughts about incest in Mexico, I laughed uncertainly, “Yes, I guess we could say that has been pretty well
established.” While the atmosphere was not lightening, the rain had slowed, and she stood up. Her tension had returned.

“Prompt me right now if you really want me.” She stared out into the Gulf, as if afraid to meet my eyes. “If you do, I believe
we’ll always be together, no matter what. But I must know now if you wanna throw me over and go back, after JJ or whatever…
Nay, please don’t make me go on alone.” Her voice quavered. Somewhere in all this, the strangeness had returned and become
pronounced. “Please, if you want this, take me right now!”

She waited for my answer, and I couldn’t imagine why I hesitated. A fatal attraction is only a problem if you don’t want it.
I was knocked out that all this had been going on in her while I had wallowed in my silly insecurities. Never would she have
to fear abandonment. Logically, I could not live long enough. It would be me who would age and sicken while she was yet young.
She would never have to plead with me that it was still her inside, never know how shamefully shallow I could be…

From what depths was
this stuff
coming? I had abandoned no one; my record was clear. What I had traditionally thought of as sanity gave one last, feeble
protest before it expired. “Do I want you?” The very question seemed as preposterous as her mother’s “Do you remember me?”

“Of course I want you. But, my God, girl, look at you—look at me…”

I’ll never be able to describe or express this, no matter how hard I try. The heartrending girl-cry that sounded as though
it echoed down the halls of eternity did not even resemble her voice or speech. She gripped her fists under her chin and I
wondered that one young lifetime could contain that much pain, and consequent release.

“Don’t go there, don’t
even
go there! Can’t you see that I never wanna have to stop looking at you, ever again?” As though the enormity of it all caught
up with her at once, she sank to her knees on the deck, her tears dissolving into the rain and the waters of the Gulf.

Somehow, I couldn’t abide her like that right then. Seeing her on her knees before me aroused a strange, sickening sense of
shame. I gathered her up and she lay against me like a sleeping child as I carried her back down the rain-slick planks. If
she had somehow found her father and lover in one, I was going to buy into it.
Come hernia, come coronary,
I thought,
there is no way I’m going to let this girl down.
I would not allow the slightest indication that I might ever let her go.

The newly washed greens of the trees, bright paint on the antique houses facing the storming Gulf, the ozone in the air—all
things seemed fresh and new. I was breathing in the air of a brand-new world and knowing I was never going back to the old
one. As I felt my lifelong obsession with her mother pale into an ambivalent footnote, I knew that
now
I had seen it all! Of course, I was wrong again.

I
TOOK HER WITH ME INTO A HOT SHOWER, WHICH
relieved the chill of our soaking in the morning storm. Lathering each other up, it developed that my body hang-ups of the
preceding day were missing. How not, when she watched me, slightly blushing, as I gently scrubbed the contours of her young
flesh? It is not distasteful work to stroke under full, firm breasts and down along a well-muscled abdomen. No, I should have
been the one to feel embarrassment when, rinsing off, she began to compulsively use her lips on my aging chest. Working down
my belly, she went to her knees again and, this time, I felt no shame, quite the contrary.

The shower had one of those adjustable heads on a flexible tube, which she pulled down with her. “Spread your legs,” she commanded
with a wicked glance.
Oh, really?
The needle-spray was stimulating enough before she reached back and began to gradually turn up the heat. The treatment began
to get intense, but damned if I were going to cry uncle! In wonder, I watched her implicitly worshiping my aging flesh, apparently
desiring nothing other than to fill herself with me.

I tried to reach down for her, but she pulled back from my cock just long enough to gasp, “I don’t care about that right now.
I wanna get it done for you; I want you to come.” When she dropped the nozzle and dug her electric blue nails into my butt,
there was no difficulty on that count. I was staggered, but I could no longer discount the obvious; for some reason, in some
fashion, she genuinely did want me!

After a great seafood lunch in a glass-walled restaurant overlooking the still-churning Gulf, we set out for Atlanta. By the
time I swung the Del Sol northward at Mobile, the sun had come out and the day was fine. Contrasting with our weird drive
through the Southern night, there was little conversation while we cruised through the forested Georgia hills. I drove, and
she nestled against me.

Justine was apparently content, though I’d made little enough verbal commitment to her when she’d poured out her soul. Still,
a crucial something had passed between us. This I could not have denied, even had I been so inclined. My mind full with trying
to get a handle on what was happening to me, I surmised that she felt much the same. In my own internal quest, I’d remained
vigilant for synchronies as a sort of barometer. I’d prayed that the fabric of reality might be worked, to worry loose a few
threads of what my life might have been, or maybe had been and lost.

But what was happening was outrageous! synchronicity appeared to overwhelm causality in a nexus of uncertainty, of which the
wild weather presented an objective metaphor. Justine had said she saw convergence, but I feared the chaos of delusion. Could
I persuade myself that my mad fantasy to return to the lake and the young JJ had been, all along, linked with a destiny leading
me to her child instead? The implications of this possible outcome to my life were extraordinary as anything I’d been consciously
exploring.

If that was the case, how did the strange saga of the life and work of William Seabrook fit into all of this? Or did it, I
wondered, as we skirted Columbus, beyond serving simply as the point at which we touched? I had a most unsettling moment as
I glanced at her, dozing with her head on my thigh, hair red as the Georgia clay on the embankments streaming past us.

That association of her with the environment evoked something from my unconscious. I could but partially call the reminiscence
up to awareness, a sentiment of grief so inexpressible as to be stanched only by oblivion. That notion being something I was
unaccustomed to, it sent my mind spiraling again into a bizarre domain in which Justine did not exist at all.

I fished in my pocket for a Valium. Could I have gone utterly mad? Might I be on this wild odyssey all by myself, this being
resting on my thigh a nymph by the strictest definition? A Gaia? Might the eerie sense of familiarity devolve from her being
a hallucinatory manifestation of a reality that I failed to cope with and railed against?

I settled down as the tranq cut in, reasonably sure that I could confirm the reality of our meeting. Unlikely as it might
seem, this young woman was quite real. There were receipts in my pocket establishing that two had lodged and dined. No, the
ugly thought that I was avoiding in the real world was the prospect that I might be nothing more than a casual circumstance
in realizing her destiny. I had to face, after all, the probability that she had substantially more to offer the world than
I yet did.

The colors of the natural beauty without exacerbated the foreboding of mortality. How often I had ignored the simple joy of
life, and how little time was left! Could she recall for me youth’s brave illusion of feeling like an immortal being? Or would
she make me old by punctuating the pointlessness of all existence confronting extinction?

We reached Atlanta late in the afternoon but, with the modern loop around the city, were able to avoid most of its traffic
as well. Old Atlanta had been forced even farther underground, like the great Texas cities, with big chunks of Los Angeles
dropped on top of that which I remembered. To the north, the hills still grew rougher, and deciduous forest blended with the
softwood of the tree farms. Along the American auto-bahns, we made our way to the little town of Buford, now a suburb of Greater
Atlanta.

The mills and factories of an earlier era called Progress had marked the road from Chattanooga I had traveled with Linda so
long before. They had given way to the usual generic collection of discount gas stations, Wally Worlds, and Pizza Huts.

Above the main artery, then lighting up for the evening, a few vagrant houses of vanishing yesteryears held on to the rocky
hillsides, among newer bricks and mobile-home developments. In second gear, we climbed a winding street pitted with potholes
that were real axle-breakers. Justine directed me to a gate in a rusted iron fence. It sported a statue of a deer that would
have been life-size had the representation been of a Texas whitetail.

Inside, concealed by trees and overgrown shrubbery from the encroaching residential district, a Victorian monstrosity to quicken
the dead heart of Tennessee Williams clung to the side of the hill. An odd location, I thought, for a cosmopolitan woman of
the “smart set” to finish out her years. What could have moved her to bury herself in these Southern hills, what reasons beyond
the obvious? Atlanta had been Katie’s place, after all, and other pieces of Willie’s roots had been nearby.

A quiet wistfulness wafted about its weathered sides and sagging balustrades. A casemented corner rose in a false tower to
support an octagonal “birdcage” turret beside the tin roof. Disintegrating wooden shake awnings shaded the windows that surveyed
the darkening hollows below. Those lengthening shadows were baleful as the broken relief of Ollioules Gorge, in a picture
I’d seen of that menacing ravine when I found Evenos on an Internet tourism site. An elaborate lightning rod, with curlicues
and lateral rings, asserted the old house’s defiance as it hung on for dear life against time and change.

————————

“L
ET ME GO TURN ON THE LIGHTS.
”

While dusk was about to settle, I observed there was still plenty of illumination. “Nay, I totally want you to see this!”
I watched her butt as she bounced up the porch steps and unlocked the door. As she stepped inside, the old screen crashing
behind her, her youthful vitality became a welcome relief from unbidden thoughts that the house inspired. Maybe I’d overdone
the Valium?

Momentarily, the entire house was lit against the coming twilight by a little electric lamp in each of its windows, even those
in the tower and gables up above. Looking closer, I could see that they were tiny glass lamps in a wild variety of shapes
and colors, most resembling old oil lamps. She skipped back down the creaking steps, and proudly announced, “I’m way happy
they came on. If even one bulb is out, none of them will work.”

“Wired in series,” I thought aloud, somewhat cheered from my reverie on the house where her ancestress had grown old. “Well,
they do kind of make you think of old-time Christmas lights, don’t they?”

The pride in her voice subtly changed as she gazed at her fancifully lighted windows. “I’m sure she found them one at a time,
and added them so that there

would be a light in each and every window.” In that strange light, her features were preternaturally
real.
It seemed to me that I was seeing the pretty spirit within this young thing shining through her skin. I wallowed in the luxury
of a guilty question as to my right to inflict myself upon her, whether she thought she wanted it or not. But I conceded that
to be luxurious speculation, indeed. Of course I would. Anyway, why presume that I would do harm?