The Governor's Lady (21 page)

“They’re good,” she said when he finished. “Why didn’t you sing them with the band?”

“I’m still working on the one about the pig.” He strummed a few chords from it. “I keep adding verses. I’m playing with one about how the pig enters the Porker Special Olympics.” Then he stopped playing and looked up at her. “The other one I wrote this morning, right after I woke up and knew I was gonna bring you out here this evening.”

“Before you even called me. Pretty presumptuous.”

“Okay, I’ll confess. I wrote it a couple of years ago about a girl I was dating. But it suits you better. In fact, it suits you perfectly.”

It hung there in the air between them, and she felt herself blushing. Then, for some reason she couldn’t explain, she started to cry. Maybe it was the sweetness of it, the way she felt airy and light and enveloped by something both comforting and startling, something she needed very much. Or maybe it was hearing the word
dream. What the hell
, she thought,
maybe it’s just the beer
.

“I’m sorry,” Pickett said. He reached for her hand, wrapping his big, firm one around hers. “Should I take you home?”

“No,” she whispered, “I don’t want to go home. I’m all right.”

He gave her a minute to compose herself, then started singing again about the pig to make her laugh. He ran a few licks, then put the guitar away and went for another pitcher of beer. She watched him—long legs, easy, graceful stride, maybe an athlete. He walked like a man who was sure of himself. Not in the way Woodrow was, not so especially sure of where he was headed, but entirely comfortable in the place he occupied now. In someone else, it might be swagger.

She blushed again, and this time it wasn’t from embarrassment. It was, she realized in a dim, beer-drenched corner of her mind, lust.
My God
.

Sometime later, Cicero called out the door, “I’m leaving. You can stay here all night if you want, but I’m going home.”

“What time is it?” she asked.

Pickett peered at his watch. “One forty-five.”

“Oh, hell,” she said. “I’ve got to be at work at seven.”

“I’m sleeping in.” He laughed.

“Asshole.”

She was wobbly when they crossed the parking lot to the motorcycle, wobbly and a little loud, leaning against Pickett. After managing to get both of them aboard, he ordered her to hang on to him like barbed wire.

She remembered little of the ride back to town, only the sensations of the rush of cool wind and of clinging fiercely to him. What she did remember when she awoke the next morning with a wretched head was that Pickett Lanier had kissed her good night, and that it was a damn good kiss. She remembered that well.

He reached her at the newspaper. “Beer after work?”

“No,” she said.

He laughed. “One rough night and you’ve sworn off beer?”

“Please,” she said, “don’t call.” She realized right off how abrupt, how final it sounded. She didn’t mean it that way. “For a few days.”

“Is there anything I can say, should say?”

“No, there’s nothing you can say. I’ve got to …”

“Of course.”

She hung up, sat staring at the phone, got up finally and went to her editor to ask for some time off.

She called Fate Wilmer. “Can I fish?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Just me. Tomorrow. Quietly.”

“I’ll have the boat and everything ready. No need to stop at the house, just go on to the pond. Nobody’ll bother you.” A pause. “Are you all right, Cooper?”

“I’ll see after I drown a few crickets. Just … let this be between us, okay?”

She was up early, in the car before first light, driving upstate, stopping once for gas, coffee, and donuts. She had slept badly, had been aware all night of being just at the edge of rest, had finally given up an hour before the alarm went off. She was on the water by eight, gliding across the mist-covered pond, the hum of the trolling motor and the easy slap of water against the boat an undercurrent to the awakening of the pond itself—birds, the occasional splash as a fish broke the surface, the chatter of squirrels. She drifted to the far end, anchored twenty yards from the shrub-thick bank, got a line in the water, and sat back to let the morning reveal whatever it might have to offer.

She thought, full-hearted but dry-eyed, about her father, about his need for still, quiet places amid the tumult. She thought about William Faulkner, his speech when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, his words about the secrets of the human heart. She felt she didn’t need to be a writer to explore those, and that if she were wise enough to want to know what her heart’s secrets were, she also had to be wise enough to shut up and listen. And she couldn’t do that in the midst of the boiler factory that was life lived by the day. She needed the time and space to shut that out, to hear the undercurrents and subtexts, the deep places where those secrets lived and might, if she were gently patient, reveal themselves. She needed her pond, figuratively and literally. Everybody needed a pond.

In this quiet, still space was the question that had lingered since Cleve’s passing, that had brought her here now: Could she carve out and jealously guard these quiet, still places in the midst of the boiler factory that was political life? Cleve had managed it, but at the end he had spoken of being the sum of his regrets. Cooper didn’t delude herself about the matter of regrets. A life with any substance to it was bound to accumulate a peddler’s sack full of them. Even at twenty-two, she could look back on things that made her cringe with embarrassment and weep with grief. But would she be the sum of her regrets?
No, I will not let that happen
.

And back to the question, which at its core amounted to Woodrow. She couldn’t escape the image from the church just after the funeral service, Woodrow reaching, smiling, politicking. He was a good man, honest about who he was and where he was going. She believed he loved her for herself. He would be successful in politics, and if she chose to strike out on that path with him, she would be an asset to his career, might even have some opportunities through his public life to do good things.

But then there was Pickett Lanier—not so much his person, attractive as it was, but the fact of his
otherness
. He was
not
Woodrow. What
he seemed to represent to her just now was a life alternative. In the stillness of the morning, her mind swirled with the insistence of it all.

She was snapped from her reverie by a violent jerk that nearly tore her fishing pole from her hands. She caught it at the last moment, gripped it, hauled back on it, setting the hook, giving herself completely to fighting what she realized was the biggest fish she had ever encountered. A largemouth, she suspected, an ancient and daunting fish with all the wiles that had kept it for a great long time out of frying pans.

Cooper flung herself sideways, one leg over the seat, straddling it now. She reared back with a foot braced against one gunwale, her back against the opposite side, mind racing through all her fishing knowledge. Then she could hear Cleve:
Give him some room, but not too much
.

The fish broke the surface with a fabulous shake of its body, flinging head and tail in opposite directions, trying to shake the hook.
My God, it’s huge!
Five, six pounds at least, a magnificent specimen. She leaned forward, gave the line a bit of slack so the fish couldn’t strain against it, either bending the hook or ripping it loose from its cavernous mouth. And then it fell back into the water and swam directly for the boat, the line going loose in the water. She knew instantly what it was up to—swim under the boat so she lost control of the tension on the line, or tangle it in the propeller and snap it. She stood and almost lost her balance, hauled back hard on the pole, which bent violently as she fought to keep the fish out in front of her, away from the boat.

The fish was powerful and cunning, but Cooper had the advantage of a strong line, a supple pole, and a gathering feeling of exhilaration and abandon. She had no idea where it came from, that absolute conviction she would see this through.

And suddenly, it was over. There was no sense of the fish gradually beginning to tire, but instead a moment when it seemed simply to surrender. She waited, suspecting it might be a trick to lull her, then began to cautiously pull it in, lifting the pole to shorten the line and then
reaching for it. The fish seemed almost docile now, breaking the water with its broad, beautiful back, a gentle swish of its fins and tail. When it was next to the boat, she gave it a long, admiring look, noticing for the first time an odd, thin streak of white along one side of the dorsal fin. Then she hooked a hand in one of its gills and took a moment to collect herself. Holding the fish, she reached for the tackle box, opened it, found the pliers with the sharp edges, and bent to snap off the barbed end of the hook and pull the rest of it free from the fish’s mouth. She turned it loose. The fish floated near the surface for a moment and then, sensing freedom, gave a flip of its tail and dove away.

She opened the cooler, cracked a beer, drank it in slow, easy sips. Heat was on the morning now, the air close and sodden and alive with the buzz of insects.

She laughed, thinking how easy it would be to read too much into this. If this morning were a piece of fiction, it would be tempting to make the fish a profound, life-altering, Hemingwayesque symbol. But what the hell, it was just a big, old fish that had lived in this quiet place for God only knew how many years and would likely live here many more. If the fish had done anything for her, it was to jerk her out of the wallowing she had done in her mind and soul and remind her to get on with things, to face squarely what she had been looking at obliquely for a long time. At last, she knew.

She drove straight to the capital airport and then flew to Arkansas to find Woodrow, to tell him she could not share his life.

THIRTEEN

The call came before seven, as she was getting ready for work. She let the phone ring several times before she picked up.

“I talked to Woodrow last night.” Mickey’s voice was calm and even. Cooper waited. “He’s heartbroken, I’m sure you know that.”

Woodrow had pleaded and cried, begged her not to be so final about it. He asked her to wait, give it time, don’t close the door. But for all the pleading, he had never for a moment offered to give up what separated them. He couldn’t, she knew that. And neither could she. Their choices were irreconcilable.

“I don’t have to tell you that Woodrow’s deeply in love with you.”

“I know that, Mother.”

“Then surely you can work things out.”

“We have nothing to work out,” Cooper said. “I didn’t rush into this. I’ve thought about it a long time.”

“We’ve both been through a lot lately. Changes in our lives. Losing your father … Did that have something to do with it?”

“Maybe it brought things to a head.”

Mickey was silent for a moment. “Cleve did things with his eyes wide open. He didn’t try to fool himself or anybody else.”

“I know. I had a hard time understanding that, coming to some kind of peace with it,” Cooper said. “But I did, and it led me to the conclusion about Woodrow and me. My eyes are wide open, Mother.”

“Woodrow will go a long way,” Mickey said evenly. “Maybe all the way. He has the gift.”

“And I can’t go with him. I know that’s what you’d like.”

“What I like doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t it? Didn’t you and Woodrow have a plan, for him and for me?” Cooper felt an edge creeping into her voice.

“All right,” Mickey said. “I hoped you would be with him. He needs you.”

“But that’s not what I need.”

Mickey’s voice rose a notch. “And what do you need, Cooper?”

“To be myself. To be what
I
want to be, not part of somebody else’s plan, somebody else’s appendage. I tried to make Woodrow see that, and maybe in a way he does. And I need you to see it, too.”

“Be yourself?” Mickey snapped. “A stupid little newspaper reporter?”

Okay, here it is. She’s done with being Mrs. Nice
.

“Well, if that’s what I am, a stupid little newspaper reporter, it’s because it’s what I chose. If I make a go of it, or if I totally screw it up, it’s still nobody’s but mine.”