The Last Lovely City

PART ONE

“I think we should try it again. You move back in,” says Meredith, in her lovely, low, dishonest Southern voice.

Carter asks, “But—Adam?”

“I’m not seeing him anymore.” Her large face, not pretty but memorable, braves his look of disbelief. Her big, deep-brown eyes are set just too close; her shapely mouth is a little too full, and greedy. Big, tall, dark, sexy Meredith, who is still by law his wife. She adds, “I do see him around the campus, I mean, but we’re just friends now.”

That’s what you said before, Carter does not say, but that unspoken sentence hangs there in the empty space between them. She knows it as well as he does.

They are sitting in the garden behind her house—their house, actually, joint ownership being one of their central problems, as Carter sees it. In any case, now in early summer, in Chapel Hill, the garden is lovely. The roses over which Carter has labored in seasons past—pruning, spraying, and carefully, scientifically feeding—are in fragrant, delicately full bloom: great bursts of red and flame, yellow and pink and white. The beds are untidy now, neglected. Adam, who never actually moved in (Carter thinks), is not a gardener, and Meredith has grown careless.

She says, with a pretty laugh, “We’re not getting younger. Isn’t it time we did something mature, like making our marriage work?”

“Since we can’t afford a divorce.” He, too, laughs, but since what he says is true, no joke, it falls flat.

And Meredith chooses to ignore it; they are not to talk about money, not this time. “You know I’ve always loved you,” she says, her eyes larger and a warmer brown than ever.

Perhaps in a way she has, thinks Carter. Meredith loves everyone; it is a part of her charm. Why not him, too? Carter and Adam and all her many friends and students (Meredith teaches in the music department at the university), and most cats and dogs and birds.

She adds, almost whispering, sexily, “And I think you love me, too. We belong together.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” Carter tells her, somewhat stiffly.

The brown eyes narrow, just a little. “How about Chase? You still see her?”

“Well, sort of.” He does not say “as friends,” since this is not true, though Carter has understood that the presence of Chase in his life has raised his stature—his value, so to speak—and he wishes he could say that they are still “close.”

But four years of military school, at The Citadel, left Carter a stickler for the literal truth, along with giving him his ramrod posture and a few other unhelpful hangups—according to the shrink he drives over to Durham to see, twice a week. Dr. Chen, a diminutive Chinese of mandarin manners and a posture almost as stiff in its way as Carter’s own. (“Oh, great,” was Chase’s comment on hearing this description. “You must think you’re back in some Oriental Citadel.”) In any case, he is unable to lie now to Meredith, who says, with a small and satisfied laugh, “So we’re both free. It’s fated, you see?”

A long time ago, before Meredith and long before Chase, Carter was married to Isabel, who was small and fair and thin and rich, truly beautiful and chronically unfaithful. In those days, Carter was a graduate student at the university, in business administration, which these days he teaches. They lived, back then, he and Isabel, in a fairly modest rented house out on Franklin Street, somewhat crowded with Isabel’s valuable inherited antiques; the effect was grander than that of any other graduate students’, or even young professors’, homes. As Isabel was grander, more elegant than other wives, in her big hats and long skirts and very high heels, with her fancy hors d’oeuvres and her collection of forties big-band tapes, to which she loved to dance. After dinner, at parties at their house, as others cleared off the table, Isabel would turn up the music and lower the lights in the living room. “Come
on,”
she would say. “Let’s all
dance.
”

Sometimes there were arguments later:

“I feel rather foolish saying this, but I don’t exactly like the way you dance with Walter.”

“Whatever do you mean? Walter’s a marvelous dancer.” But she laughed unpleasantly, her wide, thin, dark-red mouth showing small, perfect teeth; she knew exactly what he meant.

What do you do if your wife persists in dancing
like that
in your presence? And if she even tells you, on a Sunday, that she thinks she will drive to the beach with Sam, since you have so many papers to grade?

She promises they won’t be late, and kisses Carter good-bye very tenderly. But they are late, very late. Lovely Isabel, who comes into the house by herself and is not only late but a little drunk, as Carter himself is by then, having had considerable bourbon for dinner, with some peanuts for nourishment.

Nothing that he learned at The Citadel had prepared Carter for any of this.

Standing in the doorway, Isabel thrusts her body into a dancer’s pose, one thin hip pushed forward and her chin, too,
stuck out—a sort of mime of defiance. She says, “Well, what can I say? I know I’m late, and we drank too much.”

“Obviously.”

“But so have you, from the look of things.”

“I guess.”

“Well, let’s have another drink together. What the hell. We always have fun drinking, don’t we, darling Carter?”

“I guess.”

It was true. Often, drinking, they had hours of long, wonderful, excited conversations, impossible to recall the following day. As was the case this time, the night of Isabel’s Sunday at the beach with Sam.

Drinking was what they did best together; making love was not. This was something they never discussed, although back then, in the early seventies, people did talk about it quite a lot, and many people seemed to do it all the time. But part of their problem, sexually, had to do with drink itself, not surprisingly. A few belts of bourbon or a couple of Sunday-lunch martinis made Isabel aggressively amorous, full of tricks and wiles and somewhat startling perverse persuasions. But Carter, although his mind was aroused and his imagination inflamed, often found himself incapacitated. Out of it, turned off. This did not always happen, but it happened far too often.

Sometimes, though, there were long, luxurious Sunday couplings, perhaps with some breakfast champagne or some dope; Isabel was extremely fond of an early-morning joint. Then it could be as great as any of Carter’s boyhood imaginings of sex.

But much more often, as Isabel made all the passionate gestures in her considerable repertoire, Carter would have to murmur, “Sorry, dear,” to her ear. Nuzzling, kissing her neck. “Sorry I’m such a poop.”

And so it went the night she came home from Sam, from the beach. They had some drinks, and they talked. “Sam’s actually
kind of a jerk,” said Isabel. “And you know, we didn’t actually do anything. So let’s go to bed. Come, kiss me and say I’m forgiven, show me I’m forgiven.” But he couldn’t show her, and at last it was she who had to forgive.

Another, somewhat lesser problem was that Isabel really did not like Chapel Hill. “It’s awfully pretty,” she admitted, “and we do get an occasional good concert, or even an art show. But, otherwise, what a terrifically overrated town! And the faculty wives, now really. I miss my friends.”