The Last of the Savages (7 page)

Mr. Savage turned to me. “Fine piece of wing shooting,” he declared. “Now you’re blooded.” Tired as I was, I believe I blushed. As soon as we could, Will and I excused ourselves and crawled upstairs.

“I’m so goddamned tired,” I declared, “if Cheryl Dobbs spread herself naked across my bed I’d tell her to go find her own place to sleep.”

“I don’t know that I’m quite that tired.” Will opened a window and took a pack of cigarettes from a bureau drawer. I shook my head when he offered me one. I’d done enough smoking for one year.

“She’s not so hot,” he said suddenly.

“Not so hot? Are you crazy?”

“She’s got no spirit, no soul,” he said, blowing smoke out the window. “She’s like a pinup.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s what I mean.”

“Two-dimensional.”

“That girl’s as three-D as they come,” I insisted. “What do
you
like, that scrawny little colored girl?”

He narrowed his eyes and looked at me. “Maybe,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or just trying, as he often did, to get a rise out of me.

Suddenly the door burst open and Elbridge bounded in. “Hey, what you faggots up to? Shit, Will, you better put out that butt before I call your headmaster.”

Elbridge plucked the butt from Will’s fingers and took a drag. Beneath his other arm he cradled several books.

“If you didn’t know better,” Will said, “you’d think L.B. was a redneck.”

“Don’t go blowing my cover,” Elbridge said. “Next you’ll be telling people I know how to read and approve of desegregation.”

“What have you got?” Will demanded, grabbing for the paperbacks under his brother’s arm. After a brief struggle, Will claimed the books—Jean Genet’s
Our Lady of the Flowers
, Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Capricorn
and Richard Brautigan’s
A Confederate General in Big Sur
—which were apparently intended for him all along.

“Don’t go telling anyone where you got ’em, little bro.”

Will admired the volumes with undisguised relish. “Thanks L.B.”

“You boys up for a party in town,” he asked. “See some of the quality? I don’t want your friend to get the wrong impression of us, think we’re all a bunch of Negro musicians and dope fiends.” I was flattered that Will’s older brother seemed to care about my opinion. Minutes later, as we roared out into the night, I sat quietly in the backseat of the Cadillac with Will, watching Cheryl’s golden hair bouncing in front of me for miles like a prize that would always be just out of my reach. This reverie was broken when Elbridge pulled through a set of stone gates and drove up to a luminous white mansion floating on a wide dark lawn, its circular drive an enchanted ring of white Cadillacs, red Mustangs and a
matched pair of British racing-green MGs. This looked remarkably like the world to which I wanted to belong.

Raucous knots of clean-cut revelers loitered in the two-story entry hall, which was dominated by a circular staircase. A boy in a crewcut waved from the stairs and called out to L.B., who bounded up to meet him. I felt I had walked into a movie set, but at least, in my chinos and button-down shirt, I looked like the other boys. My first impression of the girls was that they all came in pastel shades—turquoise, peach and pink. The boys were essentially unchanged from that breed William Tecumseh Sherman had identified a century before, in a letter to Lincoln, as the “young bloods of the South: sons of planters, lawyers about town, good billiard-players and sportsmen, men who never did work and never will.”

One of them was introduced to me as Spook Lawson. “You still up at that Yankee homo ranch,” he asked Will.

“Spook,” Will said to me, “was, as you may have guessed, unable to gain entry to any of the nonmilitary schools up east.”

Somehow Will disappeared and I found myself standing alone, acutely self-conscious, with Cheryl. I wanted to take the opportunity to impress myself upon her, to tell her who I was, to tell her
that
I was; she couldn’t possibly imagine the sheer vivacity of my being, the poetry of my fierce yearnings and fears, or she wouldn’t simply be standing, half ignoring me. If she were to register a fraction of my tortured essence surely she would throw her arms around me. But I was at a loss for conversation, and I found it difficult to look at her directly. Beauty often affects us like deformity; we are afraid to seem to notice.

“Nice house,” I said, swiveling the beam of my gaze around the hall and beyond.

She nodded. She was probably even more daunted by the surroundings than I was, though at the time I was aware only of my own awkwardness.

“You want a beer or something,” I asked.

“I don’t drink alcohol,” she said. “I’m a Christian.”

A Yankee, I was both puzzled by this non sequitur and stymied in my fantasy quest for Cheryl’s attention, for I couldn’t even
imagine
a girl
yielding to me, except under the influence. Never mind that she was dating my friend’s older brother; I was able to conjure away such minor logistical problems. But sobriety seemed insurmountable; and I was running out of time.

“Hey, good-looking,” said an older boy in a dark suit who seemed to stand several feet taller than me. “Where’d you come from?”

“Hopkinsville, Kentucky,” she answered, taking him at his word.

I felt I should say something to assert my presence, to affirm my role of temporary chaperon, but suddenly another boy had approached, nudging me with his arm as he inserted himself into the company. “Don’t mind my friend here. Prescott goes to Dartmouth and doesn’t know how to behave around the fair sex. Pack of wild Indians, literally. Uncivilized brutes. Say the word, darlin’, and I shall forcibly eject him from the premises.”

Prescott grinned at this dangerous sketch of himself, while the newcomer bowed deeply to Cheryl: “Jim Cheatham at your service.”

Cheryl was blushing, and in her nervous excitement, she nearly curtsied, clutching the sides of her dress. “Cheryl Dobbs,” she said, looking at the floor.

“I’m Patrick Keane,” I said, holding out my hand.

“Pat, why don’t you get me a beer?” Cheatham turned away from me, deftly sliding toward Cheryl and cutting me out of the circle. At that moment I saw Elbridge approaching with several friends.

I turned and slipped away, chagrined at my dereliction of duty. Unable to find Will, I wandered through the house admiring the furniture and the art, studying the paintings—dour portraits, rural landscapes and hunting scenes—as intently as a visiting art historian. My tour led me into a parlor of sorts, occupied exclusively by couples, draped on the sofas and stuffed chairs, making out. Retreating, I found a refuge—a book-lined, masculine den which was miraculously empty. I scanned the titles: old leather-bound sets of Dickens, Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving and something called
Tennessee Torts.

“Careful,” said a gravelly, female voice behind me. “No one’s touched them in years. They might explode or something.” A girl about my own age was standing in the doorway holding a glass full of ice in one hand,
a pack of Winstons in the other. Having so far formed an impression of Southern Womanhood as fair-haired and brightly clad, this specimen seemed unusually dark and angular, her straight, shoulder-length hair as black as her turtleneck. She dropped into an armchair, spreading herself like butter over its leather surface, and lit a cigarette.

“So what are you?” she said, leaning her head back to exhale a cloud of smoke. “An intellectual?”

I haltingly introduced myself.

“I’m Lollie Baker,” she said. “If you open that cabinet to your left, you’ll find a glass and some whiskey.”

I hesitated. “Are you sure it’s okay?”

“Well, if you mean would Daddy mind, he might, if he knew, but that’s what makes it fun.” She studied her cigarette as if it were an exotic insect that had just flown into the room and landed unexpectedly in her hand. “It’s like,” she added, “who’d bother to start smoking if you didn’t have to sneak them. That’s my philosophy. Anything worth doing’s usually prefaced with the words ‘thou shalt not.’ Except maybe reading.” Delivered with a drawl, these sentiments seemed particularly radical. She paused to reconsider. “Hell, even reading’s supposed to be done only in moderation in these parts. And of course, well-bred southern young ladies aren’t supposed to tax their pretty little brains. Southern gentlemen don’t like them too educated.” She examined the perilously long ash on her cigarette, then tapped it into the narrow throat of a bronze urn on the table behind her. “How about you? I’ll bet you just love these blonde belles with cotton between their ears?”

“I’m just … visiting,” I responded to this accusation. “I’m a friend of Will Savage.”

“Will’s all right.” Somewhat mollified, she said, “He just borrowed my car.”

“What? Where’d he go?”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “He’ll be back. He’s probably gone over to the Bitter Lemon, to try to score some dope.”

I handed her a bottle of bourbon from the liquor cabinet. “Get yourself a glass,” she commanded, then shook several cubes into my tumbler and poured us both a drink. I took mine more in despair than with delight, upset with Will for abandoning me.

“I actually do like to read,” I said, after I’d ventured a sip.

“Such as?” She was now studying her glass of whiskey.

I quickly edited a list of my favorites. Salinger seemed too predictable. “Dylan Thomas …,” I finally said.

She nodded. “ ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age …’ ”

“Ayn Rand.”

“That crazy old dyke,” she barked, then noticed my shocked expression. “I don’t know, you get the idea that the Empire State Building’s her idea of an excellent dildo.”

I’ve tried to read Ayn Rand several times since that night, but somehow the charge, however reckless, sent her plummeting down the face of a skyscraper into the gutter reserved for embarrassing former enthusiasms. Then, out of local consideration, and because we’d just read “A Rose for Emily” in English class, I proposed Faulkner.

Lollie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. Strangle me with kudzu. You should read Kierkegaard”—a new name to me—“and Baudelaire. And maybe some Hammett to toughen you up.” She reeled off this eclectic list with the gruff confidence of a doctor prescribing a medication for a specific, if rather common, affliction.

“Are you a writer,” I asked hopefully, for this was my secret vice at the time. I wrote poetry. Certainly I had the kind of “Negative Capability” commended by Keats, if not, perhaps, the imagination.

“You ever read Anne Sexton,” Lollie asked. “I’m studying with her at Harvard this summer.”

I had, in fact, and I was particularly impressed to learn that Lollie was in her junior year at Miss Porter’s. “She’s good,” I allowed. “But I prefer Lowell.”

“He’s okay.” She shrugged, and I saw, with some relief, that I’d discovered one of the boundaries of her reading, though I barely knew Lowell’s work myself at the time.

Under the influence of the whiskey I eventually confessed to being something of a poet, and we ended up talking for more than an hour. Lollie discoursed about the dangers of regionalism—“I ain’t gonna be no damn southern lady writer, that’s for sure,” she insisted, after we’d consumed half the bottle of bourbon. Her intention was to move as
soon as possible to Greenwich Village, where she would write tough but lyrical, nonprovincial poetry. I became increasingly confident in my own aesthetic, showing off my reading as well as dropping the names of authors who were little more than names to me.

In my tipsy admiration I wanted to impress her, quote her some poetry from memory. But all that came to mind as I watched her light up another cigarette:
Winston tastes good like a cigarette should, no filter, no taste, just a forty-cent waste.
And that Ogden Nash chestnut:
Candy / Is dandy / But liquor / Is quicker.

Eventually we were climbing the circular staircase under the guise of consulting some volume in her shelves and then we were groping athletically on her bed. My hand slipped beneath the waist of her corduroys and crept stealthily up the smooth skin of her belly until, after long minutes of kissing, she impatiently guided it to its object. I would have been happy enough to lie there kissing her till morning, my hand cupped on the astonishingly soft and amazing curve of her breast, even as I began to wonder if something more might be possible, or even expected of me.

“Don’t go away,” she whispered, climbing out of bed. “I’ll be right back.”

I had many restless New England nights, after lights-out, in which to imagine her return to my arms. But it was Will Savage who roused me some time later and dragged me down to the car, and since there was no sign of Lollie I didn’t know whether she’d abandoned me before or after I passed out.

B
ack at school that December, Will seemed to draw away, as if compensating for the intimacy of my visit to his home. Or perhaps it was simply that I was playing soccer and studying for finals, while he, though barely passing his required courses, was increasingly involved with such arcana as Buddhism and Beat poetics. His mentor in these esoteric pursuits was his older brother, who seemed to be the leader of a cult of guerrilla intellectuals based in the hills of southeastern Tennessee. My own reading was taking a different turn, under the influence of Doug Matson, our housemaster and my English teacher, a recent Amherst graduate who’d spent a polishing year at Oxford, where he’d acquired, among other things, a new set of vowels. Prematurely curmudgeonly and stately at the age of twenty-three, Matson was as worldly a person as I could imagine, a sort of preppie dandy who wore a neat mustache and favored bow ties and Harris tweeds and, no matter what the forecast, carried an umbrella with which he, in the manner of a Venetian gondolier, propelled himself across the flagstone canals of the campus. In class he recited great swatches of Shakespeare, coughed up gouts of Pater and Ruskin from memory. He was said to have had a short story accepted by
The New Yorker
, although it hadn’t actually been
published and so far as I know never was, but over the years this rumor became part of the lore of the school, its eternal imminence more intriguing than the consummated fact could ever be.