The Reading Lessons (13 page)

Mama shook her head in disgust.
“
The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender
,”
she said.

“What does that even mean, Mama?” Hadley used to pretend like he got all of her stupid proverbs. Now he didn’t want to get them. 

“It means you need to find yourself someone who will be good to you and stop all this nonsense with Mrs. Worther-Holmes.”

Hadley watched Quindora and her twin sister, Velzora, chatting on the church steps. When she waved at him, he waved back, but he didn’t speak to her. This
nonsense
with Mrs. Worther-Holmes was all he cared about.

###

Wisteria was a complicated thing to grow, and yet it never occurred to Hadley that Lucinda might be better off hiring a gardener with some real experience. As with all things, he simply set about teaching himself the proper way to get the job done. So it was that, while looking for a book on the subject of wisteria growing, he stumbled on something much more interesting. 

The Meaning of Flowers,
it was called, and Hadley was hooked the first second he read that prickly pear meant
I burn
in the language of flowers. Not in all his years, had he ever suspected that flowers had a language all their own. Before he could stop himself, he was looking up all his favorite flowers to see what they meant. He liked the idea that something so simple could convey love, deliver an insult, or offer a word of advice. 

Hadley was partial to books that offered some sort of bonus in the back, like an epilogue or a glossary or a photograph of the author. It made him feel as if he was getting extra for his money. At the back of
The Meaning of Flowers
was a special section called
The Secret Names of Flowers
. Hadley laughed when he read that chamomile had the secret name of
From the Loins. 

“Buy the book or move along, kid,” Mr. Pringles said after Hadley spent half an hour looking up secret names.

At this point, Hadley decided to use the money Lucinda had given him for a book on wisteria to buy
The Meaning of Flowers
instead. Consequently, he spent the whole walk home concocting a convincing argument for why it was more important to know that spurge had the secret name of
Fat From a Head
, than it was to educate one’s self on how to get wisteria to climb where you wanted it to climb. To sweeten the news, he picked Lucinda a bouquet of clover and wild orchids on his way in the door. “In the language of flowers,” Hadley told Lucinda, “Orchids symbolize beauty and refinement, and clover is a sign of domestic virtue.”

They were white lie flowers, to be sure, but Lucinda liked to think she was refined and elegantly domesticated. She had Tilly put the bouquet in a vase next to her bed, pleased as pie by the wisdom of such a unique book purchase.

What Hadley failed to mention was that clover had the distinctly undomesticated secret name of
Semen of Ares. 

###

At Wisteria Walk, Hadley’s days were filled with flowers and his nights with fitful dreams. Sadly, the seeds he planted in the sun turned to poisonous weeds in the dark. On a good day, he might go hours without thinking of Lucinda. There was lots of work to be done, and he liked the hopeful feeling he got raking everything smooth in a new flowerbed. Every time a little green shoot curled up from the earth, Hadley felt like passing out cigars. Then night would come, and all those good feelings would wither to resentment. 

After a while, he came to believe that the touch of his head on the pillow was what triggered
it
. He tried going to bed earlier. He tried going to bed later. It mattered not. Eventually, the pillow-trigger theory was disproved when he slept sitting-up one night and the thumping happened the same as always. 

This left Hadley with only one theory to work with: Women were nothing but trouble. And not just Lucinda. Sometimes it felt like the whole world was full of women that Hadley couldn’t have: colored women, white women, Lucinda Worther-Holmes, and Lucinda Worther-Holmes’ rich white friends. There was one woman who appeared oddly agreeable. Her name was Babe Butternut. But Babe Butternut was more trouble than the ones he couldn’t have.

Once, when the new kitchen girl was feeling croupie, Hadley was asked to serve lunch to Lucinda and her friends. In some homes, it might be odd to be served stuffed celery by the gardener, but in a house filled with mechanical servants, there aren’t many servants available with the hands and legs necessary to perform food-serving jobs. It was more the rule than not that Hadley would be whisked from watering and planting on a regular basis so he might climb on a high stool and reach down a flower vase off a top shelf, or carry in a big box of something or other that Lucinda had ordered from someplace or other, or replace a radio tube. Celery-serving was all in a day’s work.

Babe Butternut crunched on a stick of celery and announced to the room that she had a terrible weakness for dominos. She licked her lips when she said the word
dominos
, but Hadley attributed that to cream cheese at first.

The only thing Hadley had ever found fun about dominos was soldiering them up on the Log Cabin Room floor and giving them a tap. He couldn’t see Babe Butternut getting down on the floor in her short flapper dress to line up dominos. Anyhow, she didn’t strike him as being careful enough for it, the way she was always spilling her
peach dos
all over the place. 

“You should go now, Hadley,” Lucinda said, taking the tray from him.

Hadley thought Lucinda must want him to get the dominos they kept in the china cabinet drawer so he asked, “Do you want me to set up a card table or do you wanna play on the floor?”

“The floor sounds nice,” Babe said.

Everyone giggled.

“Go away, Hadley,” Lucinda said, rolling her eyes. “That boy is good as retarded.”

Hadley happily departed for the kitchen and found Tilly rolling out a piecrust on the work table. “Hey Tilly, do you know why that giggly Miss Butternut likes dominos so much?”

Tilly whipped a powdery hand across her forehead, streaking it white above the leaf. “Iffin’ I know that woman,
you
be
the domino she’s talking about.”

Hadley had been called a lot of things, but he’d never been called a domino.

“Keep clear of that one, ‘lil Domino,” Tilly said. “She eats boys like you for breg’fest.”

It so happened that Hadley was just that hard up, the notion offered some appeal. 

Babe Butternut was the only woman he’d ever seen who was taller than Lucinda. Her breasts were like the dome at the top of the Reading Room in that Hadley was always looking up at them. Once, when he was trimming the new privet, Babe Butternut leaned over the bushes so far, his nose touched one of her domes. Another time, she instructed Hadley to dab
peach do
off her lap. He looked up then, too. 

“That Babe Butternut sure is an awful pain, isn’t she?” Lucinda said, the day after the celery.

“I don’t mind her,” Hadley said. He was on a ladder changing dead light bulbs. Lucinda was handing him new ones. 

“You only say that because she acts like such a Dumb Dora around you. Babe calls herself a modern woman, but she doesn’t even bandage her breasts.”

“Is that right?” Hadley said.

“Do you think she’s pretty?”

Lying was never his best skill, but Hadley knew better than to answer that question with any amount of honestly. “Her face could wither a fence post,” he lied.

For a full ten seconds, it sounded like a teakettle was whistling in the other room. “Ewwwwwwww!” Lucinda cried. “I will not have my servants being seduced by the likes of Babe Butternut. If I catch you gawking down her dress again, I’ll have you tarred and feathered.”

Hadley watched her turn the light bulb round and round in her right hand. “I’m lonely, Lucinda.” 

“Why Hadley? Haven’t I kissed you?” 

“Yes.”

“Then think on that when you get lonely,” Lucinda said, and she set the light bulb down hard enough to crack it.

“That only makes it worse.”

“Reading with me used to be enough, as I recall.”

“I’m not a kid anymore.”

She ran her eyes up and down him as if she was only just now noticing this. “Jesus, Hadley. If Dickie wasn’t such a sap, he’d know in a heartbeat what’s going on inside that one-track brain of yours.” She balled her long, pale fingers into a tight hard fist. “If you want trouble, stick with Babe. She’s more dangerous than all my nigger maids combined.” Spinning in a tornado of buttercup hair, she stomped from the room.

###

Inch by –inch—line by –line—with a descent only appreciable at intervals that seemed –ages—down and still down it came!

~Edgar allen Poe

The Pit and the Pendulum was about a fellow who finds himself sentenced to a dungeon rife with all manner of hideous tortures. There was a pit. There was a pendulum. There was unending misery for the man in the pit strapped beneath the pendulum. In Hadley’s opinion, it was an awful story. He particularly detested the part where the prisoner realizes that the pendulum has stopped descending while he’s passed out, only to resume again the second he opens his eyes. 

“I don’t care for this one,” Hadley told Lucinda. He held the book shut between his hands as if he could keep its claustrophobic terrors from crossing into his world. 

They sat on the window seat facing one another with their knees drawn up between them. Though reading was normally the most he could expect of their time together, Lucinda had slipped the door key in her pocket in a way that stirred to life a hundred butterflies of hope in the hollow of his stomach. Dickie was off to the construction site for the day, and her bare toe tapped against his shoe hard enough to cause a bowl of roses on a nearby table to drop one white petal for each tap. 

Whenever he was alone in the Reading Room, Hadley liked to trail his hand from spine to spine around the octagon shelves, allowing the smell of book glue and old paper to fill his starved senses. A single yellowed whiff had the strength to conjure swords, a ship, or trembling fingers loosening pearl buttons. All day long, every time he brushed his fingers under his nose, he’d relive the swords and the buttons. That smell, like the tap of Lucinda’s toe, had the power to make him burn for a different life. The Reading Room, with its flower nipple and its mesmerizing scents of must and leather, could be highly disorienting.

“Read it like you’re the prisoner,” Lucinda said. “You can be so convincing when you want to be.”

In the street below, the
Pinkie Bell Dairy Wagon
bumped along behind a lazy clomp of hooves. Ding. Clomp. Ding. Clomp. A petal drifted to the floor.

“I don’t want to be the prisoner, Lucinda.”

“Come on,” she coaxed. “The way you say
vibrations of glittering steel
always makes me want to kiss the life out of you.”

Hadley didn’t remind her that she hadn’t kissed him once since becoming Dickie’s wife, a circumstance that was fast becoming his greatest irritation in life.

Lucinda drew his hand away from the book and set to following his veins with the pad of her thumb, working them as if she could re-route the flow of his blood if she rubbed just right. As he locked eyes with her across the bridge of his arm, she pressed his pulse against her mouth and licked a wet heart with her tongue. “Please.”

Hadley breathed for the first time in over a minute. He opened the book and began to read.

I now observed—with what horror it is needless to say—that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor . . . 

Razor
was the last word he read before Lucinda sent the book whizzing across the room. This time, she slid his hand up the hem of her dress and molded his fingers around the hot skin on the top of her thigh. “I just love the way you say
glittering steel.”

He threw her down on the window seat, quick as you please, and climbed on top of her, and fit himself between her legs. Much as Poe’s prisoner had groped at the walls of his dark dungeon only to encounter again and again the rag he’d used to mark its circumference, so too Hadley arrived at the same familiar cairn—her mouth. 

As he kissed it, a multitude of borrowed sins seemed to slip from buckram and gold gilt, leaping free of hidden shelves. Clandestine desire rattled the closed lid of the window seat. Across the room, the Pit and the Pendulum loosed fresh waves of anguish from the surface of a bent page.
He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower . . . 

Lucinda forced her hand between their lips, wrecking the kiss. “Are you going to rape me?”

“Don’t push me away this time,” he begged.

The slap stung. “You’re out of control,” she said, and she slapped him again, this time harder. 

It didn’t hurt. Not like her teeth. Hadley almost wished she’d do it again. “You feel so good,” he whispered, wanting to have her like Alec d’Urbeville had Tess, yet eager as ever to play Jonathon Harker to her vampire kiss. 

Lucinda pounded on his shoulders. “Get off me, you filthy piece of trash.” 

Hadley didn’t get off Lucinda. For every bed-creak that echoed in his brain, he moved his hips against hers. For every dirty note that led to nothing and every teasing touch and every teasing kiss, Hadley moved against her. For every time she made him explode in the throes of utterly depthless pain, Hadley moved and moved. 

Towers of V.I.L.E. books collapsed beneath them inside the window seat. It was snowing petals on the rug. The Pit and the Pendulum clapped shut. He kissed her neck. He kissed her dress. The dress had little bluebells printed all over it, and Hadley kissed from bluebell to bluebell until he reached the one that came three bluebells beneath her bellybutton. This flower he carefully memorized, learning it first with his chin, then his nose, then his cheek. “Delicious,” he said, chewing up the bluebell.