The Reading Lessons (19 page)

“There now,” Lucinda said. “Aren’t you glad I made you wait?” 

###

“I’m going to need you to drive into Bixby and pick up some sleeping powder,” Lucinda told Tapley. It was ten minutes later. Eleven minutes later, she slipped into Hadley’s bedroom. “Can you do it again?” she asked.

“On the bed this time,” he said. “Take off your dress.”

###

Dickie Worther-Holmes was a decent fellow. Those that didn’t want his wife so much might even go so far as to call him
likeable
. It was tough to hate a man whose happiest moment of the day came when he opened the newspaper and turned to Winnie Winkle. Hadley wished Dickie would drive his new Packard off the edge of the Beattie’s Bluff on his way home from Baton Rouge 

When that didn’t happen and the car drove up on Tuesday afternoon unscathed and with Dickie safely inside of it, Hadley took to praying that the chandelier would drop on his head when he walked through the front door. 

“It’s good to see you, Crump,” Dickie said, stepping inside without any incident. His dark eyes actually twinkled, like he was truly glad to see Hadley. Then, calm as you please, he withdrew a pistol from his pocket and pointed it at Hadley’s head. 

Hadley tried to think what he could say in order to save himself. His eyes darted to Lucinda. Would she really stand there calm as can be and let him be shot down in cold blood? Her monkey-flower eyes locked on the gun. 

Seeing how she wasn’t compelled to throw herself in front of Hadley and beg for his life, he decided he was on his own and started trying out speeches inside his head: 

I’m sorry, Mr. Worther-Holmes, but I couldn’t help myself.
No. This was not the sort of apology to offer a man who had his finger on a trigger. 

It was an accident! Remember that time when Quindora fell? Well it was kind of like that only with laundry instead of a ladder.
Hmm. If he had even the smallest amount of skill as a liar, he might be able to do something with that one. But no. He had no skill in that regard. 

The truth was the only way to go.
I’ve been in love with your wife for most of my life . . . 

“Pow,” Dickie said. He laughed that big sad-as-hell laugh that he always laughed. Hadley checked himself for bullet holes. “God damn, boy. You’re white as a corpse..” Dickie handed him the gun. Hadley was still checking for holes. 

It wasn’t a real gun, Dickie said. It was a pistol-shaped
Giblin Radioear
. 

“It looks real,” Hadley said.

“Naw,” Dickie said. “Not if you’re a gun man.” With that, the gun man caught his wife by the waist and gave her a big squeeze, oblivious to the impending peril he faced from the six-armed chandelier overhead. 

Hadley stood by, loosening ceiling screws with the brute force of his mind. Holophane shuddered. The bulbs dimmed. As soon as Hadley could get the thing to come crashing down, he planned to push Lucinda clear and turn himself into a hero while at the same time disposing of his enemy. 

The screws held, though not for lack of effort.

When the hopping started up that night, Hadley rubbed his temple with the radio pistol, gathered up his bedclothes, and made himself a bed on the bathroom floor.

###

For all his life, Hadley had wholeheartedly believed that, if he could have Lucinda just once, he would finally be free of the spell. That didn’t happen. He only wanted her worse than before. He laughed at himself for thinking he could ever be content with the deal he’d tried to make in the Rose Bud parlor. Hadley had never loved anything so hard as he loved Lucinda. And now he knew that she cared about him, too. 

“Oh Hadley,” she’d said. “I wish we could do this every night.” 

The first chance he got, he sent her a note: 

From the kitchen of:

When can I touch you again?

Hadley had gotten much more than he’d bargained for. It was torture seeing her black lace Dancelette hanging over the tub. He wanted to kiss under the curls at the back of her neck. Even a sheet on the clothesline had the power to undo him. Lucinda waited three days to respond to his recipe card: 

Hold your horses, Hadley.

He’d made love to Lucinda four times the night Dickie was in Baton Rouge. Afterward he could hardly walk, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to push Lucinda up against the wall again on Tuesday. 

On Friday, Lucinda sent him to the library. “You need to get out of the house, honey bun. You’re looking a little unglued.” So Hadley went to the library to try and glue himself back together. 

“How are you, Flora?” he asked as he slid his list across the desk, same as always. 

“I’m good, Mr. Crump. How are you?”

Hadley’s heart froze. “Come on, Flora. You ain’t gonna start with that Mr. Crump business again, are you?”

Flora rolled her eyes in the direction of the formidable head librarian, Miss Hazelwood. Miss Hazelwood was a nervous little raisin of a woman who was given to kissing her cross necklace every time she glanced at Hadley. 

As such, Flora spoke to Hadley out of the corner of her mouth. “There are some
people
who think that you’re to be avoided at all cost due to your indelicate reading selections,” she said. “We mustn’t let on that we’re friends.”

“Are we friends?” he whispered. The thought elated him. 

“Yes, in deed, Mr. Crump,” Flora replied in her normal librarian voice. “We are an open-minded institution, after all.”

Hadley felt the urge to throw up his hat but refrained on account of Miss Hazelwood, who gave him a dark, somewhat frightened look and hastily pressed her lips to Jesus’ green-tarnished crucified body. “I’m so glad to hear that, Miss Gibbs.”

She is definitely too good for me,
Hadley thought. He tucked his dirty books under his arm and went home to Lucinda. 

###

There were four memories that played over and over again in the theatre of Hadley’s over-active mind. They played while he pruned bushes and laid out garden bricks. They played while he spackled and hammered and plumbed. And when he slept, if he was lucky, they played in his dreams. 

The first memory took place behind a flapping wall of bedclothes. It was awkward and sloppy and probably his favorite of the four. Spiritually speaking, its significance was immeasurable. Unfortunately, the details of this particular memory were fuzzier than the others. Hadley’s brain couldn’t quite duplicate the scene without adding things to it. Once, he dreamed they’d ripped down the sheets and tangled themselves up in them. Another time he dreamt that Wisteria Walk collapsed around them like a house of cards. Twice now, he’d added a silvery spray of water from the garden hose.

The second memory was no less urgent, but it was surrounded by softness because of the bed. In Memory Number Two, Hadley got to see Lucinda naked. 

There were parts of a woman’s body he’d never been able to accurately picture before that. Loomis had a set of French playing cards that showed the top half of the female body real clear, but the bottom was inevitably covered up by a ruffled skirt or a coquettish hand or an ill-placed ostrich feather. As an alternative, Loomis had recommended the
Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences
in Savannah. According to Loomis, there were dozens of nude paintings and sculptures on display, and anyone at all could look at them. Hadley had never been to Georgia, and therefore, he’d never gotten around to seeing the nudes at the
Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences.

“What are you looking at?” Lucinda asked when he stopped touching and started staring.

“Everything,” he breathed. “You look like a goddess, Lucinda.”

She looked so beautiful, in fact, that he was torn between wanting to touch all that amazing beauty with his own body, and wanting nothing more than to stare at it all night long. The main difference between the first time and the second time was that, the second time, Hadley knew what Lucinda looked like. Knowing this made lovemaking even nicer. 

The next memory began with him waking up beside her, which was his wildest, most wonderful dream come true. Daffodil fingers of sunlight inched across her body and Hadley was instantly jealous of anything that got to touch her skin, even sunshine. There were bruises in some places that had been made by his mouth. “Dickie’s gonna see me on you,” he whispered, secretly hoping they’d be caught. 

Lucinda smiled a drowsy smile. “Not in the dark he won’t.”

“Well, if it was me, I’d have the lights on every second.”

“Not Dickie,” Lucinda said. “Dickie likes it in the dark.” She trailed her fingers over the top of the blanket. “Goodness, darling; haven’t you had enough?”

“Never,” he said, kissing her in a way that was sure to put more bruises on her bruises. 

Lucinda rolled on top of him. “You sure do have a lot of energy, Hadley Crump, I’ll say that for you.”

“I’ve been storing it up,” he said.

Hadley never knew there were so many different ways to do it—in bed, against a wall, on the floor . . . He was certain he’d never be able to live without sex again. “If you were my wife,” he told Lucinda, “once a night wouldn’t be enough. I’d never do anything but look at you and make love to you. That would be my life.” 

Lucinda then reminded him that she was not his wife. 

The fourth memory came to pass a little later, when he was supposed to be getting dressed. Rather than pulling on his pants, he bent Lucinda over the footboard of the bed.

“Jesus, Hadley. I’ve never been so contorted in all my days. Aren’t you getting tired?”

Hadley was whipped to the very bone. Still, he would be happy to kill himself, if she’d allow it, in just this way. “I don’t want it to end, Lucinda,” he said. Even though his legs wanted to fold up like a stick of gum, he would have made love to Lucinda all day, if only he could have gotten away with it.

It was afterward when Lucinda told him that Dickie had but one position in bed—half-drunk on top of her. 

Hadley began to burn with rage. He hammered his fist on the nightstand hard enough to topple a lamp. “He’s wasting you!” Hadley said. “If you were mine, I’d love you so well, I swear to God, I’d give you anything.”

Lucinda ran her hand over her dress, brushing her bruises with her palm. “You’re a real surprise to me.”

“Why?” 

“Dickie is a man of experience. You’ve only had books.”

Hadley stood the lamp back up. “Well, I’m a fast learner.”

Lucinda combed her fingers through her hair. “Yes, you are. You always have been.”

“Anyway, you drank my blood. Remember?” 

“That’s different though.” She fixed his collar like a regular wife and rubbed her thumb over the bumps of his scar. “Isn’t it?”

A hot delicious pain bubbled up inside his veins. “Yes. And no.” 

“Do you still think about that, Hadley?” She touched her tongue to the place and gave it a quick lick.

“All the time.”

“And last night? Will you think about last night like you think about me drinking your blood?”

“I don’t guess I’ll think about anything else ever again,” Hadley said. 

And it was true. Those four memories followed him more closely than his shadow. 

###

The following Saturday, Dickie threw a party for Lucinda’s eighteenth birthday. The theme was rubies, and everything had to be red. Dickie gave out ten dollar bills to anyone who could come up with a good red idea. All told, the red ideas cost him two hundred bucks, but Dickie proclaimed the results well worth it. Red Christmas lights draped the beams in the
Fireside Room
like a big jeweled necklace. Ruby-colored gallicas were brought in from Landcaster, and ruby-colored tapers were stood up in ruby-colored candlesticks on ruby-colored tablecloths under ruby-colored lanterns. The gallicas were Hadley’s red idea.

In keeping with the theme, the food was a smorgasbord of cranberry gelatin, rosy iced pudding, lobsters, salmon, and slabs of rare steak. Sparkle punch was stirred up in a big crystal bowl. Strawberries were held up to a jeweler’s loop and inspected for redness before being permitted on a tray. The whole banquet blazed like a police siren.

Lucinda was not normally fond of the
Fireside Room
. With its stone walls, walk-in fireplace, and deer-carved beams, the place had the tendency to make her sneeze. “It’s too log-cabiny for my taste,” she said once. Indeed, the
Fireside Room
was a man’s room. It was also the biggest room in the house. As such, the transformation from leather and taxidermy had to be thorough. 

On the morning of the party, a pair of black Fords pulled up in the alley behind the house, courtesy of Dick Worther-Holmes. Four pock-faced lugs in overcoats piled crates of cordials, gin, and Vine-Glo in the hall. Bars were set up around the foyer and in the buffet room. The household staff was divvied into groups of waiters and bartenders. Hadley was assigned to the latter and made to practice his skills by mixing Old Fashioneds for Dickie all afternoon. 

At seven o’clock,
Harlan Angel and the Mississippi Boys
were set up by the piano playing cocktail music. Dickie greeted their guests in a white flannel suite with a Chesterfield bobbing between his lips and Old Fashioned number six in hand. Lucinda wore a red dress that made Hadley want to bite through his fist. 

Ever since he’d spent the night with her, his nerves had been hopelessly shot. If Dickie so much as passed Lucinda the butter, Hadley’s spine went stiff. Maybe it looked like he was fixing a wiggly chair leg, but he was watching them, waiting for their fingertips to brush, or one of their eyes to wink, or their lips to curve with a secret smile. Lurking under car bumpers or behind hedge clippers, Hadley observed every move they made. If Dickie kissed Lucinda, his blood boiled. If Lucinda kissed Dickie, he died. 

Mama didn’t like the looks of Dickie’s ears. Movie star ears, she called them. “Movie star ears might look glamorous,” Mama said, “but they hide a violent nature.” Villainous ears, was more like it. Dickie used his advantages like he used a rifle, and his aim was dead on. It was hard to compete with a man with good ears. Sometimes it didn’t feel fair. Dickie could dance like George Raft and grow a real mustache like it was nothing. His clothes were always pressed. His skin was one set color. And he had money coming out the wazoo. Worst of all, Dickie Worther-Holmes was the sorry cheater who’d come between Hadley and Lucinda, never mind that he was her husband. Hadley saw her first. And so, when Dickie winked at Lucinda one morning over the top of the newspaper, it was all Hadley could do not to plunge his screwdriver into Dickie’s movie star ear.