The Wedding (23 page)

Shelby bit her lower lip and self-consciously brushed a
lock of her hair out of her eyes. Her father had shaken her. What
did
she have to lose? It would be nice to be able to tell Lute McNeil off, to defend herself, if only to put her own mind at ease. “Why not?” she asked, smiling nervously. “Why not?”

Liz nodded approvingly. “That’s the attitude. Then you can take those vows full of self-confidence.” She danced aside and waved Shelby past with a flourish. “Just try not to let the entire world see you.”

“Thanks for the advice.” Shelby walked uneasily out of her sister’s room and across the hall to the staircase. Grabbing the banister, she shook her head. “I have to be crazy,” she muttered to herself.

Corinne Coles’s little finger absently swirled her vodka tonic. It had been an exhausting week, and her mind was a blank as she stared out into the twilight. She had not touched her drink in a while, although occasionally she would lift her finger to her mouth and suck on it pensively. She needed more ice; all of the cubes in her tumbler had melted. When the screen door to the kitchen banged shut, she turned her head sharply, in time to see Shelby running across the lawn, sandals in hand. Where was that girl going? Dinner would be ready before too long. She was glad in a way that the absence of Meade’s parents had allowed her to dispense with the custom of a rehearsal dinner. One less thing to worry about.

Where was Clark? She’d barely spoken a word to him all day, what with all of the last-minute details that had to be attended to. He’d been surprisingly docile all week, even
allowing himself to be pressed into service as chauffeur, but his patience might have worn thin, because he had been short with her today on at least two occasions. She mentally shrugged. Probably just impatient to see Rachel. It amused her to witness the hoops her husband jumped through every summer, the lies he spun about where he was spending the last two weeks in August. If the truth be told, she enjoyed the solitude, she told herself. Let him go off to be serviced by that whore. At the end of the day, he was still her husband. There was a time when Corinne hated Rachel; now she just pitied her. She only hoped she’d managed to keep her own various affairs more discreet: she knew that there could well come a time when the moral high ground would be a strategically important position to occupy. Lord knew it had been easy to be discreet these last few years. She liked her men young, and the older she got the harder it grew to find eligible playmates.

As if she needed the fact of her aging underscored further, her daughter would be married in less than twenty-four hours. Now that all the preparing was over, she had a chance to let that fact sink in. Corinne leaned forward unsteadily and groped for the ice bucket on the tray in front of her. She plopped a few cubes into her glass and brought it to her lips. Whereas in her eyes Clark had treated the impending ceremony as if it weren’t altogether real, she had long ago resigned herself to Shelby’s choice. She smiled grimly. Perhaps she deserved credit as matchmaker: she had raised such bitter objections to Liz’s choice of mates that she could see Shelby’s choosing a white man as the lesser of two evils.

Corinne actually didn’t mind Meade, it was just that she
could never come to terms with the thought of a grown man playing a piano for a living. Shelby had tried to explain jazz to her often enough, but she still couldn’t quite take it seriously. In her experience, jazz was for illiterate men of no repute who bugged out their eyes and bared their teeth. If Meade couldn’t find a profession worth taking seriously, how could he take marriage seriously? Her lust for dark black men under cover of the night mirrored her repulsion during the day, and perhaps it was jazz’s open, even cerebral flirtation with the dark side, its willingness to let go and improvise with mind as well as body, that explained it, when for Corinne the two had always been sundered by a divide too vast to bridge. Or maybe Corinne was just a product of her conditioning—no more, no less. Whatever the explanation, she refused to concede a shred of inherent dignity to banging on a piano like a monkey while a bunch of liquored-up or smoked-up or hopped-up junkies thrashed around at a Harlem rent party, sweating on everyone and everything and howling at the moon as if all good sense had escaped them. Corinne took another long sip of her vodka tonic and leaned back in her chair. No, she just couldn’t see it.

T
he shadows were lengthening when Shelby stepped onto the beach. Squinting her eyes, she strained to see down to the nineteenth pole, where she could just make out the vague outline of a figure lying recumbent upon the packed sand close to the water. It had to be Lute. Shivering slightly against the high wind blowing off the water, she strode briskly toward him.

No one was entirely sure how the nineteenth pole had become the accustomed meeting place of Shelby’s generation of colored vacationers. They were a blessed bunch, Shelby and her friends, the first generation of all the generations since slavery to have no self-consciousness about being colored and, having none, they had nothing but impatience for the peculiar change that came over their elders in the
presence of people whose faces were often no whiter, whose incomes were often no greater, whose fears were compounded of the same insecurities and rumors of war, death, and taxes. They were the first to question their parents’ strictures, to chafe under the pressure of pursuing a career that came with a convenient, self-explanatory title, like M.D., or Esq., preferring instead to gather on this beach and talk of Africa, or of becoming engineers or diplomats.

Lute turned his head as Shelby stepped deliberately around a piece of gnarled driftwood. He was stretched indolently on a plaid beach blanket, hands behind his head, shirt off, muscles rippling in the dying sun. He smiled brightly. “I’m glad you came,” he said softly. “Why don’t you sit down?”

Shelby twisted her mouth into a grimace and self-consciously tugged down the tied-off ends of her gingham shirt. “I really can’t stay for very long.” Lute shrugged and turned over on his side to give her room on the blanket. Shelby sat down stiffly on its far corner, hands clasped unsteadily around her knees. Greedy gulls swung out over the beach, their shadows crossing on the sand in front of the two seated figures.

Lute began to coax her into a conversation, talking about nothing at first—about his business, and Boston, and his three little girls—real things, surely, but it seemed to Shelby that he talked mostly to form pretty sounds with his mouth, soft liquid words that fell from his lips like a song. As much as she resisted, Shelby found herself lulled by his words, soothed by the way they blended with the low rumble of the crashing surf and the muted cawing of the gulls whirling
overhead. Lute scooped up a handful of sand and made a fist through which, contracting and releasing, he pulsed thin streams down onto the blanket between them. Scoop, squeeze, scoop, squeeze, until he had formed a small pile. Shelby felt a strange tingle at the nape of her neck as she watched his long, thin fingers at work.

How different Lute and Meade were, Shelby thought. Lute was a craftsman, a man whose life was dedicated to old patterns, old forms, forms he followed with remarkable precision—forms that Meade rejected out of hand. Meade was an artist, a trailblazer. He dreamed of the day when he would no longer need to work as a sideman in television studios and recording studios to support himself, the day when he could play in jazz clubs full time, clubs like the one in which he had first met Shelby, dragged against her will by her more adventurous friends.

Lute talked on, seemingly satisfied with her occasional grunt of acknowledgment. Shelby often wondered at how relaxed Lute made her feel when he was around, even though his presence always came as a nuisance. She supposed it was his sugary flattery, the almost plaintive way he sweet-talked her. Safe in the knowledge that Lute was too far beneath her to be a threat or even a serious consideration, Shelby’s vanity could enjoy his absolute attention. Her mind wandered back to Lute’s run-in with Meade the month before. Meade had made two extended visits to the Vineyard that summer: on his first trip Shelby had introduced him to the owner of Oak Bluffs most popular night spot, and he had offered to let him play the next time he was on island. Meade had eagerly agreed. The fee was nominal, and Meade
and his band were used to bigger venues in New York, but that wasn’t the point. On his next visit he brought a drummer and a bass player, both eager for the opportunity to cut loose and shake the kinks out before an audience less jaundiced, less blase than the ones they faced in the city. That night in the club—actually little more than a bar—Lute had approached Shelby, had sat down next to her while she watched Meade play. Then too she had refused to look at him, giving all of her attention to Meade. It was the beginning of the set, and he was playing his part in a soft conversation between piano, bass, and drums. He always played gently at first, having learned that it took crowds a little time to get used to the idea of a white man playing in an otherwise all-colored band, but Meade was on fire nonetheless—a cold, cool fire; it was the only way he knew how to go on. A man who knew once said that jazz was a woman’s tongue stuck dead in your throat, and Meade played as if to prove that man right.

In Shelby’s friends’ eyes, he did, but to the older Ovalites, ragtime, even when it changed its name to the less egregious word
jazz
, was still a dubious profession that provided no fixed income. But a fixed income alone guaranteed nothing: the fact that Lute’s bankroll continued to increase did not increase his popularity with the older Ovalites who were the guardians of the past and the fierce protectors of the present. That his children were endearing was no saving grace for the other summer residents—unless his reputation for misadventures was full of holes, which they doubted. And indeed their misgivings were to be borne out.

Lute had no idea that the man onstage at whom Shelby
kept staring was her fiancé, but when he found out he assumed that explained her nervousness and her reluctance to talk to him. Between sets, Meade left his piano and came down to the table. He was clearly amused by Lute’s presence, a reaction Lute was not used to and found slightly unnerving, as if he were part of a joke that everyone else got but him. Meade and Shelby chatted briefly about the last set, and that made Lute uncomfortable too, unaccustomed as he was to the free and easy exchange of ideas between a man and a woman. In truth, Shelby was delighted to observe, Meade had shaken Lute’s self-confidence. Lute had competed with men for the attention of a woman on countless occasions, but never on a mental level.

“Hey.” Lute reached across to Shelby and brushed her cheek with the back of his hand, jolting her from her reverie. “I don’t think you’re listening to me.”

“Maybe you should make more of an effort to be entertaining,” Shelby snapped, irritated at his presumption.

Lute threw back his head and chortled. “Oh, really? If I can’t be entertaining, at least I’ll be truthful.” Turning onto his stomach, he propped his head up with one hand and regarded Shelby seriously without saying a word. The silence drew on until, just when Shelby felt forced to say something, he spoke. “Shelby, I feel something funny in the pit of my stomach when I look at you. It’s a sort of hunger gnawing up at me.” He spoke slowly, drawing the words out. “What do you think that is?”

Shelby stared straight ahead. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Would you like to?”

Shelby pushed herself off the blanket, brushing the sand
from her shorts. “I’ve heard enough cooing for one day, I think. You don’t know me, and you never will.” Shelby was amazed at the audacity of this man, this father of three who had to have better things to do than whisper sweet nothings into a woman’s ear the night before her wedding.

Lute was unmoved. “I know you better than you know yourself. You think you know what you want, but you really have no idea. You think you’ve found what you’re looking for, but I look at you and I see a woman who doesn’t even know where to start. You’re on the brink of turning your back on your family, your community, your race, all for some white-bread fantasy you don’t half understand. You’re beautiful all right, a long, tall, beautiful high yella drink of water … set to pour itself out on a desert.”

Shelby had to smile slightly at Lute’s cheekiness. “And I suppose you think you’re some vastly preferable alternative?”

Lute shrugged playfully. “You could do a lot worse. Would you look at me? I’m tired of talking to the top of your head.”

Shelby’s eyes remained locked on his waist. She would not look him in the eye. “Look at me,” he whispered gently. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

For the first time, Shelby looked him straight in the face. Keeping his eyes locked with hers, he rose slowly, in one sinuous motion, until he stood in front of her. She took a step back, but she could not tear herself from his gaze. “You’d be miserable in that all-white world, you know that, don’t you? You know what that piano man of yours is doing, don’t you? He’s slumming, that’s what he’s doing. He’s just looking for something exotic. Oh, he’s hot for you now, but once he has
had his fill of your hot black blood he’ll cool, all right. You’ll see. Mr. Charlie’s been doing it to our women since slave days—what’s different now?”

Shelby poked her index finger in Lute’s face, eyes flashing. “You’re one sad human being, Lute McNeil. Not everyone looks at women like you do, like they’re pieces of meat. Face it, Meade scares you. He’s a better man than you in every sense of the word, and you know it, so you try to bring him down to your level. Small chance.” Yet, for all Shelby’s anger, something in Lute’s eyes would not release her, and something in her skin denied her own words. She had willed her body to walk away from Lute a half dozen times, but each time she was snapped back as if on a short leash. She told herself she could not leave until she had told him off, until she had made him see how wrong he was, how myopic and self-hating, but something else pulled her back too, something darker. Lute was the first colored man she had met who treated her as if she were made of flesh and blood and not china. He was an experienced master, a man who’d had white wives and colored mistresses. He knew what women were made of. He knew the ground rules of intermarriage, and he knew what seeds of doubt to introduce, seeds that would germinate in evil flowers of regret.