Up Island (5 page)

Back in the silly seventies, a quintessentially silly woman named Marabelle Morgan had written a ludicrous antifeminist diatribe called
The Total Woman.
One
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of the husband-pleasing stratagems she had suggested was wrapping your naked self in Saran Wrap and meeting hubby at the door with a cold martini when he came home from work. Tee and I had hooted over it, and one night I had done just that, and we had ended up making love on the floor of the tiny vestibule that served the Collier Hills house as a foyer. I had had the striations of the diamond-shaped tiles on my back for days.

“Well, she’s right, it works,” Tee had said, panting.

Having tried and discarded the Frederick’s of Hollywood ensemble as simply too sleazy to stretch over middle-aged flesh, I had remembered the Saran Wrap and done it again that night. For good measure, I had added a jumbo red velvet bow that had adorned our Christmas wreath, pulling it tautly over the worst of the weals and scratches on my bum. I was bathed, oiled, powdered, and shot all over with Sung, and my heart was galloping nearly as hard as it had on the first night Tee and I had ever gone to bed. When he began to laugh, I jumped, crackling and rattling, out of bed and ran to him and threw my arms around him. I pressed myself against him and rubbed as suggestively as I knew how; I kissed him all over his face and put my tongue in his ear. I felt his arms go around me, hard, and threw my head back and laughed aloud with joy. My clean hair swung into both our faces.

“You don’ like me, I got a seester,” I growled low in my throat.

Tee buried his head in my neck and scrubbed it back and forth, back and forth. He still did not speak, but I could hear his breathing thicken and deepen. I could feel him harden against my stomach, too, a ludicrous feeling muffled in plastic wrap.

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“Wanna see if it still works?” I whispered into his hair.

I ripped the plastic wrap off and pulled him down on top of me on the bed. On the way down I reached over and clicked the light switch, sending the lamp rocking on its base.

I gave him no quarter. I took him in my hand and guided him into me, clamping my legs around his waist and holding on as if I were in danger of falling off the rim of the world.

He drove hard and deep, still not speaking, and I did not, either. Later for that. In the morning. Pancakes and sausage and Vivaldi and talk, sweet, slow hours of it. In the morning.

When we’d first made love, I was so nervous that my voice shot up an octave and I trembled all over, as if I were freezing. He was nervous, too, and half drunk; it was in our last year of school, after a Chi Phi party, in the apartment he shared with Charlie. Charlie was in Atlanta at Carrie’s house; he was almost never in Athens on weekends that year. I remember that I closed my eyes and whimpered, and Tee, trying to soothe me, had whispered over and over, “It’s gonna be good. It’s gonna be so good, baby.”

And to my immense surprise, it had been. It was so good that even before we found our rhythm, even before that first deepening and ripening, we both laughed aloud with surprise and pleasure. We were so exactly the same height and build that we fit as if we had been designed to illustrate one of the better sex manuals. There was not an inch of me, inside or out, that he did not cover exactly, fill perfectly. There was not an inch of him that I could not enclose. That had never changed, not in twenty-seven years.

And it didn’t change this night. It was as good as
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ever. If anything, it was deeper, warmer, faster, more urgent than ever before. When we finally lay gasping aloud and tangled together, coated with sweat even in the stale chill of the air-conditioning, we still had not spoken a word. I felt as if we had passed far beyond words, into a new place where, forever after, communion would be through our skin, through our mingled heartbeats, through the very blood that pulsed in our necks and wrists and throats. I lay steeped in moonlight, pinned to the bed with the sweet, sweaty weight of him, listening to his breath soften and slow in my ear. I felt his slack mouth on my neck. I felt invincible, boneless and weightless and young. I thought it would be fine simply never to move out from under him.

But finally my legs began to prickle and go numb, and I turned my face into his neck and said into his ear, a bubble of laughter catching in my throat, “And I was actually going to ask you if you were having an affair.”

He began to quiver against me, as I have felt him do before a hundred times when he laughs silently after love, and I began to laugh, too. I stretched myself as far as I could, like a cat, laughing against the side of his face, rubbing his shaking shoulders, giddy and nerveless with completion and relief.

It was not until I felt the wetness on my neck, a small rivulet of it coursing slowly down the slope of my breast, that I realized he was crying.

H
ER NAME WAS SHERI SCROGGINS. She was an assist-ant attorney in Coca-Cola’s legal department, thirty-two years old, estranged from her viciously Pente-costal family in the Florida Panhandle, divorced seven years from her citizens’ militiaman husband, childless, possessed of a naturally acute legal mind and prodigious ambition, and definitely on Coca-Cola’s inside fast track.

Tee wanted to marry her.

At dawn, through a ringing in my ears that sounded as if I’d stood too near a great explosion, I heard myself say in a tinny, puzzled voice, “How on earth can you marry her, Tee?

Then she’d be Sheri Redwine.”

Tee turned away from the window, where he’d been watching day break over Ansley Park (But how could dawn come? How could the sun rise on such a morning as this?), and said, “I might have known you’d make a joke of this, Molly.”

If I could have felt pain through the stupid numbness that enveloped me, I would have flinched at his words. I had not been making a joke. I had meant just what I’d said: It seemed to me in my craziness that Tee simply could not marry a woman whose name ever

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afterward would be a bibulous joke. I had thought perhaps it had not yet occurred to him.

We had talked for hours. Or rather, Tee had talked. Talked, wept, talked, wept some more, talked and talked and talked.

It was as if someone had pulled a stopper out of him. He sat on the side of our bed and babbled words that had, for a long time, no meaning to me, because they were about people I did not know. I said nothing, because nothing occurred to me. I sat half shrouded in crackling plastic wrap, sensing rather than feeling the small frown between my brows, leaning closer to him every now and then so that I could hear him better, so that perhaps some of this tidal wave of urgent, tear-borne words might make some sense. Grandma Bell could not have done it better. Every now and then I could feel my head shake from side to side, no, no, in a small gesture more of incomprehensibility than anguish. Anguish was not a part of that night. Anguish presupposes understanding.

I did not know this man who wept on the side of my bed, and I did not know what he was saying.

Teddy had a biology project in his freshman year at Westminster in which he studied the effect of strong emotion on the human body. I remembered that one effect of great shock and fear was the widening of the pupil to admit all possible daylight, so that the ensuing brightness could better illuminate danger. I thought now that it was true. The bedroom where we sat was very bright, even though no daylight had paled the windows on to the garden yet. I seemed smothered, and floated in a buzzing, shifting cloud of radiant mist. Sometimes I could see so clearly through it that the stubble on Tee’s chin stood out like cuttings in a hay field; sometimes he all but disappeared. Occasionally I could UP ISLAND / 39

hear words and sentences with the clarity of gunshots in a silent forest, but mostly I sat and watched his mouth move and the tears run down his face, and could not hear what he was saying.

I sat and nodded and nodded, tilting my head to hear, my hands folded in my lap, as the stray words dived out of the mist at me, pecking like scavenger birds: “Sorry…sorry.

Never meant it to happen…never meant to hurt you…doesn’t mean I didn’t love you, don’t love you…I’m an asshole, an utter jerk; don’t think I don’t know it…. Don’t think I haven’t gone over this a thousand times in my mind, how to tell you…rather die than hurt you, but can’t live without her, Moll…the lying and the sneaking around has almost killed both of us; she feels as bad for you as I do…. Needs me, Molly. Needs me in a way you never did…never had much of a family, never any security, never any cherishing…strong in a lot of ways but not in the ways you are…tell me what you want me to do now. Want me to move out? Want me to tell the kids? Want me to stay here with Teddy and let you go somewhere nice and think it out, Sea Island, maybe?

Just tell me…. Not going to hurry you, not going to just leave you dangling; you’ll always have what you need…tell me what you want me to do…”

Finally, after what seemed a very long time, the words stopped. The silence rang and the mist swirled. The room swam giddily. I said nothing, only sat looking at him, waiting for something else, I did not know what. But there must be something else….

I blinked and the room came into focus. Tee got up and went and stood at the windows. Light was coming in now, pale, thin. That’s when I said that about the name. About her being Sheri Redwine. After that, I
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could think of nothing else to say, so I waited some more.

Tee pulled up the slipper chair in the corner and sat facing me. I noticed that at some time he had put his clothes back on. When had he done that? All but his shoes and socks. He usually sat in the slipper chair to do that, but he did not move to do it now. He looked at me intently. I looked down at his bare feet, underwater white, and then at his face. He looked ghastly, burnt and then drowned.

“You must feel some way about this, Molly,” he said finally, sounding fretful, querulous, his voice faint, like a child with fever. “There must be something you need to say. We can’t not talk about it.”

“It?”

“Molly…all of this I’ve been telling you. About…Sheri. The divorce. You’ve got to feel something about it. You’ve got to get it out…”

“Divorce? There’s not going to be any divorce, Tee. I don’t want a divorce, for heaven’s sake; did you think I was going to punish you with that?”

He simply stared at me, then put his head into his hands.

He laughed through his fingers, an exhausted, awful, little laugh.

“Molly, I may be a jerk and a cad and an asshole, but I am not a bigamist.”

“You mean…you mean you want to
marry
her, Tee?”

He lifted his head and looked at me with dead, red-rimmed eyes.

“Jesus, what have I been saying to you for the past five hours?”

“Oh, Tee, why?” I whispered. There did not seem to be enough air in my lungs to speak aloud.

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He closed his eyes. The endless tears began again, leaking from under his gold-tipped lashes. I had not seen Tee cry since his father’s death six years before. Tears only for death, it seemed. But then, wasn’t that what he was talking about?

The death by murder of a marriage?

“She makes me alive again,” he whispered.

“And I don’t? We don’t?”

“We…?”

“Me. Caroline. Teddy. The family. You’re talking about divorcing the
family.
How can you even think that, Tee? The family?”

“Molly…Caroline is gone. She has her own family now.

And Teddy’s going. He’s going this fall. You know he isn’t coming back, not to this house…”

“All right, then, me. What do I make you, dead? Tee, you know what we’ve had, what our life has been. You don’t call that alive? All those years, Tee!”

He shook his head very slightly, as if the effort were almost too much. In the dim morning light he looked very young, as if he had just pulled an all-nighter at the fraternity house, studying with Charlie for finals. My heart swelled with love for him that was oddly maternal. Let him get it all out, this exhausted, fragmented boy that I loved, and then I could begin the business of soothing, sorting, mending.

“It’s not the same thing,” he said, his eyes still closed. “You know you and I don’t have those kinds of feelings anymore.

Not for a long, long time, not since…I don’t know when.

I’m not saying it’s your fault, Moll. It’s just…not like this.

Not lightning, not light up the sky.”

“Nobody has that forever,” I said prissily, the schoolteacher I had been for a short time before Caroline
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was born. “That’s for the beginning; you can’t have it always.”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “I can.”

“With this…Sheri, you mean,” I said. “Does she put a little heart over the ‘i’, Tee?”

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t make fun of her name. She knows it’s awful. It’s her mother’s idea of class, and she’s too proud to change it. But she’s come a very long way from that horrible family of hers. And she’s done it all by herself. That’s one reason…she’s never really had a family. She doesn’t even know what the word means.”

“So now she wants mine.”

“No,” Tee said, smiling painfully. “Only me, I guess.”

“Me, too,” I said conversationally. “That’s what I want, too. So I guess there’s a little problem.”

His face twisted and he stood up.

“I’ll always take care of you,” he said rapidly. “You’ll never lack for money. You’ll never have to go to work. The house will be yours for the rest of your life, if you want it. Or wherever you want to live. And school for Teddy…. You and Teddy will always be okay, Molly. I swear that to you. And anything Caroline wants or needs…”

“Tee, you don’t make that kind of money,” I said faintly.

“Not for two…families. Or does she make an awful lot? Even then, it wouldn’t be enough…. Don’t you see how silly all this is?”

He looked at me for a long moment, then reached down for his shoes and put them on, standing balanced with his hand on the back of the slipper chair.