The short history of a p.., p.20
The Short History of a Prince, page 20
“That depends,” Walter said. “If you’re not taking this thing lightly, then I guess you have to ask yourself a few questions. Such as, what is it, exactly, that you long for?”
She was holding a French fry like a cigarette and she had been about to take a bite. “What is it I long for?” she repeated. She stared at him with her mouth open. “What is it I long for?” She said it haltingly that time and as if she were speaking only to herself.
Walter had asked the right question, he knew, could feel it in the tautness of the line between them.
“Lester,” she said at last. “Lester might say that I’m really longing for God. Could that be it? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if lust was that lofty? So maybe my attraction to Lester has nothing to do with the disappointment in my career, or my boring husband, or my upbringing. Maybe all this yearning is a longing for God himself.” She smiled, marveling at the idea. “Wouldn’t that just be the limit?”
“I bet there are a lot of different routes to God,” Walter said. “And it’s probably a lot more fun and more worthwhile if you take the crooked path and the longest. I think it’s probably not harmony we’re after, not until the bitter end, anyway.”
“What do I long for?” she said again. “I want relief from drudge. Get up, get breakfast, make lunches, send the boys off, go to the studio for class, rehearse, call the sitter after school to make sure Toby hasn’t drugged her, rush home, grab a snack, nag Gary to leave the store, go back to the theater, perform until eleven o’clock, eat dinner, go to bed. This is my life, Walter, my life as a supposed Artist. I want relief, I want—”
“Adoration, and a bit of sweetness? Passion, adoration and a portion of sweetness?”
“Yes, yes,” she hissed, leaning over the table. “That’s what I want. All of it. I want the sleepless nights, the ten-pound weight loss, the drunk feeling of love.” She set her cup down, held her own face in her hands, and said pleadingly, as if she were asking Walter for it, “Sweetness. I want sweetness with a fiddle player. He is everything that Gary isn’t, I know that, Walter. He’s gallant and corny and mildly Christian and a little bit vain. The fact that he’s a stud is probably much more important to him than he’d ever admit. He’s a gentleman caller, is what he is. I think it was the way he spoke to his three spaniels in Houston that got me. He walked in his house and said, ‘You-all dogs want to eat?’ ”
“ ‘You-all dogs want to eat,’ ” Walter echoed.
“I know it’s not much to go on but it charmed the life out of me. And his Christian-ness made me think he might readily be naughty, that he might be itching to be just a little bit wicked. And yes, all in the name of sweetness.”
Walter shrugged. There were different rules governing her world. In his sphere, giving in to temptation made him feel good, and then sometimes bad—or worse, indifferent. Immorality could be lethal, it was true, if you weren’t careful. As an adult he had never felt he’d sinned, that he’d burn in hell, never felt he’d done something that rent the social fabric. He could see that she had the idea that sleeping with Lester, the Houston Symphony concertmaster, might cause her house to blow up, her children to drop dead on the playground. And she would think it served her right.
“When I first met Lester I thought he seemed like Daniel. I told you that, didn’t I?”
“You did,” he said. “Although I hate to think that Daniel would have gotten religion and become a Texan.”
“You’d like Lester, you really would. I realized later that I’d made the Daniel connection to myself, as an excuse, as a reason to get to know Les, to write him letters, to like him in a legitimate way.”
“He reminds me of a dead friend, therefore I get to have sex with him?”
“Oh God, Walter. That’s terrible.”
Walter ran his finger along the plate, in the spot the French fries had been, in the grease and the salt. His remark was a little harsh, he knew. “Maybe,” he said, “you don’t have to think of the comparison in terms of exploiting a person, but a way to tap into memory. Perhaps you could call it remembering.”
“No.” She shook her head. “That’s too generous. I remember plenty.” She was quiet for a minute, nibbling her bottom lip with her front teeth. “That Christmas party your parents had, for starters? I always think of it in the winter. I can’t hear O Holy Night’ without seeing your Aunt Jeannie trying to get Francie to sing along with her at the piano. You fell down the stairs that night, and I fell in love with Daniel. I didn’t even care that you got hurt. I knew you’d survive. Daniel looked so sick in the kitchen. I remember how he stared at me, as if he was taking stock of my strength, as if he was admiring the life in me. He looked at me as if I could save him, and I thought I could, I really did. I thought the power of”—she coughed out the word—“love, could cure him. I think he was an unusual person, Walter. He saw things through this sort of scrim of goodwill, and it wasn’t that he was an obnoxious brownnoser, and it wasn’t only his innocence. He already had the bemused patience of an older, wiser person. I like to think he wouldn’t have lost that quality as an adult.”
At Christmas only weeks before, Walter had looked down the back stairs at his parents’ house. He had remembered how angry he’d been at Susan, how the minute his head hit the last stair he’d understood that she was going to use Daniel’s sickness for her own purposes. He had sometimes believed it was his neurosis that had made him think ill of her, that she herself had only been a sixteen-year-old in love. He had despised her, hated the sight of her, for nearly five months.
She was in distress across from him, wiping at her eyes. “You’re not lying to Gary after all,” he said. “We are hashing over the past. You wouldn’t believe what a nightmare it is to be in high school every day, how the smallest things, a paper punch, a milk carton, Reese’s peanut butter cups in the grubby paw of some boy—how one small image brings back an entire horrible day twenty years ago.” He noticed a speck of nail polish on her engagement ring, and he took her hand in his and with his fingernail chiseled at the spot. “You might want to take this thing off, you know, before dinner. So anyway, if we were back there in Oak Ridge, doing life over, with our knowledge intact, nothing, not one person, would be recognizable. This is how I see it, through my rose-colored scrim: Mrs. Gamble, true to her real nature, would be a dyke with a crew cut and Dobermans instead of collies. She’d be a dowser, or maybe even a surgeon, or a plumber, something that requires hunting down an error, finding a source, following a pipe or a vein through a system. Sue Rawson would live with a buxom blond biker and be completely under her power. Trishie Gamble wouldn’t exist, but if she did, she’d be out in the yard sucking on Quaaludes, handing them beyond the fence to all the little children, to counteract her mother’s vitamin campaign. We didn’t know that what we did in high school would actually mark us, would stay with us, change us. Choice, action, fate, only affected people’s lives if they were characters in Greek theater or a Henry James novel. I used to take everything, every last move, seriously, partly so that I would feel a sense of drama that I didn’t think really existed in my life, or would ever exist. I couldn’t go through the car wash without pretending it was something significant, a rite, a purging ritual. There was terror, real Aristotelian terror, I made believe, when the water came thundering across the car, and the smell of detergent went straight up your nose and behind your eyeballs, and finally the quiet, the white sign lighting up, the light that absolves and urges you out into the world, the black words: DRIVE AHEAD.”
“We were such geeky teenagers,” she said fondly.
“Nerds of the highest order, and so unaware. It’s shocking to think that while we were doing our demi-pliés at the barre up on the twelfth floor of the Louis Sullivan Building the Cultural Revolution was going on. Parents in China were made to watch their children jump from the top of buildings to their deaths. What defined my childhood wasn’t Kennedy’s assassination, and Bobby’s assassination, and Martin Luther King’s assassination, those great divides, the tragedies that determined the befores and afters. My defining moment was seeing Serenade at Ravinia, with Sue Rawson. What was one president’s death, a martyr or two, compared with seeing angels, getting a glimpse of the spirit world?”
Susan smiled across at him, and withdrew her hand. She thought that Lester probably wasn’t as interesting as Walter, that even supposing he was the love of her life, if such a thing was actually possible, he would never know her the way her old friend did. He was looking out into the street, watching each person pass. “You must miss the city,” she murmured.
“Sometimes,” he said absently, without turning from the window. “Do you remember that night you danced to Serenade in our living room, by the way? You were possessed. You bewitched us. You hocus-pocused Daniel from some far corner of the house and he came to watch. Mitch went crawling on the floor after you finished, not just to claim you, but also to try to absorb some of the magic, hoping it would rub off on him. He had previously thought he was the next great star in the making, but watching you he realized he didn’t have it for the big leagues. It was that night that determined his future as a developer in Southern California. You didn’t even have a skirt on, you were wearing jeans, and yet there was this feeling of billowing fabric. If you dazzled Mitch and me, think what Daniel must have felt. He’d never seen anything like it, never dreamed—”
“But do you know what was awful, Walter, so painful for him? When he couldn’t go to school, when he couldn’t swim, he found he didn’t have friends. They fell away, abandoned him. He couldn’t talk to anyone, not only because they didn’t know what to say but because he realized they weren’t capable of meeting him at his level. He didn’t feel arrogant. He was just lonely, sad. We used to talk about that. We had some good conversations in those months—at least, I remember thinking they were profound discussions. Teenagers are deep, anyway, sifting through right and wrong, justice and injustice. Only we had an immediate reason to think about God and death, the nature of love.”
“Some of my students don’t believe in love,” Walter said. “A lot of them live with one parent, which probably explains their skepticism. I suppose I learned about real adult love from my parents. Not about ecstasy, per se, but about the quiet, unheralded splendors of a shared history. There are kids at Otten High who have nothing but cynicism for their own bodies, for their own lives. I have to constantly remind myself that I don’t care what they think of my teaching performance art—how much energy it takes, not to care! The other day, just for the hell of it, I recited To His Coy Mistress’ to my toughest class, the seventh hour. And Sharon, the head slut of the school, says audibly, in a fakey under-her-breath way, ‘So why didn’t she just fuck him?’ On one hand I was pleased that she’d listened and understood, and on the other hand the whole place went to pieces.” “God, Walter!”
“That class is always on the edge, just about to explode. But if I can snag them, if I can harness their energy, sometimes they actually go forward. It takes all my might and my cunning. In the middle of their uproar I ran around the room handing out paper and pencils—I have to provide for them because half of them don’t come prepared. I told them to write a love letter, a letter of persuasion, to try to entice someone to go out with them, without using any profanity, without being vulgar, I’d flunk them on the spot for crudeness and swearing. The idea was to use wit to get what they wanted. You can see every teenage emotion cross their faces at a time like that. Some don’t know what to say, how much to give away. Some go blank and some can only think of their dicks. The good girls start writing and don’t look up until the bell rings.”
“Can you imagine Mr. Reynolds reciting a love poem or giving us that assignment? It would have made him blush.”
“Yes, but we were well behaved and somewhat eager and furthermore we could read. He didn’t have to veer from the textbook to appeal to our imaginations.”
“You’ve given me an idea, do you know that? I’ll buy the Norton Anthology this afternoon, and at dinner I’ll open it, like it’s the Bible, and read out loud, ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ ”
Walter sat up straight and with the rectitude of a clergyman recited, “ ‘Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife.’ ”
“And don’t think of your wife and three children, Lester, Lester, Lester.” She pulled her hair out of its rubber band, and it fell around her. She had more hair than Walter thought could be contained by one thin band. “I wonder,” she said, “if he loves me. Lester’s an awful name, what you’d call a pig if you were a girl growing up on a farm.”
“Has he seen you dance?”
“Once. The time we met, in Houston.”
“And what was it? What were you performing?”
“Jewels.”
“ ‘Diamonds,’ you danced ‘Diamonds’?”
“My part. Farrell’s part, and my part.”
“There’s no doubt, then. He loves you.”
They walked up Michigan Avenue, arm in arm. The gold candles wound with plastic greens were still strapped to the streetlights, along the avenue, left over from Christmas. The sun was shining and the wet sidewalks were crackly underfoot with salt. Susan was wearing a long, heavy camel coat that was too big for her, and on anyone else would have looked dowdy. She was all elegance in the coat and her white beret, just as she had been at ten in a black leotard. She could not possibly have needed the coat in Florida. Walter wondered if she’d lugged it from home, or, miraculously, found it in the closet at the hotel. She had always seemed to have what was appropriate, necessary, he thought, and then, amending that idea he said to himself that she had always had the enviable ability to claim what she needed.
“You know,” she said, pulling him closer, “I finally figured out that you let me win some of those music games. It was nice of you, by the way.”
“It made you so mad to lose,” he said. “I had to give you victory sometimes, purely out of self-defense.”
She frowned, looking at him. “I used to have to win back then. I thought I had hidden that unpleasant trait, but you’ve always known me. I think Daniel’s death forced me to sort things out, to realize that winning is beside the point. I did love beating you, though. I cheated to win, Walter. Sometimes, I cheated.”
“I know you did, darling.”
“I would have hated me, if I were you. Do your parents still have the neighborhood Christmas party? I loved all those strange people, poor Billy rocking back and forth with his hand in his mouth, drooling into the candies. Your aunt Jeannie trying to get her children to perform. You could just tell Sue Rawson always wanted to drive a spear through her heart.”
“Exactly,” Walter said. “That’s the whole problem with Lake Margaret. Sue Rawson wants to punish everyone because God gave her a twit for a sister. She’s had to share the place with Aunt Jeannie for so long and she has finally come to the end of her rope. If she knew she wouldn’t get caught she’d just go over to Ted and Jeannie’s house after dark. With her concealed weapon in her pocket, she’d walk in the basement door, make her way to the bedroom and blow her little sister’s brains out. But even that wouldn’t be as satisfying as this Lake Margaret deal. She’s going to torture Jeannie slowly, make her pay. Either she thinks that everyone in the family is somehow going to understand why she’s doing it, and not take it personally, and excuse her, or she figures we’ll all be mad at her forever and she won’t care, because she’ll have so much personal, lifelong satisfaction from skewering Jeannie. Whatever happens, she’s going to make about four hundred thousand dollars and possibly get revenge on top of it.” “It’s so sad, to lose a place like that.”
“It’s not gone yet,” he said, “but it’s a lot of money to raise. I haven’t told you the latest twist. It’s as if all of this, in a perverse way, has come, not exactly full circle, but close to it. So, my cousins, those who are professionals, are in hock in the suburbs and don’t want to go deeper, and the others don’t have money, period. We are carpenters, aspiring actresses, teachers. I have about five hundred dollars in a savings account in Oak Ridge. My parents can spare maybe fifty thousand, but they have to think about their retirement. Aunt Jeannie and Ted have blown a lot of money on trinkets for Jeannie, and they’ve had to educate six children, and let’s not forget the obligatory cruise in the Bahamas every year. Couldn’t do without a big pleasure boat. At my mother’s behest I went to talk to Sue Rawson a few weeks ago. ‘If anyone can sway her, you can,’ Joyce says, which, believe me, did not make me feel hopeful. In I go to my aunt’s coach house, she sits me down in her pink Louis Quatorze chair, the way she used to when I was six years old. She cuts me off the minute I bring up the subject. ‘This is not a country shack,’ she says to me. ‘Do you realize what kind of responsibility is involved, taking care of an estate of this size? Do you understand what sort of expense is required, for maintenance, for taxes, what time commitment you will have to make?’ ”
“I’ve never liked her, Walter!”
“No one can stand her, but I’ve always insisted that she has a secret sentimental heart. I know she does. When I was eight she took me to see the bronze dancer girl, the Degas in the Art Institute, and she could hardly control herself. She has great feeling, truly. I refuse to give up my opinion, even though by the end of the conversation she had reduced me to a pip. There was no point in telling her how important Lake Margaret is to me. I’m penniless! There was nothing I could say.
“I went home in a complete depression, but it wasn’t long after that Francie and Roger Miller came forward. Enter Dr. and Mrs. Miller. Center stage. Poor Roger, cultivating his lady’s slippers. He’s an eye doctor and doesn’t have anything else to do with his money. Raise his orchids and, yes, save Lake Margaret! It is Aunt Jeannie’s son-in-law who apparently is going to step in and rescue us floundering, useless nieces and nephews. And then, you see, Sue Rawson will have to live with the fact that the majority of the shares are going to belong to Jeannie’s faction. Everyone will have to tithe to Aunt Jeannie to use the bathrooms.”
