Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Think how desirable it was to him. This young girl from the Casual Club who had been turned into a tiger. Later, back in our room, we fucked each other without mercy. We beat upon each other’s body, taking all the pleasure that we could, giving nothing away, taking, taking, taking.

  At five o’clock he dressed for the banquet. He went downstairs to meet someone. He said he would come back for me at six. I dressed in my new suit. I ordered a martini from room service. Then I did not drink it. Six o’clock came. He was not there. Seven o’clock came. He did not come. The banquet started at seven. Something terrible must have happened. I called the banquet but they said he was not there. I drank the martini and ordered another one. Eight o’clock and nine o’clock came and went and still he was not there. I called the banquet over and over again. Finally a waiter told me Mr. Matasick had been there but he wasn’t there anymore. The banquet was over. They had all gone home. I sat on the bed in my suit. Beware of enterprises that require new clothes.

  At ten-thirty he returned to the room and let me yell at him. I screamed at him. I beat upon him and tore him with my fingernails. He begged me not to hate him. He said he loved me until death. He said he brought me here because he loved me. I cried myself to sleep on gin.

  Driving home was when we saw the flying saucer. Coming home on the eve of Christmas Eve. The Christmas before the New Year’s Eve when I took the Antabuse and drank on it and almost died, begged to die, wanted to die to punish him.

  Money was part of it. That Lincoln Continental with its seats of whitest leather. My father’s money, whether I would have it or not. He had never had a poor woman in his life. They were all wealthy women, the ones before me and the ones who followed. The ones who didn’t count. He said they didn’t count and I believed him.

  There is only one love like that, one white hot moment when a man and a woman ask everything of each other, ask sacrifice and pain and dishonesty. Mostly pain. Alone with him in rooms, in my apartment in the afternoons when my roommate wasn’t there, beside him or on top of him with his dick buried deep within me. My body pulling on him to empty him and make him suffer.

  James Rainey Matasick, the name is enough to make men feel inferior. Now, in my old age, sometimes I drop it in the lap of a man if he tries to flirt with me. If he’s the right age, if he looks like an old high school athlete, if he dreamed of glory, I let him make his move and then I ask him if he saw Raine play. He was my lover, I say. My one and only love.

  It would be nine years before I needed him again. Before I called and told him to come save me. Only this time I would be richer, surer, older. I don’t know why I called him then, only I had some Dexedrine for the first time in several years and I wanted him to take me to a place he knew about, a place that once he had taken me to. I wanted to go to Arkansas. The only time I had ever set foot in Arkansas was when Raine took me to Little Rock to visit his sister who was dying in a veterans’ hospital. He had cried in my arms after he saw her and on the way home we ran out of gasoline outside of Dumas and had to walk a mile to catch a ride to a service station.

  Anyway, I called and told him I had to go to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to go to school to learn how to be a writer and he met me in Vicksburg and drove me there. I made him wait outside the English Department while I went in to meet my professors. As I said, I always forgot who he was. I never thought of him as anything on earth but my lover. “Raine Matasick is outside in the car?” my professor said. “My God in heaven, tell him to come in.”

  III

  His integrity was darkened by the lies he told to make me love him. One day at noon, at lunch somewhere, one of those expensive restaurants that come and go in Jackson like the tides, over Bloody Marys and lobster salad, in a booth, I think, not a table, although it may have been a table . . . what he said removed us from the rest of the room in such a way that it seems it must have been a booth, Dudley cheats at golf, he said. He moves the ball. He improves the lie. He couldn’t look at me when he said it. It was something he had to say, something he had to unveil to me, for some reason, perhaps to ward off Dudley’s telling me about his wife, that he wasn’t separated from her, that she was pregnant, that when he left me, he went back to her house. Perhaps Dudley had threatened him, had said he would tell me. Perhaps my father told Dudley to put a stop to it. I can’t play with him anymore, Raine said. People bet money on those games. If men stop trusting you, you’re dead. I bowed my head. I was ashamed. I could believe anything of Dudley, the killer, the older brother, the one who always had the best of everything, the one my father loved the best, the one who had the power and the money. And one eye. A natural athlete who lost an eye. Yes, to make up for the handicap he might cheat. Because he has to win. He can’t live if he can’t win, can’t be second in anything. Had been kicked out of college for letting his fraternity brothers copy off of him. Had lived his life to earn my father’s love, which he could have had without lifting his finger. Because he looks like my father’s father. So much like him the resemblance is uncanny. If you hold their photographs up against each other it is the same soft pretty spoiled face.

  If it were true? If my brother cheated other men, what did that make me? It was a long time ago, nineteen sixty-three, I did not know you could leave, bail out, refuse to be part of such a family, a family that drank and cheated, whored around. Drank and lied and cheated, biblical sins. If I had known it, I could not have acted upon it. I had hostages, three sons, no money, no education. Three times I had escaped death by bearing them and still I was alive. I was twenty-six years old, then twenty-seven. I thought there was not much time left before it would be too late, before I would die from the deep dissatisfaction of my life. I had meant to be a writer, every moment of my life, since I was four or five or six years old, had counted myself a writer, had always written everything for everyone. Had always done it well, been praised for it, received the highest grades in English class. But that was all consumed now, consumed in the men and the babies and this terrible wealth my father had acquired and let us waste in any way we chose. As long as we stayed out of his way so he could go on making money and as long as we acted like we were happy. As long as we acted like we would never be poor, never be frightened and poor as he had been for many years. That shadow on his life, that terrible fear of being poor.

  I stayed because I had to stay and because my mother and father were still pure, did not lie or cheat or steal or drink. They were still the puritans they had had to be to make the money, to save, then multiply it into millions of dollars, enough to last us all forever, we thought. But my father did not think so, drove his old car, wore his old suits, stayed home at night, stayed sober.

  I stayed to take advantage of their purity. Later, when I was pure again, had purged myself of evil, had stopped drinking, lying, cheating, then I could leave, could refuse to let anyone suck the hard-won goodness from me. But this was much, much later, after years of work, of writing and psychotherapy, after twenty years I was good again. I think I will remain that way. I do not think anything could pull me down again into that mire of pain.

  You’ll be alone, people warned me. Won’t you be lonely?

  I’ve never been lonely in my life, I answered. But I’ve been afraid.

  I have tried to find a way to articulate what it was between Raine and me, the thing that passes between a man and a woman that is not words, that carves below the words and ignites them. Fire, the black people call it.

  I pity lovers, caught in that consumption. From the word consume. When nature takes us back, which we call love. I had been practicing for Raine. Four unwanted pregnancies. He had four children and this new one on the way. This inconvenient child. This child who was my enemy because I was consumed in this unholy fire.

  When we ran out of gasoline on the road between Dumas, Arkansas and McGee, I was listening to a tape of Willie Nelson singing “Stardust.” Coming back from seeing Raine’s dying sister. I had been talking for fifty miles about where we would spend the nigh
t. He did not answer me. He knew he was going to spend the night with his wife and children and he knew better than to tell me so. I would have stolen the car keys, torn him with my fingernails, jumped out of the car, done anything. It was of no importance to me if he had a family. He was my lover. No other Raine existed for me. Because I was consumed by fire.

  Why else down all these centuries have women lain down with men and died in childbirth? Lain down smiling, taken pleasure in it. It has nothing to do with freedom, tenderness, pity, love. Tenderness, pity, love, these are words we invented to forgive ourselves.

  That cold December afternoon when we saw the flying saucer. Driving along the picked cotton fields, long flat fields to the east of Jackson, at dusk, just after the sun went down. The man beside me is Raine, the one who loved me so much he lied to keep me. It is the eve of Christmas Eve and in a while he will drop me off and leave me alone at Christmas. I had to escape that knowledge so much I saw an apparition, made him see it by the force of my will, gave him an apparition so we could both escape the pain inside that car. He always said he saw it. He told everyone he did. It flew along beside us, on the horizon, inside a long blue cloud.

  Finally, we stopped the car and got out and stood along the highway watching it. Many years later, I saw a film about flying saucers and the people in the movie did exactly as we did. Got out of their cars and stood along the side of a road, in little groups of two and three, watching the apparition in the sky.

  Perhaps we were holding hands, the tacky topaz ring he had given me upon my finger, a ring so big it would have cut into his hand if he had squeezed it. Later I gave it to a maid or lost it or threw it away. It disappeared within a year. We stood there watching the apparition, wrapped up in the lies he told me, the thing he had done to me in Chicago when he left me alone in the room and went to the banquet without me.

  Soon after that I left him. Closed up the apartment, gave the furniture away, took a series of lovers, then married the wealthy Jewish lawyer, who should have known better, and moved away.

  I was burned out for a while. When I recovered it was work that saved me. The work I had abandoned when the fire that made my sons consumed me.

  What will you write? my mother asked me, terrified. The truth, I answered. Stories, poems, plays.

  Drunk Every Day

  It ended in a rape. It ended with Sally being raped behind the Jeffersons’ high brick fence. It ended with Sally taking off her blue jeans at knifepoint and being raped by a sixteen-year-old kid within sight of the five-hundred-thousand-dollar addition to the Jeffersons’ house that was the cause of the Jeffersons’ divorce and the reason no one was there to hear Sally’s cries for help. If she cried out. I don’t remember if she said she did or not. She said, “He was sixteen years old and he was black as the ace of spades and I did what I was told to do, but I was not afraid. I swear to God I was not afraid.”

  “How did you know he was sixteen?” Jodie Myers was sitting on the bed with the stethoscope around his neck and his hands in his lap. We had both been in love with him all week. Now he was sitting on my bed being a doctor. That was not what Sally and I had in mind, but it was what we got. Have you ever noticed how things seem to build and build until finally they reach a point where something has to give? That was what happened in February of 1975. We had gone as far as we could go. We had built a pyre and something had to burn.

  To begin with it was Mardi Gras and my friends and I were drunk every day. There was no reason why we should not be. We were the privileged ones. The ones who did not have to work or take care of our children or do a goddamn thing we didn’t want to do. My name is Rhoda Manning, by the way, and I am older now and wiser. Still, I don’t regret the life that I have lived. I don’t regret a goddamn minute of it. I left no stone unturned. I will never have to sit back and say, Where did my life go?

  A week before Mardi Gras I ran a twenty-six-mile marathon and finished it in four hours and five minutes. Afterward I drove to Mandeville and stayed alone all afternoon watching it rain on the porches of the summer house Eric bought me the first time I tried to leave him. I will never understand why he wanted our marriage to go on and on and on. Long after I didn’t love him anymore. Long after we had stopped sleeping in the same bed. He wanted me to stay so he bribed me and I agreed to be bribed. He gave me all the money that I wanted and he let me do anything I wanted to and in return I kept on pretending to be his wife. I will never understand those years. That marriage without passion or desire. What I did to make up for the frustration was play tennis and drink. I see women now in situations like the one I was in, and I think to myself, This is bondage, as old as the hills and still going on. Young women married to old men who can’t make them come. Women buying houses and cars with money old or second-rate men give them. Women with that look that says, I was bought and paid for, here I am.

  So that is where I was at that time in my life and I was making up for it as best I could. I played tennis like a fiend. I ran six miles every morning in the park. I got my hair dyed. I planned vacations. I drank. The great thing about living in New Orleans in those years was that there were lots of people to get drunk with. This was before everyone started cleaning up their acts.

  So it was Mardi Gras and Sally Stanfield was staying at our house and we were drunk every day. Luncheons at Galatoire’s or Commander’s Palace. Breakfast in the French Quarter. Nights at parties or viewing the parades. Men we knew rode the floats in the parades. We stood on certain corners and they showered us with doubloons. We didn’t even bother to bend over and pick them up. We wouldn’t have bothered to pick up silver dollars if they had thrown them at us. Sally’s father was the richest man in Tennessee and mine was almost as rich, and besides, I had Eric to pay for everything I could think up to charge to him. What did all this mean? I will never be able to figure it out. But I know what was missing. We didn’t have anything to do. We didn’t have to work. There would have been no reason to work. We had power without responsibility and we were bored to death with the hand we had been dealt. Don’t start judging this. Annie Dillard said to write as if you were dying and I’m trying to.

  More about Sally. She was a twenty-five-year-old swimmer who had outgrown the sport. She had come in second in the NCAA for Tennessee the year she was a junior in college. That had been the peak. It had been downhill ever since. Still, she could run as fast as I could and once she had had an affair with a sportswriter I had a crush on, and on the basis of that we had become fast friends. She liked the illusion of a home I had created with Eric and I thought she was good enough for me. We liked the way each other looked. She was tall and blond and pretty and I was extravagantly well dressed. She was my running buddy in 1975. I liked to have a good-looking slightly younger woman riding shotgun at all times in those years. For one thing it kept Eric from saying anything when I got drunk. He was much too polite to pout in front of strangers.

  So it was Mardi Gras Eve and Jodie Myers’s sister was having a party to introduce her long-lost doctor-brother to uptown society. Sally and I followed him around all night. A practicing psychotherapist from San Francisco, California. It was too divine, too marvelous. “Tell me about the mists on the bay,” I asked him in the den. “I’ve never been there. But I read The Sorcerer of Bolinas Beach and I couldn’t put it down. If I go to San Francisco will I become a different person?”

  “You might,” he answered. “It will depend on what you take with you when you go.”

  “Go with us to Mardi Gras tomorrow. We have an invitation to watch the Wild Tchoupitoulas get ready at seven. Come with us. We’re going to have a ball.”

  “I have to stay with my sister and her kids. We’ll find each other before the day is through. I’m sure of that.”

  “He’s the cutest man I’ve ever seen,” I told Sally later. “One of us has to have him. There has to be a way.”

  “He might be gay. He’s never married.”

  “He isn’t gay. I would know if he was gay. His mother
told me she wanted me to have him. His mother is one of my best friends. She’s been wanting me to have him for ages. She wants him to fall in love with me and come back here and live.”

  “But you’re married, Rhoda.”

  “So what. My marriage is irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.” I waved my wineglass in the air. I shimmered in the lights from the chandeliers. I was thirty-six years old, at the height of my wildness and my powers.

  We wandered back into the party. Four drawing rooms on the ground floor of a white mansion on Saint Charles Avenue. Black waiters serving champagne and drinks. Jazz playing on a stereo. Beautiful blue sofas in the rooms. Swings on the porches. The children of the house sitting on the stairs in their best clothes watching the grown people get drunk. They were soaking it in. Learning how to be uptown New Orleanians. Let the good times roll. Roll all night long.

  Which is not what we did. We went home at twelve to get some sleep. We had to be up at dawn to get ready for the parades.

  At that time my three wild sons lived in my house. My husband, Eric. Fifty or sixty gerbils and hamsters. Three Old English sheepdogs. One or two parrots. A white rat that smelled like old cheese. Some turtles in a turtle pond. I guess that’s all.

  When we got home the children were still up. They were having a party in their rooms. A party or a fight. Sometimes it was hard to tell. The two older boys had people spending the night. The youngest boy was asleep in his room with a barricade at his door so they couldn’t get in and do anything to him. The baby-sitter was in the kitchen eating ice cream with her boyfriend. There was a full moon. Every light was on.