Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “I fell in love with him, of course. What did you think would happen, you white witch, you? He looks like you. He has your eyes.”

  “He liked you too. He told me so this morning. He’s going to be here for a week. You can come over tomorrow and I’ll have him here.” She laughed out loud. She moved her beautiful hands across the satin bedspread. Beside the bed was the incredible Monet. Across the room was the Van Gogh drawing. There was a Calder mobile. She had lived her life. She had not been consigned to this bed until she was seventy.

  I moved closer to her. I propped pillows behind my head and kicked off my shoes and stuck my legs down underneath the covers. She handed me a demitasse and a Lorna Doone. I sat back. I sighed. I began to eat the edge around the Lorna Doone. “Why do I need your sons?” I asked. “I have you. You’re more fun than they are.”

  “You can have them and me too.” She reached for a package of Camels, took one out and began to fit it into a small ivory holder. “How many do you want?”

  “Jodie would do. Only my friend, Sally, is in love with him too. I sort of agreed to let her have him. I have this Englishman I picked up in the Quarter. He’s over there now, with Eric and the boys. He says he’s an engineer. But I keep having this paranoid idea that he might be some sort of writer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like some undercover reporter writing about Mardi Gras for some English magazine. What if he was?”

  “Then he certainly found the best material. What’s his name?”

  “Robert something. I forgot. Anyway, I wish I could have Jodie but I think Sally really wants him.”

  “You can both have him. There’s enough to go around, I imagine. If he’s anything like his father.” She started really laughing now. Holding her unlit cigarette and laughing. I got up from the bed and got another Lorna Doone and began to walk around the room nibbling it and looking at things. It was the biggest bedroom in uptown New Orleans. It had been made from three rooms on the second floor of a Victorian mansion. The room was a curve, as the rooms had curved around a central hall. There were dormer windows that looked out upon a garden and a wall. Pots of geraniums were on the wall, a cat curled up on a picnic table, beds of daisies, a hedge of cape jasmine beginning to put out blooms.

  “I don’t need any men right now,” I said. “There’s too much going on. Malcolm’s so bad. He quit the football team. And he won’t be nice to Eric’s parents. He’s so rude to them.”

  “Good for him. They would make him the scapegoat if they could. I know those people. Good for him for seeing through them.” The phone began to ring. Rachel found the telephone beneath a pile of magazines and extricated the receiver and began to listen. “Oh, no,” she said. “She’s right here. I’ll put her on.”

  There is a strange thing about being involved in a rape. You don’t feel guilty like you do after a car wreck or something like that. A rape is an act of God. It’s a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s not as if I could have stopped it by being more caring or aware.

  “Something’s happened to Sally,” Eric said, when Rachel handed me the phone. “She’s been hurt. She’s here with us. You better come home now.”

  “Hurt? How hurt? What happened?”

  “She says she was raped. Just a short while ago. I called a doctor. I called Uncle Harris.”

  “I’ll be right there.” I hung up the phone and dropped the Lorna Doone on the plate. “Sally’s been raped. Call Jodie, will you? Tell him to come to my house and help us.” I bent over and kissed Rachel and she took a pearl ring from her finger and held it out to me. “This is what I had for you. An amulet to keep you safe. Take it. You will need it. Put it on.” I looked down at the little ring she was holding. I slipped it on my finger. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll wear it for a while. I have to go, Rachel. I really have to go.”

  “I know you do. Go on. Run as fast as you can.” This was a private joke between us. Once she had been teasing me about running in the park and I had said to her, When I am worried I run as fast as I can. She had written it down on a piece of paper and taped it to the door.

  I ran now. I ran out of the room and down the stairs and out the front door and across the yard and through the gate and all the way home.

  The teenagers were still sitting on my front steps, petting the dogs. There must have been twenty of them by then. They knew what had happened. They had seen Sally staggering down the street. They had helped her into the house. Had been the first to hear the story.

  Sally was in my bed with Eric and the Englishman sitting beside her. I made them leave. “She needs a bath,” I said. “I want to get her into the tub.” I lay down beside her on the bed and petted her and crooned to her and finally convinced her to get up and go into the bathroom and take off her clothes and get into the tub. I knelt beside the tub and sponged water over her shoulders and her arms and listened to her whimper. She was bruised and trembling, but she did not seem to be bleeding anywhere.

  Eric’s internist uncle arrived and I put a robe on Sally and led her back to the bed. He examined her and said she wasn’t hurt and gave us some pills to give her. Then Eric came back into the room and we sat on the bed on either side of her and petted her and finally she began to talk. She said the same three or four things over and over again. “He was just a kid. I should have kicked the shit out of him. I wasn’t afraid. I swear I wasn’t afraid.”

  About dark Jodie Myers arrived and took over. He sat beside her and got her to take the pills Uncle Harris had left for her. That was what he did in San Francisco. He worked in a trauma center in an emergency room at a hospital. He had seen worse things than this. “Much, much worse,” he told us, after Sally fell asleep.

  At eight o’clock I ran the teenagers off and made my children come into the kitchen and eat supper. The Englishman ate with them. “Very unlucky,” he said several times. “Damned bad luck.”

  “Can I go to William Gill’s house and get my algebra book?” Jimmy asked. “I left my book over there.”

  “No, you cannot,” I answered. “Tomorrow is a school day. Everyone’s going to bed as soon as they eat. You can call him and tell him to bring it for you.”

  I took my children to their part of the house and watched while they brushed their teeth and stood by the door while they took showers and put on their pajamas and got into their beds. I tucked them in and talked to them about Sally and promised to drive them to school so they wouldn’t have to ride the school bus.

  Eric drove the Englishman back to the Royal Orleans. I went into the bedroom several times and checked on Sally but she was fast asleep. I picked up her clothes and threw them in a pile in the laundry room. I put the feather mask on a shelf by a box of laundry powder.

  We did not call the police. It never occurred to us to call the police and take a chance on Sally’s name getting into the paper.

  When Eric got back from the Quarter we went into the guest room to go to sleep. We curled up in each other’s arms. We were married to each other. We helped each other out when things went wrong. “I’m going to quit drinking for Lent,” I said. “Except for my birthday and Sundays. I might go to Ash Wednesday service tomorrow. Sally might want to go if she feels better.”

  “Let’s go to sleep. I’m really tired.”

  “I know you are. Goodnight, sweetheart. Sweet dreams, my pet.” I held him in my arms. I will wear my white wool suit to church, I decided, and that white-and-black Chanel scarf I got in Paris. It might be too hot, but I can’t worry about that. You can’t worry about being hot if you want to look good. You have to put up with some discomfort in this climate.

  Joyce

  In 1976 Doctor Wheeler taught Joyce for the last time. He had sworn never to teach it again but the graduate students begged and pleaded and the dean cajoled and finally, one Sunday morning at breakfast at The Station, with the graduate students all around him and a piece of pumpkin pie topping off his scrambled eggs, he gave in and said yes.

/>   “I will teach it,” he said. “If you will read it. I won’t lecture if no one reads the books. My notes are not the works of James Joyce. Don’t take it unless you’re going to read the books.”

  “We will,” they swore. “You can count on us.” And all around the long table of young writers and graduate students a great sigh of determination took place and moved from one to the other and rose like a cloud and joined the smoke from Doctor Wheeler’s cigarette. Nothing is free. To be in the presence of so much brilliance was also to be in the presence of cigarette smoke. Doctor Wheeler chain-smoked. He smoked because he liked to smoke. He smoked until the very last minute of the clock that ticked away his life. After all, how much oxygen does a man with one leg need?

  One of the students at the table was a woman named Rhoda Manning. She was a housewife from New Orleans who was trying to learn to write poetry. All morning every morning she sat at a Royal portable typewriter in a small apartment near the campus and tried to turn everything she saw or experienced into metaphor. She was forty years old and she considered this the time of her life. She had this one semester to be a student in a writing program, with other students all around her and people like Doctor Wheeler to adore. She knew about Joyce. She had tried to read Joyce. She had an old recording of Siobhan McKenna reading Joyce. Now she was going to study Joyce. She stood up. She raised her glass. “Champagne,” she said. “Let’s order champagne. This demands a celebration. He’s going to teach the Joyce seminar. We will read Ulysses.”

  Also at the table was a tall unhappy man named Ketch McSweeney. He had been in Vietnam and had brought his wife and daughter to Fayetteville to learn how to write a book about the war. He couldn’t stop thinking about the war. He couldn’t stop dreaming about the war, so he thought he might as well make some money writing about the war. Not that he had much in the way of alternatives being offered to him at the moment. He was from Pennsylvania and had come to school to find a way to begin to make a stand. His wife had a job teaching second grade and his daughter was in a cheap Montessori school. He was making twelve thousand dollars a year being a graduate student in the writing program and teaching semiliterate freshmen to read and write the language that they spoke. He didn’t mind. He was a good-looking man and the young girls all made eyes at him and he was sure that sooner or later he would make a killing of some kind in the writing business. Meanwhile, he was determined to make the best of it and have all the fun he could while he waited.

  “I will teach it in the fall,” Doctor Wheeler said. “Sign up now because I’ll limit the size of the class.”

  The next afternoon Ketch McSweeney and Rhoda Manning met at the registrar’s office. “You too?” she said. “Jesus, we’re lucky. I can’t believe he’s teaching it.”

  “I thought you were going back to New Orleans after this semester. You decided to come back?”

  “I will now. I can’t miss this.”

  “What about your husband? He’s going to let you do this?”

  “I’m doing it. I’m going to be a poet if it takes the rest of my life.”

  “That’s how I feel. Only I want to make some dough. There’s got to be a way to make some money writing books.”

  “Well, I’ll see you in class then, won’t I? If not before.”

  They didn’t see each other again until the fall. But they were thinking about it. Both of them had been on the make most of their lives. Not to feed off other people or do intentional harm. Just to sample the wares of the world, to trade at the fair, to know the mornings, evenings, afternoons and not to hesitate when something fine or plump or juicy was at stake. They both liked excitement and they both knew how to generate it.

  Doctor Wheeler thought about them too. He read over the list of writers and graduate students who were signed up for the course and as he read he knew much of what would transpire. He had taught this class too many times not to know its generative power and its dangers. He had taught it the year Amanda McCamey showed up on campus. He had taught it to Barry Hannah and Frank Stanford. He had taught it the year Carolyn Forche was the poet in residence and would come and sit in on his classes and look at him with her wide, beautiful, Eastern European eyes.

  He walked out into his garden and thought about it. His garden overlooked the Confederate Cemetery. In it he had planted all the flowers he remembered from his youth. Hollyhocks and morning glories, pansies, delphiniums, foxglove and four o’clocks and bachelor’s buttons.

  “Virag speaks,” he said out loud. “(Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips.) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orange flower, Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. . . .”

  The first meeting of the class took place on a warm September night. A new moon was in the sky. A thin silver curve deep in the dark sky. Eight o’clock. The students had gathered in the hall, they milled around and talked about their summer adventures, they looked each other over, they overcame their egos and were kind. “Let’s go in,” Ketch said. “He’ll be here in a minute.” Rhoda went inside and found a seat in the middle of the room. He came and sat beside her and propped his legs on the rungs of an empty chair. She laid a notebook on the desktop and turned and smiled at him. Good, there wasn’t going to be any pretense. He wasn’t going to be coy.

  Doctor Wheeler came into the room and sat down behind the desk and lit a cigarette. He adjusted his artificial leg so that it rested against one of the legs of the desk. He looked out across the thirty-two faces waiting to be filled. He took a drag on the Camel and began. “We will begin with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This is Stephen’s story, the young Stephen who later will be the lover in Ulysses, and Leopold’s foil. His name is Stephen Daedalus. ‘The archaic Greek mind ascribed all things cunningly wrought, whether a belt with a busy design, the rigging of a ship, or an extensive palace, to the art of the craftsman Daedalus, whose name first appears in the Iliad. Homer, describing the shield Hephaistos makes for Achilles, says that the dancing floor depicted on it was as elaborate as that which Daedalus designed for Ariadne in Crete. This dancing floor is perhaps what Homer understood the Labyrinth to be. Joyce did, for the ground on which he places all his figures is clearly meant to be a labyrinth.’ This from Guy Davenport. The book’s on the desk. You can look at it when we take a break.

  “Now, you won’t have to wander into that labyrinth so soon in the fall. Read the first two hundred pages of the Portrait for next week. How many of you have a copy already?” He waited while fifteen or twenty students held up their hands.

  “Good. How many have it with you?” The same twenty or so held up their hands. Ketch and Rhoda were among these good students.

  “Fine; and here are seven or eight copies I brought along from the library. The rest of you can share them.” He sat back. Nodded his head. Rhoda opened her fresh new copy of the book and beside her Ketch opened his. “What are you doing after class?” he asked. “Let’s go and have a glass of wine.”

  “Fine. I’d love it. We can go to my house. I have some wine I brought back from New Orleans. Better than anything you can get around here.” She smiled and looked him in the eye. Good, better, best, no hesitation, no fooling around or wasting time. She scooted her chair an infinitesimal bit closer to his.

  “Take the role of Aristotle,” Doctor Wheeler was saying. “He plays in the minds of the characters. He appears over and over. Stephen Daedalus in ‘Proteus’ is conversant with Aristotle and ponders and tests his ideas. Bloom in ‘Lestrogonians’ is interested, perhaps unwittingly, in many of the same matters that interested Aristotle, and Molly knows or probably cares so little about him that she turns his name into Aristocrat. Many streams like this flow between the minds of the characters. You can get an A in here if you find one I haven’t seen. . . .”

  Ketch looked at Rhoda. Watched as her dress slid up her silk stockings when she crossed and uncrossed her legs. He sighed. She turned her head and acknowledged it.

  They left the bu
ilding by the wide front door and walked out onto the main street of the campus. “I wish we could walk,” she said. “It’s such a pretty night. It’s only a few blocks to my house. Want to leave the cars and walk?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “We can walk home through the old cemetery on Spring Street. Have you ever been there?”

  “No. Not that I know of.”

  “It’s nice. The old families that built the town are buried there. I used to go up there with a photographer friend of mine and try to make art photos.” She shifted her notebook and bag to her other arm and began to walk briskly down the street. “What do you think? Do you think it’s going to be good? I think he’s a genius. I love to watch him smoke. Sometimes he has two cigarettes going at once.”

  “I need the credits. I want to get out of here as soon as I can. All I want is a novel and an MFA and I’m gone. I’ve got to earn a living.”

  “I don’t have to worry about that right now. We can go up there and take the path through the cemetery if you want. Are you ready?” She was walking very fast, and he quickened his pace and caught up with her. They went up a gravel road and came out at the top of a small old cemetery with huge maple trees hiding the sky and walked in darkness past the massive tombstones. “This will put it in perspective, won’t it,” Rhoda dropped the notebook and the bag on the ground and let him kiss her. Then she took his arm and they walked more slowly down the hill and across the street to her apartment building.

  They opened wine and lit candles and then Rhoda went into her bedroom and put on a long blue silk kimono and they took the wine into the bedroom and made love with the window open and the thin moon, now brilliant in a cloudless sky, making their skin luminous and white. They made love out of curiosity and greed, without passion or tenderness or joy. They made love to prove they were mean enough to do it. When it was over he got up and put on his clothes and went home to his wife.