“I won’t fuck you if you talk about things like that, sad things. You were not wounded. You had just won the Pulitzer Prize and you were in the papers every day. I was scared to fuck you, you were so famous.”
“Why did you change your mind?”
“I don’t know. Because I did. I can’t even have you a baby. What kind of life is that? You ought to leave me and get a younger girl. Like that young writer that came out here. She’d marry you.”
“Finish that shirt,” Tom said. “I want to go upstairs with you. I want to bury my face in your breasts.”
“We have to leave at six.”
“We’ll be on time. If I make you late I’ll buy you that new saddle you’ve been wanting. If I make you five minutes late, it’s yours.”
Sherrill took the unfinished shirt off the ironing board and hung it over a chair and went to him. She took his face into her hands and sat down upon his lap across the straight chair. She began to desire him as soon as her hand touched his cheek. “Oh, baby,” she said. “I love you so much. Don’t do it to me. It’s too much. It’s too much to bear on a weekday afternoon.”
She has a way of going feminine on me when I’m mad that disarms me completely, he had made a character say in a book that morning. I’m all set to start a fight, all overtaken by a mood and in despair and want to fight it out with her and finish up my whole world while I’m at it and she’ll turn around and put on a peignoir or start making cornbread or just get gentle and turn those damned blue eyes on me. Hell, man, she overwhelms me. She outfeminines the witch that’s chasing me. She outwomans the anima. It’s Helen Detroy I’m talking about, for Christ’s sake. Who did you think I meant? My wife, the lucky thing some god let slip through the lines one watch when he was asleep.
“It’s like being in grandmother’s bed,” Bobby had said on the phone. “When I was a kid the only place I wanted to be was in bed with my dad’s mom. I called her Tottie. She had the softest, sweetest bed with these clean, white sheets and she had a feather bed for winter. She’d cuddle me up and I’d sleep like I was dead. She’d snore sometimes, just the softest little snore, like a horse’s whinny. She’d be having sweet dreams, I guess, because I was there. We were always trying to get off and have some time together. Because Dad would be off rodeoing and everyone else was always arguing or worrying about something. Not Tottie and me. No sir. We’d get the papers or books she took out of the library and we’d go get in her bed and she’d put on her specs and start reading. I’d go to sleep sometimes with the light still on. Sometimes she’d turn it off and we’d cuddle up and she’d tell me stories, like pretending she thought the voices in the radio were little people who were locked up in a box and couldn’t get out or pretending she was some little weak person and I had to guard her with my sword.
“Yeah, Olivia and me were in bed the other night and we both had our books we were studying. She’s reading this book for her anthropology class and I was reading my history book for World History and I thought, Christ, it’s like being with Tottie. No wonder I’m in love.”
“Don’t tell her that,” Tom said. “I wouldn’t tell her she reminds you of your grandmother if you can help it.”
“I can’t even remember Mom so she can’t remind me of her.”
“Don’t be too sure. It’s a dangerous maze, crossing the romantic love terrain. Look out for sinkholes. So forth. So she took the ring?”
“Hell, Tom. I don’t know what I’m doing. I just get up every day and face the morning. What can I do? I got a job and I’m signed up in college and I got you to talk to and she says she loves me. What the hell? I don’t think my dad’s doing too good, but I can’t do anything about that.”
“We’ll be in Billings over the weekend. Call me Sunday night when we get home.”
“If I can. If I remember.”
“Hold on.”
“Same to you. Thanks.”
Bobby hung up the phone and went outside to watch the last red rays of sun falling down through the trees on the horizon. Behind him, a full moon was in the still light sky. We think the moon is a lady, he was thinking. Silvery and coming out of nowhere to surprise us and keep us company at night. His dick started getting hard at the thought and he looked at his watch to see how long it was until nine o’clock when Olivia was coming over. He scratched his head and started walking toward the high school, thinking he might go run a mile or so around the high school track before he studied algebra.
Chapter 23
A GLORIOUS morning in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Georgia is dressed for the day. She is writing a letter. Her books and the pop quiz she is planning on giving are stacked neatly by the door. Her bed is made. The dishes are done. “Have you registered to vote?” is the first question on the quiz. “Name five justices of the Supreme Court” is the second. “Tell me everything you know about DNA and the human immune system” is the third. For extra credit there is a fourth question. “What is Macedonia?”
“My darling Zach,” she is writing.
The thousands of moves and countermoves, decisions and revisions, loves and destructions and trusts and betrayals. Not just in our two lives but in all the lives that made us. The ice age, the discovery of America, your career, my career, my leaving my career. The way my first husband made love to me and the way he laughed at me and the way your last girlfriend ran off with your car. Well, now I’m driving your car. Maybe you try to get women to take your cars. Maybe you want us behind the wheel of your phallic symbols.
What do you want with me, Zach? Well, I know. You want me to be your momma and love you no matter what you do and eat dinner with you and sleep with you at night and tell you that you’re right. Well, you may not be right. I know you are right about nuclear proliferation and the need for diplomacy and peace.
But the Japanese and the Europeans and the white Africans are going to eat our lunch, dear heart. We aren’t as fierce as they are anymore. Our people aren’t scared enough to work in factories. We want day care. Read Philip Levine, for God’s sake. He’ll tell you what it’s like to work in a factory in Detroit. No wonder they started letting the forklifts drop the Chevrolets on the concrete. How would you feel if you had an IQ of one hundred and thirty and were on the line and saw in the paper that your CEO had just given himself a salary of twenty-seven million dollars?
Zach, it’s the fifth of June and I slept by myself last night. Is that my fault? Well, yes. I’ll see you Friday. I just want to come to your house and walk in the door and get into bed and start making love to you.
I met an interesting little girl. Her name is Olivia and she has come back to Tahlequah to go to school. She’s got some wacko idea about learning Navajo because knowledge will be coded in it into computers. I didn’t really understand what it is about but I’m sure I’ll hear more later. I eat breakfast in the mornings at this downtown café where everyone gathers. The Scene, as it were. Until Friday. Love and more love. Whatever love means.
Zachery Biggs, Georgia’s lover. Here’s a study in modern history, a lesson in contemporary mores. Here’s a good boy, an oldest son, an Eagle Scout, a dean’s list, dean’s darling, Momma’s angel, finally gone all the way around the bend.
For the first forty-five years he never broke a rule or a law, never missed a meeting or a class, came to the bell and Momma was supposed to love him, wasn’t she? He had dreamed of giving all the mommas a super gift, a superconductor that would allow them to transmit clean power and save a lot of energy and money. Did the mommas appreciate it? No.
Three women had left him for greener, more exciting, less obsessive pastures. The first one had left him with a pair of twin boys, so alike no one could tell them apart, sometimes not even Zach. The second wife had left him a shed full of her dark, undistinguished paintings and the third wife had left him heavily in debt.
He was doing the best he could with all of this. He loved the boys and kept them on weekends and in the summers. He had six of the paintings hanging around his house although it
depressed him to notice them. He was doing his best to pay off the debt and save enough money for the boys’ education. He was always broke. He liked being broke. He liked never having a new shirt or a pair of running shoes. It made him know that he had suffered for a momma. If he suffered, surely he was good and would be loved somewhere in the world.
He had heard about Georgia before he met her. “The dean’s hired a medical doctor to teach in the Anthropology Department,” a colleague told him. “She told the dean she didn’t want to use a text and he hired her anyway. She completely snowed the old fool. She’s going out with him. He took her out to dinner the night she got to town. You need to meet this dame. Then you’ll know what we’re up against. I couldn’t even hire one more graduate student and he goes out and brings this loony here from Memphis because he wants to date her.”
Zach’s subconscious perked up. A brilliant, loony, single woman. His main mommy had taught the Great Books seminar when he was a boy. She had smoked while driving a convertible. She had read Anaïs Nin. He was programmed for Georgia, ready and waiting. “The male perceives the female anima as wary, unstable, changeable, illusive, seductive. The female perceives the male as the gray wolf coming over the continents to penetrate the barriers of the sacred kingdom.”
“I’d like to meet her,” he had answered. “I’ll look forward to that.”
He met her three times before he could get her to remember his name. “I guess I wasn’t wearing my glasses,” Georgia always said later. “How could I not have noticed you?”
Now, two years later, on a Friday afternoon in June, Zach is waiting for Georgia to arrive from Tahlequah. He has straightened up his house, put all his books and magazines into stacks in corners and under tables. He has fed his dog, run the vacuum sweeper over the middle of the rug, called the Handicapped Housecleaning Service and let them wash the windows and clean the refrigerator and mop the kitchen floor. He has put clean sheets on the bed, gray and white striped sheets he bought the year he was at Princeton.
He goes over to stand by a window and look out upon the earth. Only yesterday it had been the gray leafless landscape of winter in the Ozarks. Then spring came barreling over the hills and turned it green. Earth and clay, he mused. The great conductors. I have to tell Georgia that. She’s always wondering how the messages get through. She thinks they’re traveling in ether. It’s clay, I’ll tell her. The great conductor with no loss of heat. She’ll say, Oh, Zach, you’re so brilliant. No, she’ll say, That’s bullshit. Earth’s too slow. We’re slow, I’ll answer. Landlocked and slow.
There’s nothing slow about Georgia. What a hot little show she’s running. She’s hot, the hottest woman I ever fucked and the strangest and the best.
He looked at his watch. Six after six. If she left at four, she ought to be along within the hour. He went out into the front yard and dug up a ball of earth from under a persimmon tree and held it in his hand. It’s something we’ve missed, he decided. One element, some balance, something I already know. If she drives up now and sees me like this, she’ll think, the mad scientist. I think it was because I put the white paint on me. That’s the thing that scared her. They don’t want us to be fierce or crazy. They reserve all that for themselves. He squeezed the ball of clay. He looked up the street toward the main thoroughfare that ran along the south side of the campus. Maybe it would be enough to grovel and admit his need and say he loved her.
He heard the last notes of the chimes on Old Main. He heard the cheers rising from the baseball diamond by the track. A postseason series against the Texas team, a doubleheader. The Razorbacks had two men on base and no outs in the bottom of the third. Cheers rang out across the valley, traveled across the track and soccer fields, past the high school and into Zach’s low-lying neighborhood. If he had not been waiting for Georgia, Zach would have been at the game.
As she drew near his house, she saw him, standing in the yard holding something in his hand. He’s trying to look like a scientist, she decided. God, I love him. He’s so goddamn silly and transparent, such a dope. Zach, my love, it’s me. I’m naked underneath this dress.
She parked the car and he came walking toward her, still holding the ball of earth. “The street looks great,” she said. “Your house looks fabulous with the trees in leaf. You look wonderful. I’ve been missing you.”
“I’ve been missing you. Come in. I have to do one thing. A student is bringing me a paper, then we can do whatever you want to do.”
“What kind of a student?”
“A boy in one of my classes. His father died and he couldn’t get the paper in. He’ll be here by six-thirty.”
“He better be. I have plans for you that can’t be interrupted.” She took his hand and they walked together into the house. They walked past the swing that his last girlfriend had painted red and past the half-dead potted plants and into the living room and down the hall and into the kitchen. Then they stopped and Georgia began to unbutton the buttons of his shirt. “I love this shirt,” she said. “This shirt reminds me of my grandfather. He used to wear shirts with little lines on them like this.” She finished with the buttons and began to undo his belt.
“What if my student comes?”
“Leave him a note on the door. Tell him to leave the paper. Tell him to go away.”
The doorbell was ringing. Zach fastened his belt and went to the door and had a few minutes’ conversation with his student. Then he shut the door and locked it and came back to where she was. He stood near her with his glasses falling far down on his fine thin elegant nose. “Would you like to go to bed with me?” he asked very formally, in his most precise and professorial voice. “I would like to take you there.”
Several hours later Georgia woke up in the gray and white striped sheets. She was plastered against Zach’s body. It was dark outside. The sound of crickets and tree frogs and the last three notes of the chimes on Old Main counted out nine o’clock.
“Given,” she said. “I love you and I think you love me.”
“You’re right about that.”
“Is that baseball game still going on?”
“We could go see. It’s a doubleheader.”
“Okay, get up. Did you notice I was naked underneath my dress when I came in?”
“No. I’m sorry. Come here, Georgia. Come back to me.”
“Again. Twice in one afternoon?”
“I’m not dead yet.”
“Will you love me till you die?”
“If you want me to.”
When they got out of bed, they walked over to the baseball field and caught the last two innings of the second game. The Razorbacks had won the first game and were tied in the bottom of the eighth in the second. They had two men on base and no outs and the crowd was going wild. Georgia and Zach stopped at the concession stand and bought hot dogs and Cokes. Carrying the food, they climbed high in the stands to Zach’s seats beneath the press box. A five-foot-five-inch Razorback batter who was a great favorite with the fans for his tenacity and passion came out onto the field. He hit a foul ball into the parking lot and the loudspeaker registered a high-volume crash of metal and glass breaking. The crowd roared its approval. On the next pitch he got a double and streaked for second base. The crowd roared. Georgia and Zach giggled and squeezed mustard onto their hot dogs from a plastic tube.
Two men crossed home plate and the Razorbacks were ahead. A breeze blew in from the south. Georgia and Zach ate the hot dogs and drank the Cokes, which were watered down with ice made from chlorinated water from a river polluted by chicken offal. Test of the immune system, Georgia thought to herself, and sucked hers down through a straw.
The Razorbacks held on to their lead in the ninth and the game was won. Georgia and Zach walked home through the victorious crowd, holding hands and not talking. He didn’t say, You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille, and she didn’t say, Why can’t it always be like this? Why don’t you shoot those kids or send them back to their momma? How could I live with you? Ho
w could I tolerate the confusion and mess of your life? They walked home across the darkened campus, holding hands and keeping their mouths shut.
The twins were on the porch when they arrived. Surrounded by five or six other scroungy, pimpled, teenage boys. Two motorcycles were propped against the porch. Beer cans were in the yard.
“Hello, Taylor,” Georgia said. “Hello, Tucker, long time no see.”
“Can we borrow the convertible?” Taylor asked. “Since she brought it back.”
“We need some money, Dad,” Tucker added. “You got any cash on you?”
Chapter 24
ON Monday morning Olivia was waiting at The Shak when Georgia got there. “So how did your weekend go with your boyfriend?” she asked. “Did you have a good time?”
“If you call having nightmares a good time.”
“You had nightmares?”
“All night Saturday night. I was in a strange city with a teenage child strapped to my back. One of Zach’s twins. It’s a manifestation of anxiety, Olivia. We all have a certain amount of free-floating anxiety, waiting to attach to something. Anyway, I was walking down this street with the child on my back. Actually, the street is one on which a female psychiatrist I went to for a while actually lived. I did my residency in New York in a city hospital. It was the pit of hell. To think anyone could survive something like that and then quit the profession. So I delivered this parasitic teenager to Zach and Zach got mad at him for being on my back. Zach has teenage sons by his first wife, I don’t know if I told you that. She’s an emotional cripple of the first order, so there’s a message and a warning.”
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