Starcarbon

by Ellen Gilchrist

  They went into the dining room and sat side by side at one end of the eighteen-foot-long table Daniel’s interior decorator friend had bought for him in England. Jade served them salad and French bread, gumbo and rice and asparagus and baked squash. They finished up with coffee and brandy and sat at the table smoking Havana cigars Niall had brought over and continued talking about the family.

  “Dad’s been complaining to Spook about the way I keep the farm,” Daniel said. “Goddammit, Niall, if it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t be a farm. I saved it. I bought it and pay the taxes. To hell with it, if nobody appreciates it. I may have to sell it soon anyway. I don’t know how I’m going to pay Olivia’s tuition next year.”

  “You don’t have to take care of everyone. That’s an idea Daddy put in our heads. Children are better off if you leave them alone.”

  “I have to educate my daughters, Niall. And I’ll help anyone who needs it. That’s the way we do it. Just because you and Anna think a family ought to split up. Well, they’re all you’ve got when the chips are down. As long as I live I’ll help anyone who needs help.” Daniel poured himself a second brandy. “Goddamn a lot of people going off and living all alone in their houses. Nobody having any responsibility for anyone else. I’m about to go nuts living in this house by myself. It smells funny when no one’s here. Spook’s going back to the farm. I can’t stop him. Well, let him. To hell with him.”

  “‘Un homme seul est dans la compagnie mauvaise.’ Paul Valery.”

  “What’s that? What’s all the frog talk?”

  “‘A man alone is in bad company.’ Paul Valery. A French Symbolist.”

  “Well, he goddamn well got that right. He got that one right on the nose.”

  Night fell on Charlotte, North Carolina. Outside the French doors of the dining room, the flowering shrubs unfurled their perfumes. A quarter moon rode the skies, stars appeared. Daniel and Niall drank brandy and smoked. Five blocks away, Helen’s husband, Spencer Abadie, was entertaining a legal secretary by showing her photographs of his children. He almost desired her. For several hours he had been getting the stirrings of desire, but when she would meet his eye, he would lose the feeling.

  I don’t know if this one is going to be worth it, the woman was thinking. I’d probably have to suck his dick for an hour to get him to stay hard long enough to fuck me. I don’t know what’s happened to all the men. Look at these pictures of all these babies. She must have been some bitch. That supercilious look on her face. She looks like the cat that caught the mouse with all these babies. Boy, she got him where she wanted him, didn’t she? Then ran off and left him. These rich southern dames are some shit.

  “Where were you raised?” Spencer was asking.

  “In southern Illinois. My mom had three of us. My dad had a dry cleaning store in Marion, Illinois. He died when she was pregnant with me. So after that Mom gave up on life and just ran the dry cleaning store. She died last year, of lung cancer. She smoked. When she quit getting laid she took up smoking. So . . .” She closed the photograph album and stood up beside him. She put her arms around his waist and squeezed his beige linen jacket. “So, you want to go to bed or not?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m not very good at that anymore. Have you ever read a book called The Sun Also Rises? Well, it’s like that sometimes with me.”

  “Like what? Like you can’t get it up because you think you’ll get someone pregnant? I guess so. She saddled you with five children in six years and then left you? I guess you can’t get it up. Well, listen, I’m on the pill and I’ve had two abortions and I’d have plenty more and not bat an eyelash. No babies for me, mister. But I like to cuddle. You got a bedroom in this mausoleum? Show me one. I want to get out of these panties and this bra.”

  She led him through the house and up the stairs and found a bedroom that looked as if it had belonged to a young boy and began to undress. “Take off your clothes, Spencer. It’s summer, for God’s sake. The sweet heart of summer and girls from southern Illinois don’t take no for an answer when they get horny.” She stripped down to a pair of purple crotchless bikini underpants and sat down on the edge of Lynley’s old bunk bed. “Pretend I’m your childhood sweetheart,” she said. “Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to go wrong. I won’t let it. Trust me. Come on. Come here to me.”

  Spencer took off everything but his underpants and T-shirt and went over and let her have him.

  The tall smiling girl named P.J. was going to become Helen’s best friend in Boston, a companion on long walks, a confidante and keeper of secrets. Before the week was out they were exchanging life stories over lunch in a small restaurant near the campus.

  “My dad’s a molecular physicist,” P.J. was saying. “He’s totally nuts. He and my mom are still in love with each other. He comes home in the middle of the afternoon and fucks her. It’s insane.”

  “It sounds divine to me. How do you think it happened?”

  “God. I don’t know. Neither of them believe in a thing. Except chaos, hazard, chance. Well, they believe in education. We lived on a sailboat when I was young and Mother taught us. I have two brothers and a sister. We lived on a boat in the British Virgin Islands and Daddy thought about the structure of the atom and Mother taught us. After a while, we took some tests and went to college. I came here when I was seventeen.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-two. I know. I look a lot older. It’s from the sun. I love this restaurant. I know the guys that built it.” The restaurant had been created by two of Mike’s ex-students. It was in a house near the campus and had a waterfall made of recycled glass bottles. Red and green and blue and amber. Water poured over the bottles from plastic garden hoses and ended in a pool where carp swam lazily among water lilies.

  “And you’re in love with this Sicilian you married?”

  “I met him the day I got to Harvard. I’ve been with him ever since. He’s one of the men who went with Mike to get the champagne. The tall one with dark hair. He’s a honey. He’s studying to be a teacher. He wants to teach school. Fata Morgana. Who would I end up with?” She laughed delightedly and waved a glass of bottled water in the air. “Brave New World. We’re already here if you have enough sense to know it.”

  “The new world is really new to me. I have daughters your age. I wish you could meet them. Or, maybe, we could just know each other.” Helen looked down. It seemed a revolutionary idea. To have a friend and keep her to herself. “I’m beginning to love being selfish. I may not even invite my children to my wedding. Why should I? They don’t want to come.”

  “I’m selfish. I’m going to arrange a life where I have time to write and it sure isn’t going to include kids anytime soon. I want to write a book to remind the world of wonder. I want to write a book that contains the ten thousand beautiful things and the ten thousand horrific things. So I have to try to see all the great paintings and hear all the music and eat great foods and think about how they grow corn and grain and rice and where milk comes from and how it’s processed and if we have a right to milk cows by machine. Not to mention veal. I want to put in everything. Of course, the writer who did that was Shakespeare. Everything was in, nothing left out. Thunder, lightning, love, baked chickens. I’m writing an article about orgasms now. About how to make it happen with your mind. How to overload the systems with your imagination. Do you know what makes you come? I mean, the imaginative part?”

  “I like to think I’m getting pregnant.” Helen giggled. “I think about how much it hurts to have a baby and that makes me come. Isn’t that bizarre? I’ve never told that to a soul. Don’t tell anyone. It’s my darkest secret.”

  “That’s fabulous. That’s perfect. Before you had a baby what did you think? Before you had that experience to draw on.”

  “Oh, I had guilt. I thought it was terrible to do it, even with my husband. I was so ashamed. It seemed so evil. My body seemed evil, but not his. His seemed okay. I asked Anna about that once. You know what she sai
d? She said, we were all drunk continuously, everyone we knew, on priests and communion wine and crucifixes and talk, talk, talk and worrying about what other people thought. She said it was because people think if they get shunned by the group, they’re dead. She said so many things that day. She said the only time we sobered up for a second was when we looked at the stars or were swimming in the ocean or when we made love. The pitiful little guilt-ridden moments we call love, as she called it.”

  “But she escaped.”

  “Not really. She ended her life in love with a married man, with terminal cancer, with no children. She had the most wonderful eyes in the world, P.J. You could look so deep into her eyes. She let you enter into her. Mike’s like that. You are too. The minute I met you, at that party, I thought: I know that girl. I’ve seen that girl somewhere, but it’s Anna you remind me of.”

  “Would you share a dessert with me, Helen? Let’s eat dessert. They have flan and chocolate pie and chocolate mousse. Let’s eat some fattening dessert and find a gallery and go and see some paintings.” P.J. smiled and Helen returned the smile.

  Chapter 39

  DOWN in New Orleans the summer has reached its zenith. It can’t get any hotter, wetter, more humid or depressing. What a terrible place to be with a new baby and a troubled marriage and the culture pressing in from every angle.

  King Mallison doesn’t have any business being in New Orleans to begin with. His mother married a rich Jewish lawyer when he was twelve and made him move there, leaving behind his Little League career and a wild, exotic life in Rankin County, Mississippi. His granddaddy was even richer than the lawyer and had his own white supremacist school where he hired and fired the teachers. King had his own personal school bus and three servants. He saw no reason for his mother to marry a short rich Jew and drag him to New Orleans where the principal of Newman School was determined to make him tuck his shirttails in. His mother’s darker designs had been to send him to Exeter, but King’s rebellion ended that.

  On the plus side King is working out of a set of very powerful genes. “I fear the native power and might of him,” his stepgrandfather had thought a dozen times as he watched the boy go to work on his innocent, lighthearted, hero-loving son, Manny.

  The hot heart of summer. King is working thirty hours a week for Blaine Mabry building Mardi Gras floats. He is going to Tulane, keeping his hands off other girls, putting in hours at AA meetings. He is dazzled by K.T., was in the delivery room and was blown away by the birth, enchanted and seduced. Thrown to the mat.

  King’s mother, Crystal Weiss, has every member of her family in “therapy” this summer. King and Jessie are seeing a marriage counselor on Wednesday afternoons. Jessie is seeing a psychoanalyst three times a week. Crystal Anne is seeing a woman on Thursday afternoons. Crystal is seeing the famous Gunther Perdigao four days a week. Manny talks to Gunther whenever Crystal decides he is acting out his neurosis or their sex life starts getting boring or inept. King goes to a shrink and to AA.

  You get the picture. New Orleans, Louisiana, in the hot heart of summer. Azaleas, bougainvillea, morning glories, Confederate jasmine, gardenias, magnolia trees heavy with thick white blossoms, painted houses, café au lait and beignets covered with powdered sugar. Oysters and white wine and crayfish etouffee and shrimp remoulade and café Brulet.

  It is Saturday morning. King and Jessie are in bed with K.T. between them. Jessie wants King to cut the yard and help her in the flower beds but she knows better than to ask. He’s only twenty years old, her analyst has told her. Let him have some fun.

  “I’m going to play volleyball in the park,” he announces. “Put K.T. in the stroller and come and watch.”

  He pictures Jessie in a pink-and-white-striped dress, strolling the baby over to watch him play. After he wins the game they will walk back across the park. There goes King Mallison with the prettiest girl in town, other men will say. That lucky little son-of-a-bitch.

  “I want so many things,” Jessie says, and lays her hand upon his thigh. K.T. gurgles between them, breast milk still on his lips. He has surfeited himself and is almost asleep. “I want to make a Japanese garden on the side of the house by the Monroes’. I want to get some white gravel and fill it in where the juniper was. Everyone says it will wash away. Do you think it will?”

  “So you want me to go get you some gravel, don’t you?” King laughs and covers her hand with his own. His counselor has told him there is always a price to pay for pussy. This morning it seems like a reasonable exchange.

  “What time is your game?”

  “At ten. I could get it this afternoon. Can you wait till then?”

  “Of course. Well, go on. Get up. I know you want to get up.”

  “Is he going to sleep?”

  “He might. I wish he would.”

  “Come here then.” King slid off his side of the bed. He walked around the other side and pulled his wife into his arms and then laid her down upon the rug and began to fuck her. K.T. sighed. Dreaming of watery graves where boys who lost their mommas floated in the waves. He began to cry.

  “Go get him,” King said and pulled her to her feet. “I’ve got to go get dressed.” He kissed her on the hair and eyes, on the arms and shoulders. He kissed her as actors kissed their women in French films he had seen at the Prytania when he was a teenager. It worked. Jessie was deliciously charmed and dropped an egg down into a Fallopian tube. She was already full of come. Coitus interruptus was too late now.

  Let him go play volleyball. The wider the pasture, the longer the string, the less control the better. She sang a little mantra to herself as she tended to the baby and dressed herself. She found a pair of lavender lace bikini underpants on the back of a chair and put them on. She added a lavender silk brassiere and a pair of khaki shorts and a white shirt. She tied her hair back from her face with a yellow silk scarf. Be strong, she told herself. Be really strong. She picked up the baby and carried him to his bed. She looked out the window at her hollyhocks, at the bed of daisies and roses and cyclamen, at the hibiscus blooming on the fence. A pair of fledgling blue jays were flying from tree to tree, a robin sat upon a branch puffing out its wings.

  “I’m going,” King called from the front of the house. “I’ll be back by one or two.”

  “Okay,” Jessie answered. “I’ll stroll him over if I can.”

  Outside, in the yard, tent worms were working on the walnut tree, cutworms were at work on the tomato plants, moles ate the bulbs in an iris bed, and a blight crept up the bark of the redbud tree. It had rained every afternoon for a week in New Orleans and the wars were heating up, between the insects and the leaves, order and chaos, light and darkness, between Jessie’s old cat, Deveraux, and the blue jays, between Deveraux and the Monroes’ Springer spaniels.

  Three blocks away, behind its thick wide levees, the Mississippi River carried its silt and insecticides and fertilizers and chemicals and fish and old shoes and hats out to the Gulf. The salt sea waited to go to work on all of that.

  Five blocks away, across Saint Charles, Crystal Manning Mallison Weiss was getting ready for the day. She added blusher and lipstick to her makeup and stepped onto the scales. They said 132 so she pushed the lever back to 124 and forgot it. It was her new way to deal with gaining weight. If you didn’t like it, pretend it wasn’t true. She turned off the bathroom lights and went into the kitchen to wait for Crystal Anne to finish dressing.

  Today is Crystal Anne’s day, Crystal decided. I will spend the whole morning with her and in the afternoon I’ll go and see K.T. I don’t want to go over there too often. I don’t want to bother Jessie.

  The phone was ringing. It was her housekeeper, Traceleen, calling. “Brown’s gone fishing,” she said. “You sure you don’t need me to come in today?”

  “Do you want to come?”

  “I might as well. I didn’t sleep very well last night. I kept thinking about Darrell and Annie and that terrible wreck they were in.”

  “It’s just a soap opera, Tr
aceleen. Don’t forget that.”

  “How many years have we been watching it?”

  “Twenty-five. It seems longer. You and I’ve been watching it together for eight. I don’t think they were killed anyway. Do you?”

  “They had a head-on collision on a bridge. How could they survive? You sure you don’t need me to come in?”

  “Well, we can’t find out till Monday. Sure, come on in. We can see if Jessie needs us to keep K.T. Do you need me to come get you?”

  “I’ll ride the streetcar. It’s a nice day for it. I could pick up some shrimp and make a gumbo. Mr. Manny loves it so.”

  “Good. Do that. Listen, Traceleen, I don’t think they died. They could have jumped out the window into the water. I could call Anthony.” She was referring to a friend in New York who played a villain on the program. Sometimes they called him to find out what was going to happen next. He wasn’t supposed to tell but, if they begged, sometimes he would.

  “Don’t do that. We don’t want to bother him again. I can wait till Monday.”

  “It’s only a soap opera. It isn’t true.”

  “I know. Keep reminding me of that.”

  “We have to remind each other.”

  Chapter 40

  BY the time King arrived at the game the net was up and several people were practicing serves. The game was set up in the clearing by the corner of Camp and Exposition Boulevard. King parked his bike by a tree and walked on over. A pair of boys he used to smoke dope with were standing on the sidewalk watching. A girl he used to fuck was serving to a girl he once had loved. This volleyball game was a mire, a swamp, but he couldn’t keep away. At least on Saturday morning he had to be with people who weren’t always trying to make him into someone new. He had been the ringleader in his age group. He had led the expeditions to find the mushrooms, had manufactured LSD, had hit a cop.