If you start things in life, the likelihood is you will not stop. That is the sum and the summit of what I know today, teetering before careerhood, having taken up hermiting in a beach house, erstwhile the house I grew up in. I certainly see nothing to obstruct this most agreeable hermitage. I can see from this salty vantage, lounging around on grit and noting repairs necessary to the house but not about to effect them, that you must be careful in life not to begin things you do not wish to do for a long time. The gravity of habit looks perdurable and instantaneous. I hesitate—for one low-minded and trivial example—to replace the hinge on the shutter by the sideboard. It is one of, looks to be, ninety-one more hinges, none in top condition.
Here’s another trivial example: With the purchase of one pair of Kelly-green poplin slacks and with one phone call to my father telling him I’d like to belong to Hilton Head Pines Country Club, he’d secure me membership, a bag of pro-grade clubs you’d need a caddie or a cart to carry for you, and I would golf at HHPCC and other clubs of similar status from here through Georgia and North Carolina for the rest of my life. Member-guest tournament would be a permanent, recurring phenomenon in my days on Earth.
7
MY MOTHER IS AT the house when I get back from my little lesson in first and last things at Turtle Creek. This is what she meant by “good,” when I told her I’d be holing up: she can, too. In the backseat of her car is a case of liquor and what looks like a Smithfield ham. She is a good one for provisions, laying them in and savoring the larder. She’d be good on a ship.
I take up a load—there are sacked groceries, too—and hear from the kitchen the shower going. My mother will emerge with a towel on her head, Nefertiti fashion, and a good terry-cloth robe, and make herself a tall gin-and-tonic and look like a movie star for an hour. Being around her is like being on safari; there is an elusive something we are after, in difficult conditions, and we will look good in the getting there. She can manage to snuggle into the world where ordinary people would languish. She will look like a lion hunter with a small glister of country-ham fat on her lip and the fine spray of fresh carbonated tonic dancing in the air before her bright eyes. And she will taste the salty meat and the tart tonic and gin and lime and settle into the crisp wicker with a contentment that is agreeably restless: What now? she says, smiling.
I don’t know, but something, you say, agreeably slapping your thigh, both of you shaking your heads together at the mystery of nothingness about you and your lives. My mother is a very accomplished safarigoer. We have never determined the game we are after, is the only small problem. It doesn’t bother her, and she instructs me not to let it bother me.
Before she comes out, before I have the limes sliced—I am putting up corned beef and saltines and sardines and maraschino cherries and Ovaltine and cheese and Wheat Thins: it’s like Christmas going through the groceries, no Turtle Creek here—a sound comes from my bedroom.
The kind of disappointment this could suggest is large. I dread that it is a beau, as she likes to call them. The situation is complex and long and tedious; suffice it to say, here, that it could be a beau, that I do not want it to be, I do not want to share any of this good load of groceries with a boyfriend of my mother. That’s not all there is to it, but that’s enough.
I poke my head in the room, and on the bed, reclined with feet crossed, arms behind head, is a woman, about a thirty-year-old-looking woman that I feel I should recognize. It’s a rather smart-looking woman, trim, tasteful, sturdy. I find it difficult to leave, standing against the doorjamb with a knife and a lime.
“Hi,” she says, eyes open.
“Hi.”
“Remember me?”
“Yes.”
“There wasn’t really a snake. I wanted you to save me.”
“Did I save you?”
“No.”
My mother is emerged. “You’ve found your cousin,” she says from across the way.
“Yes, I have.”
“She turned out well, didn’t she?”
My cousin, on the bed yet, looks directly at me with, I swear, a caricature of sultriness in her expression.
“She did,” I call to my mother over my shoulder.
“You did,” I say to this woman they are calling my cousin.
“I know I did,” she says, still in the charade of allure, I think.
But I cannot be sure it is charade. I may well be looking at a cousin of mine in an inviting pose on my own bed who does think she turned out well. The fact is, she has turned out well, very very well, so well that at least two people in a house of three think the strange woman on my bed has turned out well, and the woman on the bed seems inclined to go along, if only in farce. A woman who turned out well on my bed! My mother for chaperone! Don’t have to share the sardines with an oaf who paws my mother! What a day!
I go down to the car to get the ham. I shall carve the ham, and the ladies and I shall eat the ham. There’s enough lust and food and liquor and good weather and sea breeze and iodine on that breeze and good-looking women on hand to think life a perfect piece of cake there for the eating. Life, suddenly, is an I can’t wait proposition.
When she was twelve years old, my turned-out-well cousin—tonight sitting opposite me on the sofa with my mother and with her legs out in an elegant scissoring cross, not folded up under her as my mother’s are—my turned-out-well cousin, whom I want badly and see is possible to be had, given judicious application of charm and feigned indifference, and given her just detectable suggested recent history of some not-working-out with a man, some kind of failed fling that she is working hard not to allow to be major, to reduce to misdemeanor, an annoyance, something laughable as she sits in the good ocean air with her entertaining low-country aunt, thinking, maybe, Aren’t these two a pair, and Simons, how bitter and cute he turned out … ah, the beach, he’s really rather … well, grown-up, to be just out of college. And I am wondering what Aunt he-had-a-peter-this-big Sasa’s position would be if … I mean, we all know the historical low-country position on the matter of cousins marrying, but that is historical, not now, and marriage isn’t what I am inclined to consider: I need a vacation, is what I need. My cousin, when she was twelve years old, admits to heavy false terror, terror struck in her by a snake she claimed to have seen that she claimed was at least seven feet long, frantically exiting the water—an upcountry lake—clutching her neck and screaming and coming to me hysterical with the news. Which news I apparently smartly dismissed as herpetologically impossible and went about my way, missing thereby the opportunity to console my then budding-breast cousin. Perhaps some private tenderness would have been in order, she says tonight, laughing. I have forgotten the incident entirely except for the image of her holding her neck, which gesture at the time I ascribed to choking on lake water before she spoke of the mythic snake.
But some fifteen years later the prospect of private tenderness in the way of consolation is not to be dismissed. There is again an hysteria obtaining in this woman, my cousin, quieter but also more real, and hysteria is a gold mine of opportunity in my limited experience—perhaps the sublimest atmosphere for negotiations on matters sexual between consenting adults. With at least one party hysterical, things go smoothly, smoothly.
Without saying a word, my mother is managing to contribute favorably and seriously to my cause. She sits there, twinkling of eye above her glass when she drinks, saying, Of course you claimed to have seen a seven-foot monster in order to attract my son, and—she keeps just twinkling, and the story itself does not merit it—of course you are telling us the story tonight. My mother is virtually winking at me, and then winking at my cousin: I understand, she says to her; you go right ahead.
What has arranged the presence of my cousin now does not get broached, which is what prompts me to suspect some kind of trouble that the league of women has agreed to keep to itself. Namely, in this case, from me, which is a boon to operations. I am free to be fresh. The shadow of palled relations with men has not been
penumbrated unto me. I am in the sunshine. More correctly, I am in the sea breeze and the moonshine, and I am carving the ham. I take a good long look at my long-lost cousin Patricia, and I deduce that her good long legs have got that way riding horses. We have a Piedmont horse girl at large in the house, her genealogy preapproved, wanting to dash some small misery to pieces while down here. And I am the dashing man. To prove it, I fix them fresh drinks before they ask, and neglect my own, the better to watch women on firewater. If there is anything more interesting to watch than women on firewater, I do not know what it is.
There is talk of relatives I know not too well—too many of them to know them any better from listening to the rundown. A whole section of the family tree is pruned and primped and assessed as I politely sit there. Overall, I detect that the tree is fine: its leaves gently turning in the breeze of life. We have no scandal blight, no limb-wrenching storms of fate, no bad apples. I wonder what it is like when the Kennedys sit around for a disk check like this. You know they can always start at the good stuff and never move far from it. We are not the Kennedys, it would seem. We are the Manigaults. Well, two hundred years ago we had more rice than the Kennedys have votes. Buckra not on top today, is all. The Wawer. The Kennedys need them a Wawer, and I guess they’ve been having one all along.
There is a lull, and I am caught looking at Patricia. There is no profit in looking away. She looks steadily and directly and tellingly back, and she throws in some of that cartoonish voluptuousness and smiles a little in recognition of it, to tell me it is camp. I am most encouraged, delighted by her wit. The wit to say things, to render things easy, to preclude blunder. To be acting this way is, in my view, worthy of my affection as well as my lust. I begin to love this Patricia. This Patricia plays by some fair rules. This Patricia plays. This Patricia.
I busy myself in the kitchen, wrapping the ham, which tomorrow goes in the bathtub. We can’t eat these nitrites for a whole ham.
“What firm in Atlanta do you have an in with?” my mother wants to know.
“Fitzsimmons, Trammell, and Blode,” I tell her.
“And who in … is it Georgetown?”
“Litchfield. A guy who smokes pot and wins awards.” It is true.
I hear her relate this—that I have, despite appearances, real direction in the world—to Patricia. I then hear talk of my father, in appropriately perfunctory tones and abbreviated rhythm. This will tell Patricia that I, too, struggle against the world of men. I take a look through the serving window at Patricia. Her head is back, as if she’s not altogether listening. Someone has seen fit to deliver me a fine woman in my own house.
“Patricia’s in your room,” my mother announces. “You’re in the front room.”
“Fine. Ladies,” I announce, “I shall take a constitutional on the beach. Leave the door unlocked.” Patricia’s expression is so perfectly neutral I fall in love, if not with her, with her face and what she can do with it. In my experience, loving a face is sufficient, but not necessary.
8
I HOPED THAT SHE WOULD make it easiest of all and take a beach constitutional herself. I could have just met her head-on and greengowned her, wind and surf noise too much to bother with any subtle talk. I went down to the shack and posted myself in the chair. The next absurdly easy piece in the puzzle of seduction would be to bed down with her in the shack, rat funk miraculously gone or insignificant in the face of our giant strangers’ passion. But she did not come. It may well be that she came down and looked around and, not seeing me, went back up; the shack is out of sight up the beach. Poor logistics on my part. I should have announced I was taking a constitutional up the beach, 150 yards north to the chair beside the shack in which, despite the rat smell, a couple of a mind to could secure their new lust for each other on a simple poor pallet and have theyselves a good time. But I did not. And sitting in the chair watching the desolate turbulence and phosphorus and being blown nearly over backwards, I counsel myself about putting mind in gear before mouth in motion. Courage now will need be screwed into one scary ball, and I must dribble that ball into her (my) room, if I want to play.
I want to play. The absolute nadir of eventuality? She screams rape, and my mother condescendingly puts her on a bus in the morning and clucks about naïfs when she gets home. Somewhat less improbable, and more damaging to esteem, this Patricia simply is surprised and finally not interested, leaving me with an endless analysis of how I misread all that camp voluptuousness all night and might-should check in for some IQ work somewhere. At the top end, she says about what half the women at Turtle Creek said to me: What took you so long?
I make goodly noise going into the dark house, fiddle in my temporary room, a little wash up, turn down my temporary bed, turn off my temporary light, and go to my (her) room, my upcountry cousin’s temporary bed. The door is closed. I open it, wide, and slowly enter, and slowly close it, not muffling the click. She does not move, but I do not hear the breathing of sleep: I am, we are, beyond the screaming point. The best way to get past the surprise point is to give her something to be surprised at; I don’t speak, I sit, easily, on the bed. She puts a hand on my thigh.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
“Thought you might be gay.”
“Apparently I’m not.”
“Are you taking advantage of me, or me you?”
“You me.”
“But you’re in here.”
“It’s my room.”
“Are you an alcoholic?”
“Not yet.”
“Your mother’s nice.”
“She holds up, yes.”
“The reason I’m here …”
“Yes?”
“Well, among others, I thought I was gay.”
“But you’re not?”
“Not yet.” And she laughed, and in that release I kissed her. In a couple of minutes, for a couple of hours, we could have both been gay, I do not think we knew or cared. It was a storm. She was firm and she used her firmness. Femininity, or that softness that passes for it popularly, has no place in bed.
Somewhere about three in the morning I asked, “What’s the plan here?”
“The plan?”
“How long you down for?”
“Don’t know. All summer, I think.”
That looked, at that moment, a delicious and correct period. All summer.
“Go to sleep, then.”
“Okay.”
“Night.”
“Night.”
A very tender and not self-conscious kiss. Gratuitous affection between adults is to my mind something you do not make fun of. The one thing you do not make fun of. I was, it is fair to say, wound up. The lust was tamped down for the moment, but tenderness and flutters were running high. She tasted good. She looked good. She made sense. I felt I had been agreeably run over, and I was agreeably getting twisted up underneath whatever vehicle it was; it was heavy and moving fast and had a two-range transmission like a rock truck. Trash was raining off the truck—“I thought I was gay”—and I did not care. Let it rain. Let there be trash. Intelligent, surviving animals make durable nests of trash. Trash is a precious commodity in our time. He who cannot look trash in the eye is lost. In a raiment of minor garbage walks the necessary hero today. Excuse me. It used to be a habit of mine, the boyish, untethered locution. Finding a woman in your bed can make a boy of you again, a cute, frisky boy.
When I woke up I was against the wall, looking over my cousin at the surf outside the window. Patricia Hod was looking straight up at the ceiling, unblinking, in a fixed eerie stare that would have given me the creeps if her eyes had not been themselves beautiful. They were the same blue as the ocean and the sky beyond them. She stared at the ceiling as if she knew about this marvelous optical composition. But of course she did not, and I touched her. She gave my hand a little squeeze, still not looking from the ceiling or even blinking, and smiled. I was relieved and not: she was okay, the squeeze and smile said, but staring at the ce
iling (for how long?) said not. I kissed her neck just below her jaw, which is what you do in situations like this. A little awkward but delicate affection will secure a doubtful woman staring at the ceiling.
Her eyelashes stuck brightly and smartly up and out at angles from her eyeballs so that her eyes looked like miniature crowns. I thought of Orphan Annie. I watched her eyes gaze at the ceiling and held her hand and saw beyond, unfocused, the cool, rough, glassy morning surf thrash and roll and shine. Nothing could be finer than to be in Caroliner in the morning is about the way it felt.
9
I RESOLVED IN THE MORNING to try not to be so small. I know where to get more detailed self-improvement lists—Mr. Franklin’s comes to mind—but, for me, this is enough. I am supposed to be thinking about self-determination, about not wasting a life, about the large picture, and I am thinking about Patricia Hod’s early ass in my late bed. My old lady is asleep and my new girlfriend is asleep. Weather fair. Tide regular. Boats on the horizon. Birds afloat and a-peckin’.
Patricia and I had a conversation somewhere in our parade of appetite about her taking me for gay. I asked her if she was serious. “Well,” she said, “not really, I mean, I hoped … see, I’ve found this a lot—a lot—lately, that if a guy isn’t, you know, Billy Carter, you can find him in the other camp. A lot. This has something to do with my entertaining—I thought I loved a woman.”
“Because gays turn up?”
“Because Billy Carters kept turning up, more.”
“I see.” I thought maybe I did. “There’s sexists on the one hand, like me, and gays on the other—”
Edisto Revisited Page 3