by Hadley Hury
Just then, the thin man who had not spoken, dressed in black pants and a white shirt and seated behind Terry, rose, shaking slightly, looking as if he might begin to cry. Instead, he hesitated, and then went down on one knee in front of Michael. He looked up at him through thick black-rimmed glasses, and took his hands in one of his own and patted them slowly with his other.
“This is the Reverend’s and my cousin, Michael. This is Joseph. Joseph cannot talk. Like all of us, in his own way, he is one of God’s ‘peculiar people.’ He is a soldier, too, in God’s war. He’s done some work like yours and he manages our website outreach program. Do you know, he had hoped very much to do this mission, but God has told us that it is only you, Michael, whom He wants.” She touched the kneeling man lightly on his shoulder. “You want to pray with Michael, don’t you, Joseph? May I speak for you?”
The man called Joseph nodded. “We are one in God’s work,” she continued, extending one hand to Terry and sustaining with the other her hold on the kneeling man’s shoulder.
The three or four other people remaining nearby had left the pavilion by now, heading down the long pier in the gathering darkness. As the heat lightning on the western horizon began to erupt into writhing horizontal bolts, the foursome held hands, and the woman prayed.
***
Without further words, the woman then led the way back up the pier toward shore, one arm linked as before in Michael’s, Terry and Joseph behind. They climbed the wooden steps and then descended into the car park. Just as the first fat, round blobs of tropical rain began to pummel them, the woman turned to Michael, took both his hands in hers. Her face glistened with rivulets of rainwater and her eyes welled with tears, but she did not blink and held him fast with her piercing gaze and a slight smile that suggested patient determination and a deeply shared intimacy.
“My cousin and I must return to our work now in Pensacola, Michael. Terry will go over the final details of the mission. We are honored that God has brought you to take such an important role in this glorious revival, this crusade for His truth. And Reverend Oakley and I thank you, too…” she hesitated, closing her eyes for a moment, “…personally. For our little brother Tim. We are with you and we love you, Michael. And until we meet again, you know that God is guiding your every step.”
With that, she got into the car with Joseph, who started the engine and turned on the lights and wipers, smiling diffidently and lifting his hand in farewell. They drove away into the early darkness of the downpour as Terry and Michael, drenched, climbed into Terry’s pickup.
Chapter 24
The film, as it turned out, was even smarter and more surprising than Hudson had remembered.
“I hate to resort to a cliché, especially with a movie critic, but that last scene really put my stomach in knots,” said Camilla as they dashed back to the car in the downpour.
“Mine, too,” Hudson said. “Do you think a drink might unknot us?”
They stopped at a funky seafood place renowned for its oysters and clams, on Highway 98 near the turnoff to Santa Rosa. The place was crowded with an amalgam of locals, tourist families, and tables of local laborers stalled by the storm from going on home at the end of a hard day. It was loud and clattery and, quite uncharacteristically for him, that suited Hudson just fine. Is this a date? he had asked himself throughout the day. What’s going on here? He had interrupted the short stories he planned to use with the freshmen and the David Hare play he was considering for AP, interrupted himself, over and over, questioning himself, no matter how absurd he knew he was being.
“You’re a good host. Last night was great fun.”
“Thank you. A little out of practice.”
Her hazel eyes were frank and warm, and when she tilted her head very slightly her blunt-cut brown hair, finely streaked with gray, fell softly along one side of her face, not quite touching her shoulder.
“You’ve been on your own now for—two years did Charlie tell me? I’m very sorry. It must be hell.”
She was taking it head-on. Probably, he thought, very wise.
“Almost two and a half. It has been hell. Just recently I’ve come to think that I’m not in hell anymore. Just rather awkwardly in life. It’s not a lot easier. But I think it may be progress of a sort.”
She smiled gently, and Hudson suddenly knew what had caught his attention the first night he’d met her at 26-A and several times in the course of the previous evening. Her gaze was discreet but steady. Her smile was not brilliant or dazzling, it was slow and sure. She seemed to know something about life. They were the eyes and smile of someone who is not easily fooled, who is judicious and yet who—and this, he realized, was the great thing—manages to be kind.
He relaxed. They behaved shamelessly with the baskets of shellfish and slaw and hushpuppies, and laughed, and talked easily. About Laurel, teaching, the weather, movies, books, food. They lingered over a last cold beer.
***
“I’m on my own, too.
“As of four years ago. Divorced. I was married for sixteen years. My former husband is a cotton merchant and shipper. We divided our time between a wonderful, quaint old house in Mobile, where his offices are, and a place in Seaside; we were among the ‘early settlers.’ We have one wonderful son who is studying in France this summer and will be a sophomore at Sewanee in the fall.
“As I said last night, Charlotte is my home. I went to college in Charleston, then lived in Boston with a friend for a couple of years. Came back south to teach, in Atlanta, and met my husband there. He commuted from Mobile every weekend for nearly a year. I finally gave in. He made me laugh, he was very nice looking, and he had a generous nature and…he meant well.
“Unfortunately, not many years passed before I realized that there simply wasn’t much there there. No core, really. I stayed busy teaching and I didn’t want my son not to have a family. And there was actually very little unpleasantness. We just grew apart. There were a series of women. He was discreet. I blame no one, not even myself now, though I did do that for awhile. I was disappointed, and I’ve come to think that living too long with disappointment can eventually make people feel like something less than whoever or whatever disappointed them in the first place.” She smiled.
“My husband has kept the house in Seaside, though he and his new wife who, according to my bemused nineteen-year-old, just celebrated her thirty-third birthday, spend less time here than before. They do come into 26-A, of course, from time to time….”
“Hmm.”
She laughed. “Oh, no. That’s nothing. We’re all very amiable and everyone knows I’m happier than I’ve been in years. I know I do. The divorce and his almost immediate remarriage are far beyond their shelf life as local gossip. I’m old news now. I can’t tell you what bliss that is.
“I love my work. Teaching the little ones was great. I did it for eleven years. But I came to a point where I needed a change, and I opened a small retail business with a friend. I learned a lot but it just wasn’t the right fit, so I sold my interest to my partner. I ran into Charlie—we’d known him socially for years—at a party several months after the divorce. He got this funny look on his face when he saw me across the room, and we ended up on this patio discussing all the reasons why I should think seriously about taking over at 26-A. His manager was about to move on to open a place in Key West and he hadn’t found anyone he felt he could really entrust his ‘baby’ with. He was ready to start pulling back. I said yes.” Camilla’s smile grew broader.
“And every minute since I’ve been so happy I did. Charlie’s a good man and he’s created an exceptionally fine place. Victor and Fentry are treasures. I feel at home there, and the work offers me just the right context in which to bring together my interests and skills. I like the routine and I like the unexpectedness: it’s like teaching in that the form remains largely consistent and yet every evening, every moment, really, is in some way new. Plus I get to do things that I just plain like and enjoy and am good at. It suits m
e.”
***
As they drove through the pitch-black Gulf night, even more seamless than usual in its enveloping rain, Camilla said, “It was good being with Libby last night. I hadn’t seen her in too long a time.”
“As we say back home, isn’t she something?”
“Indeed,” she laughed. “I’m crazy about her.”
“Me, too.”
They rode for awhile in silence, staring ahead as the headlights followed the broken center line of the road through the storm.
Then Hudson asked, “Had you met Chaz before?”
“Only briefly in March. Charlie and he were in for dinner. Twice, I think.”
“You and Libby seemed to be keeping him entertained at your end of the table.”
“Mostly Libby—which was just dandy with me. I enjoyed your wonderful pasta and pretty much sat back and watched the show.” Hudson looked over just in time to see her eyes shift to the dark masses of trees hurrying past the windows. “We certainly talked, though.”
“They’re a handsome couple aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Charlie’s very happy for them.”
“Of course.”
After another silence, Camilla said, “I enjoyed meeting Susie. She’s so attractive and bright.”
“A passionate reader and an inquiring mind. Gives me hope that all of America’s youth aren’t turning into passive video heads.” He paused, looking over again for a moment. “Will I retain whatever status I may have as a gentleman if I say I think I just sensed a change of subject?”
“Oh? Chaz, you mean? Well, I don’t know.”
“I’m wondering if Charlie has shared some of the same things with us.”
“About Chaz’s background? Yes. It’s not that exactly.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not interested in prying.”
“No, I know that. And I’m not trying to be mysterious. It’s just that until you brought him up I hadn’t really sorted through some impressions I had last night.” She turned to him, and smiled. “And I’ve enjoyed our evening and don’t want you to think I’m some sort of madwoman.”
“Hadn’t really occurred to me.”
“Okay.” She pursed her lips, then said, “I don’t want to be unfair. It’s just that something about him, oddly enough, reminds me of my former husband.”
“Attractive and charming, I think you said.”
“Yes, and that may be part of it. But that’s not what struck me. There was something more intangible yet somehow more specific than that.” She paused. “It was the way he talked about his business, I think. He seemed knowledgeable, had lots of humorous anecdotes. A natural marketer. I remember thinking at some point in the evening that if he really wanted to, he could do very well indeed in Atlanta.”
“And?”
“Well, what I’m remembering now is the precise phrasing of that observation as it formed in my mind. ‘If he really wanted to.’ That seems odd.”
“Is that it, do you think? Did your husband not really care about his business?”
“Well, he cared very much about the idea of it, about the idea of being chairman of the board, about all the trappings that go with it. But I think he cared even more that his father had built it and that his brother, for all intents and purposes, ran it. He talked a good game, he looked involved, and occasionally I think he even wanted to believe himself that he had it in his blood. But I’m relatively certain that for all those years, even the early ones, his office was just a brief stop on the way to the next golf or tennis game, or long lunch. Or, later on, girlfriends.”
She paused and looked levelly at him. “And now you’re going to think that I have some sort of sick obsession about my former husband, which I assure you I do not. My passing impression may be utterly wrong, anyway, and it’s incredibly rude of me to be discussing someone I don’t even know like this. I can’t imagine what, as my mother used to say, got into me.”
“I asked you. You feel as though something is missing.”
“But that’s incredibly presumptuous. There’s nothing wrong with not loving your work. That’s the natural state of most human beings, isn’t it? I think we’re in a very tiny, very fortunate minority.”
“But your husband not loving his work was not, alone, I take it, the only problem. You spoke earlier of ‘no core.’”
“Yes. I suppose less than passionate involvement in the firm might even have been desirable, if there had ever been any real engagement with anything else. An avocation of some kind. Public service. Charities. Faith. Our son. Anything.” She paused. “I was young but I should have known better. I mistook his rather vain expansiveness and animal energy for character and spirit.”
“And you think it’s something like that you may have glimpsed in Chaz?”
“May have being the key words. You know, though, this impression may have much more to do with my feelings for Charlie than anything else. I have such high regard for him and am so fond of him, and I know how much his cousin Peter meant to him, that I may be holding this man up to some unrealistic and completely unjustified standard. Chaz is not Charlie. And apparently he’s come through a lot, and that’s admirable. And this is really none of my business. I’m behaving like one of those people I loathe. All that I need to do is wish them the best and be glad that Charlie’s happy.”
Hudson pulled over in front of the cottage, behind Camilla’s car. He turned and looked at her.
“That’s exactly what I told myself this morning over coffee. When I found myself wondering what had gone on last night at my end of the table. Why, instead of feeling some sort of personal response to Sydney, I went to bed with my film reviewer’s hat apparently sitting squarely on my head. ‘Great performance,’ I thought. And, in order to get to sleep, I finally wrote it off to the fact that she had been an actor and that even when some actors leave the profession they never really retire. But this morning I thought, no, it wasn’t anything that simple. Or that obvious. Oh, she may have been a bit eager, but I’m sure she just wanted to please Charlie’s friends. She’s attractive, charming, intelligent, good-humored, extremely poised but evidently capable of spontaneity.…”
“And?”
“I have no idea. But perhaps almost the opposite of ‘something missing.’ Something more like, like something extra. Like a great actor trying not to grandstand, trying to make the harder choices, the most subtle ones. Trying to disappear as an actor and cross that line where they really become the human being, really live it. It’s rare.”
The windows were coated with condensed moisture, and he turned off the engine. They looked at one another in the tree-and-rain-dappled light from the old wooden streetlight down the road. “You were impressed with her? Would that be accurate?” asked Camilla.
He looked out into the darkness and they listened for a moment to the sounds of rain and wind. “Exactly.” He turned back to look at her. “I could find no fault with her. But this morning I felt somehow, disappointed, may be the word, that that was the best I could do as a response. As you say, perhaps we just have unjustified expectations for Charlie’s sake.”
“And,” said Camilla, “you know he’d be the first to say that Chaz and Sydney are their own people, living their own lives, they obviously are bright and attractive, and they’re not bothering anyone. So who are we to judge?”
“Right. He’s happy enough that Chaz isn’t dead from an overdose or living in a halfway house somewhere. And that he’s found a capable, good-looking woman whom he loves and who loves him.”
Smiling, she asked, “So what’s our problem, do you suppose?”
“We’re idealists?”
“Okay, let’s go with that. It’s so much nicer than busybodies. Frankly, I’m just pleased that you shared your, whatever it is, with me. I certainly never intended to spend the last part of a very pleasant evening doing this rather bizarre post mortem, but at least now I don’t have to go home knowing you must think I’m some sort of, I don�
��t know, misanthrope.”
Hudson laughed. “Misanthropes don’t have smiles like yours.”
***
He couldn’t sleep. He managed to finish off a New York Times Saturday crossword puzzle that had frustrated him for three days. From the porch he watched the last of the rain dripping from the eaves and heard it in the silhouettes of the trees. He wandered the cottage. Finally, he decided he might as well work. There was no need to revisit his appraisal of the Julie Christie performance, but the conversation with Camilla brought another film to mind. He took up his station at the desk in the hall, scanned a few files, and began to read.
L.A. Confidential From Noir to Neo-Puritanism –Catching the American Conscience at a very specific moment
There has been much comment about L.A. Confidential’s style, particularly the palpable authenticity of its sense of time—it is set in the early 1950s—and deservedly so. From the upholstery on a diner’s banquettes to the bands on men’s hats, from the snout-nosed Ford coupes on the streets to Kay Starr crooning on the airwaves, the production design by Jeannine Oppwall and costumes by Ruth Myers are seamlessly accurate. The idiom of the dialogue, refashioned from James Ellroy’s thriller by Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland, snaps with the breezy be-bop slang of the ’50s, punctuated here and there by monosyllabic tough-guyisms still in post-War favor. Hanson, who also directs, and cinematographer Dante Spinotti unfurl the movie with a perfect texture and pace, equal parts seedy film noir and brassy “Show of Shows,” that catch that very instant when America, and most emblematically, Hollywood, were poised between the school of hard knocks (the Depression and the War) and a jarring array of social revolutions (the ’60s and beyond). If the 1950s may be described as a period for self-satisfaction, a time simply to keep up with the Joneses and contemplate our blessings, then certainly no one aided and abetted our strictly enforced sentimentality more avidly than did Hollywood. The conformist morality of its product was never more sanctioning, or hypocritical. The world of Written on the Wind and Magnificent Obsession did not invite an introspective splitting of the fine hairs of conscience; it was a broad-brush canvas, a midnight or noon world of fraught but tight-lipped consensus.