“Good to see you again.”
“Good to see you.” Her voice was warm. She settled down into his couch and knocked back the bottle of beer as her free hand sought his knee.
“I got a new job today,” she said.
“You quit Sissy?” His heart leaped. He’d have a free shot at her now.
Then Clara told him about the letter from the university and how excited she’d been at Sissy’s mission, a scholarship drive for her and in the newspaper. “I should have known they weren’t gonna take up a collection for a colored girl.” Misery leaked out of her voice and spilled over to Parker.
He took her in his arms and held her as she talked. He thought about all the schools that had waved scholarships at him. All the schools he’d run out on.
“I was worried I wasn’t gonna have enough for bus fare and warm clothes and all. But now I’ve got to come up with a thousand dollars and I’ve only got two months.” Parker stroked her back until she was comforted a little. “How’m I gonna do it, Parker?”
“Shhh.” He felt her nuzzle into him and kiss his neck. But when he offered her money, she stiffened. “Hey, I’m not paying for services rendered.” He cupped her chin in his hand. “Heck, girl, don’t you know, I couldn’t afford you.”
But she didn’t want to be beholden to him or any man for money. “My mama never had any kind of a life once she started down that road.”
He pulled her to him and murmured with his face in her hair, “I want you to get your chance, that’s all. I want you to have a real life.”
“Let’s see where I am next month, okay?” Her voice was hoarse.
He held her to him. She unbuttoned his shirt and ran her fingers through the curling brown hair. Then she slipped her hand into his jeans. But it went in too easily. There was no straining against the fabric. She looked up at him, startled.
“I told you I wasn’t paying for your services,” he said, taking the hand out of his pants and kissing her carefully manicured fingertips.
She looked down at his crotch and quickly looked away. “I just wanted to be with you.” There was a wail in her voice. “I was feeling low-down and blue about having to work at that smelly chemical plant and all.”
“I know,” he said and kissed her hair.
She smiled up at him like a soldier marching into battle and unbuttoned her white blouse.
He ran his hands lightly over her chest, but tonight, for the first time, he felt nothing. Her bra was pink nylon. It molded her flesh into torpedo points, covered with cheap machine-made lace. He reached around and undid the hooks, freeing her breasts to fall into a human shape. He held them, one in each hand, as if weighing cantaloupes, pretty beige cantaloupes. Sissy’s were smaller, more the size of grapefruits, oranges even. He remembered how small and lost they looked in her black-lace push-up bra. He watched Clara’s nipples bounce, her dark brown nipples.
“What are you doing?” Clara asked.
He snapped out of his reverie and laughed. “This doesn’t turn you on? How about this?” He ran his thumb over her nipple and watched the shiver go through her body. He reached under her skirt and began to stroke her thighs and then between her thighs. She lay back and moaned. Parker wondered why he felt nothing. With his fingertips he reached into her panties. Matching pink lace, he guessed. Clara was always careful to match everything. But he didn’t bother to look, didn’t even bother to pull up her skirt. She was moving her body up and down, her eyes shut tight.
She reached for him as wave after wave of feeling made her tremble. “Don’t stop,” she moaned and grabbed the metal buttons on his jeans. Her eyes still closed, she began unbuttoning those tight metal buttons, but tonight they weren’t tight at all.
Clara sat up and opened her eyes. “What’s the matter?”
He shrugged and tried to smile, but how could he smile? “I don’t know.” Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Christ! What had these women done to him? He pulled away from her.
“You feeling all right?” She put her hand to his head.
He took her hand and held it. “These things happen to men, you know.” But not to me! Not to me! He wanted to scream at her, shake her, tell her it was her fault. Make her see. What?
Clara pulled her hand away and put it in her lap. She looked at him like a frightened bird. He felt sick to his stomach, but he didn’t want her to know.
“You’ve had other men, haven’t you?” He tried to keep his voice kind, neutral.
She didn’t say anything.
“I’m not the first?”
She shook her head. Parker felt relieved.
“He was a boy in my school,” she said, looking into her hands.
“Oh, high school boys. They’re always horny.”
A little smile played around her lips. With her head still bowed she said, “For the first couple of months, I thought an erection was a man’s natural state.”
Gee, thanks for telling me that, Parker thought. That’s just what I needed to hear. “What happened to him?”
“I was afraid if I kept on with him, I’d never get out of here. Besides, he just wanted to show me off.”
They sat in silence for a long time. Then Clara adjusted her panties and Parker hooked up her bra for her. They both concentrated on being very, very nice to one another. Very thoughtful. Very polite. Parker could see how hurt she was. But goddammit, he was hurting too.
“I’ll drive you home.”
“You don’t have to,” she said, waiting for him to protest.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind.” He was looking at his Most Valuable Player award.
“Don’t mind! Don’t mind!” Parker had never heard her raise her voice before. Suddenly her face was flooded with insight. “You thought I was Sissy, didn’t you?”
He looked up at her without saying anything.
“Tonight, when I came in.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Answer me, Parker.”
“No.” And then, “I don’t know, maybe. What difference does it make?”
“What difference? Oh, sweet Jesus.” He saw her eyes fill with tears. “I thought you cared about me. Me. But it was always Sissy, wasn’t it? That’s why you picked me up, because I looked like her?”
Parker shook his head, but he was afraid she was right. He was also afraid that after finding Sissy again, holding her, he just wasn’t interested in anybody else. He was shocked that a girl as pretty as Clara could come over to his house and start taking off her clothes, and he didn’t care. It was a hell of a thing for a man who’d always been wild and free. He wondered if he’d ever be wild and free again.
Clara wiped her eyes and stood up. “All that time, I was just subbing for Sissy, wasn’t I? Well, school’s out, Parker. The substitute teacher’s done quit.” She walked to the front door, her head held high. Parker remembered the night Sissy had walked the same way to the same door. Clara must have remembered it too, because she turned at the door and said, “To hell with you, Parker Davidson. To hell with you both.”
She slammed out of the front door, ran across the porch, and out into the night.
Chapter 12
A girl doesn’t have to give in to temptation, but she might not get another chance.
Rule Number Thirty-nine
THE SOUTHERN BELLE’S HANDBOOK
AS THE MUGGY days of July dripped into one another, Sissy felt as if she were swimming upstream in a warm river of unrequited lust whose source was Parker’s endless phone calls.
With Clara gone, Sissy was a hostage to her children and the simplest errand became a fight. Before she could go anywhere, she had to find, wash, and dress Marilee and Billy Joe and load them and Ed Sullivan—or Chip, she didn’t trust him and the dog alone together—into the car and rush through whatever she was doing before one or all of them began to whine, make a mess, or chew large chunks out of the car’s upholstery.
So Sissy stopped going out. She had the groceries delivered and hu
ng around the house with only the tenuous line of the phone linking her with the outside world. That suited Parker. He called her every time he climbed a telephone pole.
He called when the sun beat down on him, sticking his shirt to his back and shrinking his jeans right on his legs. He called when the air was thick and the sky heavy with dense, gray clouds. He called when the rain pelted him and lightning flashed across the sky and the thunder cracked around his head. He loved to talk to her when he was suspended between earth and sky. They were like teenagers again, taking up where they’d left off in high school.
At first they caught up on each other’s lives. Parker told her fabulous tales of adventures. He described the night they were caught in a typhoon on the South China Sea and he had to lash himself to the side of an open boat. He told her about the rigors of monastic life. “One morning I was dragging my butt out of bed to cover a bunch of statues with gold cloth, and I asked myself, ‘What in the world is a nice Jewish boy from Gentry, Louisiana, doing with all these monks?’ ”
Sissy laughed. She knew exactly what a nice Jewish boy was doing. He was running away from responsibility. She couldn’t say she blamed him.
Finally he ran out of fabulous tales. He confided in her how he’d lost his business in Bangkok.
“You couldn’t help that. Your partner stole your money.”
“There were signs,” he said. And she heard the dry echo of despair in his voice. “There are always signs. You just have to know how to read them.”
“So you’re going to spend the rest of your life beating up on yourself, because you weren’t… what do they call it? Clairvoyant?”
“A man has to take care of his debts.” There was an ugly harshness in his voice, which hurt Sissy, even though she knew he had turned it on himself. “I was an American in a foreign country. I had an obligation to set a good example.” Sissy knew these were his father’s words, but they sounded as if they had been torn out of Parker’s throat.
They made her throat hurt too, but she couldn’t let him know that, so she laughed and said, “Somehow, I think the United States of America will survive.” There was silence on the other end of the line. “Oh, come on, sugar, look what you achieved. You started a business in a country where your men couldn’t even speak English. You built schools and offices and places for people to live. Are the buildings still standing?”
“I made sure the construction was first rate. They wanted me to cut corners, but I never did.”
“So people are living and working in buildings you built.”
“I guess so. Sure.”
“Well, that’s a lot more than any other man I know has accomplished.” She kept on talking that way, building him up until she heard that old note of confidence, which had been Parker’s hallmark when he was winning all those ball games. Rule Number Thirty-three: The surest way to a man’s heart is to become his cheerleader. She kept up the flattery and the banter until he laughed and said, “Enough, woman. Let’s hear about you.”
Since she’d been nowhere and seen nothing, she had to fall back on her teasing ways. She never talked of love or even sex, but her conversation was so full of innuendo that her words hung between them like hot nuggets burning up the phone lines. When her teasing really worked and turned Parker to molten metal and steam, it worked on her, too.
She would straddle the fat round slipcovered arm of the couch, throw back her auburn hair, and play with her buttons. Sometimes when his voice became warm and tempting, she’d grip the sides of the sofa arm with her naked thighs and rub them up and down across the nubby fabric. Then she’d laugh a hoarse, throaty laugh that would make him tremble and hold on to the telephone pole for his life.
Sissy knew that a woman’s greatest power came not from love, but from unrequited lust. Rule Number Thirty-five, Southern Belle’s Handbook.
When the children ran in from the yard she had to be careful about what she said. She was always afraid of what Chip would overhear and kept an eye on him when she talked. But Chip had changed. This summer, to Sissy’s great relief, he finally made some friends. Almost every day a small band of boys would troop through the house or crawl into his window and sit around his room for hours talking, laughing, or fooling with his chemistry set.
Once, following Parker’s instructions, she checked the phone line for taps, but found none. Chip had other things on his mind, she decided, and then smiled to herself. He’s growing up. But even if he had tapped the phone, Sissy couldn’t have stopped talking to Parker. He made her feel desirable again. She wasn’t just Peewee’s wife—or that flirt men had dirty thoughts about (although that was better than nothing)—but for the first time in years, since high school maybe, Sissy felt somebody wanted her and was willing to spend hours just talking about it.
Of course Parker wanted to do more than talk. He begged her to come to him or let him come to her. But how could she with the children running around and the Methodists peering at her from across the street and Sister Betty Ruth Bodine keeping watch on his house?
After dark, he suggested. By then Betty Ruth doesn’t know what she’s seeing.
“What am I going to do with Peewee?” she asked.
“Peewee. Always Peewee.”
“He’s my husband.”
“I remember,” Parker said. His voice was dark.
THEN ONE MONDAY afternoon, when the storm the weather forecasters were so excited about kept threatening, but refused to hit and cool everybody down, Parker asked what Sissy was wearing.
Her mother-in-law’s old torn chenille bathrobe covered in dog hairs was the truth, but she couldn’t tell him that. She described an outfit she’d seen in a Rita Hayworth movie. The next day he asked again.
“Black lace.”
“Over what?”
“Over me, sugar, what do you think?”
She heard an intake of air. “Can you see through it?”
“You can if you look.”
The iron ring he was holding slowly burned a hole though his glove, but he didn’t even feel it. “Is that all?”
“Of course not. What kind of a girl do you think I am?” A long pause. “I’m also wearing perfume.” She heard a groan that turned into a high-pitched moan. And when she asked, “You want to know where I smell the best?” the groan was silently echoed up the line, because Calvin Merkin had tapped in to listen.
At first Calvin just told one of the other linemen. But he told a friend who told a friend and by Thursday even the operators knew about it.
Parker called at irregular times, but as soon as he did the word went out and it became impossible to raise directory assistance or make a long distance call. The Sissy and Parker Show became the telephone company’s favorite soap opera.
WHEN PEEWEE WENT to the Paradise for a beer after work, he thought people were looking at him funny, talking behind his back. But since he’d done nothing and Sissy seemed to always be home, he decided he was imagining things.
Then on Monday, July 23, things came to a head. The countryside was bursting with life. Morning glories and honeysuckle fought for dominance over old fences and decaying shacks. Water lilies spread themselves over lazy ponds. And Parker hooked into a line.
“Hey, Parker,” Sissy purred, and across the parish the signal went out. “It was a long weekend without hearing from you.”
Parker swallowed hard. This girl could do it to him every time. “I found us a hotel in the French Quarter I think you’re gonna like. It’s got great big four-poster beds and armoires, and heavy old brocade curtains to cut out the light, and best of all, icy cold air conditioning.” He tried to imagine her body laid out on that big bed, her nipples blue with the cold. He saw himself reflected in the mirror from the armoire, bending over her, warming those nipples, kissing them.
“I never said anything about needing a hotel in the French Quarter.”
He laughed. “I guess you just forgot.” He thought he was rescuing her from the toad. But what Parker didn’t realize was h
e was looking for some kind of home. Even a temporary home. Even a hotel room for the afternoon.
“Parker Davidson, you know I can’t spend the night in the French Quarter with you,” Sissy said.
“You can spend the afternoon.”
“Is that where you take all your women?” He could hear Sissy was stalling.
“What women?”
“Oh, come on, Parker, you told me you never took a vow of chastity.” Her voice was soft and teasing. “What did you all do in that big four-poster bed? You can tell me.”
His voice was deep, sincere, and anything but convincing. “I’ve never been there with anybody else.”
“Um-hum,” she said.
Parker was too smart to beg Sissy to believe him. Instead he said he’d be glad to tell her what he’d do to her in that big four-poster bed and found a part of his anatomy was standing up parallel to the telephone pole.
“I don’t see how I could get away.”
“Come on, Sissy, you can find a way if you try.”
“Try,” echoed the linemen throughout the parish, but of course Sissy and Parker couldn’t hear them.
“I’m going to take me a cooling bath,” Sissy said, holding her hair away from her neck.
“Aww, don’t get naked alone!” moaned Calvin.
“That girl needs to cool off,” said one of the operators to Rowena Weaver, her supervisor and the relief organist at the Methodist church.
“I know you want me as much as I want you,” said Parker with a low chuckle, “so why don’t you put both of us out of our misery and say yes?”
“Say yes!” Came a chorus of unseen and unheard male voices.
“Don’t you do it,” said the operator.
“Trash is trash!” declared Rowena, adjusting her headphone for clearer reception.
“I’ll think about it,” said Sissy.
“That’s the trouble with women,” said Calvin, taking his cigar out of his mouth as he climbed down the telephone pole. “They all think they can think.”
The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc Page 17