Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

by Lee Smith

  THE SECOND TIME ROXY met Willie was twelve years after that, when she took a poetry class by mistake over at the college. It all started the day after Livingston told her that he was contemplating a run for the state legislature. “Why not?” he’d said, striding back and forth across the new Oriental rug. He’d made partner at Massengale, Frankstone, and Hogue, he’d made over ten million dollars winning personal injury suits, his specialty. Both boys had just left for Virginia Episcopal School, the same prep school Livingston himself had gone to. They were doing great. Roxy’s decorator, David, had just put the finishing touches on this house they’d built at the Ambassador’s Club — right on the seventh hole, for luck. Now, Livingston said, he felt lucky. For years, people had been after him to run for office. He had headed up a list of volunteer organizations and fund drives as long as your arm, he had served on many boards. It was time.

  Roxy cleared her throat. “Actually,” she’d said, “I was just thinking it’s also about time for me to go back to school and get that degree. I’d like to teach, like Mama. Maybe home ec, don’t laugh. Or maybe special ed. I’d like to be useful in the world.” She didn’t know she was going to say this before she said it, it popped right into her head. Well, I swan! she thought. I sound just like Mama, who had recently died. Roxy had been feeling sort of shaky and weird ever since. Sometimes she felt like she was floating above herself, watching herself walk and talk and smile like an idiot. Or like she was in a play, or a pageant.

  “Honey,” Livingston said, “you are useful in the world. You’re useful right here.” Livingston had been walking all around the new living room. Now he stopped and poured her a glass of wine. “I need you — the boys need you — just think how much I’ll need you when we run.”

  “We,” he said, not “I.” And “when,” not “if.”

  Immediately Roxy saw herself in a series of photographs taken on a series of platforms, herself and Livingston, smiling, smiling, smiling ever more broadly until her whole face was stretched tight. He would need her on those platforms, and he would need her as a hostess too, for Roxy was already a famous hostess in Macon, where her Christmas Eve parties had become a tradition, with homemade gumbo and jambalaya and a Christmas tree in every room, each tree with a different theme. She’d always loved people, and she loved to cook. But suddenly Roxy had a vision of herself cleaning up from those parties, putting the Christmas ornaments into those special boxes with the little dividers, each box clearly marked with its own theme label, for all the Christmases of all the years of her life to come.

  She raised her glass to Livingston. “To you,” she said. “Go for it, honey!”

  But she called Continuing Education over at the college that very day and signed up for a class named Kid Stuff: Special Topics in Special Education.

  FIRST SHE COULDN’T FIND a parking space on campus, and then she couldn’t find Lenore Hall, and then the doorknob wouldn’t turn, or at least she couldn’t turn it, maybe because her hands were sort of sweaty because she couldn’t find the elevator either and she’d had to walk up three flights of stairs, so that she burst, literally burst, into the classroom, immediately dropping her purse, which fell wide open spilling change and makeup and her driver’s license and about a million credit cards all over the floor.

  “Is this it?” she asked wildly.

  Fifteen blank young faces turned around to look back at her.

  “Well, is this it or not?” she said into the silence.

  Willie stood up at his desk. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “But why don’t you just take a seat and we’ll find out?”

  IRENE KRAMER HAD BEEN right, of course. Willie turned out to be Willie Cocker who used to play with Lynard Skynard and then started the legendary group Desperado. They had had that huge hit back in the late sixties with “Heat Lightning,” which he wrote. In fact the whole album went platinum. Lucinda had left him three years after they bought the house, taking their only child, a girl, with her. A year after that, Lucinda killed herself. Willie got the child, Lilah, at that point, but since he was in no condition to take care of her, Lilah had lived with his mother, Miss Rowena, in the big house over on Virginia Place until he got out of rehab.

  So Lilah, not Roxy, was the one who had actually saved Willie, in Roxy’s opinion. From then on, he raised Lilah by himself, if anybody could have been said to have raised Lilah at all. Mostly she raised herself, or maybe she raisedhim. Willie quit the band so he wouldn’t have to travel and started teaching music lessons at home, plus the occasional English course over at the college, his original occupation. He was keeping it, he told everybody, very simple. They lived in an old bungalow near the campus. Lilah was the envy of all her friends, with a bead-curtain door and a television and refrigerator in her own room, plus her own dog, Possum, who slept on her waterbed with her. Possum was mostly Lab. They had found him lost in the mountains while on a camping trip. Willie had a dog too — Gator, found injured in a ditch beside the road when they were driving through the Okeefenokee Swamp. “Shot and left for dead!” Lilah liked to announce dramatically, pointing at Gator, a big friendly yellow mutt with floppy ears. Roxy thought it was so weird for them both to have dogs named for other animals.

  And there were other weird things about them too, but what could you expect? After all, Willie was a genius, with a lot of fancy degrees from fancy schools up north, and geniuses are even weirder than rock stars, everybody knows that. Roxy was a practical person. Later, she would clean out their cabinets, get rid of the mold everyplace, buy new sheets that matched, and plant an herb garden. Willie was a gourmet cook but a terrible housekeeper, though a series of girlfriends (there was always a girlfriend, and she was always nice) had tried their best to organize him. “I have my own system,” he would explain, referring to the piles of papers and records and sheet music on the floor as his “files,” and in time these nice women would give up on organizing him, if their pet allergies or his unwillingness to commit hadn’t already driven them away.

  The bungalow’s living room was filled with pianos, keyboards, and recording equipment, while the dining room table was piled high with papers and books. Willie slept downstairs back then, in the little room off the dining room, which used to be a sun porch. He liked it out there. He liked the weather, hot or cold. He liked to see the japonica bloom in the spring and watch the dogwood leaves turn red in the fall, up close. He wanted the moonlight to fall across his bed.

  Lilah had the big sunny corner bedroom upstairs. She was never exactly sure who might turn up in the other two bedrooms when she woke up in the morning. Students, fans, relatives, friends — Lilah and Willie had a lot of friends. Sometimes the friends stayed for weeks. Sometimes Miss Rowena sent her hired man, Horace, over there to clean. Horace moved through the house mournfully and purposefully, mopping and vacuuming, clicking his tongue; after he’d left, they couldn’t find anything for the longest time, until they had messed it all up again.

  Yet Lilah emerged from this crazy house on time for school every morning, neat as a pin, and marched off to the Harper Hill Academy in her uniform, the blue blazer and plaid skirt and knee-socks in winter, the white blouse and khaki Bermuda shorts and sneakers in spring and fall. She always had perfect attendance and perfect grades. It was a miracle; she was a miracle. Lilah grew into a tall, blonde, beautiful girl like her mother but so thin that her knees knocked together when she walked. Roxy had an immediate impulse to feed her. Lilah had the same huge blue eyes that Roxy remembered so well, the same Kim Novak nose, but a big, generous mouth like Julia Roberts so that when she smiled, which she did often, she gave off light like the sun.

  Or like a lighthouse, Roxy thinks now, walking out on the sagging deck to look across the marsh at her favorite view, the black and white striped Cape Plenty lighthouse built in 1910 and still in use. Roxy identifies with this lighthouse — she and Willie are getting pretty old themselves now, but by God they are still in use, both of them. Everything still works — everything. Sudde
nly she can’t wait for him to get here, she hasn’t seen him for three days because he’s been in Atlanta scoring a documentary film. Roxy smiles, putting cushions out on the heavy old cedar deck chairs, gray with age. She looks out at the horizon and remembers the night they pulled the mattress out here and drank champagne and watched the Perseid shower, those shooting stars all night long. She has just gone back into the house and gotten another armful of cushions when the phone rings. She puts the cushions down and picks the receiver up; somehow, she knows it’s going to be important.

  “Roxy?” Lilah’s voice is about an octave higher than usual.

  “Hi honey, what’s going on? I thought you were going to some golf tournament or conference or something with Kyle this weekend.”

  Kyle is the current boyfriend.

  “We are — I mean, we were, but then Kyle changed his mind and now he wants to drive down to the beach all of a sudden, so is that okay with you guys?”

  “Well, sure, but you know it’s still kind of cold out on the island, and it’s a pretty long drive, and it’s not great weather or anything yet. In fact, I just got here myself, I’m just starting to clean up the house.”

  “What about Daddy? Isn’t Daddy there? Kyle says he especially wants to see Daddy.”

  “Lilah, tell me what’s going on. Are you okay?” Roxy sits down on Miss Rowena’s old sofa, she called it her davenport.

  “I’m fine,” Lilah says in a cheery voice, though it’s clear that she’s not. “Where’s Daddy?”

  “He’s coming, sweetheart. He’s driving down from Atlanta, I’m not quite sure what time he’ll get here. In a little while.”

  “Well, we ought to get there about. . . . What time did you say? Just a minute.” Though Lilah has put her hand over the receiver, Roxy hears a man’s voice in the background — clearly she’s talking to Kyle.

  “Today? You mean you’re coming today?” Roxy wedges the receiver under her chin as she lights a cigarette.

  “Actually we’re already on the road,” Lilah says. “Kyle says we’ll be there by six.”

  “Oh great! Can’t wait to see you!” Roxy lies, hanging up the phone. Well shit. She sits on the davenport looking out at the line of waves on the empty beach. What if Lilah’s pregnant? But that’s impossible. Lilah has always been the sanest, smartest, most capable child in the world; now she’s got an MBA degree and carries a briefcase. MBAs don’t get pregnant, do they? But what else could it be? Now Roxy’s just dying to talk to Willie, but of course he doesn’t have a cell phone. He refuses to get one. He’s such a throwback, he won’t do e-mail either. He’s on the road by now too, loud music playing on his old tape deck, driving like a bat out of hell.

  ROXY REMEMBERS HOW MISS Rowena used to push that imaginary brake pedal on the floor whenever she rode with her son. “Slow down, honey, for pity’s sake!” she’d beg, stomping on the floorboard.

  “Brake-dancing,” Willie called this.

  Roxy herself wasn’t much better, also terrified by his driving, always telling him to slow down, or pointing out whatever was happening on the road ahead, just in case he didn’t see it, backseat driving even when she was riding shotgun in the front seat — but Willie was such a scary driver that she just couldn’t help it. It was mostly a matter of his driving style, she had to admit, since he’d never had a real accident although he’d had plenty of fender-benders and gotten a lot of speeding tickets and even lost his license once for a year. But Roxy, like Miss Rowena, just couldn’t control herself whenever she rode with him. She couldn’t shut up. She couldn’t stop shouting out; she couldn’t stop giving pointers and issuing warnings. It got to be a real problem. Finally Willie had rescued them both by making a game out of it.

  The game had started about ten years ago when they were driving up to the North Carolina mountains for MerleFest, Doc Watson’s bluegrass festival held in memory of his son, Merle. Roxy and Willie had never missed it.

  They were barreling up I-77 north of Charlotte in his old white Dodge Dart convertible, taking the curves like a piece of cake, when all of a sudden the giant red tractor-trailer ahead of them slowed down to a virtual stop in its lane, without putting its turn signal on. “Willie,” she yelled, “Watch out! This truck is going to turn, or get off, or something. Look out, honey! Slow down! Or maybe you should try to switch lanes — “ which Willie obviously couldn’t do because the other lane was clogged bumper-to-bumper with traffic.

  “You’re going to hit it! We’re going to hit it, honey — “ Roxy’s whole life began to flash before her, as it often did on a car trip with Willie. The last actual thing she saw before she ducked was the Ohio license tag of the truck, close up.

  “Is that a fact, Mama? Is that right? You got to hep me, Mama, I can’t see a thing. I’m blind, Mama. Don’t you forget I’m blind. Now where is that truck? I swear I jus can’t see a thing out here on this highway, where is we, Mama? Where we going?” Willie went into his best Stevie Wonder imitation. Roxy sat back up to see that the truck had turned off and Willie was rocking back and forth, head cocked and bobbing, grinning from ear to ear. “Did you say they is a truck out here, Mama?” he hollered. “Where that truck at? You got to tell me, Mama, I can’t see nothing, I blind, Mama. I be just blind as a bat out here.”

  She started laughing and fell right into it. “Stevie, you crazy thing! You slow down now, you just slow down and listen to yo Mama.” Even in Roxy’s own opinion, she sounded great. Willie wasn’t the only one who could do Stevie Wonder.

  “Yas, Mama. Anything you says, Mama. Little Stevie gone get you there, you don’t got to worry about a thing. Little Stevie sure gone get you there bye and bye.” Willie threw back his head and started singing “I Was Made to Love Her.” Roxy joined him on “Work out, Stevie, work out,” singing at the top of her lungs.

  Willie had explained that if she was going to treat him like a blind man, he might as well be one. After this, they played Mama and Stevie every time Roxy started backseat driving. It always slowed him down, and it took the pressure off too.

  THE STEVIE AND MAMA routine still cracks Willie and Roxy up, though it scandalizes their three politically correct, super-high-achieving children, whose major rebellion lies in their straightness. Oh well, at least they aren’t Republicans. Roxy sighs, starting to clean. Or at least not yet, though nobody is really sure about this Kyle fellow. He’s brand new . . . Jesus, this living room looks like archaeology with its layers and layers of clutter: papers, clothes, books, shoes. Oh well. Roxy will just have to do the best she can, and the hell with it. She moves into higher gear. She puts the rest of the cushions out on the deck furniture, then sweeps the winter’s sand off the deck, then goes back inside and puts sheets on their bed and on the double beds in two of the other little rooms, who knows? Maybe Lilah and Kyle will make a pretense of sleeping in separate rooms. They are so straight.

  Roxy shakes her head, remembering herself and Willie at the same point in their relationship, about two months after she started taking that poetry class. Because Willie was the love of her life — she knew it immediately too. She had never met anybody like him — anybody so brilliant and wild and funny, yet so educated — why, she was just crazy about him! She couldn’t believe that he actually seemed to like her back; she knew she didn’t deserve him. She is still convinced that she doesn’t deserve him, especially after losing Alice. If Roxy actually had to say what her best trait is, she would say, reliable. Hardworking. That’s pathetic, isn’t it? Even mules are hardworking. Horses! Even dogs. But she has a good bust-line too and a good heart which is capable of intense love, so much love that it has surprised her and even scared her to death upon occasion when it has caused her to do the wildest things, things she would have thought nobody her age would ever do, especially a realtor. She has never been his equal. She is just a normal person who got hooked up to a genius, sort of like a car that gets its battery charged by a Rolls Royce. This is a metaphor, which means saying one thing in terms of another, such as, �
��My love is like a red, red rose.” This is one thing she learned in Willie’s class.

  They met for a cup of coffee to discuss the poem she had written for her first assignment, and after that, she couldn’t help it. Any of it. They were immediate soul mates, old souls, Willie called it. Roxy had never had a soul mate before. In fact, she hadn’t had any fun for years either, and Willie was so much fun. They snuck around. They had picnics out in the silent, secret black-water swamp. They spent afternoons at the Bambi Lynn Motel in Montezuma, where all the pictures on all the walls showed the same thing, the same locomotive coming around a bend. The Bambi Lynn Motel must have bought a truckload of those pictures. They made love on the new Oriental rug in Roxy’s living room while the boys were off at school and Livingston was at the legislature; they got rug burns, at their age. Rug burns! Roxy looked at them in the mirror and giggled. “Oh, that’s eczema,” she told Livingston when he asked. Sometimes they made love in Roxy’s own king-size bed with its dual controls of mattress firmness; she is not proud of this. Sometimes Roxy wore her old majorette uniform, which still fit, and one time when Livingston was at a meeting in Washington, she met Willie at the door wearing nothing but white high heels and her Miss Rose Hill banner and her rhinestone tiara.

  They were crazy, and of course they got caught. But the big surprise was that Livingston did not appear to care too much one way or the other, certainly not as much as Roxy would have thought. In fact, this almost hurt her feelings, at least until his bland little administrative assistant, Miss Porterfield, came forward and stepped right into Roxy’s shoes without missing a beat. Claudia Porterfield had graduated from Sweetbriar College and gotten a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown. She was much more suitable for Livingston in every way. They had actually done him a favor, Willie said, which must have been true, since Livingston was reelected easily the next two terms, and then ran for attorney general.