The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  He’s the one who suggested the fireworks, too, which were fabulous, capping off the evening. Here’s a photo of the grand finale when six or seven were fired off at once, exploding like an arrangement of celestial lilies in the sky over Magnolia Court. Looking up, the whole crowd went “ooh!” at once, three hundred faces bathed in the colored light. And who would ever guess that inside the potting shed which you can barely see in the bottom right-hand corner of this photograph, the mother of the bride and the florist were locked in a long, damp, passionate embrace?

  OF COURSE, GENE MINOR is not pictured in photograph after photograph of the children—Gene Minor is just for her, just for Courtney. He has no business here among these boys in various groups and various uniforms, shining heads all in a row, smiling or squinting into the sun, holding different kinds of balls. There’s Jeremy’s little face, Scotty’s big grin. Oh, if our children actually knew how much we love them, they’d never be able to hit any of these balls, they’d be simply immobilized by the force of it, by the awful force of our love. Probably in the long run it’s best that our children are shielded from us, as they are, by schools and churches and teams, by teachers and friends and other people.

  Then little girls in tutus, little girls on ponies; bigger girls in bodices, in dust caps, in plays; girls in bathing suits, with breasts. There’s Lydia grown hugely tall and toothy, carrying her hockey stick, making a goal. There’s Lydia hugging her teammates in an all-out way that makes Courtney vaguely uneasy. Lydia teaches now, history and hockey, at a prep school in Virginia. She runs marathons, and does not make hors d’oeuvres. Scotty is getting an M.B.A. at Duke. But Jeremy, well, something’s wrong with Jeremy, though Hawk will not even admit it and no one seems to know what it is. “It’s just a phase . . .” Courtney has been saying this for years.

  But he was such a normal child. Look at him in these photographs, he looks just like every other boy on his Little League team, doesn’t he? Like every other boy in his Rainbow Soccer league, like every other boy in his graduating class. But like Gene Minor, Jeremy is not really pictured here either. Courtney doesn’t know where her sweet little Jeremy went or even when he disappeared. Why did his grades start going down, and why did he drop out of school freshman year at Williams College, despite his famous IQ? Courtney has no idea. Hawk is simply disgusted, calling Jeremy a “slacker.” And now he’s cut him off, which Jeremy seems not to mind or even notice. For several years now he’s been in Boulder, Colorado, living in a rented room over the secondhand bookstore where he works. Courtney tells everyone who asks that Jeremy is “finding himself,” though she doesn’t really believe it and would be even more worried about him if she didn’t have other, bigger fish to fry.

  SPEAKING OF FISH, here’s a picture to catch your eye: Hawk with that sailfish he caught off Cozumel two years ago on his annual trip with Scooter Bowles and Martin Hanes. Held upright by a block and tackle at the dock, this fish stands even taller than Hawk, who’s grinning ear to ear behind his sunglasses, beneath his fishing cap. Bare-chested, barefooted, he’s wearing those crazy, baggy old Hawaiian shorts he loves, looking just as much at home on this foreign dock as he does in a boardroom. A man accustomed to killing things—deer, birds, fish. Big fish. A man who can still stop a girl dead in her tracks just as he did—oh Lord, yes, didn’t he?—so many years ago.

  But Hawk’s most recent fishing trip, earlier this summer, in May, is not pictured here.

  Actually Courtney was in bed with Gene Minor when she found out about it. Wednesday afternoons are always theirs. Gene closes the flower shop and Courtney meets him at home—his house—with lunch, something delicious. It’s fun to cook for Gene because he likes food so much. (Hawk, on the other hand, always carries a pocket counter for fat grams.) That particular afternoon (Was it only two months ago? God, it seems like years) Courtney had fixed lamb chops and new potatoes with mint from Gene’s herb garden right outside his kitchen door. She’d left the door wide open, letting the spring sunlight and Gene’s cats, Stan and John, into the dingy old fifties kitchen. She’d set two places at the red and gray plastic dinette table. She knew he’d bring her some flowers for lunch, which he did, five blue irises in a slim yellow vase.

  “Beautiful,” she said.

  “You certainly are.” Gene Minor kissed her, always an unsettling experience. Well, thrilling. Always a thrilling experience. Gene perused his pantry, chose a bottle of wine, and opened it with a grand flourish. “Ah!” he said, swirling the red Bordeaux around and around dangerously close to the lip of the wineglass, a parody of the connoisseur. He inhaled deeply. “An impertinent little red,” he pronounced. “Good body, though. Nice ass.” Courtney giggled. He winked broadly at her, behind his thick glasses. Gene Minor was legally blind, which might be the reason he thought she was beautiful. Or maybe he thought she was beautiful because he’d thought so in high school, and he was stuck fast in time. Whatever! Courtney didn’t care. The fact was that when he took his glasses off to make love to her, his eyes were as round and blue and unfocused as baby-doll eyes, as plates. When he turned them toward her, she could see herself there as that hopeful girl, that cheerleader she used to be long before she grew up and got so old and so responsible.

  Time stood still in Gene’s house. Even the jeweled kittycat clock in his bedroom ticked along two hours and twenty minutes late, so that if you ever wanted to know what time it was, you had to add two hours and twenty minutes to whatever it said. The first time she came here, years ago, Courtney had been amazed by this system. She’d said, “Why in the world don’t you get it fixed? Or just get a clock that tells time?”

  But then she got to know him.

  Gene is a big man, close to three hundred pounds. Courtney loves to lie in bed with her arms around him feeling that thick layer of fat. Gene Minor is like a seal, like a warm fur coat. He turns Courtney on and comforts her, both at the same time. Yet she’s never able to fall asleep the way he can on those Wednesday afternoons after making love, instantly as a baby. In fact, Courtney never naps, she’s always too keyed up. She’s lucky to get four or five hours of sleep a night, often lying awake for hours as lists run through her mind.

  Here, at Gene’s house, she had finally learned to leave the dirty dishes on the table when they went to bed, but still she couldn’t sleep. And today she was really on edge, she didn’t even know why. Finally she had gotten up and put on one of Gene’s huge shirts and walked into the kitchen. It was an army-green work shirt she’d never seen before, with BOBBY stitched onto the pocket. Gene had probably bought it at the Twice As Nice store—he loved old clothes, costumes, and dressing up. To be as smart as he was, Gene was an almost childish man. Courtney smiled, remembering the time he had appeared for lunch in a pink silk kimono, to her horror. But it was hysterical, she had to admit. Stan and John were on the dinette table, gnawing at the lamb bones. They didn’t even look up when she came in.

  On impulse, Courtney had crossed the kitchen and called her home answering service. There was a message from Anne Weaver changing the date of the upcoming Friends of the Library meeting and a message from Ellen Henley, Hawk’s secretary, saying that so-and-so was still waiting for him but would have to leave by noon, and then, that message from Hawk.

  “Honey”—he hadn’t called her honey for years—“where are you? I’m heading down to the coast to do a little fishing with the guys. Why don’t you come on down, too, and pick up some barbecue on the way, will you? And some hushpuppies, you know, the works.”

  She knew. With Hawk, it had always been “the works.” The barbecue place was right on the way down to their beach house at Emerald Isle. But Hawk hadn’t said a word about any fishing trip, especially not in the middle of the week like this. And what about that message from Ellen Henley? Courtney had listened to the messages again, standing barefoot in the middle of Gene’s kitchen floor while Stan rubbed against her legs and purred. Before Gene, she’d never known a man who liked cats. But there was something funny about Hawk�
��s voice, there was something wrong. Courtney tiptoed in and retrieved her clothes from Gene’s bathroom and dressed and left, as she often did, without waking him. On Wednesdays Gene liked to nap until about six o’clock and then stay up till all hours watching videos. He was a night owl and a movie nut.

  Courtney pictured him as she drove to the coast. It usually calmed her down to think of Gene slumbering through the afternoon, her own sleeping giant, but today that didn’t work and even the pokey little towns of eastern North Carolina, which she loved, failed to do the trick. It was a beautiful day, though. As she drove across the last big bridge over the sound, Courtney put her window down and drew in a deep breath of the familiar salt marsh smell. The wind felt good in her hair. She’d been finally cheerful by the time she turned into the concrete driveway of Miss Evangeline’s old shingled beach house, an anomaly among the newer, smaller houses that surrounded it.

  Courtney had pulled in next to Hawk’s Land Rover and got out, wondering where the other cars were, the other guys. She climbed the outside staircase up to the deck carrying the box from Fat Daddy’s, then went in the kitchen door and put it on the table next to Hawk’s car keys and this morning’s newspaper. The old house was completely quiet. Dust turned in the beams of sunlight slanting across the wide pine floors, covered with the myriad rag rugs that had been here ever since Hawk’s parents were young and this house stood alone on its stretch of beach. Courtney hadn’t been here since the past summer—funny, isn’t it, how time gets away from you? The Copelands had come over for lunch, and she’d made that cold spinach soup; later, she walked up to the point by herself and saw a rainbow. It seems like yesterday. And only yesterday, too, since the kids were small and she brought them down here all the time. Right here on the kitchen wall are all the marks Hawk made with the ruler as they grew up. But where is he? Maybe they went off to fish in somebody else’s car.

  Courtney stepped out of her shoes and went out on the deck. Almost nobody was on the beach. The tide was out, tide pools glistening silver in the sun at different places, Courtney thought, from where they used to be. Nothing stays the same. She headed down the boardwalk which was partially covered with sand from the winter’s storms, making a mental note to call Mr. Tabor, the caretaker.

  But who was that on the last landing, just sitting there? Somehow, from the back, it hadn’t looked like him. He turned as she approached, but did not wave or speak. He sat on the wooden bench, tackle box beside him, rod and reel propped against the rail. Cloud shadows raced across the beach behind him; a jogger passed and waved. He sat there. “Hawk!” she called. He looked at her for a second with absolutely no expression followed by a big surprised grin that lit up his whole face. “Courtney!” He had seemed delighted. “Hey, where’s Baron?” Didn’t you bring Baron?” Their old chocolate lab, Hawk’s pride and joy, Baron had been dead for fifteen years.

  AND NOW, IN SPITE of all these tests they’re doing on Hawk, Gene Minor has picked this very week to issue his ultimatum. It’s all the fault of that life coach, he got her off the Internet, everything was going along perfectly well until she entered the picture. Courtney found the brochure two weeks ago, lying by the phone. “Rosalie Hungerheart,” it read. “You can live your dreams! Like an Olympic coach, Rosalie guides her clients to the top levels of performance in their personal and professional lives. Discover what you want and get it! Life won’t wait!” The back of the brochure had been torn off and sent in, Courtney presumed, to Rosalie Hungerheart, probably along with a check. Gene is so gullible.

  But Courtney and Gene have a perfectly satisfactory relationship already. Courtney spends every Wednesday afternoon with Gene, plus the occasional overnight when Hawk is out of town or when she manufactures a shopping trip to Atlanta. Several times they’ve met at one of those cheap motels up in north Raleigh, though Gene finds this depressing. “I’m a big quality-of-life guy,” he told her the first time, turning a terrible print of an Indian brave to the wall.

  It was his idea to drive down I-95 to Pedro’s South of the Border for an overnight. “It’ll be a hoot,” he promised. Courtney had seen those tacky Pedro’s signs lining the highway for years, but of course she’d never thought of stopping. “This is a stolen weekend!” Gene had announced to the startled waiter, wearing that silk kimono. He cast a little flurry of dollar bills at him before slamming the door in his face, bearing the tray of margaritas and enchiladas over to the giant bed where Courtney waited, naked, in hysterics. Before Gene she hadn’t laughed, really laughed, in years.

  The best thing about Pedro’s was that they did not have to hide out. Courtney was absolutely sure that she would never, ever, meet anybody she knew there. Not in the giant gift shop where Gene bought her a ring that said BABE in fake pink diamonds, not by the gaudy tiled pool, not in the dark Sombrero Lounge where she let him run his hand all the way up her leg under the table. It was so dark in there, nobody could see a thing. They’ve never gone back. It was just too far, too risky. But Courtney has often thought about it. That overnight at Pedro’s existed outside of time and space, like their whole relationship, which is why it’s so perfect. Courtney can’t believe Gene Minor wants to wreck it now. It has been just perfect since the very beginning. Look.

  “MY GOODNESS!” Harriet Holding says politely when Courtney pulls out the aqua blue vinyl scrapbook with MY PROM on the cover in gold script—Gene found it in a thrift shop someplace. Suddenly Courtney can’t wait to open it, to see him again, her darling, her love. She can’t wait until the end of this trip when he is going to meet her in New Orleans for a stolen weekend at the Royal Orleans Hotel. “Don’t you dare bring that kimono!” she has already told him. But secretly, she hopes he will.

  Harriet Holding would not look so sleepy and bored if she knew the truth about these pictures. She’d be astonished. Courtney is astonished, too. She still considers herself the last person in the world who’d ever have an affair, the very last. She’d never have done it at all if it had been anybody real, anybody that people knew.

  This is how we met, she does not say, opening the scrapbook. Gene Minor materialized in her life under the most improbable circumstances, really, circumstances as improbable as he was. It was eight years ago. Courtney was forty-four, over the hill by anybody’s standards. And a little blue, to tell the truth. It was the first year that the kids were all gone, or mostly gone—they’d never live here again anyway, not in the way they had, though she’d keep their rooms just the same, of course, monuments to their happy childhoods. Courtney had always assumed she’d feel relieved at this point, free to devote herself to her various causes, to travel with her women friends—to paint, perhaps. Though she’d never had time, she’d always wanted to paint, and she certainly had a flair for color and design. Perhaps she’d go over and take some courses at NC State. What was it everybody said? You’ll have more time for yourself.

  Courtney had been wandering the house that day (“That fateful morning!” as Gene would deem it later) thinking about it. Her house, huge and silent, was in perfect order. It was Lucille’s day off, and Hawk had gone to Switzerland on bank business, or so he said. Courtney picked up the card that had been on her kitchen table for a week now, an invitation to her high school reunion. Jean, in charge of the food apparently, had left two messages begging them to go, not understanding that it was the kind of thing she’d never even mention to Hawk. But Hawk was gone.

  “ENCHANTMENT UNDER THE OCEAN”

  Class of 1963 Reunion and Prom Night

  Had a terrible time at the first one?

  Well, you’ve got another chance!

  Dress to impress.

  Volunteers needed to decorate.

  Call 939-0335.

  Well, Courtney had certainly had a bad time with, who was it? Pee Wee Raines, Lord only knows whatever happened to him. Now, she didn’t have anything else to do. Of course, she could go shopping, but she didn’t really need anything. Or she could go over to the club and slip into the Round Robin tennis gro
up. Or she could go to Dina’s for a manicure. Or she could just lie down here on this nice thick Oriental rug and scream her head off.

  The reedy voice which answered her call sounded oddly familiar. “Hey now,” it said.

  Courtney reconsidered. Then she said, “Hello, this is Courtney Ralston, and I’m calling about the reunion, I know I’m a little late, but—”

  “This is Courtney? Courtney Gray? Oh my God, be still my heart! Courtney Gray, as I live and breathe! I can’t believe it!” He sprang into her mind as fully as if he’d never left it for all those years—Gene Minor, that geeky boy. He used to make her laugh so hard in study hall that they’d both have to go to detention. He used to do those harelip readings from the English anthology: “Thith ith the forest primeval . . .”

  So that afternoon Courtney found herself driving over to Robertson Elementary, a little abandoned schoolhouse which was “being transformed absolutely as we speak,” according to Gene Minor on the phone. Inside, it was a time warp—the entrance hall with its institutional-green paint, its brown woodwork with coat hooks at intervals, its antique drinking fountain that Courtney would love to have out by her pool, actually. In the auditorium, several women were nailing fishnets full of blue balloons to the ceiling. One bald guy who looked vaguely familiar sat on a folding chair blowing up the balloons, while another man, on a ladder, installed a hanging mirror globe. Up on stage, a big man with long gray hair was making gold coins spill artfully out of a pirate chest onto a pink-sand beach. He wore a voluminous white shirt, thick glasses, and sweated profusely. “Right here,” he was saying to two boys who struggled out on the stage carrying what appeared to be a real palm tree in an enormous pot.