The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  “What friend? What’s he talking about? Did somebody die?” Catherine finally stands up and turns to Russell.

  “Yeah. It was Mr. Stone, you know, the old guy who’s always out at the bar. I introduced you, right?”

  Catherine nods. She comes around the chair and takes Russell’s arm. He looks terrible. “What happened?”

  “Heart attack,” Russell says. “I was right there, sitting at the bar with him. Shit, baby, it was awful. Everything you ever thought about a heart attack, it’s true. It’s all true. In spades. Except it’s even worse than you can possibly imagine.” Russell follows her out of the Grand Saloon. “It’s so gross. So undignified. They strip you, they stick stuff on you, they stick other stuff in you, they hit you . . . Jesus. It’s the end, the absolute end, of privacy.” Russell is fanatic about his privacy, he hates to have strangers in his house. Hell, he even hates to have friends in his house. He holds on to Catherine’s elbow going down the Grand Staircase, then along the corridor. She stops in front of their stateroom door and fumbles in her purse for the key. Russell encircles her waist from behind and buries his face in her lemony hair. He closes his eyes. “Mr. Stone was fucking dead, honey,” he tells her. He breathes in deeply, raggedly. “Russell—,” Catherine starts to say when suddenly Russell’s dick rises up out of this long weird confusing scary day, rises of its own accord to push insistently against Catherine’s soft butt in the denim skirt. “Ready Freddy,” he says, making a joke. He had a girlfriend one time who called it Mr. Happy. His hands move up to her breasts.

  “Russell!” Catherine pushes his hands down and breaks away from him. She goes to stand at the window, looking out. Right now they’re fairly close to a densely wooded island with an old boat wrecked on its muddy half-moon beach. Bleached wooden ribs curve out from the boat’s rounded spine, like bones. The mud looks pretty good there, actually, around the wreck. Dense, dark, clay-ey. Suddenly Catherine knows exactly how it would feel to scoop up a handful and squeeze it through her fingers. This was where she started making things, on the riverbank at the river house, long ago. Figures—little people and animals, some real and some not real, bowls, plates, a tiny perfect pitcher. She wonders whatever happened to that tiny pitcher. It was just her and Wesley then, wasn’t it, just her and Wesley in the river house before it all got started, periods cramps boys dates birth babies, the works. Oh God, before Wesley left her and then suddenly somehow Catherine got surrounded by all these other people. Husbands, children, grandchildren, friends—where did all these people come from is what she’d like to know.

  “Honey,” Russell says. He’s looking at her. He holds out his arms. He looks drunk, disheveled, pathetic. But he gets it now. Something’s wrong. “Baby, come here. Just come over here to your old man, I won’t do anything you don’t want me to, you know that.” Crossing the room, Catherine feels like she’s underwater or like she’s a girl in a dream. “Yeah. Just let me hold you like this.” He strokes her wild hair. “Baby, what’s the matter? What the fuck is wrong with you anyway?”

  Catherine takes a deep breath and lets it go. “Oh Russell, I’ve got this lump in my breast, see, feel it, it’s right here. I just found it yesterday, and I’ve been feeling so weird ever since—” The dam crumbles, the water rushes through.

  “Where? This? Oh Jesus, oh my God, you’re right. Oh honey, oh baby, oh my love. But why didn’t you tell me?” He pulls back to look at her face. “Catherine? Why didn’t you tell me immediately?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I guess, I didn’t—I didn’t want to spoil your trip” though that’s not the real reason, Catherine knows.

  “Oh, fuck! I give up. Mary Bernice would be proud of you for once, you’re finally turning into her. My trip? My trip? Oh Jesus.” He folds Catherine up in his arms where for the first time in days she feels like herself again, and this is Russell after all, her old buddy, her old flame, her old man. Whatever was she thinking? But it’s all about holding back and letting go, isn’t it? Pulling apart and getting back together, keeping and giving, on and on, that’s the way it works, that’s the real story, and there’s no beginning and no end to it either.

  “We’ll get the best doctors,” Russell says. “We can go to the Mayo Clinic, Houston, anyplace you want. We’ll go straight to the top.” The irony of this is not lost on Russell, of course: the hypochondriac’s wife gets cancer, the fire chief’s house burns down. He imagines the Big Guy up there getting a real chuckle out of this one. Shit head.

  “Hush, I’m sure Birmingham will be just fine, and we can’t do anything about it until Monday morning anyway.” Catherine seems like her old practical self again. “Also, it might be a cyst, or it might be benign, or—who knows? Let’s wait and see. Anyway, whatever it is, they’ll get it, I’m sure. They can almost always take care of breast cancer these days.” It’s the first time she has named it.

  “Well, they’d better. Because I can’t fucking live without you, you know that, don’t you? Baby?”

  “Yes,” Catherine says, “yes,” again, as he pulls her T-shirt over her head and throws it down on the bed. The stateroom fills up with sunset. Now she wants him. She wants him terribly, and for a drunk guy, he does fine. Then he wraps one leg around her legs and hugs her tight all over. This is his sweet Catherine, the one he loves. “Buddies?” he asks. “Buddies,” she says, the last thing Russell hears before he falls instantly, deeply asleep, mouth still open, snoring slightly.

  Catherine sits up on one elbow. She pushes his heavy leg off her. She looks up from the sleeping man beside her to watch the sun make its fiery trail across the water straight to their window, a shining path so wide and straight that she imagines stepping out onto it and walking across the water and into the trees on the other side. She imagines the mud and the vines and flowers, and the smell of honeysuckle and rotting fish. She knows exactly how it would be there. She looks down to stroke his cheek.

  Mile 128.0

  Bonnet Carre, Louisiana

  Friday 5/14/99

  1640 hours

  WHAT A NUISANCE—everything except hand luggage has to be packed and set out in the hall before bedtime, so Courtney might as well do it now, before dinner. And speaking of dinner, she’ll have to get a picture of the whole group tonight. Maybe she can get Bridget to snap it, so she can be in the picture, too. Actually, it’s just as well that this trip is finally almost over, in Courtney’s opinion—for her, the whole point of it was to have a stolen weekend in New Orleans with Gene. She takes the new baby-doll pajamas out of the drawer, hesitates, then buries her face in the emerald green silk. Never worn, never will be. She thinks she ought to feel good about her decision, but she does not. On impulse, she reaches for the phone and sits down on the bed to call Gene one last time.

  “Ay-up,” he says in some sort of cowboy voice, you never know what he’s up to.

  “Gene, it’s me. Courtney.”

  “Why, yes it is!” He sounds much cheerier than she would have thought. He’s supposed to be brokenhearted.

  “What are you doing?” she asks, with a sudden stabbing desire to picture him there in his crazy house.

  “Oh, nothing much, you know me. Just been out in the yard racing these two wisteria vines. I started one on each side of the trellis by the pond. So far the left one is ahead, but I’ve got my money on the right.”

  It’s just like Gene Minor to be totally involved in something nobody else would give a damn about.

  “Actually,” he goes on in that oddly cheery, manly tone, “I’m so glad it’s you. I was just going to try to call that WATERCOM number and leave you a message to call me.”

  “Yes?” Courtney’s heart leaps up to her throat. So he’s changed his mind, after all! Everything else falls away. But what if she can’t change her airline reservation back again? A lady doesn’t care what it costs. At least she’s still got the room, she’ll tell Harriet she can’t use it after all. She won’t even try to offer an explanation, she’ll just let Harriet think that the reser
vation got inadvertently screwed up somehow. Never apologize, never explain. Just talk real sweet and you can have whatever you want. She says, “Gene, honey, I’m so glad you’ve changed your mind.”

  “Whoa, baby,” he says immediately. “Who says I changed my mind? I was just thinking, though, that since I’ve already got my nonrefundable ticket and you’ve got a room you’re not using, I might just fly down to New Orleans anyway and meet Rosalie.”

  “What?”

  “Rosalie.” He sounds pleased as punch with himself. “You know, I told you, Rosalie Hungerheart. Incidentally you were right, it’s not really Hungerheart, it’s Patterson. Anyway, she lives in Atlanta and she’s got all these frequent flyer miles saved up and she’s never been to New Orleans either.”

  “No! You can’t do this to me, I’ll cancel the room—”

  “Then meet me, babe. Last chance—my way or the highway. I don’t care where we stay. Just meet me and go back home with me and be my love and we will all the pleasures prove. You know I’ve always loved you, ever since I was a lad.”

  Courtney is trying to breathe. “No,” she finally says.

  “What a shame then, what a fucking shame.” Gene sounds old and tired. “You’re just not up to it, are you?”

  “Gene, you know that’s not it, you know I have to . . .” But Courtney feels both furious and foolish, with none of the resolve she had felt in the church at St. Francisville.

  Click.

  “Gene!” she cries into the phone, then click, then buzz, then nothing.

  Mile 130.2

  Killona Landing

  Friday 5/14/99

  1700 hours

  ANNA STEALS A GLANCE at her little jeweled travel clock. Oh no—what has happened to the afternoon? After a week of furious work, she has almost finished The Louisiana Purchase.

  Though she should start getting ready for dinner now, especially if she really intends to shampoo her hair, she just can’t bring herself to stop writing. She takes the last miniature Nestlé Crunch from its blue wrapper and pops it into her mouth. She crumples the cellophane bag and tosses it into the wastebasket. She can’t quit now.

  Propelled by a sudden sense of urgency too strong to ignore, Jade throws the gold pen down onto Jean St. Pierre’s huge mahogany desk. She jumps to her feet, scattering the contracts.

  “Darling! What’s the matter?” Alarm gathers in Jean’s penetrating blue eyes.

  “Ooh! I just don’t know—I have this feeling—” Jade presses her hands to her heaving breast. “I can’t really explain it. It’s just the most powerful sense of—of—”

  “Here, my love.” Swiftly he has rounded the desk and pressed her back down into the leather chair, while four lawyers and his secretary look on in surprise. “Some water for the lady, please,” he barks, and the secretary races out to obtain it.

  He strokes her hair. “Now, Jade, you do realize that these contracts must be signed today, right now in fact, if we are to have the financial backing of the powerful Japanese firm Unagi in developing our island—”

  “Jean, stop it! Just—quit—patting me!”

  Obviously embarrassed, Jean stands back up and straightens his power tie. “Women are often emotional at times like these,” he remarks to all.

  “I am not emotional! It’s just—I just—” Jade closes her eyes and sways slightly in her chair. Deep in her ears she can hear the faint melody of an old fiddle tune, her grandmother’s favorite, “Jole Blon.” In her mind’s eye she sees an old-fashioned couple waltzing across the wide bare floor of an ancient wooden house . . . Jade rubs her fists in her eyes and stands again, clutching her purse to her chest. “I’m sorry,” she blurts. “I can’t sign these contracts right now, there’s something else I have to do first. I’ll sign them later. Please excuse me.” Then before anyone can stop her, she has bolted for the door and run across the parking lot and down the grassy bank to the dock where Jean St. Pierre’s sleek motor launch sits glistening in the sun. Jade leaps aboard despite her stiletto heels. She turns the key and the engine roars to life. The Playboy key chain dangles from the lock as the Mermaid heads into the bay. Back on shore, Jean St. Pierre jumps up and down in fury like a puppet in a Punch and Judy show.

  Jade points the bow into the waves and races toward the island. She cannot help but notice the gray clouds that have suddenly appeared from nowhere it seems, rolling across the horizon toward her at alarming speed. Now the sun is obscured and the wind picks up. Waves slap against the boat. Jade kicks off her shoes and holds on to the wheel with both hands. Soon she is drenched with spray, her white silk blouse all but transparent in the gathering gloom. Lightning flashes. Thunder rolls. The boat rides up and down the troughs of enormous waves. And yet—despite the fearsome noise of the storm—she can still hear the fiddle tune in her mind, ever more clearly.

  At last! Through the curtain of rain, she spies the island. Fighting the wheel, she maneuvers the launch into Frenchman’s Bayou and cruises up to the rotting pier of her grandmother’s house. Now the song is ringing in her ears! Quickly she secures the boat as best she can and climbs out, heading for the house, tripping and falling as pesky vines grab at her feet. At last she reaches the wide balcony, crosses it, and pushes at the old cypress door.

  “Ma cherie!” Adrian Batiste drops his fiddle and leaps forward to cover her wet face and her throat with his burning kisses—the kisses she has secretly wanted ever since the first day she laid eyes on him. Even the furor of the raging storm outside is muted by the rising music—music, music everywhere, as Adrian takes Jade in his arms and waltzes her across that old pine floor.

  There! Anna throws down her pen. She stands and stretches, as stiff and sore as if she had just run a marathon, which—in a way—she has. The world comes back; she hears voices in the corridor outside her door. It must be dinnertime already. She’ll have to forgo that shampoo but it doesn’t really matter anyway, does it? She can always put her hair up. Tonight she’ll wear the jungle dress, with ivory combs in her hair, very Heart of Darkness. She unbuttons her pink dressing gown and throws it across the bed, then crosses to the mirror in her rose satin panties and bustier to pin up her hair for a quick bath.

  “Oh, Miss Trethaway! I thought you would have already gone to dinner! Pardon me—” Huckleberry drops his tray to the floor with a resounding crash. “Oh my gosh! I’m so sorry—” He falls to his knees and starts scrambling after the china and silver, which has spilled everywhere.

  Anna grabs her robe and slips it around her shoulders, but not before—she hopes—he has seen her enormous breasts. Boys like breasts. She clutches the robe at her neck in a show of primness. “Here, now, get up—you can just come back later to get those things and straighten the room up.” Finishing a book always makes her feel sexy.

  “Later?” But Huckleberry stands up immediately, an obedient boy, a puppet. The red blush under those tan freckles is adorable. He gulps for air. “Actually, I’ve been trying to get up the nerve to talk to you for the whole trip,” he says. “I mean, I’ve been wanting to really talk to you, ma’am.”

  “My name is Anna.” She takes his sweaty hand. “And I’ve been wanting to really talk to you, too.” She loosens her robe just the slightest bit. “Tell me all about yourself.”

  His Adam’s apple quivers. “Of course I know who you are. We all know who you are. And I know I’m not supposed to bother you. But I wanted to tell you—I’m a writer, too. I just got my M.F.A. from Florida State, and my thesis was a novel which I’m revising right now so I can submit it for publication. I don’t want to impose or anything, but I was wondering if you might have a minute to look at my query letter and my synopsis and maybe the first chapter, that’s all, just to see what you think before I send them off, a professional opinion, you know, I’d really appreciate it.” Huckleberry pats the pocket of his uniform, why, he’s actually got the envelope with him, the little polecat! He smooths it out on his knee.

  Anna stands up. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t do t
hat,” she says crisply. “My agent doesn’t allow me to look at any manuscripts—or synopses or any letters—,” she adds. “In fact, he strictly forbids it, on pain of death. That way, no one can ever accuse me of stealing an idea, and this is something that comes up frequently in my field, you’d better believe it. So if you’ll excuse me, I am—as you see—late for dinner.”

  “Oh, sure, oh yes ma’am. I’m sorry!” Huckleberry stands up, too, folding the pages furiously, jamming them back down into his jacket pocket. “I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  “You haven’t bothered me a bit, you silly boy,” Anna says from the bathroom door with a brilliant smile. How could she ever have been so foolish? So—so deluded. Why he’s young enough to be her own son, her own little baby . . . “And you can just clean up all that mess later, when I’m not here. Good luck with your work, and now—adieu.” She flutters her fingers at him, then closes the mirrored bathroom door and sinks back against it until she has slid all the way down to the floor where she sits propped up like a rag doll with her fist pressed against her mouth.

  Mile 109.0

  Waggaman Light

  Friday 5/14/99

  2100 hours

  HARRIET GOES INTO her stateroom and kicks off her heels, feeling under the edge of the bed with her toes for her sandals. There. That’s better. She crosses over to the mirror and stands in front of it and looks at herself still wearing the Mardi Gras beads—three shiny strands, one purple, one green, one gold—over her white sundress. Actually, they become her. But the last dinner was strange, definitely strange, in spite of the excellent New Orleans food and the determined Mardi Gras gaiety that the staff was trying so hard to create. Anna didn’t even show up; nor did Russell. Catherine just smiled when they asked her about him. “Oh, he’s all right. He’s still napping. He’ll join us later, I’m sure.” Catherine had a certain Mona Lisa gravity about her at dinner, striking long gray hair pulled back into a knot at the nape of her neck. She was less talkative than usual, though, and Courtney, too, seemed out of sorts, edgy and abstracted.