Tell Me a Story

by Cassandra King Conroy

  * * *

  As time went on I didn’t ask Pat about his other relationship because it not only made me feel bad, I didn’t really want to know. I cringed the next time he brought it up, but he said he was trying to be honest, not exactly what he did best. He started off poorly by telling me that he’d canceled so many get-togethers with her that he’d run out of excuses. “And you want me to help you come up with some new ones?” I said, trying not to sound too sarcastic.

  Pat flinched. “I just feel like such a jerk.”

  Because I’d been in his shoes I felt for him, but I also knew better than to say anything one way or the other. If he truly wanted to break things off, then he wasn’t doing her any favors by staying in. It seemed like the least he could do was come clean and admit he wasn’t ready for a serious relationship. I didn’t suggest it, though, determined to stay out of the whole thing. It was a situation only he could work out, no matter what.

  But I had wondered how he explained his absences in the last few months to someone he’d been seeing before I came into the picture. Several of Pat’s friends would tell me later that he was incapable of a clean break with anyone. His pattern was to simply disappear and leave the poor woman to wonder what on earth happened. Pat inadvertently verified that by telling me he’d had so much trouble ending his relationships that he’d sworn to never start another one. The whole thing made me uncomfortable but bemused. Why was he telling me that? Anytime he wanted to end ours, all he had to do was bugger off. I certainly had no intention of tracking the dummy down if he disappeared on me.

  Pat’s old buddy Cliff Graubart told me that after Pat’s breakup with the woman in California (the one he’d planned to marry once his divorce went through), the woman called Cliff numerous times looking for Pat, who’d abruptly cut off all contact with her. He wouldn’t return her frantic calls or answer her letters. (According to Pat’s version of the story, their parting of ways had been mutual.) “Sounds like she failed to get the memo,” I said dryly to Cliff, who threw his hands up in exasperation. “That’s Pat for you” was his astute assessment.

  The memo I got on hearing this was loud and clear, however. I’d finally gotten myself out of a toxic relationship and had no business getting into another one. Pat might be lovable and a lot of fun to be with, but it was obvious that he could also be a real pain in the ass. I heard the stories of his failed relationships as cautionary tales, to be ignored at my own risk.

  The funny thing was, I still didn’t know where he and I stood. Despite his frequent visits, our trips together, the gifts he brought me, and his almost-nightly calls, I couldn’t figure out what was going on with us, much less with his other entanglement. At that point, I wasn’t even sure how I felt about him. No question that his mixed signals kept me from getting too emotionally involved; it’s certainly easier to remain detached when you can’t read the other person. I adored Pat, enjoyed our time together immensely, and felt a strange kind of peace when we were together. But how did I feel about him? I suppose I was like the teenaged Emily, the character in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, when asked by her new boyfriend how she feels about him. Emily gives it careful consideration before responding. “I think about you, George,” she says earnestly, “as one of those people who . . . I think about.”

  No question, however, that things had changed between us since New Orleans. Some of our conversations and notes to each other could even be called mushy. Pat called me one time when he knew I was in class just to leave a message: “I have absolutely no reason for calling you, King-Ray. I just wanted to hear your voice on the answering machine.” When he came to Gadsden, he started arriving on Wednesday evening, stayed at my place to write while I was teaching the next day, and left late Sunday afternoon. One time he stayed until Monday and left shortly after I did early that morning. I got home late that night to find shrimp salad for my supper, a bottle of wine, and a short note: “King-Ray the stingray . . . being with you was a life-changing experience.”

  Now what did that mean? I wondered. Life-changing in what way, pray tell? Another time on the phone he told me that he was often accused of giving mixed signals and putting up all sorts of barriers to intimacy. I laughed and said, “You think?” His response was “So I can’t tell you how I feel about you. If I do, I’ll be too embarrassed to ever face you again.”

  No wonder I was confused. Shrugging it off, I coped by doing what I did best. I went into full Helen Keller mode, kept my mouth shut, and just enjoyed the ride. It would either work out or it wouldn’t, I reminded myself. Either way, it was certainly a fascinating journey.

  Despite my laissez-faire attitude, Pat’s inability to make a clean break with his other relationship caused a couple of miscues with our plans for me to visit him in South Carolina that summer. I couldn’t imagine how difficult the daylong drive was on him, but my teaching schedule had made it almost impossible for me to make the trip instead. Even so, I was willing to give it a try, I was so curious to see where he lived, the places he’d described to me and talked so much about. I’d never been to Beaufort, the picturesque little town closest to Pat’s Fripp Island home. A few days after our New Orleans trip, he called to cancel my tentative visit because the other woman had surprised him by showing up. She had some relatives visiting her who loved his books and wanted to meet him. “Guess it’d be better if you came another weekend,” Pat said sheepishly. I refrained from reminding him that he’d been the one to invite me, not the other way around. “No biggie,” I said instead. “We’ll try another time.”

  Ironically, another male writer I knew only casually had asked me to go to a bluegrass festival with him in Tennessee that same weekend. I hadn’t returned his call because of my tentative trip to South Carolina, but I called back to say I’d love to go. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. I continued to go out with other guys occasionally, though I still hated everything about dating. Looking back, I’m not sure why I did it. Except when I was with Pat, I was fidgety and couldn’t wait to get home. It’s where I preferred to be, home and at work on my new book, vicariously leading a rodeo parade on a golden palomino.

  * * *

  Despite my big talk and even bigger resolve, Pat and I kept getting closer. The problem was, we just plain liked each other and liked being together. Even while I was telling myself not to get involved, something began to shift in our relationship without my being able to articulate what it was, or why it was happening. Although it made no sense, everything kind of fell into place when we were together. Apart, we stayed busy and went on with our lives; together, neither of us felt the need to be anywhere else.

  Finding the time to be together, though, was another matter. Pat was determined that I visit him on Fripp Island, but the summer was halfway over before we could make it happen. As if my class schedule and Pat’s other entanglement hadn’t complicated our plans enough, family matters threw other obstacles our way. Late in the previous spring, Pat’s dad had been diagnosed with colon cancer, about the same time that my ex-husband had. I’d stayed with my ex in the hospital during his surgery and visited him after his release whenever I could. By that time, the animosity between us had dissipated, as those things tend to do, and we were getting along. Meanwhile, Pat had brought his dad to Beaufort for treatment. Pat’s youngest sister, who lived in Beaufort, was a nurse and could help care for their father. That whole summer, Conroy relatives from far and near flooded Pat’s house on Fripp Island for visits with the ailing patriarch. I didn’t want to come during that time. Although it wasn’t stated, I knew Pat wasn’t quite ready to introduce me to his family. We weren’t there yet. Where we were, neither of us could’ve said, nor did we try to. Pat slipped away to Gadsden when he could, and we were content with whatever stolen moments we found.

  My first visit to Fripp Island came about in early August. I’d barely begun my eight-hour drive to South Carolina when I wondered if the gods were trying to tell me something. After driving through thunderstorms and torren
tial rains the entire trip, I got disoriented and ended up halfway to Hilton Head. A friend had given me my first-ever “car phone,” but I couldn’t make the blamed thing work. When I drove onto Fripp Island much later than expected, the pouring rain made it so dark that I saw nothing of the famed scenery. I arrived bedraggled, hungry, and exhausted. When I climbed the steps to the front porch, drenched, I saw that Pat had left a vase of white roses by the door with a welcome note taped to it. Or so I assumed. The rain had left the note a soggy, unreadable glob, the roses drooping.

  Having no way to call me, Pat had decided by midnight that I wasn’t coming and gone to bed. I entered the house carrying the vase of wet roses and my suitcase, only to be greeted by a sight that would become familiar in the years to come—not just to me but to other visitors to the Fripp house. In his own home, Pat saw no reason to stand on ceremony. His only concession to the presence of houseguests was to put on his drawers when he made an appearance after bedtime. Hearing a guest arriving late, Pat had no qualms about venturing out of the bedroom to say hello. I can still see him coming down the dark hallway in his boxer shorts; barefoot, bare chested, and calling out a hearty welcome.

  It was our first time together with Pat as host, a role he was born to play. He couldn’t wait to show me his favorite place on earth. I’d been to the general area many years before; once to Charleston with my parents, then later with my former husband and the boys on vacations in Savannah. But I’d never seen the Lowcountry with the Prince of Tides. “The only way to see Fripp Island,” Pat told me on my first morning there, “is by golf cart. And wear your swimsuit because when it gets hot we’ll take a dip in the Atlantic to cool off.”

  On the grand tour, Pat pointed out all the things he’d been telling me about during our conversations over the past two years. I finally saw where he swam every day, where he walked on the beach, and where he went for the best sightings of osprey nests. Enchanted, I drank in the wild beauty of Fripp Island as though it were nectar offered from the cup of God. Accessible only by bridge or boat, Fripp is a private residential island that doesn’t have the feel of a resort. Low-key instead of posh and ritzy as I’d expected (and feared), it’s a tropical paradise: lush, verdant, and dense with saw palmettos, towering palms, and spreading oaks. On Fripp you’ll see weather-beaten cottages rather than columned mansions. Like most of the other dwellings there, Pat’s house was so well hidden by moss-hung oaks and oleander that I’d driven past it twice the night before.

  Later, folks would tell me that they were surprised by how modest Pat’s Fripp house was. Modest it might have been, but it was also cozy and welcoming, a comfortable, low-slung bungalow the color of driftwood. I soon discovered that alligators lurked in the dank waters of the lagoon in the backyard when they weren’t sunning themselves on the banks, just a few feet from the house. Fripp’s a virtual game preserve. Herds of deer roam around the island as tame as house pets. In the low-hanging branches of trees growing by the lagoon, dozens of snowy egrets perched, which made the trees appear to be laden with giant white blossoms. At some invisible signal the egrets raise their wings gracefully and soar away together, a wondrous sight that took my breath away the first time I saw it.

  The following night on Fripp couldn’t have been more different than my first one. The rain had gone, and a full moon hung high in an ink-dark sky. On a lark, Pat proposed that we swim in the Atlantic in the moonlight. Although we’d already been swimming at sunset—the water we swam in a fierce pink—we pulled on our soggy suits and headed out again. The island was bathed in moonlight, bright enough to light our sandy path down to the beach. We had it to ourselves, but I just wanted to sit on the shore and stare in awe.

  The full moon left such a startling expanse of silver on the gently rolling waves of the dark ocean that I sat watching it spellbound, not wanting to move. The only sound was the splash of the waves on the shore. Pat plopped down beside me and placed an arm around me to shield me from the strong, chill wind. “How could anyone see this and not believe in God?” he said in a low voice.

  I shook my head and leaned into him. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

  “Thank you for coming,” he said simply. “I love having you with me.”

  We must’ve stayed that way for an hour, neither of us daring to break the spell by talking. Finally Pat nudged me. “Ah, King-Ray? Could you move your lovely ass over a bit? My arm’s numb.”

  With a laugh, I jumped up, ran headlong into the surf, and dived in. Surfacing, I called out, “Is this far enough for you?”

  He lumbered to his feet groaning. “I didn’t mean for us to actually get in the damn water. It’s cold out here.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said. “But when’s the last time you went swimming in moonbeams?”

  On our golf cart ride back home, Pat told me another of his stories, reminding me of our time in the pool in New Orleans when he kept me entertained with tale after tale of his life. His story that night came about after I tried to get him to turn around so I could retrieve a beach towel I’d left on the sands. He shrugged it off, saying it’d be there the next day. “But what if someone gets it?” I cried. “That’s a really nice towel, Pat.” It was his, not mine, but I couldn’t believe he’d blow off something so obviously expensive. The beach towel I’d brought with me was a Kmart special I’d had for years.

  He let out a weary sigh. “Oh God. Not you too. I might’ve known.”

  “Known what?” I asked, wary.

  It was a Conroy thing, he explained. Not too long ago, his brother Jim had come up with the Conroy version of one of Aesop’s fables. Everyone, Jim observed, was by nature either extravagant or thrifty—in other words, each of us was either a grasshopper or an ant. In the fable the industrious ant was busy storing up for winter while the grasshopper fiddled and frolicked and frittered away his resources. According to Jim, most Conroys were ants. Jim and his brother Mike, both ants, had married outside their species by hooking up with grasshoppers. Their sister Kathy was an ant married to an ant; while brother Tim and sister Carol were ants with their provisions and grasshoppers with other people’s.

  “You, my dear,” Pat said with a glance my way, “are obviously an ant. I’ve never met an ant who wasn’t proud and pious about it. You’ll fit right in with my family.”

  “And what are you?” I teased.

  “Now what do you think? Unlike you stingy, miserly ants hoarding your last dime in your tight little fists, we grasshoppers are life-affirming, Zorba-like creatures. My family calls me the Jurassic Grasshopper.”

  * * *

  It was early fall before Pat and I arrived at the point where fate seemed to have been taking us all along. During the summer Pat’s other relationship had ended as amiably as he’d hoped, and now ours was out in the open. The next time I came to Fripp I met Pat’s closest friends there, Gregg and Mary Smith. On my first visit Pat had intercepted Gregg at the door but not invited him in, which hadn’t fooled Gregg one bit. “I guarantee you that son of a bitch has got a new woman with him,” Gregg had reported to Mary, who told me later. Why would Pat hide a new love interest from them? Mary had asked her husband, since they hardly knew the other one. Gregg’s response was “Why does that crazy fuck do anything he does?” Gregg had been at The Citadel with Pat and knew him well.

  One bright day we took off for a picnic on Pat’s boat, aptly named the Grasshopper, with the Smiths and another couple, friends of theirs visiting from Georgia. Although our picnic was mostly liquid—a choice of either vodka tonics or Bloody Marys with pickled onions instead of celery sticks—no one got soused, which might have saved our lives. With Gregg at the helm, we boated for hours, basking in the warmth of the sun and strong salt breezes. We were in the middle of the St. Helena Sound, a few miles from Fripp, when a dark cloud formed overhead. In the hands of an experienced skipper (Gregg ran the marina in town), we nonchalantly headed back toward Fripp.

  The marina at Fripp was in sight when the bottom fell out. Ligh
tning flashed around us as a sudden squall blew in and turned the water we’d just peacefully floated on as wild as a tempest. The Grasshopper was a good-sized boat, but the squall tossed it around like it was a toy. Huge angry waves splashed over the sides and soaked us. Squealing, Mary and her friend Becky grabbed for the picnic items, which were rolling all over the place. From his perch near Gregg, Pat yelled at me to hang tight, which I was doing with both hands. Maybe it was hysteria, but each time a wave—the water was now freezing cold—sloshed over me, I screamed with laughter. The wilder it got, the more I howled. Evidently it was contagious. By the time we’d reached the dock, Mary Smith and I were bent double with laughter. None of the guys were able to join in, as they were working frantically to get us safely docked. By the time that was accomplished, the rain had stopped. It hardly mattered then since we couldn’t have been any more soaked.

  Safely ashore, we all laughed and hugged one another in relief. When we posed for pictures, Mary and I bent over to turn our wet rear ends to the camera. In the midst of a storm, I’d found a soul sister, my first Lowcountry girlfriend.

  The storm seemed like nothing compared to what happened when we got back to the house. Few things have ever caught me so completely off guard. Even though Pat and I had wrapped in towels on the golf cart ride home, we were still dripping wet when we entered the house. My teeth were chattering as both of us rushed toward the shower. He headed to the master bedroom while I opted for the one closest to the guest bedroom. When I passed by Pat in the hall, he paused to smile down at me. He was looking at me so intently that I said, “What?”

  “I just want you to know, King-Ray,” he said in a tone I’d never heard before, “that I love you. I think I’ve loved you from the first time we met.”

  “I love you too,” I mumbled as I ran into the bathroom. Leaning against the door, I closed my eyes and took a deep, trembling breath. Did we just say what I think we said? Oh God. What on earth will we do now?