Duff liked to ride for hours with Wood in the pasture behind his house. There was a little creek beside a cluster of persimmon trees where they always made love while their horses looked on. They had laughed about how, when people made love in old movies, the camera always cut to horses running through a field. But their horses had actually watched them have sex. When she and Wood were done, they would lie on their backs and drink Dr. Mac’s brandy after warming the flask with their cigarette lighters. They loved lying around on the McIlmores’ back porch, reading their favorite books out loud, or going to the movies and discussing the characters afterward. They especially liked foreign films and many of the darker cinematic offerings, like A Clockwork Orange and Satyricon, which the others in the group had failed to appreciate. Brundidge had called them two of the worst damn movies he ever saw. And Milan had chimed in with her usual annoying bromide, “If you pay six-fifty for something, I just think it should make you feel good.”
Duff wasn’t an excitable person, but if she had been, Milan’s was the kind of cheerful idiocy that could drive her straight up the wall. That’s why Duff refused to join something called “the Pep Club.” Before Wood, Duff had never even attended a football game. Then she and Milan had both been nominated for homecoming royalty. And Duff had taken herself out of the running because she didn’t believe in competition. It wasn’t in Duff’s nature to be jealous or competitive. Even after her selfless gesture was widely misunderstood, Duff had never questioned the value of her own noble ideas. It wasn’t until much later, after years of disappointing returns, that she had finally begun to wonder if people don’t indeed have a competitive other, someone who spends a lifetime trying to edge them out, wishing them ill, rejoicing in their defeat. In Duff’s life, it looked like that person was and always would be Milan Lanier McIlmore.
Once, while waiting to be disciplined in the vice principal’s office, she had looked up Milan’s SAT scores. And what she found had shocked her. Milan’s scores were in the top twenty percent of the senior class. They were, in fact, just a few points lower than her own. It was unbelievable. Sure Milan made good grades, but that was just because she worked hard. The fact that she could spout such moronic drivel and still test almost as good as Duff—well, it didn’t make any more sense than Wood’s finally ending up with her.
Certainly, Milan had not been careless. She was the single most calculating person Duff had ever known. And forgetting to take birth control pills? Well, that was about as likely as Milan forgetting to put on her makeup. The actual act of not taking the pills, of trapping Wood into marrying her, was so clichéd and predictable only Milan would have failed to be embarrassed by it. It was like something out of one of her soap operas, whose characters she discussed with awe and reverence, as though they had sprung from novels. In Miss Delaney’s class, Milan had even written a term paper arguing that someone named Lisa Miller Hughes on As the World Turns was every bit as layered and worthy of literary recognition as Madame Bovary. Imagine such a person pretending to be Wood’s soul mate. Seducer was more like it. Always ready to be on her knees, with her perpetually moist eyes, which of course put a man in mind of the rest of her. Duff certainly understood Wood’s being vulnerable to all that. After all, she was a man’s woman herself. But the fact that Wood had entrusted his and Duff’s future to Milan’s integrity, that’s what was so unforgivable. How carelessly he had given away a mind so in tune with his own, along with the two long legs that wrapped around him with such ease and the silky voice that spoke of interesting things.
Yes, there had been a breakup. Wood had said some things he didn’t mean—words that could have been put right if Milan had played fair and a certain wild-ass sperm had been stopped at the circle that became the girl that the sleeping boy next to her was now going to marry. The same person who in all innocence had ruined his mother’s life. A soap opera of more tragic proportion than any of those Milan had succumbed to. It was, in fact, more akin to the Greek tragedies that filled the bottom right shelf of Wood’s parents’ den. She knew that shelf well because she had seen it from upside down when she and Wood had made love in there, too.
Duff pulled the little Toyota into a gas station and got out. Luke continued to sleep as she filled the car and went inside to pay. A little later, as they pulled away, she tossed a Stuckey’s pecan log in his lap. He woke up just long enough to eat his half and fell asleep again, exhausted from studying for exams. It was a ritual they had shared many times, driving on southern highways, eating the rich marshmallow and caramel-filled bar, playing the radio with their shoes off, one or the other asleep, never having to talk unless they felt like it. That’s the way it had always been between them.
When Luke was a baby, she had taken him everywhere. To dinner, to class, to California. She had carried him on her back and in her arms. And when she couldn’t afford a new baby carrier, she had lugged him around in her purse. Duff looked again at her boy for as long as the road would allow. In the late afternoon light, he looked even younger than his years. The way he looked sometimes when she stood beside his bed, having just come home between waitress shifts, to turn his lamp out or put the quilt back over him. Whatever had gone wrong in her life, he was the one good thing she could point to and say, “There. How ’bout that now? How about that?” No, she could never do anything to hurt him. This one good boy would be more than enough for a woman who’s made her share of bad calls. To have been young once herself, to have felt the promise of happiness, maybe that was almost as good as actually getting it. Anyway, she was sure her memories were better than anything she was going to come up with now.
Her parents, Dr. Jim and Susan Duffer, had doted on their only daughter, nicknaming her “Katrina.” “Duff” came later, as her own idea. The Duffers were as climbing and pretentious as the McIlmores were their relaxed, unassuming selves. They built a French château on the edge of town and then spent a fortune trying to make it look old. They imported a maid from El Salvador and insisted that she wear a uniform, something that was virtually unheard of in a small town, except maybe at Christmas.
Jim Duffer was a podiatrist, but when people came to the house, Susan always spoke in hushed, reverential tones about whether or not “Doctor is in” or “Please be quiet, Doctor is sleeping.” Wood’s dad had said, “The man scrapes feet for a living. You’d think he was upstairs discovering penicillin.” The Duffers were joiners, the king and queen of the country club, the first ones to have a theme party, be it hobo night, which involved dressing up like homeless people, or a Hawaiian luau, which involved Susan Duffer demonstrating the hula, which she had learned from her Polynesian massage therapist. For the Duffers, every day was an excuse to mix up a batch of dirty martinis and throw some two-inch steaks on the grill. On football weekends, they presided over twenty-five-hundred-dollar tailgate parties. By January, they were in Florida playing all the signature golf courses.
They were, in fact, having such a good time, one can only imagine their surprise when they learned that little Kathleen had stolen money from her father’s wallet and liberated the El Salvadoran maid, who used it to buy a bus ticket to Las Vegas. This was especially sticky for Dr. Jim, who had forgotten to pay the taxes on Martita’s wages. Then, as a teenager, Kathleen had eschewed her parents’ country-club membership, where she had been the first girl to lie around topless, in favor of hanging out at the municipal pool—where Wood and Brundidge and Jeter had made a point to swim on “Colored Day.” Duff passionately admired the McIlmores. She especially loved that Slim McIlmore had herded Wood and Brundidge and Jeter into her station wagon and driven them all the way to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, just to see the exact spot where Martin Luther King had been killed. She was ashamed that her own parents did not have that kind of social consciousness. Social consciousness? Hell, they were brain-dead. Hobo Night? If the Duffers had stopped to believe in anything, it would probably have been the notion that if you’re not doing well, it’s your own damn fault. That’s why Ji
m had so much trouble understanding why his daughter enjoyed hanging out at the old train station and playing her guitar for the winos. Even at fifteen, she had joined the line of cashiers and box boys picketing the Piggly Wiggly for higher wages. This caused a question to develop in Susan Duffer’s mind that she asked over and over again to anyone who would listen. “If you don’t work at the Piggly Wiggly, what business is it of yours what the employees are doing there?”
And that’s pretty much how it went for most of Kathleen’s adolescence. There was the time she invited migrant farm workers to the house when the Duffers were out of town. Miraculously, nothing had been stolen, but Jim Duffer was incensed that they had roasted a goat on his ten-thousand-dollar Jenn-Air grill. There was also an ugly penpal incident in which Kathleen’s parents hadn’t even known that she was writing to a man in prison, much less that she was up half the night reading his letters by candlelight in her closet. Kathleen had thought she might actually be in love with this person until the day he wrote that he was getting paroled in a few weeks and could not wait to see the smile on her face when he shoved his old army bayonet up her sweet ass. That was when she had been forced to tell her parents, who surprised her by acting just as scared as she was. This was the first time Kathleen had realized that mothers and fathers are no more brave than children, but are simply better actors.
Finally, mercifully, at seventeen, Wood had entered her life and Kathleen had become “Duff”—a mature, lighthearted, reasonable young woman. After seeing the relationship Wood had with his own parents, she desperately tried to emulate it with Jim and Susan. For their part, the Duffers bought their daughter an Arabian horse and English saddle so that she could ride over to the McIlmores in style. As far as they were concerned, Wood was as welcome in their home as Tom Collins. He was the prodigal son of a family that was at least as good as their own. Sure, as a kid, he had tried to integrate the city pool, but that was just his parents talking. The Duffers didn’t understand why the McIlmores didn’t drive better cars or why they refused to join the country club. Jim Duffer wasn’t buying that old excuse about them not joining because blacks and Jews were not admitted. He said Dr. Mac was just too cheap to pay the dues. Look how they put masking tape on an old clock radio instead of buying a new one. But the real mystery was all those books in every room of the McIlmore house. Hell, their whole house smelled like old books! Like a damn library! Susan Duffer had paid a small fortune for an expert artist to paint the classics on their own den wall—books that looked so real, you felt you could almost reach out and read one.
But overall, the Duffers would have laid down their own lives for the boy who had given them the daughter they always wanted. Sure, Kathleen had grown up some on her own, but it was Wood’s influence, his unerring steadiness and good sense that had finally overtaken their Katrina. It also didn’t hurt that on good days he could throw a football over fifty yards. They were already planning a hundred-thousand-dollar wedding in their minds when they heard of Wood’s betrothal to the brazen white-trash daughter of their garbage man—Florence or Rome or Milan or whatever the hell her name was. Jim and Susan were almost as inconsolable as Duff.
That’s why they decided not to say anything when she showed up from college a few weeks later with a young black man in tow. His name was Keith Walters and he was a talented assistant professor in the Graphic Arts Department at Emory. Duff was pleasantly surprised that she did not have to make the speech about racial acceptance she’d been rehearsing for days. And she was also puzzled to learn that he thought her parents were mildly amusing. Especially when Jim kept asking Keith how he had enjoyed that television program Roots. Keith’s inability to take offense at things mystified Duff. Even when they made love, and she insisted on always being on the bottom, he never got the significance or symbolism of her sacrifice. Duff had been thinking of ending their relationship on the day Elizabeth Marie McIlmore was born. Up until then, she had survived in a sort of dreamlike state where unwanted babies are never born. They are always on the way. A few days later, at Duff’s insistence, she and Keith eloped to Vermont, where interracial couples were treated with dignity and respect. That was when Jim and Susan Duffer made the painful decision to disown their only child. They had put up with a lot over the years. They had lost their maid, paid excessive taxes, posted bail, and obtained a restraining order against some Rastafarian convict pedophile. But they were not about to also end up with grandchildren the color of fried chicken. Now Kathleen was screwing with the purity of the Duffer family gene pool and this they would not allow.
They needn’t have worried. A few weeks later, Keith, who was homesick, had the marriage annulled and returned to Arkansas. Duff gathered her guitar and her paints and caught a ride with several artist friends to California. Over the next year, people in Paris told different stories about what she was up to. Someone had seen her selling her watercolors on the beach in Venice. Mavis got a card that she was a hostess at the Hard Rock Café. A friend in Santa Barbara sent Jim and Susan a picture of Duff from a national magazine. The caption read, “Record producer Ron Hurley and date attend a party for Billy Joel.” It wasn’t long before word got around Paris that Duff was living in an artist colony in Excelsior Springs, Arkansas, and dating a used-car salesman. People who heard this and knew Duff thought it sounded about right. Especially the part about her giving birth to this man’s son out of wedlock. The Duffers, who had moved to Florida, no longer supported their daughter. However, they did send a small check and some baby clothes for their grandson.
The new man in Duff’s life was Dennis Childs. Like his wife, Dennis was a dreamer. And an idea man. He had an idea for chocolate cola. And a bleacher cushion that unfolds into a rain tarp. And a CD containing all the birthday songs ever written. He also had the idea that no one should question his authority. Ever. He was the first male Duff had known since Wood who made her feel safe and protected. And he was adventurous like Wood, too. Especially the way he liked to have sex in strange places. Moments after they applied for their marriage license, he had stopped the elevator between floors at the Cabe County Courthouse, taken her panties off right there, turned her on her stomach and pounded her for a good long twenty minutes while everyone else cooled their heels. It was one of the most thrilling things Duff had ever had a man do. No one else had made her feel that way except Wood. And Wood could do it without stopping elevators. Wood, with his knee-wobbling charisma, could do it with just a look. Like the first time he had put his own dark eyes level with hers and said sincerely, “Kathleen, can I kiss you?” Of course, she wasn’t about to tell Dennis who his best side put her in mind of. She had already begun to notice that what had once seemed like strong male leadership was starting to look more like garden-variety bulliness. Like a lot of women, she had mistaken meanness for manliness.
It was around this time that Dennis hit Duff. Just a little at first. Then it got harder and more regular. Sometimes she gave as good as she got. But mostly the one who weighed two hundred pounds came out on top. It didn’t happen every day really, but over the years, as the money dwindled and tempers frayed, Duff had checked into various emergency rooms with a broken nose, a fractured wrist, and several cracked ribs. When Luke got old enough, he had stood up to his father, several times exchanging blows, which had further increased their estrangement. That and the fact that Luke now spent his summers with Jim and Susan Duffer, who lavished all the love they held in reserve for their daughter on their grandson.
By the time Luke left for college, Duff remembered just enough of the high-spirited girl she used to be that she decided to file for divorce. After that, Dennis Childs had only one idea left. And that was to get his wife back. He begged. He cried. He bought her gifts. He beat her up and bought her more gifts. But nothing seemed to work. By this time, Duff no longer believed in even the redemption of herself, much less anyone else. After Dennis left town with what little money they had, Duff took a job as a waitress at IHOP. Then she changed all the locks on her
doors and waited to see where life would lead her next. The next morning, her boy came home from college and announced he had met a girl from Paris—a girl he had fallen in love with and wanted to marry.
CHAPTER 14
It was Thanksgiving morning and Milan had already whipped through six outfits before deciding to go with her red Valentino sweater and matching pants. She was now standing in the middle of her country French farm kitchen, worrying that the calligraphy on the place cards wasn’t dark enough, and wondering if they had enough food. She remembered another Thanksgiving right after she and Wood were first married, when she had bought so many groceries, they ran out of places to put them all away. And Wood had stood behind her, holding her, and whispered in her ear, “You have to stop this. I promise, we’re never going to run out.”
Mavis was brushing her hot-pepper-jelly-and-bourbon marinade on two ducks roasting over a hearth rotisserie as Rudy presided over several other dishes. Milan slipped one of her newly manicured hands into a quilted mitt and opened one of the oven doors.
“Rudy, these rolls are just sitting there.”
Rudy pushed the door shut. “Trust me, they will rise.”
Mavis looked toward Milan. “Especially if you keep the damn door closed.”
Milan said, “Please don’t cuss. It’s Thanksgiving.”
Mavis spoke under her breath, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought we were gonna stop saying fuck, but keep saying damn.”
Then, noticing Milan’s interest, “I’m warning you. Stay away from my ducks.”
Elizabeth entered the kitchen. “They’re here!” Then she flew toward the front door.
Milan nervously straightened her sweater and patted her hair. “Okay, everybody just be calm. We’ll have cocktails in the den. Rudy, you circulate with the paté and bruschetta.” She turned to Mavis. “Do I look all right?”
Liberating Paris Page 14