Liberating Paris

by Linda Bloodworth Thomason

  Mary Paige put an arm around Mavis’s waist. Mavis swallowed hard, not yet knowing what her courage would someday cost them all.

  Brundidge was getting dressed for his date with Charlotte Rampling. He had decided to go with his black Tommy Bahama pullover, an oxford shirt, and jeans with Bally loafers because it all looked good with his tan dress coat. Cake handed him his burgundy houndstooth scarf as she fanned the air. “Dad, that perfume.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Too much.”

  “Okay, well, get a washrag and get some of it off.”

  She went into the bathroom as Brundidge said to Lily, who was now on the bed, “Don’t sit on Daddy’s scarf, babe. I may still wear that one.” He crossed and retrieved it. Cake came back out and patted his neck and chin with the wet cloth.

  “Thank you, pancake.”

  He held up both scarves and asked them to choose. They picked the red one. He put it on, then clapped his hands. “Okay. Let’s have it. Daddy’s gotta go.”

  They ran to him, kissing his cheeks. “That’s my girls. Whoa, that’s good sugar!”

  Brundidge’s teenage niece, Deanne, came and watched at the door. “You mind your cousin, now. And I want you both in bed by nine.” Then he said to Deanne, “Remember, you gotta check ’em for flashlights ’cause they’ll stay up and read all night if you let ’em.”

  They were passing through the living room as Lily caught up with him and opened her hand. “Daddy, breath mints!”

  Brundidge took the little roll from her. “Whoa! Can’t forget that. Thank you, baby.” Then he kissed them all again and went out the door, calling back, “Don’t get Popsicles on the rug now. Eat ’em over the sink.”

  He was standing in the lobby of the Sam Peck hotel. And Charlotte Rampling was walking toward him. She was short, with a pretty, round face, plush lips, and glasses. Her brown hair was smooth and shiny and she was dressed completely in black. She wasn’t what he was expecting, but overall, he was pleased, smiling. Then she said, “My God, you’re bald! I can’t believe it. Every man I go out with is bald!” She shook her head. “It’s like I have some kind of hairless date destiny.”

  Brundidge stood frowning at her. Then he said, “That’s it? That’s your opening line? ’Cause if you’re feeling like you blew it, I’m willing to let you go back and get off the elevator again.”

  She didn’t laugh. An hour later they were sitting in a booth at Uncle Ned’s Barbecue in Little Rock. Charlotte had hardly touched her food. Brundidge ordered two more margaritas and then turned to her. “See, here’s the deal. I know you like those ribs. But you’re so invested in, I don’t know, your own superiority, that you won’t eat them.”

  “How would my not eating ribs make me superior?”

  “Oh, come on. It’s that whole conversation we had about New York and Arkansas and how you should come down here and eat barbecue. I just can’t believe you went to all this trouble just to show me that you don’t like it.”

  “Here’s a newsflash.” She leaned toward him and said, sincerely, “I don’t like it.”

  He regarded her for a moment, disbelieving. “Well, then, you’re evil. You’re the devil’s spawn. Because there’s no way in the world someone wouldn’t like this if they were a normal person. Seriously, there’s somethin’ deep within you that’s gone very, very wrong.”

  The waiter arrived with the margaritas. Charlotte took a sip. “I’m sorry. I’m not gonna eat some charcoal pig, slathered in unknown red sauce, just so you can feel better about yourself. If you can’t deal with that, seek therapy.”

  “Hey, I don’t have to pay somebody two hundred dollars an hour to listen to me talk. I’ve got real friends. And if it’s something I’m too ashamed to tell anyone, then I just keep it to myself, feeling small and worthless for the rest of my life. Because that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

  Charlotte was smiling now. “It’s too bad this has gone poorly. Because I’ll be honest, there’s something about you that attracts me. Of course, I know it could never go anywhere. But there’s this sort of dense, impenetrable masculinity that you have—I don’t know, it’s like I hate you, but I want to make you yell out my name.”

  Brundidge’s Tommy Bahama sweater and all his other clothes were now neatly hung in the closet of Charlotte Rampling’s hotel room. Her clothes, on the other hand, along with her undergarments, were strewn everywhere. Right now, she had her legs wrapped around his waist as he sat her bottom down on the writing desk and humped her for a good ten or fifteen minutes before she cried out and fell spent across the hotel concierge’s list of Things to Do in Little Rock.

  A half hour later, they were in the shower together and he was using the complimentary mango shampoo to wash her hair while pounding her from behind. Then, as she cried out again, he covered her hands, which were pressed against the tile wall, with his own.

  Just before dawn, he picked Charlotte up and carried her out to their narrow third-floor balcony. He placed a pillow under her rump and did her face-to-face for at least another half hour as the sun came up and several cars came by and honked, which made it all the more exciting. By seven-ish, they had devoured everything under the silver domes that had been brought in by room service. Then they went at it once more with Brundidge on the bottom and Charlotte riding him, happy. Afterward, they lay exhausted in bed. Finally, she said, “I don’t care what happens next. That was the best sex I’ve ever had.”

  He had his back to her. Charlotte put her hand on him. “What’s wrong?”

  Brundidge rolled over. “I have to tell you something. I’ve never done anything like this in my entire life. I mean, I always try to get to know somebody before we, you know…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  She was stunned. “What is this? Some kind of Bible belt thing? Are you crazy? It was wonderful. It was sublime. One a scale of one to ten it was a million.”

  “Even when I dated a topless dancer, we didn’t do anything but have dinner for the first three weeks.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. We’re not animals, Charlotte. We need to have values and to care about people’s feelings. It’s important. It’s the backbone of civilization.”

  “Listen, I don’t give a damn about civilization. I just know that we’re here for a very short time. And you and I fuck really well together. Therefore, we should do so whenever we can.” She pulled the sheet up and climbed back on top of him.

  He said, “You talk terrible.” Then, as they got going again, “What I should really do is wash your mouth out.”

  She was smiling. “Yes, you should. We’ll do that next.”

  Mavis was in her kitchen lighting a Christmas candle and rearranging the flowers on the table. When it came to graceful living, she was no Milan, but she had taken the trouble to drive to Fast Deer Farm and cut these flowers in the greenhouse. And even though they didn’t go with the Christmas candle, she didn’t care. Tulips in winter! What could be more romantic?

  A little later, when Mary Paige was seated across from her, Mavis couldn’t help thinking how sweet her face looked in the candlelight. Almost beatific. And that it reminded her a little of the picture of Jesus that had adorned the wall of her Sunday school classroom. She had once marveled at how handsome he looked, gazing upward, almost like a movie star, as a similar light shone on his face.

  Mary Paige couldn’t get over the meal Mavis had prepared. She had never tasted anything like the pan-fried oysters with caviar crème fraîche (which Mavis had special ordered from Gulf Shores, Mississippi), the lobster mousse puff pastry bouchées, and strawberry trifle. Afterward, Mavis put on one of Dr. Mac’s old tapes and asked Mary Paige to dance. Mary Paige told her she didn’t know how and Mavis said not to worry, that she would teach her. It was a slow number and Mavis wasn’t very good either, but it felt good just to be moving to the music together. For the first time, Mavis had someone in her arms who actually made her heart soar, as they shifted from foot to foot
, heavy, plodding, with their heads on each other’s shoulders.

  Suddenly, they heard someone knocking lightly at the door, as though the person wasn’t sure she wanted to come in. When Mavis answered it, Milan entered. She seemed uncharacteristically forlorn, not even bothering to ask Mavis how she looked. After speaking to Mary Paige, Milan crossed to the sofa and sat down, saying that the thing she had worried about for twenty years had finally happened. Her voice sounded numb and defeated as she told them how Wood had gone to see Duff and come home at 3 A.M. Because of the unbelievable fluke of Elizabeth’s meeting Luke at college, Wood and Duff had now found the impetus they needed in order to live out their long-harbored desires. Milan almost felt she was fighting destiny. What she actually said was that Elizabeth should have gone to Vanderbilt, but that’s what she meant.

  Mavis tried to console her, when Milan suddenly got up. “It’s so dark in here. Why don’t you all turn on some lights?” Then she crossed to a lamp and did so, noticing the dinner.

  “Wow.” She looked at Mary Paige. “She fixes me spaghetti.” Then she began studying Mavis. “My God, you’ve got on makeup. Who did that?”

  “I did.”

  “Why didn’t you call me? It looks liked you put that concealer on with a putty knife.”

  “What’s concealer?”

  Milan rolled her eyes to Mary Paige. “Hopeless.”

  Now both Mary Paige and Mavis were staring at her and Milan was getting a strange feeling that she should leave. Later, as she walked to her car, she was thinking that not since she was a little girl had she felt so utterly left out and alone.

  Once Mary Paige and Mavis were in her old four-poster bed, they held each other, watching the moon come up and not even letting go when Chester jumped up and lay down beside them. From time to time, during the night, each one awakened and said things that she wanted the other to know. Mavis told Mary Paige that aside from a few clumsy experiences in college, she had never been with another woman before this, though she had known since she was a teenager that she wanted to. And Mary Paige told Mavis about her only other love, her roommate in the Philippines, who had tragically died of ovarian cancer.

  Then they enumerated their dreams, one by one, as they held hands and rubbed Chester, who was lying on his back with all fours in the air. And after a while, each dream seemed not to belong to either woman anymore, but rather to both of them—what they should name the baby and all about Mary Paige’s hero, Lottie Moon, the great woman missionary who gave her life for Christ in China and how they might start a little church of their own someday, combining the two things they were good at—Christianity and food. Mavis got up and crossed to her dresser, returning with a gold cross that had a small globe in the center with some sand in it that Jesus was supposed to have walked on. Lena Farnham Stokes had brought this to her from the Holy Land because Mavis was having such a hard time after her daddy died. She slipped it around Mary Paige’s neck and kissed her, a sweet tender kiss that had in it the promise of all the words that had just been spoken, with Mavis thinking that wherever Mary Paige went from now on, she would go, too. And with Mary Paige saying a prayer of thanks that she was finally home.

  Three long rows of first graders were lined up next to a fake green Christmas tree in the Pleasant Valley Villa cafeteria. The six-year-olds were there, as they were each year, to put on a show. Only this year, Judith Nutter had insisted on a half-hour orientation beforehand in which she personally briefed the children on how to act around the elderly as well as why there was no reason to be afraid. The last point must have struck home because most of them were now looking around while they sang, picking their noses, scratching, and yawning as though they were bored out of their skulls.

  Afterward, there was cake and punch, enjoyed by all, because these little ones were still too young to have caught on to the idea that old people have no value. These children would actually laugh and kid around and even sit attentively listening to a story or two if some newly stagestruck geriatric soul came alive long enough to tell it. It reminded some of the more clear-thinking old folks of how things used to be—children sitting and listening to their grandparents’ wisdom or, even in the lack of it, picking up valuable tips, remedies, and shortcuts that might not be gotten anywhere else. It didn’t make any sense to seniors that just at the moment you knew the most you would ever know, nobody wanted to talk to you anymore. But what really rankled was when their own grandchildren graced them with a little ten-minute visit and then acted as though they were going straight to heaven for it. Often, a grandma or grandpa would wait all day for a visit from one of these youngsters who, while being driven to a crushing array of appointments, rode in the backseats of cars like little heads of state. And when they did finally show up, it was their elders who had to keep things going, asking questions of young, disinterested faces that seemed dazed from too much attention, too many toys and time-outs. And their parents, the baby boomers and yuppies, seemed to think this was all just fine and that their own parents, the World War II people, were just fine with it—when in fact, though they didn’t say so, the World War II people didn’t think it was fine at all. And a few were even starting to wonder if maybe they hadn’t sacrificed too much for their own children, if these adult offspring couldn’t raise more considerate, less self-involved human beings than this.

  After the music and refreshments, the tiny carolers had left, holding hands, two by two, and you could see how the sweetness of it all affected the old people. Certainly Serious West had smiled at Miss Delaney in a way that told her if they were six years old again, he would sure be holding her hand in that line. And the others were probably thinking that it wasn’t so very long ago they themselves had walked in a line, two by two, and then, if they were lucky, gone home to their warm houses where their mothers gave them something good to eat and put them in their beds and felt their foreheads for fever and listened to their prayers. That was the shame of it—that old people needed their parents as much as babies and little kids do, but what they got was Judith Nutter and her five stages of grieving seminar, which almost no one attended, because frankly, most people felt one stage was enough.

  It would be hard to know if it was the joyfulness of the children or the fact that Christmas was almost upon them, but Serious West had already made up his mind that tonight, he was going to hold Miss Delaney in his arms and kiss her and he hoped that she was going to kiss him back. Because they lived in the assisted-living section of Pleasant Valley, Miss Delaney and Serious came and went as they pleased. And the fact that her front door stood not more than five feet from his own had made his recent social forays into her world so much easier—five feet being the shortest distance that a black man has ever traveled to call on a white woman in Paris, Arkansas. Most who knew of these visits assumed the old English teacher was regaling the ex-lawman with her knowledge of literature, probably assigning him a book or two to read or something.

  But Miss Lena Farnham Stokes, who lay about and languished as attractively as she could on the scaled-down movie set next door, had other ideas. She had seen the way Serious West looked at Margaret Delaney and she thought Tolstoy was the last thing he had on his mind. Which is why she kept her television off on the nights Serious visited, so she could monitor his arrival and departure—and also why, in spite of being half-deaf, she held a juice glass up to the wall, but was unable to hear anything except a noise that sounded a little like the wind.

  Anyway, this night, Miss Delaney was in fact reading a book and listening to La Traviata on her CD player. She remained, even at seventy-nine, childishly astonished by the versatility of not only language, but also the musical scale. Astonished that after thousands of years, words and music could still be gathered into exquisite, artful arrangements that have never been thought of, expressed, or heard before. It was miraculous. Divine. And sometimes, when she came across a thought of such searing beauty and importance say, in a novel, then she would have to stop and put that book down, lay a h
and on the middle of her chest, close her eyes, and just take it in. Then she would let out a sigh, almost of relief, that such things could still be absorbed in a world where TV reality shows allotted a full hour to finding out who peed in the camp.

  A little later, Miss Delaney and Serious West were seated on her sofa watching the last scene of The French Connection. She had spotted in the paper that this movie would be shown tonight and, knowing how much Serious liked it, invited him to watch it again.

  Now a perfume commercial had started and Miss Delaney, who was wearing her best long velour robe with the pretty sash in front, had gotten up to clear the coffee cups. But Serious had taken her hand and pulled her back down beside him. They sat for a minute, watching the couple in the ad, who looked emaciated and cold and mean—like they were incapable of loving anyone but themselves. They were kissing, but you could tell each would leave the other in a minute, if one of them got old or sick or ugly, and that the power of perfume would never be enough to keep them together.

  Then Serious had picked up the remote with his good arm and clicked it off. He turned to Miss Delaney with as much deliberation as he might have used to deal with someone he had just taken into custody. And he said, “Margaret, I sure would like to kiss you. Now, I know how most people around here would feel about that, but I’m only interested in how you might feel.”

  She looked at him, a little dumbstruck. Then she said, “Well, I believe I would feel…honored.”

  That was when Serious took her in his arms and kissed her powerfully and hungrily—not like an old man, but rather like a man who has had a lot of experience doing such things but has not done them for a long time. They must’ve kissed for a good ten minutes before he untied her robe and rubbed his palm gently across the front of her. Pretty soon he put both his hands on her bare bottom and rubbed it good, too, and patted it. Miss Delaney couldn’t help marveling how these Golden Glove hands, which had taken their toll on men and handled so expertly the ones who beat their wives, could be so kind to women. After that Serious used his long, graceful fingers, gently fondling her private parts like he would the soft folds of a favorite old cap. He did this for a long while, too, and the fact that his once powerful arm trembled only intensified her sensation. Then, he put his wide, generous mouth over hers at the exact moment she groaned with pleasure—allowing her, finally, gloriously, to add her own voice to the chorus of ecstatic lovers heard throughout her fifty years of teaching poetry. It would be the first time. But it would not be the last.