Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  Boy, that was another thing Jerilyn did not get in the least. Some girls bragged about their surgery; some hid it and got whispered about (“I heard she had two nose jobs…”). Some girls said they loved to make out with girls and were so popular and funny and beloved; yet one girl, Amanda, whose name was nearly always sneered, hit on another girl while drunk at a party and she was whispered about as some kind of creepy dyke. And then the frat brothers and sex. What on earth were the rules there?

  Taylorr bragged about having oral sex with all but two of the Zeta Pis her third year at Carolina; in fact, she said they were renaming the BJ Room after her when she graduated. This set off a contest of sorts about who had come in second, who had been through the most guys, Lew, Richard, Andy, Joey D, and Frank—no one had Frank, he was still in mourning for some girlfriend that dumped him, but two or three of the really slutty-popular sisters were determined to get him in a threeway. And yet, while all that was acceptable and breakfast-bar gossip, Jerilyn heard girls talk at dinner about Sara who was with two guys in a ménage à trois and what a slut she was, how she had “a problem.” The rule, Jerilyn decided, was this: the popular ringleading girls could do or say or screw anything and it was all right.

  Jerilyn always listened to see if Skip’s name was mentioned as a frequent conquest, but so far no.

  “Jermaine!” called out Britannie. Jerilyn corrected her about the name. “Aw honey, I got close! You be our taste-tester.”

  A plastic cup was dunked into the mire and something opaque and brown was forced into her hand. Jerilyn took a tiny sip from her cup, and almost retched at the strength. “It’s a little like drinking mouthwash,” she reported.

  As the mixmasters tinkered some more, Jerilyn slipped away to the pantry where no one was standing. She felt she was getting sad again; the cocaine was slowly wearing off, the brightness and tingle was becoming intermittent.

  “You don’t like it?” some guy said.

  “Hm, oh it’s all right,” she said, lifting the cup. “Not exactly delicious.”

  “Yeah, I’m more of a beer person,” the tall boy said, almost apologetically.

  “Me too, but I couldn’t get near the fridge.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll get us both one.” He flashed a shy smile and she smiled back. God, he was a cute one! Didn’t sound like he was from the South. Some trace of the cocaine reignited within her; she felt her heart pick up.

  “Here we go,” he said a moment later, handing her a beer. The boy took the trashcan cocktail from her and dumped it into an already dead potted plant. “I’m Joseph, but the guys call me Joey D.”

  “Jerilyn, you can call me Jeri.”

  Just then a shirtless young man walked down the hall—a pledge, she figured, given the wet and matted hair, though he had put on a pair of jeans. Joey D and all the guys erupted into “Baaaaaa baaaaaa!” as he walked by. He angrily gave them the finger and everybody laughed.

  Then there was a crash in the next room, some raised male voices, a door slamming, another crash …

  Joey D muttered something under his breath and bounded upstairs, away from the action in the kitchen.

  Jerilyn stuck her head around the corner: some guy had another guy—Justin, right?—pinned to the wall, while he sputtered, “Look, man, she just ran off—I couldn’t help it!”

  Then the new guy hit Justin squarely in the face, then once in the stomach, which bent him over double. Another young man in a red windbreaker kicked Justin once he was down on the ground. Lot of screaming. What woman were they fighting over? Two Zippermen came to Justin’s aid … and soon had smashed noses, too. Then one of the Sigma Kappa sisters ran in to do the screaming-stop thing …

  “I saw your sheep! It was out by the pool, I just saw it!”

  The three interlopers stopped using Justin as a punching bag and backed toward the door. By the time Corey and Kevin got to the kitchen, a gathering mob of Zeta Pis was ready to avenge Justin’s pummeling. The man in the red windbreaker and his friend then took the full trashcan of alcohol and tipped it. To deafening shrieks, the fifty gallons of hard liquor and fruit juice flooded the kitchen, flowed into the carpet of the hallway, out the door, soaking people’s shoes.

  “You’re gonna die for that!” yelled one Zipperman.

  But now the guy in the red windbreaker held an old-fashioned cigarette lighter, which he opened and sparked the flame. Jerilyn hopped up on a chair. “Stay right there or we’ll see if this all is flammable,” he said calmly.

  Everyone stood where he was.

  The young man and his friends escaped out the back door.

  The fumes of the spilled alcohol, the weed smoke, and her little bit of athletic activity made Jerilyn feel sick. She decided she would go out the front door, avoiding the mess, and get some fresh air … maybe just wander back to McIver, although Corinne said there were rooms back at Sigmahouse set aside for crashing and composing oneself. She wanted to dispose of the rest of her beer; she looked for another garbage pail only to see the stack of paper cups reeking of the trashcan cocktail, plates and saucers piled high with cigarettes ground into congealed dollops of chip-dip … and her nausea renewed itself.

  She made it outside to the front curb where the Zeta Pi sidewalk met the street and sat down a yard away from another party refugee.

  “I may hurl in the next minute,” Jerilyn said in the stranger’s direction. “I’m apologizing in advance.”

  “Whatever,” he said, barely audible.

  “You all right?”

  He turned toward her. It was the boy everyone was making baaaa noises at. “I guess. Not sure if they’re gonna vote me in.”

  “I wonder if the Sigma Kappa Nus are having second thoughts about me, too. I can’t really hang with the professional partiers.”

  “You wanna lie down?”

  He held out his hand and she wobbled to her feet, and then they were walking back into the Zipperhaus, past the foyer, toward the stairs … Jerilyn thought of the woman in the cool green formal wear, the man in the formal suit with his hand at her lower back walking toward Thetahouse, the way she looked up at him, the way he smiled back at her …

  “Watch that,” he said, steering her away from a puddle of vomit with a high concentration of Cheetos. She looked around the strangely quiet Zipperhaus, now a war zone of party debris, alcohol stink, Doritos ground into the rug, the hallway to the soaked kitchen and sodden carpets. Some guys were going in and out of a small room across from the stairs where the lights were off; female laughter emanated from within. She saw Skip Baylor come from the bathroom heading to the little room; he looked up and did a double take seeing Jerilyn ascend the frathouse stairs with … what was his name again? Well, fine. It’s not like Skip and she are a couple. Skip clearly is playing the field, so why shouldn’t she?

  And then suddenly they were in a dark room with two single beds—one for each of us, she thought. But as she lay down he snuggled up beside her. He slid his hands around her waist and buried his head in the crook of her shoulder. To slow him down she reminded him, “I still could throw up, remember.”

  He didn’t say anything. “You just tell the Skanks I’m not some gay weirdo who wants to screw a sheep. These guys are … it’s so fucking unfair…” He punched at their mattress once with a clenched fist.

  Then he was kissing her. He tasted of beer and she imagined she did too. He was very insistent, a little rough but … but he kissed better than Skip who always gave her a tongue bath. Then he was undoing his jeans, and guiding her hand between his legs.

  Someone opened the door and light from the hall poured in; Jerilyn instinctively hid her head in the pillow. “Uh … okay. Next time use your own room, all right?” said the voice, before leaving and pulling the door shut.

  Then he rolled on top of her. He kissed her some more and she felt the pressure of his erection through her clothes. Okay, well, this was all right if it progressed no further … She was certainly willing to do things with her hands, like
she’d done with Skip, so she reached for him down there and he took her hands in his own hands, which was sweet, and … wait, he pinned them back behind her head as he straddled her. He was inside her. Was her underwear off? When did that happen?

  “Wait,” she cried. “Stop. Hey stop—”

  And then one hand was over her mouth. She tried to bite it but that just got the hand pressed further, harder into her mouth. So she tried to kick and writhe and break free … but he was already doing the thing she didn’t want him to do.

  Gaston

  Gaston Jarvis, condemned to Plunkett, North Carolina, and its literati, beyond the reach of mercy or redemption, would offer himself to the sun. He pressed the button to lower the driver’s-side window and positioned his face. Indian summer, seventy-something degrees, sky an autumn blue, not really warm … cool, in fact, when a hint of a breeze made itself known, but still the sun could sear, could revive the spirit, could keep the dwindling flame of his humanity guttering a moment longer. It was like in France, this weather. Cool brisk days yet a warm sun.

  Well, that’s what he thought he remembered about Paris sunshine. It had been rainy, cold and damp most of the time, hadn’t it? American writers were supposed to go to Paris and write. That’s what he’d done in the late 1970s, once upon a time, when he was one notch above poor and had published his first, justly praised debut, The Rapeseed Field. Then his second novel was published, the one he wrote in Paris, the ponderous pretentious artsy-fartsy bullshit Paris Novel (Reunions of the Tomb, taken from an inscription on the tomb of Abelard and Héloïse in the Père-Lachaise cemetery … oooh that was some High Art). Then, thanks to Book Number Three and his heroine Cordelia Florabloom, he landed again in Paris with beaucoup cash in pocket to debauch himself, eat richly and drink copious amounts of wine. Then the writing fell away and it was just the debauch. Still, he was working within a time-honored American tradition, you had to admit.

  He checked his watch. A half hour more until this godawful reading. Thanks for nothing, Norma.

  He closed his eyes again. It had been easy to sustain his personality traits in Paris. Love of excess, immoderation, petulance. He was especially good at petulance. He didn’t go back for his father’s funeral. He hadn’t lifted a finger to help his mother, nor had spoken to her since—what?—a decade, at least. And it was easy to manage his social life in Paris, too. Every slight, every nuance of denigration or indifference had been repaid many times over by his cutting people off, not doing fledgling writers the literary favors that he had promised them, dropping hostesses cold … and Paris egged him on à juste parfait.

  Then came the summer in 1978, when he was about to purchase a top-floor garret in the scuzzy vingtième to make his Paris-escape permanent. “Not the Twentieth!” his friends shrieked in horror, judging that arrondissement slightly less barbarous than Mogadishu. Gaston was already building his American roué legend; he joked that he would buy a grave in nearby Père-Lachaise, where he strolled almost daily, leave it open and just drunkenly stumble into the hole when the time came. As the centuries rolled he’d burrow a bony finger over to Colette and cop a feel. An attic room on the rue Stendhal—how was that street name not a talisman? Yep, the purchase papers were drawn up, the former apartment packed, the change-of-address cards were ready to mail … when the most appalling homesickness came over him.

  Homesick. The word for once literally true, sick, unable to eat or sleep well, sick for thinking of shabby little North Carolina, all the while bar- and café-hopping along Haussmann’s monumental boulevards. He longed instead to be driving on the tar-patched macadam of N.C. Highway 49, speeding from Charlotte to Durham, still an undergraduate racing back to campus in his rattletrap used car, the red earth of the roadside embankments, the surprise views of the ancient Uwharrie Mountains, that upland ridge connected to no other, smack in the middle of the state for no logical geological reason, dense green woods crowded with deer, roadside vegetable stands with hand-painted signs, red painted scrawl on a whitewashed board, that last chance in September for a taste of the Sandhills peaches … He longed not to speak his fatally flawed French anymore or pretend interest in incomprehensible films or junkpile art or crackpot European politics. Americans are servile before Paris; they creep about it feeling unworthy of it, not good enough for it. He had done that, cringing and worrying about what waitpeople, concierges, cleaning ladies thought of his French.

  And Gaston, the lone wolf, the recluse, even missed some people back home … yes, mustn’t let that get out! Not so much the people he had dropped or written off, the three agents, the earnest editors whom he put through hell, but his two sisters, Jerene and Dillard, pains-in-the-ass that they were, and he missed his friend Duke. Duke most of all. He had tried to write off Duke, banish him from the good life that Duke himself had introduced Gaston Jarvis to, many years ago at university. Gaston prided himself on how successful he had become on Duke’s terms—wealth, good clothes, fine wines, specialty tobaccos, how he moved easily between countries and grand hotels … but that was just money, wasn’t it? The whole planet opens its mouth wide for American money; it was nothing personal. Europe didn’t really love him. And North Carolina claimed him but he hadn’t valued that at all, not until that summer in 1978 when he was homesick for the first time in his life, a nostalgia like a terminal illness, aching, unrequited nostalgia for being a young writer just starting out, for Duke and him sitting up until the dawn, sorting out the world and its problems, under the eaves in the attic room of Arcadia.

  So autumn of 1978, he returned. Things back to normal, all irritants and indignities at a low volume, humming beneath the surface, for the most part … Dillard, long abandoned by her husband, was semi-functional then, though letting her boy Christopher run wild—we see how that ended up. Jerene and Duke had made a happy home. It never ceased to strike him as odd how their progeny rallied round him at family occasions and called him “Uncle Gaston”; it always sounded strange to his ears, aged him a few decades. He hated kids. Although he had mentioned all the brood in his most recent will, giving them each $20,000 when he kicked the bucket. See? Uncle Gaston loved you, he just didn’t want to see or deal with you or get to know you in the least. Beauregard, a bright fellow, going to Duke University as he had done, then going to seminary at Davidson, peddling that Christ-in the-sky claptrap to the yokels across the Union County line (beyond the pale) in Stallings, N.C. The two young ones, Joshua, that little fruitcake, and Jerilyn, who is her mother’s clone with less smarts and personality. And Annie—she was the smartest, come to think of it, but willful and self-ruinous. He chuckled—wonder what side of the family she got that from?

  Seven minutes to the reading. Norma set these things up for him. Gaston wasn’t quite sure how this old friend whom he had broken with innumerable times kept crawling back to insert herself into his life. She was the number dialed when he couldn’t get a cab and was too drunk to drive. She was the pocket picked—admittedly years ago—when debts and canceled credit cards left him without money for breakfast. When he complained of his publishing house’s apathy in setting up readings, it was Norma, super-spinster, to the rescue, setting up small but well-attended events all across the South. He owed her a great amount for her services, her keeping his life on the rails, but the payment she wished for, marriage, a permanent association—heck, she’d be fine with affection and being seen in public together, being identified as a quasi-couple—that he would not give her. He felt his cell phone vibrate. And that would be Norma. Reminding him that in five minutes he had to give a reading. Just in case he wasn’t at the bookstore but had detoured to a bar. Which would have been the better idea …

  But I’m a creature of the old manners, the old courtesies, Gaston assured himself, as he opened his eyes and took in his surroundings. Another once down-at-heels mill town subsumed into the Charlotte metastasizing sprawl—McMansions, six-lane parkways through deforested fields where they had yet to build the development that justified the highway,
identical strip malls, Panera Bread, Old Navy, Bed Bath & Beyond, Pottery Barn, P. F. Chang’s, arrayed in characterless malls, a poor man’s Florida with brick sidewalks and pastel awnings. Amid the bourgeois boom was the Antiquarian’s Bookshelf in Plunkett, North Carolina, a little family-run independent store that hung on. And Gaston Jarvis was here to read from his new work, move some product, press the mottled and antiquated flesh of his antiquated readership of the Antiquarian’s Bookshelf. He leaned toward the glove compartment—even this activity at his weight was a reddening strain—where he found his flask and retrieved it, sipped from it.

  I’m too nice, saying yes to everything, he thought. He always yearned to be a curmudgeon, aimed for it, a Sheridan Whiteside whose rudenesses and insults to his loyal following could become the stuff of literary anecdotes told for a century on the order of Faulkner’s snapping at his annoying offspring, No one remembers Shakespeare’s daughter, or H. L. Mencken inscribing hotel-room Bibles with With compliments from the author.

  Gaston watched a van pull up before the bookstore, in the handicapped spot. Out came the enfeebled and disabled, a lady in canary yellow with two sticks, a human scarecrow with a cane … and here come the motorized chairs out of the back. The old folks’ home emptying itself, backing up the boxcar, shooing the livestock down the chute. Behold the kind of babes and groupies he can expect—Ethel and Hortensia and Letitia, all scrambling over one another with their walkers to get to the front row so they can hear properly. Gaston sipped from his flask, taking stock: the halt and lame, the elderly, white white white, varied only by the degree of palsy or blueing in the hair.

  Gaston noticed two black women in their twenties, perhaps, walking out of the store with coffees to go. Staff, he figured. No, of course they would leave before he read. Indeed, they probably demanded not to work on the night Gaston Jarvis was coming to read; these young women, probably students at UNC Charlotte, they might act up, might have to say something to the old white man peddling his slave-times romances. It was as if he were wrapped in the Confederate battle flag. Why should anyone colored care one little bit what Gaston Jarvis had to say for himself? Back before his Civil War shtick, Gaston Jarvis was briefly the toast of New York after his wondrous literary debut. He had sat on a panel at 92nd Street Y with William Styron and gotten himself invited back to Roxbury, Connecticut, where (fellow Duke graduate) Styron lived and where James Baldwin was visiting. Bill and Jimmy—joking with him, enjoying his wit and youth … it was like an apostolic succession, writers who made their mark before thirty anointing another gifted young writer, entwining the laurel, the apollonian crown to place upon his head …