And who else? Shequanda Nketo Harris’s Aint No Love Thang. Up from the Dillehay Courts housing projects to confront her sexual identity. A black lesbian memoir … ah yes, how vital and unique! There hasn’t been a black lesbian novel of self-discovery published this whole month! Perhaps this discerning new press should consider hunting for a black woman who toys with the idea of heterosexuality since none of them seems to ever write books. About time, yes, for some affirmative action for the straight black females. Maybe she can check with her Ancestors about what that man-woman experience was like, hm? I am insinuating nothing of the sort, I just … No, no—now no hanging up before you tell me who else is a Titan among the Olympians of Southern Fiction, who else resides on your Charlottean Parnassus, the western slopes of our own Crowder Mountain, come down to walk among us mere mortals at the B. Dalton’s at the Eastwood Mall?
“I don’t think it’s useful,” Norma was saying, apparently having been reproving Gaston for some time now, “to burn bridges.”
“I’m going to hire someone to burn the Queen City Times down to the ground, just you watch,” he added. “I’ve driven by their offices a few times. One can of kerosene would do it—”
“You mustn’t drive by! They’ll report you to the police!”
Here they were again, functioning like an old married couple, in his own kitchen no less. He wanted no claim or obligation to restrict him in any way, no expectation of his time, no imagined commitment to even trifling regularities—he did not even wish to have to be courteous or make explanations for why he wasn’t courteous. He treated Norma badly, he supposed, but that had only acted as Super Glue to bind them ever closer. She could not be persecuted away or crushed in spirit. He’d have to take out a hitman’s contract to be free of her—a twofer, get her while she’s having lunch with Giordano near the Queen City Times. He could move out of Charlotte, for New York, for Paris again … but that wasn’t going to happen. He hated that she’d made herself his indispensable parasite. He was the rotting log, Norma was the garishly hued lichen …
“Cordelia was about to go to the garden,” said Norma, now trying to nudge him back to work.
“Cordelia wandered into the gardens,” Gaston dictated, hurting behind his eyeballs, pinching the bridge of his nose. He was past the one-hour mark, way past his usual endurance. “Somehow, though the house had been torched by Sherman’s men, leaving two leaning, charred chimneys at either end, the winds had kept the fire from the Dunsmuirs’ splendid garden, with its domed gazebo. Of all the things—sorry, Mrs. Meacham, quote, Of all the things to remain standing, unquote, thought Cordelia, the gazebo where Wilkerson had first declared his love for her had survived the general devastation visited upon Orangeburg. Maybe it was a sign, she prayed, that Wilkerson too was among the living … Ladies, that is enough,” he added in a different voice. “I am done for the day.”
Norma beamed. “It was a good day, Gaston. I’m proud of you!”
Gaston stumbled back to the coffeemaker, now brewing its third pot. “You condescend to me like a child who has gone caca in the potty for the first time. Although, admittedly, the child of my simile and Gaston Jarvis do seem to be producing the same item.”
“Oh really. Your metaphors and similes lately are all about excrement. Honestly, I think this book will be the best yet. Now some business. Do you want to do the Asheville Book Festival?”
Norma was insensible to his opening a kitchen drawer filled with airline miniature liquor bottles. He opened two Chivas Regals into his new cup of coffee. “Speaking of excrement, will Forrest Wrightway be there? Will I have to sit on a panel beside him?”
“I’m sure he will be there, since he lives in Asheville. I take it the answer is no. How about the Public Library Book Fair in Goldsboro?”
“Is there never anything from a university? Did you…”
Norma did that thing she did, a quick intake and release of a breath that signaled effort and disappointment. “Yes, I called a number of university reading series, but they have other bookings this season.”
How long had it been since a university English department had wanted him as a guest lecturer? Backaways, for sure. The academic and literary types don’t have much truck with Mr. Jarvis these days. Mind you, when they have a state literary festival or some fund-raiser to raise lucre for the library, who do they call to fill the tent? It’s either me or Anne Rice or Pat Conroy with a line around the block while the Algonquin and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Grove and Vintage and Holt and Norton authors, the MFA-program parasites, les artistes, who couldn’t sell five thousand books collectively, cluster and lurk and complain to each other at the cocktail parties, make a meal out of the hors d’oeuvres like starving undergraduates, brag about who endured the least attended event, wear their obscurity proudly—always ready to be assured, on cue, in rotation, that The New York Times or The Washington Post or some momentarily venerated blog said just-wonnnnnderful things about their last title. How they all cling to each other in the literati life raft, what a comfort they are to each other—
“Yes or no to Goldsboro?” Norma prompted.
Gaston was in that brotherhood once, after the first two underselling books; that was him thirty-some years ago, clustered with the Real Writers at such functions, envying the money of the Shit Writers, wondering how they managed to write schlock so poorly and earn so much money. Now not a one of the literati would deign to come over and talk to old Gaston Jarvis—Gaston Jarvis who would embrace them and praise their (nearly invisible) masterpieces! Gaston Jarvis who understood their plight! No, they leave him to his crowded corner fending off the blue-hairs and the neo-Confederates and the tyrannical book club presidents encountered only when his books come out, who pick and choose titles for some little library system in some trailer-filled red-clay goatpen of a county, who expect to be treated like Marie, Queen of Romania, paid court to, given obeisance … ah ah ah, Mr. Jarvis, you wouldn’t want us to not select your novel as the Cow-pat County, Georgia, Book of the Summer! You arteeestes ever wonder with whose profits the Germans (who run all of American publishing) pay for your little literary exercises? It takes a Gaston Jarvis or two to pay for your little writing hobby, your linguistic divertissements, to underwrite your little post-divorce, post-modern, post-plot-and-character twaddlings excerpted in some online gazette read by three people associated with some lefty Massachusetts rag that serves as a slurry pond for all the Fine Fine Writing cranked out from the medicine-off-the-back-of-the-wagon snake-oil MFA mills throughout the Northeast …
“No, fuck Goldsboro!” he said.
Mrs. Meacham shook her head. When he started becoming a “sewer mouth” it was time for Norma to take her home.
And time for Gaston to head to Charlottetowne.
To repeat, Gaston Jarvis had a respectable mini-chateau northeast of Myers Park, but no one who knew him ever expected to find him there. Phalanxes of maids and grocery delivery boys came and went but Gaston would have gotten just as much use out of a hotel room out on I-85. No, his real headquarters was the Charlottetowne Country Club. The Nineteenth Hole was his royal court, where the cream of Charlotte society passed through after rounds of golf, some lingering, some pointing him out to out-of-town guests, hoping to hear Gaston Jarvis—“our local writer and wit!”—say something evil, gossip savagely, hold forth. (Gaston briefly entertained a campaign to get the prettifying e off the end of “Charlottetowne,” but that was a battle as doomed as the Southern cause itself…)
Charlottetowne’s main building, wherein resided the Nineteenth Hole, was known as the “Big House” and many of the club’s devotees earnestly reported to visitors that it was antebellum. Which was nonsense. In slave times, who would have need of a country club? Every white man’s home was a country club. Set back from the modern pool and tennis and golfing facilities, gyms and clubhouses, spas and steam rooms, stood the four-story, blindingly white, symmetrically square plantation house, eight thick columns on each side, enclosing a wide
verandah on the first story and a balconied porch on the second, all mounted by a cupola and a widow’s walk. It could be a movie set. There had been numerous approaches from production companies, petitioning to use the house as a pre–Civil War setting, a ready-made Tara, with its ground-floor ballroom that spilled through twelve-foot French doorways to the verandah, its sweeping marble staircases to private function rooms in the second story, its gilded bedchambers on the third floor for overnight stays (to be rented by equity-holding, first-family members for their out-of-town guests during high-society weddings).
It was an ingenious fraud, built in the 1920s to appear much older in that time of Klan-besotted neo-chivalry and high romanticism about Civil War glories. Still, it was a grand place, a worthy second home, Gaston Jarvis often thought, enclosed with tall pines and ancient oaks, ringed by an array of azaleas—flame, orange, magenta, white—at its base, with young magnolias tactically beckoning at the right angles of the Big House, wafting the evening air with sweetness … as he stumbled nightly to the parking lot where scrupulous bartenders, withholding his keys, had rung for a taxi or for “Miz Norma” to come pick him up and drive him back home.
Gaston heartily endorsed the club’s snobbery. Charlottetowne Country Club was the city’s most exclusive, discriminating, judgmental, double- and triple-screened enclave. The club you had to be born into. Only a member could get you in (and then only for a non-equity, “residential” membership, precarious, liable to be snatched away for any infraction), and these all-powerful trustees had to be of the first families of Charlotte, some wealthy before the Civil War, most wealthy as a result of the War, many wealthy in the ruined South’s aftermath, when Charlotte’s elite cashed in royally on the last intact supplies of cotton.
Gaston could not have dreamed, ordinarily, of gaining admittance to such a patriciate bastion, but his college roommate and brother-in-law, Duke Johnston, vouched for him. The trustees were worried: mightn’t he be a writer who could one day embarrass the club with a racy or a too liberal book? But Duke stood his ground. Now that Gaston was a millionaire and their one-man Algonquin Roundtable, the trustees were delighted with their earlier gamble. Indeed, club members were likely to think that he was an equity, come to them from an ancient Charlotte family; people would be surprised to learn that he was merely a resident member. Gaston was a fearful snob. Every time certain elements in the club contemplated a loosening of the membership requirements or thought how nice it would be to host a PGA or LPGA event—which would bring unwonted attention to the club’s exclusive membership policies—Gaston was loudly in the forefront of these discussions, no, no, never! Perhaps there was some fleeting prestige in having Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson traipse through on the Senior Tour, but there was truly more refinement in being able to resist such calls to the public spotlight. Besides, Gaston thought, anything that made the Nineteenth Hole any more overrun was a bad thing.
“Afternoon, Mr. Jarvis.”
Gaston’s eyes adjusted to the Hole’s comparative dimness. It was Dexter. All the bartenders were black, similar in age and appearance (fifties, close-cropped graying hair, a neatly pressed uniform in the club colors) and Gaston took a moment to identify his bartender in the gloom, a nearly windowless cavern of dark wood, stacked bottles on shelves, muted table lamps on round wooden tables, alcoves and booths and places for quiet conversation.
He was determined not to make this agreeable perch one more location he had besmirched with bad behavior. Gaston had almost blown it a few times. Sharing gossip with a small group, where inevitably his calumny got back to its victim. He had to dedicate his sixth installment (The Cannon’s Silence) to Belle Bennette to get out of the doghouse a few years back. So he had learned his lesson on intra-club gossip or supremely clever remarks concerning ladies’ hats, horrendous fashion choices, hair of unnatural hues or heights. But it was on just one such Dictation Day (every second Tuesday), a day like today, that he had lost his temper with Norma in a public scene, still whispered about.
A crowd would gather because they liked to hear Norma banter with Gaston. Gaston liked it when Norma was his foil, urging charity and patience, as he savaged and laid waste—it often was quite a public performance. Of course, Norma had her hobbyhorses, the topics she could not fail to warm to, every few Tuesdays.
“I come from a long line of spinsters,” she would say with that soft proud smile.
And Gaston would parry. “And how, pray tell, do these virgin maidens spawn successive generations of virgin maidens?”
“Oh somebody or other breaks down and accepts a troth, and produces mostly useless daughters, good for nothing but schoolteachers, such as myself, and librarians. Of course, you gentlemen realize the whole of Southern culture and society would crumble without its underpinning of spinsters. There’s not a church I have ever heard of that does not entirely depend upon the service, the cooking, the efforts of the unmarried or widowed older women. I daresay some of you gentlemen have been taught by spinsters.”
Many hands were raised, many gray heads nodded. Harker Ballimer reminded the group that in Mississippi, when he was young, only spinsters could be teachers and when they married they resigned their place in the school.
“Oh yes,” Norma said, “down east here in North Carolina, also, until after World War Two, at least. It was a vocation, it was nothing less than taking the veil, to be a teacher. I was taught by women who were known simply as Miss Campbell or Miss Gwinnett, if she were the eldest sister, though usually oldest sisters felt a duty to marry to jump-start the marriageability of the sisters waiting in line behind her. You see how intractable my spinsterhood is, that I managed even as eldest and first in line not to be entrapped! But more often, it was Miss Mary Lee or Miss Evelyn or Miss Elizabeth.”
“Seems a bit familiar,” a transplanted Northerner pointed out.
“They were not eldest daughters and therefore the use of ‘Miss’ and the first name was entirely proper. And you underestimate the power of ‘Miss’ in those days, the awe and respect that honorific could wield. These women were fearsome tyrants of their subject and their curriculum. The principals were mere functionaries who shuffled papers and came and went; it was the Miss Mary Lees and Miss Elizabeths who ran the schools with an iron will. And there was no need to complain to your parents about being struck with Miss Mary Lee’s ruler or humiliated by Miss Elizabeth making you stand for a barrage of questions until your not having read the assignment was abundantly clear … because your parents likely endured the same torments under the same women—and still feared them!”
She loved to invoke the noble sisterhood of teachers, but one night a month ago, Gaston grew impatient with her routine and decided to romanticize the fraternity of writers, in mild opposition:
“I’ll give you a brutal occupation,” he began, warming to his audience of after-dinner drinkers. “It rarely leaves a man unmarked,” he said, before finishing off his bourbon, setting the glass down with a loud enough clunk that the bartender turned and was signaled with a head nod to refill it. “Robert Penn Warren, my old pal James Dickey—good Lord, Faulkner was in the bottle half the time.”
“Hmm,” Norma said. He could tell she didn’t approve of the premise.
“I remember after The Rapeseed Field, when I went to Connecticut to stay at Bill Styron’s and Jimmy Baldwin was there. Now there were two men who could put it away. Styron could drink. O. Henry lived in the bottle, too—Thomas Wolfe a manic-depressive and drinker—that’s just the North Carolina contingent. Writing well didn’t make them very happy, it appeared. Look at Tennessee Williams. Look at Capote. We didn’t care for each other, true enough…” Gaston was once at a publishing party in 1978 featuring a mobbed Truman Capote occupying the far side of the hotel ballroom, but that proximity would do in his cavalcade of name-dropping anecdotes. “But Truman ended up spectacularly unhappy. The most treacherous profession, don’t you think?” He dramatically took a sip and looked at his enthralled audience. “Southern wri
ter.”
Norma held off for a moment, then let the counter-argument flow: “Well. Harper Lee and Eudora Welty didn’t end up all miserable. Katherine Anne Porter, Zora Neale Hurston, though God knows, she had every cause to drink. Flannery O’Connor was sick, but not spiritually miserable. Let’s see … Alison Lurie and Annie Dillard and the Ellens, Ellen Douglas, Ellen Glasgow. Toni Morrison, Valerie Martin—has she ever written one bad thing?—and Anne Tyler, Gail Godwin was in North Carolina for a while, wasn’t she? Jill McCorkle, Bobbie Anne Mason, Elizabeth Cox—”
“Your point being?”
“All these women seem to be able to whip up lots and lots of wonderful books without careening into the bottle or beating their children or publicly disgracing themselves.”
Among their laughing listeners, one older woman shouted, “She’s got you there, Gaston!”
“Norma,” asked one man in a seersucker sports coat, “to what do you attribute the fact that the Southern women writers are well behaved and the men less so?”
“Typical Southern male behavior. Lots of nonsense and noise and drama. I suppose we owe the Civil War to this strain of male self-dramatizing preposterousness. Wait—Carson McCullers. Wrote her first novel right here in Charlotte. She messed up her personal life in spectacular fashion.”
“Yes,” said Gaston, with his eyes narrowed to slits. “She kept taking up with homosexuals and wife-beaters, as I recall. Devoting her life to men who had no intention of loving her back.” He enunciated with surgical precision: “No future in that, hm?”
He didn’t look at her as he said it. Nor did he look at his embarrassed listeners who could barely imagine the lighthearted topic had ended with the plunge of such a dagger. He didn’t want to meet any eyes, so he looked into his drink. He heard her gather her things and leave. And he let her do it, no running after her. He hated to think of that now. Not so much the cruelty to Norma—she was begging for it. She knew better than to ruin one of his great literary musings … but the publicity of it, fighting like a real couple might in public.
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