Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  It wasn’t like he did nothing for Norma. After each Dictation Day, Gaston rewarded his muse and life-manager with a dinner at Charlottetowne. She, too, was a resident member, vouched for by Duke Johnston, and fees paid for by Gaston. These nights out were her motivation, he supposed, for all the selfless hours of toil on his behalf. To be arm in arm with the celebrated Gaston Jarvis, a long candlelit dinner (with the impeccable service the CCC was known for, black middle-aged men and women in pressed white suits, some who had been there for decades, discreet, laconic, always at the ready, no request too much trouble). While Gaston had been here drinking all afternoon, Norma had been to the beauty parlor (where “the girls” requested every gossipy detail of these Tuesday dinners), before treating herself to a spa or salon or some alchemy to take a few years off. By evening she would look lovely in a dark conservative floor-length dress as she made a grand entrance into the Charlottetowne dining room and he stood at the table to greet her … how the heads would turn, how people would smile to be in the room with them. Why did they never marry? they must speculate. Some of them theorize that Gaston Jarvis must be homosexual. He never got over his affection for his college roommate, Duke Johnston, they would whisper.

  Good guess, but wrong.

  Yes, and speaking of Duke Johnston, his brother-in-law, he had put a foot wrong there, too, in the Nineteenth Hole for all to see. God, these public slipups were more and more frequent. Once again, he had a small coterie of Charlotte’s rich and powerful hanging on his words. He was up off his stool, sloshing his bourbon around, animated in his depiction of bitterness.

  “I love bitter people,” he was saying. “No better conversationalists in the world than bitter people. We have it all wrong in this country.” He mocked some Polyanna somewhere: “Now now, mustn’t be bitter! That’s the refrain. It’s un-American to be bitter. We’re the land of pick yourself up and try try again.”

  Norma was back to her usual role of feeding him straight lines. “Oh Gaston, please. What on earth could you possibly be bitter about? You write bestsellers!”

  “I can’t think of a more fertile soil for bitterness. The paltriness of American success.”

  “Bitterness,” Norma insisted, “is not a very attractive trait when you’re successful, Gaston.”

  “My darling,” he answered, warming to his Oscar Wilde mode, “it takes true success to make for true bitterness. How important is the bitterness of the failure? It is an easy bitterness, hm? Simple to achieve, almost effortless. No money, no recognition—the resulting negative feelings are … child’s play.” His country club barroom audience was chuckling. “No, the real art is to succeed and find it all wanting, find it insufficient for petty and small reasons. To sour on a successful life … speaking of that, Benjamin, another bourbon sour, please.” More laughter. “This club is full of CEOs and rich entrepreneurs and the first families of Charlotte, and yet I bet there are subterranean chambers beyond chambers, fathomless caves unknown to man, of bitterness and smoldering disappointments. Lateral promotions so close to the top. Investments gone wrong—”

  “With the Dow mired in the seven thousands, that would be most of us, Gaston!” cried one jolly red-faced man in a yachtman’s blazer while everyone laughed.

  “Marriage to the wrong spouse,” Gaston continued his crisp adumbration. “Social slights. Children turning out to be layabouts.”

  “Lord, that’s true,” said a white-haired queen bee known as Mrs. T., a woman who lived at the club as much as Gaston. “You have been reading my diaries!”

  Another heavyset patron: “Not just the children, Mr. Jarvis—the grandchildren!”

  Much laughter. A lively widow held her martini aloft: “Anyone here have grandchildren that aren’t spoiled completely rotten and incapable of working a day’s honest labor in their lives?”

  Widespread agreement. The gentleman in the blazer, through laughter, cried out, “Three grandchildren, all propped before the TV or their video games every waking hour—and every one of them obese!”

  “I would bet my brother-in-law Duke Johnston would be at the head of that line, if he ever had a moment’s self-reflection,” Gaston began, while he heard audible gasps and oooohs. Oh his hangers-on had been waiting for this one. “Duke had it all, family, money, he was a city councilman, before that a football hero and a scholar … and what’s it come to? He was expected to be our governor by now, if he hadn’t run out of steam.” One or two women smiled guiltily, another put her hand to her mouth. “Hope the money doesn’t run out on my old friend. I would hate to have to call a meeting of the equity members for us to decide his status…”

  Suddenly, it appeared, his sister Jerene—Jerene who was never here at this hour, who never stepped into the Nineteenth Hole!—was hovering. “You should go home, Gaston,” she said calmly, but the worse for its being calm. “Everyone in the club knows what you were saying isn’t the least bit true.”

  His assembled admirers had wincing expressions of uh-oh, and turned away to whisper among themselves, leaving the siblings to talk privately at the bar. Norma instinctively moved to sit at the richest of the tables; thanks to her, soon everyone there was laughing again.

  Jerene stepped closer, still staring him down, speaking quietly now: “They built this place around Joseph Johnston, Duke’s grandfather. They were equity members, and your membership here, I apparently have to remind you, was due to Duke’s own kindness—”

  “Yes yes, of course that’s how it is.” He swallowed the words, grinding his hands together as if that could snuff out this whole conversation.

  Jerene wasn’t done. Duke, she reminded him, took him under his aristocratic wing at Duke University, introduced him to important people, befriended a young man of promise, a young man who became an ungrateful old man—

  “All right, Jerene, I stand corrected.”

  She then seated herself on the barstool next to him, smoothing her soft rose-colored silk dress. She always dressed like she was going to a wedding as mother of the bride where a conservative couture had been approved; her appearance often put him in mind of one of those severe Puritan portraits, high collars, erect carriage. Probably a first for her, sitting on a barstool in this much derided den of imbecility. “I don’t know when you started hating my husband, Gaston,” she said so no one could hear but them. “Your former best friend—probably one of the only real friends you have left in the world. I can see your contempt every time you raise your eyebrows and talk down to him like he’s … like he’s one of your annoying, senile fans you go on about. My land, Duke does not deserve that. And he lets you mistreat him because he loves you.”

  It had been years since Gaston had apologized for anything, and his first impulse was to lash back. “Duke doesn’t provide for you or your family. I don’t find much to admire in that.”

  “And you’re worried that I will come with my hat in hand to you?”

  “I didn’t say that—”

  “I am sure rather than objecting to my begging at your door, you would like it very much. You could lord it over Duke. Tell all your acolytes here in the Nineteenth Hole what a freeloader he is, the great Duke Johnston who all of Charlotte loves. How he would be nothing if it weren’t for the even greater Gaston Jarvis.”

  Gaston threw back the icy remains of his bourbon, then set the glass down with a loud enough clunk to cue Dexter that he needed another.

  “You may,” Jerene continued, “have already rehearsed that monologue, which I’m sure will feature your trademark wit and acid. Well, let me tell you, little brother, things would not be so tight around the Johnston household if we weren’t…” She paused as the inscrutable bartender set a new glass down quickly. “… if we weren’t taking on the lion’s share of the bill for Lattamore Acres. Poor Dillard, she can afford her share less well than we can.”

  On this subject, Gaston could come to fiery focus. “That solution is the simplest. Let her wander downtown like a bag lady. Throw Her Highness out of the palace
.”

  “The simplest solution is for you to contribute your third like a decent human being. You would be doing it for us, not for her. An even more decent thing, since I observe you have millions of dollars, is to pick up the whole tab which would be as nothing for you. It would come to less than the bar bill in here, I suspect.”

  “Not a dime for her, now or ever.” He smiled, taking a sip and actually savoring the bourbon for a change. “Not for that witch.”

  “You would have us move her into one of our homes? I understand your ill feelings toward her, but toward us? What have we ever done to you that you would wish that fate on your sisters?”

  He looked steadily ahead at the mirror behind the bar. He enjoyed playing this scene with the very same dialogue with both his sisters, every few months. “Turn Maman out in the goddam street.” He reached for the peanut bowl. “I will not lift a finger. She can have an old age as fine as the childhood she gave us. I wouldn’t have thought you had any mercy for Mother, after what she let Daddy do to all of us.”

  Jerene stood from the barstool, straightening out her skirt, gathering her thoughts. She leaned into his ear and said, “And it doesn’t bother you to have the whole of this club, many of whom knew our parents in society, know that you are this Scrooge-like with your own mother?”

  Gaston stopped popping peanuts as all that remained in the bowl was peanut dust. He leaned in another direction to nab the bowl of pretzels. “People put up with a lot from writers as successful as I am. It’s a free pass for bad behavior—trust me on this. Invitations will continue to pile up in my mailbox. Jerry darling, I’ve had everything said about me that can be said. I’ve heard I’m addicted to pills, that I’m an alcoholic, that I have a steady habit of prostitutes coming in and out at all hours. That other people write my books and I put my name on ’em.” He laughed, crunching a pretzel. “I am beyond the reach of scandal. So Maman shall not see one dime of my considerable fortune. You think I’m joking about the women’s shelter. Tell her to consider euthanasia. I’ll mix the hemlock.”

  Jerene, who didn’t speak passionately or ever show emotion—not since she was a girl—turned to go. “Just for my working information,” she asked, “if Duke and I have to declare bankruptcy, publicly, and with no shortage of embarrassment, would you help us then? Not Duke, but me, your sister who would find a bankruptcy and public ruin very distressing.”

  “Jerene, I would write you a check for a hundred thousand dollars tonight but I know as I am sitting here you will spend it to keep our mother living like a dowager empress at Lattamore Acres and I will not let my money go to that enterprise.” He popped a pretzel into his mouth. “You could, you know, always sell one of those paintings of yours.” He had said it lightly but he felt the temperature lower as he said it.

  Jerene’s place in society was amplified by managing the Jarvis Trust for American Art, an entire room in the Mint Museum devoted to American landscapes that were, by obscure methods, piled up by their ancestors. Jerene was the dictator of a little ladies-who-lunch, time-on-their-hands circle of society good old girls, most of them chosen for their sycophancy, who called themselves “trustees” and met monthly to compare shopping, children, to get tipsy at lunchtime, and play at being fund-raisers for the purchase of new art. That would be intolerable to Jerene, Gaston knew, if Duke ran out of money and she had to start selling off the precious family art pile! The Jarvis Room at the Mint … well, it might have to be called something else if the paintings passed into someone else’s hands. Maybe he could buy it up and the sacred room could be the Gaston Jarvis Room and it could be the Gaston Jarvis Trust for American Art … had a nice ring to it … Nah, screw Art. He didn’t care about it that much. Frederick Church, George Inness, bunch of haystacks and cows in fields, gleaners and hay wains, blah blah blah—like Savonarola, throw ’em on the bonfire. He turned to Jerene …

  But she had gone. Well. That wasn’t a nice way to leave it. He’d make it up to her on some other occasion.

  * * *

  Alcohol was supposed to depress, to relax … but it only made Gaston more awake as night wore on. He’d fall into the bed tired enough but in a few hours he was wide awake again. No book or television show could interest him then. God knows, he had no intention of writing on the latest Cordelia Florabloom installment. But he might, in this inconsolable time of night, in just such a mood, work on a literary project long dreamt of, long threatened.

  He rolled to the edge of his grand king bed and bounced his portly frame into an upright position. He padded into his slippers, found a bathrobe hanging in the bathroom, and shuffled across the hallway to a nearly unfurnished room. But there was a small desk and a laptop, which he now opened up.

  So far there had only been notes, lines, musings, fragments. Somewhere amid all his things there was a box of student papers and notebooks, back from his days at Duke University, where some notes toward this literary comeback resided, youthful notions sketched out decades years ago. God only knew what immature dreck he’d written as a teenage undergraduate. But that youthful writing, whatever its faults, was before the rot set in, when he wrote from his soul, when he was insensible to the market and wouldn’t know a royalty statement from a bubble-gum wrapper. When the one reader he wished to show things to was Duke Johnston.

  Duke Johnston at Duke University. “Duke” Johnston, the legend. The name was Joseph Johnston but over four years this handsome, smart, athletic student had become “Duke,” the embodiment of all that was dashing and prestigious about the university. One heard of Duke Johnston witticisms, Duke Johnston parties, Duke Johnston’s romantic exploits, although he steadily remained unattached, driving the sorority girls into frenzies. Duke Johnston, who had principled opposition to the Vietnam War—mostly about its strategy, and not so much about the need to fight Communism—but nonetheless would answer his country’s call and would enlist in the Officer Corps after finishing up his degree in 1966. Because Gaston arrived at Duke University in 1967, he got to hear, endlessly, religiously, of Duke Johnston’s athletic exploits and his most famous misfortune.

  Duke was the handsome, easy-in-his-skin quarterback, his blond hair holding the late Saturday sun at Wallace Wade Stadium as he sat on the sidelines waiting for his chance at glory. He would take the field and they would chant his nickname, Duke, Duke, Duke, and he would oblige the crowd by a dazzling feat, an impossible threading of the needle, a completed pass the length of the field with every opponent bearing down on him. Duke University had slumped at football in recent years, though it had been the conference champion as recently as 1962; South Carolina (still then in the Atlantic Coast Conference), NC State and Clemson were the football powerhouses. But with the advent of Duke Johnston, who at his best could score against anyone, the pent-up years of university football frustration broke forth like dam waters, he was praised, loved, adored, worshipped. But in a game against Maryland, he took a terrible sack, going down hard, hitting his neck on another player’s knee while another player fell upon him with his full weight. His neck was thought to be broken; he was carried off the field immobile. That night, the local radio stations reported, he sank into a coma.

  Such quiet on Duke campus—it was as if President Kennedy had been re-assassinated. Students, professors, alumni walked with heads down, everyone in dark contemplation, in premature mourning, barely muttering to one another, prayerful and hoping this young good-natured boy, this emissary from the sun, was not paralyzed. The Durham Herald proclaimed a week later: FOOTBALL HERO RECOVERING. Young Johnston was not paralyzed, but this most certainly ended his gridiron days, and his much publicized dreams of going to officer’s school at West Point, joining the Vietnam War effort. In interviews that reported how close he had come to paralysis, how long his recovery would be, how he would be afflicted with vertigo and should walk with a cane, Joseph Beauregard “Duke” Johnston, son of Major Bo Johnston, a hero of World War II, descendant of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, defender of the Carolinas ag
ainst the savageries of Sherman’s army, let it be known that the loss of football was truly nothing to him, but the inability to serve his country as his ancestors had before him … alas, that was the end of a passionately held dream.

  Of course, the local Democrats hoped to recruit Duke for office, there and then on the spot—and the head of the Republican Club paid him a hospital visit as well. Duke Johnston, showing up to candidate debates with his limp and his cane, handily became student body president. He got to go to Washington to shake hands with former Vice President Nixon (a Duke alum), he lunched with the governor and asked Senator Sam Erwin, who had come to Durham for a lecture, to attend one of his famous barbecues at Arcadia House—and Senator Sam said yes! What a college career, what greatness was portended … and now, in Duke Johnston’s first year at law school (Duke University forbade him from heading up north to Harvard or Yale, gave him every fellowship, threw at him every prize and scholarship not nailed down), insignificant wretch Gaston Jarvis had an invitation to a house party at the next-to-campus mansion known as Arcadia, was going to meet this philosopher king and his legendary coterie of smart, gifted young men and the gifted ladies who adored such men.

  Gaston Jr. hated his father Gaston Sr., but he had to give his old man credit for allowing him to keep up appearances at Duke University. Gaston Jarvis Sr. had always been a bit sensitive about the provenance of his own law degree, so after a lifetime of belittling his son, he nonetheless was willing to pay for a Duke University education, so as better to allow a confusion, a sense that maybe son followed father to his ol’ alma mater, a few backslaps in the club, a bit of “Yes, just like the old man!” when asked how his son was getting on at Duke. Nor did he wish his son to show up as some rube with one Sunday suit.