Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  “When are you going to do it?” Duke persisted in saying, each time they’d meet in the years after Duke University, then rarer with Duke Johnston in his law practice. “When are we getting Lookaway, Dixieland?”

  Gaston Jarvis began the book a thousand times. Gaston rented an antique attic room in eighteenth-century Hillsborough, in a colonial-era house falling down around its old-maid proprietress, writing most days and driving into Durham most nights … Yes, when indeed?

  That was it, wasn’t it? That was why he had grown to despise his friend. Gaston looked at Duke and saw a washout, someone who fumbled away many chances for a great role in life’s pageant. And when the world looked at Gaston, everyone saw a success … except Duke. Duke looked at him and thought that they were partners in failed promise. To Duke—though he would never say it or remind him of it—Gaston was the writer who failed to write his masterpiece, who whored out his talent, who never wrote Lookaway, Dixieland.

  Right now! Right here with the blank computer page before him, like Canute ordering the tides, the dark waters could be forced back, the novel could still rise!

  Instead, Gaston sighed and clicked on MY PICTURES, and up popped a folder marked GIRLS, and he clicked on that and looked at some racy photos of Lucinda, a lovely ample black woman, of Maria, a saucy dark-skinned Latina, of Cherie, a thin smooth brown woman with sensuous eyes … he clicked on Cherie. He got to his feet and returned with the remote telephone. Cherie’s number was on speed dial.

  “It’s a little late, isn’t it, sugar?”

  Gaston sat back down. “I thought you never slept.”

  “I’m always awake for you, big daddy. You always know when I feel like getting hot and wet…” She breathed heavily into the phone.

  “You think you can get a cab?” There was a pause. “Of course, I understand with the hour and all, you would be compensated at our special rate.”

  “Wasn’t even thinkin’ about that, sugar. I was thinking about my big ol’ daddy, and, ooh, I hope you’re saving it all up for your Cherie.” Since Gaston didn’t respond, she wrapped up the call: “Be there in about forty minutes. Don’t you fall asleep on me now.”

  “That will not happen,” he said, hanging up.

  Dad was wrong. Wrong about advising against the tramps and hookers. These were the women who understood men best. They had perfected the one act for which women were irreplaceable—they had distilled it, refined it, unencumbered the sex act with an agendum. These were the women who didn’t gouge or cling or manipulate. And money made it all possible, easy, clinical. He looked at Cherie’s picture, those seductive big brown eyes, one more time and felt the early electric stirrings of arousal. Then he closed all the computer files, leaving the blank document called LOOKAWAY, DIXIELAND for last, and closed his laptop gently.

  * * *

  And why was September in North Carolina getting to be worse than August in recent years? The merciless summer sun was in no hurry to depart.

  Gaston drove into the Charlottetowne Country Club parking lot, and was annoyed to find it full. Some ladies’ luncheon garbage going on, some do-gooding nonsense … every single place filled in the near lot. So he drove to the overflow lot and looked at the prospect of a several-hundred-yard walk in the ninety-six-degree sun, eighty-some percent humidity, just pure mid-Carolina hell. His linen suit would be soaked by the time he made it to the air-conditioning. He decided to do the much-forbidden remedy of cutting across the eighteenth green to the Nineteenth Hole. There were signs proscribing this activity to save the lawnsmen from having continually to repair the trace of the popular cut-through.

  “Well, lookee there,” called out a voice, when he was halfway to the clubhouse door. “Is that Gaston Jarvis on a putting green?”

  Gaston turned to see Bob Boatwright, attired in his usual pink shirt and plaid golf pants and a jaunty golf cap with a pom-pom to make his presentation even more clownlike.

  Bob’s friend broke in: “Now Bob, you promised to introduce me…”

  “Indeed I did!”

  Bob Boatwright, Gaston understood, was among the wealthiest people in this club, entirely off real estate development. Bob had figured that Charlotte was going to be a boomtown long before the NBA franchise and the NFL stadium, before Wachovia and Bank of America grew into top-five banking behemoths, before trucking and warehousing gave way to high-tech and money managing, and he bought up prime properties in the urban wards accordingly—bought ’em for a song. He developed the northern reaches of South Carolina, which offered lower taxes and an effortless commute to Charlotte across the state line. He developed that mud-wallow of a lake called Lake Norman in the 1970s—formerly middle-class and cozy, old men in bassboats—to an upscale destination until everybody who was anybody had a home and a powerboat on it. He bought up land in the poor-black northwest and the poor-white southeast and built affordable condos and, next to that, upscale gated communities, and no matter where he built people bought. Jesus Christ, what a Midas touch.

  “Still happy at that semi-abandoned lot of yours, Gaston? Wouldn’t let me talk you into a little lakefront property befitting yo’ station in life?”

  “I like being close to the club,” Gaston said, feeling the sweat bead on his forehead, ready to flow into a number of unattractive streams. “Makes for fewer DUIs.”

  They all laughed. The swarthy man showed the whole of his upper teeth and gums as he chuckled, a snarling dog before an attack. Another man, fat, in puke-green plaid golf pants, Charlie Brownbee, Gaston thought his name was, leaned forward as if to catch their collective scent.

  “We may have to have a word with your brother-in-law,” Boatwright added, coming down from his laugh. “We’re interested in the Fort Mill shore of the Catawba, down near the old trestle. Looks like it’s light industrial, Duke Power and their power lines own a wide strip, and then there’s a big ol’ beautiful chunk all zoned away for historical preservation. And Duke Johnston’s name is all over the trust.”

  How acidly deprecating should I be, wondered Gaston for a second. He liked to rain abuse on his brother-in-law’s Civil War preservation and re-enactment mania … but he didn’t care for these moneymen either. “My brother-in-law imagines there was a skirmish of historical importance along that riverbank,” Gaston said, taking a middle avenue. “Perhaps a musket ball fell in the vicinity, though I rather doubt it. Stoneman’s Raiders and all that.”

  The men looked at him blankly.

  “Nonetheless,” continued Gaston, “my brother-in-law and some Civil War obsessives are going to make it a memorial park, honoring the zeroes of brave men who fought alongside the U.S. 21 Bypass.”

  “So it’s not whatcha call historical?” asked the loud New Yorker in the ugly plaid puffed-out golf trousers. “The designation could be overturned?”

  Gaston was struck by the nakedness of the greed, a stupefaction that anything or anyone would get ever so slightly in the way of their making another mountain of money. Plowing up the clay, turning the river brown, cutting down the old growth. Screw ’em, Gaston thought.

  “Stoneman’s Raiders did burn the bridge there,” Gaston said, wiping his brow, wet throughout his torso now. “A few shots were fired, in point of fact. That was about it for Charlotte in the Civil War but you know how folks are about the Civil War, and what little visible Charlotte history there is. I’m afraid you fellows may be out of luck.”

  “Aw now,” said Boatwright, “I betcha there’s a way. Maybe we should sit down with Duke and see if he’d be interested in a property there, let him participate. Could be some real gain in it for him.”

  Gaston reflected how Duke of all individuals was the least moved by money and practicalities. He had never capitalized on being a city councilman, never scooped up the appropriate graft. “Be my guest,” Gaston said, thirsting for the clubhouse and the liquid bounty awaiting within.

  “You might put in a word,” said Charlie Brownbee with the ridiculous pants.

  “Yeah,” said sw
arthy teeth-and-gums, “I hear he might need the money.”

  Boatwright blanched at this tactless comment. That was clearly something Boatwright told in secret to his partners, shared at some strategy session. Gaston could imagine the PowerPoint presentation: Obstacles to Success, with Duke Johnston’s affable face popping up as a slide. But we hear he’s run through the family money, someone in charge of market research would pipe in. As much as Gaston wanted to deliver a savage response to this vulgarian who would lightly bring up his brother-in-law and sister’s financial standing, Gaston also felt bad, really bad, about his ugliness with Jerene in the Nineteenth Hole a few months back. What would be the harm of putting Duke in the way of these shysters? Maybe Duke would make a little money, keep his sister Jerene in pearls and matronly fashion.

  “I assure you,” Gaston said, “Duke has plenty of money tucked away, hence his life as a Civil War bon vivant. You are not likely to persuade him to do anything for money.” He paused briefly, they were all ears. “That’s the difference down here, my Northern friend, between Old Money and vulgar, crass, showy, greedy New Money which would jump at any opportunity for a sweetheart deal.” He enjoyed his perfectly pleasant tone, looking right at the man with the snarling dog teeth. “If you think a man such as Duke Johnston will spring at the sign of a few dollars like a trained seal lurching for a fish, then you don’t know Duke Johnston. If your little development honored the site in some way…”

  Boatwright broke in, “Yes, well that’s an added value to the property, that we could preserve the integrity of the Civil War site. We would be open to that sort of development—indeed, it might help sell the units. I think Duke might well be the perfect person to help with design and planning.” Boatwright talked on, having surmised the situation perfectly, as well as Gaston’s contempt for his partners. Gaston felt he could see Boatwright’s wheels turning: Yes, take meeting with Duke, don’t bring my partners, talk Civil War claptrap, sacred ground, how only Duke Johnston could guide us …

  “Bob,” Gaston said, aiming himself toward the clubhouse, “I am melting like the Witch of the West. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Gaston’s suit was indistinguishable from a towel after a shower, and when he plunged through the double French doors of the clubhouse, and felt its arctic air-conditioning, he wondered if he would faint. Keeping himself aloft by a steadying hand on the bar, he found his way to the next-to-last seat, his seat, his sentry post, at the end of the Nineteenth Hole. Dexter saw him enter and had his bourbon (an especially generous pour for drink number one) waiting for him in the chilled silver julep cup, surrounded by a high-thread-count cotton square with the club blazon embroidered upon it.

  “Got the silver out today,” Gaston exhaled, near collapse from the change of temperature.

  “Founder’s Day is this weekend.”

  “Yes it is.” Gaston wrapped the smooth silver tankard in his hand, protected from the chill burn by the napkin square. Oh bourbon does taste its best in chilled silver—what so much of the world does not know. And Charlottetowne keeps alive this nicety … the old ways, the old manners. Should have told Bob Boatwright and those Yankee carpetbaggers where to go fuck themselves, but that’s my central downfall right there. Should have buried Norma and Mrs. Meacham and my war criminal of a mother in a trench down by the Catawba River, too. I’m too accommodating, a creature of the old courtesies. Too nice for your own good, Gaston—he lectured himself between divine sips—too nice for your own good.

  Jerene

  On a Sunday late morning, the Mint wasn’t open to the public but the lights were on and a janitor and a few administrative staff were in early. Jerene Johnston dressed for church, but then decided to skip it and drive to the Mint. She knocked on the main door until someone waved to her through the glass; moments later Jerene could see that it was Miss Maylee, an ancient docent, who toddled over to the front door with a string of heavy keys to let her inside. “You’re certainly here early, Mrs. Johnston,” she sang.

  “I know that Lynne and the catering people have everything well in hand,” said Jerene. “I’m just being a Nervous Nellie.”

  The Mint Museum of Charlotte was different from other museums because it was not conceived as a museum. It was a columned, porticoed neo-classical U.S. mint building from 1836 turned renegade Confederate mint, printing out all that Confederate scrip that would bankrupt the region, with a turn as a Confederate hospital, then a once-grand building you could rent space in—Thomas Edison worked on his lightbulb in a rented space here (or was that apocrypha?)—then finally it was pressed into service as an art museum. This was a museum organized not by period or school, but by rich benefactors’ hoardings. One walked through the various high-ceilinged rooms, as Jerene was doing now, looking above the grand doorways to see the gold-plated names of donors’ families—the Rankin Room, the Crosland Room, Belk, Dowd, Harris—some names among the pinnacle of Charlotte society, some names no one had heard of until the embossment of the golden name above the doorway.

  Jerene could home in like a pigeon on the Jarvis Room, walk through the other galleries of art without looking up, turn left once, right twice, and then raise her head in time to see the family name shining above the door. She never tired of surveying the room itself, the holdings of the Jarvis Trust for American Art, five big and ten miniature paintings of varying value by American nineteenth-century artists studied by art history students, plus a few engravings and watercolors, too.

  The ghostly Miss Maylee had materialized behind her to see if there was anything she could do. “Antoine Blanche,” she added, with an approving smile.

  “Getting Antoine was a coup, wasn’t it?”

  Charlotte’s hottest semi-celebrity chef was debuting a run of his fall hors d’oeuvres tonight, and that would bring Charlotte out even if a hurricane materialized. At 8:30 P.M. tonight Jerene Jarvis Johnston’s brainchild, the Mint by Gaslight, would commence. Patrons, friends, dilettantes and donors, for a hundred dollars a ticket, would be given little gas lamps and allowed to wander around the many rooms, casting romantic shadows, all fueled by an open bar that rivaled any high-society event of the season. Jerene had imported the two best bartenders from the Charlottetowne Country Club … well, Gaston, her brother, had assured her they were the best and he would know. Antoine Blanche from the packed-nightly Carte Blanche in the Marriott Uptown would cook, then mingle; it didn’t hurt that he was a handsome Frenchman who shamelessly played up his accent. The six trustees of the Jarvis Trust for American Art, all contemporaries of Jerene, handpicked for their sociability, wealth, pliancy, would be in attendance too. These ladies had contributed the necessary money to the foundation (tax write-off!) for catering and cocktails.

  Every year it was a mob scene and the invitations were much sought after but Jerene knew the whims of these sorts of events. She would announce the date months in advance, then pray the date held up, unmenaced by tornado warnings, civil disturbances, unforeseen NASCAR events or a Panthers Sunday-night game, hastily announced concerts of pop stars—she spent weeks divining the best possible Sunday evening—before the new fall TV season and the NFL heated up in earnest. She was not about to have The Simpsons trump the Mint by Gaslight.

  Charlotteans came just for the liquor and the snacks, of course, oblivious to the greater purposes of raising money to purchase art. The Jarvis Trust had to give a slice of the ticket price to the Mint Museum itself, but at least $75 out of that $100 ticket went to the Jarvis Trust, multiplied by … what was this year’s body count? At least two-hundred-ten RSVPs, so they’d be 15K in the clear. Ideally, every year she would gladhand and swan about the room, someone would chime on a glass, she would briefly greet everyone by microphone in the Jarvis Room, a little banter, a few shout-outs to the most important people in the room (to let the unimportant people know they were swimming in rich waters) and then she might unveil another print or take the cloth off a newly purchased miniature to polite applause. This would be followed by obsequies to the
many people who made it possible, the people gathered here tonight, the core of culture in Charlotte right here in this room, art lovers, heroic, dependable. After her brief but memorable speechifying, the event was then on the downhill side: some carried their lanterns around the shadowy rooms of the second floor, other people took it as a cue to mow through the contents of the hors d’oeuvre trays, suck down the last of the free booze, then stumble into taxis or risk a Breathalyzer stop, all the while thinking, That Jerene Johnston can throw a mighty fine party, and well, at least they had “supported the Mint.”

  But Jerene knew it wasn’t about the Mint, which did quite well on grants and gifts and legacies, it was all about supporting her legacy, her legend.

  The Jarvis Trust for American Art was the ticket into Charlotte society for the Jarvis women, in perpetuity. The core of this collection had been purchased by her great-great-grandfather who indulged his wife’s fondness for art. Jerene had seen the Jarvis homeplace site down near Waxhaw, North Carolina, a stone’s throw from the state line with South Carolina, now just a bit of dirt and weeds between two shambling, still-standing chimneys. It hardly seemed that anything confined between those two chimneys could ever have been a grand enough house for the Jasper Cropsey, the Thomas Cole and the David Johnson, let alone any other sort of finery, but the story went that her great-great-grandmother Adeline was from Wilmington, North Carolina, a woman from an old grand colonial family (the Bells), who found the hinterlands of Waxhaw intolerable. So, her great-great-grandfather Hermann Jarvis indulged whatever decorating whims would content her. He took her to Charleston to buy European furniture, to Baltimore to buy American landscapes. Hermann Jarvis and his brothers Wilhelm and Otto. People often assumed the Jarvises were Scottish, because Jerene and her immediate family went to Presbyterian churches, but Jarvis was a German name and her people came in with the original Germans who settled Mecklenburg County and named the central market town after the English king’s German bride, Queen Charlotte, hoping to gain royal favor.