I was getting bored when one of the apprentices, a big muscular guy (Marlin Owen, I later learned) stuck his head in the door without knocking and said, “Hi, you Devin?” I remembered him as the hero in the play last night.
“Yes,” I jumped up to be introduced, but all he said was, “Some friends of yours outside looking for you,” and shut the door again.
In the parking lot, Verl stood beside an old pickup equipped for snow with a broom and wide shovel stuck upright behind the cab. Next to him a tall, lanky blond guy leaned cavalierly against the side door. I shook hands with Dennis Reed. He offered to take me for a ride.
In and out of the winding dirt roads of the circling mountains, he drove us for hours, drove gracefully, as if his truck were not a machine but a dance partner. And squeezed comfortably into the cab, I felt for the first time since I’d come there the fineness of the place. A fine place to see from a truck. At dusk, we came to a rambling white stucco building sheltered by crab apple trees. It was a Mexican family’s restaurant called Cervantes’s, and it had a windmill painted on the front by, I was told, a friend of Dennis’s. So, while the owners lingered affably around us serving more and more strange food, we talked of philosophy, and the war in Vietnam, and the revolution of the young, and sexuality, and all the limitations of the human condition. I was having a wonderful time.
We argued politics. Verl thought we were going to win, that what people like Danny the Red were doing in France to De Gaulle, that what we had done to LBJ, that what Robert Kennedy would do for us, all meant we could believe again that maybe everything could work—the way we had believed in 1960.
“But who do you think got us into Vietnam in the first place?” I asked. “A Kennedy. I think it’s all over. Everyone should just go home and grow his own roses.”
“You’re a cynic,” Verl smiled.
“I’m a southerner.”
“I thought all southerners were sentimentalists,” Dennis said.
“That’s when they’re reading Look Homeward, Angel. After that they go to Harvard and study cynicism,” Verl told him.
“And look around for Quentin Compson’s bridge,” I said. Dennis laughed. I was glad that Verl’s friend liked me. I ordered the fourth bottle of wine. By the time we finished eating, I was sure that (next to my family and Verl) there was no one in the world I could like more than Dennis Reed. He was so good-looking he might have been intimidating, but part of his charm was a natural easiness whose sincerity you had to accept. In the john, Verl told me that Dennis knew Greek well and was a drama enthusiast, but I guess he was too modest to mention either subject during our talk. He didn’t mention what he did, either, except that he had refused to go to law school because he had no use for his father, who was a judge.
By the next time I came back from the bathroom, four more people had joined our party. Then Dennis borrowed the proprietor’s guitar and sang songs that they all seemed to know. Chain gang songs, and union songs, and laments about cornbread and beans, and a ballad involving the tribulations of a Miss Cornelia, resident of a New Orleans bordello, who suffered from pernicious anemia, who was visited and graphically cured by Our Lord Jesus Christ, whom she then charged two dollars for the house call.
“I’m glad I came to Colorado,” I told everyone there.
On the ride home I stuck my head out the window to feel the tingle. My face had gone slightly numb, and the words to the songs we were still singing kept having trouble with my tongue. Then all at once we were pulling up in front of the Starks’ summer house, and my new friends were saying good-bye to me.
Dennis anointed my head with oil. “You’re all right, Donahue. Why don’t you give up the grease paint, come over, and stay with us? You play Scrabble?”
My cup ranneth over with fellowship. “Sure. Listen, I may just do that. Anyhow, next time you guys get over here, we’ll play some in the bar. Okay? And thanks a lot, hear?”
I started up the steps to the house.
“You all right, Devin?” Verl called after me through a tunnel.
“Sure, fine. See you,” I yelled.
“Okay. I’ll be in touch. Take care of yourself.”
“Jesus, you’re such a mother hen,” I told him. “Come back soon. See you.”
They drove away.
The wind was really blowing now; pine needles flew out of the trees and stung my face and arms. The clouds were whirring about in blacker and blacker spirals. Van Gogh brushstrokes, I thought. It made me heady in the straight-from-the-stomach way a Ferris wheel does when you go over the top.
My spirit expanded. The air held that sustained suspension of a storm’s imminence just before its letting-go. I would meet it. “Oh, to live each moment at this height, this enlarging of the faculties until they are at one with the unconquerable forces of nature,” I thought, or something like it.
Then I thought again of Leila. How, one immemorial day at the high school water cooler, I had rescued her from that narrow ignorance that lashed her to the masts of hillbilly music, majorette practice, the cloddish attentions of the football defensive line. How I (a younger, smoother Henry Higgins) had led her gently by the mind into the bright, still chambers of Art (the Impressionists), Music (Rachmaninoff and Wagner), Literature (beginning with Wuthering Heights and Sanctuary), and Drama (beginning with securing her, through my influence as president of the theatrical club, the lead in the junior play, Anastasia).
Had I not given her a soul capable of feeling grandeur? Had I not proven that by our love and my literary enlightenment, we could reach that pure rare empyrean, the eternal trysting place of those who set no bourn but new heaven, new Earth? Had we not felt as they felt, shared their company up there, cut out in little stars? Dido and Aeneas. Paris and Helen. Tristan, Isolde. Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton. André and Natasha. Madame Bovary. Sayonara.
“But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?” I thought. It was the bedroom and Leila was awake. In itself a presentiment. As I climbed the steps, I took one last full breath of fire and air. My baser elements I gave away. They slipped on the loose bricks, and I tripped. Righting myself, I went softly inside the house.
Chapter 5
My First Dissipation
Inside the living room, I sailed on a weave to the fireplace, where I threw on some old newspapers, pine cones, Sabby Norah’s copy of The Prophet, two logs, and half the box of magic color flames. With one match they took fire. Then I went to Leila’s bedroom, knocked, and opened the door.
She was lying upon her bed. It had a brass headpost, one she had found in the back room of a Salvation Army store. She had stripped off its layer of blue paint and now transported it with her wherever she went in her small wooden trailer that was now parked in the backyard. She called it her gypsy wagon.
What I could see of the room by the light of a blue bulb in a purple tasseled shade was not very neat. The closet was just a chain strung across the window, with hers and Mittie’s clothes hanging from the loops. More clothes were piled in two director’s chairs labeled “Mittie” and “Leila,” others flung over the dresser; clothes carpeted the floor along with play scripts, shoes, empty Chinese food cartons, and the children’s toys. A shop window full of silver jewelry hung from cuphooks on one wall. Pictures and posters of the Starks were tacked onto the others. And over the bed was a poster of Robert Kennedy and a nude sketch of Leila drawn from the rear (white pastel on rose paper, unsigned).
Below, the original Leila lay upon tangled sheets handsewn of blue silk jersey. Uncovered pillows striped behind her, she was watching the California presidential primaries on a portable television that had a coat hanger for an antenna. Leila followed all the campaigns assiduously, for she held strong and wideranging political opinions—espoused simultaneously, in fact, the policies of the French Revolution and the sentiments of Victorian philanthropists.
She looked up. “Where have you be
en, Devin? You missed supper.”
“I missed you,” I smiled, sitting down on the bed and staring at her nightgown. “That’s very pretty,” I commented with a larger smile. The gown was shimmery and white.
“It’s my Jean Harlow dress,” she said. “I got it for my audition in Rain…Well, I found it. Somebody threw it in one of those collection bins Goodwill Industries puts up. Can you believe that?”
I said I couldn’t.
Then, pulling my smile to a close, I spoke in gentle earnest, “You know what, Leila? You know what you have? You have fineness. This is what…what I want to say. You’ve been the very best thing in all of my life. You and Verl. And Dennis. And Jardin. And Mama. But what I mean is, you’re the very…the finest center of my being. That’s the truth, Leila. That’s really true.”
“Are you okay?” Leila asked me.
She got up and turned off the television. When she looked at me, she started laughing. “Where have you been? You’re snockered!”
I fell back upon the pillows from where she had arisen and found them warm.
“I’ve been talking with some good friends, talking for hours, trying to figure it all out, what it comes down to, what lasts and what shimmers. The readiness is all, Leila.”
“Good,” she said, “I’m ready to take a shower.” I had never really gotten Leila to respond correctly.
Having gathered her apparel, she left me while I was still trying to decide what the difference was between the readiness and the ripeness. It seemed vital. Looking down to the floor at the side of her bed, I noticed a blurred and bouncing record player stacked with Aretha Franklin albums and the soundtracks of The Fantastiks and Damn Yankees. I took these off and put on Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, which I found at the bottom of a pile of albums under the dresser. It was the very copy of the symphony I had given her six years ago, inscribed ‘Here will we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony.’ With love forever, Devin.” Ah, she had treasured it. I sank back, buried my head in the pillows of my fair love’s ripening breast. (“Sweet” love’s? Which was it?)
“Devin! Are you crazy?”
Leila had returned. She stood in the door, wrapped in a towel. It was also inscribed: “Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge.” Harshly she advised me, “Turn that damn thing off, you idiot! You’re going to wake everybody up.”
When, slowly, I protested, she rejected Rachmaninoff herself and went back to the bathroom. I followed. In the living room, my fire had gone out, miraculously consuming The Prophet on a stake of untouched logs.
Reaching the bathroom, I continued my testament while Leila turned on the shower, stepped behind a bilious plastic curtain, and handed me her towel.
I began, “You know, love’s not hereafter. Is it? Let’s ball our sweetness up. Let’s…” I began again. “Look, Leila, all of us just go ’round and ’round our pasts forever trying to get back home. A just circle. Ends where it begun. Began. That’s why, without you in my life, I couldn’t keep on being me.”
She stuck her head out at the front of the curtain. Her shower cap had blue umbrellas on it. It made her ears stick out. That bothered me. “What?” she asked.
“I said, without you in my life, I couldn’t keep on being me.”
“Oh,” she smiled and withdrew behind the curtain. Having to shout over the water was a handicap; it was difficult to enunciate in a wistful tone. I was beginning to get depressed.
“You are me, Leila. Do you remember when Cathy and Heathcliff said that? You’re the only haven I can go to that will take me back to who I need to be.”
“Devin, I’m sorry. I can’t hear you. What did you say?”
“I SAID…” I leaned forward to put my right foot on the toiletbowl lid. It happened to be up at the time, so my leg went through as far as the knee.
“Oh, C-h-r-i-s-t,” I whispered.
She stuck her head out again, turned off the shower faucets and laughed. The indifferent laughter of Olympus above and around me. I was shaking my leg up and down like a dog come out of the rain.
“What did you do?” she laughed.
Despite the superfluity of her question, I brought myself to respond with a head-tilted Tom Sawyer grin. It was the right approach. Clumsiness, if artfully manipulated, can be as effective as suavity, since nothing, I had concluded, flames more swiftly to the erotic than the maternal.
“Take off your shoes and pants and put them out on the back porch,” she sweetly enjoined. A proposal indirectly promising. In addition to my as-yet unpeeling Tennessee tan, I had on one of the new pairs of baby-blue shorts Mama had hurried out to buy me for the trip—along with four undershirts and four pairs of socks so that if worse came to worst, I could be hospitalized in clean underwear. Our hygiene-for-disaster mentality, she called it.
I wrung my pants out over the toilet bowl, took off both shoes and socks, and shiveringly carried them out to the back porch, where I was immediately reminded of the storm, no longer imminent, but fulfilled. Rain was squalling down. Leila’s directive struck me as less practical than I had at first thought it, but rather than return for alternate instructions, I hung my pants and both socks over the rail. My shoes, I left in the kitchen.
Meanwhile, my pants blew off into the yard and were swept here and there by short gusts of wind. Up on a bush, wrapped around a tree, down among the leaves. I chased after, circling in the rain, but the wind kept grabbing them, slapped me in the face with them, so I gave it up, almost in tears now at the pity of the whole soggy situation. My new red-and-white-striped shirt had become a solid pink body shirt. My shorts were soaked. My nose was running. I was depressed.
Slushing back to the bathroom, I found Leila thoughtfully appraising her face in the medicine chest mirror. She studied it as one would a familiar object to determine its continued serviceability, like a family armchair or an old party dress.
She mused, ignorant of my distress, “If I can learn to live without makeup now, maybe I’ll be able to stand getting old and looking like my mother.”
With her face washed naked, she was blond everywhere, the Leila of my adolescent room, where she had undressed one Sunday afternoon when Mama and the others were away visiting Uncle Norwood. Leila Dolores Beaumont. Leila D’Or. Seductress of Sorrow, I used to call her. Dolorous Delilah, weeping barber. Gold Mountain, Leila of old.
Behind her I said, “You know, I would have thought that without your eyes made up you’d be defenseless, more vulnerable. But you’re not. You’re more protected. More you. And you’ll never look like your mother.”
This was observation now, not strategy, for I had given up on Cathy and Heathcliff, was feeling world enough in time.
“Just not as flashy, you mean?” she asked, then turned. “Devin, you’re soaking wet!”
Shivering all over the Holiday Inn floor mat, I rather ashamedly muttered, “My pants flew away. Out in the backyard. It’s raining out there.”
She smiled, biting softly on her lower lip. It was the old indulgent smile, which rushed the years backward so we both could feel them give way. I kissed her.
Water was dripping down from my hair around my nose, making it itch, and in between our mouths. I was wondering about the possibility of moving my left hand from her back to scratch my nose and then touching her right breast, when she turned her head enough to say, “You want to fuck me, don’t you?”
I was startled by the profanity.
All of a sudden, I felt a lot younger than Leila. In the past we had always used more generalized terms like go to bed with, sleep with, mess around with, make love with. I was afraid she might notice my embarrassment if I didn’t make a reply, but a simple “yes,” though to the point, felt too blunt and wouldn’t come out. Hyperbole was inappropriate. My tendency was to return the question to her (“Would you like me to?”), but I cou
ld conjecture how evasive and juvenile that might sound. I felt like saying I didn’t know what I wanted to do, now that things had gotten so real. For I hadn’t planned on her leaping in front of her own capitulation to memory this way, and I needed a moment to adjust.
I didn’t say anything. Jesus, I thought, maybe I’m going to cry. Leila took my hand and led me into her bedroom.
Warm, damp, under her tangled sheets and a quilt of blue velvet that she pulled from beneath a mound of clothes at the bedfoot, I turned to her and kissed her, kissed all the felt memories of shadow, curve, light, gesture, odors, weight, kissed my first kiss, touched my first breast for the first time, again.
Oh, God, I thought, maybe this is really true.
“OH, GOD, GOD!” someone screamed from the back room.
I soared to attention. Scurried for a pair of Mittie’s pants.
“THEY’RE ALL OVER THE PLACE!” the scream continued.
It was Nathan Wolfstein’s voice.
Leila rose as well, all white-robed. We reached the living room just as Wolfstein, looking like a pajamaed Ichabod Crane, roared flapping out of his bedroom.
“BUGS! BUGS!” he screeched. “THEY’RE ALL OVER THE PLACE!”
“Nate! Nate!” Leila tried to stop him. “What’s the matter? What bugs?”
He stared past us with the blind horror of the damned. “BED! Bugs crawling! Bed bugs!” was what I made of his mumblings.
Then he rushed on past in a roar of wheeze, flinging off his pajamas as he went, clawing at his white bony frame in a frenzy of panic. We ran after him to the bathroom, where he was already in the tub with the shower going full blast. After five seconds there, he jumped out, jerked the towel from my waiting hand, fled into his bedroom, came out pulling on his pants and sweater, and stomped his feet into his cowboy boots all at the same time.
Ignoring our inquiries, our assurances about nightmares, he streamed outside, got into his old Austin, started it up, and ran it into the nearest pine tree. The horn went off.
The Delectable Mountains Page 6