Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  Isabella saw that Moses Ezekiel’s motivations were too intricate. Most simply he wanted to impress and outdo his host. He had succeeded. He also wanted to seek a Roman husband for the girl. If he could marry her off to a Roman or a permanent exile, she would be that much more likely to stay with him in Italy. All that was simple.

  But perhaps he wanted to see her. Not her body displayed for his plea sure, but her body celebrated inviolate. His fear during the war had been that the South would win and he would die and slavery would be continued and his darling would stand in some showing room, a commodity to be inspected. He wanted to see that she was untouched. He didn’t understand his wish to be a violation. He did not understand his wish as Isabella did. He wanted to replace the images from his night terrors with an image from daydreams, a tableau of his daughter, almost white and cold as marble, but alive and forever most significantly draped. He wished he could assure and ensure that no one but her mother and her future husband would ever see whatever there might be between her legs. If she couldn’t have a baby it wouldn’t surprise him. He imagined she might be missing an essential part. He imagined her not merely inviolate; he imagined her inviolable. He wished her sex away without blinking at the violence of the hope.

  Her mother was noticing something else. Or trying to take notice of something she couldn’t quite catch sight of but could sense. One of the women was falling in love with Alice. Who was looking at her daughter through too-shiny eyes? Eyes full of tears. Her mother was wondering what had put them there. And how it was that her daughter was intact; she had had word from a Roman doctor, an authority on such things, and yet something about the girl was different. When asked, Alice would only say, “I’ve seen Rome and Rome has seen me.” Alice was not the same country girl she had been in Washington.

  She confessed to her mother what she would never tell her father. She had been kissed by Charlotte Cush-man. She would have preferred to have kissed Emma Stebbins. And of course she was exceptionally curious about Edmonia Lewis, the black lady sculptress, who had appeared in Hawthorne’s Marble Faun. The kiss was of curious origin— provoked by Alice’s own awareness of two Cleopatras, S———’s version and Lewis’s. Only Charlotte and Alice and Emma had paid attention.

  Moses Ezekiel had miscalculated. Shortly after the tableau vivant incident, his woman packed up his daughter and returned to southwest Washington.

  If he wanted to see the girl, he would have to go after her.

  When Hope came out of the bathroom the pages were in her Dial-soap-washed and Jergen’s-lotioned hands. She smelled like Abel.

  “He loved that story,” said Nicholas.

  “I don’t think so,” said Hope. “I remember being so very disappointed that he didn’t. I remember all he said after he finished reading it was ‘Are you a lesbo?’ All I could think to say to that was ‘Are you an idiot?’ so I didn’t say anything.”

  “If you had said, ‘Yes, I’m a lesbo,’ he would have said, ‘I’m queer sometimes too, aren’t we perfect for each other?’ ” said Nicholas.

  “Then I’m very sorry I didn’t tell that lie.”

  “I’m sorry too.”

  “Was Abel gay?”

  “No, he only sometimes feared he was.”

  “What an odd thing to say.”

  “And sad thing to feel.”

  “Lunch?”

  “After a stroll through the Country Music Hall of Fame. Abel would want me to see Elvis’s solid-gold Cadillac. And no more soul food unless it’s at Prince’s Hot Chicken,” said Nicholas.

  He leaned over the bed and picked up a medicine bottle three-quarters full of what appeared to be black sand.

  “Is this what I think it is?”

  “Do you think it’s volcanic sand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “And this critter,” Hope said, pulling a small white limestone carved rabbit or squirrel off of a shelf, “is the Edmondson I gave him for his birthday the last year we were together.”

  “What’s this?”

  “A starfish from Bohol.”

  “Here’s another copy of the Dr. Dan book.”

  “I’ll take that for Ajay.”

  Hope added this last to the pile she had been creating all morning, a pile that included the books next to Abel’s bed, Epitaph of a Small Winner, Eugénie Grandet, Man’s Fate, and Where the Wild Things Are, as well as a Ringling Brothers ticket and a picture of a fountain in Central Park. All this she slid into her large canvas bag.

  Nicholas put on his black jacket, Hope put on her shoes, they rinsed out the jelly glasses, and they locked the front door. The house was empty again.

  TWENTY

  STANDING IN FRONT of Elvis Presley’s “solid-gold Cadillac,” a cream-colored pearlized 1960 Fleetwood, Nicholas Gordon did not appear impressed, not with the gold-plated refrigerator that froze ice in two minutes, not with the gold-plated shoe buffer, not even with the gold records embedded in the roof of the automobile.

  “It was a very good thing we did for you Yanks, the British Invasion. Without Mick and John and Ray . . .” said Nicholas.

  “Ray?” queried Hope.

  “Davies,” said Nicholas.

  “Davis, the Kinks,” said Hope.

  “Davies . . . without the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, and Van Morrison, America would have been doomed to hearing the blues raped rather than reinvented,” said Nicholas. Hope shook her head.

  “I am not a big fan of either the Beatles or the Kinks,” said Hope.

  “But you appreciate the Stones,” said Nicholas.

  “Love the Stones. Manuel designed ‘the lips,’ ” said Hope.

  “God designed those lips,” said Nicholas.

  “But Manuel, the man who made your jacket and Parsons’s, Manuel turned the lips into a pillow as a make-up gift for Mick after they fell out when Mick was hitting on whoever it was Manuel was with at the time,” said Hope.

  “ ‘No shit,’ as the young people say,” said Nicholas.

  “ ‘Word,’ as my young folk say,” said Hope.

  “How did you know Manuel made my jacket?” asked Nicholas.

  “No one but Manuel could make that jacket, or those boots,” said Hope.

  “You recognized a signature,” said Nicholas.

  “This time,” said Hope.

  “Take me to the nearest martini. Did I see a Palm?” asked Nicholas.

  “You saw a Palm,” said Hope.

  Walking through the tourists, they made their way from the half-light of the Country Music Hall of Fame galleries to the bright light of the Nashville sidewalk.

  Turning to take one last look back at the building as Hope pointed out the notes for “Amazing Grace” decorating the rotunda, Nicholas laughed out loud—with, not at, the building. Finally Nicholas was impressed. He was amused by the visual evocation of a stack of records, a piano keyboard (the windows were the black keys), and a late-fifties car fin. Nicholas had fond memories of the backseat of a certain 1957 Chevy and a certain piano player.

  They were seated beneath the faces of Trisha Year wood and Jennifer Aniston. Having downed a steak, two martinis, and a full plate of Half & Half— a mess of fried onion rings and matchstick potatoes— Nicholas was asking for pudding and waving toward a tray of large but not luscious desserts. Hope ordered a cappuccino. Nicholas ordered a very tall slice of chocolate cake embedded with what appeared to be malted milk balls. After the cake arrived he took one bite, then pushed it away.

  “You didn’t ask me how I got the jacket,” said Nicholas.

  “I assumed it was a gift from Abel,” said Hope.

  “On the occasion of my seventieth birthday,” said Nicholas.

  “How did he seem?” asked Hope.

  “Guarded,” said Nicholas.

  “Guarded?” repeated Hope.

  “He couldn’t say anything about his work to me, being who I am, or who I was, but I suspect he was tired of parsing ‘perpetual detainment.’ And he w
as strangely worried about some marine named Seamus,” said Nicholas.

  “Seamus?” asked Hope.

  “Like the poet,” said Nicholas.

  “Killed by friendly fire?” asked Hope.

  “Just heading out to Iraq, if I remember correctly. From somewhere in Illinois, I think. Abel said he had met someone who had asked him about this Seamus. What ever Abel found out about Seamus changed how Abel was seeing things,” said Nicholas.

  “Seamus? What did he say about Sammie?” asked Hope.

  “That she was a mistake. That she was God’s punishment for what he and I had done,” said Nicholas.

  “Whoa,” said Hope.

  “And ‘the picture was prettier,’ ” said Nicholas.

  “What did he mean by that?” asked Hope.

  ***

  Abel’s habit of over-sharing in romantic and sexual matters had extended past Grandma to Nicholas. He had indulged the habit when he had gone out to Manila for Nicholas’s seventieth birthday celebration. Nicholas had always enjoyed Abel’s indiscretions even more than Grandma had. His stories had kept Nicholas feeling sexually competitive. Nicholas knew much that he couldn’t tell.

  When Sammie’s pink and white skin turned red, as it often did— she was a woman given to blushing with embarrassment and flushing in anger— it complemented her blue-black hair most particularly.

  She bought simple tailored clothes that made her look like Jackie Kennedy dressed from Wal-Mart, a credit to her taste and a boon to Abel’s bank account. Sammie knew how a thing was supposed to look— she had developed her eye for clothing by regularly reading news magazines and perusing the society pages of the newspaper—she just didn’t know how they were supposed to feel.

  One of the first things Abel had noticed about Sammie was that she always looked good in pictures, and it was something he had told his grandmother the day he had taken her a picture of Sammie and said they were going to get married. The picture was prettier.

  I want some of that, he thought, but did not say, the first time he saw the woman who would be his second wife. He waited to speak the thought aloud inside his head until he was leaving his office, until he was walking out the tall plate-glass doors that separated the glass-sheathed tower that housed his office, on the always perfectly sixty-eight-degree twenty-third floor, from the wildly fluctuating temperatures of the sidewalk. He was moving toward his perfectly wet and cool five o’clock scotch after a hard day’s work in municipal finance.

  I want some of that. He spoke the words to himself, but softly. He was in the habit of taking himself into his own confidence. Back then he had had to speak a thought aloud, or commit it to a piece of paper, or type it on a screen, to allow himself to know a thing, especially a thing about himself.

  He raised his hand to cover his mouth as he spoke. His ring finger (encircled by a gold band engraved with the Harvard Class of 1981 insignia) caressed his chin.

  He did not say he was slightly anxious. Anxiety was an emotion he wished to forget. He would not state this idea to himself. He would not commit it to paper or screen. Soon he would not know it.

  “She is pretty enough,” he said, “pretty enough for a white prince, pretty enough for me.”

  Sammie, a runner-up to Miss Alabama and the winner of the Miss Peanut Festival, worked for the same bank as Abel did, but in the District of Columbia office, planning and setting up parties where the lobbyists lobbied, instead of in the Nashville office where Abel worked.

  He never did tell Samantha that the reason he had developed such a strong and sudden interest in banking regulations was that he had seen her picture in the bank newsletter. And he never told her the picture was prettier.

  Abel had ducked out of his office early for his perfect scotch. Needing something to read while he waited for his buddies to arrive, he had grabbed the in-house rag he never read.

  When Caldwell Lyttle, then a newly minted lawyer serving a tour of duty as vice president of municipal finance, sat down beside him, Abel made way for his buddy by laying his reading material on the bartop. As Lyttle settled onto a stool and ordered his drink (Heineken in a bottle), Abel tapped a photograph on the glossy page, while commenting that the woman was pretty. Lyttle laughed. Then he set his glass bottle down on Abel’s newsletter.

  “Nobody’s gonna go near that! She’s got four or five kids, all boys, a dead husband, and liberal, unemployed, hippie bluegrass musician parents,” said Lyttle.

  Abel wasn’t so sure. Of course, if a girl had liberal parents, it helped if they were rich, preferably wickedly rich of the trusta-farian persuasion.

  Abel grimaced. He was thinking about Margot “Gogo” Linden. Gogo was smart, and funky, and fun, and white. She was too pale to be pretty—her hair was white blond, her eyes were light watery gray, and she wore too much makeup trying to give herself some color—but she had a dancer’s body and bearing and she knew her own powerful mind. Her momma was a judge and a former Junior League president. Her father was a physician. Abel had very much wanted to marry Gogo Linden, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t abide his politics.

  “She can’t abide my politics,” he had typed onto the screen of his computer monitor the day they had broke up. He didn’t say, she is afraid of my sorrow, and my anger, and of the way I drink the way her daddy drank. He didn’t say it. He didn’t write it. He didn’t type it. For a few days he felt the pull of temptation. He had a love for truth. He had professional knowledge that knowing the lay of the land, of the emotional territory surrounding a moment or a self, could be useful.

  He had a more profound knowledge that embracing certain dark ideas, no matter how truthful, could slaughter the future. To know that Gogo Linden held within her pale self the potential to loathe him was a dagger, even if it was sheathed in the knowledge that her potential for loathing was born of a loathing for her brilliant daddy.

  He bit his tongue. He kept his hands down by his sides. When his fingers were curled over his keyboard he bid them work only on the documents at hand.

  Soon all he knew about Margot Linden was that her politics were too liberal for him and her chest was too flat. Soon he was silent about that knowledge, allowing it to be replaced with My old girlfriend, Gogo, was an amazing gal, she’s a producer on The Dennis Miller Show, she’s their token liberal.

  He spoke of Margot so often his friends often felt invited to ask him questions about her. Lyttle was no exception. He was asking when Abel would be next going out west. Abel smiled. Abel liked it when his white friends pushed him back toward white girls.

  When Abel left the bar, with one of the secretaries from Caldwell’s division, a bubbly girl, he took the stained bank newsletter with him. He dropped it atop the burled-walnut and bird’s-eye maple Art Deco chest of drawers that stood sentry across from the bed as he walked into his room. The bubbly girl was following him.

  Abel pulled the secretary’s shirt over her head. He liked the look of her breasts in her front-closing bra. He smiled. He was proud of his ability with clasps. He had it undone with one hand.

  He was a breast man. He liked the moment everything but the breasts was covered. The moment before he touched them, the moment before he made the nipples hard and made the tight slit wet. He liked it a lot, more than he liked the feeling of the stiffening in his pants. Before was always for him all about the female. During was all about him. Just as he sank into her slit, he wondered vaguely if his buddy was giving his secretary a bit of the same at the very same time.

  After he came, after he threw her front-closing, purple, thirty-four double-D bra out of the bed, wishing it would be as socially acceptable for him to throw this new pale, blond thing beside him out of the bed, it struck him hard that he was bored with new beginnings, blonds, and breasts.

  Sometime before midnight the girl left. She had a kid to go home to. He liked white girls with kids. Usually their families— their mummy or their mama, their poppa or their daddy, their ex-husband, their somebody—kept them from getting serious abo
ut him.

  He woke up, as was his habit, around two when the bars closed and publicly loud people poured onto the street. He went into the bathroom, then into his kitchen, comforted by the familiar sounds of the night. He poured himself his usual, a glass of milk with a slug of brandy. Listening to the shouting back and forth of happy promises as they morphed into worried queries—let’s get together soon . . . stay in touch . . . see you tomorrow . . . where did we park the car . . . that’s my cab . . . I’ve got to get home— intensified his intimate connection to the city. Every night he got up to stand on the fringes of the party as the other guests were leaving. Usually it made him happy. This night was different.

  Long after his glass was drained he moved toward his bed. On the way he grabbed the newsletter from the top of his bureau. He glanced at it for a moment, put it next to his Westclox travel alarm with round face and glow-in-the-dark hands, then stretched out beneath his Italian linen sheets and clicked off the light. It was almost four o’clock.

  Sitting up in his bed, after the alarm had gone off, Abel drank his coffee from a porcelain cup decorated with chevrons, while watching the barges float on the slow-moving Cumberland River. In the morning quiet, he began his day’s work. When he was finished reading the New York Times, article by article, he glanced through the headlines of the Tennessean. When he was finished with the Tennessean, he grabbed the bank newsletter. He liked the look of the pretty face encircled by the beer halo.

  Samantha Weekly, the caption announced: a pretty face atop a boyish body in a pert pink suit. With ebony hair, magnolia skin, and red lips, she looked like Snow White in the picture book he’d seen a thousand years earlier. And she had the longest legs he had ever seen.

  Abel phonied up a reason to visit the bank’s Washington office. The picture was prettier, he thought but did not say the first time he met the woman who would be his second wife. He asked Sammie out on a date after that first meeting. Walking to join her for drinks at the Old Ebbit Grille, he whispered to himself the picture was prettier. A month later he fucked her for the first time in the middle of a two-day team-building seminar held in a Pennsylvania Avenue hotel during a coffee break. Her hair let down reached almost to her knees. Then she got pregnant and they set a wedding date.