“I should have never come back to North Carolina,” Jorvelle sighed.
“I should never have trusted Ford. Or Jenny. Or Maude,” Theo sighed.
Jorvelle shook her head. “Oh, come on! Maude was involved with Herbie before you ever met her.”
“Why do you have to argue about everything?” Theo snapped.
“I’m sorry, Thee.”
“I’m sorry, Jor.”
They drank more beer.
“At least you got contact lenses out of that show,” Jorvelle said after a while. “Even if you are back to those old corduroys.”
“Oh, leave me alone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We should have never let ourselves start thinking I could win,” Steve sighed. “Call Yale back, Jor. Take the offer.”
“You take the Columbia offer,” she sighed. Both knew they wouldn’t do it. She would go to Amsterdam on her Guggenheim to study slave trade records for her book, Decolonizing the Canon. Steve would go to Bread Loaf to teach Southern fiction out of the heat. In September, they’d both come back to Cavendish. They knew that.
Theo, who had no offers not to take, didn’t know exactly what to do. And yet he found he had not dropped into a slump at the bottom of the slough of despond, despite his old habit. Through the next few weeks, rage against Ford Rexford pinched him everywhere in sharp hot bites and kept him in constant motion. To think of his wonderful revision of Foolscap was a gnawing ache. For, on top of everything else, Rexford had unforgivably taken off with the one copy of the revised play that he had printed. Had tossed it somewhere in the rat’s nest of that miserable gold Lincoln, and then no doubt tossed away the Lincoln, too. Just the way he had tossed away Rhodora Potts.
As for Rhodora, Theo told himself she had had no right to blame him for Ford’s leaving her. But it was no use. Blame buzzed in his head while he was grading papers until he had to reread the same scribbled bluebook half a dozen times. He blamed himself not only for Rhodora’s abandonment, but for Jenny Harte’s seduction. The loss of his play and (as he saw it) the inevitable ruin of his graduate student fused in his thoughts until the manuscript and the young woman became one grand theft by the man whose Official Life ought to be published as a warning to anyone else foolish enough to trust a faithless irresponsible bastard like Joshua Ford Rexford. Theo tortured himself with how he might have stopped Ford if only he hadn’t invited him to lecture to his class, hadn’t taken him to the Spitz Center; if only he had never recommended Jenny Harte for graduate school, never advised her to work on the endings of plays.
If only he had made Rhodora listen carefully to those tapes of Rexford’s past—those haphazard chronicles of a hit-and-run life, crowded with accidents, littered with waste—she would have known it had to end this way. Ford had been bolting from commitment for half a century. Theo could have quoted to her Rexford’s own dictum on playcraft: “The end must be in the beginning. Look for it there.” He always said: see how life imitates art.
So obsessive on the subject was Theo that even Dr. Ko (who was paid to listen) said she was tired of hearing about it, and that he talked as if Jenny Harte were a helpless child snatched from her nursery while the watchdog (that is, Theo) failed to keep awake. “Plus, he didn’t leave you,” the therapist added in her infuriatingly sensible voice. “Rhodora’s the one who got left.”
“He took my play!”
“He took the revisions. Can’t you redo them from your draft?”
“He ruined my computer! And he tore the draft in a thousand pieces!”
“Well, before Ford pushed you, hadn’t it been sitting in a drawer for years?”
“Thanks a lot, Dr. Ko! I’ve been coming here for years, and where has that gotten me?”
“For one thing, you know how upset you are.”
“You think I’m upset, you should see Rhodora.”
“You keep talking about Rhodora. How do you feel about her?”
“I feel awful.”
Rhodora was not taking things sitting still. When Theo had asked her if there were anything he could do for her, she said, “Kill him.” Then she said, “No. Find him so I can kill him myself.”
As soon as she’d learned for certain that Rexford had left her, she had moved out of his house. She had stuffed her two enormous vinyl suitcases with her clothes, picked up her blue guitar, her tapes and records, and all her bright potted flowers, and moved out of the beautiful yellow pine chalet high above Tilting Rock.
Theo was there that Sunday to help her pack. He heard her when she called Bernie Bittermann and told him, “I’m going, I’m not takin’ a thing I didn’t come with, I want that understood for a fact. And if y’all want all this shit just left sitting here, and this ton of dead meat Ford shot cleaned outta this ’frigerator ’fore it rots, you’re gonna have to hire somebody to come do somethin’ with it. ’Cause I’m not.” Then, in her brother’s truck, she had driven without a backward glance down the mountain named in her honor; she hadn’t so much as closed the windows or locked the door.
Bittermann’s sympathetic assurance to Rhodora that Ford didn’t deserve her met with, as he told Theo, a curse so chilling it belonged in a Rexford play—and indeed would probably appear in one if Rhodora had ever expressed the same sentiment to the man directly, and if the man ever wrote another play. Bittermann knew enough of the moods of, as he called them, “Ford victims” not to bother begging Rhodora please to reconsider. And as for her younger brother, T. W. had said succinctly that if he ever got near that house again it would be to throw kerosene at it and torch the place, and the same was true if he ever got near Ford Rexford.
So it was Theo whom Bittermann persuaded to close the lodge, and arrange to hire a local housekeeper. Theo agreed after Bittermann told him he’d had a letter from Rexford with instructions to make over by deed to Rhodora the chalet (and the mountain). All Ford wanted from it was the army trunk with his manuscripts in it and the personal effects on his desk. Rhodora was also assigned, as of now, all the royalties from his play Her Pride of Place, and all future royalties from the play he’d started writing while living with her. The business manager asked Theo if he would find Miss Potts and tell her that the documents of ownership, signed and legalized, had been sent to her c/o Rexford’s local bank.
“All right,” said Theo, “But Ford’s a complete asshole if he thinks he can justify what he did with goddamn presents!”
Bittermann sighed into the phone. “Young man, this is no news to anyone, including Ford.”
“Where is he, dammit! If he’s calling you and writing you, I bet you know where he is, Bernie, and you’re just not telling me!”
The business manager did not take offense at this shouted accusation; it was the rustle of doves compared to many decades of other voices raised in his ear about his famous client. His phone, his ear, were only conduits between the lightning and the man the lightning would have struck if it had only been able to find him. Mildly, Bittermann continued, “He’s in England. The letter was sent by Josef Middendorf, his London agent.”
“Christ Almighty, I know who Buzzy Middendorf is, Bernie. I’ve wasted the last two years of my life finding out about Ford Rexford’s.”
“Then maybe you can find out where he called from. I can’t, as I am only a C.P.A. and not the FBI.”
“How do you think Jenny Harte’s parents feel!”
“Theo, I’ve haven’t an inkling in the world. But, let’s give the devil his due, he doesn’t appear to have shanghaied Miss Harte, who is after all considerably beyond her majority.”
“I want my play back!”
“So you’ve explained, and when he runs out of money and calls again, I’ll see if he knows where it might be.”
“You do that!”
Bittermann, unruffled, asked the young professor to pass along his warm wi
shes to Miss Potts, of whom he was as fond as he’d been of the third Mrs. Rexford, his favorite of the four certified wives. “I did let myself hope,” he sighed, “that she’d make it ’til he finished the play.”
•••
Rhodora, barefoot, wearing no makeup, her tight jeans and halter as black as the hair that fell in two straight pigtails down to her lap, sat playing her guitar on the stoop of her brother’s little split-level when Theo drove up the dirt driveway. Her response to the, as it were, separation settlement was to throw her coffee mug at the mailbox. A hot line of stain sprayed across Theo’s shirt sleeve. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” she said. “But that bastard didn’t have the sleazebag guts to tell me to my face he was runnin’ like a rabbit. Not even a gawddamn note. And now he’s sending me deeds! Sending me contracts! Come on in, dammit, Theo. Deeds! Care of his agent care of his manager care of his fuckin’ bank? That bastard.”
She didn’t want the chalet or the mountain, and she didn’t want any royalties on Her Pride of Place, or any new play that Ford might finish either. “He don’t know finishing anyhow,” she said, her eyes bitter. “He just knows quittin’. You want some coffee? Not thrown at you this time? And, hey, sugar, I’m sorry I missed your show.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You know I’d have been there if I hadn’t had to be at Cherokee’s both nights. Lord, I didn’t know what the hell I was singing half the time anyhow. I’d totally lost my mind that whole weekend long. How’d Guys and Dolls go?”
“They say, fine. I guess ‘the show goes on’ okay even when we’re nuts, right?” He rubbed her shoulder. “Sell the chalet then, Rhodora. Or rent it out and get yourself a new place. You don’t plan to stay here at T. W.’s, do you? You could use the money, couldn’t you?”
“Listen! I had a job singing at Cherokee’s when I met that asshole, and I still got a job.” They went inside and she handed him a mug of coffee. “I even got a goddamn Nashville record company that wants me to do some of my songs for them.”
“You do? That’s great.”
“Yeah, everything’s great.”
“Which songs?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. The mood I’m in now I can think of a heap of sad, mean ones.” She leaned across the white tin kitchen table where they were sitting and grabbed away her coffee mug so fast he was afraid she might be going to throw this one at him too, but instead she took it to the cheap new two-burner stove and poured herself another cup. “What’d he pick Pride of Place to give me for anyhow?” she snarled. “Some old dried-up spinster running a funeral parlor! Whatta you bet he’s imagining me dead so he can cry about it and stop feeling guilty? That’s what I bet!”
“You used to say you loved that play.”
Her eyes were hot, frowning against the tears. “Yeah. I used to say I loved the asshole that wrote it, too.” She reached over and pressed her hand like a slap stopped before it reached his cheek. Two blue beaded bracelets slid up her bare arm. “I did, too. I loved him. Didn’t you?”
Theo nodded, his chest tight. “Bastard.”
“Right.” She scrubbed at the table top with a napkin. “Couple of jerks, that’s us. We both got fucked. And while we’re sitting here crying in the woods, he’s off buying everybody drinks at some gawddamn English pub, everybody shouting, ‘We love you, Ford.’”
He shook his head. “Poor Jenny Harte.”
Rhodora threw the napkin at the sink. “Poor Jenny Harte, my ass! Why don’t you take my wedding dress and send it to poor Jenny Harte, and she can wear it to Buckingham Palace!”
“Oh, Rhodora. I know.” He took her hand and held it against his face.
Theo left her seated again on the front door stoop, her blue-painted guitar cradled in her lap, her long red fingernails plucking from its steel strings a hard grieving sound.
“If I could stick a sharp, clean knife in my head and cut everything that’s him out of it, I would,” she called to Theo as he walked away. “But isn’t that the sad part, how the mind just goes on? Come see me. Don’t be a stranger.” She leaned down over the guitar.
“That’s a nice tune,” he turned and said. “Take care, Rhodora.”
•••
The day after the spring term officially ended at Cavendish, Theo drove back over to Tilting Rock, up the high winding road bordered with bright foxglove that led to the top of “Rhodora’s Mountain.” The big vaulted living room of the chalet smelled of wood and ash still in the fireplace. Shriveled petals of yellow lilies lay curled at the foot of their vases, and a dead bee floated in the whiskey glass beside the photograph of Rhodora singing at Cherokee’s bar. Collecting the bills and papers cluttered on the giant oak door Ford used for a desk, Theo threw them on top of all the scripts packed in the dented black army footlocker near the man’s writing chair. It was a sprung-cushion, drink-stained, cigarette-scarred armchair. Its name was Chester, as the desk was called Sharon, the car Abe, and the birch tree outside the study window Lavinia. Rexford named all the objects in his life, treated them like people; and, it seemed, thought Theo, as if the reverse were also true.
On the desk, under a biography of Sir Walter Raleigh checked out of the Tilting Rock library, Theo found carelessly piled eighty or so pages of typed paper. Three-fourths of an unfinished play. The play’s title was Principles of Aesthetic Distance. It seemed to have a woman like Rhodora in it. It seemed to be about a love affair between her and a young professor who taught drama theory. This young man loved plays passionately, but lived without love or passion.
“Bastard,” said Theo Ryan.
He sat down in the chair with the pages resting on his knees. After an hour, the last page dropped from his hand, and his eyes closed. What he had read was as good as anything Ford Rexford had ever written, and that he was right about that, the young professor who loved plays knew absolutely, beyond the possibility of denial.
“Bastard,” he said quietly again.
Then he stretched up out of the chair, wiped his face against his sleeve, and picked up the telephone on the desk beside Rhodora’s picture. He called Bernie Bittermann in New York. First he discussed methods of shipping the footlocker to Rexford’s agent in London.
“Did you look for a manuscript?” the C.P.A. asked eagerly. “Ford told Buzzy Middendorf he’d finished his play, but he didn’t have a copy with him. Said he’d had to leave for England on the spur of the moment—”
“Goddamn right!”
“—and he’d left the manuscript in Tilting Rock. Was that a complete fabrication? is there a new play, Theo? Believe me, a lot of people need to know. Morris and Amanda are out of their minds.”
Theo looked at the photograph of Rhodora, then out the wide window that opened onto hills, pine green, ridging the sky. As his head turned, a blackbird winged past as if it had flown out of Rhodora’s hair and soared into the dark hushed woodland of her mountain.
“Yes, there’s a new play, Bernie.”
Bittermann’s relief came whistling through the phone, all the way down the coast of America. “Great! For God’s sake, make a copy and send it to me.”
“No,” Theo said.
“No? What do you mean ‘no’?”
“You tell Ford,” Theo said, “that I have his play. And that I’m coming over there to get mine.”
“‘Coming over there?’ Coming where? You don’t know where he is.”
“England.”
“Theo, you’re sounding crazy. Why do you think we have postal systems? Just send me the play. Did you read it?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“It’s wonderful.” Why mention that it wasn’t finished?
“Send it! And I swear to you, Theo, I swear, I’ll do what I can to locate yours. Maybe Ford didn’t even take it with him.”
“Then I’ll ask him where he left it.” Theo rolled
the manuscript against his side, and slapped it against the desk. “That’s the deal, Bernie.”
Bittermann groaned in disgust. “You’re going to fly to England, you’re going to wander around who knows where, looking for Ford who could be, I swear to you, anywhere, just so you can maybe take a—God forbid—swing at him, and maybe kill him before we can get his play on so Morris and Amanda don’t sue the idiot’s estate for what he owes them? For that, you’re flying to England? You’re as big a lunatic as he is.”
Theo put the picture of Rhodora in his pocket. He said, “No, I’m not. But I am damn big for a Jew.”
Bittermann spluttered, “What are you talking like that to me for?”
“I’m quoting your client, Bernie. That’s the first thing he ever said to me. ‘You’re damn big for a Jew.’ Well, when I put my big fist in his redneck face, he’s going to find out how right he was.”
“Fists, racial slurs. You sound like Ford.” A long sigh, heavy with years of Rexford blew gently through the receiver. “In the end, they always do. They turn violent. They start calling him ‘redneck,’” said Bittermann. “God knows, that’s the least of the man’s sins…Okay. So call me if you find him. And give him a little clonk on the head from me. Just don’t knock anything loose. Looser. You need a loan for the plane?”
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