“Bres—”
“Leave me alone. I’m busy.”
“Bres!” Panic-stricken, I grabbed her arm, but she threw off my hand.
“I’m tired of you.”
“Oh, my God … Bres—”
“Go away!”
She spun on her heel and returned to the carrel room. I was in such a frenzy to undo what I had done that I would have torn up the check had she come back out and demanded it. The need to push back time and start over was unbearable. Inchoate prayers flashed like epileptic discharges through my brain: make it this time yesterday … make it ten minutes ago … take me back to before!
I waited in the hall for almost an hour but she did not come out. Finally, I gave up and walked woodenly back to the dorm, the same way I walked home on my first day in college when I found I could not study French. Once again, a perfect femininity had been ripped away from me, and it had happened so fast I could not take it in.
Later that night I told myself that she hadn’t meant it, that she would come to her senses and tell me she was sorry, and read my stories and laugh about them. Other people had lovers’ quarrels, why should we be any different? It would be all right.
But it wasn’t. The next day when I saw her on campus, she looked through me. I turned and walked after her, calling her name, but she gave no sign that she heard me. I waited for her outside the Classics Department, in the carrel room, in front of her house, but it was always the same.
“Bres—”
“Bres—”
“Bres—”
I thought of the times I had murmured her name to myself. Now I might as well have been talking to myself. She remained a frozen block of condemnation. Why? She had always been so disinterested in the actions of others, priding herself on her broad-mindedness, yet … I told you to get a grant! Did she need to control people, turn them into Grope members who would sit reverently at her feet and do her bidding? Did she want everybody to be a copy of her, living on grants and fellowships, so that her own mode of life would seem to be the norm? Or was it because publish was the foremost word in academia? There was no comparison between what Bres meant by publishing and the kind I had pulled off, yet I had been paid for writing … .
My mind refused to entertain these thoughts for long. I could not imagine a jealous Bres, or a bad Bres of any kind. Instead, I turned to the Grope for advice. Vanny would not even speak to me. “I don’t know anything about it, she didn’t say a word to me, I haven’t heard a thing,” she rattled nervously, sidling away from me as though I had a contagious disease. Sorella was equally unforthcoming, so I turned to the boys. I did not know how much they knew about our relationship, but I was beyond modesty.
“That’s ole Bres for you,” Lucius sighed, after hearing my story. “She’s riding one of her wild hairs. That’s why Vanny and Sorella won’t talk to you. They’re scared to death of her. She always gets mad at them if they don’t get mad at her … at whoever she’s mad at,” he amended carefully.
“You mean it’s happened before?”
“Last year,” said Augustus. “The Scottish woman. She was an exchange professor from the University of Edinburgh, ’bout thirty-five, real nice woman. She and Bres were thick, then they had a falling out.”
Something shriveled inside me. I knew there had been other women, but hearing about one made all of them unbearably real.
“About what?” I asked.
Augustus shrugged. “Nobody ever found out. You wait for Bres to explain, you’ll wait forever. The woman went back to Scotland and Bres started going down to New Orleans. Some girl from there came up to see her a few times last summer.”
“The one with the earrings,” said Lucius, placing his thumbs on his shoulders for measurement.
I saw the girl with the earrings a week later. She was about twenty, with an exotic New Orleans look that managed to combine an extremely short, shingled haircut with long, looping gypsy jewelry. She carried a suitcase affixed with decals from Sophie Newcombe, the sister school of Tulane, and she spent the spring break in Bres’s apartment.
The dorms remained open for the holiday and Miz Arvella invited me to Easter Sunday dinner. I choked down leg of lamb and hot cross buns with her and the other housemothers, and threw them up later in my room.
I saw the girl from New Orleans again that week. Despite her emancipated air, she followed Bres around like a puppy. Passing them at the door of the Student Union, I heard the girl say “Whatever you want” in a placating voice and skip to catch up with Bres, who strode on ahead as if she were alone. I opened my mouth to shout her name, intending to force her to listen to me even if I had to pin her to the wall, but suddenly a weak feeling swept over me and I broke out in a clammy sweat. I had eaten nothing and now it caught up with me and forced me into a chair in the television lounge. I was still sitting there when Bres and the girl emerged from the snack bar and walked out the door.
It was the last time I ever saw her. That night she was killed in a head-on crash on her way to Batesville. A pickup truck with a drunk at the wheel crossed the center line doing eighty and plowed into her car with such force that the engine was driven into the front seat. Bres and the other driver were dead when the troopers got there, and the girl from New Orleans died on the way to the hospital.
The Batesville road, known throughout the hooch-free state as the “Malt Liquor Way.” My poor darling baby in her white cotton pants. Mississippi gave her to me, and Mississippi took her back.
The Grope came and got me and we went to Lucius’s apartment, where we spent a stunned and helpless night. The next day, Bres’s parents came up from the Gulf to make the arrangements. There was no funeral nor any kind of service; her remains were taken to Memphis for cremation, the ashes to be stored for the time being at the crematory until the family decided what to do with them. Lucius heard these details from a classics professor who had clashed with Bres’s mother over the disposition of the ashes. He was coming up for a sabbatical in Athens and offered to take them with him and scatter them from some suitable literary or historical spot, but she would not hear of it.
Against the Grope’s advice, I went down to Faculty Shacks while Bres’s mother was cleaning out her apartment. The door was open and I saw a petite woman in her late fifties, with a towel tied carefully around the waist of her chic mint green linen dress, tossing books into a wheeled receptacle marked u. OF MISS. SANITATION DEPT.
I knocked on the jamb and she looked up. Searching her face, trying to find something of Bres in it, I found nothing. She was olive-skinned, with black eyes and a thin pursed mouth that indicated her French blood. Mademoiselle Le Brès, I thought.
“Yes?”
“I’m … I was Bres’s friend,” I stammered. “I wonder if I could have something of hers, a book, or—”
“Friend!” she snarled. “Ah know what that means!”
She slammed the door in my face.
Lucius and Augustus tried to find the trash cart at the sanitation depot and salvage something for me, but they could not. Its contents were burned, too. I spent the following week in my room. Poor innocent Miz Arvella, to whom “friend” had only one meaning, overflowed with sympathy and invitations to dinner, but I wanted nothing.
One night I heard a knock at my door and found Tulaplee holding a white pie carton with grease spots coming through.
“Ah brought you some barbecue from Grundy’s. Ah just had some, it’s real good.”
She set a place for me at my desk and smeared syrup on the biscuits while I took a few listless mouthfuls of the tangy steaming pork. After a few moments I put down my fork and looked at her.
“Where’s your latest French exercise?”
“Oh, shoot, you can’t fool with that ole thing now!”
“Yes, I can. It’ll remind me of a happy time, when I was in high school.”
She relented and went and got the weekly translation, and I wrote it out for her.
Seconds after she left my room ther
e was an altercation in the hallway. I heard one of the other girls say something indistinct, followed by a fluttery giggle. Suddenly there was a loud crack! and Tulaplee’s screeching voice rang out.
“You shut your dirty mouth, you Gulfport trash!” The other girl said, “Oh …” and burst into tears. There was a scurrying sound of footsteps as she made for her room, then the dorm shook in the now-familiar fashion as Tulaplee slammed the door of hers.
When I emerged from the first stage of numb grief, I hurled myself into another more vigorous kind. I’m not sure why I did it; maybe to try and get killed in a drunken smash-up of my own, or shot in a Southern crime of passion, or simply to lose myself in dissipation. Whatever my motive, I went out and fucked my ass off. My partners were some men on campus who had been making eyes at me since September, whose initial interest had been further stimulated by my friendship with Bres. Nothing charms the male ego more than the prospect of converting a dyke, so when I played up to them, they saw nothing of the feverish despair that lay behind my flirting.
It’s a miracle I did not get pregnant. I always inserted the diaphragm before leaving the dorm, but several times I was too drunk to remember to put in any jelly before the fucking started, and one night I removed the diaphragm when a man challenged me to fuck without it. “Ah’m gonna give you sumpin that long, cool drink of water didn’t have to give,” he promised, but it did not happen. All he gave me was a description of Bres that was more beautiful and fitting than he knew.
The last man I fucked was unconnected with the campus and thus unaware of my relationship with Bres. His name was Vardis and he owned the local tree-pruning firm that came up to rescue the dorm from a rotten oak that was about to fall in on it. He was in his early thirties and a special friend of Miz Arvella, being related in some way to her late husband’s family.
From the conversation they had as he worked, I deduced that he lived in a room in town while keeping a wife and three children stashed away on a farm, where it was “so much healthier for them.” Listening from my window, I could tell he had Miz Arvella convinced that Oxford was a smog-choked megapolis and he a devoted family man willing to suffer loneliness for the sake of his loved ones, whom he visited as often as possible but not nearly so often as he would like. Miz Arvella believed it but I did not. Vardis had the eyes, the smile, the walk of a dedicated slash hound, and like all slash hounds, he had figured out a way to lead a double life.
One thing led to another and we got together, ending up in a Memphis hotel near the bus station. Vardis stocked up on bourbon and beer and we drank boilermakers and fucked. His potency was effortless and endless, but somehow he wasn’t there. He gasped out “darlin’” with each thrust, but his pale blue eyes were glazed and staring like the eyes of a man with an electrode wrapped around his cock; not making love but receiving shocks.
After the third fuck, while drinking my fifth boilermaker, I started crying. Most people are not in a position to realize it, but there is nothing sadder than being with one sex when you want to be with the other. I wanted Bres, but I wanted femaleness also. The sight of this naked man filled me with tearing pain; his hairy chest, his curveless trunk with no discernible waistline and the navel up so high, the tight flat nothingness of his buttocks, seemed like a mutation of the species.
Vardis sat down beside me and put his arm around my shaking shoulders.
“Honey … Honey? Whatsa matter? Ah say sumpin that hurt your feelins? Don’t cry so hard, darlin’. Ain’t nothin’ to cry ‘bout, we’re gonna have us a real good time this weekend. Ah got plenny money and we gonna spend it all ! Say, you want me to buy you sumpin pretty? How’s about that, huh? Look, tomorrow we’ll go up to Lowenstein’s and you can pick out a new dress. Enythang you want. Then we’ll go to the Peabody Hotel for lunch! You like that? That sound good to you? That’ll make you feel better, sure as shootin’. Honey? Aw, darlin’, if you don’t stop cryin’ Ah’m gonna cry right along with you. You’re just tearin’ the heart right outta me. Ah can’t stand to see anybody hurtin’ like that—”
He broke off and sobbed. We sat there together on the edge of the bed, weeping and drinking boilermakers. After a while he began telling a story about Korea. Something about the timbre of his voice made me stop crying and listen.
“Me and Quint Radley from Tupelo joined up together soon as the news come. We was in the same outfit all ‘long. The night he got his was the coldest night Ah evva did see—Lord, it was cold! Ain’t right for a Miss’ippi boy to die in such cold, but ole Quint did. The gooks come at us all of a sudden-like, blowin’ that bugle of theirs, ’cept it ain’t pretty and clear like our bugle. It’s flat and tinny, the creepiest sound you evva heard.”
He shuddered. The eyes that had not seen me as we fucked now saw something else as he stared into the past. He drained his glass and went on.
“Quint got separated from the rest of the squad somehow. Ah don’t rightly know what-all happened, but they got hold of him. If they’d of killed him fair ‘n’ square it’d been one thang, but …” His voice shook and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “They cut him open right down the middle, just like you dress a pig. Craziest thang was, he was still alive when Ah found him. His guts was hangin’ out and startin’ to freeze, and he was still alive. Ah was ‘bout to kill him myself to save him from sufferin’ when he died. Ah carried him back to camp, and by the time we got there, his guts was froze solid.”
His hand tightened on my shoulder. “Next time, Ah got even for him. Ah killed me five gooks with a flamethrower. Ah was spozed to take ’em prisoner but Ah dint … .” He wiped the tears from his cheeks and crushed the empty beer can in his hand.
Rising, he walked unsteadily into the bathroom and returned with a long stream of toilet paper that he tore in half, giving one end to me. We both blew our noses.
“Ah know it’s hard for a woman to unnerstand,” he went on, “but when you fight together, eat together, sleep next to each other like we did … sumpin happens. It’s like … well, Ah loved ole Quint. Ah don’t mean nothin’ funny or enythang,” he amended quickly, “but like Ah say, he was the best friend Ah evva had.”
“I wish I could have met him,” I said.
He turned to me with an immensely pleased smile that made him seem very dear.
“Aw, you’d of liked ole Quint, Ah tell you! He was …” He paused inarticulately. “What Ah mean to say is … It’s like—well, he was a good ole boy.”
He sighed deeply. “Ah feel better, don’t you? You stopped cryin’, dint you? Ah knew you would. Less have us another drink and lissen to the radio. Ah’ll sing to you! How’s ’bout that? J’know Ah could sing?”
He turned on a country station and sang along to “I’m Throwing Rice at the Girl I Love” and “One Has My Heart, the Other Has My Name.” He did sing well, and he had mastered Nashville’s version of John McCormack’s larmes aux voix. I cried a little more, but my tears were of a different kind now. He knew the words to all the songs the station played and sang steadily until two A.M., when he put his finger to his lips.
“They’re signin’ off,” he whispered reverently, “here it comes.”
As the soaring notes of the national anthem filled the room, I saw his Adam’s apple move as he wiped away a tear. Unable to find anything else he liked on the radio, he mixed us two more boilermakers and began singing Civil War songs.
“Oh, how proud you stood before me in your suit of gray, when you vowed to me and country ne’er to go astray …” Suddenly he raised his head, his eyes taking on a fevered brightness.
“We coulda done it!” he cried. “We coulda won! If only them simpleminded Nawth Ca’lina boys hadn’t of shot ole Stonewall by mistake at Chancellorsville! And Gettysburg!” He turned to me with wild urgency. “You know what happened at Gettysburg? Heah, Ah’ll show you!”
He jumped up and, still naked as the day he was born, started moving furniture to make a mock-up battlefield for an illustrated lecture on military strate
gy. The Civil War being the most boring of all wars to women, I had no idea what he was talking about and would have fared no better had I been sober. A desk was the Yankees, a chair was Cemetery Ridge, and he was General Pickett. Backing up against one wall, he held out an imaginary sword and leapt forward.
“Yeeeeeeaaaaayyyyhhhhoooooo!”
He, the chair, and a spindly table landed with a crash against the opposite wall. By some miracle he escaped both a broken neck and emasculation, but not the rage of our next-door neighbor.
“Hey! Wuss all ’at goddamn noise? Pussun cain’t heah hisself think!”
“You ain’t had a thought in your head since Hector was a pup!” Vardis yelled back.
“Sumbitch bastud!”
“Them’s fightin’ words! Ah’ll kill him! Where’s my knife?”
“Oh, please don’t!” I screamed, sounding just like the distressed damsel in a melodrama.
He was rifling through his pockets for his knife when he passed out, falling backward in the direction of the bed and landing half on it. Groaning, he pulled himself up the rest of the way and sank into a drunken stupor.
I expected the manager to come knocking on the door to request quiet, but it was not that kind of hotel; either the police came or nobody did. I washed and dressed and sat down in the chair to wait for dawn. Gazing at Vardis’s sprawled body and listening to him snort and fart, I found myself doing what Granny had recommended so often during my peer-problem days: looking for the good in people.
I could not deny that the man on the bed personified the worst aspects of the South. I had heard him cuss out the nigras in his work gang and seen them cringe from the pale blue fire flashing in his eyes. It was easy to imagine the rest. I had no doubt that him and ole Quint had whupped a few nigras in their boyhood forays, and I was even more sure that, driving along a lonely road on some black velvet night, they had spied a l’il nigra gal and slowed down. Technically they did not rape her, but only because they did not have to; she knew the path of least resistance was the way home. Afterwards, if they had it to spare, they gave her a quarter.
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady Page 24