You know—and I guess this sounds neurotic—I can’t go to the theater anymore these days. If the guy up onstage is too amateur, it’s painful because I could get up there and do better. If the guy up onstage is good, if he’s stagestruck, if he’s got that gleam in his eye and hears in the small-town polite clapping of Evanston the thunderous ovations of New York … well, it’s just hard to watch, that’s all. I’ve got a job now doing—
Uh, wait. If I tell you what I’m doing for a living now you really will yell SELL-OUT! And in a way you’d be right. But hey, I’ve got a nice little office and a typewriter and a top desk drawer where for several months now in spare moments, during coffee breaks and lunch hours I’ve been adding to this pile of paper you’re reading. And that’s been rewarding, looking back over everything before this next chapter of my life starts.
So let’s finish up: Emma did not get herpes, hasn’t had a child yet, only stayed in California six weeks before returning to New York. The last time we talked was when she snapped “Have a nice life, bozo,” and stormed off the subway train at Washington Square. And let’s see, that was … god, almost five years ago. Sophie says I’m still a bit in love with her. No, Soph, scarred for life is more like it. This book isn’t a love letter, it’s partly an attempt to try to figure out someone named Emma who saved my life from being unexciting and half-lived a lot of the time: there I’d be, teetering on the brink of normalcy, of averageness … of happiness. And Emma you’d pull me back every time.
Sophie says I’m writing this to spite Emma, to succeed in the written word where she didn’t. Eh, maybe a bit. Mostly I wanted to tell you about this particular life as it may be the only book this life may have in it, and you get so many success stories these days, so much Yuppie Dream, so much life-at-the-top. There are people out there who don’t get to the top, who walk away, who give up, but who also don’t mind really, and I thought I’d tell that story.
You know, my last days in New York after Emma left were very quiet and dull and I packed for the last time (God, what a relief not to be hauling myself inhumanly around that city with All My Things). And I decided I needed a New York Moment, a last time of goodbye. And I thought up all kinds of Last Goodbye stuff to do, go up the Empire State Building, go out to the Statue of Liberty, even go back to Far Rockaway. Naturally none of this panned out—I got very busy toward the end with my landlord and my bills and New York Telephone and I kept going out with the cast of ’59 Mustang and getting to know them and getting drunk and then … damn, it was suddenly my last day. I picked up my U-Haul in the Bronx, drove to the West Side, loaded up and prepared to drive to Chicago (later I’d get on a train and come back to join the cast in Boston). So I’m on my way in the Lincoln Tunnel, crawling in a traffic jam about 7:30 p.m., and when you get out of the tunnel there’s a spiral highway that winds up to ground level and to your right is one of THE Views of Manhattan—the island is spread out in a panorama of lights and glimmerings, a city shimmering like the hope that it is, a beacon for newer, fresher, younger people, and I looked at it a little distantly and thought: well, that was then and I feel a part of somewhere else already, and then I thought: maybe I didn’t get my name in lights, maybe I didn’t set the place on fire, maybe all of New York doesn’t know my name, but there are scratchings on the wall, New York, little pieces of graffiti in certain off-Broadway theaters, a linoleum floor I put down in Brooklyn, telltale signs that I was there, and maybe one day I’ll be removed and assured enough to go back and look for a few of them, point them out to my boy or girl, maybe. Glimmer and shine and pulse over there always, I thought—never let us down in America, always be there for us to expend our youths and dreams and energies and lives upon. It is time to go, New York, and one last thought before I go is—
HONNNNNNK! The car behind me was not appreciating my New York Moment. I wanted to get out of the car and tell him, HEY BUDDY, don’t you know this is my swan song? A chapter is ending here? That’s how it goes these days, huh? Moving forward at the sounds of horns on highways, at the cue of traffic signals, turnstiles, tollbooths, ushered and rushed to the next stop on the itinerary, and there are days on the commuter train in the winter when it’s got dark early and you can’t see out because of the reflection and you might put down your paper or put aside your book and really look at yourself, because amid the noise and the smoke and the strangers and what’s become of your life: there you are.
So wish us luck on the kid. And I hope you’re happy these days. I am.
Which is not to say that there aren’t nights when I put on my coat and take a walk here in Evanston and go down to the lakefront near the university and walk along the rocks and get nostalgic and look up at Chicago, all golden and clean, reflecting down the shore to me, and think: that’s nice, that’s real nice, but I knew a place once where the lights were brighter, and the air was filled with dreams.
Read on for a sneak peek at
Wilton Barnhardt’s new novel
Available August 2013
in hardcover from St. Martin’s Press
www.stmartins.com/lookawaylookaway
Copyright © 2013 by Wilton Barnhardt
Advance Praise for Wilton Barnhardt’s
Lookaway, Lookaway
“Barnhardt’s fourth novel is a revelation: witty, savage, and bighearted all at once; it is the Southern novel for the twenty-first century.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Lookaway, Lookaway is a wild romp through the South, and therefore the history of our nation, written by an absolute ringmaster of fiction.”
—Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
“Move over, Tom Wolfe! Writing with brilliance and brio, Wilton Barnhardt has penned a hilarious satire that often has surprising depth and hits way too close to the truth.”
—Lee Smith, author of Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger
“Wilton Barnhardt has written the big Southern novel I’ve been wanting to read all my life. I can’t think of a book that better expresses the complexity of exactly where our Southern culture is right now. His insights into his characters—both male and female—are rich and genuinely hilarious, expressed with a dangerous level of humor and pain. Lookaway, Lookaway is entirely remarkable. I finished reading it and started again on page one to see how he did it. (I still don’t know.)”
—Mark Childress, author of Crazy in Alabama and Georgia Bottoms
“Lookaway, Lookaway is an often humorous, sometimes unsettling, ultimately poignant romp through a ‘New’ South still reluctant to let go of its past. Barnhardt’s novel earns a place on the bookshelf between J. K. Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons.”
—Ron Rash, author of Serena
Jerilyn
There were only two white dresses that ever would matter, her mother said. The first of these was the Debutante Dress that Jerilyn would wear when she would take her father’s arm and march across the stage in Raleigh, into the single spotlight, radiant, along with all the other debs in North Carolina.
As of last week, the suspense concerning that dress had been extinguished, when Jerilyn and her pals from Mecklenburg Country Day, Bethany and Mallory, besieged uptown formal shops to hunt down their quarry, capturing and releasing, debating, embracing, denouncing many white gowns before claiming the perfectly flattering one as their own. Jerilyn suffered an hour of agony as she prayed that her more assertive friends would not fall in love with the beautiful number on the mannequin near the cashier’s station as she had. The crinkled taffeta, treated with some French-termed process, so smooth, like petting a puppy, had an internal corset, mermaid tail, subtle beading that sparkled opalescent around the slimming bodice, all blooming out upon layer upon layer of tulle, soft and dreamy. Wearing it would defy gravity; to walk into the light would be like floating in on a tulle cloud, something right out of an antebellum cotillion, which would please her father. He did his best to remain in that world before 1860: Duke John
ston, descendant of Civil War General Joseph E. Johnston.
Even though the debut was a year off, she had an impulse to take the gown with her to university, let it hang in her Chapel Hill closet so she might look in on it, stroke and adore it, have it as a beacon before her. But the gown was so wide at the bottom, and surely dorm room closets were tiny and who knows what could happen to it there, when it would be safe and sound right here at home.
The second white gown, the Bridal Gown, was thought of solemnly; it would involve years of decision-making. It was, really, a life’s work. Jerilyn and her female contemporaries, having just graduated high school, had already put in reverent hours with scores of bridal magazines, begun the opinionated window-shopping, attended the society weddings like dress rehearsals for one’s own event, notes mentally taken, good things memorized so they might be borrowed or varied, atrocities eschewed. The decision about that gown, mercifully, could wait some years hence.
When she’d brought up the issue of a showstopper wedding dress with her mother, she was cautioned to whoa the horses. “You’ll do something, I would hope, with your future Carolina degree,” her mother reasoned. “Enjoy your independence. Work for a few years before you see which of the young men you met at Carolina seems destined for something besides his parents’ basement. Or, given the atmosphere at Carolina, rehab.”
Even though Jerilyn’s mother was her hero—Jerene Jarvis Johnston, director of the Jarvis Trust for American Art at the Mint Museum, respected matriarch of one of Charlotte’s first families—and her mother was almost, almost her best friend … her mother did not understand everything. Jerilyn would be very happy to find a husband quickly at Carolina and begin fomenting wedding plans no later than her senior year. She did not yearn to be part of a workplace, never failing to be somewhere for a set time in the morning, nor did she care to learn what it was to balance checkbooks and be frugal; she felt her life would be quite fine without those improving, self-revealing years of sacrifice starting at the bottom rung of something. She wanted (1) to be married in four years, (2) move soon into a beautiful home, (3) babies soon after. She longed to decorate her own new house, having her father and mother—who was an accomplished hostess without compare—over to their new home to see what she, Jerilyn, could offer as hospitality, how she could arrange a centerpiece and the Provençal floral tablecloth with the majolica place settings from Umbria she coveted at Nordstrom. See, Mom, how the tiger lily is picked up in the fleur-de-lys along the golden trim of the dinner plate and the scarlet mandala pattern on the Kashmiri linen napkins (on sale last week at Saks)?
And this desire led to Jerilyn’s one upcoming act of proposed rebellion. She was going to rush a sorority. She had visited older friends at Carolina, girls content with life in the dormitory, study breaks at ten P.M., girls in sweatshirts gossiping and squealing in the hallways with bowls of microwaved popcorn, pop music blasting. Seemed nice. But it wouldn’t get her where she wanted to go: before the eligible men of North Carolina, the next generation of doctors and lawyers and tycoons. Mother had forbidden sororities, because of expense and distraction, and provided lectures on how very different they had become “since her day.” On some mornings, Jerilyn hoped that she might persuade her mother otherwise.
No, she quickly told herself on this particular morning—Jerilyn, get real. She would not change her mother’s mind. Mrs. Johnston had never, since birth, changed her mind about anything. It had to be presented to her mother as a fait accompli. Even then, Jerilyn reflected in these last minutes in her childhood bedroom, her mother could scotch the whole enterprise, such were her powers’ vast and immeasurable sweep. She’d probably call the chancellor or something, get the sorority disbanded nationally …
Jerilyn stood looking at the Debutante Dress hanging in her bedroom closet, along with the unwanted clothes not making the journey to Chapel Hill. She had packed three suitcases of clothes and another three boxes of accessories, the heaviest being her curling irons and blow-dryers and expensive hair care products. “You can open your own salon, sweetheart,” her father said, as he packed the car. There was another suitcase—well, a small trunk—just for shoes, then her computer and stacks of school supplies … the BMW was full to the brim. No, the dress would not be going. She touched it a final time and respectfully shut the closet door.
She should feel more wistful and sad, shouldn’t she? Here it was at long last, farewell to her childhood room, bye-bye to the stuffed animals (well, the pink panda Skip Baylor gave her for her birthday was headed to Chapel Hill, after all), bye-bye to the Justin Timberlake poster inside the closet door, her faded valentine and birthday cards taped to the vanity mirror, remnants of proms and parties, all of it girly and vaguely embarrassing. Nope, no sadness at all. She had waited and waited for this day—couldn’t wait to get to Carolina and begin her life. She was the last of the four children, the “accident,” no matter how they euphemized about it, a full ten years out from the other three, Bo, Annie, and Joshua. Her siblings doted on her, patted her head, thought she was a little pest or brat or doll, some entity at whom love could be directed but not quite fully human. She used to hate being the outlier youngest, but she reconciled to it. It meant being the baby, being spoiled a little.
She checked the vanity mirror one more time. Her stylist had convinced Jerilyn to cut her hair short in a nice rounded bob. Everyone loved it; they loved it so openly and insistently that she realized she must have looked quite dreadful beforehand with dull brown hair to her shoulders that never kept a shape, that fanned out and frizzed. She could grow it long but it was never shampoo-commercial long, gleaming silken tresses that coiled and released, forming waves of sheen. If she lolled her head like a model in a L’Oréal commercial, the hair moved in a piece—it was never silken tresses, it was shrubbery. So Jerilyn had given up that fond fantasy of luxurious hair, as well as a notion that she was a certain kind of beautiful. With the bob she was cute, not beautiful. Mind you, she could work with cute. Big eyes looking out from under bangs, very winning with a subtle suggestive smile, a natural shyness she intended to kill off as soon as she got to Chapel Hill, starting later this very day when her father would charmingly stall for time making small talk with her new roommate, launching into perfectly interesting but wholly irrelevant ruminations on North Carolina history, before kissing his little princess goodbye and driving back to Charlotte.
“Alma?” Jerilyn left her bedroom and called out from the upper-floor staircase. Their housekeeper was nowhere to be found. It would have been a special goodbye had Alma been there to receive it.
“Dad?” she called out. He wasn’t back yet. He said he would take the BMW out to fill the gas tank for the two-hour journey ahead.
Mom wasn’t fooling anybody. After breakfast she invented some small crisis at the museum, the site of her upcoming fund-raiser. She hugged Jerilyn briefly and said they would talk this evening. Mom didn’t do mush. Jerilyn knew that her mother was privately distressed to be losing the last of the four children; the nest was looking a little too empty that morning, so off she went to yell at the caterers. Jerilyn didn’t mind. She admired her mother’s complete lack of public sentimentality—she hoped to emulate it, one of these days.
So, she had the house to herself.
Jerilyn walked down the foyer steps of the two-story entrance hall, the grandest room in the house which, given her imminent departure, suddenly struck her as a feature she might well miss. The Johnston house dated from 1890, built by her great-grandfather (also Joseph Beauregard Johnston, like her father). It sat regally high on its hill on Providence Road for all to see, at the very entrance to the Myers Park neighborhood, the most monied enclave of Charlotte, North Carolina. Jerilyn had been told that the house used to be surrounded by acres of land that they had once owned but, through the decades, the property had been divided and sold for infusions of cash.
Given the neighboring piles of tacky turrets and mansard roofs, fauxantebellum columns and sentry gates bear
ing coats of arms, the Johnston compound appeared modest. It was part of the architect’s genius—it advertised to the world an unassuming, comfortable two-story home from the outside, but it was spacious as any rambling mansion inside. Cushioned by ancient oak trees, the house sat back contentedly, hiding even its best feature, a large columned side porch, and its second best, a brick verandah and a perfectly enclosed backyard with its whisperings of a country estate: a small birdbath fountain that had not burbled since her childhood, a rose garden which needed much tending, and an arbor and trellis which needed none at all, dependably covered in wisteria or morning glories no matter the neglect. The upstairs of the house contained the six bedrooms. The downstairs had been featured once in Southern Living magazine: the long elegant dining room with the imitation Adam plaster-work on the ceiling, a kitchen large enough to provide hospitality to parties of a hundred or more, several beautifully realized sitting rooms—a classic American room, perfect for one of her mother’s high teas; a blue French sitting room for solitude on gray afternoons, for reading and not being disturbed, avoided inexplicably by every male in the family; an off-to-the-side warren of parquet floors and custom cherrywood cabinetry that picked up a Frank Lloyd Wright flavor for the TV room and entertainment center.
The main attraction, of course, was her father’s Civil War Study, which might have been directly swiped from the mid-nineteenth century. You had to take a small step down in order to enter it; Jerilyn imagined this small difference of elevation to be part of the magic spell that allowed you to leave the publicity and bustle of the rest of the house for the rarefied sense of the past. Like a carnival barker, Jerilyn had offered peeks to the neighborhood children, sometimes sneaking in illegally with her schoolmates—invariably boys—who would beg to take a closer look at the swords, dueling pistols, old maps of battle plans, engravings and parchments of the period, a cannonball. Every book on the Study’s shelves was a first edition from the Civil War era (Dad kept his more modern history books upstairs in the bedroom). Prohibitions against entering, let alone touching anything, haunted all secret reconnaissance missions—and Alma, if she saw any signs of trespass, would tattle on her or any of her siblings, so all forays had to be timed for when Alma was out in the laundry room attached to the garage. Jerilyn loved to have an excuse to visit her father there amid the smell of pipe smoke, burnished leather, book mold, and the aromatic hickory wood in the fireplace; it smelled of an ever-welcoming past, of lost causes and unvanquished honor.
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 51