One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  “Mmm?” I said.

  “I talked to Dillon Saturday—”

  “Who’s Dillon?” Kellen said.

  “The chef at the Harper Fowlkes,” she said, just as she would if Kellen had inquired who Brad Pitt was. “We—the partners—had a dinner there last night for all the potential junior partners and their significant others. I’m sure they had no idea we were auditioning their spouses.”

  “None whatsoever,” Kellen said.

  “And Dillon did up a bourguignon that we have to have as the beef entrée at the reception.”

  If I could have trusted myself, I would have told her the menu had already been set in the stone of my father’s credit card. But did it matter? Did it even matter?

  “Just mention it to your mother.” Randi glanced at the Geneva wall clock. “I need to go. More lawyers per capita in this town than any other city in the United States and I still can’t keep up with my own caseload.”

  “It’s because of the open cup law,” Kellen said.

  Randi paused on her way to the door and said, “What?”

  “The open cup law. You know, where people are allowed to walk around town with uncovered cups of alcoholic beverages—”

  “I know what the open container law is, but what does that have to do with my caseload?”

  “Clients that get drunk and disorderly down at the—”

  Randi winced and headed for the courtyard door again. “I don’t even touch those cases.”

  “Don’t blame you. You could get head lice.”

  “Tara, talk to your mother and get back to me. Kellen, always a pleasure.”

  Kellen at least waited until we could see her striding across the lawn to the Victorian-home-turned-law-office next door before he spewed a laugh and a portion of his smoothie.

  “You’re shameless,” I said.

  “She didn’t give you a chance to say a single word that whole time.” Kellen drained his glass and then looked at me, eyes sober. “But it’s not like you to let her get away with that.”

  He was going to ask me what was wrong, and if he did I was going to tell him. So I made a large production out of looking up at the clock and said, “Aren’t you late for work? I know your boss. He’ll have your job.”

  There was enough truth in that for Kellen to leave his glass in the sink and take off for his apartment over the carriage house. Daddy didn’t cut him any slack at the Faulkner Corporation. The bloodline and an MBA at the number one–ranked Booth School of Business earned Kellen about as many perks as the receptionist got.

  As soon as his footsteps faded up the carriage house steps, I let my head fall into my hands. I’d only had to keep up the façade for two people and I was already circling the drain. All I wanted to do was crawl back into bed.

  I got only as far as the first curve in the staircase when my cell played a jazz piano ostinato. Seth’s ring.

  My other hand sliding on the wide cherry rail, I continued up the stairs and let the piano riff twice more before I pressed the phone to my ear. Seth started talking before I could even say hello. Or good-bye.

  “Tar, don’t hang up. Please. Just listen.”

  I didn’t know what there was to say, so I said nothing. He took that for listening.

  “I want to come over,” he said.

  “No.”

  “I have to talk to you!”

  “Not here.”

  “Where?”

  I leaned against the wall on the third-floor landing and stared down the hall to the round-topped window that looked out over my Savannah. My world. Maybe if I went out in it, I would discover I was still the same as I was twelve hours ago. That somehow we were the same.

  “The park,” I said.

  He didn’t have to ask which one. “By the fountain?” His voice was wobbling its way back from some teetering edge.

  Whatever conversation we could possibly have, I couldn’t have it in the one place every tourist had to see, even on a Monday.

  “The garden,” I said.

  “Anywhere you want. I can get away at eleven.”

  I nodded, as if he could see me, and hung up. And then I slid down the wall and sat on the Persian runner and sobbed.

  FOUR

  By ten thirty the day had warmed into the kind Savannah visitors love to wander around in. The kind that makes them think about living here and slowing down and returning to the simple romantic times that never were. Sixty degrees on December first. A light breeze drying the brick walkways and freeing the leaves to float back onto lawns, where gardeners would whisk them away almost before they touched the grass. A seamless blue sky with only a few puffs of cloud for character. Sunlight dancing down through the live oaks and magnolias and splashing ahead on the broad sidewalks as tourists went strolling.

  Only tourists stroll. The rest of us have an agenda beyond, “We have a tour at two, so we ought to think about lunch so we can squeeze in a look inside the Catholic church. They say you shouldn’t miss it, even if you aren’t Catholic.” The rest of us jaywalk our way across town and hurry through the squares, bodies slanted forward because we have stuff to do just like anybody living anyplace else.

  Both of those kinds of people filled Forsyth Park when I crossed the street from my front door and neither strolled nor slanted down the broad walkway toward the fountain. I trod. That’s what I did. I trod.

  Normally I loved walking under the canopy the live oak trees formed overhead with their curved arms and their drapes of Spanish moss. I’d passed through that sun-dappled tunnel in a stroller, on a hot-pink tricycle, doing cartwheels, and running full bore on gangly preadolescent legs. And even when I’d finally gotten self-conscious teenage control of my height and my gawky limbs, I dreamed. Always I dreamed under that leafy roof of possibilities. Normally, that was what I did.

  Today wasn’t normal.

  I didn’t look for Seth when I got to the fountain. It was too early still and that was okay. I needed to be there and figure out what was still true.

  It was true, wasn’t it, that Seth and Kellen and I and even truculent little Evelyn had grown up in this park, at this intersection where our two houses meet? Didn’t we all have our heroic falls from the playground equipment? Didn’t we all learn to play soccer here, with varying degrees of proficiency? Didn’t I watch Seth and Kellen on the basketball court and shriek for Seth every time he swished one in, so he would notice me?

  Didn’t our mothers play tennis in tans and white shorts on the courts here? Didn’t our families play football on this lawn every Thanksgiving afternoon? Didn’t we feel like we owned this twenty acres of wonderful? Wasn’t this our front yard? Wasn’t this where I sat on a bench at age sixteen and pretended to read Jane Eyre, when I was really designing a wedding cake that would look like our Parisian fountain?

  Yes. Yes. Yes to all of that. This place was our life, Seth’s and mine, from the time we were too young to know it. He even proposed to me on the steps of the Confederate memorial.

  We had actually started out at the fountain, but the wind was blowing that day and the spray was like rain in our faces. I had an idea from the way Seth-who-never-stammered was stammering that he was about to propose. I’d dreamed up every scenario known to Hollywood, and standing there feeling my hair frizz and watching Seth wince and shiver with every drop that pattered his eyes wasn’t one of them.

  As much as I hate to admit it now, I was almost in tears. Then Seth shook the droplets from his wonderful sticking-out black hair and grabbed my hand and pulled me around the spitting fountain and down the walkway. We stopped at the Confederate memorial, which was surrounded by a fence to, as the sign said, “sustain its culture and longevity.” Which meant a pair of high school vandals had gotten in there and painted a mustache on the unknown Confederate’s statue and the city gatekeepers decided, after the massive sandblasting effort, that so wasn’t happening again.

  Seth grinned at the fence and then at me.

  “Really?” I said.


  He made a stirrup with his hands and I climbed over and waited, giggling, on the other side as he followed. Grabbing my hand again, he led me up the forbidden steps to the statue, and under the severe watch of the soldier who guarded the park, ready to take up arms against invading Yankees, he said the words I’d longed for since I was fifteen: “Tara, will you please, please marry me?”

  I had, of course, rehearsed my response, everything from:

  TARA: Of course. I’ve loved you all my life. (From The Firm)

  To . . .

  TARA: What took you so long? (From The Return of the Jedi)

  But what did I do when the moment came? I nodded dumbly. Didn’t say a word. Just bobbed my head up and down until he slipped Grandmother Fiest’s ring on my finger.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t do this by the fountain,” he said. “That’s how I always pictured it.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “Everybody gets engaged by that fountain.”

  “Right. We risked incarceration for this.”

  We laughed. We laughed right into each other’s faces until we couldn’t find each other’s mouth to kiss. Seth chased me to the other side of the monument and took a picture of me stopping against a cabbage palm to gaze at his great-grandmother’s diamond.

  I twirled the ring around my finger now but I couldn’t look at it. All of that was real. The life we’d already had together had been true. I knew Seth. I knew him like I knew every stony paver and iron bench and azalea bush in this park.

  Didn’t I?

  A few shoulder widths away, a middle-aged couple with cell phones pointed at the fountain turned their heads in perfect unison to look at me, identical startled expressions on their faces. I must have made some kind of pathetic noise because they both tilted their heads, both lifted their greying brows, both bit their lips as if they were chewing on what words to say. Both at exactly the same time, like people who have been married longer than they haven’t.

  I shrugged—a wonderful representation of hospitality in the Hostess City of the South—and moved away from the fountain and toward the garden. Seth would be showing up soon.

  The Fragrant Garden—so called because it was planted with scent-producing flowers so the blind can enjoy it—is a favorite spot for Savannah weddings, but I was sure nobody would be getting married on a Monday afternoon. Maybe it wasn’t the best choice for the conversation we were about to have, but the reason it was a popular wedding site was the same reason I picked it today: because it was private and had almost no foot traffic. I had no idea what I was going to say, what Seth was going to say, but whatever it was, I didn’t want anyone else to hear it.

  I hurried now, northwest of the monument toward Whitaker Street, and reached the pathway that led to the garden, another romantic walk lined with azaleas that would bloom in February and the ever-present live oaks that hovered like protective uncles. I leaned against the white cement wall, designed to keep the fragrances in, and let the heat from it warm my back. I hadn’t been able to get warm since I left the townhouse last night.

  I guess I lied to myself when I thought I had no idea what we were going to say. I’d tried to formulate a dozen scenes after Seth called—

  SETH: Tar, please, I need you to listen to me.

  TARA: I’m listening.

  SETH: (silence)

  And . . .

  SETH: There is nothing I can say to erase what you saw. All I can do is try to explain.

  TARA: How do you explain having cybersex when you have a fiancée who worships the freakin’ ground you walk on, Seth?

  SETH: (silence)

  And . . .

  TARA: Make me understand, okay? Make me believe this doesn’t change anything.

  SETH: (silence)

  We finished each other’s sentences all the time. We started the same conversation at once practically every day. Sometimes we sat not talking and then one of us would say, “I’m still thinking about that thing,” and the other one would know what that thing was and run with it. But now? I couldn’t imagine what could possibly come out of Seth’s mouth.

  No wonder I couldn’t get warm.

  I was wearing a robin’s egg–blue Old Navy sweater, the kind that shows your jeans through the fabric when you stretch it across your thighs. But it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d had on a full-length down coat. The cold was coming from the inside. I hugged the sweater around me anyway and folded my arms in a tight squeeze and watched Seth make his way down the path.

  He still looked like Seth. Pressed black slacks and the signature Oxford button-down shirt, grey-striped today, and a leather jacket hanging by one finger over his shoulder. For anybody else his age he would’ve looked overdressed. The cut of his muscles, though, and the long-legged stride dared anyone to critique his wardrobe.

  But he was a different Seth too. As he got closer I saw the sag of his eyes and the drawing in around his mouth. Before he even reached me I could hear his breath coming hard and heavy. A man who bench presses 250 pounds doesn’t breathe like a locomotive from walking down a garden path.

  He stopped an arm’s length from me and switched the jacket to his other shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Thanks for meeting me.”

  I nodded.

  He looked around. His profile cut sharply against the white wall. He was a beautiful man.

  “So can we sit someplace?”

  I slid down the wall until my seat met the ground. He stood staring down at me for as long as it takes to calculate a dry cleaning bill, and then he saved himself by easing onto the grass beside me. He held out his jacket.

  “You want to sit on this?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “You warm enough?”

  “Seth, stop.” I pressed my thumbs into my temples, fingers spread across my forehead. “Just say what you need to say.”

  “What do you need to hear?”

  “Something that will make me believe you.”

  He parked his elbow on one raised knee and squeezed the bridge of his nose. It occurred to me that he hadn’t looked me in the eyes since he’d arrived. I waited for his gaze to settle somewhere, even if it wasn’t on me, but it darted—not aimlessly, but as if the words he wanted were hidden in the grass, the cracks in the wall, the space between my nose and my upper lip.

  Finally he let it light on my knees, which I held close to my chest. “I know it has to be disgusting to you,” he said. “And I hate that you saw it. And I hate myself because now you can’t erase it. Right?”

  “Right.”

  My voice was barely audible, even to me. That seemed to give him a reason to touch my forehead. “You’ve probably made a whole movie out of it in there, huh?”

  “No! Where would I get the material for a movie like that?”

  He pulled his hand away and rubbed his mouth.

  “Just tell me why,” I said. “Just straight-out tell me why. That’s what I need to hear.”

  “I can do that. Yeah, I can do that.” He spread his hands. “I watch porn because—”

  “Wait. You don’t just watch porn. You do it.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Don’t make me say it! You were part of what that woman was doing.”

  “No—”

  “You were. Having. Sex. With her. I heard you, Seth.”

  His face turned ashen and his hand went back to his mouth. I pressed my back into the wall, hard. I didn’t go off on anyone like this. No one. But especially not Seth.

  “All right,” he said. “I—do—porn because it’s a release. Women maybe don’t get that.” He paused but I didn’t move. “And the release is partly sexual. You and I have waited a long time and that builds up.”

  “You are so not going to tell me it’s physically dangerous for a guy to go without having sex.”

  “No. I’m not.” The almost-dimples were hairline fractures in his face. “It’s the pressure, Tar—the wedding, t
he job, the house.” He glanced at my lips again and then took his eyes away. “Waiting for you. For us.”

  “That, what I saw, is a substitute for us?”

  “No. It’s nothing like us. I tried to tell you that last night. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just what I said: it’s a release. You’re a woman—you don’t—”

  “And what about after we’re married?”

  Finally Seth looked at me. A sheen of sweat covered his forehead, and his dark eyes begged. That was what he didn’t want me to see. The pleading. Seth Grissom did not plead.

  “Everything is going to be different after we’re married,” he said. “I’ll have you. We’ll have us. I won’t need . . . that.”

  “Are you going to quit your job?” someone who sounded like me said.

  “What?”

  “Is the job pressure going to go away because we’re married?”

  For the first time his eyes flickered with something besides desperation. It was gone too quickly for me to name it. “No,” he said, “but I won’t have all the other stuff on top of it. And I’ll have you.” His voice thickened. “Please tell me I’ll have you, Tar.”

  I put my thumbs to my temples again and felt my hair coming loose from the messy bun I’d forced it into. I pulled the tie all the way out and pushed my fingers deep into my curls. Think. I had to think. Now I knew the other reason why Seth couldn’t look at me. Who could think, who could even speak with a writhing struggle going on in the eyes of somebody you loved? Loved in spite of everything.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” I said.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” Seth said. “Tar—this is my responsibility, okay? I stayed up all night getting rid of everything. I’ve ordered a whole new hard drive and I took out the old one. I’m done. It’s over. You have my word.”

  I looked up. “Your word?”

  “Yes. My word. I never lied to you, Tar.”

  I knew my smile was cold. “You didn’t have to. I never said, ‘Hey, Seth, just out of curiosity, do you ever look at porn?’ ”

  The bite in my voice seemed to surprise him. It flabbergasted me. I had no control over what was coming out of my mouth, or apparently, over what my body did. I was shuddering the way you do after you throw up.