The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  “Nothing has ever taken so much ass, as walking outta that bar, away from you. Going upstairs was like trying to escape a gravity well. Then it was all—about seeing the number on your card and the message from the board, and realizing I’d seen postings from you on the Net but like, fucked around? And there you were in front of me, like all kinds of inevitable.

  “It was totally over. I was dressing up like I thought you’d wanna have me, and knowing that if you left, I’d be all, paging you to come back. I could not even believe what I was doing, getting ready to offer myself to you, body and soul. Have a clue what that was like?”

  Actually, I was running breathlessly to keep up. Then I registered the hopeless little laugh when she had confessed her name. I saw her dressing herself, posturing herself to please, she had to have relived…

  “When you pulled me back and wouldn’t let me get away, you made me feel it all again, but not the same. Then you reached down and, touched me, and I came for you—right then, not once-removed! When you turned me over, oh, I loved your eyes! I saw you accepted that I had given it all up, and it was as if I weren’t alone anymore.”

  That hit me like a whiplash and my composure faltered. Pulling myself back together, it occurred to me how all of this combined still failed to address the mysteries that had interwoven our paths. I suspected that she was aware of this. Her analysis was the means by which she had been educated to rationalize her own feelings and circumstance.

  In the face of what was happening to us, the thing that was coming to us on that pier, in a sea storming with primal forces that could snuff out our little lives in a heartbeat, then more than ever she needed some parts of her life to make sense. I could only wish that mine might. I turned my eyes to the boiling clouds. “The kinkiest thing about this may be me having sex with a psychology graduate…”

  The attempt at levity was lost. She wrapped up her end without breaking stride, “When you were describing your experiences, you didn’t pick up on my shock of recognition? I’m so up on you that I don’t think anything could turn me off.”

  Recalling her thoughts about incest in Mexico, I laughed uncertainly, “Yes, I guess we could say that has been pretty well established.” While the atmosphere was not lightening, the rain had slowed, and she stood up. Her tension had returned.

  “Prompt me right now if you really want me.” She stared out into the Gulf, as if afraid to meet my eyes. “If you do, I believe we’ll always be together, no matter what. But I must know now if you wanna throw me over and go back, after JJ or whatever… Nay, please don’t make me go on alone.” Her voice quavered. Somewhere in all this, the strangeness had returned and become pronounced. “Please, if you want this, take me right now!”

  She waited for my answer, and I couldn’t imagine why I hesitated. A fatal attraction is only a problem if you don’t want it. I was knocked out that all this had been going on in her while I had wallowed in my silly insecurities. Never would she have to fear abandonment. Logically, I could not live long enough. It would be me who would age and sicken while she was yet young. She would never have to plead with me that it was still her inside, never know how shamefully shallow I could be…

  From what depths was this stuff coming? I had abandoned no one; my record was clear. What I had traditionally thought of as sanity gave one last, feeble protest before it expired. “Do I want you?” The very question seemed as preposterous as her mother’s “Do you remember me?”

  “Of course I want you. But, my God, girl, look at you—look at me…”

  I’ll never be able to describe or express this, no matter how hard I try. The heartrending girl-cry that sounded as though it echoed down the halls of eternity did not even resemble her voice or speech. She gripped her fists under her chin and I wondered that one young lifetime could contain that much pain, and consequent release.

  “Don’t go there, don’t even go there! Can’t you see that I never wanna have to stop looking at you, ever again?” As though the enormity of it all caught up with her at once, she sank to her knees on the deck, her tears dissolving into the rain and the waters of the Gulf.

  Somehow, I couldn’t abide her like that right then. Seeing her on her knees before me aroused a strange, sickening sense of shame. I gathered her up and she lay against me like a sleeping child as I carried her back down the rain-slick planks. If she had somehow found her father and lover in one, I was going to buy into it. Come hernia, come coronary, I thought, there is no way I’m going to let this girl down. I would not allow the slightest indication that I might ever let her go.

  The newly washed greens of the trees, bright paint on the antique houses facing the storming Gulf, the ozone in the air—all things seemed fresh and new. I was breathing in the air of a brand-new world and knowing I was never going back to the old one. As I felt my lifelong obsession with her mother pale into an ambivalent footnote, I knew that now I had seen it all! Of course, I was wrong again.

  VI

  The Testament

  I TOOK HER WITH ME INTO A HOT SHOWER, WHICH relieved the chill of our soaking in the morning storm. Lathering each other up, it developed that my body hang-ups of the preceding day were missing. How not, when she watched me, slightly blushing, as I gently scrubbed the contours of her young flesh? It is not distasteful work to stroke under full, firm breasts and down along a well-muscled abdomen. No, I should have been the one to feel embarrassment when, rinsing off, she began to compulsively use her lips on my aging chest. Working down my belly, she went to her knees again and, this time, I felt no shame, quite the contrary.

  The shower had one of those adjustable heads on a flexible tube, which she pulled down with her. “Spread your legs,” she commanded with a wicked glance. Oh, really? The needle-spray was stimulating enough before she reached back and began to gradually turn up the heat. The treatment began to get intense, but damned if I were going to cry uncle! In wonder, I watched her implicitly worshiping my aging flesh, apparently desiring nothing other than to fill herself with me.

  I tried to reach down for her, but she pulled back from my cock just long enough to gasp, “I don’t care about that right now. I wanna get it done for you; I want you to come.” When she dropped the nozzle and dug her electric blue nails into my butt, there was no difficulty on that count. I was staggered, but I could no longer discount the obvious; for some reason, in some fashion, she genuinely did want me!

  After a great seafood lunch in a glass-walled restaurant overlooking the still-churning Gulf, we set out for Atlanta. By the time I swung the Del Sol northward at Mobile, the sun had come out and the day was fine. Contrasting with our weird drive through the Southern night, there was little conversation while we cruised through the forested Georgia hills. I drove, and she nestled against me.

  Justine was apparently content, though I’d made little enough verbal commitment to her when she’d poured out her soul. Still, a crucial something had passed between us. This I could not have denied, even had I been so inclined. My mind full with trying to get a handle on what was happening to me, I surmised that she felt much the same. In my own internal quest, I’d remained vigilant for synchronies as a sort of barometer. I’d prayed that the fabric of reality might be worked, to worry loose a few threads of what my life might have been, or maybe had been and lost.

  But what was happening was outrageous! synchronicity appeared to overwhelm causality in a nexus of uncertainty, of which the wild weather presented an objective metaphor. Justine had said she saw convergence, but I feared the chaos of delusion. Could I persuade myself that my mad fantasy to return to the lake and the young JJ had been, all along, linked with a destiny leading me to her child instead? The implications of this possible outcome to my life were extraordinary as anything I’d been consciously exploring.

  If that was the case, how did the strange saga of the life and work of William Seabrook fit into all of this? Or did it, I wondered, as we skirted Columbus, beyond serving simply as the point at which we touched? I had
a most unsettling moment as I glanced at her, dozing with her head on my thigh, hair red as the Georgia clay on the embankments streaming past us.

  That association of her with the environment evoked something from my unconscious. I could but partially call the reminiscence up to awareness, a sentiment of grief so inexpressible as to be stanched only by oblivion. That notion being something I was unaccustomed to, it sent my mind spiraling again into a bizarre domain in which Justine did not exist at all.

  I fished in my pocket for a Valium. Could I have gone utterly mad? Might I be on this wild odyssey all by myself, this being resting on my thigh a nymph by the strictest definition? A Gaia? Might the eerie sense of familiarity devolve from her being a hallucinatory manifestation of a reality that I failed to cope with and railed against?

  I settled down as the tranq cut in, reasonably sure that I could confirm the reality of our meeting. Unlikely as it might seem, this young woman was quite real. There were receipts in my pocket establishing that two had lodged and dined. No, the ugly thought that I was avoiding in the real world was the prospect that I might be nothing more than a casual circumstance in realizing her destiny. I had to face, after all, the probability that she had substantially more to offer the world than I yet did.

  The colors of the natural beauty without exacerbated the foreboding of mortality. How often I had ignored the simple joy of life, and how little time was left! Could she recall for me youth’s brave illusion of feeling like an immortal being? Or would she make me old by punctuating the pointlessness of all existence confronting extinction?

  We reached Atlanta late in the afternoon but, with the modern loop around the city, were able to avoid most of its traffic as well. Old Atlanta had been forced even farther underground, like the great Texas cities, with big chunks of Los Angeles dropped on top of that which I remembered. To the north, the hills still grew rougher, and deciduous forest blended with the softwood of the tree farms. Along the American auto-bahns, we made our way to the little town of Buford, now a suburb of Greater Atlanta.

  The mills and factories of an earlier era called Progress had marked the road from Chattanooga I had traveled with Linda so long before. They had given way to the usual generic collection of discount gas stations, Wally Worlds, and Pizza Huts.

  Above the main artery, then lighting up for the evening, a few vagrant houses of vanishing yesteryears held on to the rocky hillsides, among newer bricks and mobile-home developments. In second gear, we climbed a winding street pitted with potholes that were real axle-breakers. Justine directed me to a gate in a rusted iron fence. It sported a statue of a deer that would have been life-size had the representation been of a Texas whitetail.

  Inside, concealed by trees and overgrown shrubbery from the encroaching residential district, a Victorian monstrosity to quicken the dead heart of Tennessee Williams clung to the side of the hill. An odd location, I thought, for a cosmopolitan woman of the “smart set” to finish out her years. What could have moved her to bury herself in these Southern hills, what reasons beyond the obvious? Atlanta had been Katie’s place, after all, and other pieces of Willie’s roots had been nearby.

  A quiet wistfulness wafted about its weathered sides and sagging balustrades. A casemented corner rose in a false tower to support an octagonal “birdcage” turret beside the tin roof. Disintegrating wooden shake awnings shaded the windows that surveyed the darkening hollows below. Those lengthening shadows were baleful as the broken relief of Ollioules Gorge, in a picture I’d seen of that menacing ravine when I found Evenos on an Internet tourism site. An elaborate lightning rod, with curlicues and lateral rings, asserted the old house’s defiance as it hung on for dear life against time and change.

  ————————

  “LET ME GO TURN ON THE LIGHTS.”

  While dusk was about to settle, I observed there was still plenty of illumination. “Nay, I totally want you to see this!” I watched her butt as she bounced up the porch steps and unlocked the door. As she stepped inside, the old screen crashing behind her, her youthful vitality became a welcome relief from unbidden thoughts that the house inspired. Maybe I’d overdone the Valium?

  Momentarily, the entire house was lit against the coming twilight by a little electric lamp in each of its windows, even those in the tower and gables up above. Looking closer, I could see that they were tiny glass lamps in a wild variety of shapes and colors, most resembling old oil lamps. She skipped back down the creaking steps, and proudly announced, “I’m way happy they came on. If even one bulb is out, none of them will work.”

  “Wired in series,” I thought aloud, somewhat cheered from my reverie on the house where her ancestress had grown old. “Well, they do kind of make you think of old-time Christmas lights, don’t they?”

  The pride in her voice subtly changed as she gazed at her fancifully lighted windows. “I’m sure she found them one at a time, and added them so that there

  would be a light in each and every window.” In that strange light, her features were preternaturally real. It seemed to me that I was seeing the pretty spirit within this young thing shining through her skin. I wallowed in the luxury of a guilty question as to my right to inflict myself upon her, whether she thought she wanted it or not. But I conceded that to be luxurious speculation, indeed. Of course I would. Anyway, why presume that I would do harm?

  The larger part of the house turned out to be sparsely furnished and unused. Justine had moved her bed, a large four-poster of course, into what had been the library-study and camped out there, among the remaining treasured possessions of her great-grandmother. Certain touches caught my eye immediately, relating to descriptions I’d read of Seabrook’s quarters in New York: a faded cashmere shawl on one wall; a Chinese lamp above the antique roll-top desk in the corner; a long Adam mirror.

  My eyes swung back to a print framed above the desk, and I went over to study it with mild disbelief. Reclining, along the length of a stone bridge with multiple arches, lay the figure of a naked girl. She reached an arm above and behind her to grasp the roof of a tower on the bridge’s superstructure. Serenely dozing, the peaceful giantess’s long tresses descended beneath the surface of a river below. Justine shared in my admiration of the old drawing.

  “I love old bridges so.” She glanced at me and giggled. “Yes, dearest, even the ones in ‘Madison County.’ I’m afraid I’m like JJ that way!” She looked back at the reproduction. “I was charmed by that when I saw it in school, but I hadn’t remembered whose work it was.” She pointed to the signature, Man Ray, 1917. “Behold my surprise when I found it here.”

  Behold mine, I thought, the gooseflesh rising on my skin. On the edge of having to confront the reality of this part of her heritage, as well as the stunning revelations of the morning, I said, “Its name is The Bridge at Avignon.” I almost whispered, as if something might overhear. My generation had been into Man Ray and the surrealists, but Justine, the “Gen-Xer,” had not recognized him, nor known the history. If this anomalous thing were as real as it was beginning to seem, I had to quit playing games and tell her about the “composite” Justine’s vision of the street circus. In the face of what was happening, her ancestress’s alleged psychic ability might likely be more than an incidental factor.

  The study furnishings, plus Justine’s bed and some Persian rugs, made the room cozy, almost overstuffed in comparison to the rest of the virtually empty house. Along with a kitchen and bath down the hall, this was all that she’d needed. She’d been spending her recent days and hours reading her great-grandmother’s papers and books, with which the shelves along two walls were still amply supplied. After we had brought in our things, she took my hand and led me to a staircase to the upper rooms.

  “I’m afraid it looks like your estate was pretty well pilfered,” I remarked, and she nodded silently, turning on a light in the second-story hall that was as yellowed as the wallpaper. I paused to look at some large prints that still hung on the walls. Two were of street scenes, one
of a boulevard in Paris, the other appearing to be early-century New York in winter.

  I laughed at some others, “Babe, these pictures look like those swamps we were driving over last night!” She just motioned me toward a narrow stair that I calculated led to the turret room. We stopped for her to unlock a heavy door that would have been a formidable obstacle in any era. The blue twilight from without called me back to the darkened upper hall of my boyhood home. Had its whispering shadows followed behind me?

  I guessed that Justine might be feeling a similar spookiness as she took my hand, this time very like the little girl afraid of the dark, drawing me into the dimly lit room. There were windows on half of the octagon, the remaining sections abutting the roof. Each window had its little light, silhouetting a New England rocker that sat facing them. The dim illumination had already revealed to me that something much like the fabled mural was truly there, covering two sections of the wall.

  It was evident that all this room had ever been for was to simply sit and watch the painting and the windows with their little lamps. There was the ghostly feeling that the old chair might, ever so slightly, begin to rock. Might I walk around it to find the ancient Justine sitting there still? I reached to lift its tidy with incredulous anticipation, when Justine turned on an old-fashioned pole lamp to disclose the faded, checkered upholstery beneath. Ward Greene had described just such a piece of furniture, belonging to his character “Justine,” sometime before 1930. Was that the moment when I recognized the living legacy of an actual human being? Oh yes. All doubt was extinguished that the original Justine, by whatever name she had been known, had been a discrete entity, a living woman of flesh and blood, not a composite or a fiction.