“But you thought about it.”
“Not recently.” I fight back a grin. “Look, it rained while we were in there.”
A cab is coming up Lafayette, the tires sizzling on the wet pavement. I wave my hand and whistle.
“I’ll call you in the morning,” she says. “Thanks. You cheered me up a bit.”
“I rekindled your belief in the goodness of men?”
“No, in the adorableness of some rakes.” She kisses me hard on the lips and jumps in the cab.
Isabella stares at the typical all-female family of elephants frozen in midstep on the fake African plain, the old matriarch trailed by daughters and grandchildren, the young males cast out in adolescence to wander alone or in temporary boys’ clubs. As I explain the social system, Isabella bites her lower lip, and her vulnerability and defiance almost make me faint. I lose my train of thought. Isabella glances at me, waiting for me to finish, then suddenly focuses in on my eyes as if she sees something new there. Neither of us speaks for a moment.
“No hypocrisy in the elephant world,” Isabella says.
“No secrecy. They mate right out in the open.”
“No casual sex.” Isabella smiles. “They only mate to procreate.”
“No romantic love,” I counter. “Strong blood ties but no pair bonding.”
“Like you.” Isabella laughs. “How’d ya know all this?”
“I was a nut about Africa as a kid. Read all kinds of books. One story I’ll never forget. In the sixties in Uganda rangers culled a bunch of elephants from a big herd. Back then they thought there were too many. They put the ears and feet in a shed to be sold later for handbags and ashtrays.”
Isabella looks hurt, then turns back to the stuffed animals.
“That night a group from the herd broke into the shed and carried off all the ears and feet. They definitely have a knowledge of death and a sense of mourning.”
“Jesus,” Isabella whispers, still staring at the enormous tusked females.
“Let’s go to Africa,” I say.
“What?” Isabella laughs.
“Let’s go on safari.”
“You say this to all the girls.”
“I’ve never said this to anyone. Let’s go. Let’s leave tonight.”
“That would probably seduce me.” Isabella pushes me on the shoulder. “I better not. Besides I’ve got nineteen kids waiting for me Monday morning in Memphis.”
“Get a substitute teacher. They were great. You just had to do homework.”
Laughing, Isabella checks her watch. “I’ve got to take off for yoga. You sure you don’t want to come?”
“I don’t have any clothes.”
“You like to throw money around.” Isabella grabs me by the wrist. “Buy some there.”
Surrounded by women in tights and flimsy T-shirts sticking their asses up in the air, or sitting with their legs spread wide open, or bending over at the waist and grabbing their ankles, it’s not easy for me to enter a blank, meditative state of mind. I try not to let Isabella see me gaping at anyone else and watch her as our heads hang in the downward-facing dog position. She isn’t wearing a bra and even upside down her breasts look high and firm. The instructor calls us to the front of our mats and Isabella and the others all leap to a squat, then unfold to a standing position while I walk my legs to the front and try to catch up. Concentrating on the sound of their own breathing, the others don’t seem to notice whenever I stumble or nearly fall over. In the forward lunge I can feel my old ripped hamstring. Halfway through the hour I’m sweating and breathing heavily. On my hands and feet, staring up at the ceiling, arching my back high, I collapse suddenly onto the mat, worried for a moment that I’ve dislocated a vertebra. Isabella whispers for me to sit up and touch my toes to stretch my spine in the opposite direction. I skip the headstand and the handstand, taking refuge in child’s pose, lying on my stomach with my arms flat in front of me and my legs cocked at the knees like a frog. At the end, with the class sitting in lotus position, the instructor plays some sort of Indian accordion and everybody sings a simple yoga song, though Isabella doesn’t open her eyes or her mouth until they are finished.
“I could do without the happy clappy bit at the beginning and the end,” she says as we walk toward the changing rooms.
“I hurt in about a hundred places,” I say.
“You did well for the first time.” She wipes my face with her towel.
“I must have been a yogi in a previous life.”
“Somehow”—Isabella bangs me on the head with a rolled mat—“I doubt it.”
Reddish brown against her creamy white breasts, Isabella’s areolas are unusually large, two inches in diameter. I trace the edge so slowly it takes minutes to complete the circumference. She makes a soft whimpering sound. I taste Scotch in her mouth, then glide my lips to her other breast. I think of a lesbian who told me that I move my hands like a girl, my fingers like feathers. I slip my hand down her pants. She’s dripping wet. No, she moans weakly without tensing up. I let it linger, cupping her gently, then slide my hand out and run my fingers through her short hair, stare into her green eyes. I’ve never seen her drunk. It took three and a half double Dewar’s with a splash of soda. Around the middle of the third, she changed from funny to sad. At the beginning of the fourth I dove on the bed beside her and kissed her. I’m fairly certain that I would not even be in her room at the Gramercy Park Hotel if she were sober. She places her hand on the back of my head and pulls my mouth onto hers. I kiss her softly and she bites my lip hard enough to make me yell.
“Why are men such bastards?” She glares up at me.
“We just are.”
“Why can’t we do without you like elephants?”
“’Cause you need us to make you whole.”
“Then why do you make us feel broken?”
“Because we’re fucked up.” I think that I taste blood.
Isabella reaches up and touches my lip. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t look sorry.”
She laughs. “I’m just angry.”
“Well, don’t take it out on me.”
“Why not? You’re just like him.”
“No. I’m worse.”
“It’s time for you to go.” She pushes me hard by the shoulders and I roll over on my back.
“Just let me lie here quietly for a while.”
I place my head on her belly and snuggle up close and listen to her breathing slow down.
“My dreams tell me that chasing pussy is destroying my psyche.”
“What?” she whispers above my head. “How?”
Staring with one eye over the curve of her breast, I tell her the dream about my great-grandmother with the zoom shot of the Hannibal book in her purse and Dr. Pearce’s interpretations. “Remembering my dreams, examining my dreams—it’s the first time that I’ve considered the possibility of a spiritual side to life. The first time I’ve thought that humans might be more than animals.”
Isabella raises up on one elbow, letting my head roll to the bedspread, and looks down at me with a skeptical expression.
“I haven’t loved anyone in a long time,” I say with vodka-fueled fervency. “But I think that I’m falling in love with you.”
Isabella lifts a finger to her lips and shakes her head.
I want to kiss her. “I’m wrestling with my shadow. He shows up in my dreams as an Elvis impersonator or Bill Clinton. And I am falling in love with you—your irresistible, sassy spirit. And falling in love with you is making it easier to struggle with my shadow.”
Isabella laughs. “Yeah, and Clinton told Hillary that he was working very hard on himself, very hard. He had become more aware of his past and what was causing his behavior.”
“So I’m not the only one,” I say lamely.
Isabella sits up and crosses her legs, then strokes my hair. “Well, since we are being so straightforward . . .” She suddenly looks much less drunk. “One, it’s way too soon for me to leap right into anothe
r relationship. Two, you’ve slept with too many girls. I won’t start sleeping with you until you haven’t slept with anyone for three months. If then.”
I laugh. “Until August?”
“Make it September first, after the long, hot summer.” She smiles. “You probably haven’t gone three days in ten years.”
“I’ve gone longer than that,” I say, thinking, Catch me if you can.
Isabella clasps my chin between her thumb and forefinger. “I’ll know. Women can always tell. The only time we’re duped is when we’re not suspicious. Obviously that won’t be the case.”
“I’ll do it,” I say, wondering if I can.
Isabella laughs, then lowers her lips softly on mine. “You can crash here but our underwear is staying on.”
Cage
The west face of the gorge cuts the sun off half the river. Rachel, steering in the stern, keeps us in the light. In the shadows Harper and Isabella paddle steadily, trying to catch up. Looking up at the tall walls of limestone and the canopy of old trees along the edge that escaped the ax a hundred years back, it’s possible to imagine what the land was like in the time of the Cherokees. I rest my paddle across my thighs and turn around. “What do you think of Isabella?”
“I like her.” Rachel looks past me, watching for rocks. “She’s down-to-earth. She’s warm. There’s a nice light in her eyes.”
“A good egg.” I think how the ocean of the divorced makes it possible for even a fuckup like myself to run with someone kind and attractive like Rachel. Over the bow of the canoe I recognize the bend in the river that flows into the Ladies’ Pool. “Just around the corner is a big rapid, no way around it. I suggest we plow right through and hope for the best.”
“Lay on, Macduff.” Rachel smiles and glances over at Harper and Isabella, who are angling for the sunshine. They vanish behind a high boulder as we swing around the bend into the noise of white water. Switching sides back and forth, I lean out over the front of the canoe, knifing the water to pull us away from the rocks, with Rachel mirroring my strokes. The canoe rises and falls and a wave swamps us and we somehow stay upright. A big stone looms directly ahead with water curling back off it like a fountain. Jabbing it with my paddle, I push us away and suddenly we are in the wide, slow pool with the enormous weeping willow that still shades the beach where the utopian Englishwomen bathed for a few summers in the 1880s. Letting the canoe drift sideways, we watch upstream. Isabella kneels in the bow, laughing as the waves splash over her. Harper leans backward over the stern with his hands almost in the water, using the paddle for a rudder. Sailing over a shelf with half the canoe in thin air, they dive sideways back into the stream. The canoe capsizes and they disappear.
“They should have been wearing helmets,” I say too low for Rachel to hear. Harper comes up first and wipes the water from his eyes, twisting his head for Isabella, who pops up on the other side of the last big rock. Rachel and I move to intercept the canoe and a paddle, as Harper, arching his back, looking frantically behind him, and Isabella are swept along the sides of the boulder and dropped next to each other in the swimming hole. Harper laughs and tries to kiss her. Isabella splashes him with a chop. I grab the empty canoe and we guide it to the sandy beach.
“Does anyone want to go for a walk? There’s a beautiful full moon,” Mom says as Harper passes dirty plates to me at the sink.
“I’d like to stretch my legs,” Rachel says.
“Last night there was the most magnificent orange harvest moon,” Isabella says.
As Rachel follows Isabella and Mom out the screen door, Dad picks up his glass of wine. “Think I’ll get back to my book.”
“What are you reading, Papa?” Harper asks. “The sermons of Cotton Mather?”
“A Perfect Storm.”
“I like the bit about the woman,” Harper says, “who dreams that her husband is dying right about the time that his ship goes down.”
“The human mystery,” Dad intones in a Twilight Zone voice on his way out of the kitchen.
“The bishop is not the kind of guy to sit around and chew the fat,” Harper says.
“Sometimes he does. Dinner parties with his old friends.” I never liked the way Harper pokes fun at Dad. “So have you slept with her yet?”
Harper hesitates. “No.”
“Mom and Dad were virgins when they got married.”
“A long, long time ago.” Harper takes a cloth and starts drying a glass from the drainer. “In a galaxy far, far away.”
“Yeah, but it’s good for you to be a born-again virgin. Have you gotten naked with her?”
“Half clothed and sweaty. That’s it.”
“Isabella’s one of those southern girls who believe blow jobs are more intimate than intercourse?”
“In a word—yes.” Harper puts the glass in a cabinet, picks a plate from the drainer.
“Given anybody else the high hard one?” Grilling Harper gives me a déjà vu of some long-forgotten conversation with Nick.
“No.” Harper appears to be telling the truth.
“Come on.”
“Okay. Once. Truly. Right in the beginning ’bout a week after she left New York. I was drunk off my ass of course and I’d done some blow. The next day I woke up completely miserable. I decided that I don’t want to have secrets. I don’t want to have to hide things. I don’t want to have to weave a web of lies. I’ve come to think of this as a period of purification. Papa would say absolution. That was the last time I did blow. Instead I do yoga.”
“You’re in love?”
“Yeah.” Harper laughs. “This must be love.”
“Mama adores her.”
Harper imitates Mom’s soft drawl: “Isabella is a many-layered sensitive woman with more depth than anyone you’ve gone out with. I feel a real bond with her. I don’t know why—maybe we’re old souls.”
“As they say out in Californication”—I try to sound peaced-out like someone from Santa Cruz—“Isabella’s way bitching.”
“So is Rachel.” Harper gives me a little congratulatory clap on the back. “She’s a bit too earth mama for me, but you always liked her type.”
“You should meet her weekday persona when she’s selling commercial real estate in Nashville. Tough as nails, dressed to kill.”
“Many-layered.” Harper laughs.
I set the last dish in the drainer and without a word we walk outside together.
Low over the horizon of mountaintops, streaked red like a blood orange, the moon resembles a setting sun. We follow the murmur of voices across the yard to a fence by an open field. Isabella sits on the top rail while Mom stands and leans forward against the fence. Rachel is a vertical shadow out in the field, petting a cow. Over the sound of crickets and bullfrogs, they don’t hear us approaching from the side.
“When Nick and Cage graduated from college, I thought they would settle down quickly, the way our generation did. I just never expected anything different,” Mom says mournfully. “Then Nick died and Cage had his breakdown and Harper came along with a new girlfriend every month for the last, I don’t know, six years. I’ve been so sad, plagued by the thought that we will never have grandchildren . . . Isabella, may I be frank?”
“Sure, Margaret.”
“What is wrong with my son?”
Isabella shifts on the rail. Harper and I stop dead.
“I mean Harper of course,” Mom says. “There’s a name for Cage’s condition.”
“They’ve got a name for Harper’s, too.” Isabella clears her throat. “Sex addiction.”
You can see the silhouette of Mom’s head flinch. I grin at Harper, whose mouth is hanging slightly open.
“But that’s too strong.” Isabella touches Mom’s shoulder. “Harper is a player. That’s the word. Most of the single men I know are players. Or they want to be. It’s easier for the handsome ones. I ought to know.”
“Your last boyfriend,” Mom says.
“Another Casanova,” Isabella says. “Harper’s
trying. He hasn’t gone out with another woman for two months.”
“He loves you. I can tell. It’s a pleasure to see you together.”
“I love him. I felt something the moment I saw him on the airplane.” Isabella laughs. “Though that might just have been his nice hair.”
Harper whispers in my ear, “She’s never said that to me. She only says, ‘I loke you.’ Loke—somewhere between like and love.”
“In the end that’s all a mother wants.” Mom sighs and pats Isabella on the thigh. “When I met Frank, I knew I didn’t ever want to be apart from him. I’d been in love a few times, but never like that. I never wanted the life of a clergy wife—moving from city to city, entertaining people, being a wife, but I didn’t want to live any other way but with him. And we’re still in love forty-one years later.”
“I’d like that. I just don’t know if I can trust him.”
“Make an honest man of him.” Mom laughs. “Isabella, you’re so—forgive me for using a therapy term—self-actualized. You are strong within yourself. You know where you’re going.”
Out in the field Rachel starts walking back toward the fence.
“Where is that?” Harper asks.
Mom turns toward us, and Isabella swings her legs over the fence, drops to the ground, and says, “It’s not polite to spy, gentlemen.”
“Hey,” Harper says. “We just came out to marvel at the moon.”
Rising higher in the sky, the moon is shrinking, turning a pale orange.
Margaret
After dinner, as thirty men and women file up onto the stage to form a choir, I’m light-headed with pride, sitting at the head table across from Frank and between my two handsome sons. Cage so resembles his father at forty with his blue eyes and his sandy hair graying at the temples, which he graciously cut for the party. He sees me gazing at his profile and smiles. Oh, how my heart soars to see the brightness back in his eyes. Dear Jesus, please help him stay this way. And thanks again for introducing Harper to Isabella. Dear Lord, please give him the strength not to step out on her. When the pianist starts playing a rousing hymn, over three hundred friends from across the South packed at round tables in the parish hall quiet down and the choir begins:
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