In a Sweet Magnolia Time

by Wintner, Robert;

  Aníse was a classic in whom beauty grew. She drew me in as we became more acquainted, her idiomatic charm and mannerism expressed in every gesture, her brief, nervous looks my way and her knee-jerk smile whenever she could manage one. Her visage would have lit the face of anybody wearing it or looking at it; beyond that, she was simply beautiful. Suffice it to say that the question of a repeat performance was not grounds for equivocation. That we avoided equivocation as necessary was perhaps nature’s greatest good deed toward me to date.

  Then too, her nervous glances and sundry other symptoms of anxiety went away, signaling progress on a personal level, moving beyond hormonal gratification and the uncertainty a recently rejected woman might feel. Her womanly wiles were proven soundly as John Henry ever drove a steel spike home. I won’t say she represented mere sexual release, because nothing was mere about it. Rather it was thorough as the drubbing Grant gave Lee at Appomattox.

  These and other images delved into hyperbole to the gross extreme, serving to justify, rationalize and perhaps encourage my inability to curb our habit. After all, service seemed the order of the day. The impracticality would not go away on one level but then the deed could only seem ultimately practical on another. Talk about convenience. The thrill of the thing compounded with our first go in the clear light of day, and another first go outdoors. Adrift in a bateau was good for another first and good for making waves, gentle waves, which were easy to see as a good thing, even coming home with only a single select gathered up. Another first go came spontaneously on a Sunday, when silence ruled Wadmalaw, save the chorus raised in song at the African Methodist Episcopal Church, hep me, Jedus, they called, as our righteous refrain warbled on cue from the Wadmalaw Hunt Club.

  Then came all night; she didn’t stay that first night and not for what seemed like many nights to come, until she did, by which time we were known as an event, if not an item, by which time an attempt to control our pace could only be conjectural, because neither one of us mentioned the wisdom or even the purpose of attempting such a thing.

  It was a trick of nature between us.

  I’ve had unusual liaisons before, once in my mid-twenties. I was courting Eudora at the time, which process was ostensibly a formal stage of career development taking two years for respectability and, here too, practicality, like an escrow, where claims against title or insufficient funds can come to the surface if in fact they lurk just below. Eudora kept her so-called virtue intact, in deference to presentation of good title by the party of the first part to the party of the second part, who would in turn bring honor and income to the close of the deal. She offered to jack me off for the second time in our epic courting one New Year’s Eve in a sweet gesture of caring, but then begged off when I asked for lotion this time, as if avoiding the chafe was sheer, utter perversion.

  Miss May Steadman’s husband had died the prior year from a brain aneurysm and might could still be hoisting cocktails had he not passed out during that happiest of all hours. Falling on one’s face was hardly de rigueur, even in that crowd of two-fisted drinkers, or maybe especially in that crowd; sodden behavior so shockingly declared what could otherwise be denied. That the fall was tolerated was the death of Peter Steadman, who failed to attract help and called no more attention to himself than a gasping titter, “Good gracious!” The men were bemused that Peter had once again absorbed too many toddies; ah, well. So he lay there, peaceful as a happy man taking a nap with a smile on his face. They agreed to this peace and happiness later, after Peter was pronounced dead as a doornail, which nobody had reckoned for a good many more rounds, which must have pushed another hour or so.

  Peter Steadman dropped dead at forty-two. May Steadman was forty-six when she told me, not three months after Peter’s death, that she favored younger men for their vital energy. Their vigor. Their stamina and staying power. I got the picture; it had been a few months, and a woman had her needs, but I had a full agenda at the time, developing the honor, reputation, potential et al ad infinitum, representing the party of the second part in its betrothal proposition to the party of the first.

  Peter Steadman was safely planted a mere three rows down from the Covingdales, which gave the two clans a certain neighborhood affinity, or something or other of a warm-hearted nature that motivated Mrs. Steadman to up and invite me over for dinner hardly six months after the fact. I went for the greater good of society, to discuss the weather or politics or the great common interests we shared and lovely disposition of life and thereafter, and that was that, leading directly to dessert, which included pie, ice cream, liqueur and hootchie cootchie with hot sauce. It was fun alright, I suppose because forty-six is old enough to have been all grown up when the young man was hardly old enough to figure what his tallywhacker was for besides peeing out of. I remember myself trying to look down Mrs. Steadman’s blouse and then again up her skirt while picking up my pencil, because both seemed aggressively ventilated, the blouse and the skirt, and there I was, enrapt in the first and, alas in one of life’s rapturous surprises, having my way at all points and intersections. Granted, my way was a simple path, but she seemed amused. I know I was. I went back once but then let it go, though I often regretted letting it go. I assumed she wanted romance, marriage and love, which goes to show how young I was. She only wanted a good time and maybe viewed me as safe, all but married and firmly niched with enough spunk for Eudora times ten, but I wasn’t so receptive to practicality back then.

  Victoria Lee Cordet was a lesbian, and everybody knew it, living with her girlfriend, and them going out and about all lovey dovey for the benefit of anyone who doubted their daring. She took me home one night when her girlfriend was out of town, said she was using me but didn’t think I’d mind, no offense; she just had a yen for lawyer, or at least a downtown fellow who wore a blue oxford cloth shirt with one of those cute collars with the extra little buttons and a khaki suit every day of his life out of plain damn fear, no offense; but she was curious. Bi-sexual is what she was. I didn’t go back for seconds on that one because she was crazy, insisting I do what I didn’t want to do and keep on doing it, you hear. She wouldn’t have me back either.

  Then I married Eudora and got to have sexual relations once a month any time I wanted. Horny as Eudora rendered me, she was at least consistent, so in time the normal male libido atrophied and remained fairly numb, if such a thing is possible. I considered intimate liaison unnecessary for myself, thanks to adaptive chemistry or genetic predisposition or, once again, denial of the truth staring me in the face.

  I mean that I did not view Aníse lustily when we met, except maybe for a covert moment, and except that it hit me like sunrise that it was nothing but lust, as I angled my ogle at her breasts for a better view; oh, some things change, alright; they die and then decades later they resurrect in the hope and light of life.

  I believe most women want to turn a man’s head, especially if he ignores her. I didn’t mean to ignore her when we met by chance; I didn’t recognize her. She was a black woman with keen insight to an advantageous cut of her blouse and what she wore beneath it, which was nothing. Her lapels crossed like a whirlpool drawing eyes from the backwater into the swirl. At forty-one, her view of life was generous, sizing up a situation with warm simplicity. Yet moving into whisper range, she proved complex as a deep draft hull in shoal water with shifting ballast, iffy caulking and the pumps overheating at best. These and other aspects of two fools fumbling to stay afloat with romance, we shared concurrently with one pillow. I watched the ceiling, listening to an exotic woman of French extraction from Guadeloupe, a woman who had defied the fates to lie beside me.

  I don’t know that I suspected manipulation or admired her apparent skill with the direct approach. I felt cured straightaway of those things a man in emotional and mental crisis suffers. The ramifications remained but for the time were easily repressed. Then came the addiction, which appeared to be the most immediate problem to solve. We chose to solve it just as an itch is scratched; we scr
atched and scratched to end the itch. That was the trick nature played with this casual gift of convenience and release with no consequence, even in light of our utter failure to moderate the relief and convenience. That is, nature threw a fit of chemistry, feel and scent—yes; sweet and soft, it went with the skin, the accent and the rest, including the company we shared, which was simply easy, a characteristic of social contact with a sex partner I’d not yet experienced. She was the world of adventure, mine at last.

  That first night was blessedly brief and shockingly sweet. She walked home in the dark after pecking me on the cheek and whispering that I wasn’t so bad, and she really needed that and wouldn’t mind going again but not tonight, because it was late; people would talk, so maybe again soon. Yes? But then people will talk soon enough, will they not? So maybe … tomorrow, maybe. Or the next day. Who can know? Maybe tomorrow you will feel so bad. You won’t like me. I think you won’t …

  But I did. She helped me get further out of town, making my first fifty-eight years seem like a wrong start, or a start leading to a middle and an end with nothing to show for it but smug oblivion to the whole wide world and its many facets of alternate reality right there for the taking but totally ignored. Of course I exaggerate; that was the hot flush of the heavy action talking. I don’t know what else I could have done with my first six decades and really didn’t think I’d done wrong, not in the moral or professional sense, except for a night of weakness way back when, which seemed more sinful now than ever, seeing the reward of a different form of weakness as so superior to the former. I refer of course to throwing a brick through my friend’s window in ventilation of a childish tantrum, though another weakness also recollected, which was that of failing my chosen and perhaps my rightful love. But Anne never saw me as a sexual being, just as I failed to see her that way. I saw her as my perfect love, another accessory in a matched set that could be admirably showcased in the hutch called life. I think I did love Anne along with a concept of life with Anne, and that her reciprocity would have allowed us to make the great mistake; never, ever in her or my wildest dreams could she have trounced the restlessness and dissatisfaction like Aníse. Some things are known.

  I suppose I’d known for a while as well that my professional life could not serve me to the end of my days. I changed. It didn’t. I became an outcast, self-banished by practicality and then by choice. I wasn’t depressed enough to kill myself or talented enough to take up art. So I stepped off the deep end to the south of the causeway, out yonder on Wadmalaw. Then I found Aníse and wasted a little more time fumbling with fate, deluding myself over the same practicality I’d fled, over who might think what about my happiness. She opened my eyes and my mind to clear thinking, and it felt like my lucky day and night.

  She hid nothing from anyone but spoke the facts without speaking around them. She stole my heart with a different and French type of innocence, in which all behaviors were freely conceded, and why not? Are those things not natural? Do you prefer avoiding those things? She held back only in her public display of affection, deferring to my acute sense of discretion. Small anxieties surfaced between physical contacts, as if the release built up and needed continual ventilation, and any less would prove her fear of further rejection. I could only speculate briefly before signaling that it was time for the remedy with a wink or a nod, to which we scurried like kids to candy.

  Jim Cohen laughed short and shook his head, perhaps at the loss of an assistant, though I joined him on the flats as usual, when I could.

  That is, our love was neither premeditated nor expected but evolved incidentally, a by-product of familiarity, mutual drive and repetition. We leaned on each other. Aníse was exciting; I took that to be the basis for love. I awaited her arrival, savored her presence, coveted the next go and wanted her around.

  So there we were, citizens conforming to social standards till after supper, or sometimes before, when personal need transcended community consciousness. We lived my sexual fantasy and her lifelong goal of fun, wallowing in what was soon known on Wadmalaw and due north as our private jungle boogie. Old AC and some Frenchie spade gal were down there whooping it up to beat the band, don’t you know, carrying on like he lost his plain damn sense, which any man might consider doing, but he went and did it, just threw it all away. And for what? You tell me.

  Threw what away? It was all gone, save the remnant fondness of my former life, a potted fern of the same name whose reach and radiance underscored a stoic contentment, a fern drama that rendered me grateful for the commiseration. Beyond that, my pastoral boogie wasn’t perfect; Aníse complained frequently of no dancing.

  Nevertheless we were a headline, then an ongoing event, soon to be idle gossip, relegated directly to one more eccentricity hardly notable so far out of town. Like a flash boil cooling to a simmer and then to room temp and finally to the tepid flow of days, we had only to live happily ever after.

  XIV

  On Down the Road

  The end, however, was no more concise or neatly delineated than it turns out for anyone. She was not Sleeping Beauty and I certainly lacked Prince Charming’s riding skills, so we had yet to forge the bogs of every life ever lived. Oh, they deepen and widen and suck you down. She wanted to move in after a week, but I declined, explaining the difficulties of moving too fast, of facing far greater peril untangling a knot than could be imagined in the passionate throes of tying it.

  She protested; tying a knot? “You think I want for marrying you?” She swore she did not, and a man of fifty-eight has no recourse but to take an attractive woman of forty-one at her word.

  So? What was the rush?

  Because, she was bunking at her uncle’s then with no privacy and hardly a bed of her own, much less a bedroom. But the Hunt Club cabin wasn’t my place, I explained. She harrumphed, as if knowing of the resources all aging white men bring to bear on whatever problem needs a solution. And don’t worry, if the Hunt Club brethren don’t want a black woman staying there, their old bubba Arthur could easily explain that she keeps the place clean, beginning with his tubes—easily, that is, if he wanted to. Yes, her playful French approach could verge on the indelicate or mix with caustic resentment. We agreed for the time to the status quo on my assurance that she was welcome over anytime, though I chilled on issuing the invitation. Call me typical or psychic.

  Sho nuff, complexities emerged.

  Take for starters our first social outing. We didn’t need to go to town; I could have lived well into the future without crossing the vast twenty miles or either river between two worlds. A man knows he’s getting old when he still cringes on telling his girlfriend to come by anytime, but then he eases up, knowing she won’t walk in on anything compromising, because nobody is left to compromise with. She was it, the sum total of what lay over my horizons. Did that mean I could have picked oysters, shagged shrimp and crabs and gone fishing every day and cooked up with some vegetables and a few friends, give or take, and lived in a beautiful place while maintaining a warm, loving relationship with Aníse indefinitely? Well, yes, I believe it did. She showed me the exotic thrill of interracial intimacy, moreover showing that racial differences among humans come to zero once the fluids exchange, and it’s dark, and nothing remains but the sigh and the small death so similar to the big death in its perspective that nothing will survive this life but love.

  I thought such insights were gained as a positive result of the lovely country regimen rounding out the stretch to the finish of my life. And what could be better? I was a new man, born again and more; I was redeemed.

  But change comes, whether you know it or not, or want it or not, or plan accordingly, and it hardly ever ceases right where you want it to.

  To her credit, she didn’t care about wandering aimlessly among the commercial byways in Charleston, looking at frilly things to buy. Hell, what I called French tailoring, she called homemade, which was French in a way. She had a knack with fabric and a body to make the cheap stuff look good. But she didn
’t feel the need to go shopping otherwise, to prove mobility or anything to any man or woman. She knew what they said about us. I think she liked it. I think she realized that without me, they’d have said nothing of her, as if her spectacular charm would warrant no attention at all, had she not snared the likes of me. I think her assumption was correct, but it led to no resentment. She felt certain somebody would have come along for her, and that assumption felt piercingly correct too. She saw me struggle with that potential and assured me that it, like all else, was only natural.

  But the dancing bug stuck like a burr in her shorts with only one thing for it. So we settled on a casual reconnoiter of Folly Beach, to see what pubs or honkytonks might have music. Who knew? I didn’t know. She’d never been. We freely discussed the hateful potential, but she thought it was a myth. I assured her I’d not been to Folly in twenty years, but even at that I’d bet her instincts to be correct. I’d plain never seen that sort of thing around here.

  Yes, I said that, believing it as I said it, feeling it lump in my throat in the speaking, as if I’d come so far as to forget. Fact was, I didn’t consider my own past behavior to be racially motivated but rather an ill-chosen prank, a personal frustration airing out with hardly a thought for race, creed or color. At least I’d forgiven, though I still suffered remorse for the perception of others, and I accepted Aníse, in her darkness, as my penance.