Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  “Don’t look at Jules,” Odell says, grinning at her. He likes to get a rise out of Lorene now and then. She slaps him—playfully, he thinks, with her sweet-smelling cold-cream hand, but then she slaps him again.

  “Whoa there.” Odell grabs both her hands. “I’m just kidding you. I swear. Why, Jules is all right. He just turned out different from what you thought, not a thing in the world you can do about it. He’s probably just as happy as he can be, out there in L.A.”

  “You reckon?” Lorene perks up.

  “Sure,” Odell says. “Why, California is the best place in the world for Jules.”

  “I guess so,” Lorene agrees. “Anyway, he’s got a good job.”

  “See what I’m telling you?” Odell grins and Lorene smiles back and shuts up about it. Odell squeezes her hand and then goes on into the front room to watch TV, her own man, now so big he fills up the whole door when he goes through. What she ought to do is put Odell on a diet, and put herself on it, too. Lorene thinks she’ll start the diet on Monday, after she makes that German chocolate cake she bought all the ingredients for today. Odell just loves German chocolate cake. But he’s right, about Jules: let sleeping dogs lie, leave well enough alone. Still, he can’t have any idea of what it’s like to bear a child, wash his clothes and feed him and tend to him for sixteen years— Lorene remembers turning on the shower, hot, and standing in there with Jules screaming, when he was little and he had those asthma attacks—doing all of that, and then have him just disappear from the face of the earth. Because California might as well be the moon, as far as Lorene is concerned. Oh, it happens all the time and she knows it; it’s not all that unusual. Look at poor old Belle Varney: one of her boys, Horn, killed in Vietnam, Daris off working on the Alaska pipeline, Belle getting old all alone in that house down the road, not even bothering to grow tomatoes anymore. Plus she and Odell have a big time, they’ve still got their health, knock on wood, and three normal grandchildren to boot. I better count my blessings, Lorene thinks, and stop standing here in the middle of the kitchen like a fool. Odell laughs out loud and Lorene smooths her hair and then heads for the front room, where she will sit on the couch with him and watch Carol Burnett.

  WHEN CRYSTAL COMES over for a visit that summer, this is all Agnes hears from Lorene and her mama and everybody else in town for two weeks running: how attractive Crystal is, how Crystal hasn’t aged a day, how she has a diamond wedding band that will knock your eyes out. Agnes is down at the hardware store and misses the big visit herself, and even though Crystal calls her up from Lorene’s she’s just too busy to come to the phone. Then Roger Lee enters the Democratic primary for congress and, further, wins it, so Mrs. Roger Lee Combs has her picture on the front page of the Bluefield paper, just like she’s Jackie Kennedy or Betty Ford. And even Agnes has to admit she looks good.

  CRYSTAL SITS IN the white quilted armchair in her living room and watches the caterers swarm through the dining room and the kitchen like so many bees. One of them seems to be singing in Spanish and she likes this, likes the way the sound comes out foreign and strange from her own kitchen, out past the rest of them setting things on the dining-room table, out into the living room itself, where it is finally lost in the high ceilings and turning motes of dust in the last of the sun which comes in across the Oriental carpets from all the windows. The caterer’s song rings high and sweet, barely audible, just like a song in her mind. Maybe it is. She really ought to go get dressed. The living room is spotless: Mary came today and brought her little cousin to help her clean for the party, a tiny black teenage girl who turned out to be, of all things, hugely pregnant, so that Crystal had to resist the urge to help her, all day. (“Baby,” Roger would have said, she can hear him saying it right now, “remember who the help is.”) So she did not. Now Crystal fluffs up the quilted pillow by her side in the white armchair, aimlessly, then smooths it out on her lap. Fan pattern: yellow and red, picking up the warm dusty-rose shade of the walls. This is a beautiful room. Everybody says so. This pillow reminds her of Mary’s cousin’s stomach, black and full of baby, and her not much more than a baby herself. Sixteen, maybe. Barely. Roger has said she can have a baby nurse any time she wants to have a baby, but she won’t. Not now, she says, and Roger says don’t worry the nurse will do everything. But she won’t, not now, not yet. There are some things she knows a baby nurse can’t do, but she doesn’t think she can do them, either, and she hasn’t told Roger this. Later, she thinks, and the caterer’s song goes on in the back of her mind. There will be shrimp, crepes, asparagus rolled up in toast. Crystal is sleepy. There will be chicken livers on toothpicks. Mary comes into the living room still straightening here and there and putting out extra ashtrays, her face so severe and abstract that Crystal goes upstairs. Mary takes a party like the second coming, and Crystal is not even dressed.

  She runs a bath and gets into it, sinking down to her chin. When they used to have parties it was so hard: she had to do it all. Now it’s easy, but it’s not fun anymore, not like it used to be when she stayed up the night before, baking bread. Or was that fun? At least it took hours, filled time.

  She comes out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam with the lavender towel wrapped around her, all pink-faced from the heat; and Roger, reading a newspaper in the armchair, smiles. He’s dressed. He’s been dressed for an hour, downstairs on the sun porch supervising the bar.

  “You’d better hurry up,” he says. In truth Roger loves her lassitude, the way she trails in and out of rooms and leaves her cigarettes burning in ashtrays. He likes to find her car keys, to pick up the clothes she took to the cleaners four months before.

  Crystal crosses the carpet to her dressing table and unpins her hair. It falls just short of her shoulders, waving damply, and she brushes it with the absolute concentration she always assumes in front of a mirror, like a glaze has come over her face. Roger is charmed, watching from the chair. Right now Crystal looks to him exactly as she did in high school, when they were so young and he loved her so much. Her still face, the huge blue eyes so open they broke your heart. Roger remembers a coat she had in high school, red-and-black plaid with a missing button, third one from the top. Roger remembers everything.

  Crystal puts on her makeup and then she puts on her slip. “Is anybody I don’t know coming to this?” she asks, and Roger starts naming the names and then breaks off.

  “Lawrence Wright is not coming, if that’s what you mean,” he says. Roger does not mention that he knew about Lawrence Wright and Crystal all along, when it began and when it ended; he does not mention that he was instrumental in Wright’s losing his job at the bank—that in fact Lawrence Wright has left town.

  “That’s not what I meant.” Crystal lights a cigarette, standing in her slip.

  “Look, it’s OK.” Roger puts the newspaper down. “He’s not coming, he’s not invited, OK?”

  “Why did you have to say that? I wasn’t asking that, Roger.”

  “I know you weren’t. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re trying to—you’re trying to—”

  “Crystal.” Roger stands up and goes over to her. “Come on. I’m not trying to do anything, OK, except maybe save us all some embarrassment. That’s all.”

  “Shit.” Crystal puts the cigarette out and turns from him, but he comes closer and puts his arms around her and kisses her.

  “Roger—”

  “Hush. It doesn’t matter. Hush.”

  “Roger.”

  “Hush. Here.” Roger snaps off the light by the chair and takes her over to the bed and then takes off his clothes. Crystal watches, feeling that she has known his body so long, so well, that it’s her body, in fact. Hers, too. She starts crying. Roger comes down on top of her, kissing her, and at the end of it she lies with her legs wrapped around him and his face pressed into her hair. The doorbell starts ringing downstairs: once, twice, more. People are coming to their party.

  “Baby. Don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying. I won’t cry
. I’m not.”

  “I’m sorry,” Roger says.

  “No, I’m sorry, I am. I really am. It was stupid, the whole thing, I was stupid. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not stupid,” Roger says. “Forget it. It doesn’t matter.” Roger means this. Nothing matters about Crystal except Crystal herself. For almost his whole life, she has been as inevitable for him as business and death and taxes, as the sun coming up across those mountains he grew up in.

  “Roger.” Crystal struggles to sit up. “Listen. I love you.”

  “Hey,” Roger says. “It’s OK.” Crystal lies back on the pillow and Roger kisses her all over, her face, her throat, her breasts, her stomach, the sticky trail of semen on the inside of her thigh, as the level of voices at the party rises, floating up the winding stairs and under their closed door. Crystal smiles, rubbing her hand in his hair.

  “It sounds like a good party,” she says, and Roger laughs.

  BUT AS THE campaign picks up, there are too many mornings like this one when Crystal lies curled up against Roger in their king-size bed and waits for light to come, for dawn to seep in finally through her Levolor blinds, for soft edges to appear and then harden all over the room. But she dreads the coming of day. Like this, in darkness, nothing is finite, nothing is ever over, nothing is resolved, everything is possible. Daylight puts an edge on things. Roger’s back moves up and down in sleep. Once he sighs and murmurs something. Crystal leans forward, trying to make it out, but he turns slightly from her, moves his leg, quits talking. Probably it’s something about business or the campaign anyway. Something straightforward, like Roger himself. Crystal sighs. It is true that she loves him, as he had said she would. In fact, she loves him more than she knew was possible, so much that she can’t have that baby or do anything else that might change things, change the way they are. Because things are not exactly as Roger thinks, anyway. Things are more precarious. They have edges now. Crystal props herself up on one elbow, watching Roger sleep. Ever since the beginning—ever since that day when he came to her mother’s house—she has been conscious of the end.

  Crystal watches him sleep as the light grows in the room and the wallpaper changes from black to gray to blue. Sleep has become the greatest mystery of all, since she isn’t sleeping anymore. She can’t even remember sleeping the whole night through. Roger sleeps like a baby. Crystal smiles. But she never sleeps, never really sleeps. Only sometimes her mind wanders and she dreams. Crystal traces a pattern, long and complicated, on Roger’s broad back. Roger sleeps just like a baby. But she sleeps the sleep of the damned. Which is so dramatic she almost laughs out loud. Doomed, maybe. Jerold has been coming into her mind a lot lately with all his talk of doom, the way the hair curled down low on his neck. It was ridiculous, everything he said. Jerold was a madman. But still.

  The light comes in full at last, silky and golden, and Crystal watches the pattern flower in her rug. Sometimes she thinks of other things to do. She makes up other selves. For instance she might be a businesswoman, like Agnes, getting up now in this rosy light, checking over a straight column of neat black figures somewhere, going down to her little shop in the early-morning light when there is no traffic at all in some impossibly charming town with the trees planted in holes in all the sidewalks. She might be dressing mannequins in the window of her shop. She might be dressing children. She might be plaiting pigtails, tying strings of saddle oxfords or whatever it is they wear now, frying bacon, wiping tears. She might be cooking bacon in a yellow housedress, buttering six pieces of toast. Or she could be going over lesson plans with her hair pulled back in a bun. Or she could be lying in bed beside Roger and thinking realistically about the day ahead, which is what she ought to do, since Marion Fitts has that hospital tour scheduled for her. But Crystal remembers yesterday, the Kiwanis luncheon, when her eyes did that funny thing so she could see only one thing at a time—one person, no crowds. It was as though her eyes had become a closeup lens. A zoom lens. It was disconcerting. It made her see more than she wanted to, of everybody. It was like she could see into their souls.

  Crystal thinks about, and rejects, the idea of telling Roger how she feels. “Roger,” she would say, “I feel like a person in a play.” But then, of course, he would be too considerate. He would have Marion Fitts cancel the hospital tour. And if she tells him anything at all, then she might tell him everything—about her not sleeping, about the way she is conscious of endings and edges—and then he won’t love her anymore. But she doesn’t know that, of course. She doesn’t know he wouldn’t love her anymore. It isn’t worth taking a chance on, though, not after Lawrence Wright, or. Or. Crystal resolves to wear her dark glasses on the hospital tour and see if Leonard can get her some sleeping pills.

  She gets up quietly and crosses the flowered carpet to the armchair. She switches on the light, settles herself, and picks up the diary of Emma Turlington Field, which lies in a jumble of books on the round table beside her. Most of these are Roger’s books. Some of them are Crystal’s, but she can’t really read anymore. She can’t keep her mind on the page—another thing not to tell Roger. Crystal pushes back a piece of her hair and opens the diary:

  Every Sunday morning Major, the family coachman, took some of the family to Drummond Presbyterian Church, and after dinner, to Sunday school. One Sunday he took only Mary and me. On our way home, Mary was sitting on the front seat with her back to the horses. I had the backseat facing them when I noticed something that looked like a big fire. I told Mary and she called to Major and asked where the fire was. By that time I was so embarrassed because we all saw it was the moon rising!

  Crystal smiles and closes the diary. It reminds her of nights back in her old neighborhood, a whole procession of nights all exactly the same, a whole parade of moons rising like a string of Chinese lanterns. She wishes she could remember the song Jubal’s daddy used to pick on his guitar. He used to play it every night and then they knew it was time to go in and sure enough, their mothers would come to the screen doors and call them.

  Crystal thinks of calling Agnes to ask her about the song, but it is still too early, so she takes a shower instead, hot hot water to wash away the way she thinks she smells, sour and old, like a washcloth left for too long in the sink. She sprays herself all over with cologne and when she comes out of the bathroom Roger is already up and dressing. He gives her a great big hug that folds around her like a tent, and if she could stay right there she thinks she would be all right. If she didn’t have to do anything. Roger gives her a kiss, too, but she can’t get him to go back to bed with her because he has to show up at an Episcopal prayer breakfast in twenty minutes. “Tonight,” he says, kissing the back of her neck before he leaves.

  Later that morning, Crystal calls Agnes after all. She hasn’t talked to her in months, not since last August when she and Roger went over to Black Rock for the opening of the new library. Now Agnes has become a real businesswoman, hardware store and three Laundromats. No sense trying to get Agnes at home, in fact. Might as well try the hardware store.

  “Hello. Could I please speak to Agnes McClanahan?” Crystal asks the girl who answers.

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  Crystal can hear people talking in the background, something clanking.

  “Mrs. Roger Lee Combs.” Crystal lights a cigarette; she never smokes in the morning if Roger is home.

  After a pause, the girl says, “Can you hold for a moment? Miss McClanahan will be right with you.”

  “Sure.” Crystal waits. She hears a car in the driveway— Roger leaving. Then she hears the maid come in the front door.

  “Hello,” Agnes finally says.

  “Hi, Agnes. This is me, Crystal.” Crystal tries to make her voice right. “I just wondered how you’re getting along.”

  “Well, fine, Crystal, just fine. It’s funny you called. Odell was in here not five minutes ago.”

  “Are you busy?” Crystal asks. “I mean, can you talk for a minute?”

  “Well, ac
tually,” Agnes says in her old nasal, guarded tone, “I was just on my way out the door. I’ve got some salesmen from Roanoke here to see me.”

  “Oh. Well, I’ll let you go, then. But wait—this won’t take but a minute. I was wondering if you could remember which song it was that Jubal’s daddy used to play on his guitar every night when it was time to go in. Do you remember?”

  “Lord, Crystal. I couldn’t tell you.” Agnes sounds like she wouldn’t want to, even if she knew. She sounds like somebody who has some salesmen waiting right outside the door.

  “Well. Well, thanks anyway. Well, I’ll see you the next time I come over. You be sure and vote for Roger, you hear?”

  Agnes laughs. “I’ll do it,” she says. “You tell Roger that, too, now.”

  “OK.” Then there is a long pause and Crystal can imagine Agnes on the other end of the line, looking at the watch on her freckled arm.

  “What is it, Crystal?” Agnes asks suddenly. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Listen, you go ahead, I’ll see you the next time I come over. We might come next weekend, in fact.”

  “You sure?”

  “No, it’s not anything really. I was just wondering about that song. It was silly. Tell everybody to vote for Roger.”

  “Oh, he’s got this town locked up.” Agnes is obviously relieved. “I’ll see you, hear?”

  “Great,” says Crystal. “I’ll be looking forward to it.” Click. Click. Two very extremely loud clicks. Crystal winces. Then she sits looking at the phone for a long time, winding the cord to make black rings around all her fingers. This makes her hands look very interesting in a perverted way. It would probably sell, in fact, in that shop she doesn’t own: telephone jewelry. Crystal gets up and takes another shower before she dresses.

  She puts on a dark-green wool suit and a yellow blouse and she’s brushing her hair when Marion Fitts, one of Roger’s administrative aides, comes to stand in the doorway. Marion Fitts is in charge of Crystal’s schedule; she plots out all the meetings, the tours, the speeches, the appearances, on a hardbound calendar which she keeps in her briefcase all the time and takes everywhere as she accompanies Crystal during the campaign. Marion Fitts does everything. She even plans the seating and the menus for official dinners. Marion Fitts has been with them for three months now, ever since Roger hired her away from the Richmond News Leader to work full time on his campaign. Marion Fitts also writes news releases and keeps a gold ballpoint pen on a chain around her neck and has proved herself, as Roger often remarks to Crystal, invaluable. Because this is so obviously true, Crystal likes to keep her waiting, as she is waiting now, in the hall just outside the bedroom.