“Gosh no. You’re the nicest person I’ve ever met. It’s me, Flora.” He took a deep breath. “There’s this other girl.”
Peanut’s trombone let out a bleat. “Oh,” Flora said.
People were beginning to weave around them as they made their way toward the stage. Flora was carrying her granny’s quilt. They had planned to listen to the band together. “I’ve been trying not to love her, Flora, but I can’t seem to let it go. You deserve someone nicer than me. I’ve always thought as much.”
“Don’t be silly. You’re a nice young man. I’m pleased and proud to know you.”
Hadley knew Flora wouldn’t feel half so pleased and proud if she knew what he was planning to do with a married woman the next evening.
“No need to look so glum,” Flora said. “I’m fine. It’s been real fun talking books with you. I’ve enjoyed every second of it.”
“Me too,” Hadley said, feeling genuinely sad. Flora was the one he should love. Lucinda was mean and stingy and likely to disappoint him. Flora was not mean and stingy. Flora would never let him down.
She held up the quilt. “I’m gonna go watch Peanut now, okay?”
By then the band was so loud, Hadley was forced to yell in order to be heard. “I reckon we’ll still meet up at the library, unless you don’t want me coming no more?”
“You better come. The red books would be lonely without you.”
She had a good smile, too. Hadley never realized just how good it was until he was walking away from it.
Stumbling against the flow of the crowd, he walked headlong into Babe Butternut and her three show dogs, a manly bunch of Boston Terriers that went by the preposterous names of Ambrosia, Adorabelle, and Apricot. Babe hooked him by the waist of his pants as he plowed through their leashes. “Whoa. Slow down there, honey.”
Hadley spun in circles, trying to unleash himself.
“Have you had a lovers tiff, poor dear? Come and sit with me for a while. My girls will cheer you up.”
“No thank you, Miss Butternut,” he said.
Adorebelle looked particularly insulted and made a grab for his pants. It was a miracle Hadley managed to break free. “I need to go.”
At the time, it didn’t occur to him that Lucinda was sure to hear about his “lovers tiff”. If it had, he might have wondered how such news would affect their night together. As it was, he didn’t give it a second thought.
###
“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t get rid of Tapley no matter how hard I tried.”
It was Monday, and Lucinda was giving him the same what’s-a-poor-girl-supposed-to-do shrug that he got whenever her library list contained any dreadfuls written by Cherry Awntop. “He says he hasn’t a place to go and would just as soon work as sit in his room with nothing to do. He’s polishing the Conway even as we speak.”
“No,” Hadley said.
This had been the best day of his life. He’d whistled through it, happy as a lark, untroubled by the bee sting he got first thing, or the rip in his trousers, or the bone in his soup. He’d made the best of the previous night’s romp, too, secure in the knowledge that on Monday it would be his turn to be alone with Lucinda. “At last. At last. At last,” he’d said as he drifted off to sleep.
He threw down the delicatas he’d spent half his pay on and buds scattered across the floor. “You can’t back out on me, Lucinda. I meant what I said about jumping off the roof.”
“You think you can blackmail me into touching you, is that it?”
“Blackmail?” Hadley shook his head and tried not to scream. Or burst into tears. “I love you, Lucinda. Don’t pretend you don’t know that.”
Lucinda folded her arms. “You’ve never said as much before.”
He closed his eyes and tried to remember some small kindness she had shown him, settling on the time she bought an electric fan for his bedroom. All he need do was mention how stuffy it could get when Tilly was cooking, and there was Lucinda, bringing him a fancy new electric fan. That fan had changed his life, it was such a pleasant thing to have.
When she married Dickie and moved to Wisteria Walk, Lucinda could have brought along Loomis or Lemon or Flavia. Flavia could get stains out of a dress like nobody’s business, and Lemon had a secret method for darning three socks in under ten minutes. But Lucinda didn’t bring Lemon or Loomis. She brought Hadley and no one else. And she gave him his own electric fan. And she slipped him a piece of Christmas orange in her handkerchief. And she made up a holiday for them to call their own. And she promised him an evening alone with her.
“Please,” he said. “Make Tapley go. I need this night with you.”
All day, he’d dreamed about how it might go. Maybe they’d share the Coconut Kiss he brought for her. Maybe they’d dance. Pringles had wanted three dollars for a water-spotted copy of Mary Marie, and he’d been glad to pay it. He’d bought a record, too. My Regards Waltz. Lucinda loved to listen to music, and Hadley loved watching Lucinda listen to music. Sure, he’d thought about touching her, but to court Lucinda’s love, this was what he dreamed of more than anything else.
“Make him go,” he hollered.
“God love it! Lower your voice. Do you want Tapley to hear?” She steered him out the kitchen door, leading him behind the row of bedclothes pinned on the line.
“I’ll embarrass you if I have to,” Hadley threatened. “Tapley won’t be the only one to hear me.”
“Quit it, Hadley. You’re acting like a baby.”
Hadley’s breath sped up like a child set to bawl. “You promised me this night, Lucinda. You said we’d be alone.”
“There will be other business trips.”
“Uh-uh,” he said. An embroidered corner of sheet flapped against his cheek, and he batted it away. “I ain’t waiting no more. You can’t make me listen to you with Dickie one more night. You think it’s fun to push me? Well, you’ve pushed me to the very edge, Lucinda. There is no where else to push.” Hadley did some pushing of his own and backed her up against the house.
“What are you doing?” Lucinda said.
“Send Tapley away this instant, otherwise, I’m gonna take you right here. Against this wall.”
“You most certainly will not.”
“Oh you’d like that, I think. You’d like to slap me and pretend that you can’t stand the sight of me. Well, I want it to be nice Lucinda, but that isn’t a requirement.”
The bedclothes billowed in the breeze. “The neighbors might see,” Lucinda whispered.
Hadley stepped closer. “So make him go then.”
She stared him in the eye. “No.”
“Suit yourself,” Hadley said, pushing up her dress. “I warn you though; I don’t intend to be as speedy as your husband. I’ve waited too long for this.”
“Promises. Promises,” she said.
Hadley grabbed her by the face. “I’m not playing with you. It’s gonna be the bedroom or it’s gonna be this here wall. You decide. Right now.”
Lucinda fingers danced over him as she groped for his buttons. “The wall.”
The wall.
It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t speedy, and Lucinda did slap him around a bit. So much so that he was forced to pin her hands above her head. “Why do you taunt me like this, goddamn it?! Can’t you just be friendly?”
She craned her neck and licked her lips, thrashing against him as though she wished to break free. “I do it for you. I do! I want you to die when you push inside me.” The wall of sheets snapped at his back. “Do you want to die, Hadley?”
He released her hands.
Hadley discovered that making love against a wall did pack a deathblow of sorts in that his whole life with Lucinda passed before him like flipping pages in a book. From childhood until this moment, the days whirred by. There he was on the very first page, scribbling dirty words down on recipe cards, his heart pounding like a mallet. Next page. There he was, stretched out with Lucinda in the attic letting her rip into his skin. Next page. Her fo
ot. Next Page. Her hand. Next page. Her bluebells. Next page. He was about to die . . .
“That’s nice. You do that real good.”
Hadley couldn’t take his eyes off the body under his hands. Lucinda couldn’t take her eyes off the Brewster’s windows. “Look at me,” he said, turning her attention away from the Brewsters. “Look at me when I die.”
Lucinda looked at Hadley.
“At last. At last. At last . . . ” he sighed, the cement behind her shoulders creating a tattoo on the skin of his palms.
After years of dreaming about being with her, Hadley Crump had Lucinda Worther-Holmes up against the wall behind the clothesline under the kitchen window while Tapley polished the piano bench. And he didn’t stop having her until Lucinda struck her fists against his back and gave a spiraling moan some five or more times. “God,” she spat, gritting her teeth, the words flying from her like a curse. “You’re going to kill me.”
The bedclothes whipped. The ground tilted. All colors blurred into one. “I love you,” Hadley choked. They sank to the ground, forehead to forehead, smashing clovers under their knees.
“There now,” Lucinda said. “Aren’t you glad I made you wait?”
###
“I’m going to need you to drive into Bixby and pick up some sleeping powder,” Lucinda told Tapley. It was ten minutes later. Eleven minutes later, she slipped into Hadley’s bedroom. “Can you do it again?” she asked.
“On the bed this time,” he said. “Take off your dress.”
###
Dickie Worther-Holmes was a decent fellow. Those that didn’t want his wife so much might even go so far as to call him likeable. It was tough to hate a man whose happiest moment of the day came when he opened the newspaper and turned to Winnie Winkle. Hadley wished Dickie would drive his new Packard off the edge of the Beattie’s Bluff on his way home from Baton Rouge
When that didn’t happen and the car drove up on Tuesday afternoon unscathed and with Dickie safely inside of it, Hadley took to praying that the chandelier would drop on his head when he walked through the front door.
“It’s good to see you, Crump,” Dickie said, stepping inside without any incident. His dark eyes actually twinkled, like he was truly glad to see Hadley. Then, calm as you please, he withdrew a pistol from his pocket and pointed it at Hadley’s head.
Hadley tried to think what he could say in order to save himself. His eyes darted to Lucinda. Would she really stand there calm as can be and let him be shot down in cold blood? Her monkey-flower eyes locked on the gun.
Seeing how she wasn’t compelled to throw herself in front of Hadley and beg for his life, he decided he was on his own and started trying out speeches inside his head:
I’m sorry, Mr. Worther-Holmes, but I couldn’t help myself. No. This was not the sort of apology to offer a man who had his finger on a trigger.
It was an accident! Remember that time when Quindora fell? Well it was kind of like that only with laundry instead of a ladder. Hmm. If he had even the smallest amount of skill as a liar, he might be able to do something with that one. But no. He had no skill in that regard.
The truth was the only way to go. I’ve been in love with your wife for most of my life . . .
“Pow,” Dickie said. He laughed that big sad-as-hell laugh that he always laughed. Hadley checked himself for bullet holes. “God damn, boy. You’re white as a corpse..” Dickie handed him the gun. Hadley was still checking for holes.
It wasn’t a real gun, Dickie said. It was a pistol-shaped Giblin Radioear.
“It looks real,” Hadley said.
“Naw,” Dickie said. “Not if you’re a gun man.” With that, the gun man caught his wife by the waist and gave her a big squeeze, oblivious to the impending peril he faced from the six-armed chandelier overhead.
Hadley stood by, loosening ceiling screws with the brute force of his mind. Holophane shuddered. The bulbs dimmed. As soon as Hadley could get the thing to come crashing down, he planned to push Lucinda clear and turn himself into a hero while at the same time disposing of his enemy.
The screws held, though not for lack of effort.
When the hopping started up that night, Hadley rubbed his temple with the radio pistol, gathered up his bedclothes, and made himself a bed on the bathroom floor.
###
For all his life, Hadley had wholeheartedly believed that, if he could have Lucinda just once, he would finally be free of the spell. That didn’t happen. He only wanted her worse than before. He laughed at himself for thinking he could ever be content with the deal he’d tried to make in the Rose Bud parlor. Hadley had never loved anything so hard as he loved Lucinda. And now he knew that she cared about him, too.
“Oh Hadley,” she’d said. “I wish we could do this every night.”
The first chance he got, he sent her a note:
From the kitchen of:
When can I touch you again?
Hadley had gotten much more than he’d bargained for. It was torture seeing her black lace Dancelette hanging over the tub. He wanted to kiss under the curls at the back of her neck. Even a sheet on the clothesline had the power to undo him. Lucinda waited three days to respond to his recipe card:
Hold your horses, Hadley.
He’d made love to Lucinda four times the night Dickie was in Baton Rouge. Afterward he could hardly walk, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to push Lucinda up against the wall again on Tuesday.
On Friday, Lucinda sent him to the library. “You need to get out of the house, honey bun. You’re looking a little unglued.” So Hadley went to the library to try and glue himself back together.
“How are you, Flora?” he asked as he slid his list across the desk, same as always.
“I’m good, Mr. Crump. How are you?”
Hadley’s heart froze. “Come on, Flora. You ain’t gonna start with that Mr. Crump business again, are you?”
Flora rolled her eyes in the direction of the formidable head librarian, Miss Hazelwood. Miss Hazelwood was a nervous little raisin of a woman who was given to kissing her cross necklace every time she glanced at Hadley.
As such, Flora spoke to Hadley out of the corner of her mouth. “There are some people who think that you’re to be avoided at all cost due to your indelicate reading selections,” she said. “We mustn’t let on that we’re friends.”
“Are we friends?” he whispered. The thought elated him.
“Yes, in deed, Mr. Crump,” Flora replied in her normal librarian voice. “We are an open-minded institution, after all.”
Hadley felt the urge to throw up his hat but refrained on account of Miss Hazelwood, who gave him a dark, somewhat frightened look and hastily pressed her lips to Jesus’ green-tarnished crucified body. “I’m so glad to hear that, Miss Gibbs.”
She is definitely too good for me, Hadley thought. He tucked his dirty books under his arm and went home to Lucinda.
###
There were four memories that played over and over again in the theatre of Hadley’s over-active mind. They played while he pruned bushes and laid out garden bricks. They played while he spackled and hammered and plumbed. And when he slept, if he was lucky, they played in his dreams.
The first memory took place behind a flapping wall of bedclothes. It was awkward and sloppy and probably his favorite of the four. Spiritually speaking, its significance was immeasurable. Unfortunately, the details of this particular memory were fuzzier than the others. Hadley’s brain couldn’t quite duplicate the scene without adding things to it. Once, he dreamed they’d ripped down the sheets and tangled themselves up in them. Another time he dreamt that Wisteria Walk collapsed around them like a house of cards. Twice now, he’d added a silvery spray of water from the garden hose.
The second memory was no less urgent, but it was surrounded by softness because of the bed. In Memory Number Two, Hadley got to see Lucinda naked.
There were parts of a woman’s body he’d never been able to accurately picture before that. Loo
mis had a set of French playing cards that showed the top half of the female body real clear, but the bottom was inevitably covered up by a ruffled skirt or a coquettish hand or an ill-placed ostrich feather. As an alternative, Loomis had recommended the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in Savannah. According to Loomis, there were dozens of nude paintings and sculptures on display, and anyone at all could look at them. Hadley had never been to Georgia, and therefore, he’d never gotten around to seeing the nudes at the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences.
“What are you looking at?” Lucinda asked when he stopped touching and started staring.
“Everything,” he breathed. “You look like a goddess, Lucinda.”
She looked so beautiful, in fact, that he was torn between wanting to touch all that amazing beauty with his own body, and wanting nothing more than to stare at it all night long. The main difference between the first time and the second time was that, the second time, Hadley knew what Lucinda looked like. Knowing this made lovemaking even nicer.
The next memory began with him waking up beside her, which was his wildest, most wonderful dream come true. Daffodil fingers of sunlight inched across her body and Hadley was instantly jealous of anything that got to touch her skin, even sunshine. There were bruises in some places that had been made by his mouth. “Dickie’s gonna see me on you,” he whispered, secretly hoping they’d be caught.
Lucinda smiled a drowsy smile. “Not in the dark he won’t.”
“Well, if it was me, I’d have the lights on every second.”
“Not Dickie,” Lucinda said. “Dickie likes it in the dark.” She trailed her fingers over the top of the blanket. “Goodness, darling; haven’t you had enough?”
“Never,” he said, kissing her in a way that was sure to put more bruises on her bruises.
Lucinda rolled on top of him. “You sure do have a lot of energy, Hadley Crump, I’ll say that for you.”
“I’ve been storing it up,” he said.
Hadley never knew there were so many different ways to do it—in bed, against a wall, on the floor . . . He was certain he’d never be able to live without sex again. “If you were my wife,” he told Lucinda, “once a night wouldn’t be enough. I’d never do anything but look at you and make love to you. That would be my life.”
The Reading Lessons Page 14