Now she understood. He believed he had bought back the property title to her life—something far more valuable than what he’d given Bruce. What she would do with it, though, was not as simple a matter as her father might think.
She put on her nightshirt, then slid under the sheets next to her snoring husband, looking at him closely before turning off the light. His jaw and chin were peppered with black and silver whiskers, grown in since the morning. He had a pleasing enough face—handsome, in the slightly effeminate way of many Southern boys she’d known whose families had run plantations or luxury hotels—or banks. It was as if privilege had softened their features over the course of too many unchallenged generations.
Brian was a man who expected to succeed; he had expected to win her, and it was this confidence, more than his looks, that she’d found appealing. He’d been friendly, self-assured, amusing—once she’d gotten to know him she’d liked him a lot. But not in a way that turned her head, not at all. She had been in love with Carson right up to—and past—the day Brian came to her with his surprise proposal.
Proof that love didn’t conquer all.
Weariness infused her every muscle as she lay there; using her left arm, she reached over and shut off the light. Brian turned onto his side facing her, liquor sour on his breath. She turned away, toward the windows, where the silvery light from the pool bobbed and dipped on the sheer curtains. She watched it, her eyes growing heavy under its hypnotic dance.
She wished she could say her life with Brian was awful and she would be delighted to take her father’s advice and run away from it, shackles dropping from her ankles like an emancipated slave’s. But for all that their relationship had begun with a spoiled young man’s ambition to win a girl away from a supposedly lesser man, she couldn’t say her decision to let him win made her a martyr. She couldn’t say she had suffered, not in any tangible way. As she concluded every time the thought of leaving came to mind, Brian was a supportive spouse, a reasonably good parent. They were a family, albeit a less-than-ideal one. “It’s not so easy, Dad,” she whispered.
Her ankles might now be unbound, but here she stood.
Nineteen
“SO ARE YOU GOING TO SHOW IT TO ME?” VAL ASKED CARSON AT BREAKFAST in his parent’s kitchen Thursday morning. James and Carolyn were already up and out of the house to work on hedging the lemon trees with their regular crew of migrant grove workers.
“Insatiable girl,” Carson said, passing Val a pitcher of orange juice. “I showed it to you just last night.”
She grinned. “Not that. Your little house, the one you and your dad built.”
“Oh, the shed.”
“The shed, right. You said I could see it today.”
He vaguely remembered saying as much, but sharply regretted it now. The rum and Cokes had loosened his tongue the previous evening as they’d all sat outside around the firepit, his folks and him reminiscing, inspired, he supposed, by his impending wedding. The shed renovation had come up—though Meg’s name had not—and Val predictably declared her interest in checking it out. She was fascinated with everything about his early years as a farm kid; his history was so different from her own upbringing that they might have been raised on different planets.
“I’ll give you the tour if we have time,” he said. “Lots to do—we need to go see those florists, and we have to be at the tailor’s at twelve-thirty.”
Val smirked. “It’s right over there.” She pointed to the shed, visible through one of the tall casement windows that had been added in recent years, one of many improvements his parents had made as a result of his success. “I think we can fit it into the schedule. I can’t believe you haven’t been in there since you first moved away.”
“You know, I keep meaning to go in and sort through stuff…. I stay here in the house whenever I’m back because to tell you the truth, it’s a lot more comfortable. Central air, stocked fridge. I like the creature comforts.” That sounded plausible.
“Your mom said she might turn it into an art studio, right? So I want to see it before it’s different.”
He wanted to put her off further but couldn’t think of any more excuses for delay. And he didn’t want to make her suspicious; that would only provoke questions he didn’t feel like answering. In the seven months since they first met, he’d managed to gloss over his relationship with Meg so smoothly that Val wouldn’t think to differentiate her from the myriad other women in his past. Underplaying that relationship—the only one that had mattered before Val—was a sort of sin of omission, and he did plan to tell her more about it at some point, but not yet. For no good reason that he could figure, he felt protective of his history with Meg. Or maybe he just hated looking weak for having been a heartsick fool for so long. Whatever it was, the thought of taking Val into the shed and showing her around hung him up inside. The place was so permeated with Meg that he was afraid even Val would be able to see and smell her there, the way he knew he still would.
His phone began ringing. He looked at the display; “It’s Gene. I better take it.” He answered the call. “Gene-o, how’s it going?”
“Like usual, I’m working like a dog while you’re off someplace playing with Surfer Girl.”
“So take a vacation.”
“Are you kidding? Your career would collapse like a prostitute on a Sunday morning. No, listen, what are you doing tomorrow night? No plans? Good, ’cause I need you to do an old friend of mine a favor.”
Carson said, “Whoa there, I do have plans. We’re going to a play with my folks.”
“Nah, that play sucks. Send Surfer Girl if you want, but you, my friend, have a date with a piano, two guitars, some drums, and my best old friend from the neighborhood, Johnny Simmons.”
“Her name is Val,” Carson said patiently, “and you don’t know if the play sucks, because I didn’t name it.”
“Yeah, and anyway, Johnny’s got this great club over in Orlando, and the band who was supposed to play tomorrow night canceled on him. And he just happens to mention this to me and I just happen to know that you, my star pitcher, just happen to be an hour away and could fill in and make Johnny owe me for life.”
“In other words,” Carson laughed, “it’s all about you.”
“When is it not? So you’ll do it? Great! He’ll pay you whatever they were gonna get, and I won’t even take my percentage.” Gene filled in the details, and after they hung up Carson thought of how a date like this, unpromoted, in a smallish club where a good crowd was practically guaranteed, would be a pleasure after so many gigs at stadiums packed with thousands of faceless fans. It would be like when he was starting out, except now nobody would be asking, “What was your name again?” and he wouldn’t be sweating the question of whether he’d find another place to play the next weekend.
“I’m going to play a club tomorrow night,” he told Val as he stacked the breakfast dishes and carried them to the sink. Shep, his mom’s mottled mixed-breed dog, clicked across the tile floor and nudged his leg, so Carson set the plates, with their scrambled egg scraps, on the floor. He patted Shep’s back and added, “I hope you don’t mind. Gene needed a favor.”
“Won’t your mom have a fit? She really wants to see the play.”
“And she will see it. You should go too.”
“Are you serious? She’ll eat me alive if you leave me alone with her and your dad.”
“Mom? She loves you, what are you talking about?”
Val shook her head. “No, she loves you—and she was expecting you to pick somebody…else. She’s just tolerating me.”
Val was right, but he was surprised she’d noticed the subtle vibes; his mom was doing a good job of supporting his decision to get married even though it was just as Val said: she’d expected him to choose someone older, for starters, and more like him—or, to be precise, someone more like her. A woman who had her roots in the land, not the waves. A woman who wanted to raise kids, not act like one. Not that Val was childish, but she was ve
ry youthful. She played it down around his folks, but her energy was irrepressible.
“Mom and Dad both think you’re spectacular—but if you want to come down to Orlando with me tomorrow, that’d be great. Then I won’t have to pick up any groupies to help me pass the time.”
“Oh, I have nothing against groupies,” Val said, matching his straight face. “Let’s find us a few. The more, the merrier.”
“Girl,” he said, “don’t get me hoping like that.”
“As if you could handle more than just me.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and then hopped up to wrap her bare legs around his waist. He put his arms around her hips and snugged her against him.
It would be bad form, just now, to confess what he knew from actual past experiences he was capable of handling. Cocaine was a powerful aphrodisiac in the new user, and he wasn’t particularly proud of the stories he could tell of his earlier “rock star” days. She’d heard some of them, and not only from him; his old reputation was documented on plenty of websites and in a lot of photo albums, he was sure. But now that he and Val were serious about their relationship, engaged to be married in about three more weeks, the proper response to her challenge was a diplomatic one. So he said, “As if I would want more than just you.”
She pressed her nose and forehead to his. “Right answer,” she said, then kissed him. “Take me to the shed?” she asked in a husky voice.
Ah, the shed. He was not about to take her there for that. “No,” he said, easing his arms down so that she dropped to her feet. “We need to move up our timetable if I’m gonna play tomorrow night. I need to work up a playlist, get it to the other musicians, and get some practice in this afternoon, so we’d better hit the road.”
Val made a show of looking pouty, so he added, “Well, we could forget all this grand wedding business and just elope.”
“God no, my mom would kill me! She’s already mad that we’re choosing florists without her.” Val’s mother was also mad that the wedding would be in St. Martin instead of Malibu, and the resort manager in St. Martin was mad that they weren’t using a local florist because Carolyn insisted they support her fellow agriculturists there in the Ocala area—and if Carson thought further, he was sure he could add many more names to the list of people whose idea of what or where their wedding “should” be was not being fully addressed. Weddings were too much aggravation by far.
“All right, then.” He gave Val a playful push. “Get your stuff and let’s go.”
Twenty
AFTER MEETING BACK HOME FOR LUNCH, CARSON DROVE VAL AND HIS DAD into town, where the men would be measured for custom-made tuxes. The other men in the wedding party had faxed their measurements to the tailor of Carson’s choice, a Thai transplant who went by the name Penguin Pete. Pete was one of Carson’s favorite people; despite the inconvenience of Pete being located here in Ocala, he went to him for all his suits—the few he owned. Carson just wasn’t a suit kind of guy. “Dressing up” usually meant jeans without holes and a shirt with a collar.
Pete’s name had been one of the few things he was able to remember on returning from his first visit to Thailand—a Bangkok concert in 2000. The whole time he was there, he fought to forget his declaration that his first trip to the country would be for his fortieth birthday, and that Meg would be with him. Fought the memory with cocaine supplied by the local concert organizer, a fast-talking Chinese man named Jinn. It worked famously. Not only didn’t Carson preoccupy himself with thoughts of his Meg-less future but he kept busy, the two nights he wasn’t performing and afterward on the one night he did, with a string of lovely but interchangeable dark-haired women—the ones he elected not to mention to Val earlier today.
Pete, who was related to Jinn by some convoluted marital connections, had already made him one tux, which he’d worn to the Oscars two years earlier. That one, in forest green velvet with black silk lapels, was a huge hit and won him spots in every celebrity news rag he could think of. Pete had even clipped some from Thai papers, and taped the clippings to the edge of one of the big mirrors inside the shop.
The shop itself defied celebrity expectations; at best, the front room was fifteen feet square and looked like Pete had lifted it directly from some Bangkok backstreet. It came complete with intriguing spicy smells and a patina of age and dust and humidity that he imagined made Pete feel right at home. As for the customer, well, who could argue with superb tailoring?
“Look here, Miss,” Pete said to Val, pointing at the pictures on the mirror in the back left corner of the room. “He gets red carpet with my suit.”
“Everybody gets the red carpet,” Carson explained, adding, “Nothing against the suit.”
Pete, who was shorter than Carson by almost a foot and wore what looked a lot like a toreador’s outfit, looked up at him and frowned. “No, no, you wearing that suit make you look celebrity. Otherwise they not recognize you, make you stand behind fence like mortal.”
“If you say so. Anyway, it’s a great tux. But not what Miss Val here has in mind for our nuptials. Tell him what we’re going for, Val.”
“Yes, yes, come on; we have some tea, you tell me all your ideas, and Doreen, she measure your men,” Pete said, waving Val into the back room, whose doorway was separated from the shop’s front room by long strings of wooden beads. Val looked back at Carson as if hoping for rescue, but he just smiled and moved toward the small dais in the corner, where Pete’s Cuban wife Doreen waited with her measuring tape and a tiny spiral notebook. Doreen, a curvy, florid woman of about fifty, wore a ruffled low-cut blouse of turquoise and ten or more thin silver bracelets on each of her wrists. Carson glanced at his dad, who was eyeing Doreen’s cleavage with trepidation.
“Dad, why don’t you go first,” he said.
“Okay then,” his dad replied. This was the first time he had seen the shop too, and Carson could tell he was a little disconcerted by both the place and the proprietors. His dad was not a worldly man; it had taken a lot of arm-twisting to get him to come out to Seattle four months earlier. He didn’t like to leave the groves, claimed the trees would miss him and bear sour fruit the next season.
“Jou step up right here,” Doreen said in her thick Cuban accent, bracelets jangling. “No slouching, no twitching—hokay?” she added, her round face fixed in a strict scowl. “We make hwun measure, get it right, and jour suit fits.”
“Better do as she says,” Carson warned. “She was schooled by some no-nonsense nuns.”
As she began stretching the tape across his dad’s shoulders, then down each of his tanned arms, Doreen said, “So, Mister Music, who is to be jour best man?”
“Dad here.”
“Oh, jou are so sweet. He is a good son,” she pronounced, pushing the tape into his dad’s crotch.
“He is,” his dad said, flinching just a little. “Can’t complain.” He smiled at Carson, a genuine smile that said he no longer held any grudges about his son’s defection. In the beginning of Carson’s music career, the smile wasn’t so genuine; they’d burned up the phone lines quite a few Sunday afternoons and weekday evenings, Carson defending his absence and his choices and his dad arguing that working as a singer and songwriter was like asking to be miserable and poor. And even if success was in the cards, he said, Carson needed to know what hepatitis looked like, and herpes and drug addiction and AIDS. “All those things you don’t want to think about, I’m here to tell you, that’s what’s out there.”
But what Carson didn’t want to think about was a different sort of disease, one that was endemic in his family’s orange and grapefruit and lemon groves, where, if he was not moving from town to town and club to club, he would have to spend every day. Where he had spent practically his whole life with Meg at his side, catching fireflies and chasing adolescent dreams on hazy summer nights. If he were living there, he would be so much more susceptible—or so he’d thought. The fact of it was that his heartache went with him to Jacksonville and Durham and Pittsburgh and Cleveland; it hoppe
d the Mississippi when he did, in Minneapolis; it tagged along to Denver and Vegas and San Diego. It grew smaller, though, and hid in the shaded coves of his heart, places where the light of his daily routines didn’t often reach. He wondered, now, if he’d protected it by escaping, wondered whether, if he had stayed and made his life on the farm, overexposure might have erased the pain of his heartache entirely.
Doreen finished with his dad and nudged him off the dais. “Now jou,” she commanded Carson.
“Guess I’ll see how Val’s getting along,” his dad said.
“Good idea. Have some tea—Pete makes great tea.” Carson stepped onto the wooden platform and held his arms out from his sides while his dad passed through the beads into the back room, where Val’s higher tones took turns with Pete’s lower ones in what sounded like a pleasant discussion so far.
He told Doreen, “Don’t expect I’ve changed size much. Val’s got me learning the surf—trying to learn, I should say.”
“Oh, surfing, hoo!” Doreen said. “I hwatched that movie, jou know, with that hunkie Swayze man. Oh, Dios!” she fanned herself in mock passion. “And the other sexy one—Matrix Man?”
“Keanu Reeves,” Carson said. “Yeah, I saw that movie too. Val’s a world-class competitor—a pro.”
“No!” Doreen said, sitting back on her heels. “That little girl? The waves will eat her up. Do not joke with me, Music Man.”
“I wouldn’t,” he said. “Ask her yourself. She has a competition next week in Bali.”
“Bali, oh, rough life,” Doreen said, finishing up with his inner and outer pants seams. “Jou’re going, I suppose?”
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