“Oh, that’s so lovely,” he said. “Yes. Do that.”
It was as things had once been between them. She moved her hips, her face in the pillow at his ear, and she wept soundlessly for the relief of it.
He gave a slow thrust upward and she murmured, “Oh.” And he began to thrust quickly, his hands tight on her shoulders.
“Wait,” she said. “Oh. Wait.”
He held very still, and she felt herself fall through, moving quickly now, and kissing his forehead, his cheeks.
“It’s us,” he said. “Oh, babe. It’s us.”
A little later, they lay still. She straightened, and gazed down at him. “So good.”
“Beautiful,” he said.
“We have our house and our place,” she murmured.
“Are you crying?”
“I’m happy,” she told him.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, me, too.”
“I don’t ever want to leave this room. Let’s stay here forever.”
“Oh, baby, I want that.”
“We can make it our own little crypt.”
“But I’ll want to walk through the rooms and savor everything, too. Our house. Ours. We’re in our house.”
“We are. Let’s brick up the doors and windows.”
They lay side by side, looking at the slightly shifting light on the ceiling from the passage of a car in the street. They went to sleep like this, and they slept deeply. She dreamed they were on an island somewhere, not Jamaica. It was like the idea of an island, sunny and with the smell of the ocean and, oddly, cooking meat. The odor of the meat became too thick, and the rest of the dream was of looking for a place on the beautiful island where you couldn’t smell it. She woke feeling physically spent and struggled to go back to sleep, concentrating as best she could on the perfection of the night before. But its very exquisiteness seemed now unreachable in its contrast to what she had been suffering. She got out of the bed and put on a robe, and sat shivering in the predawn at the window. After a few moments, she made coffee and went back and watched the sun come up. The panic had returned, the freeze at her abdomen. It was worse now, utterly and only itself, unalloyed, connected to no thought or idea, a separate thing coiled under the flow of her thoughts and wired to all the nerves of her body. She sat very still as if trying to hide, watching color come to the sky, a fair sunrise, full of gentle shades of gold, and how it shone through the membranous leaves, some of them even beginning to turn.
He had busy dreams, too fleeting to take hold or reach even the level of consciousness nightmares have, or good dreams. It was nonbeing for a space, and when he woke he saw that she had already left the bed. He rose and went in to her and saw her sitting on the couch in the light from the picture window. She was staring out at the backyard, holding a cup of coffee.
“Morning,” he said.
She spilled the coffee.
“I’m sorry.” He moved to the kitchen to get a paper towel. “Who did you think it would be? It’s just us. At home in our house. Remember?”
“I didn’t know you were up,” she said, laughing too loud. He saw tears in her eyes.
Drinking the coffee had warmed her from the inside as the sunlight warmed her skin, the sun rising over the treetops beyond the end of the yard and shining on her through the glass. She stood and wrapped her arms around him, feeling the solidness of him, the bone and sinew, and breathing the sleep odor of him.
“Tears of happiness,” he said. “I hope.”
“Oh, yes, my love.”
They cleaned up what she had spilled and then had another cup each, and then he had to go to work. She stood with him in the doorway and embraced him.
“Iris coming here today?” he asked.
“I’ll go over there.”
“You okay?”
“Go,” she said, forcing the smile.
4
The Thursday before the wedding, Leander and Trixie arrived. Trixie was a tall, very mild woman with an oval face and slightly crossed brown eyes. This made her inexplicably more attractive. She looked much younger than sixty. The old man called her Trix and was attentive to her in ways that were surprising to his son.
There was nothing at the apartment in town but a folding cot and two folded easels, leaning against the living room wall, so it was decided that Natasha and Faulk would stay with Iris, while Leander and Trix stayed at the house on Swan Ridge.
That first evening, they all went in Faulk’s car to Rendezvous for dinner. Trixie was so deferential to Leander that Faulk found it awkward to be around her, and her conversation seemed stilted, as if by some inner conviction that no one would listen to her. It was clear, though, that coming to Memphis for the wedding was her idea and that she had insisted on it. Faulk was grateful to her for the effort, and he tried hard to draw her out, but reticence was clearly in her nature.
The old man would begin to talk, or tell a story, and she would sit watching him, rapt, eyes wide.
Natasha stayed close to Iris, who had her cane with her and complained that the bad knee was giving her a little trouble. They all ate ribs and corn on the cob and drank cold beer in tall iced mugs, and when they walked out of the place, the foyer was packed with people waiting to be seated. They stood at a traffic light on the corner of Union and Third, and they could hear the uproar of Beale Street, three blocks north. It was a warm, cloudy night, and the various strains of music—drums and bass and wailing guitars and brass, and from somewhere an electric piano—went up to the low sky. It felt as though the whole block were a vast echo chamber.
“Do you want to go over there and have a look at it?” Faulk asked his father. “It’s really something, truly. Every warm night in Memphis.”
“Not tonight, Son. I’m tired. My foot hurts. This gout.”
They got into the car and drove back to High Point. Iris and Natasha got out at Iris’s, and Faulk drove the other two around to the Swan Ridge house.
“Let’s have a nightcap,” the old man said.
They went in and sat in the small newly painted living room with the dark picture window and had whiskey in shot glasses. Trixie threw hers back and then asked for a glass of water. “I wish I liked that stuff more,” she said. Faulk got the water for her, and she drank it down and lay on her side on the couch, head resting on one folded arm.
“Let me get you a pillow,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
Leander said, “She’ll be asleep in two minutes.”
“I’m listening,” she said.
“I should go on back to Iris’s.”
“Have another drink.”
Faulk poured more. They sat there quietly sipping it while Trixie began to snore. “Told you,” Leander said, smiling.
“Well, it’s a long drive from Little Rock.”
“Clara and Jack coming in the morning?”
Faulk nodded. “They’re driving, too. They stopped in Knoxville tonight.”
“You don’t mind if we sleep in tomorrow?”
“Of course not.”
“I miss your mother.”
Faulk looked over at the sleeping woman not ten feet away and then took a little more of the whiskey and said nothing.
“Funny thing,” Leander went on. “She wasn’t at all religious when I first met her. She’d thrown off the Catholic thing before we met, you know. She came from all of that and was in rebellion against it. Wild as hell. Parents were furious at her, of course. And she hardly spoke to them. Wild and beautiful. Nobody would’ve believed she would become so—churchy.”
Faulk sipped the whiskey and waited.
“Meaning no offense, there, bud.”
“No offense taken,” Faulk told him. “Bud.”
A moment later, the other said, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
Faulk filled the little glasses, not looking at him. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Talking about you.”
“Okay. I guess.”
“What do you think she’d say about you leaving the church?”
“I’m not leaving the church.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t think it’s useful to guess such a thing.”
“She was a strange lady, that woman. And I do miss her.”
“Dad.”
“Well, I do. It wasn’t always misery and strife.”
“What did you think of the barbecue tonight?”
The old man looked at him. “This bothering you?”
“I don’t know what good it does.”
“What good is talking about a barbecue?”
“It’s refreshing to speak of pleasurable things. The barbecue was good. I like it dry, and I noticed you asked for it wet. How did you like the wet?”
“The barbecue was delicious. Wet and dry. I tasted both. Now, do you want to talk about the damn coleslaw?”
Faulk sipped the whiskey, and kept silent, watching him sip his.
“Or leaving the priesthood.”
“Neither, really.”
“You know Theo Ruhm was talking about coming out here for this.”
“That would be a happy thing. I felt so bad for him when everything came down in New York.”
“Ah, he’s a tough bird. He actually helped with some of the triage, early.”
“I spoke to him on the phone. What a thing—the church where his son was supposed to get married.”
“Well, they got it done anyway, two blocks from his house in Brooklyn. That weekend. Should’ve planned it there in the first place.”
Faulk poured still more of the whiskey.
“I gotta say, I do miss your mother.”
He took another sip. There was no sting from it now.
“I started cheating on her pretty soon after she went with that church you’re in. Your particular church. You might as well know that.”
“She’s gone,” Faulk told him. “It’s all over now. Please. Can we talk about something else?”
“Might as well have some truth.”
“Please stop it. There’s no reason to say any of it. I’ve left the priesthood.”
“But you’ve still got that old-time religion, don’t you.”
“I’m gonna go.”
“Wait. Finish your whiskey.”
Faulk took it in one gulp and set the glass down on the coffee table. His father reached for the bottle and poured another shot into it.
“Let’s change the subject,” he said. “Okay?”
“Good idea,” said Faulk.
“Well, boy, I hated feeling like an apostate in my own house.”
“Look. I really don’t want to talk about this. It’s none of my business.”
“What if I tell you as a priest?”
“Please cut it out, will you?”
“You know what I think? I think we all come from blankness and we all go back there. Back to the way it was before we were born. The great null and void. No darkness at all. We’d have to be able to perceive that. Just blank.”
“I think it’s safe to say I know how you see things, Dad. And nothingness isn’t a particularly original idea, is it.”
“Nor is the idea of a merciful God.”
“Oh, but that’s actually pretty radical. People believed it back when painkillers were unknown. When the world was a savage place full of unmitigated suffering.”
“You mean it’s not that now?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Tell it to those people in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania.”
“You know what I mean, Dad.”
The old man sipped the whiskey and looked off. “Well, we do seek comfort.”
Faulk sipped the last of the whiskey in his own glass and poured a little more. He could feel it now, on top of the beer he’d had earlier.
“I guess I just didn’t like it when you started sounding like her,” his father said.
“Did you hector her this way?”
“Hell, after a while it wasn’t worth talking about.”
“I heard plenty of the talk, Dad. From my earliest memory.”
“Really. It was all that bad, was it?”
“Let’s drop it,” Faulk said. “It was what it was. Sometimes it was fine.”
“Sometimes.”
He took another swallow.
“Well. I don’t think she believed in a merciful God. Her God was more of a—a celestial cop, I’d say. When he wasn’t an invisible concierge.”
“Well, I believe in a God of mercy.”
“No wrath of God, then?”
“I said. Mercy. You know the story. Christ comes and dies. You remember.”
“That’s one story.”
“Well. The point is that an average life used to be somewhere around thirty-five years. It was full of misery, and someone discovered a sense in all that of one loving God.”
“And you think that’s some kind of proof.”
They said nothing for a disagreeable few moments. The old man drank his whiskey in a gulp and then added still more. “I’ve always been a bourbon man.”
The whiskey was Glenlivet, single-malt scotch.
He tipped the shot glass a little and looked into it. “Don’t know why you like this stuff.”
“I don’t know why I like it, either.”
“She didn’t even know who she was, did she—at the end. She was already almost there, almost to nothing—to the blank again.”
“It was a coma.”
“Yeah, but I mean the dementia.”
Faulk kept silent.
“Wonder what the hell it’s all for.”
“I’m going,” Faulk said, controlling his voice. “Lot of getting ready still to do.”
“You got any experience talking to people suffering from depression?”
“I’m trained to do some psychological work, if that’s what you mean.”
“Let’s say that’s what I mean.”
“Okay,” said Faulk. “And?”
His father took a small sip this time, as if testing the flavor on his tongue. Then he swallowed and frowned. “What about despair?”
“I said I’m trained to do some psychological work.”
“You got medicines?”
“I’m not a doctor, no. But I can send you to one.”
“Oh, this isn’t for me.” With the hand that held the shot glass, Leander indicated Trixie.
Faulk knew without having to think about it that this was not the truth. Trixie, lying on her side, sleeping peacefully, with her placid mouth half open, was not the type. “Does she want to talk to somebody?”
“Probably not. Probably couldn’t get her to.”
“Well, I can suggest a doctor, if you’d like.” Faulk wanted to press him a little. “Shouldn’t we ask her if she’d like to speak to somebody?”
“Nah.” The old man drank.
“I’ll talk to her about it.”
“Let’s leave it.”
After a pause, Leander tilted his head slightly, staring at him. “It doesn’t bother you that I cheated on your mother?”
“I said it’s none of my business. Not that it doesn’t bother me.”
“You don’t show it.”
“Are you trying to rile me?” Faulk asked him. “Because it’s working.”
“Nah, hell.”
They were quiet for a long time, then, drinking. They had drunk more than half the bottle.
“Just trying to have a real father-and-son talk,” Leander said.
“It’s a little late for that, wouldn’t you say?”
“Never too late, I believe, is what you hear.”
“Well, we can talk about anything you want except my mother and my religion. How’s that?”
“You drunk?”
“Getting there.”
“Yeah, well, I’m already there. Thought I’d tell you a few things, Son.” The voice trailed off, almost as if he had run out of breath. “Get to know you a little
better.”
They endured another long silence.
“Well,” Leander said at last. “I’m glad I came.” He tried to rise and then sat back down quickly. “Damn.”
His son stood and took him by the arm and helped him stand. They looked down at Trixie where she slept.
“I don’t want to wake her,” he said.
“She’ll be sore,” Faulk told him. “That couch is new but it’s hard.”
The old man leaned down and shook her shoulder. “Trix.”
She lay over on her back and then hurried to her feet. “I’m sorry.”
“What’re you sorry for?”
She looked from one to the other of them. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“Come on, girl.”
She moved to help her husband toward the bedroom.
Faulk let himself out, got in the car, and drove the short block and a half to Iris’s house, windows open, breathing the odor of the crepe myrtle that lined the street. It was a clear cool windless night, and he heard the traffic far off. He saw the glow in the sky from over there. Night in the world. He felt what he’d had to drink. The lights were on at Iris’s, and he got out and made his slow way up to the door and entered.
The women had left the living room lamps on and also the ceiling light in the kitchen. He went in there and looked for something else to drink. Why not? There was white wine in the refrigerator and a can of beer. In the cabinet above the stove he found a tall bottle of vermouth. He put ice in a glass and poured himself a little of the vermouth, then sat at the kitchen table and drank it, looking through the newspaper that had been set there unopened earlier in the day. He caught himself drifting far away from what was on the page, to Natasha in Jamaica. He had what was now the familiar and unwanted image of her walking the beach with the one who had taken the picture of her in Chicago. He shook his head, as if to come fully awake. He returned to the paper. One article was about a man in Florida who had contracted inhalation anthrax, and the secretary of health and human services claiming that the disease does occur in nature and that there was no reason to connect this case to the terrorist attacks. Inhalation anthrax. And they felt it necessary to announce that it was not terror. There was an article citing comments from scientists about efforts to produce the germ in laboratories for use as a weapon, how the Russians and the Americans had worked on it. The article went on to say that according to scientists, two hundred pounds of the germ sprayed over Washington could kill three million people. Bioterror.
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