by Rosina Lippi
“So how old were you when you got to try that out?”
He grinned at her. “Thirty-six.”
Angie sat up. “You’re kidding. That’s a virgin shower?”
“As far as I’m concerned it is. My great-aunt Helen lived here for the last twenty years, you know. She was a sweet old lady but proper, and she had ears like a bat.”
“When did she die?”
He cleared his throat, looked away. “Last summer.”
For the last year John had lived in this house whenever he could get away from Princeton, and for most of that year he had been engaged to Caroline Rose. Had Caroline declined an invitation to join him in the shower because Rob and Kai were down the hall, or had he never asked?
“What was the plan, anyway?” she asked. “Was Caroline going to move in here, or . . .” Her voice trailed away when she realized she didn’t really want to hear the answer. John was going to tell her anyway, she could see that.
“She was supposed to move in this week,” John said. “Or at least I thought she was. Her sisters still think I’m going to move into Old Roses. I don’t know what Caroline was actually thinking, which I suppose should have been my first hint.”
He rubbed his knuckles over his jaw and the bristles of his new beard made a hushing sound.
“Is that what you needed to talk to me about?”
“In a way. Caroline wrote me a letter.”
Angie pulled her knees up to her chin. “Okay. Go ahead.”
She listened, her head tucked forward as he read what couldn’t have been more than fifty words, and still Angie wished the lights were out; she wished they had had this conversation on the phone. She didn’t know how she was supposed to react. Except that wasn’t exactly true. Mangiamele, she told herself, you are such a fake. You don’t want to say what’s on your mind because you have never known a man, no matter how open-minded, how liberal, how smart, to take such speculation with a shrug. If a woman left for another man, that might be a relief or a tragedy, but the guy whose wife left him for another woman was the butt of the joke. In a town like Ogilvie, how would this play? Angie closed her eyes, trying to imagine it, and then, slightly nauseated, opened them again.
You don’t know this for a certainty, she told herself yet again. So shut up.
“I have to admit,” he was saying, “I’m at a loss. I don’t know how to read this.”
So John was clueless and Caroline was cowardly, and what a great combination that was.
“What do you think?”
He was standing at the window that looked out over the garden, his back to her, oblivious to his nakedness or the picture he made. He had the build of a rower, his arms and shoulders and neck broad and strong. She could count his vertebrae, trace the flexing muscles in his back, the sun-bleached hairs on his long legs. His hips were narrow, his buttocks perfectly round and pale as milk compared to the rest of him, the color of toast. Turn around, she wanted to say. Come here. Touch me. Angie closed her eyes and counted to three until the tide rising in her subsided.
“You know Caroline much better than I do,” she said.
He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Bullshit.”
That took her by surprise. “Huh?”
“Bullshit. I’m missing something obvious. I know I am, for the simple reason that I always do, as you have pointed out to me before.”
Angie cleared her throat. She said, “Let me read the letter, then.” Not that it would be of any help, but it would buy her some time. She took the letter from him and ran her eyes over Caroline’s strong handwriting, but she was really weighing one statement after another and dismissing each in turn. When she was done, she put the letter down on the bedside table.
John had come back to bed and was stretched out beside her, his head propped on his arm.
“A few ideas come to me,” she said. “But first let me ask you. Does it matter?”
“Does it matter?”
“She’ll be here tomorrow—” Angie glanced at the sky outside the window. “She’ll be back here today, and she’ll . . . explain.” And then, in response to his blank expression: “I just mean—”
“You think there’s some simple answer to all this?”
“I think there’s no sense in anticipating trouble. We’ve got enough of that as it is.”
“Christ, I wish she had got that letter I wrote. The way things stand, I have no idea what to think. Rob took this as an indication that she wants out.”
Angie shrugged. “Sure, you could read it that way.”
“If that’s the case,” he said slowly, “then I’ve got to wonder why. Do you think she could be—” He stopped, and Angie could almost hear the words in her head: in love with somebody else.
“Angry—about you?”
She wanted to bury her face in the pillow, because the urge to scream or laugh or both at once was almost overwhelming. Luckily John’s mind and his attention were elsewhere. And he was trying, and so she made an effort and calmed herself down so she could listen.
“I’m drawn to women who are hard to read, I always have been. But I’m learning, because I can tell that you’re not saying what you’re thinking, right at this minute. Are you?”
His voice had gone slightly blurry, as if he were drunk or near sleep. There was resignation in his expression, and that cut her to the quick.
Angie pressed herself against him. She put an arm across his chest and her face against his neck and she kissed him, softly, on the underside of his jaw and then on the mouth. She kissed him again, trying to apologize without words for the things she couldn’t say. He caught her wrists and flipped her over on her back and kissed her back.
“John,” she whispered. “I can’t explain Caroline to you, but I can tell you about me, and how I feel about you. That will have to be enough for right now.”
He rubbed his face against hers, caught her lip between his teeth and kissed her, breathed into her. “You’re what I want,” he said, and then he pulled away from her. “You, and a shower.” He caught her wrist and drew her along with him.
The tub was ancient, huge, a luxury boat with paws for feet. An awkward shoulder-height shower arrangement had been added in the sixties, but this bathroom was the first thing John had remodeled after his aunt died. He kept the tub, updated the shower hardware, and added a pale linen curtain that could be drawn around the entire circumference.
They stayed there until the hot water was gone and they were both exhausted and Angie was as soft and loose and open as an overblown rose. John wrapped her in towels and rubbed her dry and then tucked her into bed next to him. She was almost asleep, breathing deeply, when she suddenly roused herself enough to roll out of the towel and drop it by the side of the bed.
“Skin,” she mumbled. She pressed herself against him, and slipped away into sleep. John stayed awake for much longer, every sense focused on her textures and smells and the sight of her. He had brushed his teeth and lost her taste: salt sea, milky sweet. He thought of spreading her open with his hands, taking his fill, swallowing her whole, and then pushing himself, all of himself, inside her while she whispered in his ear and undulated around him, hair like floating seaweed, her body suckling insistently, come and come and come. When he woke she would be next to him. Angie in the night. Angie in the morning. He let himself relax and slip down, follow her down and down into sleep.
The plan was, Angie would leave first and walk back to Ivy House while John went his usual route to campus. Standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, she listened to him talk about the day ahead, things that might happen when Caroline came back, how he would deal with each possibility. She was oddly calm, at ease with him and herself, though the potential for disaster was tremendous.
She was putting on her shoes when John said, “You know what I said about difficult women?”
“That you’re drawn to them, sure.”
He said, “You’re worth whatever trouble comes my way.”
She r
elaxed a little, and then happiness made her sloppy and she said what she was thinking. “Not that there’s any such thing as an easy woman.”
“Sure there is,” John said, and a small line appeared between his brows. Normally Angie liked arguing with him about this kind of thing, but it would be foolish to let the conversation move in that direction just now.
“Okay,” she said.
“I would call Rivera . . . not easy, but straightforward. You don’t have to guess what she’s thinking.”
“Hmmmm,” Angie said.
“I don’t know Jude Parris very well, but I’d say the same of her.”
“I better get gone,” Angie said, but she could see that it was hopeless, because he was pacing now.
“Even Meg, if you think about it—”
Let it go, Angie prayed. Let it go, let it go.
“Of course all three of them are—well, maybe not all three are lesbians, but almost.”
She waited, breathless, to see if he could dig himself out.
“Okay, so that’s a generalization that deserves to be shot down,” John said, as if she had objected aloud. “But there’s something there.
Maybe it’s just that women who are openly gay don’t worry about impressing men. Meg sure wasn’t worried about what the men at the table thought of her last night.”
“Wow,” Angie said. “Look at the time, it’s getting—”
“Though she went over the line when she got going about Miss Zula,” John finished.
“—late,” Angie said. She took an imaginary sip from her empty cup. When she looked up, John was watching her.
“Come on,” he said slowly. “You don’t buy into that garbage Meg was spouting.”
“That Miss Zula is a lesbian?” Angie shrugged. “I don’t know one way or the other, not for sure. Does it matter?”
John blinked at her. “Of course it doesn’t matter,” he said. “But it isn’t true.”
“And if it were true, would you be upset if we pursued the subject with her?”
“The question is moot,” John said. “Because she isn’t.”
Angie closed her eyes briefly, and then opened them. “This is something we have to talk about,” she said. “But not just now. We don’t have time.”
John said, “There are things you don’t know.”
“I forgot how stubborn you can be when you get your teeth into a subject that interests you.” Angie tried to grin, and failed.
“Nice try, Mangiamele.”
“Okay,” she said. “Sure, there’s a lot we don’t know. We’ve only been working on this for a month. So what exactly is it you’re talking about?
“There are family tragedies I’m not sure Miss Zula would want you digging around in.”
Angie said, “That’s between Miss Zula and Tied to the Tracks—as you pointed out last night. So far she hasn’t refused to answer any question we’ve asked.”
“Is that so?” John said, looking more than a little agitated. “So, how much has she told you about her mother and her brother?” And, seeing her expression, he said: “That’s what I thought.”
“We haven’t really pursued the subject,” Angie said, feeling suddenly defensive and intrigued, too. “But why don’t you go ahead and tell me this big secret. Unless you don’t trust me with it.”
He shot her a disgusted look. “You know that’s not the issue.”
“Could have fooled me,” Angie said. “Look, we should leave this—”
He cut her off with a shake of the head. “Listen. The reason Anabel Spate moved to Savannah had nothing to do with Zula,” said John. “Or only indirectly. What happened was, she got on a train one summer day and without telling anybody went up to Oberlin. Abe Bragg was there, on leave, waiting for her. And they got married by a Catholic priest.”
Angie tried to make sense of the words. “Anabel Spate and Abe Bragg?”
“I don’t know the details of what happened next, except that Miss Louisa brought enough pressure to bear that the marriage was annulled within the week. The next time Abe came home on leave he married Lavinia, and then he was gone again. After that I don’t think he was back here more than three times before he was killed in action.”
“Christ,” Angie said.
“I told you, it’s explosive stuff.”
“What in the hell could his mother have said to him?”
“Your guess is probably better than mine. It must have been pretty ugly, the whole thing, but at least Abe didn’t have to stick around and face the consequences.”
“So Anabel had to handle it on her own.”
“There wasn’t much to handle, Angie. We are talking about Georgia in the fifties. I can’t claim that things are perfect now, but back then, black on white? It must have been hell for her. Of course she couldn’t stay. She moved to Savannah and made a name for herself as an activist.”
“That’s what Jude was talking about last night.”
“Part of it,” John agreed.
Angie closed her eyes and tried to put it all together. She saw Miss Anabel’s crowded parlor, the pictures on the wall. There had been friends and family and students, but she couldn’t recall Abe Bragg among them, and she thought she would have noticed. She said as much to John.
“Do you have any photos of me hanging on your walls at home?” John said, and Angie had to give him that point, though there was something else, something so small and quiet that she had to close her eyes to try to make sense of it. She saw Miss Zula in Anabel’s parlor and the tenderness in her expression when she touched the older woman’s hand, dark skin against the almost translucent white. The fragile skin of a true redhead, something she had seen in another photograph, not so long ago.
And it came to her: Abe Bragg in civilian clothes and the young woman standing in front of him, the way the camera had caught the movement of her hand as she lifted it to touch his fingers where they rested on her shoulder. White on black. Anabel Spate, Abe Bragg.
“You don’t believe me,” John said.
“Oh, I believe you,” Angie said. “I believe you about Anabel and Abe.”
He threw up his hands. “What does that mean? Miss Anabel isn’t a lesbian, but Miss Zula—” He broke off and his expression stilled.
He said, “You think Miss Zula was in love with her brother’s wife. The brother who abandoned his wife when she needed him most. You think Miss Zula is—”
“Harvey Carson,” Angie finished for him. “Miss Zula buttoned herself.”
“Wait,” John said. “You can’t draw conclusions on such—” He stopped. “Shit.” He ran a hand through his hair. “That’s a trick she teaches in every introduction to writing class—switching genders in a story you want to tell to get some distance from it.”
Angie felt a huge wave of relief, and of appreciation, too, that he had taken this jump, though she could see what it cost him.
“If it is true, is that so horrible?” she asked, more gently. “Maybe she decided to go ahead with the documentary because she’s ready to . . . to . . .” She couldn’t make herself use the cliché, and so she stopped.
He said, “This is what you wanted to talk to me about, that night after the train.”
She nodded. “I saw a connection, and Tony saw it too. I wanted to ask you about it, what you thought.”
“I’ll tell you what I think. I think, if it’s true and you’re right—and if Miss Zula does want the story told—that things are going to get really messy. In every way. At every level. I think the board of regents is going to look for somebody to blame, and it’s most likely to be me. I think we’re in for a couple years of major problems. Christ, Angie,” he said, pushing out a breath. “Is it really necessary?”
Angie looked at his face, at the expression that was half-angry, half-desperate, and she felt those same things rising up in herself. Anger that he should ask such a question, and desperate for a way out of this. “Is what necessary? The documentary? I think you know the answer to that
.”
He ducked his head and looked at his shoes. “I’m wondering if you need to go into this whole business. Do you have to set out to prove that every woman who never married is a lesbian?”
“You jerk,” Angie said, her voice wobbling and cracking, but that was better than shouting, certainly, wasn’t it? The look on his face said it wasn’t, but she couldn’t keep the words from spilling out anyway. “That is the most ignorant thing I’ve ever heard you say, and the most insulting, to me as an individual and as a professional, to Rivera, to Miss Zula, to—”
John had the good sense to look guilty, but he didn’t sound that way. “I didn’t mean it like that, and you know it. You aren’t some third-rate shock journalist.”