“Stop it,” Shumaker said.
“Well, really, Son. You know what? When I was first married to your mother, I formed a friendship with this other woman, someone in the math department. We were at a conference together, and I got to liking being around her and listening to her talk and watching her move.” The professor looked over his shoulder at the doorway, then turned and lowered his voice. “So I said something about her, about how she was sexy, to Terry. You know? Brothers talking. And Terry had already been through his divorce with Megan—well, you never knew Megan. But you know what he said to me? He interrupted me as I was talking, right? Two guys in their twenties, and he shook his head at me and said, ‘Buddy, even if she can plug that thing into the wall socket and make it spin. Don’t do it.’ ”
“Jesus,” said Shumaker, low.
“It’s a rough way to talk, I know. But the point was well taken.”
“I don’t want to marry Sonya anymore, Dad.”
His father raised his voice again. “I’m not talking about Sonya. Don’t be stupid. This isn’t about her. It’s not even about this—Alexa person. It’s about you. What kind of man you want to be. What kind of man I’m afraid you’re gonna turn yourself into.”
Again, they were both silent.
“Well, it is finally your business,” said the professor. And then he leaned in close. “But maybe just for me, just as a very small favor for me, okay? Could you maybe take some time—just a while, a little probationary period, say—where you try, for me, and maybe for your mother as well, to stop thinking with your dick.” He stared, nodded very slightly, then turned, walked to the door, and looked back. “Come on. We’ll take you home.”
“My car’s at the airport.”
“You can’t drive.” His tone was pure exasperation. He went on with sardonic patience: “We got your car. Your mother drove it back to our place and I followed her. That’s why we didn’t get here right away. You’re not going to your apartment. You have to stay down for a few days. No exertions, no lifting, no driving or drinking. Just rest. You have to come with us.”
Shumaker followed his father down the long corridor, where his mother waited, looking sorrowful and embarrassed, too. In the car, they didn’t speak. The radio was on low, two men talking about the National Football League.
At the house, his father reached into his jacket pocket, brought out a small cellophane bag, and handed it to him. His cell phone and wallet were inside.
“Personal effects?” Shumaker asked.
His mother gasped. “That is not slightly funny.”
“I don’t think he meant it to be funny,” said his father.
“I’m sorry for all of this,” Shumaker told them. He went up to his room and sat on the bed. His parents had stayed downstairs and were talking in low tones; it sounded like an argument. He touched Alexa’s number. No answer. There was one message, from the night before—Sonya. “Just getting ready to come home. I can’t wait to see you. I love you.”
He lay back and listened to it again, and then tried once more to call Alexa. Nothing. Not even a way to leave a message. Just the ringing, while he listened and waited.
—
HE TRIED THE NUMBER over and over in the next four days. His mother brought food upstairs to the room and attempted to talk to him. His father came in once, but mostly kept to his downstairs study.
“I don’t understand why I have to stay here,” Shumaker said to his mother.
“You’ve had a concussion. There’s no mystery about it at all. You have to stay down. In case you haven’t noticed, you’re still unsteady on your feet.”
It was true. Getting up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom—the pain medication they had given him had a diuretic effect—he had to keep one hand on the wall and make his way slowly. The world spun. There were headaches. He lay in bed with the cell phone to his ear listening to the ringing of Alexa’s. It went on and on. He thought of calling Buddy Lessing. He could use the painting as pretext. But he lacked the nerve. Once he fell asleep with the little phone at his ear, and the faint ringing on the other end, and woke up to find it silent and dead under his arm.
VII
At the end of the long week he got into his rust-eroded car and drove to his apartment and the pile of work, of attempts to depict her in various sketches, and the abortive smearing of oil, as he thought of it, of the painting itself. His mother followed him and watched him go inside. He waved from the door, called to her that he would be at the restaurant that evening.
After he closed the door, he stood for a moment looking at the room: his mother had been busy here. The dishes were put away. The sink was clean. She had spread a comforter on the divan and arranged the chairs around the one table. The recliner on which he had stacked work and clothes was clear, the clothes were hanging in the closet, and the work was neatly arranged on the top shelf of the cinder-block-and-plank bookcase. He moved to the divan and sat crying. There was nothing but junk in his mailbox. He looked into his little refrigerator and found one beer and a Styrofoam container of rice and beans from the Rum Boogie Café. He threw this away and drank the beer. He had a powerful thirst. After the beer, he gulped three tall glasses of water from the tap. Then he walked out into the sun and stood gazing up the short gravel drive to the road, thinking of Alexa. Where was she? He walked down the street to the 7-Eleven and the public phone. But it was broken. There was no handset.
At last he drove to the Orpheum and parked across the street. Tourists had already begun gathering at the head of Beale Street, and police stood at the barricade, smoking and talking. It wasn’t even noon yet and the heat was oppressive, humidity rising from the river. There wasn’t anyone at the Orpheum. The doors were locked, the big lobby empty and dark. Tonight was classic-movie night: Desk Set.
Back at the apartment, he tried to focus on the painting, and three hours passed with the quickness of work time: he looked up and realized that he had spent it toiling with unsteady fingers over one element of the color in the hair framing the face—that face—meticulously putting daubs of tawny shade on one side of a curl, a thin streak of white and gold on the other. He wanted to get it right, the way the sun blazed there. It was as if he were manipulating the light itself from the end of his brush. He stepped back and looked at what he had, the flawless body in that indolent pose. His heart leaped. He threw the brush he was holding against the door—and saw a man standing there, staring in at him through the window. His heart leaped again, and a sound rose from the back of his throat.
The other knocked on the glass, and that also startled him. He reached to open the door, gasping low. “Yes?”
“David Shumaker, right?”
“Yes.”
The man wore a sweat-stained Memphis Redbirds baseball cap and a white short-sleeved shirt with big sweat circles under the arms. His unshaven face was squarish, wide jawed, with deep-socketed dull brown eyes and a thin nose that stood out of the center of it like a blade. “I’ve been coming here every day for a week,” he said. “Mr. Lessing wants to know what the progress is on his painting.”
“It’s not finished.”
He reached into his pants pocket and brought out an iPhone. “I’m supposed to take a picture of it.”
“It’s not ready for that,” Shumaker told him quickly. “Please. And my—the—the model hasn’t been anyplace where I could find her.”
“Nobody could find you, man.”
“I had an injury. I was in the hospital. I’m back now. And I want to finish the painting.”
The man looked past him into the apartment, at the painting. “Looks done to me, man.”
“It’s not finished,” Shumaker said.
“Okay.” The other shrugged. “I’ll tell him.”
“But I need the model.” Perhaps this was said a bit too forcefully.
The man’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll pass it on, buddy.”
“Tell her I’ve been trying to call her,” said Shumaker, adding qui
ckly, “I mean could you please tell her for me?”
“Hey, I’m not in touch with her, man. I’ll tell Mr. Lessing.”
“But she’s got to know I couldn’t call her because I was in the hospital with an injury.”
“Got it,” the man said, walking away.
“Tell her I’m here,” said Shumaker.
—
HE CAME TO REALIZE, during the course of the long afternoon, that the painting was actually quite good, and that his sense of the smeary nature of it was false, was a kind of holding on. It was a precise and achingly realistic rendering of her physical splendor. There was nothing left to do, short of starting over from some other angle, with another canvas.
And she was nowhere.
She did not come to him or answer her phone through the afternoon and into the evening. He went to the restaurant and took his uncle’s questioning about being assaulted in full view of everyone by a young woman in an airport. Others teased him, talking about the fury of a woman scorned. And how even after attacking the offending former fiancé, Sonya had possessed the presence of mind to wait for her luggage before leaving the airport. A couple of the waitstaff knew her, of course, and they were obviously being careful not to speak of what she was doing with herself now, and he did not ask. He performed his job with a kind of blind diligence, always expecting Buddy Lessing to show up, or Alexa. But the night passed, and on his way home he stopped and used a credit card to buy a bottle of straight rye whiskey. When he got to the apartment, he opened the bottle and poured a tumbler full, planning to drink himself into a stupor. It was something he might show Alexa, something that might cause her to take pity on him. But before he had drunk half of what he’d poured, it made him feel sick, and then, as if something in the very air were seeking to instruct him, he developed a toothache. It lasted the night. He ended up rubbing the whiskey on his gums to numb them.
Early that next morning as he started out of the place, sleepless and still feeling the toothache, there she was, coming down the gravel path from the road. He waited in the open door, expecting her to step into his arms. She smiled and edged past him, actually stepped aside when he reached for her. Moving to the divan, she sat down and gazed impassively at the painting on its easel. It was the unemotional stare of someone looking at herself in a mirror. Then she glanced at the room. “You cleaned the place.”
“My mother.”
“Nice.”
“I kept trying to call you,” he said. “I’ve been desperate. I got hurt. I thought you were gone for good. Jesus. I got hurt. I had a fall.”
“But you’re all right.”
“No, I’m not all right.” He picked up the bottle of whiskey on the table and placed his paint-stained finger on the line that showed it was almost half gone. “You see this? I drank this down to there. Why didn’t you answer me? Why didn’t you call me back?” He put the bottle down hard. “You can’t imagine what I’ve—” She had spoken as he began, and he caught himself. “What?”
“We were in Spain.”
“Spain.”
Smiling that alluring soft-lipped smile, she went on, in a faintly incredulous tone, as if there could be nothing more reasonable than deciding on a whim to fly across the Atlantic. “I said we were in Spain.”
He could not speak.
“Buddy decided he wanted to see Barcelona. And Madrid. And drink Spanish wine.”
Silence.
“You know how he is. He’s got all the money in the world and he’s like a spoiled little boy who can’t be controlled.”
“I love you,” Shumaker told her. “I’m in love with you.”
“You just love misbehaving with me. Like I love it. I do. And I do misbehave sometimes, you know, just to misbehave. I have fun. And I’ve just been to Spain.”
He took a step toward her. “I love you. My God, Alexa.”
“You don’t know me.”
“What’s changed?” He could barely get the words out.
“Well, we finally got married. On a cruise up the Spanish coast. Buddy and me. The captain married us.”
“Oh, God. You—oh, Jesus—”
“It’s all right, baby, nothing else has changed. Well, almost nothing else.”
“You—” He moved to the recliner and sat down, like a collapse. The painting was across from him, exactly to her left. It was as if she were posing for a photograph of herself with the painting—she had even taken something of the same pose, the legs crossed, the long, lovely torso very straight, so that the breasts stood out.
“Oh, God,” he breathed.
“I told you I was engaged. What’d you think that meant?”
“Why didn’t you call me back? All those calls.”
“I left my phone in Memphis. Isn’t that silly? And I couldn’t make up an excuse to call you from Spain, on my honeymoon.” She sighed; it was more of a little laugh. “Just wouldn’t look good. But you know what? It turns out it would’ve been okay.” She looked at the painting. The gesture made it clear that now she was going to change the subject. With an air of someone who feels relief after long effort, she said, “Ah, so it’s done now. And what a perfect likeness.”
“Please leave,” he managed to say.
“No, but I mean it really is okay.” She pulled the skirt she wore up over her knees. “Come here, lover.”
After another series of inexpressibly dazzling passes on the divan, she sat up and stretched, as if just waking from a nap. Gazing at her long spine, he realized finally that it wasn’t the things she did during sex so much as the extraordinary flawlessness of all her features, of every turn of flesh and hair, and the slender hands, the eyes, the unreal fineness of her form and her willingness to use herself for delights. She looked over her shoulder at him.
“Oh, Christ,” he said. “I don’t care. He’s an old, old man. I don’t care. I’ll wait for something to happen.”
“Stop it. Stop that.”
“No, I mean it. And we can go on like this. I’ll find a way to make it last. I’ll fuck this painting up—I’ll splash black paint on it or burn it, so I have to start over.”
She laughed.
He lay there watching this. The laugh went on. “No,” she got out finally. “Don’t do that. I’m telling you. Really, it’s all right.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, see—thing is, he knows all about it.”
“He—what? He knows about this?”
“It came out when we were in Madrid. And he—well, he wants to watch us. He—he says he wants to sit and watch us do it.”
“He knows about us.”
She merely gazed back, a stare as blank as that of a carved-stone face. “Seventy-three calls from you on my phone. No explaining that anyway, right?”
A sudden rush of fright gripped him. “You’re serious.”
“So even if it didn’t come out when we were in Spain.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Neither of them spoke for a few seconds.
“And?” Shumaker demanded.
“And what? He wants to watch us.”
“Jesus. The answer’s no, right?”
“Well, I guess. If you say so.”
He was unable to utter a word.
“But I don’t know. I mean I think it might be kind of kinky.”
“Kinky,” he said. “Kind of? Kind of kinky?”
“Darling. It’s all—being alive. New things. I’m not settling down for any one man, and he’s all right with that. He’s very cool.”
“I know, but—no. No, we love each other.”
“Well.” Her cell phone buzzed in her purse on the floor. She took it out and looked at the little window. “It’s him.”
“Don’t answer it.”
She smiled with a coy tilt of her head, brushed the lustrous strands of hair from the side of her face, and held the phone to her ear. “Hi.”
Shumaker put his slacks on and went to the door and out. There didn’t seem to be any strength i
n his legs. The sun blazed through the pine boughs and leaves of the trees; the smell of crepe myrtle was so heavy that his gorge rose. He wanted to go back to before he ever knew her, wanted out of this urging of his body when she was near. He saw in a moment of sickening clarity that spiritually she repelled him. There was nothing he liked about her. And he wanted her so much that here he was, now, standing in the heat and thickness of the summer afternoon, entertaining the idea of going through with it—giving Buddy Lessing what he desired—as long as he, Shumaker, could go on being with her.
“God,” he said aloud. Then again, under his breath. “Oh, God.”
She came out, dressed, her purse over her shoulder. “I have to go.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want me to come back?”
He shook his head. But as she started to where she had parked, he said, “Yes.”
She stopped and turned. “The painting’s really fine.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Beautiful.”
“I’ll tell Buddy.”
“No—look. It’s not finished. I’ve still got some work to do on it.”
“I sure can’t see what.”
They were standing perhaps ten feet apart. “Well, you’ll just have to trust me. I know what I’m doing. It needs a few more touches.”
“Is that an excuse for us?”
“No,” he said flatly, certain that she wouldn’t believe him, and feeling sick again, but now not for what this was but for the prospect of not seeing her again. Before she started on, he said, “You’re just—it’s just—gaming with you, isn’t it.”
“Gaming?”
He waited.
“Funny thing to say. That’s Buddy’s word. Anyway I loved every minute of being with you. You’re very nice, you know. A tender lover.”
Living in the Weather of the World Page 15