by Robert Inman
“Judge Broderick Nettles has no mercy. He will have your fanny for lunch.”
“Active jail time?” Will asked.
Morris thought about it for a moment. “Oh, yes. Along with probation, a fine, maybe community service.”
“Would he let me do the community service as the Weather Wizard?”
“Goddammit!” Morris exploded. “What in the hell is going on here?” His eyes blazed. Will halfway expected him to hurl the pencil and legal pad against the wall. Or maybe even at Will. But Morris got hold of himself after a moment. “I woke up in the middle of the night wondering why in the deuce that bag of pot was in your jacket pocket, how it got there, if you knew it was there, if somebody planted it. ‘Morris,’ I told myself, ‘there is no way Will Baggett would intentionally take a bag of pot to court. Maybe he smokes a little bit of it at home, back behind the garage away from prying eyes. Maybe it puts old Will in the right frame of mind to do the fucking weather on TV. Morris,’ I told myself, ‘sometimes people you think you know will surprise you.’” He stopped for a moment and glared at Will. “Hell, I’ve smoked a little myself from time to time. But take it to court?”
When Will didn’t say anything, Morris placed the pencil back on the legal pad and stood slowly. He leaned across the desk, palms flat on the top of it. “You realize that this really rips it.”
Will met his stare. “Yes.”
“TV or any other kind of responsible job, politics, teaching a Sunday School class, you name it.”
“Yes.”
“Possession of marijuana is a felony offense under North Carolina statute.”
“Yes.” He tried to sound final, unequivocal. Amen and Amen.
Morris reached for the phone. “I’ll call the District Attorney and tell him you want to plead guilty and get it over with.”
“That’s okay. If I’m going to jail, I want to start serving the sentence as soon as possible. Tomorrow would be just fine.”
“You’re either incredibly stupid or you’re some sort of misguided hero,” Morris said.
“Hero?”
“I think I know what happened,” Morris said quietly. “I’m pretty sure of it.”
Will shrugged. Morris stared at him awhile longer and then started dialing.
Will studied Morris’s desktop while Morris waited for the District Attorney. It was neatly arranged -- pencil holder, desk lamp, a wooden carving of a donkey he had brought home from the Democratic National Convention the year they nominated Walter Mondale, an inch-high stack of legal-size file folders, a brass desk lamp. Morris was a neat man who -- despite whatever personna he might have chosen for himself at any given moment -- was a fine attorney. He deserved better than this. Some day he might share a thing or two with Morris deLesseps. But that would be a long way off.
BOOK FOUR
FIFTEEN
He would always associate her with John Coltrane. That’s what was playing on the stereo when he first laid eyes on her. Coltrane, making loose and funky on the sax. And there was Clarice, standing in the open front doorway just behind Morris deLesseps, looking a bit bewildered.
It was an aging, delapidated farmhouse several miles out of Chapel Hill toward Pittsboro where Will lived during his senior year simply because it was cheap and he was having to pay most of his way. Since he had changed his major from Business to Broadcast and Film, the monthly checks from Min had dwindled. She was mad at him, but he had stood his ground about that.
The occupants were an eclectic bunch -- a goateed sociology graduate student, an artist, a musician (owner of the Coltrane album and a devotee of classic jazz, rock and big band music), a Ferlinghetti-inspired poet from the creative writing program, Will and another guy from Broadcast and Film, a non-student who drove a bread truck.
The bread truck driver owned the place. It was habitually grubby and litter-strewn. They had cleaned up a little for the party, at least moved stuff into piles. It was mid-March and there was an early warm spell that held promise of Spring. Will was thankful. The drafty house had been gripped through the Winter by an abiding chill that overwhelmed the small kerosene heater in the living room. In Will’s tiny bedroom off the kitchen, formerly a pantry, he slept under a mound of blankets. But this Friday night all the doors and windows were open. The farmhouse had been airing out all day and some of the stagnant smells of Winter -- stale food, stale beer, mildewed furniture and bedclothes, had dissipated a bit.
She was tall enough that she could look over Morris’s shoulder as he stood in the doorway. Tall and angular, strikingly fine bones in her face, a swath of soft golden hair that swooped down across her forehead, almost covering one eye. She kept flipping it back with her right hand, a movement so utterly graceful that it took Will’s breath. She blinked into the crowded room and there was a sort of what on earth? look on her face. Will was on the far side of the room, a bottle of Budweiser raised almost to his lips. She was framed by Morris’s shoulder and the doorway, stunning in the pale light from the single bare bulb that hung over the crowd in the living room. Will was talking with the sociology graduate student, who was carrying on drunkenly at some length about a certain professor’s bizarre grading habits. Will was on his third Budweiser, a pleasant buzz tickling the back of his brain. “My God,” he said softly. John Coltrane hit a high note, making the sax squeal with ecstasy. “My, my God.”
“Yeah,” the sociology major said. “That Coltrane. He’s a bitch.”
It took him several minutes to corner Morris, who was by now in the kitchen making daquiris. He had left the girl in the living room, where she stood near the door, looking as if she might take flight at any moment. Morris had brought everything for the daquiris in an Igloo cooler -- rum, frozen pineapple concentrate, ice, even a blender for God’s sake. Everybody in the place drinking Budweiser or cheaper, or smoking joints, and here was Morris making daquiris. Morris was a Phi Gam. If you saw him on campus during the week, he would be dressed in fraternity uniform -- khakis, madras shirt, weejuns, often a navy blue blazer with the Phi Gam crest on the breast pocket. But on Friday nights, he was more likely to show up at the farmhouse than the Phi Gam house. He was fascinated by the kind of people who gathered here -- the campus off-beats, the artists and sociologists and writers, the retro musicians, the Broadcast and Film people. He and Will were friends, though Morris was a year older and Will wasn’t a fraternity man. Morris was just barely a senior because he kept changing majors. He had been, at one time or another, in psychology, premed, chemical engineering, finance and art history. He was now back to psychology and thought he might go on to law school. Morris’s Friday night farmhouse dates ran by habit to plain-faced girls with long, straight hair and long, straight tie-dyed dresses who played guitar and read poetry. Not tonight.
“Who is she?” Will demanded.
Morris poured rum into the blender, a good deal of rum, fitted on the rubber top and flipped the switch. It whined and rattled. “Who?” he asked over the racket.
“That incredible creature,” Will pointed to the living room where he could just see the top of whoever-she-was’s head through the pall of smoke that hung over the crush of bodies. Coltrane was making the air shimmer.
Morris gave him a close look. “Down, boy. You’re drooling.”
“Who?” he demanded.
“Clarice Palmer. Duke. Of the Greensboro Palmers. She’s out of your league, son.”
“The hell you say.”
“Want a daquiri?”
“No, Morris. That is definitely not what I want.”
“You’re with Morris,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Slumming?”
She gave him a puzzled look, then caught his meaning. She looked over his shoulder, her gaze sweeping the room. “Morris said there’s nothing like this at Duke. He’s right.” She had a rather small voice, almost timid, but it had an incredible timbre to it -- rich, colored with soft browns and umbers, a half-octave lower than you might expect. He could hear the col
orings in it even if he couldn’t understand exactly what she was saying.
“I’m Will Baggett.”
“Oh. Yes. Morris told me about you.”
“Morris says…” Coltrane’s sax screeched and Clarice’s eyes went wide. A deer caught in headlights. He took her elbow and guided her out onto the front porch. He thought she might resist, but she didn’t. “Morris says you’re out of my league,” he said when they were outside.
“What league is that?”
He looked back through the open door at the living room -- packed to capacity, everybody shouting to be heard over the music, the conversations intense, the Coltrane pulsing. The walls of the old house seemed almost to bulge. At a party two weeks ago, a piece of ceiling plaster had collapsed onto the crowd and a girl had been knocked cold. It was a jazz crowd, even the bread truck driver’s friends. There was some Charlie Mingus and some Modern Jazz Quartet and some Brubeck all stacked on the stereo, waiting for Coltrane to finish. The musician had a nice collection. He played trombone.
He turned back to her. “I live here,” he said. “These are my people.”
“I can see why Morris likes it. There seems to be one of each.”
“And Morris is all of the above.”
She laughed. “Or none. On any given day.”
They just looked at each other for a moment, but you wouldn’t call it an awkward silence. A sizing-up, maybe. Then she said, “I’ve heard you on the radio.”
He worked the night shift at a Chapel Hill station, Sunday through Thursday. He played jazz, folk, some light rock -- an odd mix, maybe, but students liked it. Local businesses liked it because the students listened, and they bought a lot of advertising on his program. The station manager told him he could play recordings of pigs grunting if that’s what the students and the advertisers wanted.
“You’ve got a good voice,” she said.
“Not as good as yours. You could talk on the radio and melt butter in Raleigh.”
They looked at each other some more. “Do you date many Chapel Hill men?” he asked.
“Do you date many Duke women?”
“Never have felt the need until just now.”
She was amused. She had a nice smile that went nicely with her rich voice. She was wearing a yellow dress with some green and blue figures on it, cut low across the front, but not so low as to be bold. She was, he thought, probably the only woman here who owned a bra. He had never seen anything quite like her, not this incredible package of stunning looks and graceful movement and yet a certain air of vulnerability, uncertainty, that made him want to touch her cheek, to reassure her that he would make everything all right.
He was working on this fourth beer. He might never lay eyes on her again. “Come home with me,” he said.
“You are home,” she answered.
And then Morris showed up with the daquiris.
Hours later, when the party had mellowed out and everybody was drunk or stoned or both, the musician got out his trombone and played along with an old Tommy Dorsey Orchestra recording of “Mood Indigo.” And then the crowd began to yell for Will and the musician turned off the stereo and Will did some imitations -- John Wayne doing Shakespeare tubbee or not tubbee, that’s the question, Pilgrim, and a new routine he had worked up, Senator Sam Ervin questioning Nixon at the Watergate hearings while Tiny Tim sang “Tiptoe Through The Tulips” in the background. He could see her at the back of the crowd, daquiri in hand. She was laughing.
Two o’clock in the morning. Morris was in the kitchen. He had run out of daquiri ingredients and was drinking one of Will’s Budweisers and carrying on a heated argument with the musician that had something to do with Fats Domino’s piano technique. It didn’t make much sense to Will. He went looking.
He found her on the front steps, the yellow dress drawn up around her legs. The air was cool. It was, after all, March. She looked up at him, bored and tired. The swath of hair cascaded across her forehead. She pushed it back. He thought, please don’t. He brought a jacket and draped it over her shoulders and she gave him a grateful smile.
He sat down beside her. “How long have you known Morris?”
“Since his art history phase. Was that last year or the year before?”
“With Morris, it’s hard to remember. What’re you studying?”
It was such a lame line, he thought, such a shopworn opening gambit. Surely, she was used to better. But it wasn’t an opening gambit, he thought. He had already opened, and now he was exploring. She didn’t seem to mind. “Elementary education,” she answered. “You?”
“I started out in Business, but then I got a job pushing camera at the public TV studio and decided that’s what I wanted to do. So I switched to Broadcast and Film.”
“I suppose you want to own NBC or something like that.”
“Not really.”
“Then what?”
“Maybe program a network. The stuff that’s on prime time now -- I could do better.”
“I’m afraid I don’t watch much television.”
“You’re not missing anything.”
“What would you put on?”
“Something to make you think. You know, in there tonight,” he waved a hand toward the living room, “did you listen to the conversation?”
“It was sort of hard,” she said.
“Well, it was mostly people talking mostly about other people. A little about places and things. Not much about ideas. And these are fairly intelligent people.”
“What does that have to do with television?”
“I want it to be about ideas.”
He was looking out across the yard, elbows propped on the top step, legs stretched out in front of him, but he could feel her eyes on him. He turned to her. “Do I sound incredibly Boy Scout?”
She smiled. “No.” Then, “You were funny in there tonight. But that was mostly about people.”
“Not really. You can entertain people and still be about ideas. Watergate? That wasn’t about Nixon, it was about faith.”
“Faith?”
“You get in your car in the morning and you put the key in the ignition and turn it and you have faith that the car will start. You elect a president and you have some faith that he won’t try to steal the country from you. Make fun of Nixon and you show people how ridiculous he is, and it’s not far from that to showing how he broke faith. Ideas don’t have to be boring. It depends on what you do with them.”
“If you make fun of Nixon on television, even now that he’s gone, a lot of people get…”
“Pissed off.”
“I really don’t like that word.”
“Sorry. They get upset.”
“Yes.”
“Disturbed.”
“Yes.”
“Well, television ought to disturb people sometimes. Television’s too damned timid.”
She smiled. “And you’re going to change all that.”
He returned the smile. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I ought to own NBC.”
Then there was a noise at their backs and he turned to see Morris lurching through the door with the Igloo cooler in his arms. “Goddamn Fats Domino,” he said. Then he looked down at Will and Clarice there on the steps. “Son, are you trying to snake my date?”
“Yes,” Will said matter-of-factly, “I sure am.”
*****
He called Morris from the radio station Sunday night. “I’m in love,” he said.
“I told you, she’s out of your league,” Morris said.
“I don’t think so. I can offer her things you can’t.”
“Such as?”
“NBC.”
Morris grumbled, but he finally gave Will the number.
She was alone in her room. Her roomate was engaged and out with her fiancee for the evening. They talked while the records were on and then she listened to the radio while he adlibbed ads for bookstores and coffee shops and introduced the next number. Four hours later, toward the end of his shift, h
e said, “Well, we can just keep talking on the phone or I can ask you for a date.”
“Yes, you could.”
“Friday?”
“The farmhouse?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
He picked her up at Duke and they went to dinner and a movie. He kissed her good night and they held the kiss for a good long while, not anywhere near the usual first-date goodnight kiss. On Saturday night he borrowed the apartment of a friend who had gone home for the weekend. He put some Coltrane on the stereo and made whiskey sours. And sometime not long after midnight they made love.
*****
Will moved out of the farmhouse and into another apartment, this one sublet from another friend who had come down with mononucleosis and had gone home to Tarboro to recuperate. The farmhouse was no place for a nice girl. And Clarice Palmer was, despite the complete abandon with which she gave herself to him, the nicest girl he had ever met.
They were both giddy with their discovery of what they could do to and with each other. Sex seemed almost a thing apart from both in which they each came as pilgrims, worshiping at the shrine of it and receiving its blessing and benediction. There is this thing, and there are our things, and we engage our things in this thing and our things disappear into this thing and … He tried to articulate it. She told him to shut up and just do it. She had, he discovered, despite her abiding air of vulnerability, a good sense of herself and a way of saying something quite forcefully when she made up her mind. He was intrigued.
Yes, she was the nicest of girls, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, from the finest of Greensboro families, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Morris told him a good deal about her. President of the Kappa Kappa Gammas at Duke. A former Greensboro debutante. Recipient of the DAR Good Citizenship Award. Presbyterian. And she had come to him as a virgin, Will was pretty sure of that. The stunning thing was not so much that she devoured sex, but that after twenty years of chastity in a strictly-codified Presbyterian-Kappa-DAR-debutante world, she had so utterly and happily abandoned chastity with him. He felt quite rare.