by Robert Inman
Was it love? They were surely in love with each other’s bodies, with curve and hollow and orifice and protuberance and with eruption and pyrotechnics. They might even be in love with each other. Everything was happening so fast, and so spectacularly, he gave little thought to love as anything more than what they were doing and saying to each other here and now. For one of the first times in a great long while, Will Baggett didn’t feel as if he was on probation. He felt totally, unquestioningly, accepted by a magnificent young woman who was both beautiful and passionate. Morris was dead wrong. She wasn’t out of his league at all, nor he out of hers. He asked no questions about why. He just gave himself to it completely. And if that, the complete giving, was love, or at least part of it, fine. Let it be love.
*****
At the same time he was pursuing Clarice Palmer, he was, with graduation looming, pursuing a job.
There was an opening at the television station in New Bern, near the coast, for a “production assistant,” -- a camera-pushing, broom-wielding flunky. He sent resume’s and letters of recommendation from faculty members, telephoned at least once a week. Virtually every other prospective graduate in the Broadcast and Film curriculum was after the same position. The job market was tight in local television and the competition for entry-level openings, even at bare-bones stations like New Bern where the facilities were primitive and the pay was pitiful, was fierce. The station manager got weary of hearing from the horde of applicants and sent word back to Chapel Hill that anybody who contacted him directly would be automatically eliminated from consideration.
Will drove to New Bern on a Friday night in early April, went to the station, found the production supervisor, and offered to work on weekends without pay. “Just looking for experience,” he said. Throughout April and May he made the trek, sleeping in his car in the station parking lot, operating a camera on the weekend news shows and doing odd jobs about the studio, returning to Raleigh in time for his Sunday evening shift at the radio station. Clarice complained about his absences, and he missed her terribly, but this was about the rest of his life. Maybe she was too, but she wasn’t a job, a way to make a living. Without a job, there could be no Clarice, anyway.
On a Sunday afternoon in mid-May, with graduation only two weeks away, he rounded a hallway corner into the front lobby and almost ran into the station manager, who glared at him and demanded, “Who are you?”
“Will Baggett.”
“When did I hire you?”
“You haven’t. Yet.”
“You’re one of those Chapel Hill pests.”
“Yes sir.”
The station manager looked him over with a sneer. “One lousy job opening that any idiot off the street could fill, and I’ve got half the Chapel Hill student body asking for it. What makes you so special?”
“I’m eager, ambitious, and terribly earnest. Sir.”
“And why the hell do you need a college education to push a camera in a rinky-dink television station?”
“I don’t,” Will said. “But I’m gonna do something important in television someday. I’ve got to start somewhere. I’ll give you two of the best years of my life, and then I’m out of here.”
The station manager stared at him. I am either a brash genius or a complete fool, Will thought.
“Are you the doofus that’s been working for free?”
“Yes sir.”
The station manager stared for a moment longer. “Okay.” He brushed past Will and headed for the front door.
“Does that mean I’m hired?”
“What the hell,” the station manager with a wave, and was gone. On Tuesday, Will got a formal job application in the mail. He would start full-time in New Bern as soon as he could finish his final exams. He wasn’t planning to hang around for graduation. Why bother? Min had shown no interest in attending, and at the moment, he hadn’t the foggiest idea where Wingfoot was living. The last Will had heard, he was at Hilton Head Island doing construction work. But that had been a year ago. Wingfoot remained elusive.
So, Will Baggett had a job. And now he would see about Clarice Palmer.
SIXTEEN
On a weekend in mid-May Clarice invited him to Greensboro to meet the Palmers. She hadn’t said much about them, just that the family had been in Greensboro for several generations and that her father and brother were involved in some kind of business in which they handled money. It took about fifteen minutes from the time of his arrival for Will to understand that they were Old Greensboro, and wore the title and aura with an air of carefully-cultivated grace. Clarice’s mother, Consuela, nonchalantly dropped nuggets of Palmer bona fides into the introductory conversation. Palmer ancestors had been among the founders of Greensboro Country Club, where they would be lunching on Sunday after church at First Presbyterian. Their home, a sprawling two-story cedar-and-rock, was at the heart of Irving Park, Greensboro’s most prestigious neighborhood. Politically, they were conservative Democrats who had no truck with activists, social engineers and professional do-gooders.
As the weekend wore on, Will observed that Sidney and Consuela moved and spoke with exaggerated ease and seemed to go to great lengths to cultivate an air of not having to try hard at anything they did or were. The mantle of gentility appeared tailor-made for their shoulders. Greensboro Palmers, Will surmised, might work like the dickens to maintain their status – financial, social, political. But you’d never see one of them sweat.
Consuela (her mother had had a weakness for Spanish novelists, she said) reminded Will a bit of Aunt Margaret, who had seemed more Baggett than the Baggetts, though Consuela was less obvious about the status she had attained by marriage. Consuela was Old Greensboro in her own right, she made clear. Will caught the underlying message: Old Greensboro girls married Old Greensboro boys. Morris was right, Will thought. I am indeed out of my league. But to hell with it. I am damned determined not to be on probation here, not even for the weekend.
Clarice’s older siblings lived in Greensboro -- brother Donald and his wife Pookie; sister Fern (two years out of Sophie Tucker, dabbling in art, waiting for a suitable match with one of Old Greensboro’s eligible young men) -- but they didn’t make an appearance during the weekend, nor were they included in Sunday lunch at the country club. That would have made it, Will suspected, too much of an occasion.
The table Sidney had reserved was off to one side of the dining room, next to double French doors that looked out on the practice putting green. It was a spectacular day. Dogwood and azaleas were in full bloom across the club grounds, their aromas drifting in to mingle with the scents and muted voices of their fellow diners, dressed and coiffed and powdered in Sunday best. The Palmers seemed as essential a part of Greensboro Country Club as the paneled walls and damask drapes and oriental rugs. Will, though wearing a new suit and tie, though he felt fairly confident that he was using the silverware correctly, was on edge. Probation, no. But he still wanted to make a decent, or at least not indecent, impression on these people. He had labored for twenty-four hours to maintain an air of casual cheer and good manners without seeming to toady to the Palmers. Sidney had been watchful and distant, peering at Will occasionally over the top of whatever issue of the Wall Street Journal he happened to be reading at the moment. The weekends, he said, were when he caught up on his Journals .
Will knew, of course, that he was being measured, as any man would measure a young buck who panted after his daughter. But Consuela had obviously decided to make no great fuss over this particular young buck. Her air was lighthearted, as if Will were some distant cousin’s boy who had popped in for the weekend and would vanish into family obscurity when it was over. She had asked only the most cursory questions about his background and none about his breeding. “I’m from the Wilmington area,” he said. It seemed to be quite enough for Consuela. Everything about her said, This is nothing of consequence. Ah, but it was. And if Will needed anything to remind him that it was something of consequence, it was the wrenching effort he a
nd Clarice had made in trying to keep their hands off each other, at least in the presence of the elder Palmers.
So here was Will, at lunch with the Greensboro Palmers on a spectacular Spring Sunday in the elegant dining room of the Greensboro Country Club, his beloved sitting across the table from him, her stockinged foot rubbing lightly against his trousered thigh, his erection threatening to make him faint into his soup. At any moment, he half expected Sidney Palmer to lean over to him and say, quite evenly, “Young man, that faint line of perspiration on your upper lip gives you the look of someone who might be diddling my daughter.”
Instead, Sidney Palmer said something else. “Are you a golfer, Will?”
“Hah! Huh?” He dropped his spoon with a clatter and turned to stare, not at Sidney, but at Consuela, sitting at the end of the table to his left. Gay, lighthearted Consuela, clad in floral print – sufficient for a Presbyterian Sunday, but nothing so dressy as to suggest there was anything remotely serious about this young man with whom the Palmers were sharing lunch. “Sorry,” Will said. He made to pick up his spoon, but thought better of it. A man in social peril with a hard-on shouldn’t try to eat soup. Clarice’s foot slid another inch toward his crotch. “A golfer!” Will cried, his voice a couple of octaves north of normal. “No! I’m not a golfer.”
Silence settled over the table. Will stole a glance at Clarice, who gave him a quick wink. A waiter approached with the main course, the centerpiece of which was a thick slab of prime rib.
At the other end of the table, Sidney Palmer suddenly roused himself. “Speaking of golf…”
“Yes dear,” Consuela smiled at him.
“There was a Baggett fellow here at the club some years ago,” he said.
“Clint Baggett,” Consuela said. “The oil distributor.”
“No, that wasn’t his name. And he certainly wasn’t into oil. This fellow was a hustler. Showed up one weekend and damn near cleaned out a couple of the members playing five-hundred-dollar nassaus. He left just ahead of the Sheriff. I was the one who called the Sheriff.”
Will wasn’t paying much attention. He stared at the prime rib on the plate in front of him, pink in the middle, oozing fragrant juices. His erection ratcheted up another notch. It was becoming painful.
“Oh, that one,” Consuela nodded. “I remember Maude Fletcher talking about him. Right handsome, Maude said. But,” she added quickly, “not the kind you’d want…Talbert…Tolbert…”
“Taylor. No, Tyler. Tyler Baggett.”
Will’s head jerked up.
“Killed in a plane crash, as I remember,” Sidney said. “Flying drunk, probably.”
Will stared at Sidney. “No, he wasn’t drunk. It was the exhaust system. They all passed out and the plane kept flying.”
Sidney stared back and his face drained of color. “Tyler Baggett…”
“My father,” Will said. Clarice withdrew her foot. The steel thing in his lap melted into limp noodle.
From the other end of the table: “Oh my God.” Gay, lighthearted Consuela looked stricken, as if a pigeon had dive-bombed her gaspacho.
Will looked across at Clarice. Her lips were pursed, her brow furrowed. What’s going on here? Where did all this come from? He had told her little of his background, only that his parents had been killed in a plane crash when he was thirteen and he had been raised by a cousin. In truth, they hadn’t really talked about much at all, what with all their groping and entering and ecstasy. And it shouldn’t matter, he thought now. None of it. But obviously, it did.
Something akin to grief settled over the table. They were all witnesses at the scene of a bad wreck. And not just any wreck. Something both horrid and distasteful, like an overturned chicken truck, all feathers and runny doo-doo. Sidney and Consuela uttered barely a word for the rest of the meal, and precious few as they rode back to the house in Sidney’s Mercedes.
When he descended the stairs with his suitcase, Clarice was emerging from the study, closing the door behind her. They stopped in the front hallway, just looking at each other. Her hand went to her hair. She tugged, swept it back over her ear, tugged again. “I’m…I’m going back to school later.”
“Your car’s there,” Will said. He had planned to drop her off at Duke, then pack his car in Chapel Hill and drive on to New Bern. He started work in the morning.
“Daddy will take me. I’ve got some things to do here.”
“Clarice…”
She kissed him, but it was just a light kiss, on the cheek. “It’s okay, Will. Let me handle this.”
*****
He called her room at Duke, where final exams were still underway, on Wednesday. She was out, studying in the library, her roommate said. He left his new number in New Bern.
She finally called on Saturday night. She was crying. It took him a minute or so to get her calmed down enough to understand her. And then she said, “I can’t marry you, Will.”
Time seemed to stop. He had no idea how long he held the phone, listening to her sobs, feeling physically ill and humiliated and angry and trying to figure out who to blame: Tyler Baggett? The snotty Greensboro Palmers? Clarice? Himself?
Finally he said, “Who said anything about marrying?” His voice was hard and cold, floating up from the wretched icy pit of his heart.
“Will, please, try to understand…”
He hung up. Then he collapsed against the wall next to the phone and let his feet slide out from under him until he hunkered there, back to the wall, in utter desolation. “Goddamn ’em!” he cried out. “Goddamn ’em all.” But there were no tears. He wasn’t about to give them that satisfaction.
*****
There was the job, and he immersed himself in it. He learned all he could about studio production and pestered the rest of the staff with questions about newsgathering, advertising sales, promotion, station management. He had a timetable, a plan. Two years in New Bern, as he had promised the station manager, learning as much as he could about the basics of TV station operation. Then a larger market -- maybe something like Charlotte or Des Moines or even a place as big as Miami or Chicago. And then a network job, working his way up the ladder to the seat of power. He wanted to run things, to have his hand on the throttle where he could make a difference.
At mid-summer, though, something happened that altered his course. An opportunity fell at his feet in the form of Grady Lee Potts.
Grady Lee was the weathercaster -- a portly, balding man with bad breath and a terrible temper who had been a fixture in New Bern television from the day the station went on the air. In a station that small, he performed a variety of duties ranging from weathercasting to hosting an afternoon kids’ cartoon show dressed as Truffles the Clown, all done with ill humor that he concealed from the audience but spewed generously over the young men and women of the production crew. He suffered terribly from heartburn and popped Rolaids like candy. The crew members referred to him fondly as “Acid Ass.”
One sultry night shortly after eleven, as Grady Lee was delivering the weather, delineating the sweeping line of an occluded front on the map with a magic marker, he stopped suddenly, lowered his arm, and turned very slowly to Will, who was serving that evening as floor manager -- giving time cues and indicating which camera was taking a shot at any particular moment. Grady Lee’s mouth curled into what appeared to be the beginning of a snarl. Will’s stomach lurched. Oh God, what have I done now? Then Grady Lee’s eyes rolled back in his head and his legs buckled and he pitched face-forward, out of the camera shot. The lapel microphone he was wearing picked up the WHUMP as he smacked into the floor, his head bouncing a couple of times on the linoleum, blood spurting from his nose and mouth.
There was stunned silence for a long moment. “Holy shit,” one of the cameramen said through his intercom headset.
“What the hell’s going on out there?” the director barked into their ears from the control room.
“Want me to get a shot of him?” the cameraman asked.
“No,�
�� Will said calmly. “I think the sonofabitch just died. Go to commercial.”
While commercials played, Gordon, the news anchor, bustled over as Will and the other crew members knelt over Grady Lee. Will pressed a finger against Grady Lee’s neck, probing for a pulse. “Yep,” Will said, “Dead as a doornail.”
“What’re we gonna do?”
They looked at Gordon. “I don’t know a damn thing about weather,” he protested.
“What the hell,” Will said with a shrug. With a grunt, he rolled Grady Lee over, unclipped the microphone from his lapel, and clipped it onto the front of his own shirt. He pried the magic marker from Grady Lee’s hand, then stood and faced the camera. He took off his headset and handed it to the cameraman. “I’m doing the weather,” he announced. And he did, standing over Grady Lee Potts’ body, finishing the drawing of the occluded front and pointing out to an astonished audience at home that this particular weather feature would mean intermittent showers for Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but not a darn thing for the good people of New Bern, North Carolina, who could expect continued hot and muggy weather because of a large and stubborn Bermuda high pressure area hanging around in the Atlantic.
As Will rambled on, essentially repeating what Grady Lee Potts had told the audience at six o’clock (the weather rarely changed from early to late evening this time of year anyway) he felt a rush of something almost sexual -- a kind of raw power that began somewhere down very deep in him and flowed freely from his mouth and through the magic marker onto the weather map. He smiled into the camera. Listen up out there. I’ve got something you need. And, it struck him as he finished and the red light on top of the camera winked off, you’ve got something I need. The studio burst into applause. Gordon rushed over and pounded him on the back. Outside the studio building, he could hear the faint sound of the ambulance approaching, coming to tote old Grady Lee away. It was as fine a sound as Will Baggett had heard in a long time.