by Martin Clark
The girls arrived on Saturdays for the mixers. Evers would wear a blue blazer, a black and orange tie (the school colors), khaki pants with cuffs and penny loafers without socks. The girls and Woodberry boys listened to bands and danced. Real bands. Not dopers and hippie trash like the philistines who show up at motel bars too drunk to play, not dirty fools in flannel shirts shouting and twitching and caterwauling, not bands with five-necked guitars and a double bass. This was 1978, and at the Woodberry mixers they listened to real bands, bands that played songs by Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Harry James.
The sex was perfect, since anything beyond a kiss was a good and great gift. Sweet, warm, tentative, one button at a time, often alcoholic, eyes closed and blind. The young, melting, perfumy smells; the girls smelled warm. They smelled soft. And it was all new and complicated. De Soto, Ponce de León, Neil Armstrong, Alexander the Great and Evers Wheeling. There was no need to feign interest in Chinese cooking, the politics of de Gaulle, the greedy denuding of rain forests, Joyce Carol Oates, or a ban on nuclear weapons. Evers was barely able to drive a car, and was years and events away from evenings with harridans who would, where their favors were concerned, bicker and haggle like hucksters in a tent carnival to ensure that none of their kindnesses went unacknowledged. He enjoyed women more when he was sixteen than when he was thirty-nine, and according to his wife this was his biggest problem in life. “Arrested mentality,” she called it. “No, it’s not a bad thing. It’s yearning,” Evers often said in his own defense. “These were very black-and-white times.”
College was more of the same. Evers graduated from Woodberry and went to Princeton. He was content there. His favorite days were Friday afternoons in November and December, when he didn’t have to worry about classes and everyone was showering and shaving and steaming up the hall bathroom, getting ready to leave for parties and movies and dates. Evers would work out in the gym on Fridays and then come back to his dorm and shower. As soon as he was dressed, he would put on a heavy coat and wool scarf and step outside into the evening, tired and relaxed from five sets in the weight room, warm as could be in his winter clothes. Sometimes he left a trace of soap on his face so that it would pull especially taut for a few moments, and he never wore a hat or covered his head. Evers would step outside even if he had nowhere to go, just to feel the winter air on his skin and hear the noise coming out of the residence halls.
But then it all began to run out. Evers could sense it when he looked around. The days of typing term papers, drinking beer at the student union and weeklong road trips were being eaten up locust-quick, and at the close of the good years he began to worry. A posse ad esse. By the time Evers arrived at law school—he went to Duke—he had begun to feel like all the continuity and joy in his life were vanishing. Evers began to sit in the law school library, in the basement behind the regional reporters, and think about slippage, about Howard Hughes or Henry VI mewing in the Tower of London or Greta Garbo or poor William O. Douglas limping around the Supreme Court. The last semester at Duke was odd, funny, melancholy, often anxious. The fraternities were different, and Evers was, uh, married. He had been since arriving in Durham. No more dorms, no more softball games … just like that, he was buying dress shirts, selling rugs and chairs instead of moving them and talking to a college friend about life insurance.
When Evers walked across campus on his last day of law-school classes, he turned around in the crowd and realized that he was only weeks away from becoming another doctor or lawyer or banker with a wife from St. Catherine’s, a “WFS 78” license plate, an Irish setter, an Ortho lawn, Louis Vuitton luggage and a timeshare town house at Sugar Mountain. About a month before, in April, he and his spouse (as the white cardboard invitation from his fraternity described her) had driven to Cambridge for a Princeton-Harvard baseball game, and he was worried because none of the kids were wearing coats and ties, even though they had been the year before and the year before that. And he got pissed off because some cretin wearing a papier-mâché tiger’s head spilled a rum and Coke on his car. After the trip, he was spent, weary for days, in spite of the fact that he’d slept during the entire ride back to Durham.
Pascal, during this period, had very little to say that Evers found helpful, although Evers felt sure his brother was doing all he could and wasn’t just being flippant. “Be feckless and come live with me. Fuck it. Enjoy the many aspects of mobile home living and cable TV. When we get tired of that, we’ll tour the country on a Greyhound and meet Roy Clark. The Catskills, Atlantic City, Nashville, whatever. Big-time shit, my brother.” All this from an honors graduate of one of Virginia’s oldest and finest colleges who now smoked dope, lived in a trailer and shot trees and stumps with a twenty-two-caliber pistol. It was about this time that Pascal had lost his job as a loan officer at Wachovia Bank and Trust, this because he’d loaned a fifteen-year-old and her boyfriend six hundred fifty dollars for an abortion. “Fuck it. I’ll become a fireman or a veterinarian,” Pascal said when Evers asked how he planned to support himself.
“How about police work?” Evers offered.
“Whatever.”
While Pascal understood his brother’s feelings and had no solutions, Jo Miller simply could not understand her husband’s discontent. They quarreled from time to time in the months before Evers was due to finish law school. “I don’t think you make a whole lot of sense, Evers. I just don’t. What’s the matter with you? Look at your future. What else do you want? You’ll have a good job. You’ll have me, and I love you. We can do just about anything.”
“But everybody else has already done all of the things I’m going to do. Thousands of people make law review. Thousands of people become judges or senior partners or whatever. So what? As for falling in love and the rest of what follows from all that, it’s pretty straightforward. I love you; you know that. Don’t take what I’m saying poorly, okay? You know what I mean?”
“Do you want to be famous or something, is that it? Or better than everyone else—or just keep going to school and never get a job? Maybe you should have been born around 1810, when so many people hadn’t already done so many things. You would’ve had a lot more possibilities then. You could’ve invented the steam engine or the cotton gin or something like that.”
“What it is, I guess, is that I’m not happy to have to stop going to school. But I don’t really have any problem with getting old per se; I really don’t care about that at all. And I really don’t mind accepting responsibility, despite your hints to the contrary. The biggest thing is that after I stop going to school, I’ll lose a lot of order and standing. You see what I’m getting at?”
“What? Jesus, Evers, no. I really don’t, I’m afraid. You can be excellent in what you do. You can make your own order. The world won’t end because you don’t have a class schedule. Don’t get pissed off, but I really don’t see the problem.”
“Really, you don’t? You’re not just trying to badger me? You don’t have any idea what I’m saying?”
“Nope. You just need to grow up and get on with things.”
“There’s more to it than that. I just don’t want to be alike, to be another sad sack standing in a long line and then, on top of that, lose all the structure in my life. It’s a kind of ontological engineering, you see. It’s depressing to know that there’s a shitload of people out there just like me, all of us just sort of being carried along, bumping into things.”
“What’s the last thing you did that you really enjoyed, Evers?”
“I don’t know, okay?”
“Come on, if you think back far enough, you’ll be able to come up with something. Don’t be so puerile.”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“I should be candid with my wife and psychologist, huh?”
“Yes.”
“A couple of days ago, I felt good about telling you to go fuck yourself.” Evers was serious.
“How nice. What about something before that cathartic u
ndertaking? Can we go back a little further?”
“Well, during Evidence class today I started to get drowsy, and I was right there on the cusp of sleep and I thought for a moment I was a wizard and that I had cast a spell on your friend—what’s her name? Ellen, Ellen Wyatt—and shrunk her to the size of a cashew nut and then dropped her into a cup of espresso, a double of course. She wasn’t able to swim and died a hot, brown drowning death with her pulse racing. I shrunk her clove cigarettes, too; they were in her pocket when she perished.”
“I think that sometimes you must hate me,” Jo Miller said.
Despite wanting to stay longer, Evers completed law school, graduating with honors. He did so well, in fact, that at age twenty-six, almost immediately after finishing school, he became a judge. A district court judge in Norton, North Carolina. During his final year of law school at Duke, Evers sent out résumés to law firms all over the East Coast. He received job offers from two firms in Washington, D.C., from firms in Miami, New York (White and Case), Richmond, Raleigh, Tampa Bay, Atlanta and from Boyd T. “Baby” Hicks, Esquire, a sole practitioner in Norton, North Carolina. Boyd’s letterhead carried precisely that heading; all of his correspondence had both the infantile nickname and the title of “esquire,” a juxtaposition that struck Evers as stupid and silly when he read it for the first time.
Boyd was a kingmaker, a sweet-talking fellow who had his hand in everything and a file cabinet full of uncollected favors. When Evers visited Norton, Boyd promised him that two judicial spots would be opening up in the next two years. Boyd had the votes to get Evers a job on the bench, and Boyd wanted someone in the courthouse who would be indebted to him and would listen to what he had to say when he stopped by at five o’clock with a bottle of bourbon in his briefcase. Boyd liked Evers immediately and recalled that Evers’ father had paved a lot of roads in Surry County. He also had a good sales pitch: “Shit, Evers, all them bright boys at the top of your class will be working eighty-hour weeks and kissing your ass, begging for a continuance or a little docket time. And me and you will be teeing off no later than three every afternoon that you want to head on over to Pinehurst to play.”
Jo Miller was frenetically happy around this time. Even though she and Evers had been married for nearly three years, she viewed their time in Durham as no more than an uncomfortable stopover on a long trek that was supposed to get better as it went. After three years of academia, spaghetti dinners and her husband with greasy hair in sweatpants, she was eager to start her life. She was living for it. And when you live for it, it beats you. Evers had told Jo Miller this on more than one occasion. When you really want something, when you lust, seek, desire, await, anticipate or expect, when you sit in front of the TV after the late news twirling a plastic spoon in a bowl of lukewarm skim milk and saturated puffs of Special K, praying for nine or so hours to pass so that you can check the morning mail to see if the college accepted, the one-night stand wrote, the tax refund arrived or Publisher’s Clearing House made you the winner of a dream house in Wisconsin, when you’re really looking forward to something, that’s when Fortuna dispatches a couple of her handmaidens to drop a load of shit on you. Jo Miller wanted more than anything in the world to leave North Carolina and move to Atlanta.
Evers did not want to go to Atlanta. He wanted to go to Norton, and he did everything he could to change his wife’s mind. “You’ve never been there, honey. You’ve never seen the place. You don’t know the people, what the economy’s like, where we could live—anything. You just don’t know anything about the place or the man I’ll be working for. And it’s only twenty-five minutes from Winston-Salem. All you know is what you’ve read in the two brochures the chamber of commerce sent to you—one was about the local fairy stones and the other was about some Civil War battle. What kind of decision can you make from that?”
“Doesn’t that give you a tiny hint, Evers? They send me a flyer on rocks and an obscure battle when I asked them for ‘any relevant literature regarding cultural, social and economic opportunities in the area.’ That pretty much says it all.”
“You’re not giving the place a chance. You won’t know about it until you go there.”
“I know, Evers. I know exactly what kind of place it is. Norton, North Carolina. I drive into the local filling station, and a pack of newts in coveralls is hunched over a checkerboard. And what do I do? Join the D.A.R. chapter and thaw out fish sticks and scheme about having an affair with a pudgy insurance salesman who was an all-district basketball player for the Norton whatevers? Shit on that, Evers. We need to go to a city that has something for both of us. We need to go to a city that will give me a chance to find an interesting job and make interesting friends.”
“Don’t paint with such a broad brush. Small communities attract a number of good people. Really. And picture this. A farm—a real farm out in the country, with horses and hardwood floors. We’re lying in our bed, a brass job from Neiman Marcus. Toasty under a quilt. Across the room is our fireplace, and the coals are still warm and orange from the fire the night before. We get up, put on clean clothes, clothes with a lot of starch, go for a horseback ride through the forest, come back, play with our basset hounds, drink brandy, take our shoes off, maybe then have a meal and some light sex—a languid sixty-nine on the sofa downstairs under the skylight. And then—”
“Could we wash our hands after rubbing the dogs? I think that would improve the food and sex a little.”
“Let me finish. After we—”
Jo Miller interrupted again. “Picture this. You’re sitting here in our apartment in lovely Durham, North Carolina, at our cable-spool kitchen table with the stolen Pizza Hut plastic tablecloth, and a process server brings you the papers for a divorce. I’m serious, Evers. I love you and will make sacrifices for you, but I won’t make myself into your shadow. You have to give some as well. I’m more interested in doing something substantial with my life than I am in living in a Harris Tweed commercial with dogs and horses.”
“The reason we have such a shitty apartment is because you’re so compulsive about making our own money. Anytime you want something, you can have it. You know that. I’m rich. And you know you don’t have to get a job. Why do you want to work, anyway?”
“It’s not that I necessarily have to have a job. I just don’t want to waste away, Evers. Why do you have to have a job?”
“I will enjoy practicing law. I like it.”
“I will enjoy what I do, too.”
On the day in March that Evers let the deadline pass for accepting the job in Atlanta, he skipped class, smoked dope and drank vodka before lunch, walked home from a bar, knocked over a glass half full of orange juice beside the kitchen sink and vomited in the bed. By the time Jo Miller got home, Evers had rolled around in the puke, and it had dried on the sheets and on his hair, hands and arms. His pants and underwear were pulled down, twisted and wrapped around his thighs, his shoes and socks still on his feet. Jo Miller woke Evers up, and he told her he was going to go to Norton. They began arguing, and Jo Miller put her hands over her face and started to cry.
“But what are you going to do, Jo Miller? That’s my point. I mean, just what kind of career choices do you have? You’re so damn vague. What do you want to do?” Evers asked. He felt dizzy, and there was a lot of throbbing in his head.
“Something that interests me and I’m good at. And don’t make some obnoxious remark about that, either. I just need an area where there are a number of options so I can try things and find out what I want to do. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know exactly what I want, but I’m willing to look at a lot of things. Is there anything so wrong with that? I’m still young, Evers.” Jo Miller wiped her cheek.
“I see. So the bottom line is that even though you don’t know what you want to do, we can’t go to Norton because you’re sure there’s nothing there for you. Even though I want to go and already have a good job there. And you’re only a few minutes away from Greensboro and Winston-Salem.”
Evers pulled his pants up. He felt sick.
“It’s a hole, Evers. A boring, small hole. I don’t want to organize the Christmas parade and spend my afternoons with bluehairs named Mary Ruth and Miss Lilly.”
“It has the kind of law I like. Very low-key. And, like I’ve told you, there’s a strong possibility I’ll become a judge if I go there. It’s a great opportunity.”
“How do you know that for sure?” Jo Miller had stopped crying.
“I just do. Boyd Hicks is very political. It seems pretty certain.”
“So you become Judge Evers Wheeling. That doesn’t really help me any. I’m still in the same boat. I just don’t want to go; it isn’t fair.”
“Well, let’s be analytical. What do you want to do? Let’s just list things. Now, there’s a big demand for psychology majors from Hollins, so our biggest problem will be paring down the list. Maybe you could—”
“Fuck you, Evers. I had better undergraduate grades than you did. I had better S.A.T. scores, and I took the law boards and could’ve gotten into any law school I wanted. But what you do is boring, Evers. You’ve said so yourself. Law school is a tedious trade school filled with pimps and robot pimps. All you’ve done for the last six months is mope and carp about how you hate what you’re doing. I went to school and did something that I enjoyed and that’s far more interesting than the study of real property. Lawyers have no imagination. Lawyers are douche bags for the rest of the world.” Jo Miller’s tone was steady now; she had folded her arms across her chest.