A Southern Exposure

by Alice Adams

  It is impossible to drive more than about a mile an hour, and not to stop. Almost whispering, Jimmy asks Cynthia, “Want a cigarette?”

  “Sure, I’d love one.”

  He gets them out, lights hers. As he does she cups his hand, for the tiniest instant only as, for that instant, a flicker of sexuality passes between them. They make no move, do not look at each other, but continue to smoke, indifferently. But they both have noticed.

  Some minutes later they are stubbing out the cigarettes, and still in a whisper Cynthia asks him, “Does anyone ever use this road, do you guess?”

  Meaning: does Russ? And so Jimmy answers her, “Russ does. Sometimes.” He has spoken with authority, about his buddy. He starts up the car, his quiet Buick whose slightest noise he now resents.

  Driving along, still quietly, still with the most infinite slowness, Jimmy’s mind races; it is one of those times of lordly clarity—past, present, and future all spread before him. He sees that Cynthia brought herself and her small family to Pinehill for Russ, very much as he himself did; he sees this clearly, and just as he imagined an important friendship, himself and Russ, big literary buddies, so Cynthia, being a woman and a beauty at that, must have imagined some love affair with Russ. Dear God, maybe even some fantasy of bearing his child. And for all he knows, she too has some literary ideas, some little poems somewhere. But he, Jimmy, seeing and knowing everything at just this moment, as he is able to do—Jimmy knows that on certain scores at least she is wrong. For just as he and Russ are not even casual friends and will probably never be so, she and Russ will not be lovers, or anywhere near.

  Whereas by the end of the fall, or somewhere in between, he, Jimmy, and she, Cynthia, will be kissing. Kissing each other in stolen places, as often as they can. He feels no hurry, though; he can wait (not knowing that every single one of his predictions is wrong).

  The woods on the sides of this road begin to thin out, a few small shacks appear: small boxes, high up on stilt foundations, above their bare mud-rutted yards. Then more houses, somewhat better, bigger houses—and now they are back in town. It is several minutes before Jimmy quite knows where they are, but then he recognizes the outskirts of Deaconville, the “colored” part of town, adjacent to Pinehill. Where people’s maids live, and the men who work around town at odd jobs, the janitors, men who hose down the filling stations, men who stand around on street corners on Saturday nights with their cousins in from the country—all in their dusty bib-front overalls, their dusty shoes.

  Between Deaconville and Pinehill there is no exact border—or perhaps in the county courthouse there is, but otherwise the distinction is unclear. There is, for example, a row of old brick houses, none now in good shape, but all once handsome and upright and trim. Are these houses in Pinehill or Deaconville? No one knows, but since all the inhabitants are white—not exactly poor whites but people more or less down on their luck, widows who take in boarders, that kind—the block is thought of as being in Pinehill.

  “What nice old houses,” Cynthia now remarks, as she and Jimmy Hightower pass them by.

  “They’re in pretty bad shape,” he tells her. “You don’t want to buy one out here.”

  “But couldn’t they be fixed up? You know, that’s exactly what I’d really like to do. Buy something old and just terrifically shabby and make it all grand again. And I’ll bet I could.”

  “Maybe you could, but you’d have a job of work cut out for you with those.”

  “But that’s what I’d like. And a woman I know in Connecticut made a really lot of money that way.”

  “I reckon somebody around here will do that exact same thing sometime. Probably after the war.” (Jimmy and Esther, unlike almost anyone else in Pinehill, are convinced that there will be a war; they both speak of it as a certainty.)

  Concentrating on the gears, which stick, Jimmy does not quite hear Cynthia’s next exclamation, “… what an incredibly beautiful girl—oh, I wonder if she lives around here.”

  At which Jimmy does look up, but sees no one. “Worse luck, I missed her.” He laughs. “I guess I’ll just have to look at you.”

  “Oh, Jimmy. That girl looked like a movie star, she really did. This long dark hair, and her figure—!”

  7

  There was indeed a most beautiful young woman who was just going into one of the old decrepit brick houses as Cynthia and Jimmy Hightower drove by, and if Jimmy had not been preoccupied with his clutch, he would have seen that it was Deirdre Yates, the town beauty, away for five years, but everyone still speaks of her in that way. Deirdre is back, with her little brother Graham, and she is about to take possession of this house, the sale of which has been negotiated in great secrecy; details will never be entirely clear to the town, despite the most avid interest and inquiry.

  Deirdre, who is tall and dark, clear-skinned, green-blue-eyed, full-breasted, has no special sense of her own beauty, except at moments. It is something for which she has accepted the word of other people, a fact of her somewhat complicated life. Smarter people than she is (Deirdre is considerably smarter than she knows) say that her beauty is very great indeed, and so she thinks, Well, maybe. Maybe I am what they say.

  So far her beauty has been quite as much an inconvenience as an asset. Visible breasts at twelve made her shy, the subject of whistles and not-so-furtive jokes. “Remarks” from the boys in school, and sometimes not-so-kind teasing from the girls. “Well, Deirdre, it’s nice to see you again. All of you.” It was all very well for her anxious mother to say that the girls were jealous and the boys just plain silly; still, Deirdre did not feel that her looks made anyone like her better, made no one love her. And Deirdre so wanted to be liked; she yearned so desperately for love that she could put no name to that yearning.

  Town-gown feelings ran strong in Pinehill in those days, and Clarence Yates, father of Deirdre, owned and ran a filling station, about as tacky as anyone could get, never mind that he was handsome, and that Deirdre’s mother and her grandmother had come out at the St. Cecilia Ball, in Charleston. No one knew why she had married Clarence, and in a social way no one “knew” the Yateses; they only spoke at accidental encounters in the A&P or somewhere else downtown. Emily and Clarence Yates seemed to have no friends, they had only Deirdre.

  Deirdre in high school felt herself a real non-success; the girls for the most part kept their distance, and all the boys who called her on the phone sounded as if they were calling on a dare, like the notes they wrote in study hall, which were mostly unsigned. With her heavy breasts, and her paper-white skin that could stand no sun at all, her long long legs and her big eyes neither green nor blue but some sea combination of the two, Deirdre was mostly uncomfortable. She derived no pleasure from the fact of being herself.

  Until the day in the post office, when she saw the famous poet.

  How did she know who he was? She could not remember, she just did, she always had, but at the same time she was sure that she had never seen him before.

  But there he was, standing in the line right next to her line, with his packages to mail. Just like anyone else—but not at all like anyone else, ever, anywhere, really. His blue eyes deeper and darker, hair livelier and stronger. His mouth. His hands. His shoulders in the old torn brown sweater. She couldn’t not look at him. Unconscious that she stared, after a moment or two she realized what she was doing, and she blushed. She saw that he was slightly smiling at her. Just the smallest smile that said, I know you. Hello.

  Did Deirdre smile back? Later she could not remember, although Russ always swore that she did. “You smiled so beautifully,” he always told her.

  I am in love with that man, that poet, is how Deirdre phrased what she felt, to herself, that afternoon at home, after the post office. She thought, So that’s what it’s all about, that’s how people feel when they say “in love.” All those songs and poems.

  She was happy at this recognition; she was peacefully entranced, and confident. Of course they would meet again, and sometime, eve
ntually, something would happen.

  She took to walking around the town alone, after school, exploring its edges. Sometimes she would come across a bunch of kids from school, on their way to the ice-cream parlor or maybe to some game, but these days, with her mind and heart so taken up with the poet, Mr. Byrd, she didn’t care much about whom she saw; she could say “Hi,” or say nothing, with almost perfect indifference.

  This all took place in a long cool smokey November. Deirdre had a bright red scarf that year, with a hat and gloves that matched. Wearing that red, she felt that she was sending out signals. Surely he would see, and remember, and recognize her again.

  And of course he did. Once, near the entrance to the back road, near the row of old brick houses where later Deirdre was to come and live—one day just by those houses his car stopped at the sight of Deirdre. He rolled down his window and he asked her, “Can I give you a ride somewhere? You’re a pretty long way from home.”

  He knew where she lived? But of course he did; in those days everyone knew everything about each other, and everyone knew that Clarence, who owned the filling station, lived in the cluster of very small frame houses in back of the elementary school. With Emily, his wife, and his daughter, Deirdre.

  Not wanting to get into the car with him—and not knowing why, it just didn’t seem right—Deirdre smiled, and she told him, “I’m just taking a walk. But thank you.”

  “Well, it’s a nice day for walking. I like November about the best of the months, do you?”

  “Oh yes. The smells, and the leaves—”

  His eyes had never left her face, her eyes; their gazes seemed unable to separate. But then they did separate, and Deirdre and Russ both were saying, or murmuring, “Goodbye.” Not, of course, shaking hands. No touch.

  In those Depression years there were no paved sidewalks in the town, except for a couple of blocks in the business district and in front of the Baptist church. Deirdre walked home over the hard white rutted dirt, never looking and never stumbling either. But dazed. Bedazzled.

  A week or so later it occurred to Deirdre that she could walk down that road, the one he had driven up from, out of. Why not? A walk in the woods, on a bright November afternoon. His favorite month.

  Before she saw or heard his car, she felt some emanation, as though she had known exactly when he would be there. As though he had known she would come.

  He stopped when he saw her ahead of him, among the bare gray trees, and she walked down to the car. He opened the door for her, and for maybe half an hour they sat there, making aimless conversation that neither of them could remember later on. Their brief courtship. At some point he asked her, “Do you want a cigarette? Do you smoke?”

  “No. I mean, no thanks.” She added politely, “I guess I could learn.”

  “No, don’t do that.” They were staring at each other, they had been staring since she got into the car. He said, “Maybe we should walk for a while.” (And later he was sure that he had intended only that, a small walk, some relief from the extreme tension between them.)

  Blindly they got out and headed into the naked landscape, going toward nothing. Loudly snapping twigs and branches as they went. From some distant Negro cabin came the pungent, nostalgic scent of wood smoke. Russ pushed heavy branches aside, and suddenly they were in a small and densely sheltered clearing, with barely space to stand in.

  Then, as they turned toward each other, Russ grasped her face. “Lovelier than anyone, than anything in the world,” he said to her, his voice thick, and caught. “Do you know—?”

  But she had moved closer, and raised her face, her mouth, to kiss. As though she had ever kissed or been kissed before.

  In that way they met for several weeks of afternoons, now by design, until one afternoon they moved, with infinite slowness, down to the hard winter earth, to the dead leaves and slippery pine needles. Not exactly to remove but to push aside clothes, until they were lying together. But still Russ whispered, “Deirdre, we can’t—”

  “We have to—” And she guided his member inside her, as though she knew what to do.

  Her body exploded. Again, and again. With his.

  If anyone had noticed a new look on Deirdre’s face, he or she would have remembered that Deirdre had always been beautiful, and was simply getting much more beautiful. And if someone who knew her well looked more closely and saw, unmistakably, love, the radiance imprinted on her eyes, in her slower smile, that person (her mother was the first) could well have concluded, as Mrs. Yates indeed did, She’s got herself mixed up with someone. Some boy over at the high school, or maybe one of those college boys. She hoped it was not a college boy. Too old for Deirdre.

  And as for Russ’s face, which clearly too showed change, that also could be explained, as Brett did explain it, or she tried to: Russ had a new poem somewhere in his mind. He was lost in his poem.

  The winter was hard on outdoor lovers, and meetings had more and more to be contrived. And so Russ, unbeknownst to anyone but his banker, bought one of those derelict old brick houses, on that row next to the Negro part of town. The banker was a deacon in the Presbyterian church, a man of monumental discretion. “It’s a sort of investment,” Russ said to Mr. Gwynn, the banker. “But Brett would think I was nuts.”

  “Very wise, I’m sure. Those were fine old houses, in their day. They could be made fine again.”

  “I don’t plan on doing much to it.”

  And so doors were unlocked, keys given, and a minimal cleanup accomplished. And that is where Russ and Deirdre met, in an upstairs room in which there was a wide high bed, with some bedding sneaked in by Russ. From Sears.

  No streetlights illuminated that part of town, back then. They saw each other as dark stretches of naked flesh. As eerily shadowed faces.

  They never met in the daytime, nor did they meet by accident in the town.

  Except once, on a side street near the post office; they meant to nod and pass but were unable to do so, and stood for an instant, smiling and staring, held together. They were unseen, except for one crucial person, passing in a car. Unseen by them, it was Brett. Of course it would be Brett.

  They had so little time together, it seemed, as it does to most lovers. Very little time to talk. Russ told her about his offers from Hollywood (this was before he had actually gone out there), how tempting and at the same time how disgusting. How he could not help being curious about the life out there. She told him about her aunt in San Francisco. “We could meet somewhere in between.” They laughed, both fairly ignorant of the geography of California.

  By the time Deirdre told Russ that she was pregnant, sparing him the news for several months (she was terrified of his reaction; would he love her still?), she had already made up her mind what she would do: she would go out to California, to her aunt, and have the baby there. It never occurred to either of them to somehow “get rid of it.” Of course there were abortions then (Brett could have told them that), but usually not for white middle-class people like them. Their pregnancies were concealed in marriages, or in some complicated fictions—like the one that Russ and Deirdre eventually devised. More importantly, Deirdre really wanted this child, this child of Russ—and he did too, once he appreciated her great calm, her absolute lack of demands.

  Deirdre told Russ none of the family hysteria, the threats and the weeping.

  The whole Yates family drove to California; they were moving out there, it was said, and nothing was heard of them for many months. And then the news was indeed dramatic: Emily Yates had been pregnant, it seemed, and had given birth to a little boy, named Graham, in whose birth she had died (such a risk, trying to bear another child at her age, so selfish of Clarence). Clarence Yates had bought a new filling station in the San Fernando Valley, and was staying put. But Deirdre was coming back in a couple of years to live in Pinehill, the rumor went. To bring up her little brother there. Little Graham.

  Having been passionately anxious to get Deirdre into the beautiful old brick house, havin
g worked strenuously and paid a lot of money to that end, Russell gradually comes to realize something quite terrible and amazing. Which is simply that, once Deirdre is back here in town, he does not want, passionately, to see her. He does not long for her constantly, as in the old (five years ago) days. It is enough for him that she is here. And the boy.

  He comes to see her at night, in the old, excited, frantic way—but even at their extreme moments he has a sense of staginess, of acting. And in Deirdre too he senses an unreality, as though part of her mind were always on her son, her “brother,” rather than on Russ, her poet-lover. Pale and still, unsmiling, she lies beneath him, until at last she stirs, and she says, “It’s a beautiful house, I really like it here.”

  “If you ever need anything, you’ll tell me—you promise?” He bends down to kiss her eyelids, as he always does. “Or for the boy.”

  She says, “I don’t reckon—” But the sentence is broken by a small cry from Graham’s room. Getting up, she says to him, “I’ll be right back.”

  Lying there alone in the dark, in the house that he bought for her, and for her son, their son, Russ experiences a sadness, a sorrow so profound that it comes close to madness.

  He thinks, So it all comes to this. A very beautiful and intelligent (but so uneducated) young woman, in a pretty, secret house, with her little son. It is like a story already written, finished. Russ wants no further role in this play, which he knows, in his heart, that Deirdre would make extremely easy for him. His exit.

  And he wonders, Was this all she ever wanted of him, after all? A house, and a son? And in that case, why him? Almost any man could have given her those things. Why the added presence of his fame, and poetry?

  Perhaps, Russ is forced to conclude, that part of it was simply accidental. He was simply the man her eyes fell on at her own ripest moment for love.