A Southern Exposure

by Alice Adams

  “Well, not the people together, of course not. Just these things that they make.”

  “Well now, Dolly, I just don’t know. Lem wouldn’t like the sound of that, not one bit.”

  • • •

  “But that’s really crazy,” Cynthia had argued. “What does she think, her doilies will be contaminated by possible contact with Odessa’s pillows?”

  “Now don’t you start getting huff-puffy like that, Miss Yankee,” Dolly countered. “It’s just not the way we do things down here. As I’m sure Willard or Clifton Lee would be the first to tell you. Or Russ Byrd, for that matter. Any of the men around here. It’s just not our way of doing things.”

  And Cynthia was forced for the moment to leave it at that, to leave it exactly nowhere. And to wonder, among other things, just why Willard Bigelow and Clifton Lee or even Russ Byrd were such experts, such judges of “what’s right,” as Dolly herself might put it.

  “Southerners are—well, extremely complicated,” Esther tells her. “And absolutely nuts on the subject of colored people, as they call them. It’s a little different in Oklahoma, don’t you think so, Jimmy? And of course my family is Jewish.”

  “I would not entirely exonerate Oklahoma from racial foolishness,” Jimmy tells her, “but mostly you’re right. Although it does seem to me I’ve heard a certain amount of ugly stuff about what they call ‘Indian blood.’ Who has it and who doesn’t, and who just might.” Cynthia notes that he is no longer sounding like Russ.

  “If any of them had any idea what’s going on in Germany.” Esther sighs, with a gesture of hopelessness.

  “Your work is good, though?” Cynthia asks.

  “It’s so exciting, and so frustrating.” Esther explains, “We do get a lot of people out of Germany, with sponsors and incomes, places to live and all that. But there’s a sort of elitist cast to our operation that’s beginning to bother me a lot. We’re mostly saving rich people with ‘connections.’ What about all the others?”

  Though she mentions discouragement and frustration, Esther’s face is still radiant, and intense. How Cynthia envies that sense of mission. All she has is an idea for a silly store that will probably never work.

  Harry seems at least to have been thinking about her problem. “Tell you what,” he says, with one of his more charming grins. “Why don’t you and Dolly open up two stores, one for colored and one for white? Isn’t that the Southern solution?”

  Everyone laughs, if a little edgily, especially Cynthia, who then says, “And I’ll be the one to run the colored store, and no doubt get run out of town for my trouble.”

  “I’ll run it with you,” Esther tells her. “They can’t run us both out of town.”

  The visit with Harry at home has been more than a little disappointing to Cynthia, no doubt at least in part because she so built it up in her mind, a fantasized romantic reunion. Whereas in fact it has been simply nice, or perhaps not so simply; there are certain complexities. But they have been a nice small family all together again.

  Abby has been more present than was usual for her in the past year or so.

  She has seemed most to want Harry to go for walks with her; she takes him to places that she has especially liked: to a waterfall, a secret meadow, down to the creek and across the bridge to its further bank. They come back from these trips often a little muddy but happy, enthusiastic over wildflowers and new streams. Cynthia notices that Abby is closely observing her father’s face as they talk, and she thinks, a little sadly, Oh dear, she really wants him to like it here. She wants us to be an ordinary family in a house, in a settled place. And she thinks, Oh, my dear Abby, you have probably chosen the wrong set of parents for that.

  Cynthia herself is experiencing a time of some loneliness. Nothing has improved in her negotiations with Dolly and their projected store; the last word from Dolly was that, according to Willard, a bank would never finance such a project. “He’s probably right,” was Harry’s opinion, when told of this.

  Cynthia felt lonely and isolated, even with Harry there. And much worse when he left.

  21

  No one will give a shit for his pig-shit play, thinks Russ, barely managing a smile at his thought. He is limping into the second act; he is sitting at his desk, empty-headed. He is dreaming of everything in the world but the play that he is, in theory, writing. He is staring out the window, watching the squirrels chase each other along a pine bough. He is listening to his houseguest, Dr. Clyde Drake, who is making a lot of phone calls in the next room. He is wondering if Brett—if SallyJane will get up before the kids come home from school. He is wondering if Deirdre is pregnant. Again.

  Once he could write no matter what. That was the only thing that never failed him, his work. Once, although out of his mind in love, so crazily wanting Deirdre, and worried and dying of guilt toward Brett and his children, plagued with bills, not to mention some painful problems with his teeth—he still could write. In those days he wrote some of his best poems, and Restless Omens, the play that sent him out to Hollywood, to all that money.

  But now his mind is hollowed out, his imagination dead. The words that parade through his brain seem to be in another language—or, more precisely, could be the words of someone new to English. A refugee from Europe, or maybe a very small child, just getting the hang of sentences.

  “Now, darlin’,” he hears dimly, Drake’s voice from the room next door. “You very well know …” And then the voice is lowered, so that Russ can hear no more, does not know whatever the other person very well knows.

  And what, he wonders, does anyone very well know? He thinks of the three of them under this roof at this moment, himself and Clyde Drake and Brett SallyJane Caldwell Byrd, and of what any of them must know. If he, for example, could entirely know what either of those other two know, he could write forever, could fill volumes, and stages full of actors. He could write the most endless poetry, from one day, even one hour, inside the consciousness of his SallyJane.

  Does Drake “see into” SallyJane in this way? Isn’t he supposed to? Does he say to SallyJane “… you very well know”? (She wouldn’t like that, probably.) Could Drake possibly have been speaking to SallyJane when he was saying, “Now, darlin’, you very well know—” No, he couldn’t. For one thing SallyJane is here, in this house. In bed. For another that is not a tone that a doctor would take with patients. It is how a man talks to his wife, or maybe a girlfriend who is being a little difficult. Suspicious, maybe, or clinging too long.

  Sometime, a long time ago, when SallyJane was Russ’s girlfriend, she was a little difficult, but she was also so beautiful then, so golden, her hair and her skin looked like gold, and she loved him so much and she was so—so sexy. As eager for kissing and touching and squirming together as he was. More so, he sometimes thought. Sometimes she scared him a little, when they were both so young and her father was the president of the goddam university. She was always finding secret places for them to be together, and secret times when the parents and the help were all away. Lying together on some bed in a guest room, even though they kept their clothes on, he was scared. And sometimes in the moist between her legs—oh Jesus, she wouldn’t let his hand stop. He had to make excuses for not going on.

  But she was as vulnerable, as sensitive, as she was sexy, Russ soon learned. It took almost nothing to make her eyes tear up, her voice tremble, although she had a lot of pride, always, and would try to hide how she felt. But especially when she was more eager for love, for kissing and all that stuff, than he was—that hurt her most; he could feel her hurt, along with his own almost killing guilt.

  He often thought of leaving her then, and taking up with some more ordinary girl. Some flirt. He imagined this girl, this ordinary girl, as dark and saucy, always laughing. A little like Dolly Bigelow. That type. A girl who would lead him on, the way girls are supposed to do, and then stop him cold, not caring much herself. With SallyJane he felt strange, although he often told himself that of course he felt strange, he wa
s a poet. Like no one else around these parts, and it was not SallyJane’s fault. And then at other times he would think it was all SallyJane’s fault, the poetry, all of it. With a more normal girl, he could go to business school, or study medicine, for God’s sake, like some normal guy.

  He gave her the new name, Brett—like Lady Brett in Hemingway’s book, of course—in the hope that her character too would change. Not that she would become the Brett of that novel (God forbid!) but that she would be at least a little harder, a little more independent. So that he wouldn’t have to leave her, after all. But that did not work. She did not change, and he married her instead. His beautiful, loving, vulnerable, hard-working wife. So often in tears.

  And so often pregnant. Holy God! The wonderful new rubber device, supposed to prevent all that, was for Brett an unromantic interruption. A scientific interference. It was anti-love, and if she had to get up for that purpose, love was over, she could not respond.

  And then there was Deirdre.

  At first, with Deirdre, he felt like a man entrapped in a poem, in one of his own poems, perhaps. He was encased in breathlessness, in desire, in her beauty. He could barely even speak to her, so constricted was all his blood in its turgid veins; his blood was all flowing, he felt, toward his swollen member.

  Only gradually did he notice that Deirdre, like Brett, had those heavy, hyper-sensitive breasts, and those vulnerable eyes. She too spoke little and wept easily. And then she was pregnant, too.

  Sometimes he crazily thinks that Deirdre could just move right in with them all, Deirdre and Graham. The two women and the kids would all get along; he could be a sort of grandfather figure to them. Between them the women could get the household work done, and keep the children quiet and happy. They could just forget about romance, and love. And he would only think of it in terms of his work. He could write all day, and maybe at night he would read them bits of what he had done. All of them sitting around the fire.

  “SallyJane, you have to understand—”

  Russ hears this partial sentence very clearly from the next room, and at first he is mystified, until the obvious answer comes to him: of course, SallyJane has come downstairs and is in the next room, talking to Clyde Drake. It seems strange, somehow; on the other hand not strange at all. Though Drake is at the moment a visitor in her house, she is still his patient, after all. Why shouldn’t they talk?

  But are their conversations still supposed to be intensely private? Should Russ go on into the next room, the dining room, as, bored and stalled in his work, he would like to do, and say hello to them both?

  The day outside is gray and cold, spring seems nowhere near. There is even a cold, persistent wind. As Russ enters the dining room and sees SallyJane there in her sheerest, barest nightgown, his first thought is practical; he thinks, Poor SallyJane, she must be cold. His second very quick reaction is one of a strong and peculiar embarrassment: he has interrupted a scene of some sort; he is in a place where he should not be, even in his own house, between his own wife and her doctor. It is not precisely a sexual scene, although SallyJane’s nightgown gives it to some degree that aura. Nor is it exactly a medical conference. It would seem some bizarre combination of the two, though Russ is not able until much later to so describe it to himself.

  For an instant SallyJane looks at him uncomprehendingly. Who is he? Where does he live? But then she comes into focus, more or less. Her hands rise to her throat, arms protecting her breasts, as she says, “I just came down to see if you-all needed anything.”

  “SallyJane still needs a lot of bed rest,” Clyde Drake in a man-to-man way explains to Russ. Which is actually no explanation at all, but something that needed to be said. Obviously.

  “Anything we need we can find for ourselves,” says Russ, not exactly addressing either one of them, but understanding that he is aligned with Drake, at least in SallyJane’s mind. She feels herself confronted with two men; he can read that in her eyes, and in her posture, which is defensive. (Is SallyJane afraid of men? Of him?)

  “I just came down to get some tea,” she says, a self-contradiction that they all ignore.

  Gently, Russ tells her, “I’ll tell the girl to bring you up some. You go on back to bed now, honey.”

  Looking to Drake as though for protection, SallyJane then turns and leaves the room, colliding with a chair on her way, at which she murmurs, “Goddam,” and continues toward the stairs. She turns again then, to say to Russ, “I didn’t really want any tea. I just thought I did.”

  “It’s okay, honey.”

  Faced with each other, Russ and Clyde Drake are silent, and then both begin to speak at once.

  Russ asks, “Would you like—?”

  And Drake, “Do you ever—?”

  In a mild way they both laugh, and then Russ asks his guest, “Can I get you some coffee—anything?”

  “Do you know what I would dearly love? About this time of the morning I often treat myself to a plain old Coke. Not even spiked with anything, though I have to admit that I have yielded to that temptation on occasion. But just a good old Coca-Cola.”

  “Sounds real good to me. I think I’ll join you.”

  “Just out of the bottle, please. Tastes best that way to me.” Clyde Drake laughs, a sort of apology for crude tastes.

  It does taste good that way, notes Russ—who has never had a morning Coke in his life before, much less one out of a bottle. As the two men move into the living room with their bottles, he observes that he feels very young, and remembers his mother saying that Cokes were bad for your teeth, whereas his father said they were a great source of energy. His father was probably right, he thinks. Maybe a Coke every morning is just what he needs for work.

  “It takes a long time, depression.”

  Clyde Drake has spoken so softly that Russ has to replay the words in his mind before he is sure that he heard them right. He mutters, “I guess it does.” For an odd moment he has wondered whose depression they are talking about; but then he knows—of course, SallyJane’s. He, Russ, is not supposed to be depressed at all, but busily writing away. At a great new play. About pigs.

  “Sometimes it can seem like forever,” Drake continues, before taking an enormous slug from his cold green bottle.

  “Do you think—” Russ starts to ask; then he hesitates, and gulps in turn from his own cold bottle. “Do you think, this shock treatment you’ve mentioned—do you think—?”

  Clyde Drake slowly composes his face into a frown. “I sincerely hope not,” he says. “Had a lady die on me once; of course the truth is she had a weak heart, a condition, but still it was in the course of my treatment that she died.”

  A somber silence ensues, during which both men consider the prospect of dead women. If SallyJane died, Russ is thinking, I would be more than half dead too; we’ve become the same person, almost. These days it’s her pain I’m feeling. It’s like I’m Clyde Drake’s patient too, with all her feelings about him.

  This last thought is quite new to Russ, and he examines its implications. He has already noticed in himself an unusual, out-of-character impulse to talk to this man, to tell him things, and to try to get his, Drake’s, views on life. He would even like to tell Drake about his play. The pigs. Almost at random (he had not meant to say this) he asks, “Do you think a depression could be contagious? Sort of like having a bad cold in the house?”

  Drake seems to be mulling this over as again he frowns, and clears his throat. Then smiles. “That would be a little on the order of—what do they call it?—mental telepathy, am I right? The stuff that fellow over to Duke is working on. Dr. Rhine. Extra-sensory perception, I think some folks call it. If you can believe in all that business, then it’s easy enough to believe in what you might call depression germs too.” His smile broadens.

  Russ has in fact been very interested in experiments done on ESP; he might be said to believe in it. He would like to argue the point, but feels that he should not. He only says, “I guess sometimes in a marriage, though, f
olks get so close that it feels like you’ve caught what the other person has. Depression included.”

  After a judicious pause Drake agrees. “That could certainly be. Like when it seems like you’ve both thought of the same joke at the very same moment. Lucky you if it’s a joke, of course.” He gives Russ a grin of boyish complicity.

  Against some better (older, wiser) judgment, Russ finds this exchange enormously appealing. He feels young, and bad. Not naughty, as his mother used to put it, but bad, really bad. A bad boy who does terrible things to girls, a bad man who cheats on his wife and does not really love his girlfriend. But he is not depressed!

  How handsome Clyde Drake is. Better-looking than some of the Hollywood actors Russ has met around the swimming pools out there. He wonders if Clyde can act, and then remembers that he is a doctor. Probably doesn’t have the slightest interest in acting.

  He wonders what it would be like to be a patient of Clyde’s. To tell him all your secrets, everything. Like, how much of the time he does not want to make love to Brett. To SallyJane. And sometimes he does not want to do it to Deirdre. Does Clyde ever feel that way, about his wife, the wonderfully named “Norris,” whom so far Russ has never met? Would Clyde say so if he did ever feel like that?

  For a moment Russ has this most curious sense that he is Clyde.

  “Say, I’ve been wondering,” Clyde now says, very slowly. “Tell me, Russ, old man—”

  I’ll tell you anything, Russ thinks, but he only smiles.

  “You ever try any huntin’ round here? You know go out and shoot up some squirrels and some rabbits?”

  And Russ, who has never shot at anything but a large stuffed target, who desperately hates the sight of the smallest amount of blood—any blood, anyone’s, anything’s blood—Russ says to his guest, “Great idea! We could even go after wild turkey.”