Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
What the hell, I decided. I might as well go on and fuck
him—carpe diem and all that. Life is short and we’re all doomed one way or the other.
“You’re looking good,” he said. “I love it when you don’t put makeup on your face.”
“I got up at five to come down here. How did you know where I was?”
“You weren’t at home and I know you like to work in the early morning. I couldn’t sleep, knowing I was in the same town as you, so I came out looking for you.”
“How’s Arletta, or whatever her name is?”
“Arlen. She’s okay. She’s been sick.”
“How’s your golf game?”
“It’s been better. Look here, Olivia, how about going out to eat breakfast with me? I’m starving to death.”
“There’s a hotel in the next block that’s open now—the café, I mean. All right, let’s go.” I got up from my desk and put on my old tweed jacket, pushed my hair back from my face, took off my reading glasses, and came around the desk, and he put his body around me and held me as though I were a bird in a golden retriever’s mouth, and I let him hold me because why not, for God’s sake—I love the man.
A
ROUND NOON WE
got out of bed and he called the Republican headquarters and I called the newspaper and we got dressed and went our separate ways, to pretend to work, and then we came back to the hotel and got sad as hell the way we always do. Here’s how we worked the sadness.
“I can’t leave her because she’s sick.”
“You can’t leave her because her father is part of the southern Mafia and he’d have you killed.”
“That’s also true.”
“So the Mafia is backing President Bush?”
“I don’t know who they’re backing. I’m backing him because I believe in what he’s doing. I’m not arguing with you, Olivia. I have a lot of friends who don’t agree with me, but I can’t help believing what I believe, any more than you can help believing what you believe.” He hung his head again. It always got to me when he dropped that amazing chin down from that amazing neck. He’s so still and he just keeps on being there, six feet three inches of a man who was Rookie of the Year with the Chicago Bears and would have been the greatest running back they ever had if he hadn’t lost his right knee to gravity and a right guard from Champaign, Illinois, who afterward became his best friend and used to caddy for him while he was learning to play golf so that he’d have a reason to live. He won the Oklahoma state championship one year after he bought his first set of clubs.
“I’m glad you hurt your knee and had to quit playing football,” I said. “They might have torn up your whole body if you’d kept on playing.”
“They’d have had to catch me first.” He didn’t take his eyes from mine. His eyes were the darkest brown I’ve ever seen, except for an old chief I knew in Tahlequah who also had the strange, pure power this man I’ll never stop loving has or contains.
Contains
is the better word. It’s this reservoir he never taps in front of me. “What have you been doing, Olivia?” he asks. “I tried to call you at least twenty times last month, but no one would put me through.”
“I’m going out with a newspaperman from Fayetteville. He used to work for the
New York Times
. I’ve been fucking him just to spite you.”
“I don’t fuck her.”
“Yes, you do. You liar. You fuck Arlette and half the women in Oklahoma and maybe Mississippi and Tennessee and Alabama. No, I’m sorry; I know that isn’t true. Jesus Christ, Kane. It’s a couple of days until the biggest election of the last twenty years, and you have to show up and do this to me. Make me jealous of shadows. Make me sick with dreading when you leave two days or two hours from now and then I’m back to taw without a paddle and no one to eat dinner with.”
“What’s his name?”
“William Finney. It’s nothing. He plays golf, but he’s not any good.”
“Do you still have my putter?”
“Yes, it’s at my house. You want to go over to my house and get it? Come on, let’s go. The main thing wrong with all of this is the rented hotel rooms. That always makes me so sad, but then everything about this is sad. In real life, nothing makes me sad. How dare you make me sad.”
“I don’t know, baby. I don’t mean to. I know I don’t.”
So we went to my house and I got his goddamn putter out
of my umbrella stand and gave it to him, and then I took him back to the Republican National Committee headquarters and I went back to the office and got to work in earnest. It was going to be a long haul until the polls closed on November 2, and I had work to do.
S
OMETIME THAT AFTERNOON
I had an epiphany. It isn’t just Kane and his breathtaking sweetness and his body, I realized. I am wonderful too, goddamn it, amazing and unprecedented. I took the life I was given—not that much different from the lives around me in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, although the genes were very, very good, I guess—and I made a hugely successful career. My grandfather had been a chief of the Cherokee Nation and my grandmother was uneducated but strong and wise, and they had loved me and taught me to be strong.
All those blessings given to me, and out of that, I, the love child of a Cherokee girl and a young man from the upper middle class of North Carolina, had brought my talents to fruition in those strange years in the United States, years of upheaval and change, and become the youngest person ever to be editor of the main newspaper in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
So what if I wasn’t very good at relationships over the long haul and had fallen for a married man? That’s not much of a stumble in a life that’s been mostly success.
“Don’t do this to me again,” I told him that night. I looked him right in the eye and kept saying it. “I won’t be nice the next time you show up in my office or call me or do anything else
to get me to be a fool. You are married. You have children. Go home and act like a man, Kane. Get the hell out of here.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, baby.”
“Leave.”
Then he was gone and I went back to the office and back to work, waiting to find out what headlines we were going to need in what was now the next forty-eight hours.
“I’
M SICK OF THIS
goddamn election,” my best friend, Thomas Keys, said. He is second in command at the paper and a stalwart in every way: a veteran, a war hero, a one-armed wonder in the brains and ability departments. “I don’t even want to know the results of what the American people in all their diversity and craziness and half-educated guesses and real and imagined vested interests decide to do about the future of this, my beloved country. Long may it wave and so forth.”
“How are you feeling, aside from that?” I asked. I was at my desk with my feet up in the second drawer, trying to get a knot in my leg to quit twitching.
“I’m doing okay for a man who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in a week. I keep waking up thinking I’m supposed to do something.”
“Write me an editorial for Wednesday’s paper about the lessons of history.”
T
UESDAY
, N
OVEMBER
2, 2004. Election day and goddamn it if I don’t run into my ex-husband standing in line at
Creek Elementary School, where I go to vote. They had some really good art on the walls where we waited in line. One especially good combination poem-painting was called
A Fast, Fat Squirrel
.
I was halfway to the door of the room where the voting was taking place when I spotted him just turning in his ballot. Bobby Tree, the first boy I ever fucked and the only man except for Kane that I ever loved. You don’t forget your first love. Nothing is ever again that fast and fat.
A minute later he was beside me with his hand on my waist and all that goddamn indescribable sexual stuff that comes out of his five-foot-ten-inch Cherokee body like snowmelt in the high mountains in early May. He used to take me to the Rockies in spring to watch the snow turn into rushing rivers, then take me down the rivers in a canoe.
I was having my second epiphany in a week: in some vast illumination I realized I could love two men at once. That is how men do it, love more than one of us. I want them both, but not together the way men fantasize about their women. I want Kane then and Bobby now, and maybe that’s how you keep it in balance, or maybe it’s the new vitamins I got in the mail from Andrew Weil, or maybe it’s just this damn election.
“Where are you going when you leave here?” Bobby asked. “Come have coffee with me. I’ve been missing you. Every time I read the paper, I think of you and how proud I am of everything you do.”
“Okay.” That’s what I said. Words were never a big deal between me and Bobby Tree.
“I’ll wait out here in the hall,” he said.
“Look at the pictures,” I said. “There’s a fast, fat squirrel you’d really like.”
S
O
I
VOTE
and turn in my ballot, and ten minutes later I’m at Alfred’s Coffee Nook, eating sweet rolls and crying on Bobby’s shoulder about every goddamn thing in the world. An hour after that I’m screwing him, and then I was three hours late to the office on Election Day and I didn’t even apologize or give a damn. The last editor of this paper was a staggering drunk and didn’t show up one-tenth as much as I usually do. I’m sick of the election anyway. Who gives a rat’s ass which political party is at the trough?
“There’ll be a real attack now,” Bobby said, and I believed it when he said it because I believed it anyway.
“As soon as this election’s over, they’ll attack, and this time there’ll be a nuclear element. No one can protect a country as free and open as the United States. They’ve got so many Mexicans in Oklahoma now you can’t count them, and even more in northwest Arkansas. And Muslims in all the colleges. Plus any black or white kids that are pissed off and want to do damage. I just pray it will be in a city. After that, there’s an outside chance the United States will wake up and get serious about protecting itself. I hate to tell you that, but you asked me what I was
thinking.” He sat back on the bed, his body as beautiful and tanned as it had been when he was young, his black eyes boring into me, loving me. The most seductive thing about Bobby is he really loves me, no matter what happens; I never doubt that.
“Things are going well at work,” he said. “You ought to come out sometime and see the things I’m building at the old fair-grounds.”
“I will,” I said, knowing I probably wouldn’t do it. Nothing ever came of Bobby and me fucking each other. We’d been too many miles together and the trip had been too rocky.
S
O ANYWAY, THAT
’s how I spent the first week in November, fucking both of my old boyfriends, which is really unusual because I haven’t been fucking anyone much for a year. William Finney is mostly talk. Feast or famine. Don’t judge me on my sexual behavior this one week. Most of the time I live like a nun and work twenty hours a day and give to charity and try not to hate my fellow man. Olivia de Havilland Hand, remember me. My story is far from over.
Things are also far from over between me and Bobby Tree, who started off loving each other in the days when we were just branching up to be real human beings.
The election happened. Nothing came of it except the usual. Life went on. I worked all Thanksgiving Day and went out Thanksgiving night to see a movie my crew had been begging me to see—a film called
Sideways
, which they all thought was hilarious because of a scene with an actor we know from Mississippi
running naked down a street, trying to catch his wife’s lover.
I had hardly taken my place in the ticket line when I saw Bobby a few places in front of me, wearing his old blue and black plaid flannel jacket, his black hair curling all over his head.
“Twice in one month,” I told him. “I guess that settles it.”
“I’ll buy you a ticket,” he answered. “What do you want to eat?”
We bought buttered popcorn and Diet Cokes and went inside and watched the film, and then we went to my house and spent the night.
“I used to know how to be happy,” I told him. “And so did you. What’s happened to us?”
“I’ve loved you all my life, Olivia. I’ll always love you. All you got to do is let me be with you. You don’t have to change yourself for me. I know who you are.”
“Yeah, I do need to change. I have this new idea I got from yoga. It’s about the anahata, the heart chakra, this imaginary place in your chest that you open up so you can let people in and love them.”
“Could we go to bed now?” he answered. “I got up at dawn and couldn’t find a thing to do except go look at a project we’ve got going on Webber Street. I didn’t even call my dad and step-mom until right before I went out to the movie.”
“Let’s stop acting so goddamn pitiful,” I said, giggling. “Let’s go to bed and see if you can still make me come.”
S
O, FOR A LOT
of mysterious and not-so-mysterious reasons, Bobby Tree and I made up for good. We didn’t talk about it much. We just decided to go on and try to be happy. Who knows, maybe having the world seem like it’s coming apart draws people to the things they really love. Maybe it’s fear. Anyway, Bobby Tree and I settled down to make a new start. We’d been loving each other since we were fifteen years old, and we knew each other’s past. “Look at it this way, baby,” he told me. “Sooner or later we’d get back together. Why wait till we’re old and gray?” And he pulled me close to him until I could feel his body taut and fine against mine, and the same old music started playing. “Dance with me. I want to be your partner. …” It has been our song since the first time I heard it on the radio, riding in Bobby’s old red pickup toward the river to take the canoe from Pinewood down to Five Feathers on the east fork of the Big Black. I hadn’t been going out with him more than a week and already we were getting in trouble.
“I’m going to Fayetteville to a cheerleading camp,” I’d told my grandparents. “I’m driving over with Bobby Tree because I don’t want to go on the bus. Why—why are you looking like that?”
“Where you going to stay over there?”
“At the university, in their dormitories. I did it last year. Don’t you remember?”