Beautiful Girl (17 page)

She is clearly in no shape to go out to dinner, and Walpole wonders if he shouldn’t cook something for the two of them to eat. Scrambled eggs? He looks around the impossibly disordered kitchen, at stacks of dishes, piled-up newspapers, a smelly cat box in one corner, although he has seen no cat.

He reaches and pours some more vodka into his own glass, then glances over at Ardis, whose eyes have begun to close.

By way of testing her, he asks, “Something I always wondered. That summer, I used to see you around with Gifford Gwathmey, and then later you’d be with Henry Mallory. Weren’t you pinned to Gifford?”

Ardis abruptly comes awake, and emits her laugh. “Of course I was pinned to Giff,” she chortles. “But he and all those S.A.E.s were almost as boring as Dekes, although
he did come from one of the oldest and
richest
families in Charleston.” (This last in her nasal snob-imitating voice.) “So I used to late-date on him all the time, mainly with Henry, who didn’t have a dime. But the Delta Psis were
fun
—they had
style
—a lot of boys from New York and Philadelphia.” She laughs again. “Between dates, I’d rush back to the House and brush my teeth—talk about your basic fastidious coed. Henry teased me about always tasting of Pepsodent.” For a moment Ardis looks extremely happy, and almost young; then she falls slowly forward until her head rests on the table in front of her, and she begins to snore.

Carrie, who has recently discovered jazz, is upstairs listening to old Louis Armstrong records, smoking a joint. “Pale moon shining on the fields below …”

She is thinking, as she often does, of how much she would like to get out of this house for a while. She would like to drop out of school for a term or two, maybe next spring, and just get into her truck with a few clothes and some money, and maybe a dog, and drive around the country. There is a huge circular route that she has often imagined: up to Seattle, maybe Canada, Vancouver, down into Wyoming, across the northern plains to Chicago—she knows someone there—New England, New York and down the coast to her father, in Wilmington, N.C.; Charleston, New Orleans, Texas, Mexico, the Southwest, L.A.; then home, by way of Big Sur. Months of driving, with the dog and the CB radio for company.

In the meantime, halfway through her second joint, she sighs deeply and realizes that she is extremely hungry, ravenous. She carefully stubs out the joint and goes downstairs.

Walpole Greene, whose presence she had forgotten, is standing in the pantry, looking lost. Ardis has passed out. Having also forgotten that she thought he was a creep, Carrie experiences a rush of sympathy for the poor guy. “Don’t worry,” she tells him. “She’ll be O.K.”

“She sure as hell doesn’t look O.K.,” says Walpole Greene. “She’s not O.K. No one who drinks that much—”

“Oh, well, in the long run you’re right,” says Carrie, as airily as though she had never worried about her mother’s health. “But I mean for now she’s O.K.”

“Well. I’d meant to take her out to dinner.”

“Why bother? She doesn’t eat. But aren’t you hungry? I’m starved.”

“Well, sort of.” Walpole looks dubiously around the kitchen. He watches Carrie as she goes over to the mammoth refrigerator and extracts a small covered saucepan from its incredibly crowded, murky interior.

“She likes to make soup,” says Carrie. “Lately she’s been on some Southern kick. Nostalgia, I guess. This is white beans and pork. Just made yesterday, so it ought to be all right.”

The soup, which Carrie has heated and ladled into bowls, is good but too spicy for Walpole’s ulcer; the next day he will feel really terrible. Now he and Carrie whisper to each other, like conspirators, above the sound of Ardis’s heavy breathing.

“Does she do this often?” asks Walpole.

“Pretty often. Well—like, every day.”

“That’s not good.”

“No.”

Having drunk quite a bit more than he usually does, Walpole feels that his perceptions are enlarged. Looking at Carrie, he has a sudden and certain vision of her future: in ten or so years, in her late twenties, early thirties, she will be
more beautiful than even Ardis ever was. She will be an exceptional beauty, a beautiful woman, whereas Ardis was just a beautiful girl. Should he tell Carrie that? He decides not to; she wouldn’t believe him, although he is absolutely sure of his perception. Besides, even a little drunk he is too shy.

Instead, in an inspired burst, he says, “Listen, she’s got to go somewhere. You know, dry out. There’s a place in Connecticut. Senators’ wives—”

Carrie’s bright young eyes shine, beautifully. “That would be neat,” she says.

“You’d be O.K. by yourself for a while?”

“I really would. I’m thinking about getting a dog—our cat just disappeared. And there’s this trip. But how would you get her there?”

“Leave that to me,” says Walpole, with somewhat dizzy confidence.

Carrie clears the table—without, Walpole notices, washing any dishes.

Carrie goes back upstairs, her heart high and light.

She considers calling her sister, Linda, saying that Walpole Greene is taking their mother to Connecticut. But Linda would say something negative, unpleasant.

Instead, she puts on another record, and hears the rich pure liquid sound of Louis’s horn, and then his voice. “Beale Street Blues,” “Muskrat Ramble,” “A Son of the South.” She listens, blows more joints.

Downstairs, seated at the table, Walpole is talking softly and persuasively, he hopes, to Ardis’s ear (her small pink
ears are still pretty, he has noticed), although she is “asleep.”

“This lovely place in Connecticut,” he is saying. “A wonderful place. You’ll like it. You’ll rest, and eat good food, and you’ll feel better than you’ve felt for years. You’ll see. I want you to be my beautiful girl again—”

Suddenly aroused, Ardis raises her head and stares at Walpole. “I am a beautiful girl,” she rasps out, furiously.

In San Francisco there is apt to be no spring at all. During one such season of grayness, cold and wind, when everything else in my life was also terrible, I felt that I would die of longing for home—“home” being in my case a small Southern river town, not far inland from the Atlantic coast.

My problems were more serious than I could cope with or even think about: a husband, a lover and a landlady, all of whom I was terrified of, and a son for whose future, in those conditions, I greatly feared. And so, instead, I thought about hot river smells, jasmine and hyacinth and gardenias, caves of honeysuckle and live oaks festooned with Spanish moss.

And finally, in June (there was still no summer, no remission of cold and fog), against some better judgment, with my son I rushed back there—rushed toward what, in another frame of mind, I might have considered an origin of my troubles: alcoholic parents, a disapproving, narrow small town that still (probably) contained several former lovers (I had been a wild young girl) and some inimical former friends.

Exhilarated by a remembrance of steamy river afternoons, canoe trips down to small white beaches and summer night dances, I went and bought some light new clothes—cotton shorts, flouncy pastel dresses—such as out in San Francisco I hadn’t needed for years. My married life had made me feel ugly—drained and discolored, old; and with the unerringly poor judgment of a depressed person I had found a lover who disliked me, who in fact was a little crazy, mean. Perhaps as much as anything else I needed to return to a place where I had been young and, if never beautiful, at least sought after.

And once my plans were made, my problems seemed somewhat to abate: the landlady herself went away on vacation, so that for a time there were no more of those harrowing, repeated phone calls about the noise of my son’s running footsteps (Simon, at four, not a heavy or clumsy child); my lover was sympathetic (possibly relieved, since we had chosen each other out of angry needs?); my husband took Simon and me out for a pleasant, noncritical parting dinner, at a good Italian restaurant. He only said, “You won’t be eating food like this for a while, will you, Claire,” and I said that I supposed not.

Perhaps I did not have to go home after all? But by then I was committed. Letters written, tickets bought. And those clothes.

Only on the plane did some of the drawbacks inherent in my plan occur to me: my selfish parents’ total indifference to children; the extreme heat, to which neither Simon nor I (now) was used; and the embarrassment (fear) of seeing certain people there—Mary Sue, my girlhood rival-friend-enemy; Dudley Farmer, with whom I had once had a violent and badly ending love; other friends.

And so I flew across the country in a wild mixture of fear and excitement, a state that was all too familiar to me: it
was how I felt on getting married (rightly, as things turned out); how I felt each time I went to meet my lover. Often, when the phone rang I was afraid.

My apprehensive state increased in Washington—Kennedy Airport, where we were to change planes to go south, to go home. And by the time we were on that second plane, heading up through small puffy clouds in a pastel-blue sky, I was babbling to Simon, crazily: “Remind me to show you—take you—tell you about—”

He was fine, so far. Filled, perhaps, with nice kindergarten stories about little boys going to visit their grandparents, my volatile, difficult, demanding and adored young son sat buckled into his seat in seeming contentment. He listened to the ravings of his mother, himself at peace, sipping his diet cola (ludicrous, such a tall thin child, but having failed him in large ways I have tended to yield on small issues). I gulped vodka.

The plane landed and skidded along a red clay field—my part of the South is made almost entirely of red clay; the rest is dust. And we headed toward a one-story white clapboard building, the terminal. In front there was a high wire fence, next to which stood a portly, white-haired, red-faced man, very erect, in a white linen suit: my father. I would of course have known him anywhere, picked him out in any crowd, but what I first thought was: Oh! I’d forgotten how short he is. By reasonable standards he is not short, almost six feet, but I had been involved with unreasonably tall men: my husband, six two, and my lover, an impossible six four. My son too will be very tall.

We got out, Simon and I holding hands down the steps; for an instant I felt my father’s eyes pass across and not recognize us. But then he did, and we were all upon each other, embracing and saying familiar blank words and smelling familiar smells: his cigarette-smoked clothes and breath,
shaving lotion and mint (mints to kill the smell of bourbon). I don’t know what about me seemed or smelled familiar: I switch perfumes a lot and drink scentless vodka—or Simon, whom he had only seen two or three times before, at widely spaced intervals.

Another thing I had forgotten about my father: he is impossible to understand until you have been with him for several days. He has a heavy Southern accent and he speaks extremely fast, generally with a cigarette in his mouth. And so, as we drove over the long flat white miles toward home, over swamps, past creeks and dried-out rutted farmland where the only shade was a single chinaberry tree, we did not exactly have a conversation. I said that my husband was fine but working too hard—“you know how he is” (which my father did not know). I didn’t mention trouble with the landlady and certainly not my dangerous lover.

Between us, forgotten by us both, Simon sat forward on his seat and stared at everything.

As we approached our town, “New hospital!” my father cried out triumphantly, and he pointed toward a towering white mass of concrete and glass and steel that rose unrelatedly from a spreading pine grove. Its busy parking lot was islanded with buckets of thin young trees; the landscaping confirmed the newness of the place—to me it all looked raw and hostile. And so large: I had a quick image of all the inhabitants of our small town being sucked inside.

Just then my father was saying something about Dudley Farmer (I thought) and then (surely unconnectedly)—“psychoanalyst, from Boston, Harvard College, I believe, doing some sort of research—” but I really couldn’t hear this either.

When we got to the house—a big, pillared box, imposingly back from the river—the sun was still high, yellow-hazed
above the brown slow water, but actually it was five o’clock. “Time for a drink!” said my father, as he did each day at that time.

I was suddenly exhausted, and strangely inwardly tearful: a drink seemed a good idea. My mother was still asleep; she spends the afternoon sleeping off the lunchtime sherry, and then it’s time to start again. And so we sat on the porch and waited for her entrance, while Simon ran down to the dock, where he took off his shoes and waded at the shallow muddy river edge.

My father was going on about the wonderful new hospital, the gift of a prominent (and dreadful right-wing rich red-neck, I thought) local family, and he mentioned again, with one of his curious jolting laughs, the psychoanalyst who had come down from Boston to do some work in the hospital, research. (“Artistic Negro children” is what my father said; I later learned he meant autistic—in his accent, impossible to tell.) And in a dreamy bleary way I thought, Good, I will have a summer romance with the Boston shrink. God knows I could use one, or both.

My mother is one of those women who, having been great beauties, forever retain that air; automatically people defer to and wait on her. All my life I had watched her performances with a defeated, angry envy, as I too deferred and waited on her. It was hard to believe that we belonged to the same sex, much less the same family. Now she came in, scarves floating around that faded golden head; my father and I stood up and she kissed us both, and we started getting things for her: a special drink, an ashtray and then another scarf that she had left upstairs in her bedroom.

I told her that I was fine, that it was good to be home. That she looked wonderful.

“Did Daddy tell you about poor Dudley Farmer?”
she asked me next. “Has to have this terrible operation on his stomach, they say they’re going to take out most of it. He’s scared, I tell you. Supposed to lose a lot of weight.”