Miracle (22 page)

Dimly she knew that everyone was staring at her, waiting. She felt too hot. She held her copy of the audition piece in front of her like a shield and watched it tremble.

“Take a deep breath and give it a shot,” the director said. There were some barely stifled giggles in the audience. She heard
those
as if they’d been amplified a million times.

She squeaked her way through the piece, not knowing or really caring what she read. The director stopped her halfway. Somewhere in the dark distance between her and the audience he stood up and said, “Thank you. Good night.”

“Good night” meant “Get lost,” she’d already heard someone explain. Amy stole a glance at the people around her as she left the stage. People craned their heads to watch her. They had bewildered expressions, as if they weren’t quite sure how to classify what they’d just seen and heard.

Her face felt as if it were on fire. She bolted into the cool evening air and ran to the Ferrari, then threw up beside the rear bumper. She slumped against the car and rested her head against the smooth black metal.
Doc, I’m sorry. This
is one thing I can’t do. I’m never going up on a stage again.

She and Mary Beth and Harlan drove to Florida during spring break. Daytona Beach. It was a madhouse filled with college students from all over the Southeast. Amy wore an ordinary white maillot to the beach and was surprised when boys whistled at her.

The attention pleased her and bolstered her confidence at the same time that it made her nearly sick with loneliness. She didn’t want to be ogled by these guys; they were just kids. She had sampled something that they were incapable of offering, and she couldn’t forget it.

Mary Beth hauled Amy and Harlan to a wet T-shirt contest on their last night in town. Sitting in a club packed with eagerly waiting males, Mary Beth drank six vodka stingers and Harlan drank four. Amy drank one and stopped. She felt disoriented and depressed.

When the contest started Mary Beth shoved her bra into Amy’s hands and went up on stage with two dozen other girls. She wore only tight cutoffs and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, and her breasts bounced merrily. Harlan grew morose as the emcee started spraying the girls with a hose and the audience started cheering.

Mary Beth proudly thrust her plastered chest into the spotlight. She won first prize and twenty-five dollars. Harlan
was embarrassed and grumbled about Mary Beth’s morals all the way back to the motel. Amy was sorry to be sharing a room with them. Mary Beth stripped to her panties and got into one of the double beds.

“Can the lecture,” she told Harlan. “I wouldn’t protest if you entered a wet jock-strap contest. Life was meant to be experienced, sugar. Now shut up and go to sleep.” Harlan left his clothes on and flopped down beside her.

Amy turned out the lights, pulled the tail of her T-shirt out and removed her shorts, then slid into her bed and lay there in the dark listening to Harlan and Mary Beth mutter to each other. She was stunned when the mutters turned to soft slurping sounds. Then she heard a zipper open, followed by Harlan’s grunts as he pushed tight denim shorts off the lower half of a 250-pound body.

Amy turned her head and saw the faint pinkness of Harlan’s naked butt as he rolled on top of Mary Beth. Her sense of honor wouldn’t let her watch the rest; she pulled a pillow over her head and turned on her side, facing away. The sounds filtered through anyway—soft moans, the bed thumping the wall, ragged breaths, and finally simultaneous gasps.

As crude and silly as the whole event was, it turned her loneliness into a hot, aching desire to be touched, and suddenly she understood how any attractive man could serve a woman’s purpose at a moment like this, or vice versa. She muffled her soft sobs in the pillow and whispered Sebastien’s name.

The old wound was now just a fine, crescent-shaped scar, mostly hidden under her chin, with only the front tip visible under close inspection. Mary Beth liked the scar. She said it and the tattoo gave Amy an air of mystery and a sinister appeal. Amy decided to make fun of it, rather than let it embarrass her. She was learning to protect herself by making fun of a lot of things.

Pop never mentioned the scar. He didn’t this time, either. He treated her like a distant relative who dropped in to
visit, which depressed Amy more than his bad temper had. At least when he had been mad at her, she’d felt noticed.

For her Easter visit he wore a yellow flannel shirt and his best brown slacks. He propped his elbows on Maisie’s prettily set kitchen table and dangled a beer between his hands. Amy sat adjacent to him and stared at the pink roses on the china. Maisie bustled around, bringing casseroles to the table, humming a gospel tune, her mind much farther away than her body.

“You’re dressing like one of those preppies,” Pop commented. He nodded at Amy’s herringbone blazer, pleated blouse, and long plaid skirt. “I thought college kids were supposed to be hippies.”

“It’s the Reagan era, now, Pop. everybody’s going conservative.” She studied the graying auburn hair that lay on one of his shoulders in a thin braid. “But hey, I always liked the Willie Nelson look.”

“Raise hell and live the way you please.”

“Sing with Julio Iglesias. It gives me the shivers.”

“You’re making fun of Willie.”

“No, I’m making fun of Julio. He looks like a lounge lizard. Or since he’s Spanish, like a lounge
iguana.
”

Pop laughed. It startled her. She couldn’t recall when she’d made him laugh at a joke. Despite the thread of distrust and bitterness that always underlay her feelings for him, she couldn’t help but be pleased.

“College has made you more fun to talk to,” he told her.

“Fun is my middle name these days. So, how’s the art world treating you, Picasso Pop?”

“Lousy. Haven’t sold anything in three months.’

“Power company cut us off last week,” Maisie interjected. “I had to sell off fifty of my hens to catch the bill up. I fussed with that man out at the power company, but he wouldn’t give me any more time.”

Amy frowned over this news and was about to ask more questions about their bills, when Pop asked abruptly, “Heard from the Frenchman?”

Amy cleared her throat and answered, “Nope,” in a nonchalant voice. It still angered her that stories about her and Sebastien had gotten to Maisie through Pio Beaucaire’s
secretary. She rattled the ice in a glass of tea and hoped that dinner would be ready soon. She wouldn’t feel like eating if Pop pursued this subject.

“Well, I’ll say this for him,” Pop continued, nodding. “He stole the milk, but he paid for the cow. Can’t ask a man to do more than that. I mean, if you had to go live with some foreigner, I’m glad he was a generous one. And he didn’t knock you up, so there was no harm done. I just don’t understand why he picked
you
out of all the girls who worked at the winery. He wasn’t some kind of pervert, was he?”

Maisie gave Amy a sympathetic look and plopped another casserole in the center of the table. “Amy wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with a homosexual. That man was probably just shy. You know, some men are scared of girls who sound too smart. Amy suited his nature, that’s all.”

Amy took a swallow of tea. She very calmly set the glass down. She arranged Maisie’s pink, embroidered napkin in her lap and folded her hands on top of it. She was going to be very pleasant, eat her dinner, and compliment Maisie on her cooking. She had reached an important point in her life, and it made her calm. Deadly calm.

“Pop, do you know how much that car I drive is worth?”

He snorted. “More than this double-wide and the chicken house put together.”

“Right. Well. I’m gonna sell that car. Then I’m gonna buy me another car—something ordinary. I’m gonna give you and Maisie the rest of the money. I want you to be comfortable. I don’t ever want to worry about you and wonder if you’re able to pay your bills.” Her voice kept a low, casual timbre, for once. She nodded to Pop. “Because I’m not ever coming back here.”

That announcement pretty much ruined dinner. Amidst all of Pop’s snide comments about her attitude and Maisie’s pleas for her to give them some money but not abandon the family, Amy remained unyielding. She’d pay the debt for what, if anything, she’d done to deserve being unloved and made to feel unlovable. Now she could move forward, toward a time when somebody could love her and she could love herself. It was another step toward Sebastien.

S
ebastien rented the top level of a spacious duplex in an exclusive section of Abidjan, a place where chauffeured cars cruised down streets lined with fruit trees, and gardeners tended yards filled with tropical flowers. His downstairs neighbors were a university professor and his family. The professor had left the Senoufo tribe as a very young man and gone to France to attend college.

Though middle-class, middle-aged, and very European in dress and manner, he proudly bore the whiskerlike scars of the Senoufo on his face, and he had taught the traditions of his tribe to his children.

To Sebastien the Ivory Coast was like that professor, a fascinating mixture of cultures. Thatched huts existed in the shadow of skyscrapers and resort hotels; huge freighters slid along the surface of the great inland lagoon that fronted the city, while only a short drive away monkeys chattered in the rain forests.

It was a country of ancient ways and dark mysteries, which suited his nature, but he was anxious to finish his service and leave. Owing to the natives’ lean diet, there was little heart disease here. Except for an occasional congenital defect or injury, he had few opportunities to practice his specialty. Because there were so few doctors, each had many duties, so he did everything from lance abscesses to deliver breech babies.

Now he dropped to his haunches beside a cot in a village
home and probed the thick scar that crossed the man’s belly from hip to hip. The pink ridge, swabbed clean with alcohol, made a startling contrast to the patient’s dusty black skin. Sebastien nodded with approval at the results of the work he’d done a month ago. This was surgery at its most primitive, and yet somehow most satisfying.

“Tell him his wound has healed well.”

The robed interpreter who hunkered next to Sebastien relayed that message. The patient, a young father of five, sat up on his mat-covered bed frame and slapped his bare chest lustily, then zipped his pants up. He said something and grinned.

The interpreter began to smile. He drew one dark hand over his mouth to hide it. “
Monsieur le docteur
has made the patient’s wife very happy,” the interpreter said in precise French. “He says that his penis works very well again.”

“It should, now that his abdominal muscles have lost their soreness. Ask him if he’s had any more fights with the fellow who did this.”

The victim listened to the interpreter solemnly, then nodded. “They still feud,” the interpreter told Sebastien. “It’s a family quarrel. They may continue for years.”

Sebastien frowned. “He’ll end up dead, and waste my efforts.”

“But for now his stomach is healed and his penis works. What more is needed to make a man happy?”