“Rose”—the irritation had crept into her voice—“I said something here; I told you something. Why haven’t you responded?”
“I’m not in this world to mind your business, Lily.”
“Rose, who else do you talk to?”
I said I knew all the women up here on the lake.
“Why do I never see them sitting on your porch?”
“The ones who don’t work have small children. They’re busy,” I excused myself, from what I had no idea.
“I’m a peroxided piece of work, Rosie. I ought to be on my knees with gratitude to Glen Pembroke. If it wasn’t for him, I’d probably be a call girl down in Atlanta, hooked on heroin or dying of AIDS or both.”
“Is there no in-between?” I was dumbfounded that she knew herself so well and mortified that she realized I wasn’t always thrilled to see her at my door. I thought I’d done a better job of disguising it.
“I never understood it,” she said glumly. “Husband, mortgage, kids and recipes. I’m no good at it.”
“Then you need a career,” I said. I had told myself the same thing a thousand times. After it was too late.
“You mean typing all day?” she asked with disdain. “And then come home to husband, mortgage, kids and recipes.”
“Plenty of women do,” I said grandly.
“I’d sooner be a call girl.”
She’d talked a complete circle around me and as usual I’d missed the point. Typing looked good to me. I didn’t have her options. The best I ever did was a minimum wage an hour clerk’s position at a Birmingham department store.
“Rose, are you stupid?”
“Smart enough to know I made my own bed and I have to lie in it.”
“I made my own bed.…” She rolled her eyes in disgust.
I took umbrage at that. I told her as much.
“Every word out of your mouth is something you’ve heard others say.”
Supper. I’d dice ham and melt cheddar cheese over it and serve it on sourdough bread. I went into the larder and pulled a quart of corn chowder out of the freezer.
“Well!?”
“Make your point, Lillian.”
“You never make
your
point, Rose. You’re terrified someone will notice and tell Dashnell that you have a brain.”
“I try to avoid trouble.”
“Trouble? You avoid human contact.”
She was up from her chair, standing right behind me, my best French linen dish towel in her hand. She laid it down absentmindedly on the stove and before she noticed the burner was warming, it was scorched. I grabbed it up. It was the last of six Carmen gave me the Christmas before he died. Dashnell had used the others to wash his truck windows. I blew apart.
“When I want my brains pecked to pieces, I’ll see a psychiatrist! Whatever human contact I miss out on, I’m still not so low and deceitful I’d entice a kid into my husband’s bed while he’s off earning us a living! Your kind has to either stay in trouble or start it for somebody else. Go on out that door and don’t come back!”
She looked like she’d swallowed a gopher. I checked myself care
fully to see if I felt any remorse. To my great relief, I didn’t. Lily stood there, her eyes coolly seeking mine. I wouldn’t give them to her directly. I busied myself about the kitchen and waited for her to make that long sigh she always gives out before she leaves a room.
“Evidently I read you wrong, Rose. I apologize,” she said in the same flat tone she had used earlier to tell me that she was afraid. “You’ve been a lot more decent than most,” she added as her hand reached for the screen door.
I suddenly wanted to tell her everything. You forget when you draw up into yourself and pass the days alone. Loneliness is a precarious state of being. The most immediate and inconsequential things take on false importance. Diced ham and dish towels override people.
She was almost to their dock by the time I reached my backyard. She was smiling. I needed her friendship. I wanted it. I took more pleasure in her company than I had ever admitted to myself. Following her home was an act of surrender.
“I apologize for what I said.”
“Don’t apologize, Rosie. Trouble travels with me. You didn’t say a word I haven’t already thought.”
I explained why the French linen dish towel set me off.
“I ruined one. I was careless, but it was unintentional. You threw me out. Dashnell has used five of them to wash his truck? What did you do to him?”
She couldn’t possibly understand Dashnell or what it takes to keep things calm and even between us. I didn’t say anything.
“We don’t talk about Dashnell?”
I allowed I preferred that we not. I knew she was going to push it. Whether her intuition took over or she had seen more than I realized, Lily plucked a forgotten string.
“Rosie, I have eyes and ears. I know what’s going on. I know how afraid you are. Just remember, I’m here when you need me.” I wasn’t ready to pour it all out. But her kindness gave me a great deal of hope that some things were still possible even for me.
It was dark. We sat on the bench at the end of the pier and waited for the moon. A lovely, aching feeling washed over me. It was
tenuous and familiar and humbling. We were taking in the tender lapping of the water on the wooden pilings, the sporadic puffs of warm evening wind, and the sudden balm of our newly found friendship.
“He’s decent, Rosie. His eyes give more than they take.” I stopped my mouth. I didn’t let myself play dumb and ask, “Who?” That would have been a backhanded warning not to mix me up in it. I just listened. “He doesn’t understand deception. He doesn’t have anything to hide. He’s all that he appears to be.”
She was in love with him. I could tell it frightened her. Well, it frightened me too.
“Every other man I loved was either deluded or duplicitous. I always saw it right away. It never caught me off guard. I’d determine his fatal flaw and stow it deep in my mind. I’d have it to blame later when our cloud ran out of gas. I was fatalistic. I had to examine every exit, to know my way out before I’d let myself fall in love. Until I met Heath.”
I was immediately engulfed by shame. The notion that there was anything beyond the physical indulgence of two pretty young people had never entered my mind. The possibility that Heath Lawler was remotely decent had completely eluded me. I was far too envious of their beauty to consider their hearts and minds. Mine had been an exalted existence in an unreachable tower of self-pity. I was the unsung, martyred and deeply poetic keeper of all emotional truths. Lily was loose, blind and common next to me. Heath was certified Prince George County trash who had by an outrageously generous creator been given a comely form to disguise the brutal emptiness which set the Lawlers apart from the rest of the species.
“Why so quiet, Rosie?”
“I’m just trying to see this from your point of view.”
“I didn’t expect his kindness. I thought he’d deflate the tension of one relentlessly boring afternoon. It was a game of chance. Could I seduce that handsome young boy? Could I extract a measure of admiration? If I managed to lure him into my bedroom, how long could I keep him there?”
So I hadn’t been completely off base.
“Why does his kindness upset you?”
“No stored well of falsehoods to throw at him if he gets too close to me. I’m defenseless. If I’m not careful I’ll wind up hopelessly in love with him. I’ll be powerless to stop. I’ll do something crazy like walk out on Glen. I’ll lose my children. God knows what Glen might do.”
Suddenly I saw it. Lily and I were the same trembling birds of prey.
“Rosie, I play the slattern with the razored tongue. It’s not altogether by choice. Glen
likes
it. It enables him to play the deceived, hardworking and relentlessly good man. Rosie, I’m not some thankless, unappreciative wife who refuses to work. Glen doesn’t want me to work. He wants me at home where there’s less temptation. He won’t admit this, not even to himself, Rosie, but sex is his way of punishing me. He hurts me. He takes me when I’m asleep. He makes it excruciating. He slaps me and calls me names and plays choking games. If I so much as whimper he punches me and that excites him more. Rosie, I don’t mean to embarrass or humiliate you, but I see, Honey. I know what you endure. I know that panicked look you try to hide when you hear his truck engine.”
It was as if a stone fortress in my breast had suddenly toppled. I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. My initial, instantaneous distrust of Lily had had nothing to do with her character or lack of it. She knew what I had hoped to hide from the world by moving up to the lake. She didn’t arch her brows and purse her judgmental lips and accuse me of staying because I was sick or had any desire to be beaten to death.
To the world around us, Lily and I were two entirely different breeds. Beneath the wrapping we were prisoners of men who we knew would hunt us down and kill us if we left them.
We held on to each other and cried for a long time. The sudden din of a billion cicadas woke death in the looming pines.
A broken silver-pink moon hung in the east. Lily and I could read it plainly in each other’s eyes.
Someone was going to die before this was over.
I
know she’s up there at Rose Lawler’s running her mouth about me, drawing tales to get sympathy from those women who sit out there on the porch when they ought to be doing any of a hundred things. I’ve lived with her nine years now. I know her. That doesn’t mean I know what she’s going to do next. Or that I want to.
I tell myself I stay because of the kids. But if that’s all there was to it, common sense would dictate that I take the kids and go back to Augusta and live with Mama and Daddy. I point out the foolishness of loving a woman like her. I make lists at the office of all the reasons I should leave her. I’ve been to three ministers about her and one psychologist. The psychologist was a nice guy. He made it easy to talk about her. He told me flat out there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s the environment I’m in. Yeah, well, hell, I knew that when I went to see him.
I won the southeast regional Golden Gloves Middleweight Championship twice. I played tight end for the University of Alabama. Played baseball too. I had aspirations towards pitching professional ball, but my right eye is weak. I took a master’s in computer programming from SMU down at Dallas. I was on a fellowship and Lily taught elementary school. Daddy sent us money and I worked part time.
I used to pride myself on the fact that I was a simple guy. Give me
a pretty woman, a little money in the bank and a hard job to do. I’m nobody’s walking brain trust, but I’m not a fool. I took the middle path. I don’t mind a hard question as long as I know there’s an answer someplace. But the older I get, the more I realize that no one is that simple. Anyone who thinks he is hasn’t looked very hard at himself. There are definitely more questions than there are answers in life. Take love.
Love is the most destructive force on earth. It gets in a man’s way. It clouds his reason. It thwarts his intent. It keeps him in debt. It forces him to work at a job he hates. It makes him look in the mirror and wonder who that idiot is looking back at him. Sometimes she’ll be on her third glass of wine, talking nonstop about one of her subjects, and I’ll just sit there wondering what’s wrong with me. I’m a good man. Some would say a strong man. I’m loyal and levelheaded, and five years from now I’ll be a corporate vice-president. Why do I waste myself on her?
You want to know the worst part? There’s no good end coming. She’ll up and leave (again) or walk in with a loaded .44 and blow me and the kids off the planet or wind up in jail or God knows what. You can bet she won’t ever settle down into what we have and make the most of it. I try to hate her for that. Sometimes I do. I know she has no power over her discontent, and I know there’s times when she feels bad about that. That’s why she goes off telling awful things about me that aren’t true. She wants them to be true to justify the way she shudders when I touch her.
There is no lie detector like the bedroom. I’m a man. Sometimes I just have to have it. She cooperates because sometimes she does too. But that’s all it is—cooperation. She doesn’t love me back. It’s the way I’d imagine it with a paid woman. I feel worse when it’s over. Lonely, selfish and abandoned by God.
My love for Lily is my terminal illness. I’m incurable. She uses that against me when she slips off with other men. It’s the same pattern today that it was years ago in Dallas. I pretend not to see it. She pretends she doesn’t know that I know. I swallow the anger. I bite my tongue in half to keep from accusing her because if I ever do, I’ll lose her. This way I have some chance of holding on to her.
My love for her is my madness. It’s contrary to everything my mind tells me to do. In that regard it’s pure and holy and changeless. It’s insanity; it’s god-awful painful, but it’s constant, endless and perfect pain. She can’t touch or alter that in any way. It’s my power over her.
I
t got deep with Lily. I hid away trying not to get too deep with anyone. You weigh the loneliness against the things that can happen if the wrong person knows the wrong thing. When we’re alone we tend to tell ourselves we can bear anything. We turn ourselves to stone trying to keep our fearful secrets. We learn a way of getting by and we go on and become habituated to our private sorrows, to keeping silent about the things that matter to us the most.
I was making supper. Lily says I’m always making supper or cleaning up after supper or running off to buy food for supper. She was here. Seems like she’s always here. I tease her about it. She knows she’s welcome.
There was one bleeding secret I hadn’t shared with Lily. I barely acknowledged it to myself. She was onto it. Or close.
“Rosie, this isn’t your ordinary bunch of pretty little houses on a lake.”