Where were my children while this was going on? I had forgotten them. My brother Dudley told my father I was going to bring Raine in and marry him. Take care of the kids, he might have said. Let Rhoda capture him.
Even my father was not immune to Raine's glory, his picture in the Hall of Fame, his name on the back of programs, his gentle manner when he came into my parents' home. Yes, my mother had seen him now. My mother knew I went to rooms and took off my clothes and lay down with this huge Indian-Italian man. She wore an expression that said this was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Still, she paid thousands of dollars every year for fifty-yard-line seats in the stadium where he had been the hero. She read the programs too. She was not immune. Then too, he courted her. Looked up at her with his dark sweet eyes and told her that he loved me, that I was the love of his life, that he would never harm me in any way.
I enrolled in a college in the town. A small, private college in the old part of town. I went to classes when Raine wasn't around. It was the excuse for the apartment. It was what my mother told her friends at the Casual Club.
I remember packing a suitcase to go to Chicago. I remember putting my beautiful black pantsuit with lapels of black satin and the little white satin blouse into the suitcase and closing the top. I remember the drive to Nashville where we caught the plane to Chicago. I remember the drive home on the eve of Christmas Eve and how we saw the dark shape on the horizon, just at dusk, halfway between Nashville and home. I thought it was a flying saucer. I told everyone I had seen a flying saucer and Raine always said he saw it too. But I would remember anything rather than remember what happened in Chicago.
We went to the Palmer House Hotel where he had been staying on the night he had the accident that ended his career. He stayed there out of some perverse desire not to shield himself from unpleasant things. I had never stayed at a hotel that fine with a man who could pay for it with his own money. But I did not notice the hotel. All I knew was that on that night after we arrived I would put on my new dress and go to the banquet with Raine. As though I were his wife, in place of his wife, he would take me to the place that meant the most to him.
We arrived late one evening. It was bitterly cold outside. I have never been that cold in my life. The wind came around the corners of the buildings and made you run back inside. We left the hotel and he shielded me with his body and we went to a bar where pictures of him were on the walls. His friends were there and we sat at a small table and had dinner with two men who had been referees at the games. They told me stories of his glory. They walked around the bar with me. They showed me pictures of him. Young and sweet and dark, in his football uniform, holding the ball cradled in his arm. I held his hand beneath the table and thought how big it was, how perfectly designed for this football that had given him his power in the world.
He brought me here to see these pictures, I decided. But I came to go with him to the banquet as his wife. First this banquet, then he will get a divorce. As soon as this unnecessary baby that she had only to keep him gets here. As soon as that is over I will take him away from his ugly children and his ugly wife and give him to my sons for their father. To my father for a son, to my brothers for a friend, this man I love, this man who is strong enough for me, who can dodge the things I throw at him, who can bear the pain I cause him because I am his one and only love, the one he cannot bear to be without.
The next day there was a football game in the stadium where he had played. We sat on the sidelines on folding chairs. Other men and their wives were there. It was so cold they had to bring me a cape like the ones the players wore on the bench. They draped it over me. A boy brought paper bags and put them on my feet. I was a geisha at a football game, being cared for by men who could withstand the cold.
A thin black man kept running down the side of the field and making touchdowns. Raine was like that, the other men said to me. Until the black man no one has done the thing he did for us. I held his arm. I watched his face as they said these things to me. I had never seen him happy. Until this day, sitting on those folding chairs in the cold I had never known him to be happy. With me he was in such sadness, such pain. He knew he could not keep me and it made him sad. My beauty vanished when we were together. There was no beauty in me now. Only this terrible Dexedrine thinness and this will to keep and overcome him.
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Think how desirable it was to him. This young girl from the Casual Club who had been turned into a tiger. Later, back in our room, we fucked each other without mercy. We beat upon each other's body, taking all the pleasure that we could, giving nothing away, taking, taking, taking.
At five o'clock he dressed for the banquet. He went downstairs to meet someone. He said he would come back for me at six. I dressed in my new dress. I ordered a martini from room service. Then I did not drink it. Six o'clock came. He was not there. Seven o'clock came. He did not come. The banquet started at seven. Something terrible must have happened. I called the banquet but they said he was not there. I drank the martini and ordered another one. Eight o'clock and nine o'clock came and went and still he was not there. I called the banquet over and over again. Finally a waiter told me Mr. Matasick had been there but he wasn't there anymore. The banquet was over. They had all gone home. I sat on the bed in my dress. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
At ten-thirty he returned to the room and let me yell at him. I screamed at him. I beat upon him and tore him with my fingernails. He begged me not to hate him. He said he loved me until death. He said he brought me here because he loved me. I cried myself to sleep on gin.
Driving home was when we saw the flying saucer. Coming home on the eve of Christmas Eve. The Christmas before the New Year's Eve when I took the Antabuse and drank on it and almost died, begged to die, wanted to die to punish him.
Money was part of it. That Lincoln Continental with its seats of whitest leather. My father's money, whether I would have it or not. He had never had a poor woman in his life. They were all wealthy women, the ones before me and the ones who followed. The ones who didn't count. He said they didn't count and I believed him.
There is only one love like that, one white hot moment when a man and a woman ask everything of each other, ask sacrifice and pain and dishonesty. Mostly pain. Alone with him in rooms, in my apartment in the afternoons when my roommate wasn't there, beside him or on top of him with his dick buried deep within me. My body pulling on him to empty him and make him suffer.
James Rainey Matasick, the name is enough to make men feel inferior. Now, in my old age, sometimes I drop it in the lap of a man if he tries to flirt with me. If he's the right age, if he looks like an old high school athlete, if he dreamed of glory, I let him make his move and then I ask him if he saw Raine play. He was my lover, I say. My one and only love.
It would be nine years before I needed him again. Before I called and told him to come save me. Only this time I would be richer, surer, older. I don't know why I called him then, only I had some Dexedrine for the first time in several years and I wanted him to take me to a place he knew about, a place that once he had taken me to. I wanted to go to Arkansas. The only time I had ever set foot in Arkansas was when Raine took me to Little Rock to visit his sister who was dying in a veterans' hospital. He had cried in my arms after he saw her and on the way home we ran out of gasoline outside of Dumas and had to walk a mile to catch a ride to a service station.
Anyway, I called and told him I had to go to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to go to school to learn how to be a writer and he met me in Vicksburg and drove me there. I made him wait outside the English Department while I went in to meet my professors. As I said, I always forgot who he was. I never thought of him as anything on earth but my lover. “Raine Matasick is outside in the car?” my professor said. “My God in heaven, tell him to come in.”
III
His integrity was darkened by the lies he told to make me love him. One day at noon, at lunch somewhere, one of those expensive restaurants that come and go in Jackson like the tides, over Bloody Marys and lobster salad, in a booth, I think, not a table, although it may have been a table ⦠what he said removed us from the rest of the room in such a way that it seems it must have been a booth, Dudley cheats at golf, he said. He moves the ball. He improves the lie. He couldn't look at me when he said it. It was something he had to say, something he had to unveil to me, for some reason, perhaps to ward off Dudley's telling me about his wife, that he wasn't separated from her, that she was pregnant, that when he left me, he went back to her house. Perhaps Dudley had threatened him, had said he would tell me. Perhaps my father told Dudley to put a stop to it. I can't play with him anymore, Raine said. People bet money on those games. If men stop trusting you, you're dead. I bowed my head. I was ashamed. I could believe anything of Dudley, the killer, the older brother, the one who always had the best of everything, the one my father loved the best, the one who had the power and the money. And one eye. A natural athlete who lost an eye. Yes, to make up for the handicap he might cheat. Because he has to win. He can't live if he can't win, can't be second in anything. Had been kicked out of college for letting his fraternity brothers copy off of him. Had lived his life to earn my father's love, which he could have had without lifting his finger. Because he looks like my father's father. So much like him the resemblance is uncanny. If you hold their photographs up against each other it is the same soft pretty spoiled face.
If it were true? If my brother cheated other men, what did that make me? It was a long time ago, nineteen sixty-three, I did not know you could leave, bail out, refuse to be part of such a family, a family that drank and cheated, whored around. Drank and lied and cheated, biblical sins. If I had known it, I could not have acted upon it. I had hostages, three sons, no money, no education. Three times I had escaped death by bearing them and still I was alive. I was twenty-six years old, then twenty-seven. I thought there was not much time left before it would be too late, before I would die from the deep dissatisfaction of my life. I had meant to be a writer, every moment of my life, since I was four or five or six years old, had counted myself a writer, had always written everything for everyone. Had always done it well, been praised for it, received the highest grades in English class. But that was all consumed now, consumed in the men and the babies and this terrible wealth my father had acquired and let us waste in any way we chose. As long as we stayed out of his way so he could go on making money and as long as we acted like we were happy. As long as we acted like we would never be poor, never be frightened and poor as he had been for many years. That shadow on his life, that terrible fear of being poor.
I stayed because I had to stay and because my mother and father were still pure, did not lie or cheat or steal or drink. They were still the puritans they had had to be to make the money, to save, then multiply it into millions of dollars, enough to last us all forever, we thought. But my father did not think so, drove his old car, wore his old suits, stayed home at night, stayed sober.
I stayed to take advantage of their purity. Later, when I was pure again, had purged myself of evil, had stopped drinking, lying, cheating, then I could leave, could refuse to let anyone suck the hard-won goodness from me. But this was much, much later, after years of work, of writing and psychotherapy, after twenty years I was good again. I think I will remain that way. I do not think anything could pull me down again into that mire of pain.
You'll be alone, people warned me. Won't you be lonely?
I've never been lonely in my life, I answered. But I've been afraid.
I have tried to find a way to articulate what it was between Raine and me, the thing that passes between a man and a woman that is not words, that carves below the words and ignites them. Fire, the black people call it.
I pity lovers, caught in that consumption. From the word
consume
. When nature takes us back, which we call love. I had been practicing for Raine. Four unwanted pregnancies. He had four children and this new one on the way. This inconvenient child. This child who was my enemy because I was consumed in this unholy fire.
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When we ran out of gasoline on the road between Dumas, Arkansas, and McGee I was listening to a tape of Willie Nelson singing “Stardust.” Coming back from seeing Raine's dying sister. I had been talking for fifty miles about where we would spend the night. He did not answer me. He knew he was going to spend the night with his wife and children and he knew better than to tell me so. I would have stolen the car keys, torn him with my fingernails, jumped out of the car, done anything. It was of no importance to me if he had a family. He was my lover. No other Raine existed for me. Because I was in this consummation, was consumed by fire.
Why else down all these centuries have women lain down with men and died in childbirth? Lain down smiling, taken pleasure in it. It has nothing to do with freedom, tenderness, pity, love.
Tenderness, pity, love
, these are words we invented to forgive ourselves.
That cold December afternoon when we saw the flying saucer. Driving along the picked cotton fields, long flat fields to the east of Jackson, at dusk, just after the sun went down. The man beside me is Raine, the one who loved me so much he lied to keep me. It is the eve of Christmas Eve and in a while he will drop me off and leave me alone at Christmas. I had to escape that knowledge so much I saw an apparition, made him see it by the force of my will, gave him an apparition so we could both escape the pain inside that car. He always said he saw it. He told everyone he did. It flew along beside us, on the horizon, inside a long blue cloud.