This afternoon was going to be a wash. That much was clear. This afternoon would waste the fine happiness of the morning, not to mention a day of driving time.
“Here's Rhoda,” Randolph said. “She sold a story and a poem. Give her a drink, somebody. Come on, girl, you want to pitch horseshoes with us?”
“Not that I know of. I'll just watch. I just want a Coke, Tom. A Coke will be fine.” The young man walked over to a tub of ice and reached down and retrieved a Coke and gave it to her. The preppie who was married to the skinny blonde bitch was behind him.
“I heard there was a hot tub that spread hepatitis from here to Maine,” Rhoda said to the preppie. “Where is it? I'd like to see it.”
“Come on. It isn't far. I'll walk you there.” They set off down a path behind the house.
“Should you leave?” Rhoda asked. “What about the goat?”
“They'll take care of it. Wedge is doing it.” He took her arm. They walked in silence for a hundred yards or so. When they were out of sight of the house, he pulled her to him and kissed her. “There,” he said. “Sooner or later I had to do that.”
“You're married to Judy,” Rhoda said. “I'm swearing off married men.”
“I married her when I was drunk. I'd leave today if I had anywhere to go. We live together because it's convenient. We don't fuck.”
“Well, I don't want her mad at me. I'm scared to death of Judy.” Rhoda stepped farther back.
“She's dropping acid. She wouldn't care if you fucked me by the barbecue pit.”
“When is she going to do it?”
“She's doing it now. She did it this morning. Didn't you think she looked sweet? She gets sweet when she's high.”
“Let's go back. I really want to go on back. I need to start driving. I need to get to Little Rock by midnight.” Rhoda started back up the path. Judy was coming down the other way to meet them. Randolph was behind her. “I wanted to talk to you about something,” Judy said, when the four of them met at a clearing in the path.
“Sure,” Rhoda said.
“I was wondering. We're being evicted here in two weeks. I wonder if you'd let us sleep in your apartment for a few days while we wait to get our new apartment. I know it's an imposition, but Randolph said you were keeping it for the summer. It would be such a help. We have all this stuff and nowhere to put it.”
“Sure,” Rhoda said. “If it's only for a few days. But you have to take care of things. I left all my papers there. And I might come back at any time. I mean, I'm not going to be gone all summer. I have to come and get my mail.”
“How could we get in?” Judy asked. She was beaming, standing in the shadow of divine Randolph, who was the most generous of men. Weighed down with Randolph's goodness and the triumph of the day and the need to escape and the shameful burden of her husband's money, Rhoda looked at the preppie, not at Judy, and said yes.
“You have to stay clear of my papers,” she repeated. “I don't want anyone to even touch them.”
“Of course,” they said. So Rhoda took a key ring out of her pocketbook and removed a key and handed it over.
“Thanks so much,” Judy exclaimed. “You don't know what this means to us.”
Randolph was shaking his head from side to side. Randolph was not pleased.
By seven o'clock that night Rhoda was on the road. By ten she was in Little Rock. She stopped at a restaurant and called home and talked to her husband and Teddy. “I miss you so much,” she told them and it was true. Then she called Raine and told him to come and meet her and he did. He got into a car and drove to Dumas, Arkansas, and met her there in the middle of the night and held her in his arms and made her cry. “Everything you said came true,” she told him. “My work is being published everywhere. It terrifies me and I love it. I don't know what I'm doing. I have to go home and see what's wrong with Teddy. I have to mend my marriage. No one can live two lives at once. I'm schizophrenic from all this traveling. Now that bitch is going to stay in my apartment. I'm scared to death to have her in the same place as my papers. I'm paranoid and schizophrenic and I miss my sons.”
“It's okay, baby,” he said to her. “Go to sleep now. It will be better in the morning.”
It was better. She spent the morning with Raine and took strength from him. She showed him the poems she had been writing. She sat beside him on a bed and ate breakfast on a tray and giggled and was happy. Then she dressed and drove home to New Orleans. It would be all right. The world was a goodly place. People could be trusted. There was time for everything.
In New Orleans Teddy and Eric were straightening up the house to get ready for her homecoming. They had been vacuuming for hours to get the dog hairs off the rugs and sofas. They had filled the refrigerator. Their mother was coming home.
In Fayetteville the skinny blonde poet and her husband and a lesbian friend were moving into Rhoda's apartment. They took all her clothes and papers out of the drawers and put them in boxes and lined them up against the wall. They brought in their typewriters and bicycles and the remains of the goat. They turned the air conditioning down to sixty-eight degrees. It was going to be a splendid summer. Living off the rich bitch from New Orleans. Off the fat of the land.
Rhoda walked into her house in New Orleans late that afternoon. Eric and Teddy were waiting for her. They had taken the sheepdogs to the vet to have them cleaned. They had put on clean shirts and combed their hair. They took her to the darkroom and showed her the photographs they had made of people in the park. After a while Teddy went down the street to a friend's house and Rhoda awkwardly made love to her husband. “I love you,” she said, and she meant it. She did love Eric, his intelligence and goodness, his kindness and hope and gentle charm, his love for her child.
“We will start again,” he said.
“Good,” she answered. They both hoped it was so.
May went by and June and July. Rhoda took Teddy to a child psychiatrist. Teddy went to the psychiatrist on Monday and Wednesday and Friday. Eric and Rhoda talked to the psychiatrist on Thursdays. “You have to discipline him,” the psychiatrist said. “He wants you to.”
“Well, we aren't going to hit him.” Rhoda laughed and looked at Eric. The psychiatrist was seventy years old. He was a friend of Eric's parents. Both of his children were doing all right. In a world of insane children, his children were married and sane. Rhoda and Eric had decided to take his advice.
“Be stronger than he is. Don't give him money.”
“Is he taking dope?” They leaned toward the psychiatrist.
“I don't think so. But his friends are. Watch his friends. Keep him busy.”
“He won't go to camp. He came home the first week last year. We wasted two thousand dollars on that camp.”
“Get him a job.”
“Okay. We'll try.”
Teddy got himself a job. He got a job being a roadie for the Neville Brothers. He carried their instruments in and out of Tipitina's when they did their gigs.
Eric and Rhoda didn't know what to think about Teddy's job. They didn't know what was going on in the world enough to understand Tipitina's. Rhoda had seen the graduate students taking dope in Fayetteville but she didn't believe that applied to Teddy. Not sweet little Teddy with his sheepdogs and his camera and his bright red hair.
“I think it's a terrible idea,” Eric said. “It's a bar.”
“At least it's music,” Rhoda answered. “At least it's art.”
“We'll wait and see.” Eric was in a quandary. He was so glad to have his wife back that he didn't want to queer it by being too suspicious of Teddy. He took Rhoda's arm. He smiled his Holden Caulfield smile. He was rewarded. She took him into the bedroom and made love to him.
In July Rhoda got an electric bill from Fayetteville for three hundred dollars. She got a phone bill for more than that. “I'd better go up there and see what's going on,” she told Eric. “I want to get my mail. I have to kick those kids out of my apartment.”
“Okay,” he said. “If you have to. But don't stay too long. We need you here. Teddy needs you. I need you.” He held his breath. He controlled his mind. He was a mensch.
“You're the sweetest man in the world,” she said. She meant it. She knew that it was true.
That afternoon at Tipitina's one of the other roadies gave Teddy his first line of cocaine. He came home in a fabulous mood. He was so sweet to everyone. He went to the darkroom and developed film for two hours. He told his mother to go on and get her mail “Don't worry about anything,” he told her. “I'll be with Eric. Stay as long as you want. We're just fine. I like my work. I'm learning so much. We have plenty to do.”
In the morning Rhoda called her apartment and told the skinny blonde girl that she was coming to Fayetteville. “Be sure you're gone by then,” she said. “I'm going to be real tired when I get there.”
“Don't worry about the bills,” the skinny blonde girl said. “We'll pay you back. I applied for a National Endowment grant. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get it.”
“Just be sure you're out of my apartment, Judy.”
“Oh, we will be. Don't worry about that. It was nice of you to let us stay.”
Rhoda drove all afternoon and spent the night in Little Rock. The next morning she drove to Fayetteville and got there at noon. Judy and Ron were just getting up. The lesbian on the sofa was still asleep. They had had a party the night before.
“My God,” Rhoda said. “I can't believe this. You promised me you'd be gone.”
“Our place wasn't ready yet.”
“Well, you have to get out of here. I mean right now.” Rhoda stood in the living room trying not to look at the lesbian, who was a small, thin girl who only seemed to be along for the ride. Rhoda kept on standing there while Ron and Judy got dressed and packed some things and started taking them to the car. “I want all this stuff out of here right now,” Rhoda said. “I mean it. My God, where are my things?”
“Calm down,” Judy said. “You don't understand.”
“I understand that this is my apartment and you said you were going to stay a few days and it's July. For Christ's sake. And you owe me six hundred dollars for the phone and electric bill.”
“You can afford it,” Judy said. “Get your husband to pay for it.” She shifted the canvas bag to her other side. She waited.
“Get that typewriter off the dining room table. I mean it, Judy. Get all this junk out of here by the time I get back. I'm going to see Randolph.”
“He knows we're staying here. We had him over one night to eat supper.”
“Oh, my God.” Rhoda walked through the apartment opening drawers and closets. The bedroom closets were stuffed with piles of half-clean clothes. There were milk crates marked
Do Not Remove From Premises
, filled with bric-a-brac.
Rhoda walked back into the living room and glared at Ron and the lesbian and went out to her car and drove over to Wheeler Hall.
“I wondered what you'd think,” Randolph said. “I should have called you, but they said you knew. Christ, the suitors from Ulysses. We went over there one night. Shannon was appalled. She told me to call you. I should have done it.”
“They'd better be gone when I get back.”
“Good luck.”
“I'll go get my mail.”
“Why wouldn't you let us forward it?”
“I don't know. There's something about having a mailbox here. It's important to me somehow. It feels lucky.” She smiled. Her work. Something of value that she alone had created. Her heart lifted, as it often did in Randolph's presence. How did he have the bounty, the largess, to go on giving and giving and giving. “I feel bad about being so mean to them. After all, they're broke.”
“They're grown people, Rhoda. Her parents are physicians in Kansas City. She went to Duke. She's doing what she wants to do.”
“Who's the lesbian?”
“Someone from Sassafras in Eureka Springs. They rescue housewives.” He started laughing. Rhoda started laughing too. They wept with laughter at the madness and divinity of humankind. Above Randolph's desk was a poster of Botticelli's
Primavera
. Rhoda laughed into the flowers on the heavenly woman's dress.
The day got better. There were five good letters in the stacks of mail. Two were acceptances of poems. Another was an encouraging letter from the
Atlantic Monthly
. One was an apology from Ketch. He was working in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress. He was reading the Christian Existentialists. He said he was sorry he had treated Rhoda as a Thou.
The fifth was from the
Prairie Schooner
. They were giving her a prize. A thousand-dollar prize for the story they were publishing in October.
Rhoda clasped the letters to her bosom. She was lucky again. Fayetteville was lucky for her. She was the luckiest woman on the earth. She went back over to the apartment and helped Ron and Judy pack up their things. She let them leave some of their stuff in the coat closet in the hall. She let them leave a whole closet full of musty half-clean clothes piled from floor to ceiling in the only storage closet in the house. She forgave them their debt. She offered to buy them dinner soon. She watched them drive away. She took an envelope the lesbian had given her into the house and wrote a check for fifty dollars to the place in Eureka Springs that saved the housewives and almost mailed it. She found the vacuum sweeper. She vacuumed the rugs. She called a housecleaning service and made a date with them for the following afternoon. She wiped off the table. She got her old Royal portable typewriter out of the pantry and set it on the table. She put a new ribbon in it. She found a ream of bond paper and set it on the table. She was a writer. In the morning she would begin to write.
She put on her old shoes and left the apartment and began to walk. She walked up to the campus and watched the sun go down. What the hell, this was her life as a writer. This crazy town that she had found that had nothing to do with any other life that she had ever led. She was here. She was back where she belonged. She could stay awhile. Maybe she would come back in the fall.