Inside the living room, I sailed on a weave to the fireplace, where I threw on some old newspapers, pine cones, Sabby Norah’s copy of The Prophet, two logs, and half the box of magic color flames. With one match they took fire. Then I went to Leila’s bedroom, knocked, and opened the door.
She was lying upon her bed. It had a brass headpost, one she had found in the back room of a Salvation Army store. She had stripped off its layer of blue paint and now transported it with her wherever she went in her small wooden trailer that was now parked in the backyard. She called it her gypsy wagon.
What I could see of the room by the light of a blue bulb in a purple tasseled shade was not very neat. The closet was just a chain strung across the window, with hers and Mittie’s clothes hanging from the loops. More clothes were piled in two director’s chairs labeled “Mittie” and “Leila,” others flung over the dresser; clothes carpeted the floor along with play scripts, shoes, empty Chinese food cartons, and the children’s toys. A shop window full of silver jewelry hung from cuphooks on one wall. Pictures and posters of the Starks were tacked onto the others. And over the bed was a poster of Robert Kennedy and a nude sketch of Leila drawn from the rear (white pastel on rose paper, unsigned).
Below, the original Leila lay upon tangled sheets handsewn of blue silk jersey. Uncovered pillows striped behind her, she was watching the California presidential primaries on a portable television that had a coat hanger for an antenna. Leila followed all the campaigns assiduously, for she held strong and wideranging political opinions—espoused simultaneously, in fact, the policies of the French Revolution and the sentiments of Victorian philanthropists.
She looked up. “Where have you been, Devin? You missed supper.”
“I missed you,” I smiled, sitting down on the bed and staring at her nightgown. “That’s very pretty,” I commented with a larger smile. The gown was shimmery and white.
“It’s my Jean Harlow dress,” she said. “I got it for my audition in Rain…Well, I found it. Somebody threw it in one of those collection bins Goodwill Industries puts up. Can you believe that?”
I said I couldn’t.
Then, pulling my smile to a close, I spoke in gentle earnest, “You know what, Leila? You know what you have? You have fineness. This is what…what I want to say. You’ve been the very best thing in all of my life. You and Verl. And Dennis. And Jardin. And Mama. But what I mean is, you’re the very…the finest center of my being. That’s the truth, Leila. That’s really true.”
“Are you okay?” Leila asked me.
She got up and turned off the television. When she looked at me, she started laughing. “Where have you been? You’re snockered!”
I fell back upon the pillows from where she had arisen and found them warm.
“I’ve been talking with some good friends, talking for hours, trying to figure it all out, what it comes down to, what lasts and what shimmers. The readiness is all, Leila.”
“Good,” she said, “I’m ready to take a shower.” I had never really gotten Leila to respond correctly.
Having gathered her apparel, she left me while I was still trying to decide what the difference was between the readiness and the ripeness. It seemed vital. Looking down to the floor at the side of her bed, I noticed a blurred and bouncing record player stacked with Aretha Franklin albums and the soundtracks of The Fantastiks and Damn Yankees. I took these off and put on Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, which I found at the bottom of a pile of albums under the dresser. It was the very copy of the symphony I had given her six years ago, inscribed ‘Here will we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony.’ With love forever, Devin.” Ah, she had treasured it. I sank back, buried my head in the pillows of my fair love’s ripening breast. (“Sweet” love’s? Which was it?)
“Devin! Are you crazy?”
Leila had returned. She stood in the door, wrapped in a towel. It was also inscribed: “Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge.” Harshly she advised me, “Turn that damn thing off, you idiot! You’re going to wake everybody up.”
When, slowly, I protested, she rejected Rachmaninoff herself and went back to the bathroom. I followed. In the living room, my fire had gone out, miraculously consuming The Prophet on a stake of untouched logs.
Reaching the bathroom, I continued my testament while Leila turned on the shower, stepped behind a bilious plastic curtain, and handed me her towel.
I began, “You know, love’s not hereafter. Is it? Let’s ball our sweetness up. Let’s…” I began again. “Look, Leila, all of us just go ’round and ’round our pasts forever trying to get back home. A just circle. Ends where it begun. Began. That’s why, without you in my life, I couldn’t keep on being me.”
She stuck her head out at the front of the curtain. Her shower cap had blue umbrellas on it. It made her ears stick out. That bothered me. “What?” she asked.
“I said, without you in my life, I couldn’t keep on being me.”
“Oh,” she smiled and withdrew behind the curtain. Having to shout over the water was a handicap; it was difficult to enunciate in a wistful tone. I was beginning to get depressed.
“You are me, Leila. Do you remember when Cathy and Heathcliff said that? You’re the only haven I can go to that will take me back to who I need to be.”
“Devin, I’m sorry. I can’t hear you. What did you say?”
“I SAID…” I leaned forward to put my right foot on the toiletbowl lid. It happened to be up at the time, so my leg went through as far as the knee.
“Oh, C-h-r-i-s-t,” I whispered.
She stuck her head out again, turned off the shower faucets and laughed. The indifferent laughter of Olympus above and around me. I was shaking my leg up and down like a dog come out of the rain.
“What did you do?” she laughed.
Despite the superfluity of her question, I brought myself to respond with a head-tilted Tom Sawyer grin. It was the right approach. Clumsiness, if artfully manipulated, can be as effective as suavity, since nothing, I had concluded, flames more swiftly to the erotic than the maternal.
“Take off your shoes and pants and put them out on the back porch,” she sweetly enjoined. A proposal indirectly promising. In addition to my as-yet unpeeling Tennessee tan, I had on one of the new pairs of baby-blue shorts Mama had hurried out to buy me for the trip—along with four undershirts and four pairs of socks so that if worse came to worst, I could be hospitalized in clean underwear. Our hygiene-for-disaster mentality, she called it.
I wrung my pants out over the toilet bowl, took off both shoes and socks, and shiveringly carried them out to the back porch, where I was immediately reminded of the storm, no longer imminent, but fulfilled. Rain was squalling down. Leila’s directive struck me as less practical than I had at first thought it, but rather than return for alternate instructions, I hung my pants and both socks over the rail. My shoes, I left in the kitchen.
Meanwhile, my pants blew off into the yard and were swept here and there by short gusts of wind. Up on a bush, wrapped around a tree, down among the leaves. I chased after, circling in the rain, but the wind kept grabbing them, slapped me in the face with them, so I gave it up, almost in tears now at the pity of the whole soggy situation. My new red-and-white-striped shirt had become a solid pink body shirt. My shorts were soaked. My nose was running. I was depressed.
Slushing back to the bathroom, I found Leila thoughtfully appraising her face in the medicine chest mirror. She studied it as one would a familiar object to determine its continued serviceability, like a family armchair or an old party dress.
She mused, ignorant of my distress, “If I can learn to live without makeup now, maybe I’ll be able to stand getting old and looking like my mother.”
With her face washed naked, she was blond everywhere, the Leila of my adolescent room, where she had undressed one Sunday afternoon when Mama and the others were away visiting Uncle Norwood. Leila Dolores Beaumont. Leila D’Or. Seductress of Sorrow, I used to call her. Dolorous Delilah, weeping barber. Gold Mountain, Leila of old.
Behind her I said, “You know, I would have thought that without your eyes made up you’d be defenseless, more vulnerable. But you’re not. You’re more protected. More you. And you’ll never look like your mother.”
This was observation now, not strategy, for I had given up on Cathy and Heathcliff, was feeling world enough in time.
“Just not as flashy, you mean?” she asked, then turned. “Devin, you’re soaking wet!”
Shivering all over the Holiday Inn floor mat, I rather ashamedly muttered, “My pants flew away. Out in the backyard. It’s raining out there.”
She smiled, biting softly on her lower lip. It was the old indulgent smile, which rushed the years backward so we both could feel them give way. I kissed her.
Water was dripping down from my hair around my nose, making it itch, and in between our mouths. I was wondering about the possibility of moving my left hand from her back to scratch my nose and then touching her right breast, when she turned her head enough to say, “You want to fuck me, don’t you?”
I was startled by the profanity.
All of a sudden, I felt a lot younger than Leila. In the past we had always used more generalized terms like go to bed with, sleep with, mess around with, make love with. I was afraid she might notice my embarrassment if I didn’t make a reply, but a simple “yes,” though to the point, felt too blunt and wouldn’t come out. Hyperbole was inappropriate. My tendency was to return the question to her (“Would you like me to?”), but I could conjecture how evasive and juvenile that might sound. I felt like saying I didn’t know what I wanted to do, now that things had gotten so real. For I hadn’t planned on her leaping in front of her own capitulation to memory this way, and I needed a moment to adjust.
I didn’t say anything. Jesus, I thought, maybe I’m going to cry. Leila took my hand and led me into her bedroom.
Warm, damp, under her tangled sheets and a quilt of blue velvet that she pulled from beneath a mound of clothes at the bedfoot, I turned to her and kissed her, kissed all the felt memories of shadow, curve, light, gesture, odors, weight, kissed my first kiss, touched my first breast for the first time, again.
Oh, God, I thought, maybe this is really true.
“OH, GOD, GOD!” someone screamed from the back room.
I soared to attention. Scurried for a pair of Mittie’s pants.
“THEY’RE ALL OVER THE PLACE!” the scream continued.
It was Nathan Wolfstein’s voice.
Leila rose as well, all white-robed. We reached the living room just as Wolfstein, looking like a pajamaed Ichabod Crane, roared flapping out of his bedroom.
“BUGS! BUGS!” he screeched. “THEY’RE ALL OVER THE PLACE!”
“Nate! Nate!” Leila tried to stop him. “What’s the matter? What bugs?”
He stared past us with the blind horror of the damned. “BED! Bugs crawling! Bed bugs!” was what I made of his mumblings.
Then he rushed on past in a roar of wheeze, flinging off his pajamas as he went, clawing at his white bony frame in a frenzy of panic. We ran after him to the bathroom, where he was already in the tub with the shower going full blast. After five seconds there, he jumped out, jerked the towel from my waiting hand, fled into his bedroom, came out pulling on his pants and sweater, and stomped his feet into his cowboy boots all at the same time.
Ignoring our inquiries, our assurances about nightmares, he streamed outside, got into his old Austin, started it up, and ran it into the nearest pine tree. The horn went off.
I ran down the walk, slipping in rain puddles, opened the car door, and pulled Wolfstein off the steering. His mouth was cut and his face was blue. He didn’t appear to be breathing.
“Call a doctor.” Assuming the worst, I yelled up to Leila, “I think maybe he’s killed himself.”
She ran back inside. By now, Joely, Sabby, and Seymour were hurrying out of the basement in various styles of night garb.
Collectively we argued about whether or not to move the body until Dr. Calvin Ferrell arrived. He was the Floren Park general practitioner, a youthful, tousled man who proved disturbingly jovial about both life and death.
By the time Ferrell reached the car, the corpse inside it was conscious. We carried him up the steps and returned him to his bed, once I had inspected it for insects and declared it safe for slumber. After the doctor put a bandage on his cheek and provided a sedative for his soul, Wolfstein sank to peace. So we adjourned our vigil at his bedside and stood outside the door. Then Joely, Sabby, and Seymour went back downstairs to bed.
“That man ought to be dead,” Ferrell told Leila and me. “And not from any car accident, either. His body’s riddled with ill health. Cigarettes, booze, nerves. I’d make him do something for himself or else get him out of here before you have to pay to ship the body home.” He cheerfully snapped his bag shut.
Leila offered Ferrell a drink of scotch, which he annoyingly accepted. He aggravated that rudeness by sitting down and amiably reminiscing with Leila about the medical calamities of previous summers. Finally he got up to say good night. Leila was unabashedly yawning, offering a hint.
“Well, see you, Leila. Things sure do pick up for me when you get to town.”
She saw him to the door. I went down to my basement room, changed into some blue jeans and a T-shirt, and returned with Mittie’s slacks to Leila’s bedroom. Once again, I found her lying upon her bed. This time, however, she was sound asleep. The speed, ease, and frequency with which Leila landed in the arms of Morpheus was enough to make a younger suitor jealous. As she failed to respond to either vocal or physical promptings, I folded Mittie’s pants neatly over a chair back, then thought better of it, mussed them, and dropped them on the floor where I had found them. I left her with one backward look at her wondrous (though not as far as I was concerned, wonderful) capacity to relax.
At that moment, a lumpy gray mattress beside Joely Finn in the basement would undoubtedly have led to an unattractive self-pity. So I stretched out on the living room floor, relit my fire carefully, and stared at it. And then, remembering her, though nothing is worse than such memories when you’re miserable, I fell asleep, “Jardin, Jardin,” ringing like a sweet bell in my brain. The great waste of life expended in the living of it weighed on my heart and sank me into a sorrowful slumber. Stuporous as the dead.