When I would not go to them, they came to me. I had not been back in New York a week before the phone rang in my apartment, on a Friday evening, and I lifted it to hear Charlie Gentry’s voice. Even without the absence of the small hollowness that meant long distance I would have known that he was in the city with me. His voice had such an immediacy that I instinctively held the receiver away from my ear.
“Sarah and I are at the Plaza, and we want to see you,” he said without preamble. “None of us can live decently until we’ve talked. We’re not going to go home until we have. When have you got some time?”
He had not said “Hello,” or “How are you,” or identified himself. Despite his phlegm, Charlie had delicacy and empathy, and he knew that there was no need and no way to frame this conversation in convention. And he knew very well how I was. He had been that way for years: stricken and without Sarah.
Pain and a child’s simple, consuming fury at the unfairness of it all surged into the cold, whistling hollow that had filled my chest ever since I had heard Dorothy Cameron’s words the Saturday before, and washed back out, tidelike. I saw rather than felt that my knuckles around the black plastic telephone receiver were blue-white, and my whole body was clenched, as one does just after a sudden injury to brace for the pain that will inevitably come boiling in. I hated them both in that moment, weakly and hopelessly, and I felt tears prickle in my eyes. But I willed the pain to stay back.
“I haven’t got any time for you, now or ever,” I said. My words sounded childish and impotent even to me, though my voice was level. “I don’t have anything to say to either of you. I don’t know what you can possibly think you have to say to me. Go on home and go to some parties, or get married, or do good works, or all three.”
He sighed.
“Sarah said you wouldn’t want to. I didn’t believe her. I thought we were more to each other than all this. We’re not going home, Shep. We can outwait you, if we have to, but we’re going to talk to you. Can we come down?”
“No,” I said instantly, in something close to abhorrence. “I’ll come up there.” I thought I would die, would kill them both, before I let them come here, to these rooms that were my own, that were where Sarah and I had made love and the beginnings of a life. If they came here, every place and everything I had would be contaminated with the pain of them, and I would literally have no refuge. I already sensed the poison of their pairing in the warm air of the city outside, as if it had drifted out from the hotel uptown and curled down into the Lower West Side to find me. When I hung up the telephone I went to the windows, mindlessly, and closed them. Then I put on a gray seersucker suit and a black knit tie and went over to Eighth and hailed a cab. When I got out in front of the Plaza, it was almost nine, the hot, pearled gray of a Manhattan summer twilight, and the white globes of lights were just blooming on Fifth Avenue along the perimeter of the park.
I thought it was sly and meanspirited of them to go to earth in the Plaza, that impenetrable, unassailable fortress of privilege and grace, that spiritual pied-à-terre of all the Camerons back to Ben’s grandfather. They might as well have been receiving an enemy at an ancestral castle. Power bulked dark against the lucent west, over the hotel. A small part of me, clear and somehow divorced from the clenched deadness, knew that there was not one fiber of Sarah Cameron that was sly or meanspirited, or of Charlie either, and that Sarah had instinctively taken refuge in the Plaza simply because it represented safety and comfort to her. That lucid fraction quivered for an instant with Sarah’s pain, as well as my own; actually felt it. But the cold nothingness in me froze it out. Let them do their worst, say their piece, be gone from my city. I would keep a noble silence; they would feel their own cravenness and deceit. Sarah would weep; she would change her mind as they spoke, beg to have me back; it had happened. I ran lightly up the stone steps into the lobby, heart hammering under its glacier.
I had thought they would be waiting for me there, but they were not, and they were not in the Oak Bar or the Palm Court. I asked at the desk, not for Charlie, but for Miss Sarah Cameron. It never occurred to me that they would not have separate rooms, and they did.
“Miss Cameron asks that you join her in her suite,” the desk clerk said. “Mr. Gentry is with her. Please go up.”
I went into the paneled elevator, smelling of good carpet and lemon wax, and pressed seven. I had never been in an elevator or a room at the Plaza, and did not think that I would again. The thought came, unbidden and riding on a dart of promissory pain, that for the rest of their lives Sarah and Charlie Gentry could, if they wished, enter this elevator together and be borne swiftly up to rooms overlooking the park—perhaps the same ones that the Camerons always had here—and close the door upon the rest of the world, and that until a week ago, it would have been me beside Sarah, instead of Charlie. My presence beside Sarah in elevators and hotel rooms seemed as fantastic now, as unreal, as Charlie’s did. Unreality settled over me like a thick cape, and I burrowed gratefully into it, wrapped away from the pain.
As soon as Charlie opened the door I knew that coming here had been a mistake. He stood silently aside for me to enter, and he looked square and sober and substantial in an olive summer suit that did nothing for his sallow skin and dark freckles, or his great brimming, magnified brown eyes. He looked years older. Only the eyes were the same, mild and bottomless with Charlie’s own mischief and goodness. He did not speak, but touched my shoulder lightly. I went into the lamplit room.
Sarah sat on a small flowered sofa in front of a great window that did, indeed, overlook the darkening park, and she rose when I entered the room and started toward me, then stood still on the blue carpet, hands clasped loosely in front of her, feet in polished pumps set squarely together. She wore a yellow linen dress, and her curly crop of hair was smoothed down and back in some way I had never seen, and her smile was small and seemed to fight to stay on her mobile mouth. She, too, looked older, suddenly years removed from the ardent, laughing, sweat-sheened girl who had lain in my arms on West Twenty-first Street a scant nine months before; and I remembered, dimly and witlessly, that of course, she had had a season in Paris since we had last met, and wondered at the change that those months had wrought.
But then I knew that it was not Paris that had changed Sarah, or the passage of time that had touched Charlie. They looked, in that warm-lit, gracious room hanging in the midair of Manhattan, irrevocably and every inch and for all time married. The wedding that was yet to be seemed already years past. There seemed to be no space between them, even though they stood a room apart, and I felt with a plummeting finality verging on physical nausea that somehow, if I had not seen them here, if they had come instead to me, there might have been some possibility of averting the thing ahead, some hope for me. Now, here, there was none. It was done, even though it still lay before us, and the great pain that had been scratching and whining at my door now entered, roaring. I could not speak for it, could not get a breath around it, and so I simply stood in that night-floated frigate of a room looking at them, first at Charlie, and then at Sarah.
“Hello, Shep,” Sarah said, and her voice went into and through my heart like a rapier.
“Hello, Sarah,” I said. My own voice seemed to come from a source quite apart from me—the overhead light fixture, or the little flowered china clock on the dressing table. I was profoundly surprised that it sounded normal.
“I’ve called down for some drinks,” Charlie said. “I thought we’d have them here and talk a little, and then we hoped you’d let us take you to dinner. You pick the place.”
It was that “we” that did it; that “we” which included, now, nothing of me. Rage came riding cold and red and rescuing over the pain.
“I don’t think I want to drink with you, Charlie, old boy,” I said. “And I believe I’ll pass on that dinner. Victory dinner, is it, or a little prenuptial chowdown? You don’t have to feed me. I could stay, though, and watch, just to make sure things get done right, you know, like they did in imperial Russia on the royal wedding night, to be sure everybody’s parts were working okay.”
I heard Sarah’s swift indrawn breath of pure hurt, and saw Charlie’s face flame dark and ugly. A furtive tongue of shame fed the fire of my anger and it leaped even higher. I knew I would regret my words to the day I died, but I wanted, suddenly, only to wound them, to hurt.
“I can set your mind to rest about Sarah’s parts,” I said. “They work just fine. I’ve always wondered about yours, though. We all have.”
“Goddamn it, Shep—” Charlie began in a high, shaking voice, but Sarah overrode him.
“Don’t take it out on him,” she said, and though I was still looking at Charlie, could not look at her, I knew from her voice that she was crying.
“Be mad at me, if you have to be mad at anybody. It was me who asked him. It was all my idea. He’d never betray you; he never would…. Don’t take it out on him, please, Shep. At least listen.”
I turned to her then. Sure enough, she was crying; she stood in the lamplight against the dark sky, beautiful in yellow and lost to me, and cried, now, for Charlie Gentry. Or at least, I thought that she did. I willed the rage to drown the pain again, and it did.
“What can you possibly say to me, Sarah, that you haven’t already said?” I said. “I thought we’d said it all. I know I did. I thought you had. You sure said a lot, the last time we were together. I can’t imagine that you have much to add to that.”
She turned and ran from the room into the bedroom and shut the door behind her, and I stood looking at where she had been, where now there was only glass, and beyond it, the spangled night. In it I saw, reflected, Charlie lift his shoulders and let them drop again, as if under the weight of great fatigue, and saw him reach a hand out to me, and turned to him. I looked at the hand that he held out. It was square and rough, with blunt-tipped fingers and numerous little scratches and half-healed nicks; Charlie would go through his entire life with the stigmata of his beloved relics on his hands, and the stains of the red Georgia earth that entombed them. It was the same brown hand that had reached for mine through all our shared childhood, that had steadied and supported and applauded and sometimes rescued me, and I saw it in that alien room through a sting of sudden tears. My own shoulders slumped and I lowered my head, but I did not take his hand.
He sat down on the edge of the sofa and looked up at me, motioning me into a wing chair opposite, but I did not sit.
“I know you think I’ve betrayed you, Shep,” he said heavily, “and maybe I have. Maybe I did. But I would have taken her any way I could get her. And it didn’t seem to me that you wanted her bad enough. Somebody ought to want Sarah more than anything in the world, and I always did, and I always will. She needs to be cherished. You never cherished her, Shep. I’m going to devote my entire life to making her happy. And maybe, between me and Atlanta, she will be. She needs to be in Atlanta. She was born for it—”
“No!” I shouted. “She was not! No! She was born for me; you know that! She knows it! You’re such a poor second choice you’re not even close, Charlie! She was just trying to get back at me for going after Lucy; we would have worked that out, but there you were, sniffing around like a dog in heat, and all of a sudden she couldn’t even wait one week….”
The color drained entirely from Charlie’s face, so that I knew in a ghastly instant what he would look like dead, and he stood up and took a breath so deep that I could hear it tremble and shake in his throat.
“I want you to leave,” he said. “I thought we might talk this out with you. I thought we might be able to keep this friendship. I even thought you might give us your blessing; she wanted that, badly. We love you. I did, I do; she does, too. But not like this, and not ever again until you apologize to Sarah….”
The bedroom door opened again, and Sarah came out and stood in front of me and looked so searchingly into my face that I thought I would drown under the endless amber look, or faint from it. The little white lines that fanned out into the faintly tanned skin at the corners of her eyes were deeper, as if she had been squinting, or laughing into the sun, but I knew that Sarah had not, lately, been laughing. Her eyes, and the skin around them, and her short, tilted Cameron nose, were red, but her voice was low and composed. She leaned a little toward me, but she did not touch me. I don’t think I could have borne that.
“I have to matter to somebody as much as he does to me, Shep, or I’m…totally devalued,” she said. “I have to matter that much, or I simply don’t exist, somehow. It’s silly, maybe, but there it is. I saw when you went out there to get Lucy that I didn’t, to you, and that I never would. It would mean everything to me if you could understand how I feel.”
I abandoned myself to the rage. It was a feeling, almost, of luxury, of satiation; orgasmic. I had never felt it before, not with my mother or father, not even with Lucy. There was in it, under the sure and certain knowledge of unredeemable, irreparable damage, a kind of savage absolution. I laughed. It was an obscenity even in my own ears.
“You are wrong,” I said to Sarah. “You are wrong about me, and you are wrong about that, and you are wrong about everything. You lied. It wasn’t me you wanted. You wanted a pet dog, not a husband, and you got one. Enjoy it.”
And I slammed out, nearly toppling the room service waiter in the hall outside the door, and rode in a muscle-quivering silence down on the elevator with a flat-voiced man and woman wearing plastic name tags, and left, in the same instant, the hotel and the life of Sarah Tolliver Cameron. I knew that if I should ever meet her again—and I did not plan to do so—it would be Sarah Cameron Gentry I met, and that the meeting would be utterly insupportable.
There should be a body of literature for the male rejected in love. There is one for women. Women stricken by love, or pierced by the loss of it, are strewn through the world’s literature like broken roses, and thus is the word made suffering flesh, if not actually ennobled. There are maps for women, blueprints, handbooks, as it were. Emma Bovary lived in that country of pain, Anna Karenina did, Antigone, Mary Magdalene, thousands of their punished kinswomen. The world’s tears are their tribute.
But the rejected male is a joke, an embarrassment, a wimp. Worst of all, he does not know how to go about the business of mourning a lost love; who is there to tell him? His discomforted friends will tell him to get going, get drunk, get laid, get another love. And above all, keep quiet about it. Literature and precedent tell him nothing at all. And so he blunders through pain as I did, inept and unconsoled and suspecting, rightly, that he is a figure as ridiculous as he is unwelcome. Ultimately he, like me, withdraws.
After that unspeakable night at the Plaza, my world grayed out. The city that had so charmed and energized me seemed to have become, in some subtle way, almost my enemy. It was, all of a sudden, difficult to get around, to move through traffic, to thread my way through a day. My job and my small society no longer engaged me as they had done when I had the solidarity of Sarah beside me to give them resonance. Even the rush and pour of jazz, which had run through my veins intermingled with my very blood, seemed flat and tepid. I sometimes played my clarinet and saxophone late at night, desultorily, noodling dispiritedly on the fire escape into the hot predawns until fatigue or a maddened neighbor drove me inside again, but I no longer went to Basin Street East or the Vanguard or the Half Note in the evenings. It seemed, not tragic to revisit those places where Sarah, at my side, had flamed with life and joy, but merely pointless. The only thing that did not lose its luster was the glimmering lure of antiquity deep in the stacks of the library, flashing like the golden carp in the pool at Versailles. I was soon spending almost every waking moment that I was not down in the basement working there, reading, reading. I drowned myself in Attica, Thrace, Mycenae, Crete. Long hours might slide by thus, without pain. I stayed until the night crew tossed me out and closed up. A long retreat, I think, began then.
It would not be true to say that every waking moment was filled with pain, but it is fair to say that those which were not were packed in numbness like ice. I learned in those days to will parts of my consciousness dead and cold and calm, and became proficient enough at it so that respectable parts of each day were spent out of the pain’s crushing path. Work was the anodyne all the truisms held it to be, and I became a tireless and awesomely focused worker. If my efforts had been bent on something more substantial and enriching than trundling rotting paper from one subterranean chamber of the library to another, I might have quickly made a lustrous name for myself in some worthy field. But I did not even think of changing my work; the labyrinths were as friendly and shielding to me as the poor, mutant Minotaur’s to him, and they performed the same function: they hid me. I burrowed underground by day and into miles and tons of leather and paper by night, and when both of those refuges were closed to me, I drifted home and tried to hide behind fast-tarnishing brass and wailing dissonance. That was not so effective as the maze and the stacks. That was when the pain came.
It was sharp and particular and mappable: pure loss, pure loss. Sometimes, when I had been hidden and deadened away from it for a few hours, it would waylay me afresh, and the force of it would fold me over like stomach cramps. Its worst component was the scalding memory of my behavior toward Sarah and Charlie, and the sheer treachery of my reaction to their engagement. I had never before so completely lost control of myself, never before so completely hated and hurt. I had not known that such excess was in me. I had not known that I could behave so badly, and exult in it in the bargain. Shame burned its own separate path alongside the other, larger pain’s trajectory, and pure fright at finding such alien corn in my own level field compounded both. It was a vicious potion. I could not seem to summon the strength to fight it, even as I recognized the ludicrousness of languishing in it. Even my own absurdity was clear to me; I was spared, that terrible summer, nothing at all.
Sometimes, when I could not sleep in the thick, hot nights, I would try, doggedly, to understand this thing that had my entrails in its talons and would not let me go. I had, after all, had plenty of experience with loss, starting with my father and ending up, over and over again, with Lucy. I was not, had never been, so naive as to think one did not ever lose what one valued.
But somehow my father and Lucy were things that belonged to me by birthright, things that I came into the world already in some way attached to. The first was not so much mine as I was his; that rejection might be explained simply and brutally by the fact that I did not measure up to his criteria. In the case of Lucy, we were mutually and synergistically fashioned to meet and feed each other’s needs, and did so for a long time before she, too, was—or seemed to be—lost to me. And whatever else she was to me, Lucy was, and always had been, my responsibility.
But Sarah…Sarah was a gift. Sarah Cameron had been my gift from life, the only one I was ever given until Princeton came to me. That I had not cherished her enough, had in my blind fashion taken her sadly for granted, did not change the fact that Sarah came to me fully and wholly and without condition. Every time the loss of her surfaced anew, the anguish was as red and wet as the day it had been born, and underneath it lay, each time, incredulity. I had not thought that life took its gifts back. But then, as I said, I had never really had any gifts except Sarah and Princeton.
I fled back to Princeton and Firestone Library a few times that summer, but the small, persistent shade of Sarah Cameron was so palpable on that leaf-drowned campus that I kept half turning to her, and finding only vivid, shimmering air where she had just been, and I could not go back again. Obscure anger flared at those times; anger at life for stripping me of both Sarah and Princeton; anger at Sarah for purloining even Princeton from me; and most painful of all, anger at myself for letting her go. I could taste the validity of this last, and it smote me so that I buried it deep, and in time the fresh, blistering pain dulled from searing agony to visceral ache, and I knew, gratefully, that if I walked gingerly and held myself lightly, I could manage, in some fashion, to live with that.
I did not hear from Sarah and Charlie again, of course. I believe I would have, if I had reached out a hand, apologized, made the first move, but I could not. It would not have brought her back, and any lesser payoff was not worth the enormous effort. I heard, in July, that they had moved the Thanksgiving wedding back to September, and that it would be very small, families and a few old friends only, in the little walled garden of the Muscogee Avenue house. I heard this from my mother, who seemed as aggrieved at being deprived of the season’s undisputed social event as she was furious at my defection from the house of Cameron.
“I thought you’d want to know, and I don’t guess anybody else from here will bother to tell you,” she said on the telephone. She did not say that everyone there thought I was a bounder of the first water, and wondered avidly if Sarah was pregnant by me and Charlie was rescuing her, but the words shrilled and trembled on the wires between us, and I hung up as soon as I decently could. No wedding invitation came; I was grateful for that.
My mother was right. I had heard from almost no one in Atlanta since I had brought Lucy home from California in June—not that that was unusual. With the exception of her and Sarah and Dorothy Cameron, I had seldom heard from home. Lucy called, a few days after Sarah and Charlie had returned to Atlanta, and when I hung up the telephone at the sound of her voice, called again. This time I let the phone ring, and she did not call a third time. Letters came from her, though, and kept up for some weeks, but I tore them up unopened, and finally they dwindled and stopped. I could not think of Lucy in those days without a red-fired blackness flooding my brain, a blind, implacable rage that frightened me badly. But it, too, abated after the letters stopped. By and large, the deadness held, and when it did not, the ache could, after all, be borne.
And then, in early August, Dorothy Cameron called.
“Shep, dear, it’s Dorothy,” she said, and in that split instant the anesthetized ache fled and a pure, silver and terrible new grief like a piano wire stabbed my heart. I wanted to weep, to keen like an Irishman at a wake, to wail like a banshee; I wanted to crawl through the eight hundred-odd miles of wire between West Twenty-first Street and Muscogee Avenue and lay my head in her lap and sob like a child, brokenhearted and inconsolable, until I fell asleep there, finally spent. I literally could not speak around the knot of anguish in my throat. It was not only Sarah who was lost to me now.
I managed some sort of strictured croak that did not fool Dorothy Cameron.
“Oh, my dear,” she said. “I am sorry. I haven’t called until now because I knew it would be as awful for you as it is for me; I haven’t been able to pick up the phone to call you without crying. It’s ridiculous. Neither of us has died. Ben is really quite annoyed with me. But it’s time to stop this foolishness now.”
And magically, the lethal knot loosened and I was able to speak. It has always been Dorothy Cameron’s greatest gift, that of healing.
“I’ve missed you,” I said. “And I didn’t even know how much till I heard your voice just now. I would have called, but I’ve acted like such a horse’s ass I didn’t think you’d want to talk to me. God, Dorothy, I’ve made such a mess of everything….”
“Yes, you have,” she said, but she said it so matter-of-factly that even in the admission there was healing. “But you’re the one who’s been hurt the most by it, by far. We’re pretty much all right down here. Sad to say, the world has a nasty way of stepping over our prostrate bodies and going right on. Hiding away up there and not answering letters or the telephone is not necessary and really not very smart. I’m calling to ask you to reconsider coming home. Just for a visit, of course.”
“Dorothy,” I said, “I can’t do that. I agree with you that hiding out is stupid as hell, but one thing I can’t do is come home yet. Did…did Sarah ask you to call?” A starved and craven hope slunk up from somewhere out of the ice-packed depths of me, skulking like a coyote through my heart.
“Sarah? No,” Dorothy said. “You were awfully rough on her, Shep. I don’t think Sarah’s going to call you, or Charlie either, and in any case, I wouldn’t intercede for either of them. They’re fully capable of handling their own affairs, no matter how badly I might think they’re doing it. No, Sarah didn’t ask me to call you, but Lucy did. She says you won’t answer her calls and letters, and she needs very badly to see you and talk to you. I believe she does, Shep.”
“Lucy? My cousin Lucy?” Simple astonishment made me stupid. I had packed Lucy at the very bottom of the ice crevasse, lower even than the pain of Sarah and Charlie. Lucy was the last name I had ever expected to hear on Dorothy Cameron’s lips, and to hear it couched in a request for help was as alien to my ears as if she had begun speaking Senegalese.
“Lucy, yes,” Dorothy said briskly, and I could tell she was losing patience with my obtuseness. I shook my head like a dog coming out of water.
“Okay,” I said. “What kind of trouble has Lucy gotten herself into now? And I warn you, Dorothy, I don’t much want to hear it, whatever it is. Lucy has wrecked things for me the last time she’s going to. She’s a grown-up woman, a divorcée, and she’s got enough sense and skills to look after herself now. Let her do it, or let her find somebody else to hang on to. I can’t afford to talk to Lucy right now, much less come down there and grub around trying to clean up whatever mess she’s made.”
“As a matter of fact, she hasn’t made any kind of mess that I can see,” Dorothy said equably. From childhood she had been used to my outbursts; I had felt safe in letting her field them when I had trusted no one else but Lucy with them. “Rather the opposite, in fact. She has a job that she seems to love, and she’s paying what she can toward her room and board to your parents, and I’ve never seen her quite like this. She seems…happy. Just happy. Not excited, or keyed up, or manic; there’s a sort of inner glow to her, and a quietness that I never saw before, and that I frankly find most appealing. I think she may have a new young man, though she won’t say, but in any case she’s been coming over and talking with me in the evenings for the past few weeks, and I’ve simply never seen such a change in a young woman. She says you’re responsible; I can’t imagine what you said to her. I don’t think it’s a pose, either; I’d spot that in Lucy in a minute. Sarah thinks it’s genuine, too. Lucy has spent a good bit of time with Sarah, going shopping with her and helping with wedding details. Sarah says she apologized very genuinely for all the trouble she caused for everybody, and with real tears in her eyes. Sarah was quite touched. Charlie’s still holding out, but you know Charlie….”
I did, indeed, and knew that Charlie had what Hemingway called an infallible shit detector when it came to Lucy Bondurant. I did, too.
“Well, I’m glad to hear she’s not in trouble, but if I were you I’d walk softly around the new Lucy,” I said. “She’s capable of being whoever she needs to be. This makes me nervous as hell.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I think you should come home and see for yourself. She wants you to so badly that you can tell she’s nearly bursting with it. She says she really needs to try and make things right for you, that she can’t get on with her life until she does, and that she doesn’t know how to reach you. Shep, I’m convinced that that’s just what she means to do—get on with her life on her own. The work she’s doing is really quite valuable, and she’s done some writing, too, that she says something might come of one day or another. It’s as though she knows a lovely secret; as though there’s a candle lit within her. Luminous…”
Well, I thought. Luminous is the word for Lucy. Always was. What is it really? I wonder. Aloud I said, “I’m not going to come home, Dorothy; I just can’t do that yet. But I’ll talk to her if she still wants me to. Tell her to call me. I’ll take it this time. And…Dorothy…how is Sarah? How is she, really? Is she…you know…happy?”
“Happy?” She tasted the word as if she did not know what it meant. “No, I don’t think Sarah is particularly happy right now, Shep, but she’s very much all right. She will be very useful in her marriage and here in Atlanta, and I believe that in time that will make her happy. She could not be useful in New York. No matter what you think, she could not be. And for girls like Sarah, being useful is far more important in the long run than being merely happy.”
My heart hurt, briefly and profoundly. Sarah was not happy. Three weeks away from her marriage and she was not happy. Useful…useful Sarah. In that instant I saw her life.
“Damn your high-minded crap, Dorothy,” I said, not loudly, but with trembling vehemence in my voice.
“Shep, don’t,” she said. “We love you. We feel your pain. All of us do. Don’t lash out at us like this.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
That night I wrote Sarah and Charlie, a letter apiece, short but as warm and penitent as I could make them, benedictory. I apologized for my behavior and gave my blessing, feeling like a Borgia pope as I did so, false and corrupted. I love you, I signed off to both of them. I wept a little, tired, shamed tears in the hot, thick darkness as I dropped the letters into the mailbox on the corner of Twenty-first and Ninth, but I felt somehow ennobled too, exalted. I imagined Sarah opening hers in her studio and reading it, saw the blessing of the autumn light from the window wall on her face, saw her close her glowing eyes and droop her dark head over the letter. I could not see where Charlie would open his, for his apartment in Colonial Homes was not a part of the country of our youth, and it seemed that I could really see Charlie Gentry only there. He seemed caught in our mutual boyhood as in amber, and I could no more imagine him at the altar with Sarah, or in a new white bed with her, than I could at his executive’s desk at the Coca-Cola Company’s new headquarters on North Avenue. I was glad for that.
Two days later a telegram came from them, signed, all our love, Sarah and Charlie. Please, please, it said, come home for the wedding.
But I could not do that.
During the next three weeks I managed quite well not to think of them, but I did think a lot about Lucy.
“She says you’re responsible for the change in her,” Dorothy Cameron had said. “I can’t imagine what you said to her.”
For a long time I could not remember, either, and then I thought perhaps I did. It had been on the plane that lumbered interminably toward Atlanta from Los Angeles, somewhere over Utah, I thought, or at least early in the trip, before fatigue and the afterwash of pain and drugs took her down into sleep. I had been trying to have a serious talk with her, but it had turned out to be pretty much a monologue, for she would not talk about Red Chastain or her marriage, except to say that it was, of course, over.
The Pendleton MPs had finally tracked Red to a fly-specked cantina back room on an unimaginable side street in Tijuana, and had brought him back to base in handcuffs on the day before we left for home; two of his superior officers had come to see Lucy in the hospital, to ask what action she thought she might want taken, but she had begun to tremble and cry again and so the doctor and I had asked them to leave, and they had, and we quit that high, sun-punished plain without seeing her husband again, and to my knowledge she never saw him again while she lived. I knew that she planned to file for divorce as soon as she got back to Atlanta, but beyond that, she had no plans at all, and so I switched my attack to her work, and what she hoped to do with the rest of her life. My own seemed, then, firmly set in its own incandescent orbit, and I wanted to get back to it and on with it, and to see her set onto some path that was least likely to disturb mine. I was wild, at that time, to be home with Sarah.
“You could be a really good writer,” I said to her. “You could be published nationally right now, that’s how good you are. All your professors said so. I know from reading your stuff—what little there’s been of it. You know so, too. But instead you’ve wasted all those good years screwing around with people like Red Chastain. God, you Southern women. You’re content with so damned little.”
“Lord, Gibby, are you one of those feminists?” Lucy said, gingerly tasting with her broken mouth the term that had just begun to creep into the vernacular.
“I guess I am,” I said, after thinking about it. “Aren’t you? I thought all women with half a brain would be.”
“No,” she said. “I hate women. You know that. Men are all you can trust.”
“Lucy, just look at your men,” I said in despair.
“Yes, Gibby, but they’re predictable, all of them. I know what they’re going to do. I can handle that. Women are mysterious. You can’t read them. And that makes them automatic enemies. It’s better to have a man on your side, as well as by it.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. “It’s an excuse you women use for not doing anything of your own with your lives.”
“Well, we’ve raised a damned lot of you Southern boys’ children,” she said sharply, stung.
“No you haven’t,” I said. “Black women do that.”
She was silent for a long time, and then she fell asleep and slept the rest of the way home. Could that small snippet of talk, words spoken in a sealed metal cylinder hung somewhere over the fabled red West, really have changed Lucy Bondurant? I could not imagine that it had, but I could recall no other….
Charlie and Sarah were married on the Saturday after Labor Day, and I did not mark the occasion in any special way at all. I had saved a lot of chores for that Saturday, and at the particular moment that I estimated Sarah Cameron became Sarah Gentry, I was midway between Gristede’s and my laundry with a package of Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner and a sack full of soiled clothing. I passed the kosher deli on the corner of Ninth and Twenty-third, and muttered aloud, “Mazel tov, Sarah,” and on impulse went into the dark, garlicky shop and bought a carton of chopped liver, which Sarah had loved with an absolutely Hebraic avidity. I went on home in the still-hot September twilight and put the liver into the refrigerator, and the telephone rang as I closed the scabrous door.
It was Lucy.
“Hey, Gibby,” she said, and all of a sudden joy and sadness and pain and glee and simple one-celled nostalgia swept me, so that my voice, as I said, “Hey, Luce,” sounded like that of someone else entirely in my own ears.
“What’s happening?” I said.
“I’ve just come back from the wedding,” she said, and her voice, around the small exhalations of the inevitable cigarette, sounded soft and full of something that I did not associate with her. Tenderness? Pity?
“Yeah?” I said. “And how was the wedding?”
“Well, it was very sweet. Very small and simple, and over in almost no time, and not really so awful at all. Nobody cried or carried on, and both of them seemed okay happy but not delirious. Already settled, somehow. Sarah hugged me before they left and told me to call you up and tell you about it before some old battle-ax did, and that they missed you and hoped you’d come see them when they got back from their honeymoon, and that was that. I was the only one of our family to go; not many outside people were there at all. I just wanted to tell you before anybody else did, or sent you some stupid clipping, that it was okay. It really was. You wouldn’t have minded it at all.”
There was something different; it was there in her voice, like a quality of light. I kept listening for the bright sharpness, the wild-honey irony, the little tongues of captivating malice that I knew so well, but they were not there. Nothing was but gentleness and a most un-Lucylike succor.
“I…well, thanks, Luce,” I said lamely. “I appreciate that. I’m glad you went. Dorothy said you’d really been a help to her and Sarah since you got back.”
“I hope so,” she said simply. “I’ve been awful to Sarah all my life, and I hope I can begin to make it up to her. I wish I thought I could to you.”
“No need,” I said. For the first time in my life I was uncomfortable talking to Lucy. I could not think of anything to say. I felt none of the red rage toward her that I had earlier in the summer, but this quiet-voiced stranger called up no other emotion to take its place. It was like trying to make telephone conversation to the most casual of acquaintances.
“So where are they going on their honeymoon?” I said, merely for something to say, and then was horrified at myself. I did not want to know, did not want Lucy to think that I did, and shrank from the images that the word evoked as from a pit of fire and vipers.
“I think just up to Tate,” Lucy said, and I smiled involuntarily. Of course. Tate. The big old family cottage up on Burnt Mountain, which Sarah loved so much. I could see her there, diving like a brown otter into the dark blue, freezing little mountain lake, riding her bicycle around the little dirt road that ringed it, tossing lichen-furred logs from the woodpile beside the back door onto the fire booming in the great stone fireplace, standing hipshot at the old stove deftly handling a cast-iron skillet. I could see square, dark Charlie stumping along behind her, standing beside her, looking up at her from the disreputable easy chair beside the fire with his whole soul in his eyes. But I could not see them climb the old pine staircase together, toward the bedrooms off the gallery upstairs; I closed my eyes against that….
Of course Sarah would take Charlie up to Tate. It was where we would have gone, she and I. I had not thought of it before, but I knew that it was. Sea Island would have come later.
“Gibby,” Lucy said into my silence, “please come home. They’ll be gone for a couple of weeks at least. You won’t run into them. And I need to see you. I need to try and make some of this up to you. I think I can, if you’ll let me. But I can’t stand being…alienated from you like this. I want to go on with my life and try to make something out of it—by myself, I mean—and I don’t think I can do that until I know you’ve forgiven me. I have to know that.”
“I do, Luce,” I said, and meant it. “I don’t have to come home to do that. I do—not that there’s anything to forgive you for, really. Why don’t you come see me instead? If you’re short, I can send you a plane ticket—”
“Gibby…” She took a very deep breath. “I want you to come home because I’ve written a book and Scribners is publishing it and it comes out next week, and there are some parties and things here for me, and I want you to come and take me to them. I don’t want to go by myself, Gibby, and I don’t think Mama and Lady much want to go with me.”
“Lucy!” I shouted over the phone, as if she could hear me only that way. “That’s…Goddamn! That’s wonderful! That’s…Why didn’t you say something? When did you do that?”
“I wrote it way last summer and fall, after Red went on that eight-month tour. Remember? I called you up and whined for you to come out and keep me company, and you said to write a book or plant a tree or something? Well, I did—I wrote a book. And when it was finished I called Professor Dunne at Scott and she knew an agent in New York, and I sent it to him and he sent it around, and Scribners took it—and here it is. I didn’t say anything about it because I didn’t think you wanted to hear about that or anything else from me—and you didn’t, right then—and it seemed so far away, anyway…but, oh God, Gibby, it got closer and closer to publication day, and Rich’s is going to give me this autograph party, and Mr. and Mrs. Cameron want to give me this little cocktail party at the Driving Club, and even Mama thought she might manage a little tea with your mother, here at the house…and I just realized that I didn’t think I could get through any of it without you. So I went and talked to Mrs. Cameron about it, and she said—she called you, didn’t she?—she said she’d try and get you to come home, and so I thought maybe if I called you after she had…”
“When are these parties?” I said, my heart pounding with pride in her.
“Next weekend. Next Saturday and Sunday.”
“I’ll be in Friday night. Can you meet me at the airport?”
“Oh, Gibby, of course I can! Oh, bless you! I’ll pick you up at your gate; I’ve got a little car of my own now, a Volkswagen. I got the loan myself, and Mr. Cameron cosigned it, it’s blue—oh, shit, Gibby, I’ve missed you so! And I’m so scared!”
“What are you scared of? Don’t be scared. You’ve got the world by the tail now,” I said. “Nothing ahead but roses and clover.”
“Because,” she said, “I’m just so happy. And I don’t know how to handle that. And nobody ever gave me a party of my own before.”
And she was right. Nobody ever had.
I sat up all that night, noodling around on my clarinet and playing and replaying my Brubeck records, softly so the menopausal Puerto Rican widow upstairs would not call the police again, and I thought about the two of them: Sarah and Lucy. Lucy and Sarah. Or, rather, I did not so much think as let the lifelong tapes of the two of them stored in my memory run. I did not want, on that evening, to think. Through the long darkness two women shimmered and played behind my eyes, both of them vivid, both of them ardent, both of them beautiful, both of them in some way mine and then not mine. Neither easily definable, neither easily given over. Both of them in essential ways shapers of lives—mine and others—yet so different one from the other that it seemed incongruous that they could be the major bones in the armature of a single life. But they were. My life without them was unimaginable. And yet from this night forth I would be required to try to lead it without at least one of them.
Lucy and Sarah, Sarah and Lucy. It seemed to me, in that still predawn hushed even stiller by the beginning of a silent, soft autumn rain, that they were like the figures on a Swiss clock, moving in and out and back and forth in my life in a formal, stylized dance, the one now advancing while the other retreated, and then changing to slow, measured order and beginning again. I could imagine nothing, should the clock stop, but emptiness. So I ceased the imagining and let the tapes run again. Lucy and Sarah, Sarah and Lucy…
Toward daylight I slid finally and irrevocably toward sleep, and the thought that the music and the tapes in my mind had kept at bay through the dark hours surfaced and struck, and I finally let the desolation of it take me down: Tonight was the wedding night of Sarah Cameron Gentry, but it was not mine.