When I was a little girl, I used to love to go with Daddy to the Godwin Lumber Yard in McNeil. A man named Arch McMillan was the foreman there, and he was the designated giver of directions to East Geddie.
“Mr. Arch,” I’d ask him, “has anybody got lost looking for East Geddie today?”
More than one tired, dazed farm-implement salesman or insurance agent had pulled into the lumber yard after foolishly heading east from Geddie on Highway 47 looking for East Geddie. They’d travel past deserted sandhills and scrub pines, and a house now and then, and by the time they got to the lumber yard, after perhaps driving back and forth two or three times looking for the nonexistent side road, Arch McMillan was ready for them. They were his prime source of entertainment.
“No, son, East Geddie ain’t east of Geddie,” he’d say cheerfully, proud to own such knowledge. “East Geddie is east of Old Geddie, which is southwest of Geddie itself, of course. You got to go back west, to Geddie, then go south on the Ammon Road, then turn west again on the Old Geddie Road, and keep headin’ west till you get to East Geddie.”
I used to think that there was a town near where we lived called Geddie Itself, because that’s how people usually referred to the town we were supposed to be east of.
I stopped at the welcome station last time I came down here and got a free state road map, and East Geddie is still, cartographically speaking, east of Geddie. I’m sure lots of people driving through on the way to the beach think the place is one of those ghost towns that cease to exist for several decades before anyone notifies the map makers.
Up in the plunder room at Daddy’s, there’s an old chest of Aunt Connie’s, where the family kept deeds and old letters from back as far as the late 1700s. My grandmother, when she was a young woman, tried to get East Geddie’s history onto a page of lined paper:
Malcolm Geddie run the Tavern on the old Indian Trail, for them that came from Cool Spring to Port Campbell. He come from Scotland. It was called Cole Geddie’s, because they didn’t serve meals. They got to calling the hole area Cole Geddie’s. Then it was Cole Geddie. Then it was Geddie. Then folks come up from the Blue Sandhills to work at the Sawmill. They bilt east of Geddie, so they was East Geddie. Then they bilt the Rail Road from Cool Spring to Port Campbell, but Neil McNeil wouldn’t let them have any of his Land, so they bilt the Rail Road north of Geddie, and they called the Town at the Rail Road station Geddie Station. Geddie Station grew, and it become Geddie. The first Geddie become Old Geddie. East Geddie stayed East Geddie. They tried to change it, but my husband, Mr. John McCain, knowed as Red John; said at the meeting in 1904, We was East Geddie because we was East of Geddie. We ain’t moved. We are still East Geddie. And so they nevver changed it.
I wish I could get my students to write so economically.
Like Red John McCain, I can be a little intractable. Maybe that’s why I’ve made such a pig’s breakfast of things.
I’ve been in Europe for half the summer and am still trying to sort everything out. I didn’t leave any addresses or phone numbers, even though Daddy always wants me to. Even at eighty-two, he wants to know where I am. Even at forty, I let it bother me and try to shut him out.
When I called the Carlsons from England to see how Justin was doing, they told me about his flight to Carolina. I wasn’t a happy camper, but I had a few weeks to cool off. This hasn’t been any easier for Justin than it has for me.
If last year had been a football game, God would have been called for unnecessary roughness. In April, they discovered Mom’s pancreatic cancer, and by November, she was gone. Also in April, I discovered that I was married to an asshole, a problem that has since been corrected.
Daddy was upset about our breakup, but he was so absorbed with Mom that he hardly had time to concentrate on relatively minor catastrophes. And I spared him the gory details, just told him Jeff had moved out.
Christmas was a bad time all around. Justin didn’t want to come down, although he and Daddy had always gotten along rather well, even if they didn’t have much in common. He sulked most of the time we were at the farm. He was so rude that I couldn’t help thinking, if it had been me at fifteen, someone, probably Mom, would have applied severe corporal punishment. I had to cajole and then threaten him into going in and thanking Daddy for the shirt and baseball bat. Everyone just seemed mired in their own private losses. Disaster doesn’t necessarily pull the survivors together. Sometimes, we just seem to be trying to push each other off the life raft.
Every memento of Christmas, every cloying TV commercial, every single “Merry Christmas” seemed to drive the dagger a little deeper. We’d been watching television, mainly to keep the lack of conversation from being so conspicuous, on Christmas Eve, when It’s a Wonderful Life came on unexpectedly at the end of some second-rate college football bowl game. Now we have the movie in our video library; we used to set aside a night to watch it and Miracle on 34th Street back-to-back, when Justin was younger. I remember how Jeff used to get kind of choked up by it and pretend he had something in his eye. But the element of surprise made this familiar paean to savings and loans seem like an unexpected Christmas present. We watched raptly. I didn’t even bother to sneak a peek at my watch to see how many more hours we had left in East Geddie.
But at the end, when all of George Bailey’s friends are filling the basket with money to keep Potter from sending him to prison, and George is holding his daughter, and “Hark the Herald” comes bursting through, Justin got up and stomped out of the room. He didn’t come back for the rest of the evening. No one should be made to endure Christmas within at least one year of a personal catastrophe.
Jeff Bowman and I were married a year after I graduated from UNC—Greensboro, when he was a don’t-give-a-damn political science graduate from Carolina with no visible future plans other than to stay out of Vietnam and I was working toward a master’s in English. We both liked to raise hell and laugh at the rest of the world. But Jeff had to find something to do for a living, and stock brokerage finally offered itself. Soon, we weren’t always on the same side.
We lived together for seventeen years, though, and might have just kept going, me an English professor at Montclair, him a broker with Parks and Sutton, mutually enjoying Justin and, on occasions, each other. Bev Lundquist is what tore it.
Jeff and Bev had an affair not long after we were married, but he’d repented, and I’d had my own affair out of revenge, and we somehow patched things up. Sometimes I think we had Justin just to convince each other that we were a real family.
But when Bobby DeVries told me Bev was now working as a secretary for Parks and Sutton, after her divorce, and that things were not good, I started gathering kindling for the funeral pyre of our marriage. Bobby works with Jeff, and he offered to “comfort” me, telling me I was “too good” for Jeff. “Well, then,” I told him, “I must be way too good for you.” I was already beginning to plot as I showed Bobby the door.
I am not the worst-looking forty-year-old in the world. I have my mother’s dark complexion (and temper), and I spend enough time in aerobics to have, thus far, avoided the “well-preserved” stage. My specialty at Montclair is American writers of the early twentieth century. If you teach as long as I have, you learn to mix and match, to teach Fitzgerald and Hemingway and T. S. Eliot and Faulkner and Dreiser in several different ways to different levels of students, rearranging old subjects with new themes. Most of my classes now are for graduate students, where, in the time-honored tradition, we teach to produce teachers.
It is not unusual for one of my students to take a course in The Waste Land, in which one starts with Eliot, then branches out to find wasteland imagery in The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises and Look Homeward, Angel. The same student might then take a course in the short stories of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, then a course in research methods, using the works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Eliot with an emphasis on the critical reception of their work. Throw in an obscure Jean Toomer or Ford Madox Ford and your career is set. In fourteen years as a professor at Montclair, girl and woman, I have never taught a course that did not include at least one work from either Fitzgerald or Hemingway. Once every year or so, I teach a course on feminism in literature. The main text is Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald. Of course, it’s necessary for my students in this course to read Tender Is the Night in order to do an analysis of the Zelda characters in each book.
At Montclair, we use some of the brightest and most obsequious Ph.D. candidates as poorly paid graduate instructors, mostly to commit Beowulf on innocent freshmen. One of the instructors, Maxton Winfree, was a twenty-five-year-old protégé of mine with an unpublished novel and half another one. Max intended to subsidize his creative genius by attaching himself to the financial security of Montclair or someplace similar, allegedly as a teacher. I’d read his novel and felt he said little, badly. But he would serve my purpose well.
No one can teach such romantic stuff as The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms without being the object of a few schoolboy crushes. I had always been flattered by such attention, especially as the years went by. I was always kind but firm; and if Jeff hadn’t resurrected Bev Lundquist, poor Max Winfree would have been let down gently.
Only two weeks before my Great Revelation, Max had made his move. He invited me to his apartment after a faculty meeting, supposedly to get my opinion on a problem he was having with setting in his second novel. (You should set it aside, I was thinking, and get a job.) He fixed us each a bourbon and water, then sat beside me while he described the problem. He slipped his arm behind me on his little student-issue couch as he talked, playing with my hair. Then he moved in, awkwardly, for the kiss. I turned and we bumped heads, causing him to spill half his bourbon. He pledged his unyielding devotion, I gave him my happy-wife-and-mother speech and we parted with a minimum of embarrassment. Since then, we’d spoken several times, once in private as he slipped into my ten-by-ten office, closed the door quickly behind him and told me how much my friendship meant to him.
After I found out what was keeping Jeff from coming home until seven on Tuesday and Friday nights, though, and who accompanied him to Denver for the business trip in October, my thoughts turned to Max.
“I have to see you,” I told him over the office phone, speaking to the instrument of my revenge three doors away. “It’s very important.… No, not here. Come by my house at five-thirty.… No, I can’t tell you over the phone.”
Back in Cotton Hall at UNC—G, other girls in the dorm would beg me to answer the phone as their proxy when prospective blind dates from Chapel Hill called. Looks come and go, but a good voice lasts. When I say, “I have to see you,” better than Max Winfree have come running.
It was a Friday in April, a week before we found out about Mom. Justin was spending the night with Trey Carlson, three blocks away. Jeff would be at his Friday after-work poker session, a habit he’d started last summer, shortly before Bev Lundquist started working for him. I wondered, grinding my teeth, if Jeff and his broker buddies got a few laughs out of the double entendre of “poker.” At any rate, I would count on him to arrive within five minutes of seven, faithful even in his infidelity. It had been all I could do the previous Friday to restrain myself from dinging him with a Jefferson cup when he came through the door, all fake cheerfulness, so full of guilt I couldn’t believe I hadn’t sensed it on my own.
At 5:25, Max Winfree’s banged-up secondhand Isuzu pulled into the drive. He got out, closing the door carefully so as not to disturb the neighbors, and came up the walk to the front door. I waited until he rang the bell, looking nervously over his shoulder as if the irate husband might come wheeling up at any second.
“Come in, Max,” I said, trying to put as much heat into those three little words as possible. I was wearing an old pair of form-fitted jeans and a silk blouse, no bra. I could feel my nipples puckering in the late-afternoon chill. I used to go braless around the house a lot because Jeff liked it, but I had seldom gone public, so to speak.
He closed the door, leaned down and kissed me. I let him, meeting his tongue with mine as he placed his left hand on the small of my back and his right hand a bit lower.
“Wait,” I said, moving back a step. “Go outside and move the car out of the driveway. I don’t want the neighbors to see.”
In his present state, Max didn’t bother to dwell for long on how much more suspicious it looked for him to back his car down the drive, park it two doors down on the street and then walk back to our house. He was a bit distracted.
When he returned, he let himself in. I had mixed a couple of black Russians, mine a bit stronger than his, and did my best to restrict things to kissing and a little petting for the time being. Relax, I told him, we’ve got all night. My son’s at a friend’s house, and my husband’s on a business trip. Monkey-business trip, I thought. On my way home, a little after four, I had detoured through a neighborhood I’d looked up on the city map. There, at 207 Park, was Jeff’s burgundy Cressida. I never have liked to leave anything to chance.
Finally, at twenty minutes to seven, after two black Russians, a lot of kissing and a fair amount of fondling, mostly by Max, I stood up, unbuttoned my silk blouse and took it off. I felt a little foolish, but black Russians are great at drowning inhibitions. Max started forward, but I motioned for him to wait. He started to take his shirt off, but I told him, “I want to do that myself.”
I laid the blouse on the floor, then took off my sandals, setting them down in a straight line between the couch and the master bedroom door. Next came the jeans and then, at heaven’s gate itself, my panties. I led Max inside and told him to wait. I guess he never bothered to wonder why I would be concerned enough to remove two drink glasses from the coffee table and put them in the kitchen.
When I got back to the bedroom, I locked the door from the inside. Max was already down to his shorts and was out of them in about two seconds. Not bad, I thought, and realized maybe I was enjoying this a little more than I’d planned. Oh well, you can’t plan everything. I led him over to our brass queen-size bed, where he planted his tongue solidly in my ear and started stroking my thigh, higher, higher …
“Wait,” I said, rolling away just before we went over the edge. I stood up and went to the dresser, opened the bottom drawer and pulled out the ropes.
“Indulge an old lady,” I told him, stretching the two elastic cords back and forth like an accordion, trying to look like I did this all the time. I hit on this part of the plan the day I had to haul the lawnmower to the repair shop in the trunk of the car. Jeff had bought this elastic rope with hooks on each end to tie down the trunk lid when something was too large to fit with it closed. I bought another one just like it at the hardware store on the way home.
I pushed Max back on the bed and crawled on top of him. I wrapped the first cord around his left wrist, hooking that end to one of the vertical brass posts at the head of the bed, then wrapped the other end around his right wrist and attached the hook to the bed on that side.
“Boy, you older women are kinda kinky,” Max said, trying to inject a note of levity. I could see that he was a little taken aback at the thought of a woman seizing complete control. If he noticed the white rectangle on the sliding glass door that led out to the deck, or if he wondered why someone fastidious enough to clean up drink glasses wouldn’t bother to close the blinds before screwing one of her graduate students, he kept it to himself.
I tied his feet the same way, leaving him spread-eagled on the bed. I sneaked a peak at my digital watch, my only item of clothing: 6:54. I turned on the lamp light, explaining, “I like to watch,” then mounted him. Just like that. Fifteen years of fidelity out the window.
I was trying to keep control of myself and Max, and I wondered if this would be the one night that Jeff was both unfaithful and late. Then, after what seemed like a very long time, with the watch showing 7:02 and Max writhing and groaning underneath me, I heard the Cressida pull into the driveway.
“Oh shit,” said Max, noticeably shrinking from the task.
“Listen,” I said, shushing him, “if you remain quiet, and don’t panic, everything will be all right. You really don’t have much choice anyhow, do you?” and I gave him a reassuring smile as I wriggled a little bit to regain his full attention.
I could hear the car door close, then heard Jeff fumble with the keys and, finally, open the front door. Our house is a contemporary, with a large living room, where Max and I had been, under a cathedral ceiling. The master bedroom is back and to the right, past the kitchen. I could imagine Jeff following the trail of clothes to the bedroom door, where my panties were hanging on the doorknob with a note pinned to them: USE THE OTHER DOOR.
Jeff knows I like to play games. One Halloween, after he’d gotten up about a dozen times to take care of trick-or-treaters at the door while I worked on a research paper, I had slipped out of my clothes, into a raincoat and out the side door. I rang the front bell, and when he answered, I flung the coat open and said, “Trick or treat!” It was this, my willingness to go the extra mile, to give 110 percent, that really pissed me off when I found out about Bev Lundquist. I mean, what did he want?
I figured Jeff was feeling a little guilty right now, was depending on that, in fact. He would go back to the kitchen, then through the door to the porch, which led to the deck, which led to the sliding-glass door I was looking out from atop Max Winfree. Maybe Jeff wouldn’t want to be amorous tonight. Maybe he couldn’t be amorous anymore tonight, I thought, grinding my teeth and grinding Max a little, too.
I could hear Jeff at the bedroom door, then listened as he walked back to the kitchen, moving, I thought, a little hesitantly. I saw him come out on the screen porch, then go through the door to the deck. He was about halfway across when he probably realized that having to satisfy two women in one night was not his biggest problem.
Through the sliding-glass door that I had secured with the charley bar from inside, I saw Jeff go from sheepish to shocked as we stared at each other through the triple-pane glass. I worked up the most devastating sneer I could manage under, or rather over, the circumstances, slowly raised my right hand in his direction and offered him my middle finger.
A husband with a clear conscience probably would have broken the glass door or gone back inside and kicked in the main bedroom door with my panties still hanging on it. But Jeff Bowman’s conscience was about as muddy as a mountain creek after a spring flood. If he needed any further evidence of my primary motive, he needed to look no farther than the cardboard message taped to the sliding-glass door, the one I’d written with a red Magic Marker just before Max arrived. It said: GO BACK TO 207 PARK, ASSHOLE. And so he did.
He left quietly, and I eventually untied Max, with whom I slept two more times out of gratitude. But I didn’t want to be around when Max finally realized that a lack of talent would doom him to teaching others how to write.
I left the door open for Jeff, leaving it for him to decide whether I sought freedom or just revenge. I wasn’t sure myself. We’re both strong-willed people, and neither of us ever apologized for much. He just came over during the day one Thursday and took away most of his clothes. It was almost a month before we spoke, and by then I think we both realized that any life we shared would be of a considerably diminished nature, accusations and despair no farther away than one wrong word.
He still lives with Bev Lundquist, with no apparent plans to marry, and I’ve spent the shank of the summer traveling around Europe with Mark Hammaker. Mark’s forty-eight, he’s managing editor of the daily paper here, the Montclair Light, and we’ve had some good times. We might have some more. I don’t know.
Justin stayed with Jeff and Bev as much as he wanted after we broke up. The reason Justin had to turn to his grandfather for help, I guess, is that I didn’t want him with Mark and me in Europe, and Jeff and Bev didn’t want him with them at Hilton Head, where they spent most of June and July. I told him there was no way we could afford for him to go to Europe, too. He didn’t take it well. I thought he’d get over his hurt spending the summer with Trey and the Carlsons.
We had to sell our contemporary with the deck and porch after the separation and divorce, and Justin and I moved into a town house near the university and Justin’s high school. Justin seemed to take it all in stride, just grew quieter and taller. I never slept over at Mark’s unless Justin was staying with friends.
The past school year, though, Justin’s grades started to slip. Most upsetting to me, he was doing poorly in English. This boy, who was read to from good books as soon as he could listen, who read Robinson Crusoe at eight and The Catcher in the Rye at twelve, almost flunked sophomore English, after nothing but A’s and B’s all through elementary and junior high school.
He doesn’t like Mark much, which hardly surprises me. Mark is a disciplinarian. When his own son got a little wild his senior year in high school, Mark sent him to Fork Union, a military school, to “straighten him out.” He’d like to do the same with Justin. Over my dead body. Mark’s son now lives in San Francisco and visits him every two years or so.
Justin seems to take a perverse delight in rejecting everything I’ve ever tried to teach him. Anything I think is trash, Justin immediately adopts. Pulp science fiction, rap music, sit-coms for the brain-damaged. His group at school seems to consist mainly of other professors’ sons and daughters, most of them suffering from an imbalance of love and knowledge.