Love of My Life

AN AFTERNOON in August. I am in my kitchen in the little frame house on Colonial Drive in Jackson, Mississippi. I am separated from the father of my children. They are six and five and two years old. I am five feet four inches tall. I am muscular and strong. I have strong bones and red hair and straight legs. I am very, very tan. I am wearing sandals, a pair of blue cotton shorts, a tight blue-and-white-striped blouse. I have been taking Dexedrine. I take it three or four days a week. I take Dexedrine and diuretics. I never eat. Food is the enemy of what I want. I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it. If I am beautiful, the thing I want will show up. I’ve been waiting since I was fourteen years old for the thing I want. Once I thought it was the father of my children. Once I thought it was a federal judge my father’s age. I never thought it was the children. They are the price I have to pay for looking for it. I don’t have to pay anymore. I had a tubal ligation. I don’t have to worry about getting pregnant anymore but still I worry.

I am getting closer to what I want. I can feel it in the hot August air, in the sunlight beating down upon the sidewalk and the two-car garage and the heads of the children. I can taste it in the gin I drink. Can hear it in the music on the phonograph. My daddy is a rich man. My husband worked for him. I have a new house, a new car. I’m at home. No one can hurt me now. My father will not let them. My brothers will not let them. I am safe now. I am almost where I want to be.

Outside, in the fenced-in yard, the five-and six-year-old are playing in the water. They have a plastic pool filled with water and a hose and a Slip-and-Slide. They are happy. They’ve been playing for a long time without having a fight. In a few minutes my mother will come and get them and take them off to spend the night. The maid left at four and Mother’s coming at five to pick them up. The only one I have to take care of is Teddy and he’s asleep. I walk around my kitchen cutting up vegetables and cooking things. It is safe to cook. I took a Dexedrine this morning. You couldn’t push food in my mouth.

I have a new record on the record player. Johnny Cash singing about his Indian blood. I’m into Indians today. I feel their pain, know their sorrow, ride the plains with the braves, wait for them to come to me at night. I’ve had the record for two days. I play it over and over. It has become me. I know the words by heart.

I put a tray of biscuits in the oven. I turn the water on to boil beneath a pan of new potatoes. I have been separated from my husband for a week. It’s wonderful. I am free, and I cannot have another baby no matter what I do. I can fall in love with anyone. I can have a lover, or two lovers, or maybe three. My brothers and my daddy will let me do anything I want to do.

I stop. A dark thought has entered me. I might not get into the Casual Club, the luncheon club my mother wants me to get into. I am waiting for an invitation. Well, surely they will want me. I am so pretty. My daddy is so rich.

A car drives up. It is my mother. We round up the boys and pack their bags and put them in her car. “I wish you’d come out too,” my mother says. “When the baby wakes up get dressed and come to dinner.” She stands at the door. She is wearing her suspicious look. She doesn’t like the way I look. She wants to know what I’m up to.

“I might. I don’t think I can. Avery might come over.” It’s a lie. Avery is the daughter of her best friend who is married to the mayor. Avery is the president of the Casual Club. Mother wants me to be friends with Avery.

“Oh, that’s nice. Well, call in a while. Call and let us know what you’re doing.” She is smiling, almost smiling. The boys are fighting in the backseat of the car. “Well, I’d better go on and take them. Call us, Rhoda. Call and let me know where you are.”

She drives off. Malcolm and Jimmy are fighting away. It is nineteen sixty-three. There are no seat belts. It has barely begun to dawn on us that we need them. Children fall against dashboards, cut their heads, we tell them not to stand up on the seats.

I think I am barefooted now. The baby is still asleep. As soon as mother leaves I go out onto the patio to clean up the mess the children made. I open the drain on the plastic pool. Water spills out on the patio. I walk around in it. I pull the ugly plastic Slip-and-Slide over behind the air-conditioning unit so I won’t have to look at it. I have a photograph of myself at this time, in this place. I am very very thin. My half-wet shirt sticks to my ribs and breasts; beneath my shorts my tanned legs are straight and shapely. I am so young. I am twenty-six years old. My hair is cut in a chin-length bob with a part on the side. I wear a barrette in my hair. If I am wearing blue, the barrette is blue. On this day, the day I met my one true love, the Indian man, the man who was my equal, who was good enough for me, on this day I think the barrette was blue. It must have been blue because my shorts were blue.

I walked back into the kitchen from the patio, making wet footprints on the waxed floor, singing along to the music. I started the record over. I strummed the air. It was my blue guitar.

Dudley’s black Pontiac pulled up into the driveway behind my new black station wagon. I saw him get out, laughing and talking to his passenger. His passenger got out and they came into the kitchen through the screen door. “Come listen to Johnny Cash,” I said. “God, it’s so good. I just adore it. What are you doing here?”

“We’re playing in a tournament at the club. This is Raine Matasick, Rhoda. My sister, Raine. He’s my partner.” I shook his hand. I took him in. Too ugly. Too foreign. Too dark-skinned. Not fat, but big, so big. Too big. He kept on smiling. He waited with his smile. He stood back while Dudley and I talked.

“What are you doing later?” Dudley asked. “There’s a party at the club. They’re going to raffle off the players. It’s a Calcutta. You want to go with us? Sally’s going.”

“You can buy us,” Raine suggested. “Dudley and me’ll come cheap.”

“Don’t let him fool you,” Dudley said. “He won the state tournament last year.”

“Oh, yeah.” I was getting interested. Not in Raine, but in the Calcutta, whatever that turned out to be. A party at the club. I could wear my new mauve linen dress. “God, my hair’s a mess. You want a drink?”

“Not now,” Dudley said. He put his hand on Raine’s arm. “You ought to go with us, Sister. Everyone in the state’s there. This is a big tournament.”

“I’ll have a glass of water,” Raine said. He followed me to the sink and stood beside me while I filled the glass. I had a sense of the immensity of the man. Not that he was that tall or big. He was six foot three or four. It wasn’t that. It was something else, a sense of mass or power. A smell that didn’t belong in the same world with the Casual Club. Too dark, too big, too foreign. I looked up at him while I filled the glass. His eyes were dark, like mine. Dark sweet eyes. I would take him for an admirer. I wanted plenty of admirers. “I wish you’d sit down and listen to this music,” I said. “I’m just crazy about it. I don’t listen to another thing.”

Teddy came walking into the room. He was wearing a wet diaper and carrying his bottle. He was still half asleep. He stopped in the middle of the room and looked around. Raine went over to him and knelt beside him and began to have a conversation. Teddy smiled. He pulled the bottle out of his mouth and hit Raine with it. They laughed together. Then Teddy came over and grabbed me around the legs. “I’ll have to get a baby-sitter,” I said. “I don’t know who I’ll find this late.”

“Call Sally,” Dudley said. “She’s got a list. Well, listen, Sister, we’ve got to go. We have to meet some people down at the Sun and Sand and then we’ve got to go change clothes.”

“My clubs are still in my car,” Raine said. “I need to put them in my trunk.”

I picked up Teddy and held him while they left. I was still so uninterested in this man I could pick up a child in a wet diaper and hold him against my half-wet blue-and-white-striped cotton shirt and stand in the carport barefoot and wave as they drove away. I pulled Teddy’s diapers off and left them in the carport and took him inside and put him in the tub. While he played in the water I called a babysitter. I walked back into the kitchen and turned the record over and played the other side.

It was exciting to think of going out alone. When I went out with my husband I had a horrible time. No matter how many martinis I drank it was always an awful time. Now I was separated. Now I could go out somewhere and have a good time. Even if it was only my brother and his wife and this big, dark man who was a champion golfer. Still, I had a funny feeling. I was very excited about this evening. As soon as I had a baby-sitter lined up I got Teddy out of the tub and dressed him and gave him some biscuits to eat and then I went into the bathroom and washed my hair and rolled it up. I took my new mauve dress out of the closet and laid it on the bed. I took out earrings and a gold bracelet. I gave Teddy some cold fried chicken and a bowl of cereal and some toys to play with on the kitchen floor. I started getting dressed. I put on my new perfume, Jungle Gardenia. I put on makeup. I dried my hair and combed it. As soon as the babysitter arrived and took Teddy off to the backyard, I put on the dress. I looked at myself in the mirror. I was beautiful. More beautiful than I had ever been in my life. They had tried to kill me with the babies. They had tried to ruin and kill me and make me ugly but it had not worked. I had outwitted them. I was separated now and I was going out to the Jackson Country Club and find out what I wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted but I believed it existed. It existed and when I saw it I would know it. I took an ice-cold glass out of the freezer and filled it with vodka. I stood in the kitchen looking out toward the carport. Soon they would come to get me. They would take me to the place where my life would begin.

After a long time he came. It was dark when he came so it must have been very late. I must have had another drink and played the Indian recording many times. The baby-sitter must have taken Teddy to his room to read to him and I must have gotten tired of waiting and finally a car drove up in the carport and I went out the screen door to yell at my brother for being late. Only it wasn’t my brother. It was Raine and he was alone.

Many years later, after it was over, after he had come into my life and changed it, wrecked it and emblazoned it, after I had married a rich Jewish lawyer and made him miserable, after ten years, after I had divorced the lawyer and gone off to live in the Ozark mountains to write my books. After the marriages and the divorces and the beginning of the books. After the week Raine drove me to Arkansas to begin my writing life. After I left the lawyer and took up with Raine again, after so many strange and eventful years. After all of that I heard the rest of the story of that day. I heard it from Dudley on his sixtieth birthday. At his birthday party, late in the evening, beside the lake, at the borrowed river mansion. “We were driving home from the first day of the tournament,” Dudley said. “We’d been hitting so well we thought we were going to win. It was the state team tournament. You never did pay much attention to sports unless you were playing, did you, Shortie?”

“No. Go on. So what happened then?”

“We were going by your neighborhood and I said, ‘Raine, what would you rather do? Go down to the Sun and Sand and find some working girls or meet my sister?’

“‘You and Ingersol have a sister?’

“‘She just moved back here. Her crazy little husband was working for us for a while. Then she ran him off. You might like her.’

“‘You and Ingersol have a sister. I don’t think I can take it.’ Then we started laughing and I slowed the car down.

“‘She lives over by the Colonial Country Club. Which will it be?’

“‘If you have a sister I want to meet her.’ Raine sat back in the seat and I turned off the four-lane into your neighborhood and brought him to you.” Dudley was holding a glass of wine. We were sitting on a double bench on a bluff above the river. He looked at me out of his one good eye and his face got the soft, puffy look it wore when he desired me. When he used to come to the door of my room when he was fifteen and say things to me and offer to give me things and take me places. Get out of here, Dudley, I always answered. Later, when we were older, one night he offered me fifty thousand dollars to sleep with him and I still turned him down. The pleasure of denying him something that he wanted was worth an empire of gold. “Are you glad I did?” he ended.

“It’s a good thing I was listening to Johnny Cash that week. I was in my Indian mood. I wanted to meet an Indian. Yeah, I’m glad you did. He was the love of my life. The only man I ever loved that I thought, really believed, was good enough for me.” I stared into Dudley’s good eye. I guess he is my brother. I know he is my brother. There but for the grace of God and one X chromosome and the fact that he was born first, go I.

“I love you, Dudley,” I said. “I’m glad you are my brother.”

So Raine got out of his Lincoln Continental and came into my kitchen apologizing for being late and not blaming it on Dudley although, since I always blamed everything on Dudley, I’m sure I did. Then I told the baby-sitter good-bye and gave her the phone number of the Jackson Country Club and we went out and got into the car. I think it had already started. Before I noticed how other men treated him. Before Dudley or one of them or maybe Raine himself told me he had been the best football player in the South. Since I knew nothing about football except the clothes I wore to games and the parties afterward and cared less. Since I never could remember what position he had played. Since only when I saw his name on the back of the program at an Ole Miss game, with his records still intact after seven years, or when men would talk about him and games he’d played and runs he’d made and touchdowns he had scored and passes he had caught, did I begin to envision him playing football. What I envisioned suited the image of the body that lay by mine, that will always be the yardstick against which I measure other men, and because of which I understand when I see love or read about it and say to myself, I had that, I was not stinted, my own true love, my one and only own true love.

And I was his. But that was later. On this night, when I entered the ballroom of the Jackson Country Club on his arm I may have thought that the obeisance was for me. I was so stuck on myself, on my daddy’s money and my newfound freedom and my thin tan body in my new mauve dress, I may actually have thought that feeling of waters parting was about me. All evening I kept going away from him and flirting with other men and then going to find him again. He was so solid, it was like going to Hercules or Odysseus, so solid, so still. Going into his presence was not like anything I had ever known. Except, perhaps, my father, when I was young.

I don’t think we stayed long at the party. We stayed for the Calcutta and there was a large blackboard and everyone was very drunk and bought the players for ridiculous sums. Dudley bought himself and Raine. Either Dudley did or a rich girl from the Delta did. After that Raine and I went out a side door and got into his car and went to a motel. It was pretty simple really. We got into his car and he took me in his arms and began to kiss me. Devour me. Gently, gently, tenderly, almost in tears. I will fall in love with you, he said. He had not had a thing to drink. He never drank. Since he was eighteen years old and got drunk one night and tried to kill a man he had never had a drink. I was drunk but I was also sober. The enormity of what was happening sobered me. I can remember every moment of that night. I can remember him rising above me on the bed and telling me he would never fuck me again when I was drunk. I can remember him taking me home. Late, very late. The baby-sitter had called my mother and her mother and the country club. I remember him saying that he loved me. I remember the way he smelled. The next day my skin smelt of him. My left and my right arm. I did not take a bath until late in the afternoon. Until after he called and said he had to see me.

 

“We lost the tournament,” Dudley was saying. Sitting on the bench by the river looking at me with his one good eye. “I guess that was your fault, Shortie.”

“You were pimping for him. You set me up.”

“You said you weren’t sorry.”

“I’m not,” I answered. “I just want to get the story straight.”

I didn’t see him the next day. It was the second day, while the maid was at my house, he came and got me in the Lincoln and we drove somewhere, I don’t know where, perhaps along the new four-lane highway that my father had built. “I’ve never felt this way about a woman,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.” He stopped the car and kissed me. Then he drove to a park and we talked like generals planning a war. Staccato, fast, intense, the terrible intensity of desire. “I’m still married. I don’t have a divorce.”

“So am I. My wife’s crazy.”

“Where do you live?”

“In an apartment.”

“We can’t do it openly. He might take my children.”

“She’ll take mine.”

“Where will we go?”

“Now?”

“No, all the time.”

“We’ll get an apartment.”

“Okay, let’s go get one.”

Perhaps we didn’t say all that that day. Perhaps all we did that day was go downtown to a hotel and make love until the sun went down. I called the maid and offered to pay her three times the amount she made. I bribed and begged her. I was two hours late. We gave her all the money that we had. We gave her too much money and she looked him up and down and shook her head. Even the maid understood. The children were there when we got home. He didn’t bribe them. He sat down in a chair and let them come to him.

They didn’t care. They were lonesome for their father but they were too young to know that Raine was part of that. They liked him. He went out into the backyard and threw balls to them. We got a baby-sitter. We went out to dinner and went back to the hotel and made love some more. My mother called me about fifty times. The maid and the baby-sitter wrote the messages down. It was nineteen sixty-three. There weren’t any answering machines.

While we were at the hotel my mother and father came and got the children and took them to the country. They paid the baby-sitter. They called Dudley and asked him what was going on.

In the hotel room I lay upon his body and told him the story of my life. He told me how he had acquired the different scars. The worst scars were on his legs. He didn’t get them on the football field. He got them in an automobile accident when a drunk man was driving. He had not thought it could happen to him. After it was over he couldn’t play football anymore. He had to learn to sell insurance and municipal bonds. He learned how to play golf. He put his trophies away. He wasn’t a has-been. He was a great athlete who had had a bad break. It didn’t matter. In a year he was the golf champion of the state of Mississippi. People bowed their heads when he came into a room. He was the quietest, gentlest man I have ever known. He had the softest skin. He had the strangest, most unforgettable smell. He was half Italian and half Cherokee Indian. The love of my life. The one and only love.

Even long ago, when it was nearer, I could never remember making love to him. We would enter a room and our bodies would meld. It was absolutely simple. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. I smelled like Jungle Gardenia or Estee Lauder or L’Heure Bleue. He smelled of shaving cream and the wild terrible smell of his body, of physical power and cunning and coordination that was unlike anything I had ever known. Except for my father. My father was that strong, his shoulders were that powerful, that wide, that still. Maybe this man was my father to the tenth power. I lay upon his body and talked to him. Later, I would lie upon his body and cry and he would pat me like a child. He was never in a hurry. He never made a mistake or wasted a motion or dropped anything. He never stopped saying he loved me and I never stopped believing it. Wherever he is, until my death or his death, that time is always there, indelible upon my brain and his brain. My own true love. The man with the Indian blood and the dark skin and the gentle eyes. The uncircumcised man. Because of him I know what books and stories mean when men and women love each other without stint or question, in defiance of order, in defiance of self-interest or knowledge or pain. Sex was only part of it. Sex was where it took place, as on a stage. But sex was not what it was about. It was because I thought he was good enough for me. Because he believed I would one day be his equal.

I can hear his voice. So deep and rich and slowed down to a Southern cadence. Full of humor and pathos. A black man’s voice, a foreign voice. It was not the voice of men who married the ladies of the Casual Club or escorted their daughters to the debutante balls. Although his family would come to that, because of him, because he was a hero and they were the sons and daughters of a hero and could get soft and still be safe.

Then it was fall and we had found an apartment and I lived in it with a roommate and he only came there. He didn’t live there because his wife was pregnant. When I found out about it I went crazy. I beat upon his shoulders. I got drunk and yelled at him and woke the neighbors. I called him in the middle of the night and he would get into his car and come to where I was and say he loved me and cry. Lots of times he cried. He cried because he loved me. He suffered because of me. I loved to make him suffer. He brought his children to see me and I was nice to them. They sat in my apartment being very polite and drank the Cokes I gave them and told me about their schools. I thought they were ugly children. He must have known I thought that. After that evening I never had to see them again. Instead he came and got me and took me to the airport and we flew off to North Carolina in his plane. We rented a car. We drove around North Carolina and I waited outside offices while he sold municipal bonds to men.

 

We took long trips together while he sold these bonds. He had several offices around Jackson. And several business partners. They were massive quiet men who had played football with him. Some were men who had thrown passes to him. Others were men who had made holes for him to run through. I didn’t know how to talk to them. They were too far away from what I knew. But Raine was not. He could be anything he wanted to be. He made people like him. He was likable and kind, quiet and dependable. Until me he had not been crazy.

I wondered if he only liked my daddy’s money. But he knew it was not mine. Later, after I left him and began to find other men, he took one of the men out to lunch one day and told him the money was not mine, would not ever be mine because women didn’t get to have the money in my family.

It was me he loved. Because he thought I would someday be his equal, was already his equal because of something in me that did not give up, never stopped looking, never stopped wanting, never gave in or compromised. Later, when I had my books and my name in the papers, he would call and tell me he was proud of me, would show up at my autograph parties and stand against a wall and look at me.

II

I had found something worth wanting, worth suffering for. With this blood in me that came from my daddy and liked to fight, I had found something worth fighting for. But who was I to fight, his broken-hearted wife and her children and her unborn baby?

At Christmas of that year he had to go to Chicago to a reunion of his old football team. He had been Rookie of the Year. Had scored the most points of anyone in the backfield. Then he had the accident and it was over. But these men did not forget. Life did cruel things to men and men could bear it. Could go on loving each other in this strange fraternity of professional sports, where they did for a living what lesser men dreamed of doing, outran, outlasted, outwilled each other on a playing field. Anyone could have bad luck. They loved Raine for taking the bad luck away from them. They asked him about his knees.

We had gone out to dinner with these men when they passed through Jackson, Mississippi, or when they lived in one of the towns we flew to in the airplane or drove to in the Lincoln. So now, to make me feel better about Christmas, we were going up there together to join their annual celebration.

This was the first time I knew how much he lied to me. He had lied to me all along but I had not really understood it. I was vain and I had not been lied to before. The men who marry girls whose mothers go to the Casual Club don’t lie to people until they are middle-aged. They have a code. They marry you and tell you the truth until the time when they really fall in love. Then they lie to spare your feelings. They take upon themselves the burden of the lie to spare you pain.

The world that belonged to this Indian-Italian man was not that world. In his world you took what you needed no matter what the cost. If the woman yelled at you and threw things across the room, you put your arms up before your face and took the blows. Then you begged and said you loved her, you cried if necessary, you bought her sofas and cars and rings with large stones your friends got for you on the black market.

So I bought a beautiful new evening suit I saw in Vogue magazine and packed it in a suitcase and counted off the days until I flew with him to Chicago.

Where were my children while this was going on? I had forgotten them. My brother Dudley told my father I was going to bring Raine in and marry him. Take care of the kids, he might have said. Let Rhoda capture him.

Even my father was not immune to Raine’s glory, his picture in the Hall of Fame, his name on the back of programs, his gentle manner when he came into my parents’ home. Yes, my mother had seen him now. My mother knew I went to rooms and took off my clothes and lay down with this huge Indian-Italian man. She wore an expression that said this was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Still, she paid thousands of dollars every year for fifty-yard-line seats in the stadium where he had been the hero. She read the programs too. She was not immune. Then too, he courted her. Looked up at her with his dark sweet eyes and told her that he loved me, that I was the love of his life, that he would never harm me in any way.

I enrolled in a college in the town. A small, private college in the old part of town. I went to classes when Raine wasn’t around. It was the excuse for the apartment. It was what my mother told her friends at the Casual Club.

I remember packing a suitcase to go to Chicago. I remember putting my beautiful black pantsuit with lapels of black satin and the little white satin blouse into the suitcase and closing the top. I remember the drive to Nashville where we caught the plane to Chicago. I remember the drive home on the eve of Christmas Eve and how we saw the dark shape on the horizon, just at dusk, halfway between Nashville and home. I thought it was a flying saucer. I told everyone I had seen a flying saucer and Raine always said he saw it too. But I would remember anything rather than remember what happened in Chicago.

We went to the Palmer House Hotel where he had been staying on the night he had the accident that ended his career. He stayed there out of some perverse desire not to shield himself from unpleasant things. I had never stayed at a hotel that fine with a man who could pay for it with his own money. But I did not notice the hotel. All I knew was that on that night after we arrived I would put on my new dress and go to the banquet with Raine. As though I were his wife, in place of his wife, he would take me to the place that meant the most to him.

We arrived late one evening. It was bitterly cold outside. I have never been that cold in my life. The wind came around the corners of the buildings and made you run back inside. We left the hotel and he shielded me with his body and we went to a bar where pictures of him were on the walls. His friends were there and we sat at a small table and had dinner with two men who had been referees at the games. They told me stories of his glory. They walked around the bar with me. They showed me pictures of him. Young and sweet and dark, in his football uniform, holding the ball cradled in his arm. I held his hand beneath the table and thought how big it was, how perfectly designed for this football that had given him his power in the world.

He brought me here to see these pictures, I decided. But I came to go with him to the banquet as his wife. First this banquet, then he will get a divorce. As soon as this unnecessary baby that she had only to keep him gets here. As soon as that is over I will take him away from his ugly children and his ugly wife and give him to my sons for their father. To my father for a son, to my brothers for a friend, this man I love, this man who is strong enough for me, who can dodge the things I throw at him, who can bear the pain I cause him because I am his one and only love, the one he cannot bear to be without.

The next day there was a football game in the stadium where he had played. We sat on the sidelines on folding chairs. Other men and their wives were there. It was so cold they had to bring me a cape like the ones the players wore on the bench. They draped it over me. A boy brought paper bags and put them on my feet. I was a geisha at a football game, being cared for by men who could withstand the cold.

A thin black man kept running down the side of the field and making touchdowns. Raine was like that, the other men said to me. Until the black man no one has done the thing he did for us. I held his arm. I watched his face as they said these things to me. I had never seen him happy. Until this day, sitting on those folding chairs in the cold I had never known him to be happy. With me he was in such sadness, such pain. He knew he could not keep me and it made him sad. My beauty vanished when we were together. There was no beauty in me now. Only this terrible Dexedrine thinness and this will to keep and overcome him.

 

Think how desirable it was to him. This young girl from the Casual Club who had been turned into a tiger. Later, back in our room, we fucked each other without mercy. We beat upon each other’s body, taking all the pleasure that we could, giving nothing away, taking, taking, taking.

At five o’clock he dressed for the banquet. He went downstairs to meet someone. He said he would come back for me at six. I dressed in my new dress. I ordered a martini from room service. Then I did not drink it. Six o’clock came. He was not there. Seven o’clock came. He did not come. The banquet started at seven. Something terrible must have happened. I called the banquet but they said he was not there. I drank the martini and ordered another one. Eight o’clock and nine o’clock came and went and still he was not there. I called the banquet over and over again. Finally a waiter told me Mr. Matasick had been there but he wasn’t there anymore. The banquet was over. They had all gone home. I sat on the bed in my dress. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

At ten-thirty he returned to the room and let me yell at him. I screamed at him. I beat upon him and tore him with my fingernails. He begged me not to hate him. He said he loved me until death. He said he brought me here because he loved me. I cried myself to sleep on gin.

Driving home was when we saw the flying saucer. Coming home on the eve of Christmas Eve. The Christmas before the New Year’s Eve when I took the Antabuse and drank on it and almost died, begged to die, wanted to die to punish him.

Money was part of it. That Lincoln Continental with its seats of whitest leather. My father’s money, whether I would have it or not. He had never had a poor woman in his life. They were all wealthy women, the ones before me and the ones who followed. The ones who didn’t count. He said they didn’t count and I believed him.

There is only one love like that, one white hot moment when a man and a woman ask everything of each other, ask sacrifice and pain and dishonesty. Mostly pain. Alone with him in rooms, in my apartment in the afternoons when my roommate wasn’t there, beside him or on top of him with his dick buried deep within me. My body pulling on him to empty him and make him suffer.

James Rainey Matasick, the name is enough to make men feel inferior. Now, in my old age, sometimes I drop it in the lap of a man if he tries to flirt with me. If he’s the right age, if he looks like an old high school athlete, if he dreamed of glory, I let him make his move and then I ask him if he saw Raine play. He was my lover, I say. My one and only love.

It would be nine years before I needed him again. Before I called and told him to come save me. Only this time I would be richer, surer, older. I don’t know why I called him then, only I had some Dexedrine for the first time in several years and I wanted him to take me to a place he knew about, a place that once he had taken me to. I wanted to go to Arkansas. The only time I had ever set foot in Arkansas was when Raine took me to Little Rock to visit his sister who was dying in a veterans’ hospital. He had cried in my arms after he saw her and on the way home we ran out of gasoline outside of Dumas and had to walk a mile to catch a ride to a service station.

Anyway, I called and told him I had to go to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to go to school to learn how to be a writer and he met me in Vicksburg and drove me there. I made him wait outside the English Department while I went in to meet my professors. As I said, I always forgot who he was. I never thought of him as anything on earth but my lover. “Raine Matasick is outside in the car?” my professor said. “My God in heaven, tell him to come in.”

III

His integrity was darkened by the lies he told to make me love him. One day at noon, at lunch somewhere, one of those expensive restaurants that come and go in Jackson like the tides, over Bloody Marys and lobster salad, in a booth, I think, not a table, although it may have been a table … what he said removed us from the rest of the room in such a way that it seems it must have been a booth, Dudley cheats at golf, he said. He moves the ball. He improves the lie. He couldn’t look at me when he said it. It was something he had to say, something he had to unveil to me, for some reason, perhaps to ward off Dudley’s telling me about his wife, that he wasn’t separated from her, that she was pregnant, that when he left me, he went back to her house. Perhaps Dudley had threatened him, had said he would tell me. Perhaps my father told Dudley to put a stop to it. I can’t play with him anymore, Raine said. People bet money on those games. If men stop trusting you, you’re dead. I bowed my head. I was ashamed. I could believe anything of Dudley, the killer, the older brother, the one who always had the best of everything, the one my father loved the best, the one who had the power and the money. And one eye. A natural athlete who lost an eye. Yes, to make up for the handicap he might cheat. Because he has to win. He can’t live if he can’t win, can’t be second in anything. Had been kicked out of college for letting his fraternity brothers copy off of him. Had lived his life to earn my father’s love, which he could have had without lifting his finger. Because he looks like my father’s father. So much like him the resemblance is uncanny. If you hold their photographs up against each other it is the same soft pretty spoiled face.

If it were true? If my brother cheated other men, what did that make me? It was a long time ago, nineteen sixty-three, I did not know you could leave, bail out, refuse to be part of such a family, a family that drank and cheated, whored around. Drank and lied and cheated, biblical sins. If I had known it, I could not have acted upon it. I had hostages, three sons, no money, no education. Three times I had escaped death by bearing them and still I was alive. I was twenty-six years old, then twenty-seven. I thought there was not much time left before it would be too late, before I would die from the deep dissatisfaction of my life. I had meant to be a writer, every moment of my life, since I was four or five or six years old, had counted myself a writer, had always written everything for everyone. Had always done it well, been praised for it, received the highest grades in English class. But that was all consumed now, consumed in the men and the babies and this terrible wealth my father had acquired and let us waste in any way we chose. As long as we stayed out of his way so he could go on making money and as long as we acted like we were happy. As long as we acted like we would never be poor, never be frightened and poor as he had been for many years. That shadow on his life, that terrible fear of being poor.

I stayed because I had to stay and because my mother and father were still pure, did not lie or cheat or steal or drink. They were still the puritans they had had to be to make the money, to save, then multiply it into millions of dollars, enough to last us all forever, we thought. But my father did not think so, drove his old car, wore his old suits, stayed home at night, stayed sober.

I stayed to take advantage of their purity. Later, when I was pure again, had purged myself of evil, had stopped drinking, lying, cheating, then I could leave, could refuse to let anyone suck the hard-won goodness from me. But this was much, much later, after years of work, of writing and psychotherapy, after twenty years I was good again. I think I will remain that way. I do not think anything could pull me down again into that mire of pain.

You’ll be alone, people warned me. Won’t you be lonely?

I’ve never been lonely in my life, I answered. But I’ve been afraid.

I have tried to find a way to articulate what it was between Raine and me, the thing that passes between a man and a woman that is not words, that carves below the words and ignites them. Fire, the black people call it.

I pity lovers, caught in that consumption. From the word consume. When nature takes us back, which we call love. I had been practicing for Raine. Four unwanted pregnancies. He had four children and this new one on the way. This inconvenient child. This child who was my enemy because I was consumed in this unholy fire.

 

When we ran out of gasoline on the road between Dumas, Arkansas, and McGee I was listening to a tape of Willie Nelson singing “Stardust.” Coming back from seeing Raine’s dying sister. I had been talking for fifty miles about where we would spend the night. He did not answer me. He knew he was going to spend the night with his wife and children and he knew better than to tell me so. I would have stolen the car keys, torn him with my fingernails, jumped out of the car, done anything. It was of no importance to me if he had a family. He was my lover. No other Raine existed for me. Because I was in this consummation, was consumed by fire.

Why else down all these centuries have women lain down with men and died in childbirth? Lain down smiling, taken pleasure in it. It has nothing to do with freedom, tenderness, pity, love. Tenderness, pity, love, these are words we invented to forgive ourselves.

That cold December afternoon when we saw the flying saucer. Driving along the picked cotton fields, long flat fields to the east of Jackson, at dusk, just after the sun went down. The man beside me is Raine, the one who loved me so much he lied to keep me. It is the eve of Christmas Eve and in a while he will drop me off and leave me alone at Christmas. I had to escape that knowledge so much I saw an apparition, made him see it by the force of my will, gave him an apparition so we could both escape the pain inside that car. He always said he saw it. He told everyone he did. It flew along beside us, on the horizon, inside a long blue cloud.

Finally, we stopped the car and got out and stood along the highway watching it. Many years later, I saw a film about flying saucers and the people in the movie did exactly as we did. Got out of their cars and stood along the side of a road, in little groups of two and three, watching the apparition in the sky.

Perhaps we were holding hands, the tacky topaz ring he had given me upon my finger, a ring so big it would have cut into his hand if he had squeezed it. Later I gave it to a maid or lost it or threw it away. It disappeared within a year. We stood there watching the apparition, wrapped up in the lies he told me, the thing he had done to me in Chicago when he left me alone in the room and went to the banquet without me.

Soon after that I left him. Closed up the apartment, gave the furniture away, took a series of lovers, then married the wealthy Jewish lawyer, who should have known better, and moved away.

I was burned out for a while. When I recovered it was work that saved me. The work I had abandoned when the fire that made my sons consumed me.

What will you write? my mother asked me, terrified. The truth, I answered. Stories, poems, plays.