The day was a fiasco. It drizzled, blew, hailed, and finally stormed. But the ladies came anyhow, at least five thousand, leaking water and grinding buckshot mud into our fragile faded Aubussons. The belles stationed on the gallery, a charming bevy, to welcome the visitors, got wet, hair fell, colors ran.
I came home from work, taking the service drive, parked and headed for the back stairs and the roped-off upstairs living quarters with no other thought in mind but to get past the tourists and the belles and the mud and watch the 5:30 news. News! Christ, what is so important about the news? Ah, I remember. We were wondering who was going to get assassinated next. Sure enough, the next one did get killed. There it was, the sweet horrid dread we had been waiting for. It was the late sixties and by then you had got used to a certain rhythm of violence so that one came home with the dread and secret expectation that the pace had quickened, so that when the final act was done, the killing, the news flash: the death watch, the funeral, the killing during the funeral, one watched as one watches a lewd act come to climax, dry-mouthed, lips parted, eyes unblinking and slightly bulging — and even had the sense in oneself of lewdness placated.
In those days I lived for the news bulletin, the interrupted program, the unrehearsed and stumbling voice of the reporter.
As I rounded the corner of the gallery, briefcase swinging out in the turn (what was in the briefcase? A fifth of Wild Turkey and a hard-cover copy of The Big Sleep), one belle caught my eye. Or rather her eye caught my eye and I couldn’t look away. She was as sopping wet and her colors as run together as the rest but she was not woebegone. She was backed against the plastered brick, hands behind her open to the bricks, backs of hands against her sacrum, bouncing off the wall by ducking her head and pushing with her hands. Under the muddy fringe of her hoop skirt, I could see her feet were bare. Her short hair was in wet ringlets like spitcurls on her forehead, but still springy and stiff at her temples.
“You must be the master.”
“What’s that? Eh?”—I must have said, or something as stupid. All I remember is standing holding my briefcase, too dumb to come out of the rain.
“Aren’t you the master of Belle Isle?”
“Yes.”
“You must be Lancelot Lamar.”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t look like I expected”—bouncing and ducking like a thirteen-year-old yet really she was post-debutante, post-belle, twenty-three or — four.
“What did you expect?”
“A rumpled Sid Blackmer or maybe a whining Hank Jones.” They turned out to be actors and it turned out she knew them or said she did. I never heard of them and nowadays don’t know one actor from another.
“Who are they?”
“You look more like an ugly Sterling Hayden, a mean Southern black-haired Sterling Hayden in seersuckers.”
“Who is he?”
“Sterling Hayden gone to seed and running a sailor’s bar in Macao.”
“He sounds charming.” It wasn’t raining hard but I stepped onto the gallery to get out of it. “And you are charming. But I am hot and tired and need a drink. I think I’ll go through the house.”
“I’m wet and cold and need a drink too.”
I looked at her. She wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t Scarlett (the other belles were trying to be Scarlett, hoyden smile and so forth, were also unpretty, were, in fact, dogs, what is more, wet dogs …). Her face was shiny and foreshortened — was it the way she tilted her head back to push herself off the wall? — her mouth too wide. Dry, her coarse stiff hair invited the hand to squeeze it to test its spring (how I loved later to take hold of that hair in both hands, grab it by the roots in both fists, and rattle her skull with a surprising joking violence). Raindrops sprang away from it. Her hands were big. As she spoke her name we shook hands for some reason; her hand, coming from behind her, was plaster-pitted and big and warm. The second time we met, at the Azalea Festival reception in New Orleans (I had to go in to get my check for their use of Belle Isle), we shook hands again, and as her hand clasped mine, her forefinger tickled my palm. I was startled. “Does that mean the same thing in Texas that it does in Louisiana?” I asked her. She looked puzzled. As it turned out, it didn’t. Her neck was slender, round, and vulnerable but her back was strong and runneled. I’m getting ahead of myself. But what she was or had and what I caught a glimpse of and made me swallow was a curious droll direct voluptuousness, the boyishness being just a joke after all when it came to her looking straight at me. I noticed that her freckles turned plum-colored in the damp and bruised skin under the eye. At the time I didn’t know what her darkening freckles meant. Yet I sensed that her freckles were part of the joke and the voluptuousness.
How strange love is! I think I loved you for equally curious reasons: that for all your saturninity, drinking, and horniness, there was something gracile and frail and feminine about you. Sometimes I wanted to grab you and hug those skinny bones — does that shock you? I did hold your arm a lot at first just to feel how thin you were. Later we never touched each other. Perhaps we were too close.
She hugged her bare shoulders and shivered. “I said I could use a drink too.”
I thought a moment.
“My God, what a frown. What lip biting! You look like you’re about to address a jury. I like the way you bite your lip when you think.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Come on.” I think I actually took her by the hand. I wanted to hold that warm, pitted hand again! At any rate, it came to pass that for the second or third time in my life, I left life’s familiar path — I being a creature of habit even then, doing the same thing day in and day out — took her by one hand, picked up the briefcase with the other, and went back down the service drive and across to the pigeonnier, the farthest place from the tourists, servants, and family, nobody but Ellis using it to store garden tools, and invited her in. Of course it wasn’t fixed up then and was dusty and cluttered but dry and pleasant.
“Warm! Dry!” She clapped her hands as I cleared a place among the tools and found an old glider mattress to sit on. “Get me out of this damn thing.” I swear I think she almost said git but not really: she was halfway between git and get, just as she was halfway between Odessa, Texas, and New Orleans.
Damned if the hoop skirt didn’t work like chaps! It hooked on behind and came right off and meanwhile she was undoing her jacketlike top and so she stepped forth in pantaloons and bodice — I guess it was a bodice — all run with violet and green dye like a harlequin. I remember wondering at the time: Was it that she looked so good in pantaloons or would any woman look that much better in pantaloons? And also wondering: What got into our ancestors later that, with such a lovely curve and depth of thigh and ass, they felt obliged not to conceal but burlesque both, hang bustle behind and hoops outside? Was it some unfathomable women’s folly or a bad joke played on them by men?