She sat, muddy feet touching, knees apart, arms straight out across them, looking up at the ceiling through her eyebrows.
“This was for pigeons?”
“Upstairs. There are still a few. Listen.” Down the iron staircase came the chuckle-coo but it began to rain hard again and we couldn’t hear anything.
I opened the briefcase between us and took out the fifth of Wild Turkey 86 proof, as mild as spring sunshine. Margot clapped her hands again and laughed out loud, the first time I ever heard the shouting, hooting laugh she laughed when she was really tickled. “What in the world—!” she addressed the unseen pigeons above us. “Did you plan this?”
“No, I can’t leave it in the office, the help gets into it.”
“Oh, for heaven’s—! My God, what luck. What great good luck. Oh, Scott—” Or something to that effect, I don’t quite remember. What I do remember was that in her two or three exclamations my ear caught overtones that overlay her original out-from-Odessa holler (gollee?): a bit of her voice teacher here, a bit of New Orleans there (they were saying Oh Scott that year), a bit of Winston Churchill (great good luck), a bit of Edward VII (at long last). Or was it Ronnie Colman? I had not yet heard her cut loose and swear like an oilfield roughneck.
I took off coat and tie. I smelled of a day’s work in an unair-conditioned law office (Christ, I still hate air conditioning. I’d rather sweat and stink and drink ice water. That’s one reason I like it here in jail). She smelled of wet crinoline and something else, a musky nose-tickling smell.
I must have asked her what her perfume was because I remember her saying orris root and laughing again: Miss What’s-Her-Name, grande dame and ramrod of the Azalea Festival, wanted everything authentic.
“I think I’ll have a drink.”
“From the bottle?”
“Yes. If you like I’ll get you some ice water.”
When I finished, she upped the bottle, looking around all the while. She swallowed, bright-eyed. “Do you do this every day?”
“I usually take a bath first, then sit on the gallery and Elgin brings me some ice water.”
“Well, this is nice too.”
We drank again in silence. It was raining hard and we couldn’t hear the pigeons. The tour buses were turning around, cutting up the lawn, sliding in the mud, their transmissions whining.
“Do you have to go back with them?”
“I’d as soon stay. Do you live here alone?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not married?”
“No. I was. My wife’s dead. I have a son and daughter, but they’re off at school.”
“I thought Mr. and Mrs. Lamar were husband and wife.”
“No, son and mother. But my mother died last year.”
“And you’re here alone?”
“Yes.”
“All by yourself?”
“Except for my son and daughter, but they’re seldom here.”
“I’d be here all the time!” she cried, looking around.
“I am.”
“I see,” she said not listening, but looking, not missing a trick. She did see, she never stopped seeing. “What a lovely studio apartment this would make. And the little iron spiral staircase. Priceless! Do you know what this would rent for in New Orleans?”
“No.”
“Two fifty at least.”
“I could use it.”
“You mean you don’t do all this”—she nodded toward the buses, now moving out in a slow caravan—“just to show your beautiful house?”
“I do it to make money. I don’t like to show my beautiful house.”
“Mmmm.” What I didn’t know at the time was how directly her mind worked. What she was thinking was: I have ten million dollars and you don’t; you have a great house and I don’t; you have a name and I don’t; but you don’t have me. You are a solitary sort and don’t think much about women but now you do. “Feel how cold I am.”
“All right.”
She took my hand and put it on her bare shoulder. Her flesh was firm and cool but there was a warmth under the cool.
“You’ve got a big hand. Look how small it makes mine look.” She measured our hands, palm to palm.
“It’s not all that small.”
“No, it’s not. Hoo hoo! Haw haw!” she guffawed. “You could put a bathroom there.” She pointed both our hands toward a closet of flower pots. “A kitchenette there. Bedroom up there. Think of it! I saw Beauvoir last week. Jeff Davis had a place like this. Let me fix it up for you.”
“All right.”
“What a cunning little place!” Cunning. Where did she get that? Not Odessa. I hadn’t heard it for years. That’s what my mother’s generation said, meaning cute, adorable, charming. Margot herself, not really a good actress, nevertheless had a good ear. She could have listened to my mother for five minutes, ear cocked, and made cunning her own. “I’d put a planter there, use an old stained-glass door, hang my Utrillos there.”
“Real Utrillos?’
She nodded absently. “Those walls!” She was taking in the famous octagon angles.
We were drinking all the while. She drank from the fifth as easily as if it were a Coke, using her tongue to measure and stop the flow. It had stopped raining. The sun broke out over the levee and the room glowed with a warm rosy light from the slave bricks. Outside, little frogs began to peep in the ditches.
“Couldn’t we get more comfortable? I’m totaled.” She simply lay down on the glider mattress, propping her head on one hand. “No pillow?”
The nearest thing to a pillow I could find was a foam-rubber cylinder, a boat fender. We took another drink. She patted the mattress. Such was the dimension of mattress and pillow that the only way we could use them was to lie close facing each other.
The sun came out before it set. We lay together in the rosy dusk, heads propped on the boat fender, which seemed to have a thrust of its own. There was nowhere to put my arm but across her waist. Below it, her pantalooned hip rose like a wave.
“You’re very sexy in seersuckers,” she said, absent-mindedly drumming her fingers on my hip. She was a little drunk but also a little preoccupied. It was strange, but lying with her I became conscious of myself, my own body stirring against the hot crinkled fabric.
I kissed her. Or rather our mouths came together because they had no other place to go. As we kissed, the sunny bourbon on our lips, her wide mouth opened and bade me enter, welcoming me like a new home. It was her head which came around, up and over onto mine. My hot sweated seersucker commingled with her orris root and rained-on flesh and damp crinoline. Outside in the ditches the rain frogs had found their voices and were peeping in chorus. Her fine leg, pantalooned and harlequined — not quite genuine belle was she but more Texan come to Mardi Gras — rose, levitated, and crossed over my body. There it lay sweet and heavy.
We laughed with the joy of the place and being there, and drank and kissed and I felt the deep runnel of her back above her pantaloons.
“Does the door lock?” she asked.
“It’s not necessary, but if it will make you feel better.” I got up and locked the door, turning an eight-inch iron key and driving a dead bolt home with a clack.
“My God, it sounds like the dungeon at Chillon. Let me see that key.”
I lay down and gave her the iron key. She held it in one hand and me in the other and was equally fond of both. She liked antiques and making love. As she examined it, she imprisoned me with her sweet heavy thigh as if she had to keep me still while she calculated the value of the iron key. I had to laugh out loud. I was just getting onto her drollness and directness. She might just as well have said: I’ve got something sweet for you, old boy, the sweetest something you’ll ever have but hold it a minute while I look at this old key. She had a passion for old “authentic” things. Texas must have everything but old things.