She was right, she had something sweet and she knew as only a woman can know, with absolute certitude, that she had me, that through some odd coming together of time and place and circumstance and her equally odd mixture of calculation, drollness, and her cool-fleshed hot like of me — oh yes, she wanted me as well as my house — she infallibly knew where the vector of desire converged, the warm cottoned-off place between her legs, the sheer negativity and want and lack where the well-fitted cotton dipped and went away. I kissed the cotton there.
We drank and laughed at the joy of the time and the discovery: that we each had what the other wanted, not exactly “love” as the word is used, but her new ten million and my old house, her sweet West Texas self and my just as sweet Louisiana Anglo-Saxon aristocracy gone to pot, well-born English lord Sterling Hayden gone to seed in Macao. It was like a rare royal betrothal, where the betrothed like each other as well. Like? Love. Laugh and shout with joy at the happiness between them.
Her calculation and cool casting ahead delighted me. As her thigh lay across me, it seemed to be sentient of itself, assigned as it was the task of fathoming the life beneath it, and even as we kissed her eyes were agleam and not quite closed as she took in the pigeonnier. big enough for a thousand pigeons or one man. An “architectural gem” she called it.
But what is love? I thought even then. For by your dear sweet Jesus I did love her there for her droll mercinariness and between her sweet legs and in her mouth and her splendid deep strong runneled back sinking dizzily into a narrow solid waist before it flared into the loveliest ass in all West Texas, but loved as well her droll direct Texas way and even her quickness in overlaying it with Dallas acting-school lingo. New Orleans uptown talk, and God knew what else.
At heart she was a collector, preserver, restorer, transformer; even me and herself she transformed: to take an old neglected abused thing, save it, restore it, put it to new and charming use. She loved to drink, laugh, and make love, but almost as well, better maybe, and orgasmically too, she liked cleaning away a hundred years of pigeon shit and finding lovely oiled-with-guano cypress underneath, turning a dovecote into a study, me into Jefferson Davis writing his memoirs. She was a Texas magician.
It was different from being “in love.” I was “in love” with Lucy Cobb, my first wife.
The first time I saw Lucy Cobb: on the tennis court at Highlands, North Carolina, I the Louisiana outlander and ill-at-ease among the easy ingrown Georgians and Carolinians, not knowing them or quite how to dress and so dressed up wrong in coat and tie in late afternoon and standing off a ways under a tree, hands in pockets watching the tennis players, and thinking despite myself: What a shame you all don’t know who I am, for in Louisiana people would, Louisiana being what it is, a small American Creole republic valuing sports, fistfights, cockfights, contests, shootouts, Gunsmoke. winning, and above all, football, and there I was in what turned out to be the high tide of my life what with being chosen Athlete of the Year by Y.M.B.C. and Rhodes scholar besides, like Whizzer White, which latter contributed nothing to my fame except a storied exotic detail (“… and he’s smart too!”) — the South a very big place after all and the rough camaraderie of Louisiana not necessarily working here in the muted manners of the east South, where people seemed to come and go, meet and part by agreed-upon but unspoken rules. I was famous in Louisiana, as famous as the Governor, and for one reason alone: running 110 yards against mighty Alabama, and unknown in Carolina.
Lucy’s smooth thin brown legs scissored and flashed under her white skirt. When she hit the ball, she got her body into it, shoulders, back, and even a final flex of pelvis. She must have played tennis all her life. Decorous as she stood talking, lounged at the net, laughed, spun her racket, eyes cast down, when she served, her body arched back, then in full reach stretched, then flexed and swung in mock-erotic abandon. Served to, she waited in an easy crouch, shifting her weight to and fro.
What I see even now when I think of her is the way she picked up the ball or rather did not pick it up but toed it onto her racket in a cunning little turning in of her white-shod foot. No, not thin was she but slim, because her joints, ankle, wrist, elbow did not show bone but were a simple articulation.
Her face a brown study under her parted straight brown hair done up in back, the irises so contracted in her smiling brown eyes that she seemed both blind and fond. There was a tiny straight scar on her upper lip, diamonded with sweat, which gave the effect of a slight pout. It was more of a quirk I discovered later, the lip forever atremble, trembling on the very point of joke, irony, anger, deprecation.
There was to be a dance that night out of doors under the stars and Japanese lanterns. How to ask her? Just ask her?
What did I want? Just to dance with her, to hold that quick brown body in my arms not even close but lightly and away so I could see into her face and catch those brown eyes with mine.
Then what to do? Go blundering into the four of them between sets and straight out ask her? Skulk behind a tree and waylay her on her way to her cottage? Without being introduced? What arcane Georgia-Carolina rule would that break?
As it turned out, of course, yes I should have asked her, asked her any way at all, and of course there were no rules. And as it turned out, she had noticed me too, as girls do: seeing without looking and wondering who that tall boy was looking at her, hands in pockets under his tree. Why doesn’t he come over and state his business? Why doesn’t he ask me to the dance? She was direct: later when I showed up in her parents’ cottage and stood about smiling and watching her, uncharacteristically shy (what were the cottage rules?), she would even say it: Well? State your business.
We were married, moved into Belle Isle, had two children. Then she died. I suppose her death was tragic. But to me it seemed simply curious. How curious that she should grow pale, thin, weak, and die in a few months! Her blood turned to milk — the white cells replaced the red cells. How curious to wake up one morning alone again in Belle Isle, just as I had been alone in my youth!
Jesus, come in and sit down. You look awful. You look like the patient this morning, not me. Why so pale and sad? After all, you’re supposed to have the good news, not me. Knowing you, I think I know what ails you. You believe all right, but you’re thinking, Christ, what’s the use? Has your God turned his back on you? It was easier in Biafra, wasn’t it, than in plain old Louisiana, U.S.A.?
Well, at least I have good news. The girl in the next room answered my knock! I knocked and she knocked back! She has not caught on that we might invent a new language. She just repeats the one knock, two knocks. That is a beginning, a communication of sorts, isn’t it? When I tried a sentence, not who are you but how are you (because h has only eight knocks against w’s twenty-three), she fell silent.
How to simplify the code? Or what do you think of a note passed out my window and into hers? See how I’ve straightened out this coat hanger, but it’s not enough. Two coat hangers, perhaps.
What? Why not just go around and see her?
But she will not speak to anyone. Hm. You see that is the point. To make conversation in the old tongue, the old worn-out language. It can’t be done.
On the other hand, I could go to her door and knock twice. She would know who it was and could knock or not knock.
Then do what? Talk? Talk about what? Some years ago I discovered that I had nothing to say to anybody nor anybody to me, that is, anything worth listening to. There is nothing left to say. So I stopped talking. Until you showed up. I don’t know why I want to talk to you or what I need to tell you or need to hear from you. There is something … about that night … I discovered something. It’s strange: I have to tell you in order to know what I already know. I talk, you don’t. Perhaps you know even better than I that too much has been said already. Perhaps I talk to you because of your silence. Your silence is the only conversation I can listen to.