“Not the singer. Melanie Jaeger, I think her name is.”
“Sully’s wife.”
“Oh, is she? I never made the connection.”
“Why?”
Bert was playing “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
“Tossed a pass my way tonight.”
“Melanie Jaeger? Where was this?”
“While I was working. Pretty obvious pitch.”
“Who was she with?”
“No one. Came alone, sat at the bar, and cruised the room like a piranha. She made her drinks last a long time. She wasn’t there for drinks or music. She was looking for someone to go home with. Found someone, too. No one I ever saw before, but she scored and took him right on out of there.”
“I’ll be damned. Melanie Jaeger. You’re sure she wasn’t meeting someone?”
“Not a chance. Nice little bit, too. Predatory cheekbones, and something special in her eyes.”
“One begins to visualize certain possibilities.”
“Just what I thought.”
Warren’s voice dropped an octave. “Why don’t you stop abusing that piano,” he murmured, “and abuse me a little instead.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
A month after Bertram Ryder LeGrand’s second birthday, his father put the family Buick into a curve at seventy miles an hour. The car left the road and stopped abruptly when it came to a tree. The steering column crushed Jack LeGrand’s chest and killed him instantly. The girl who had been on the seat beside him went through the windshield and bled to death from a slashed jugular vein. The first state trooper on the scene had never seen a car so utterly demolished. The only undamaged object was a pint bottle of corn whiskey which had somehow survived the impact. There was an inch left in it, and after a look at the car’s two occupants, the trooper felt the need to finish the bottle himself.
Bert had no true memories of his father, but it seemed to him that the ghost of Smilin’ Jack LeGrand was always present in the brooding Victorian house in downtown Charleston where he grew up. It was his grandmother’s house and he lived there with his mother and grandmother and was nourished on the stories his mother told of his father. Smilin’ Jack had been an athlete, a hard drinker, at once a man’s man and a ladies’ man. Sarah Ryder seemed as proud of his faults as of his virtues. He had been the first man in her life and was to be the last. She had loved him quite completely, and yet it seemed to Bert in later years that his abrupt death must have been a relief to her. She was a shy, timid girl, and it could not have been easy for her to be the wife of such a man. It was infinitely easier to be his widow.
She raised him in his father’s shadow and at the same time did everything she could to ensure against his growing into a copy of Smilin’ Jack. She protected him, smothered him, kept him at the piano while other boys were on the ballfield, and while she did this she told glowing stories of his father’s accomplishments. “You’re a Ryder,” she told him often. “Your father was a LeGrand, he had all the strengths and weaknesses of his blood, but you’ve always favored my side of the family. You’re a Ryder to the core.”
It was a hollow core for the first seventeen years of his life. When he looked back on those years he found he could remember very little besides music and books. At first he practiced the piano primarily to please his mother, but as time passed he could shut out the rest of the world effortlessly by sitting on that flat bench and letting his fingers work upon the keys. His training was all classical, and he practiced his classical pieces diligently, but when he had finished he worked at pop tunes, picking out melodies and figuring out harmonics by ear.
All through those years he existed in a social vacuum, friendless and unnoticed by his classmates. “I would have been gay then,” he said years later, “if anyone had taken the trouble. I was such an ugly skinny kid it never occurred to anyone to make a play for me. God, all the ingredients were there. The introverted kid with the protective mother and the dead idealized father — it was all there, but I wasn’t bright enough to figure it out for myself and nobody was interested in educating me.”
Throughout high school he dreamed of girls and never dared date one. He told himself that his entire life would change when he went away to college. He would emerge from the cocoon; he would be bright and witty and charming and debonair; he would have all the women he wanted and would want every woman he saw. He told himself all of this, and he could not make himself believe a word of it, and he graduated from high school and went to William and Mary on scholarship and was astonished to find that the dreams came true.
It never ceased to astonish him in retrospect. The caterpillar-to-butterfly metaphor was inescapable, except that it was not so much changes in himself as changes in his environment; the poise and assurance that he instantly acquired were taken on in response to his altered environment. What had been faults in a Charleston high school classroom were suddenly strengths. He had grown into his long, thin face, and what he’d thought of as ugliness was now seen as interesting and commanding, a face with character and presence. His intellect, which he’d willingly submerged before, was now respected and admired. Boys liked him. Girls were drawn to him. Even his piano playing, merely a curiosity in Charleston, was of social value now.
He was accepted, and discovered he thrived on acceptance. He pledged a good fraternity and found among his fraternity brothers the first friends he had had in his entire life. His classes were provocative as high school classes had never been. He wore the unofficial campus uniform, white bucks and chinos and button-down oxford cloth shirts, but he wore his hair long and carefully combed, a distinguishing characteristic in a swarm of shaggy crew cuts. Even as a freshman he was noticed, and noticed favorably.
But it was with girls that his success most astonished him. He couldn’t believe how easy it was to get them and how good he seemed to be at the whole business. He appeared to have a natural aptitude for the game. The easy banter came automatically to his tongue, and he intuitively struck the attitudes which would have the proper effect. The first girl he kissed had no idea of his inexperience. The first girl he had intercourse with would have been astonished to know she was claiming his virginity.
“I gather it’s different now,” he once told “The college kids have a much more mature attitude toward sex than we did. More mature, and at the sand time more idealistic. There’s this emphasis placed on honesty. Open and honest relationships openly and honestly arrived at. The only honesty I remember in sex at college was that you were supposed to tell the truth when you talked to your buddies about it afterward, Maybe the girls had the same code among themselves. I don’t know. But there was certainly no honesty between male and female. The guy was out to get as much as possible from her with the minimum emotional commitment, and the girl was looking for a fraternity pin or an engagement ring or a Mrs. degree. Even if all she wanted was a friendly fuck, she had to pretend differently. She might be laying a different guy every night of the week, but each time she would pretend she just got carried away and never expected to wind up with her knees pointing at the ceiling.”
He dated extensively, and most of the girls he dated obligingly ended the evening with their knees aimed skyward. The first time was in the fraternity house after a dance. He had taken his own girl home, petted furiously with her, and returned to the house. Another brother had passed out and his date was waiting around in the hope that he might get sober enough to take her back to her dormitory. Bert took her upstairs to a vacant bedroom and began necking with her, waiting for her to tell him to stop. There was a point when he realized that she was not going to stop him, and a great surge of triumph went through him — he was going to reach that impossible goal. It was going to happen; it was happening now.