A Southern Exposure (18 page)

Does Drake “see into” SallyJane in this way? Isn’t he supposed to? Does he say to SallyJane “…  you very well know”? (She wouldn’t like that, probably.) Could Drake possibly have been speaking to SallyJane when he was saying, “Now, darlin’, you very well know—” No, he couldn’t. For one thing SallyJane is here, in this house. In bed. For another that is not a tone that a doctor would take with patients. It is how a man talks to his wife, or maybe a girlfriend who is being a little difficult. Suspicious, maybe, or clinging too long.

Sometime, a long time ago, when SallyJane was Russ’s
girlfriend, she was a little difficult, but she was also so beautiful then, so golden, her hair and her skin looked like gold, and she loved him so much and she was so—so sexy. As eager for kissing and touching and squirming together as he was. More so, he sometimes thought. Sometimes she scared him a little, when they were both so young and her father was the president of the goddam university. She was always finding secret places for them to be together, and secret times when the parents and the help were all away. Lying together on some bed in a guest room, even though they kept their clothes on, he was scared. And sometimes in the moist between her legs—oh Jesus, she wouldn’t let his hand stop. He had to make excuses for not going on.

But she was as vulnerable, as sensitive, as she was sexy, Russ soon learned. It took almost nothing to make her eyes tear up, her voice tremble, although she had a lot of pride, always, and would try to hide how she felt. But especially when she was more eager for love, for kissing and all that stuff, than he was—that hurt her most; he could feel her hurt, along with his own almost killing guilt.

He often thought of leaving her then, and taking up with some more ordinary girl. Some flirt. He imagined this girl, this ordinary girl, as dark and saucy, always laughing. A little like Dolly Bigelow. That type. A girl who would lead him on, the way girls are supposed to do, and then stop him cold, not caring much herself. With SallyJane he felt strange, although he often told himself that of course he felt strange, he was a poet. Like no one else around these parts, and it was not SallyJane’s fault. And then at other times he would think it was all SallyJane’s fault, the poetry, all of it. With a more normal girl, he could go to business school, or study medicine, for God’s sake, like some normal guy.

He gave her the new name, Brett—like Lady Brett in Hemingway’s book, of course—in the hope that her character
too would change. Not that she would become the Brett of that novel (God forbid!) but that she would be at least a little harder, a little more independent. So that he wouldn’t have to leave her, after all. But that did not work. She did not change, and he married her instead. His beautiful, loving, vulnerable, hard-working wife. So often in tears.

And so often pregnant. Holy God! The wonderful new rubber device, supposed to prevent all that, was for Brett an unromantic interruption. A scientific interference. It was anti-love, and if she had to get up for that purpose, love was over, she could not respond.

And then there was Deirdre.

At first, with Deirdre, he felt like a man entrapped in a poem, in one of his own poems, perhaps. He was encased in breathlessness, in desire, in her beauty. He could barely even speak to her, so constricted was all his blood in its turgid veins; his blood was all flowing, he felt, toward his swollen member.

Only gradually did he notice that Deirdre, like Brett, had those heavy, hyper-sensitive breasts, and those vulnerable eyes. She too spoke little and wept easily. And then she was pregnant, too.

Sometimes he crazily thinks that Deirdre could just move right in with them all, Deirdre and Graham. The two women and the kids would all get along; he could be a sort of grandfather figure to them. Between them the women could get the household work done, and keep the children quiet and happy. They could just forget about romance, and love. And he would only think of it in terms of his work. He could write all day, and maybe at night he would read them bits of what he had done. All of them sitting around the fire.

“SallyJane, you have to understand—”

Russ hears this partial sentence very clearly from the
next room, and at first he is mystified, until the obvious answer comes to him: of course, SallyJane has come downstairs and is in the next room, talking to Clyde Drake. It seems strange, somehow; on the other hand not strange at all. Though Drake is at the moment a visitor in her house, she is still his patient, after all. Why shouldn’t they talk?

But are their conversations still supposed to be intensely private? Should Russ go on into the next room, the dining room, as, bored and stalled in his work, he would like to do, and say hello to them both?

The day outside is gray and cold, spring seems nowhere near. There is even a cold, persistent wind. As Russ enters the dining room and sees SallyJane there in her sheerest, barest nightgown, his first thought is practical; he thinks, Poor SallyJane, she must be cold. His second very quick reaction is one of a strong and peculiar embarrassment: he has interrupted a scene of some sort; he is in a place where he should not be, even in his own house, between his own wife and her doctor. It is not precisely a sexual scene, although SallyJane’s nightgown gives it to some degree that aura. Nor is it exactly a medical conference. It would seem some bizarre combination of the two, though Russ is not able until much later to so describe it to himself.

For an instant SallyJane looks at him uncomprehendingly. Who is he? Where does he live? But then she comes into focus, more or less. Her hands rise to her throat, arms protecting her breasts, as she says, “I just came down to see if you-all needed anything.”

“SallyJane still needs a lot of bed rest,” Clyde Drake in a man-to-man way explains to Russ. Which is actually no explanation at all, but something that needed to be said. Obviously.

“Anything we need we can find for ourselves,” says Russ, not exactly addressing either one of them, but understanding
that he is aligned with Drake, at least in SallyJane’s mind. She feels herself confronted with two men; he can read that in her eyes, and in her posture, which is defensive. (Is SallyJane afraid of men? Of
him
?)

“I just came down to get some tea,” she says, a self-contradiction that they all ignore.

Gently, Russ tells her, “I’ll tell the girl to bring you up some. You go on back to bed now, honey.”

Looking to Drake as though for protection, SallyJane then turns and leaves the room, colliding with a chair on her way, at which she murmurs, “Goddam,” and continues toward the stairs. She turns again then, to say to Russ, “I didn’t really want any tea. I just thought I did.”

“It’s okay, honey.”

Faced with each other, Russ and Clyde Drake are silent, and then both begin to speak at once.

Russ asks, “Would you like—?”

And Drake, “Do you ever—?”

In a mild way they both laugh, and then Russ asks his guest, “Can I get you some coffee—anything?”

“Do you know what I would dearly love? About this time of the morning I often treat myself to a plain old Coke. Not even spiked with anything, though I have to admit that I have yielded to that temptation on occasion. But just a good old Coca-Cola.”

“Sounds real good to me. I think I’ll join you.”

“Just out of the bottle, please. Tastes best that way to me.” Clyde Drake laughs, a sort of apology for crude tastes.

It does taste good that way, notes Russ—who has never had a morning Coke in his life before, much less one out of a bottle. As the two men move into the living room with their bottles, he observes that he feels very young, and remembers his mother saying that Cokes were bad for your
teeth, whereas his father said they were a great source of energy. His father was probably right, he thinks. Maybe a Coke every morning is just what he needs for work.

“It takes a long time, depression.”

Clyde Drake has spoken so softly that Russ has to replay the words in his mind before he is sure that he heard them right. He mutters, “I guess it does.” For an odd moment he has wondered whose depression they are talking about; but then he knows—of course, SallyJane’s. He, Russ, is not supposed to be depressed at all, but busily writing away. At a great new play. About pigs.

“Sometimes it can seem like forever,” Drake continues, before taking an enormous slug from his cold green bottle.

“Do you think—” Russ starts to ask; then he hesitates, and gulps in turn from his own cold bottle. “Do you think, this shock treatment you’ve mentioned—do you think—?”

Clyde Drake slowly composes his face into a frown. “I sincerely hope not,” he says. “Had a lady die on me once; of course the truth is she had a weak heart, a condition, but still it was in the course of my treatment that she died.”

A somber silence ensues, during which both men consider the prospect of dead women. If SallyJane died, Russ is thinking, I would be more than half dead too; we’ve become the same person, almost. These days it’s her pain I’m feeling. It’s like I’m Clyde Drake’s patient too, with all her feelings about him.

This last thought is quite new to Russ, and he examines its implications. He has already noticed in himself an unusual, out-of-character impulse to talk to this man, to tell him things, and to try to get his, Drake’s, views on life. He would even like to tell Drake about his play. The pigs. Almost at random (he had not meant to say this) he asks, “Do you think a depression could be contagious? Sort of like having a bad cold in the house?”

Drake seems to be mulling this over as again he frowns, and clears his throat. Then smiles. “That would be a little on the order of—what do they call it?—mental telepathy, am I right? The stuff that fellow over to Duke is working on. Dr. Rhine. Extra-sensory perception, I think some folks call it. If you can believe in all that business, then it’s easy enough to believe in what you might call depression germs too.” His smile broadens.

Russ has in fact been very interested in experiments done on ESP; he might be said to believe in it. He would like to argue the point, but feels that he should not. He only says, “I guess sometimes in a marriage, though, folks get so close that it feels like you’ve caught what the other person has. Depression included.”

After a judicious pause Drake agrees. “That could certainly be. Like when it seems like you’ve both thought of the same joke at the very same moment. Lucky you if it’s a joke, of course.” He gives Russ a grin of boyish complicity.

Against some better (older, wiser) judgment, Russ finds this exchange enormously appealing. He feels young, and bad. Not naughty, as his mother used to put it, but bad, really bad. A bad boy who does terrible things to girls, a bad man who cheats on his wife and does not really love his girlfriend. But he is not depressed!

How handsome Clyde Drake is. Better-looking than some of the Hollywood actors Russ has met around the swimming pools out there. He wonders if Clyde can act, and then remembers that he is a
doctor.
Probably doesn’t have the slightest interest in acting.

He wonders what it would be like to be a patient of Clyde’s. To tell him all your secrets, everything. Like, how much of the time he does not want to make love to Brett. To SallyJane. And sometimes he does not want to do it to Deirdre. Does Clyde ever feel that way, about his wife, the
wonderfully named “Norris,” whom so far Russ has never met? Would Clyde say so if he did ever feel like that?

For a moment Russ has this most curious sense that he
is
Clyde.

“Say, I’ve been wondering,” Clyde now says, very slowly. “Tell me, Russ, old man—”

I’ll tell you anything, Russ thinks, but he only smiles.

“You ever try any huntin’ round here? You know go out and shoot up some squirrels and some rabbits?”

And Russ, who has never shot at anything but a large stuffed target, who desperately hates the sight of the smallest amount of blood—any blood, anyone’s, anything’s blood—Russ says to his guest, “Great idea! We could even go after wild turkey.”

In the early spring of that year, late February or early March, in Pinehill, for no conscious or angry reasons, Abigail Baird begins more or less to avoid the company of adults. Even Deirdre, with whom she used to enjoy exploring the town, and the woods, the creek, and with whom she certainly had no quarrel—she tends to avoid seeing Deirdre, not calling her, and unable to explain when her mother, Cynthia, says, in a hinting way, “We haven’t seen Deirdre for such a long time!” Abby even avoids her mother, although with her father gone so much anyone would have thought (Cynthia would have thought) that they would be “closer,” they would “do things together.” But Abby, in the half-knowing, self-protective way of intelligent children, chooses almost always to be busy, either
with other children or with some private project, maybe a long bike ride out to a place called Laurel Hill. Alone. The other kids she sees most often are Betsy Lee, who is not very smart but will go along with almost any project conceived by Abby, or Melanctha Byrd, who is very smart but touchy and unreliable—you can’t tell how she’ll feel about anything. Or sometimes she sees Billy and Archer Bigelow.

These children touch off nothing complicated or frightening (not yet) in Abby. Approaching adulthood herself, though still distantly, it is adults whom she finds too complex, too intense, and often too unhappy for her to wish to emulate, or just to spend time with, just now. She has never met anyone, any grownup whom she would wish to be, or even to be like, when she grows up.

Deirdre especially has been a disappointment, although Abby would not have put it so. Toward Deirdre she feels a brooding, vague discomfort; what once seemed warm and easy—and remarkable, given the difference in their ages—has become uneasy, and darkened. Put simply, it is harder to talk to Deirdre now than it used to be. Behind all this, or maybe simply involved in the dark, uncomfortable confusion, is Mr. Byrd. Abby has spent just enough time, which is not much at all, five or ten minutes here or there, with the two of them together to feel strong currents, which in a general way she knows to be sexual, although she would not use exactly that word. But even when Mr. Byrd is not around, Abby feels his presence, with Deirdre; or when she sees Mr. Byrd downtown, in the post office, or just driving past her parents’ house, she feels the presence of Deirdre—just in the way he looks at her, at Abby, Deirdre’s friend.