A Southern Exposure (7 page)

Then, as they turned toward each other, Russ grasped her face. “Lovelier than anyone, than anything in the world,” he said to her, his voice thick, and caught. “Do you know—?”

But she had moved closer, and raised her face, her mouth, to kiss. As though she had ever kissed or been kissed before.

In that way they met for several weeks of afternoons, now by design, until one afternoon they moved, with infinite slowness, down to the hard winter earth, to the dead leaves and slippery pine needles. Not exactly to remove but to push aside clothes, until they were lying together. But still Russ whispered, “Deirdre, we can’t—”

“We have to—” And she guided his member inside her, as though she knew what to do.

Her body exploded. Again, and again. With his.

If anyone had noticed a new look on Deirdre’s face, he or she would have remembered that Deirdre had always been beautiful, and was simply getting much more beautiful. And if someone who knew her well looked more closely and saw, unmistakably,
love
, the radiance imprinted on her eyes, in her slower smile, that person (her mother was the first) could well have concluded, as Mrs. Yates indeed did, She’s got herself mixed up with someone. Some boy over at the high school, or maybe one of those college boys. She hoped it was not a college boy. Too old for Deirdre.

And as for Russ’s face, which clearly too showed change, that also could be explained, as Brett did explain it, or she tried to: Russ had a new poem somewhere in his mind. He was lost in his poem.

The winter was hard on outdoor lovers, and meetings had more and more to be contrived. And so Russ, unbeknownst to anyone but his banker, bought one of those derelict old brick houses, on that row next to the Negro part of town. The banker was a deacon in the Presbyterian church, a man of monumental discretion. “It’s a sort of investment,” Russ said to Mr. Gwynn, the banker. “But Brett would think I was nuts.”

“Very wise, I’m sure. Those were fine old houses, in their day. They could be made fine again.”

“I don’t plan on doing much to it.”

And so doors were unlocked, keys given, and a minimal cleanup accomplished. And that is where Russ and Deirdre met, in an upstairs room in which there was a wide high bed, with some bedding sneaked in by Russ. From Sears.

No streetlights illuminated that part of town, back then. They saw each other as dark stretches of naked flesh. As eerily shadowed faces.

They never met in the daytime, nor did they meet by accident in the town.

Except once, on a side street near the post office; they meant to nod and pass but were unable to do so, and stood for an instant, smiling and staring, held together. They were unseen, except for one crucial person, passing in a car. Unseen by them, it was Brett. Of course it would be Brett.

They had so little time together, it seemed, as it does to most lovers. Very little time to talk. Russ told her about his offers from Hollywood (this was before he had actually gone out there), how tempting and at the same time how disgusting. How he could not help being curious about the life out there. She told him about her aunt in San Francisco. “We could meet somewhere in between.” They laughed, both fairly ignorant of the geography of California.

By the time Deirdre told Russ that she was pregnant, sparing him the news for several months (she was terrified of his reaction; would he love her still?), she had already made up her mind what she would do: she would go out to California, to her aunt, and have the baby there. It never occurred to either of them to somehow “get rid of it.” Of course there were abortions then (Brett could have told them that), but usually not for white middle-class people like them. Their pregnancies were concealed in marriages,
or in some complicated fictions—like the one that Russ and Deirdre eventually devised. More importantly, Deirdre really wanted this child, this child of Russ—and he did too, once he appreciated her great calm, her absolute lack of demands.

Deirdre told Russ none of the family hysteria, the threats and the weeping.

The whole Yates family drove to California; they were moving out there, it was said, and nothing was heard of them for many months. And then the news was indeed dramatic: Emily Yates had been pregnant, it seemed, and had given birth to a little boy, named Graham, in whose birth she had died (such a risk, trying to bear another child at her age, so selfish of Clarence). Clarence Yates had bought a new filling station in the San Fernando Valley, and was staying put. But Deirdre was coming back in a couple of years to live in Pinehill, the rumor went. To bring up her little brother there. Little Graham.

Having been passionately anxious to get Deirdre into the beautiful old brick house, having worked strenuously and paid a lot of money to that end, Russell gradually comes to realize something quite terrible and amazing. Which is simply that, once Deirdre is back here in town, he does not want, passionately, to see her. He does not long for her constantly, as in the old (five years ago) days. It is enough for him that she is here. And the boy.

He comes to see her at night, in the old, excited, frantic way—but even at their extreme moments he has a sense of staginess, of acting. And in Deirdre too he senses an unreality, as though part of her mind were always on her son,
her “brother,” rather than on Russ, her poet-lover. Pale and still, unsmiling, she lies beneath him, until at last she stirs, and she says, “It’s a beautiful house, I really like it here.”

“If you ever need anything, you’ll tell me—you promise?” He bends down to kiss her eyelids, as he always does. “Or for the boy.”

She says, “I don’t reckon—” But the sentence is broken by a small cry from Graham’s room. Getting up, she says to him, “I’ll be right back.”

Lying there alone in the dark, in the house that he bought for her, and for her son, their son, Russ experiences a sadness, a sorrow so profound that it comes close to madness.

He thinks, So it all comes to this. A very beautiful and intelligent (but so uneducated) young woman, in a pretty, secret house, with her little son. It is like a story already written, finished. Russ wants no further role in this play, which he knows, in his heart, that Deirdre would make extremely easy for him. His exit.

And he wonders, Was this all she ever wanted of him, after all? A house, and a son? And in that case, why him? Almost any man could have given her those things. Why the added presence of his fame, and poetry?

Perhaps, Russ is forced to conclude, that part of it was simply accidental. He was simply the man her eyes fell on at her own ripest moment for love.

He will never write again, Russ thinks, at that black moment, still waiting for Deirdre. His poems are fully as trashy as his life is. Of course they are.

He will go back to Hollywood. He will write bits of scripts about pigs.

He stays at home, and won’t see anyone. Especially no local parties, or “gatherings,” as they are called. Once, at the
post office, he runs into that little fool from Oklahoma, that Jimmy Hightower, whatever he calls himself. Who tells Russ (as though he cared) that some new people have moved to town whom he, Russ, would probably like. In fact, the lady, Mrs. Baird, knows considerable of his poetry by heart. She is in fact an unusual lady, this Cynthia Baird is (Russ detects a just-controlled leer on the face of Jimmy Hightower).

Well, so much the worse for her, is what Russ would like to say. What he actually mumbles is “Well, maybe. One of these days.”

He tells Brett not to bother him with the phone, and asks if she would mind going to the post office from now on.

She wouldn’t mind.

Although Brett has been proclaimed “well” by her doctor, and has no more overt, identifiable symptoms, she does not quite feel herself to be well. She feels a pervasive sort of lassitude and a corresponding lowness in her spirits. And her heart, or something that is interior and important, seems out of control; she feels wild flutterings, plus occasional stabs of pain. Not enough to tell a doctor about, could she even find the words for whatever is wrong. She wonders about the Change; she is much too young for that, isn’t she? But—could the operation in San Francisco (Brett does not think, has never thought, the word “abortion”)—could that have brought it on early? Or done some other awful thing to her inside?

Very likely because of the way she is herself, Russ seems strange to her. He seems to be acting oddly, although perhaps he is not, is the same old Russ. One night she dreams that Russ is having some big illicit love affair, and she thinks, in the dream, Well, that explains a lot. But in the morning she recalls that this is another symptom of the Change, crazy, groundless jealousy, and so she tries to put the dream out of her mind.

The afternoon (now years ago, before Deirdre Yates went off to California and then came back), the time that she saw them, caught in that moment like pinned butterflies, although her heart jolts hard when she thinks of it, she tries to forget that too. It was nothing, she tells herself; people run into each other like that all the time in Pinehill. It was slightly odd that Russ didn’t say, “Guess who I ran into downtown today.” But not significant. A meaningless encounter. However, it has stayed all this time in Brett’s mind, it is vividly fixed there: those two faces, Deirdre’s and Russ’s, as they seemed to stare at each other.

Russ does not like having dinner with his children. Nor, when Brett was a child (when she was SallyJane), did her parents have dinner with her; she was always fed by her mother’s succession of maids—Mrs. Caldwell “could not keep help,” as the local ladies whispered behind her back, an awful indictment. Brett thus feels that she is continuing a tradition, doing as her parents did, and doing right by Russ in feeding the children first; she forgets, when she thinks along those lines, the difference between feeding one child and dinner for five, and although it is true that she has help (unlike her mother, Brett keeps any help forever), still the effort involved in those six-o’clock children’s meals is large and often exhausting, increasingly so, for
which Brett castigates herself, with no self-pity or even sympathy.

After the children have been fed and bathed and are settled, more or less, in bed, Russ and Brett have a drink together, usually in the kitchen, while she makes the preparations for their private dinner. This drink together is often interrupted by calls of need from the children’s room: “I want a drink of water. A sandwich. I want
you
.”

“Honey, you’re much too lenient with them. You make them worse. They’re getting spoiled,” Russ complains.

But Brett is unable not to go in to them, at least for a minute, if only to say, “Now go to sleep, you’ve had your dinner, you don’t need a sandwich now.” Dimly she recalls childhood loneliness, old needs of her own, for which she never cried out. In a way she is pleased that her children ask for what they want, despite the inconvenience for grownups.

Lately, though, since Kansas, Brett has been too tired, really, for either the children or for Russ. The only thing that gets her through is the drink, or drinks. She has come to count on that—that big slug of bourbon over ice, with a little sugar and bitters so it qualifies, really, as an old-fashioned. A civilized cocktail that anyone might drink. Sometimes, to help her through the children’s dinner, all that, she has a small private not-quite old-fashioned while she’s cooking for them. Frying the chicken, broiling the hamburgers or hot dogs, whatever. And the bourbon helps. It dims the children’s noise; it removes her somewhat from their passionate rages, their fights.

The only problem is that by the time that is all over and she has begun to drink in a serious way with Russ, and to fix his dinner, she is extremely tired—not drunk exactly, but just a little out of control. She burns things. She fears
saying things that should not be said. Fears saying, “Do you love me?” Or saying, “Deirdre Yates?”

But she does not say either of those forbidden things. She says very little. She sometimes in a mild way complains to Russ of headaches, but she is not quite sure that he notices.

She continues to feel that he is somewhere else.

Abigail hates the local school. “I can’t understand anything anyone says, and I know it all anyway. We read those books last year. Some kids come in from the country on trucks, and they’re all much older than we are because in the winter the trucks can’t get into town and they have to stay home. Those kids seem dumb but I don’t think they are.”

Abby is in fact fascinated by those large children from out in the country; they are called “truck children.” So large and mysterious—she cannot imagine their lives at home, where they live, but she thinks of large bare houses, babies crawling across cold linoleum, babies crying, and fathers in dirty overalls. The very size of some of these children is frightening. Seated at small tables, in the small
chairs arranged for much younger children, their legs are thrust awkwardly aside. Some of the girls have breasts already; they cross their arms over their chests and duck their heads down shyly. They don’t know the answers when the teacher calls on them, and the teacher seems to know they will not.

One of the largest, darkest, and by far the noisiest of the truck children (mostly they are quiet, shy) is a boy named Edward Jones. He teases Abby, seeming to regard her as someone alien, foreign,
wrong.
“Abby Talk-Funny,” he mutters, just out of the teacher’s hearing. “Say something in English, can’t ya?” He jumps out at her from behind the stack of garbage cans in back of the school. “Gabby Abby, big and flabby,” he chants. She is afraid of Edward Jones, with his black hair, his flashing black eyes, and his long, long legs.

Abby does not become friends right away with any of the children she met at the Bigelows’ party.

“I want to go to the Negro school,” she tells Cynthia and Harry. “Why can’t I? These kids are just dopey jerks, I like Negroes better. I could have friends there. Is there some law that I have to go to an all-white school? I thought public school meant Negroes too.”