Lookaway, Lookaway (8 page)

“Wait,” she cried. “Stop. Hey stop—”

And then one hand was over her mouth. She tried to bite it but that just got the hand pressed further, harder into her mouth. So she tried to kick and writhe and break free … but he was already doing the thing she didn’t want him to do.

Gaston

Gaston Jarvis, condemned to Plunkett, North Carolina, and its literati, beyond the reach of mercy or redemption, would offer himself to the sun. He pressed the button to lower the driver’s-side window and positioned his face. Indian summer, seventy-something degrees, sky an autumn blue, not really warm … cool, in fact, when a hint of a breeze made itself known, but still the sun could sear, could revive the spirit, could keep the dwindling flame of his humanity guttering a moment longer. It was like in France, this weather. Cool brisk days yet a warm sun.

Well, that’s what he thought he remembered about Paris sunshine. It had been rainy, cold and damp most of the time, hadn’t it? American writers were supposed to go to Paris and write. That’s what he’d done in the late 1970s, once upon a time, when he was one notch above poor and had published his first, justly praised debut,
The Rapeseed Field
. Then his second novel was published, the one he wrote in Paris, the ponderous pretentious artsy-fartsy bullshit Paris Novel (
Reunions of the Tomb,
taken from an inscription on the tomb of Abelard and Héloïse in the Père-Lachaise cemetery … oooh that was some High Art). Then, thanks to Book Number Three and his heroine Cordelia Florabloom, he landed again in Paris with beaucoup cash in pocket to debauch himself, eat richly and drink copious amounts of wine. Then the writing fell away and it was just the debauch. Still, he was working within a time-honored American tradition, you had to admit.

He checked his watch. A half hour more until this godawful reading. Thanks for nothing, Norma.

He closed his eyes again. It had been easy to sustain his personality traits in Paris. Love of excess, immoderation, petulance. He was especially good at petulance. He didn’t go back for his father’s funeral. He hadn’t lifted a finger to help his mother, nor had spoken to her since—what?—a decade, at least. And it was easy to manage his social life in Paris, too. Every slight, every nuance of denigration or indifference had been repaid many times over by his cutting people off, not doing fledgling writers the literary favors that he had promised them, dropping hostesses cold … and Paris egged him on
à juste parfait
.

Then came the summer in 1978, when he was about to purchase a top-floor garret in the scuzzy
vingtième
to make his Paris-escape permanent. “Not the Twentieth!” his friends shrieked in horror, judging that
arrondissement
slightly less barbarous than Mogadishu. Gaston was already building his American roué legend; he joked that he would buy a grave in nearby Père-Lachaise, where he strolled almost daily, leave it open and just drunkenly stumble into the hole when the time came. As the centuries rolled he’d burrow a bony finger over to Colette and cop a feel. An attic room on the rue Stendhal—how was that street name not a talisman? Yep, the purchase papers were drawn up, the former apartment packed, the change-of-address cards were ready to mail … when the most appalling homesickness came over him.

Homesick. The word for once literally true, sick, unable to eat or sleep well, sick for thinking of shabby little North Carolina, all the while bar- and café-hopping along Haussmann’s monumental boulevards. He longed instead to be driving on the tar-patched macadam of N.C. Highway 49, speeding from Charlotte to Durham, still an undergraduate racing back to campus in his rattletrap used car, the red earth of the roadside embankments, the surprise views of the ancient Uwharrie Mountains, that upland ridge connected to no other, smack in the middle of the state for no logical geological reason, dense green woods crowded with deer, roadside vegetable stands with hand-painted signs, red painted scrawl on a whitewashed board, that last chance in September for a taste of the Sandhills peaches … He longed not to speak his fatally flawed French anymore or pretend interest in incomprehensible films or junkpile art or crackpot European politics. Americans are servile before Paris; they creep about it feeling unworthy of it, not good enough for it. He had done that, cringing and worrying about what waitpeople, concierges, cleaning ladies thought of his French.

And Gaston, the lone wolf, the recluse, even missed some people back home … yes, mustn’t let that get out! Not so much the people he had dropped or written off, the three agents, the earnest editors whom he put through hell, but his two sisters, Jerene and Dillard, pains-in-the-ass that they were, and he missed his friend Duke. Duke most of all. He had tried to write off Duke, banish him from the good life that Duke himself had introduced Gaston Jarvis to, many years ago at university. Gaston prided himself on how successful he had become on Duke’s terms—wealth, good clothes, fine wines, specialty tobaccos, how he moved easily between countries and grand hotels … but that was just money, wasn’t it? The whole planet opens its mouth wide for American money; it was nothing personal. Europe didn’t really love him. And North Carolina claimed him but he hadn’t valued that at all, not until that summer in 1978 when he was homesick for the first time in his life, a nostalgia like a terminal illness, aching, unrequited nostalgia for being a young writer just starting out, for Duke and him sitting up until the dawn, sorting out the world and its problems, under the eaves in the attic room of Arcadia.

So autumn of 1978, he returned. Things back to normal, all irritants and indignities at a low volume, humming beneath the surface, for the most part … Dillard, long abandoned by her husband, was semi-functional then, though letting her boy Christopher run wild—we see how that ended up. Jerene and Duke had made a happy home. It never ceased to strike him as odd how their progeny rallied round him at family occasions and called him “Uncle Gaston”; it always sounded strange to his ears, aged him a few decades. He hated kids. Although he had mentioned all the brood in his most recent will, giving them each $20,000 when he kicked the bucket. See? Uncle Gaston loved you, he just didn’t want to see or deal with you or get to know you in the least. Beauregard, a bright fellow, going to Duke University as he had done, then going to seminary at Davidson, peddling that Christ-in the-sky claptrap to the yokels across the Union County line (beyond the pale) in Stallings, N.C. The two young ones, Joshua, that little fruitcake, and Jerilyn, who is her mother’s clone with less smarts and personality. And Annie—she was the smartest, come to think of it, but willful and self-ruinous. He chuckled—wonder what side of the family she got that from?

Seven minutes to the reading. Norma set these things up for him. Gaston wasn’t quite sure how this old friend whom he had broken with innumerable times kept crawling back to insert herself into his life. She was the number dialed when he couldn’t get a cab and was too drunk to drive. She was the pocket picked—admittedly years ago—when debts and canceled credit cards left him without money for breakfast. When he complained of his publishing house’s apathy in setting up readings, it was Norma, super-spinster, to the rescue, setting up small but well-attended events all across the South. He owed her a great amount for her services, her keeping his life on the rails, but the payment she wished for, marriage, a permanent association—heck, she’d be fine with affection and being seen in public together, being identified as a quasi-couple—that he would not give her. He felt his cell phone vibrate. And that would be Norma. Reminding him that in five minutes he had to give a reading. Just in case he wasn’t at the bookstore but had detoured to a bar. Which would have been the better idea …

But I’m a creature of the old manners, the old courtesies, Gaston assured himself, as he opened his eyes and took in his surroundings. Another once down-at-heels mill town subsumed into the Charlotte metastasizing sprawl—McMansions, six-lane parkways through deforested fields where they had yet to build the development that justified the highway, identical strip malls, Panera Bread, Old Navy, Bed Bath & Beyond, Pottery Barn, P. F. Chang’s, arrayed in characterless malls, a poor man’s Florida with brick sidewalks and pastel awnings. Amid the bourgeois boom was the Antiquarian’s Bookshelf in Plunkett, North Carolina, a little family-run independent store that hung on. And Gaston Jarvis was here to read from his new work, move some product, press the mottled and antiquated flesh of his antiquated readership of the Antiquarian’s Bookshelf. He leaned toward the glove compartment—even this activity at his weight was a reddening strain—where he found his flask and retrieved it, sipped from it.

I’m too nice, saying yes to everything, he thought. He always yearned to be a curmudgeon, aimed for it, a Sheridan Whiteside whose rudenesses and insults to his loyal following could become the stuff of literary anecdotes told for a century on the order of Faulkner’s snapping at his annoying offspring,
No one remembers Shakespeare’s daughter,
or H. L. Mencken inscribing hotel-room Bibles with
With compliments from the author
.

Gaston watched a van pull up before the bookstore, in the handicapped spot. Out came the enfeebled and disabled, a lady in canary yellow with two sticks, a human scarecrow with a cane … and here come the motorized chairs out of the back. The old folks’ home emptying itself, backing up the boxcar, shooing the livestock down the chute. Behold the kind of babes and groupies he can expect—Ethel and Hortensia and Letitia, all scrambling over one another with their walkers to get to the front row so they can hear properly. Gaston sipped from his flask, taking stock: the halt and lame, the elderly, white white white, varied only by the degree of palsy or blueing in the hair.

Gaston noticed two black women in their twenties, perhaps, walking out of the store with coffees to go. Staff, he figured. No, of course they would leave before he read. Indeed, they probably demanded not to work on the night Gaston Jarvis was coming to read; these young women, probably students at UNC Charlotte, they might act up, might have to say something to the old white man peddling his slave-times romances. It was as if he were wrapped in the Confederate battle flag. Why should anyone colored care one little bit what Gaston Jarvis had to say for himself? Back before his Civil War shtick, Gaston Jarvis was briefly the toast of New York after his wondrous literary debut. He had sat on a panel at 92nd Street Y with William Styron and gotten himself invited back to Roxbury, Connecticut, where (fellow Duke graduate) Styron lived and where James Baldwin was visiting. Bill and Jimmy—joking with him, enjoying his wit and youth … it was like an apostolic succession, writers who made their mark before thirty anointing another gifted young writer, entwining the laurel, the apollonian crown to place upon his head …

What would Baldwin, if he were alive, say about him now?

It hardly mattered, he well knew, that he tried to depict the horrors of slavery here and there, highlighted the white Southerner—and there were such people historically—who thought slavery a great wrong. North Carolina had to be dragged into the Civil War; that’s why Sherman didn’t ravage the state, knowing there had always been sympathies against the Rebellion. Indeed, once, in the third of his Civil War titles,
To Bleed Upon This Sacred Earth,
his editor insisted that Gaston not be “so hard on the whites,” cut out a harangue or two. Did he not understand that his one hundred percent white readership didn’t want to read about whites being lower than snakes for four hundred pages? He sipped from the flask. Just a few cuts, but no more, Gaston said at the time. Gaston imagined the editor suited himself once the final manuscript was in his hands; Gaston had never read the final draft. Boy, that was an activity that didn’t pay—reading your own published work. Taking down an old title from the shelf and giving it a leisurely self-loathing peruse.

The young black girls were waiting for their rides, smoking cigarettes, conspiratorial over something, laughing. I am less than nothing to them. And now here comes …

“Merciful Christ,” Gaston muttered aloud.

To the door stiffly walked a middle-aged man, with his white beard trimmed like Robert E. Lee, in full CSA military regalia, a dress uniform, undoubtedly researched to the final pin and button, probably a friend of Duke’s. (How Duke Johnston had fallen so far into the whole Civil War re-enactment cult, he wasn’t sure.) Are they going to let General Lee bring that sword in the store? Turn him away, Gaston urged in his thoughts … but that old clown was not going to be turned away. He will be seated right down in front (next to Ethel and Letitia and Hortensia) so I can meet his worshipful gaze while I read about Jackson’s dying words at Chancellorsville. And he will buy three copies, too. Gaston craned around in his seat to see if the black girls had seen Robert E. Lee, but they were gone.

He sipped again—not really a sip, a good long draw. I’m going to do it one of these days, he swore to himself: for eight books he had followed the travails of Cordelia Florabloom. She had become his most popular inescapable character, slipping through enemy lines to help the Rebels, dodging Union enormities, searching always for her betrothed whose whereabouts were unknown since the Battle of the Wilderness … I’m going to make her a Union camp follower in the next book. Have her service Sherman!
Oh general sir, I would so consider it my honor to receive you into my hindmost quarters … If you would but only kindly instruct those newly freed, strapping black bucks over there to come join us—

There was a knock at his passenger’s-side window which jolted him into a near coronary.

“Well, hello there!”

Two blue-hairs. Gaston pushed the electronic button that lowered the window.

“Why, Mr. Jarvis,” said the taller, uglier of the crones, “whatever are you doing with yourself out here in the parking lot? Come on inside!”

“Let me just tell you…” This was the short impossibly pale lady with the livid red lipstick that suggested she had just supped upon a fresh animal kill: “… let me say that I just love to pieces the new book! You get better and better each time out. You mustn’t let one fool thing happen to Cordelia in the future now. I think I would just perish myself!”