No Dark Valley (50 page)

“Write for free information”—maybe this was a place to start. And instantly a person came to mind, the same one she had thought of only minutes earlier. How curious that a totally silly thought could transform itself into something that seemed not only feasible but absolutely right. She would write a letter to Denise Davidson. An old-fashioned letter, the kind she never wrote her grandmother. In fact, she couldn't remember the last time she had written a real letter to anyone. She knew she had some stationery in a drawer in her bedroom. She would get it out now, sit right down, and write a letter for help.

And suddenly she couldn't wait to do it. The idea was like a little shiny key to a door that had long been bolted shut. She went straight to the right bureau drawer, removed the stationery, and headed for the kitchen table. She wouldn't worry about what Denise Davidson would think of her. She had already shown her shabby side to Bruce and Elizabeth earlier tonight, so she might as well push it a step further. She would set things down on paper tonight that would take Denise's breath away. Then she would see what the preacher's wife had to say about the subject of mercy after this.

Celia could see why the Roman Catholic idea of confession had its appeal. There had to be some feeling of cleansing after verbalizing your worst sins out loud to another person, some sense of transferring a small part of a heavy burden. She knew, of course, that Denise couldn't expiate her sins, but it would be interesting to see what a sheltered soul like her would say when she knew the truth about Celia.

As Celia arranged a sheet of plain white stationery on the table in front of her and took the cap off her pen, Denise's blue eyes once again rose before her. She also thought of Elizabeth, with her kind, searching gray-green eyes that seemed to want to say more than she allowed her lips to speak. She thought of her grandmother's tired old eyes peering out from all the frown lines around them, the irises a weak watery blue, the whites like discolored porcelain. She thought of her own sad, sleepy eyes reflected in the bathroom mirror.

And right before setting her pen to paper, she glanced up at the kitchen window and remembered Bruce's angry dark eyes. How instructive it might be, she thought suddenly, to be able to see yourself through someone else's eyes, to view a movie of yourself at the end of every day. She could imagine her own protests if such a movie were shown of this very day:
But that's not the real me!
she would say. Which would be absolutely true. No, such a movie couldn't begin to show the
real
Cecilia Annette Coleman, with all the deep ugly cracks of sin beneath the surface faults of today.

Part Two:

HEAR, O HEAR US
WHEN WE PRAY

25

One Holy Passion

On a Sunday afternoon in late October, Bruce Healey was sitting at the patio table in the backyard trying to carve a jack-o'-lantern to surprise Madison when he saw Celia pull into the driveway next door and park her red Mustang. It still surprised him that a woman like her, so efficient, sensible, and reclusive, drove a red Mustang instead of, say, a dark brown Volvo 280.

He had already gotten all the stringy goop and seeds out of the pumpkin and was working on the second eye—a simple triangular design, which was turning out to be larger than the first eye and a little lower on the face, down toward the middle of its cheek actually. So it would be a freak, but who cared? Nobody expected perfection when it came to jack-o'-lanterns.

He paused for a moment to watch Celia get out of her car and walk to her front door. He opened his mouth to call to her but for some reason decided against it. He realized he even had a legitimate question already framed and ready to ask: “How many trick-or-treaters usually come around this neighborhood on Halloween?” In fact, he knew in his heart that he was sitting here in the backyard with the express hope of seeing her. But something about the brisk, beeline way she was moving toward the door kept him from speaking. Not that it was much different from the way she normally walked to the door—as if she had just remembered she'd left a cake in the oven. After watching her disappear inside her apartment, shutting the door firmly behind her, he turned his attention back to the jack-o'-lantern's enormous misaligned eye.

Bruce Healey had met a lot of women in his life. All shapes and sizes, young and old, all kinds of dull and fascinating personalities, faces that made you look twice, others that made you wish you hadn't. When he was in college, he used to say he could never get married because he'd always be wondering about all those other women he hadn't had a chance to meet.

Sometimes in grad school in Montgomery, Alabama, he had sat in coffeehouses just thinking about all the women he had been with, his mind always wandering eventually to the more eccentric ones. The redheaded vegetarian from Hattiesburg who had had her first name legally changed from Audrey to Unity; the blond six-footer from Mobile who could bench-press one-eighty; Tamara something from Kosciusko who sang backup for an Elvis impersonator on weekends; those twin sisters—Tanya and Sonja—from Memphis who competed in demolition derbies; and dozens and dozens of others. His friends liked to joke that he was particularly attracted to the weird types.

Although he didn't really like the idea of lumping girls into categories, he had often said to other guys in his bragging days, “Name a type, I've met her.” And he probably had. He had passed through a lot of towns in the South, the region of the country he considered the only reasonable place to settle down permanently, and a good number in the Midwest and Northeast, too, meeting girls everywhere he went. His friends envied him, mostly good-naturedly, because not only did Bruce really like girls, but for some reason none of the guys could figure out, girls really liked him back.

And it was a sad, pitiful thing, Bruce used to tell them, that they couldn't see why girls liked him so much. It was as fundamental a principle as the ones in science books—geotropism, photosynthesis, entropy, friction, cytokinesis, evaporation, thermodynamics, on and on. Simple cause and effect. It all boiled down, as he tried to explain from time to time, to the fact that he had a very high regard for the whole female population. And women could tell it.

Women were smarter in different ways from men. They were more loyal, they could be incredibly tough, they sensed things without being told, they kept the world running with their attention to detail, they had more compassion, could keep track of so many different things at the same time, and, obviously, there was the whole physical part of it. All that soft roundness—with a few exceptions, such as the blond six-footer. That woman had biceps as hard as baseballs and a torso like a steel cage.

But really, there was nothing difficult about it all. If you treated people right, they would like you. That's what his mother had told him on his first day of kindergarten as she had stooped down in front of him at the door and planted a wet, sloppy kiss on his forehead, which he had instinctively known he shouldn't wipe off because it might hurt her feelings.

When he thought of his mother now, as a grown man,
this
was the picture that most often came to mind instead of all the other more recent and less pleasant ones he could have conjured up: That day, about thirty-five years ago when she had kissed him at the front door and said, “Remember, be nice to everybody, Brucie, and they'll be nice back to you.” And it had worked except in a very few cases, none of which could really be laid to the fault of the principle itself.

It had worked especially well with girls. Even in elementary school, girls had liked him because he had been nice to them. Not in a sissy, simpering way, but forthrightly and courteously. He had often wondered why it was that he understood this basic fact about women so much better than most of the other men he knew. Or at least he thought he did most of the time. There were always those other times after an encounter with a woman when he came away feeling that he'd had all his neat little theories shoved inside a paper bag, shaken up, and then released in a high stiff wind.

But even those times contributed to the fun. Those were the times that had always pointed him back to the ultimate pleasure of life: The Mystery of Womankind. Those were the times that helped fuel what he used to call his “one holy passion,” a phrase he had heard somewhere and thought was a good way to describe his avid pursuit of that ultimate pleasure. He didn't call it that anymore. For one thing, he had pretty much given up the pursuit, and for another, he had heard those exact three words sung in a hymn at church not long ago in reference to loving God, something that legitimately deserved the adjective
holy
.

But anyway, the point still stood. It was good to be surprised, to have your predictions overturned when it came to dealing with women. If you could ever definitively interpret and label them, could ever really, finally corral and corner them, pin them down and identify their secrets, you'd ruin the grandest adventure in life.

Of course that adventure was mostly a thing of the past now. He tried to keep from thinking about all the casual liaisons he had made in years gone by, and whenever he saw an especially attractive woman walk by now, he tried to avert his eyes, at least most of the time. It was hard, though—a lot harder than most women realized. Any man trying to clean up his heart and mind these days had a really hard row to hoe with all the visual stimulation coming at him from all directions.

Bruce set to work on the jack-o'-lantern's mouth now, first marking the outline with a smaller knife, curving the grin up higher on the side where the eye was in its normal position. He would make it a big goofy snaggletoothed grin. Madison would like that.

Of all the girls and women he had ever met, though, he had never met one quite like the little ice cube next door. Celia was her name, a name that matched her perfectly, that sounded cold and zipped up like a plastic freezer bag. The first night Bruce had laid eyes on her, back in February sometime, Kimberly had said to him after they left her apartment, “Not exactly Miss Hospitality, was she?” And he had said, “Miss Hostility is more like it.”

When he was honest with himself, he had to admit that his great gift for understanding and attracting women hadn't really paid such great dividends in the end. He could have used all that time in his youth a lot more profitably. And during those same honest moments, there was always that bad business of three years ago to remind him over and over that solving the mystery of womankind was something no mortal man should ever try to do. Things that seemed like such fun at first so often turned into tragedy.

The first night he had met Celia, when he and Kimberly had dropped by to see her apartment, he got the feeling she didn't want to be anywhere near them, yet, on the other hand, it seemed as though she wanted to follow them around with the vacuum cleaner and dustcloth to make sure they didn't mess anything up. Besides understanding women better, Bruce was also pretty sure that he paid more attention to details than the average man, and one thing he had noticed that first night was that the mail on the table by Celia's door was spread out in a tidy little fan. It made him want to knock it on the floor just to see what she would do.

But the looks she had given him weren't anything compared to the ones she had given Kimberly and Madison. She looked at them as if they were gigantic cockroaches she wanted to douse with Raid. She was no doubt worried that Madison was going to spit up huge geysers of curdled milk onto one of her paintings, which would also have been fun to see. That was something else that intrigued him about the woman—she lived in a basement apartment that, once you got inside, looked like some kind of art gallery. And it turned out that she worked at an art gallery, which explained why all the stuff covering her walls made it hard to see what color they were painted, though he had noticed they were a butterscotch gold. She had nice stuff, though. Very, very nice. If a person was into collecting
things
, that is, which was another way he had changed his thinking of late.

He and Kimberly hadn't lingered that night, although Patsy Stewart had kept insisting that they see just this one more feature that her brilliant handyman of a husband had thought of adding to the apartment. When Bruce met older women, he often tried to imagine what they had been like when they were younger. He knew exactly what kind of girl Patsy Stewart must have been—stodgy and serious, tediously dull and industrious, explaining everything in great yawn-inducing detail, always concerned that everybody follow the rules. She had probably had that same hairdo since high school, too, lacquered hard like a football helmet. In his girl-chasing days, he never ever would have gone after a Patsy Stewart type.

When he thought about what it would be like to be married for years and years and years to somebody like her, he knew it would take a special kind of man, someone who wasn't all that concerned about earthly pleasures. At church Pastor Monroe was always talking about storing up treasures in heaven. Well, maybe there were going to be endurance rewards up there for people like Patsy Stewart's husband.

But he knew if he were ever to say anything like that out loud, at least in the hearing of women, he'd probably be whapped on the side of the head with somebody's pocketbook. “You think men are the only ones who have to put up with duds for spouses?” somebody would scream, and he'd feel the blows of other pocketbooks on other parts of his body. And he could try to explain himself till he turned blue in the face—“Hey, wait a minute, I was talking about people in general,
anybody
stuck in a boring marriage, not just men”—but the attack wouldn't stop until he was lying senseless on the ground. Women had developed such an edge these days, a lot of them anyway. They used to be able to take a joke better.

Anyway, if a man happened to be interested, if he had any energy left after a couple of decades of hedonism, if he hadn't witnessed the tragic side of love or the whole tragedy called life really, if he hadn't decided to clean up his act once and for all, this woman next door could be looked upon as a challenge. When he and Kimberly had gotten into the car that night, Kimberly had laughed again about the extremely high chill factor in Celia's apartment. “The ultimate touch-me-not,” she had called the woman.