Peachtree Road (31 page)

Lucy stretched her long legs out in front of her and lit a cigarette. “Mayor Hartsfield had it all wrong,” she said. “We weren’t a city too busy to hate. We were a city PEACHTREE ROAD / 235

too busy to fuck. What a waste. Money is only money, but a good fuck is a fuck.”

I speak of the Pinks and the Jells as “we,” but it is largely an editorial we. I attended the endless dances, but usually as a nonparticipatory member of the stag line, one denizen of the anthill that gave the butterfly Pinks such vivid life. I almost never went to the dinners beforehand, or the breakfasts afterward. When I absolutely had to have a date, I took Sarah Cameron, with whom I had been at ease from the beginning of our lives. I sometimes joined the swooping flocks after school, but only because the Fury was such a powerful seductress, and I usually ended up dropping clunking, iron-weighted Pres Hubbard off at his house and going relicking with Charlie, or going home to study and then slip fathoms back into the old, nourishing, ongoing communion with Lucy.

I liked the aimless, bright wheeling and admired the glorious mating plumage of the flock, and I knew the drill, thanks to family money and the herculean efforts of Margaret Bryan and sheer proximity to my generation of anointed. It was just that it all felt queer and stilted to me; remote and unin-volving, as if I was engaged in some sort of elaborate charade that no one recognized as such but me. I always felt, watching a ballroom full of pretty girls swaying like a bright, precious garden in the soft little wind of music, that they were not, somehow, real, not truly present; and that I alone breathed and moved and spoke.

But at other times, in the cheerful, antiseptic cacophony of Wender & Roberts, or in mindless, pellmell midrush down the last long hill on Peachtree before the city limits of Atlanta loomed up, it seemed as if everything and everyone around me was real, superreal, hyperreal, and only I did not truly exist. Only with Lucy did actuality flow both ways. I had a sliding perception of

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reality in those days, but I knew absolutely and without knowing how that for me it lay somewhere else than the Buckhead and Atlanta of the Pinks and the Jells.

“Where will you go?” Sarah Cameron asked me once, when I spoke of leaving Atlanta when I was able.

“To New York,” I said, not knowing why I said it, only that it was true.

“How long have you wanted to do that? I never heard you talk about it,” she said, surprised.

“Always,” I said, as surprised as she to find that it was true.

Unlike virtually anyone else in my immediate crowd of Jells except Charlie Gentry, I liked to study, especially history and English literature, and I made impressive grades. The grades were never the point; I could lose myself for hours in the dreaming, sunny flower fields of the school and public libraries, and only after I came blinking and stretching up for air and awareness did I realize how totally happy I had been. It was the beginning of my lifelong passion for pure research, the only love save one that never left or betrayed me. It has been what I have lived with and one of the very few things I have lived for, these many years in the summerhouse.

The resultant grades, though, made my mother smile, and even my father would occasionally nod approval at the pristine string of A’s, though he seldom failed to remark that with my height, I ought to be a first-string guard by now.

Lucy, however, applauded them with her whole heart, and Lucy was still, in those days, the sun that warmed me, even though, since that night in the summerhouse, a sun that I knew could also sear me mortally.

It never occurred to me to ask her to any of the dances and parties; I honestly did not, at least consciously, think of her in that way, and she did not seem

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to consider me romantically. She was still, to my eyes and senses, utterly and powerfully seductive, but she did not yet seem to be conscious of it, and I had, in those few charring moments on that spinning daybed, distanced myself so completely from her as a woman that I could observe her almost as thoroughly and clinically as a sociologist.

And in every other respect, we had not changed for each other; even though I had moved into a world that was far closer to adulthood than hers, we were still safe havens for each other. I think we both sensed that a romantic alliance would have spoiled that, and we still, and always, needed each other in that way more than in any other. So I took Sarah Cameron to the few dances I attended and then came home and spun them out for Lucy’s delectation like a parent bird with a ravenous chick, and she gave me back the great lift and leap of her rich laugh, and her boundless, soaring approval. In those days, as I have said, I was her heart, and she, conversely, was my wings.

I did not see, never saw, really, the look of adoration on Sarah’s small face when she lifted it to me. I can still scarcely credit that it was there. Charlie would tell me occasionally,

“Sarah has a crush on you,” and I simply did not believe him.

I suppose I thought he was transferring his long, aching, silent love for Sarah onto me, and I hastened, each time he said it, to hand that love back to him.

I could not believe that any girl could look at me with adoration. I had long since, on some tender and carefully submerged level, accepted my mother’s dictum that I was too immature and sensitive for what she termed “that silly teenaged boy-girl business,” and also my father’s that I was simply not the man for it. Neither, now, was true, but I did not know that. The real truth was that I was not, by now, a sissy, and there had never been

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anything effeminate about me. I had simply, on that night with Lucy, buried desire deep.

And so we went, I wading aimlessly in the shallows of Jellhood, a great waiting for something I could not name filling what crannies of my being were not occupied by Lucy, she stoically doing her time in the sunless prison of the terrible little girls’ school, both of us still caught, and content with the captivity, in the roles of heroine-victim and savior-saint. I don’t know how long it would have gone on thus, but it seems to me now, from the vantage point of the passed years, that it was doomed to end exactly the way it did.

Lucy graduated from Miss Beauchamp’s with just enough credits to secure her freedom and virtually no academic honors the spring when she was twelve, and that fall entered the eighth grade at North Fulton High. Busy with my long hours in the library and the autumn flurry of Jellhood, and still savoring with her the old, celldeep kinship at home after school, I noticed no appreciable change in her. She still looked to me as she had for a long, suspended time: a silvery willow sapling, a fine colt frozen at the apogee of its childhood. I had long stopped wondering why no one but me noticed the air-charging impact of her. She seemed to slip into the stream of North Fulton without so much as a ripple.

I scarcely saw her at all during those first days.

In the third week after school started, I went down onto the burning athletic field to meet the three other members of the 880 relay team for the second practice of the season.

Ben Cameron and A. J. Kemp were both on the team; oddly, for few Jells participated in high school sports. But the 880

was perfect for Ben’s whiplike speed and grace, and A.J. in motion of any kind was wonderful to watch. The fourth member was Fraser Tilly, a small, rabbity, stone-silent junior from out beyond Sandy Springs, who could lope forever like a timber wolf and

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sprint like the jackrabbit he resembled, and was better at the 880 than the three of us Buckhead Jells put together.

It was the sixth and last period of the day, and several knots of boys and girls dotted the bleached grass of the field, preparing to stumble with loathing through the last physical education classes of the day. It was so hot that the figures on the far end of the field seemed to shimmer like mirages in a desert, and sweat soaked the hideous blue and white shorts and shirts that North `ègant Ben Cameron, looked awful in them, swaddled and storklike. The girls looked, simply, unspeakable. The Pinks at North Fulton hated being seen in their P.E. uniforms even more than being caught in home-permanent curlers and papers, with Noxzema on their acne.

I was late, and the track coach was a new one, a beetling, clifflike Teuton with a no-color burr of a crew cut and cold, Baltic eyes. He had tongue-lashed A.J. so badly for missing the first practice that A.J., the irrepressible one, the golden-tongued smart mouth, had had tears in his eyes before he was done. I ran silently down the stone steps of the stadium, my cleated shoes in my hand, in dread of the coach’s coiled tongue.

But they were not looking at me. They were standing close together in a huddle, backs to me, heads close together, obviously staring at something across the field that I could not see. They were laughing, and though I could not hear what they said, I knew the tenor of that laughter. I had heard it a hundred times in locker rooms and dark booths, when the talk of fucking and genitalia began; had even tried, clumsily, to join in myself. It was the laughter of the Buckhead Jells for a girl considered to be little better than a whore. I heard the huge coach say something that ended in “…little pussy right out there on a stick. Bet we could all get a lick of that without even asking for it.”

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I reached the group and looked beyond it to see who they were talking about, and it was Lucy. She was standing with her sixth period soccer class, doing absolutely nothing but standing stockstill in the sun on the edge of the group of girls, dressed, as they all were, in the hated blue bloomers and white shirt. But all of a blinding sudden I could see what Ben and A.J. and Fraser Tilly and the coach saw: the white flesh of Lucy Bondurant looking so totally naked in the merciless sunlight of September that the shorts and shirt might as well not have been there; small, sharp breasts that appeared absolutely bared even under the starched white; long legs joined in so obvious a cupping of tender genitalia that the blue bloomers could have been made of transparent netting. Lucy’s clothing was not tight, and she did not flaunt her body; did not even move it. She simply stood straight and still, looking back across the field at them, and I could both feel and see the molten blueness of her eyes in an empty sunlit silence that rang like a bell, over and under the sly, fetid laughter of the 880 team.

They turned and saw me then, and fell abruptly silent, and the laughter stopped. Ben reddened, and A.J. looked away.

Ben, A.J.
…

Fraser Tilly and the Prussian coach busied themselves knocking dried mud off their cleats. The afternoon swung around me; the air swarmed like bees. Lucy stood before my friends and teammates and the hulking, alien betrayer utterly exposed, and now everyone knew what it was that, in the dark center of me, I had always known: Lucy Bondurant went naked in the world.
Lucy could be taken
. I had, once again and now irrevocably, failed to shield and protect her, and in that moment, the power of my sainthood fled for the last time, and only the hunger for it remained.

CHAPTER NINE

W
hen I turned sixteen and got the red and white Fury, the last rational barrier to full participation in Jellhood fell, and I could think of no good reason to avoid the dinners and dances and breakfasts, and so, borne by the daunting splendor of my wheels and urged on by my mother, I began to attend the bulk of them.

“You simply cannot think of missing another one, Sheppie,”

my mother would say, coming out to beard me in my den in the summerhouse when a determined inquisition at dinner unearthed the fact that I had not gone to the last two or three and had no plans for the one upcoming. “These little parties are where the debutante lists are drawn from; you know that as well as I do. Do you want to go through five or six entire seasons without being on a single list? Your future is being built right now. Of course you’re going. Now come on in the house and call one of your pretty girlfriends. Little Sarah Cameron would just love to go with you. Do you want me to call Dorothy for you?”

And, face flaming with the sheer awfulness of my mother calling the mother of a girl, even Sarah, I would stalk into the big house and slink sullenly into the telephone niche under the foyer staircase, and dial the Camerons’ number.

“Sarah,” I would say without identifying myself, “I’ve got to go to that stupid Alpha Nu thing Friday night, and my mother won’t get off my back until I get a date. I don’t guess you want to go, do you?”

“Thanks, Shep,” Sarah would say. “I’d love to go. It sounds like fun.”

Even at fourteen, she had a woman’s full-throated and warming voice, with the rich little hill of laughter 242 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

under it that always drew people to her, and her simple, glad-hearted acceptance was so much more gracious than my mean, muttered invitation that I blush even now, all these years later, to think of it. It didn’t occur to me then that I was being rude to Sarah. It was many years before I fully stopped taking that bounty of approval and affection for granted.

Those Friday evenings when I departed in the Fury, white orchid in hand, pleased my parents almost more than anything I had ever done, and the fact of that made me obscurely truculent and melancholy. I went to the dances gracelessly and morosely, but I went correctly. My father took me down to John Jarrell’s and had me fitted for a magnificent tuxedo, the only one I have ever owned; it was a lustrous, penguin-black single-breasted suit of fine wool, with a rich satin shawl collar, and with it I wore a blinding white pleat-front shirt with a soft collar and French cuffs. A black satin cummerbund and tie completed the outfit, and my grandfather Redwine’s onyx and gold cuff links and smoked pearl studs were grace notes.

These my mother brought me on the night of the first Friday evening dance of that season, insisting on inserting and fastening them herself. As she bent in front of me, I could smell the smoky, bittersweet breath of Hermès’ Calèche that was her signature that autumn, and the clean, light floral odor of the shampoo that her hairdresser at J. P. Allen’s used.