Spinning Dixie (16 page)

2005

There are different theories about when middle age begins. On the evening before I left for Tennessee, I typed “midlife crisis” into an Internet search engine on a White House computer. The computer spit out articles denoting ages ranging from thirty-five to fifty-five. The male midlife crisis, according to the experts, comprised “depression, marital disharmony, obsession with death, feelings of worthlessness, trouble at work, intense attractions to younger women, and sexual problems.” All in all, Mardi Gras.

As the Panamanian and I boarded a Learjet used to carry out Air Force Special Mission 14060, we overheard one maintenance engineer ask another where the plane was headed. The other man responded, “What plane?”

The nonexistent aircraft took off from Andrews Air Force Base in Suitland, Maryland, at nine o'clock EST in the morning and traveled five hundred and twenty-seven nautical miles to land at Maury County Airport, a small regional affair that accommodated small jets. The land beneath the airport had once been a part of the Rattle & Snap tract, and was about a mile from the mansion. This proximity would prove to be very useful.

The manifest had listed the mission's call name as Operation Dixie Knish. Very funny, Mr. President.

“Put on your getup, Jonah,” the Panamanian reminded me before we deplaned inside of a private hangar. It consisted of a ponytailed blond wig and matching mustache. I looked like General Custer at a NASCAR event. “And don't interact with anybody. Just go straight to the car.” We drove a hunter green rented Chevrolet about a mile to Rattle & Snap.

The plantation's landscape was refreshingly the same as it was when I left in 1980, with the exception of several industrial buildings that sat low in a valley to the east of the mansion.

The house, bless its pillars, appeared to be precisely the same. The trees, perhaps, were thinner. I envisioned General Don Carlos Buell returning to Rattle & Snap and again giving it a reprieve from the torches of his men. It would not be George Washington Polk's Masonic ring that saved the place this time. My sense was that this burden would be falling to me.

I parked several hundred yards from the mansion when I saw a figure move in a first-floor window. “I'll have a look around the grounds,” Marcus said.

“That would be best, given—”

“No need to justify, Jonah.”

What does a man think about after all these years when he returns to visit his epic love? In my case, I was thinking about my hair. I removed my disguise, but could not shift my eyes away from the passenger-side mirror. What would Claudine see first, an aging fool (in pretty good shape for forty-three, I might add) or sunlight bouncing off my brow?

When I had last seen Claudine, my hair was thick, wavy, and black. I could work in the sun for hours and have no pink on my scalp to show for it. This was no longer so. A sizable patch of hair had decisively thinned out during my thirties. I had plenty of hair flecked with silver insurgents, except for this, this damned moon roof. I didn't kid myself: No one would confuse me with an eighteen-year-old knight-errant anymore.

As I opened the car door, I thought of Neil Armstrong. I had the notion that I was about to take a historic step. I studied the rocks on the driveway and tried to determine if there was anything lunar about them. I decided that the extraterrestrial quality of the plantation had more to do with the blur of time and space than anything that could be found in rock samples. Here I was, a living contradiction: a Man of Achievement who had fallen from an exalted place; a married father of two with an expectation of meeting a gorgeous eighteen-year-old girl; a hard-nosed realist with delusions of reversing God's orbit. But maybe it was possible: Wasn't the earth, after all, in the same approximate position in space right now it had been in on my first giant leap onto this soil in 1980?

Claudine stood, Corinthian, on the porch beside Rattle & Snap's other columns. Slender, taut, and chiseled by the spirits of her frontier, she took gazelle steps toward my Jeep. In middle age, Claudine had cropped her hair to an efficient shoulder length, her long hair having proven to be some sort of threat to the operation of a millennial plantation. Her smile was tight; she may have just been the wreck that I was. She brushed a renegade strand of hair from her temples, perhaps covering a few silver strands. Her discomfort cruelly served as a booster shot that gave me the juice to move closer.

Claudine was wearing khakis, a pink polo shirt, and paddock boots. The outfit was the natural evolution of what she had worn when we first met. She wore little makeup. I wore khaki pants, a gauzy white cotton shirt, and a light sport jacket that I bought from Brooks Brothers not long after I graduated from college.

I could see that Claudine's eyes still flashed green, but the untamed edge they once had had throttled down. She had made the precise metamorphosis that I had imagined, from a tearing beauty to an aging royal—like Jackie Kennedy had looked when her kids hit their teens. Maybe I was perverted, but I always thought Jackie was hotter in her forties than she was as first lady. Claudine was beautiful, but, finally, of a species resembling my own.

When nervous, Jonah, be a smart-ass.

“Sorry I'm late,” I said. “The pilot said we'd be landing in nineteen eighty.”
Ba-dum-dum.

Claudine laughed. “Well, you know how it is with vectors, but at least you got here all right.” Despite our earlier phone calls, I had forgotten how deep her accent was, all Confederate coins spilling into a wishing well.
Yew gawt he-yar owl rah-aht.
The accent defused the tension I was feeling, the compulsion to explode with the question:
“Who was that girl outside the White House?”

I hugged her, wondering when adultery officially left the starting block. I feared that Claudine may have felt my tension (tension = not sexy). She hooked her arm in mine, and we climbed the seven steps toward the portico—I remembered that number, seven—and I felt like we weren't so much passing through the house as we were haunting it. I felt the loony impulse to creep from room to room shouting, “Boo!”

The place was eerily the same as it was when I left, which, I suppose, was the whole point of being a Polk. The great portrait of George Washington Polk still hung in the entryway. Colonel Polk, Sallie Hilliard, and Andrew Jackson still disapproved of me from the same walls.

Claudine took me into the kitchen and poured me lemonade. Our reunion ritual. I heard a creak from elsewhere in the house and turned around.

“J.T. and I have been separated for eight years, Jonah. He's not here.”

I drank. “Separated, not divorced?”

“He won't grant me a divorce.”

“Were you the one who wanted out?”

“We both wanted out, but certain things prevented it.”

“Would one of those certain things be a child?”

Claudine set her lemonade down on the counter.

“Actually, Jonah, Sallie supports the divorce.”

“Sallie?” I said. My voice cracked. I could stand before the national press corps and not flinch while announcing a missile strike on a foreign capital, but Claudine says the name Sallie and I almost faint.

“I understand you've met.”

“She didn't tell me her name, Claud.”

“She was nervous, I'm sure.”

“Why would that be?”

Claudine sighed. “You're famous. She's heard so much about you.”

My vanity was piqued. “Like what?”

“Oh, Jonah, our history.”

“She has your bewitching quality.”

“You're still charming,” Claudine said, flipping back her hair. Her features remained classic. I suppose one could ask, Why wouldn't they? After all, a nose is a nose. Perhaps. Maybe something happens to a nose, perhaps subtly in the cells itself, in the mind of the outside observer who covets the nose, or in the invisible atmosphere between the two parties. I'm not sure which, but there was a practicality about her midlife good looks, a practicality, as opposed to the hot-fudge-sundae deliciousness that had once engulfed me.

“Tell me about her,” I asked. I wanted to say “Sallie,” but couldn't.

“She's a wonderful girl. She graduated from Vanderbilt. She works on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide.”

“When did she graduate?” I asked.

Claudine hesitated.

“She got her degree in two thousand three.”

I was terrible at math, so I took a slow sip of lemonade as I attempted to back out her birth year. I'm awful at dates, too. I honestly don't know which months have thirty days and which have thirty-one. There was a calendar tacked to a corkboard on the wall. My eyes caught the minuscule letters in the date boxes. It was Passover. There was cornbread on the counter. Total violation.

“So you and J.T. got married while you were still in college, huh?”

“Yes. Thanksgiving, nineteen eighty.”

“Wow. Fast-a-mundo.”

“Yes, I suppose. I got pregnant after you left.”

“I left in early September. When was Sallie born?”

“May twenty-third, nineteen eighty-one.”

“Are you sure? About when you got pregnant?” Slick, Jonah.

Claudine didn't respond. This could mean anything. The date of Sallie's birth could point to either J.T. or myself. My old girlfriend was the Sphinx.

“Tell me more, Claudine, about our reunion?”

Claudine walked me outside to the porch. She brought out the cornbread, perhaps to remind God that my stay in Eden should be limited. We sat across from each other. She took my hands. The obstacle in the divorce proceedings between Claudine and J.T. was Rattle & Snap. Through a legal trust mechanism that Claudine didn't understand, J.T. had the property switched into his name. He had slipped her the bombshell document among routine tax papers many years ago, when things between the two of them were better.

RED FLAG
: Claudine's too smart to have fallen for something like this.

COUNTER
: Mickey was supposedly so smart he had hundreds of millions of dollars squirreled away in overseas accounts. My inheritance? A few acres of land in West Virginia.

THE MORAL
: Smart people can do stupid things.

“Have you looked at legal options?”

“Of course. My lawyer—after he throttled me—told me that it would be very hard to prove fraud.”

“Even though it was fraud.”

“I signed the documents, Jonah. It would be a mess to prove otherwise, especially since J.T. would argue—truthfully—that he had managed so many of my business affairs. I can't stand in front of a judge and say, ‘Yes, Your Honor, I let him handle these ninety-nine things, but not this one hundredth matter.”

“Does he want to live here?”

“No, he just doesn't want me to live here.”

“What about Sallie? He'd throw her out, too?”

For the first time, the sunlight caught Claudine in a way that betrayed crow's-feet around her eyes. “I don't know. I don't think he'd see it that way.”

“What's their relationship like?”

“It's never been good.”

“And why is that, Claudine?” I asked. I felt a shiv in my own voice.

Claudine was exasperated. Exasperation had never been a Claudine attribute. This aging beauty had become a trapped she-wolf. “Chemistry, Jonah. Or whatever causes fissures between fathers and daughters.”

Confront her directly, Jonah. No, don't, she'll lie. Play her game. Be patient. (Not your strong suit.)

“What is it you think I can do to help?”

“I don't know.”

“Then why call me after all these years? What is my magic?”

“Rattle & Snap is my heritage, my history, my blood. I can't just throw up my arms and give it up. In a way, it's your history, too.”

RED FLAG NO
. 2: It's my history. In a way.

“I spent a summer here, Claud. Are you telling me that this is part of my history, or are you telling me that it's part of my blood?”

“It is part of you.”

“But is it in my
blood?
Do you see where I'm going? There's a difference. You may be mistaking what's good for you with what's a part of me.”

“What did you see in Sallie, Jonah?”

“She had that forest fire in her eyes like you did. Furies whirling around in her pupils. Like I did. Like Deedee did. Like my daughter Lily does. Lily has auburn hair, too.”

“I know she does. I saw you holding her once on TV.”

Getting nowhere, Jonah. Throttle up: “I'm sorry to be so crude, but did you ever have blood tests done?”

“Let me ask you something, Jonah. If you were in my position, would you have had blood work done?”

“What
was
your position exactly?” I was shaking now. I took a piece of cornbread. It dissolved, unleavened, in my mouth.

Nuclear eyes from Claudine! My God, how had she interpreted this? A bawdy Shakespearean pun?

“My position was my position!” she said, breaking down, which set off my own catharsis. “My family didn't have a dime, Jonah. This great plantation, and nothing to back it up.” We collapsed into each other, an evolutionary manifestation of our ancient, demented attraction.

“What was I supposed to do?” she asked, her voice muffling in my shirt. The second I felt her movement against me and smelled her hair, the promises of 1980 poured back—a fresh start—and I knew I was going to do it. Whatever “it” was. I had never gotten a straight answer from Claudine or a clean expression of sentiment, so why would this night be different from all other nights?