The Lords of Discipline (37 page)

“Do you wish you’d gone ahead and had the abortion?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” I said, staring at the cramped brick enclosure of Fort Sumter at the entrance to the harbor.

“Why?”

“Because I’d never have met you, Annie Kate. You’d be away at some snob college dating rich Virginia boys or rich Charleston boys, and I’d have never gotten a chance to know you or be your friend.”

“I haven’t been very nice to you, Will,” she said, adjusting the angle of my cap. “I’ve taken a lot of anger out on you that should be going toward someone else.”

“I haven’t minded. I just like being with you. I can’t wait for weekends to come, Annie Kate. I hate it when we play games away and I can’t see you. I can’t do anything without thinking about you.”

“How do you think about me, Will?” she asked coyly, a glint of renewed coquetry in her eyes. “Tell me everything you think about me.”

“You won’t get mad?”

“I’ll be furious if you don’t tell me.”

“First I’ve got to describe my fantasy life to you, Annie Kate. My fantasy life has always been a lot richer than my real life. These incredible scenes run on in my head like a movie that can never stop. Sometimes I’m a basketball player who cannot be guarded by anyone in the world. I’m superhuman. I mean that I can do things with a basketball that have never been done before, never been thought about. It’s all so vivid, Annie Kate. I can see every detail. I’ve been the lover of a hundred women who didn’t even know I was attracted to them. Most of them I had never talked to. I followed one woman down King Street one day. She was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. I not only became her lover; I became her husband, the father of her children. I never met her and she never saw me. But in my mind she was absolutely crazy about me.”

“Do you think about me like that?” she asked.

“Like what?”

“Do you think about making love to me? Is that one of your fantasies?”

“No, of course not, Annie Kate,” I lied, and blushed.

“Is that because I’m pregnant?”

“No, not at all. That has nothing to do with it.”

“Then you find me unattractive,” she said sadly.

“You’re beautiful, Annie Kate. Much too beautiful for me. I can’t even look at you for too long. You’re that pretty to me. When you stare at me I always have to turn away. It always makes me feel ugly.”

“Poor boys and their pitiful egos. Will, why do you always talk about yourself as if you were the ugliest boy in the whole world? Why, I’ve seen at least one or two uglier boys, at least. Now don’t you go looking like that. I was only kidding. See how your horrible humor is infectious? I bet everyone who is around you for any length of time jokes the same way you do. I was horrid and spoiled enough when I met you. Now I’m getting your sharp tongue, and no one is ever going to want me.”

“I don’t know of any man alive who wouldn’t want you,” I said.

“I know of at least one.”

“I want you to know this, Annie Kate,” I said, stopping on the beach and turning her toward me. “I don’t know who he is or what he does or why he decided not to marry you or at least stick by you during all of this, but I personally think the guy’s out of his mind to desert you. I think that anybody who walks away from you or walks away from your child has something bad wrong with him, that something is dead inside him that nothing can bring to life again. And I don’t think he’ll ever do any better with a woman as long as he lives.”

“That’s sweet, Will,” she said, taking my arm and smiling warmly to herself, as we began to walk toward her house again. “That’s beautiful and sweet and I appreciate it. Now let’s talk some about you. What are you looking for in a wife? Have you ever thought about that?”

“I’d like her to be female,” I said. “I’ve narrowed it down to that.”

“There you go again,” she scolded. “If someone tries to be serious and conduct an adult conversation then you start that horrible joking again.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I do that, Annie Kate, but I do it to everybody, not just you. If something gets too close or too personal, then I can tell a joke or say something sarcastic and redirect the conversation. It’s an old trick of mine, but I’ll try not to use it on you.”

“I have my little tricks, too,” she admitted.

“What are they?”

“That’s for you to find out and not for me to tell. It’s foolish for a woman to tell all her secrets. But I will tell you one, Will”—her voice dropped into a deeper, sadder tone—“I’m not going to be very good for you. I promise you that.”

“You’re the best thing that’s happened to me since I’ve been to the Institute.”

“You’re certainly not the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said bitterly.

We had reached the seawall, which ran for half a mile along the southwest beach. We were walking on the huge black boulders from which the wall was constructed. I removed her hand from my arm, sprang down from the rocks, and began walking swiftly to my car.

“Will,” I heard her call from behind me. “Where are you going, Will? I didn’t mean to say that. I was trying to be funny like you do. It wasn’t funny and I apologize.”

“You don’t make mean jokes like that to your friends, Annie Kate.”

“And I’m your friend who just said something stupid. And I’m your friend who just couldn’t bear it if you walked out of my life right now. Will, I’m begging you to come back.”

“You don’t have to beg,” I said. “I didn’t have anywhere to go except back to the barracks and that’s nowhere to go at all.”

“Come back here and sit down beside me. Let’s sit on the rocks and watch the sunset, Will. I’m alone too much, and I look forward so much to your coming over every week. The loneliness is killing me, Will. It’s absolutely killing me. If you didn’t call me every day and write me every day, I think I would have killed myself by now.”

My back was still turned away from her when I said, “When I write you or call you or even when I’m with you, Annie Kate, I keep wishing one thing—I wish that it was my child inside you. I wish that I had put the child inside you. I wish I was calling you to see how our child was doing, how my wife was doing, how the mother of my child was doing. I keep wishing it was our child, Annie Kate. That’s the only fantasy I’ve had for months. It won’t leave me, and I can’t get rid of it. It’s much too powerful.”

I felt my face coloring deeply. I was always so stiff and formal whenever I took to the floor to stumble out the elemental steps in my awkward dance of love. I felt as shy as a sand dollar. There was no confident flow or rhythm to my words; it was a panicked, frightened spillage of deeply felt long-suppressed emotion. I had a twenty-two-year-old need to tell some woman that I was in love with her. And I needed a woman who was in no position to refuse my advances, to dishonor and rebuff my initial fervent confession of love. Later, I would think that it was not an accident that I chose an unmarried mother half-crazy from loneliness and abandonment; there was enormous safety in loving such a woman.

“Come back here, Will,” she said softly, “and sit beside me.”

I turned and went back to her, standing on the rocks. The tide was beginning to roll in again, and those great black slabs of granite had the formidable task of inhibiting the erosion along the beach, of impeding the flow and will of the Atlantic Ocean with its immeasurable tonnage and its mindless habit, centuries old, of taking or giving or regaining whatever it damn well pleased. The whole Atlantic coast was littered with groins and jetties designed to keep a portion of the continent from plunging into the sea. The tide poured through the cracks and crevices of those boulders as easily as light filtered through stained glass.

A school of porpoises broke the surface of the water twenty feet from where we had sat down. Their air holes flared explosively like carburetors opening for fuel. Each individual porpoise made a sound slightly different from that of any other, so that the school, all twelve of them, flaring and sliding and dancing so near us, formed a kind of woodwind section on the sea’s surface or even a single instrument, something unknown and astonishing to man, a celebration of breath itself, of oxygen and sea water and sunlight. They had the eyes of large dogs and their skin was the loveliest, silkiest green imaginable.

But even the porpoises could not distract us from the dazzling, soul-altering, brilliant sun as it sank below the horizon out by Tennessee and Alabama. Fort Sumter was behind us now, and its history changed for me as I saw it through the thickets of Annie Kate’s blond hair, as I smelled it through the perfume behind her ears and on her neck. The waters of Charleston gleamed like a newly struck medallion on the last exhausted dissolution of light over water. The light filtered through the steeples of the city, and a faultless linen of the purest and most sensuous gold spread toward us on the water, like a glass of Chablis spilled across a light-stained table. The clouds above the city were filled with subtle shades of pink, magenta, pearl, mauve, and vermilion, but it changed slightly, imperceptibly, permanently with each passing moment, as though the colors were wrought from movable glass as in a kaleidoscope. The pressure of her hand changed as the sun changed and the world around Charleston darkened and the porpoises moved into deeper water and we could no longer hear the primitive music of their breathing. A huge white freighter with its interior lights turned on moved out toward the ocean, bright and celebratory, like a floating birthday cake. Annie Kate did not wave to ships that abandoned her city, but I waved vigorously and with a genuine sense of loss. I wanted the moment to last forever. I would have stopped the freighter near the buoy to Fort Sumter, turned it about, and presented its constant immutable approach to the city as a gift to Annie Kate, a ship that would never leave her. I cannot express how lordly and transfigured I felt at that moment. I was a prince of that harbor, a porpoise king—slim among the buoys and the water traffic. I was aware of the blood rushing in my ears, my heartbeat, the tiny pulse in my wrist, the veins as they stood out on my forearms. It was with a keen, famished regret that I watched the last inanimate light of the sun feather the edges of the horizon. But my hand still held tightly to the hand of Annie Kate, and I felt her body press closely to mine, and I knew that I was living out one of the most important days of my life.

We rose up from the rocks in half darkness with stars beginning to appear in the sky like pale, ethereal jewelry. Looking up at me she took my face in her hands. She studied me with the fine dancing eyes of a girl who has been well trained in the art of looking at a boy. I turned away and watched the waves break against the rocks where we stood. There was a pulse and rhythm to the tide’s aggression against the beach, the harmony and fearfulness of an irresistible force. The sun refused to die out on the horizon. She turned my face back toward hers. There was surprising strength in her small hands. I could barely see myself reflected in her pupils, a diminutive boy smiling foolishly back at myself in that tiny black cell that sang my name on those rocks. It is a precious, world-transfiguring stare when a girl looks at you with love in her eyes for the first time. Pulling my neck toward her face, she kissed me softly. Her lips brushed mine lightly, tenderly, and I felt her mouth open and her tongue slip easily between my teeth. Our tongues met and we kissed with a formal, comical chasteness. We spoke to each other with those searching, silent tongues, at the exact moment when language was not enough. I kissed her as though I was trying to drink her into me. I passed dreams into her and received hers on the black rocks beside the Atlantic.

I did not know a human mouth could taste so sweet or that a human body could feel so fine as it memorized my shape. In her kisses were the hint of berries, of ripeness and salt, all the happy taste of fruit harvested near oceans. For years my own tongue had ripened for this moment. The wind blew through our hair and the spray dampened our faces. The smell of salt and Annie Kate filled my nostrils. She licked the sea water from my face and the sea was ebony and silver through the blond shining flag of her hair. She kissed my eyes and both sides of my throat, taking her time, moving slowly as she memorized the shape of my face and throat. I wanted to make myself handsome for her; I wanted my face to transform into something irresistible, something so outwardly dazzling that she would never want to leave my side again. But most of all, I just wanted to be handsome enough, handsome enough to be the man loved by Annie Kate Gervais.

Chapter Twenty-four

B
eautiful cities have a treacherous nature, and they dispense inferiority to the suburbs that grow up around them with the self-congratulatory piety of a queen distributing mint among lepers. A suburb is simply a form of homage to a city’s vitality, but it rarely receives even the slightest consideration for that homage. Charleston had the democratic good will to look down on all of its suburbs, but it reserved a very special contempt for the industrial city of North Charleston, which not only had the temerity to be extraordinarily common and depressing but had also borrowed the sacred name. To live in North Charleston was an admission of defeat. Industry huddled within its boundaries and a thick miasmic smoke hovered over the tract houses and the trailer parks, infecting each breath of the working class. It was a fine city in which to develop emphysema or lung cancer, and it was a hated city. The jokes of the aristocracy were usually about Jews, niggers, and North Charleston. There was an incontestable sadness to this unpraised, homely suburb, and there was never any reason for us to pass through its ordinary streets. That is, unless we needed to drive to Columbia or the county fair set up its midway on a dusty, unused field at the edge of town.

I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year. Each year I thought that at least one class act would force its way into a booth or sideshow, but I was always mistaken. The lure of the fair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers.