Littlejohn Read online

  Only two weeks before my Great Revelation, Max had made his move. He invited me to his apartment after a faculty meeting, supposedly to get my opinion on a problem he was having with setting in his second novel. (You should set it aside, I was thinking, and get a job.) He fixed us each a bourbon and water, then sat beside me while he described the problem. He slipped his arm behind me on his little student-issue couch as he talked, playing with my hair. Then he moved in, awkwardly, for the kiss. I turned and we bumped heads, causing him to spill half his bourbon. He pledged his unyielding devotion, I gave him my happy-wife-and-mother speech and we parted with a minimum of embarrassment. Since then, we’d spoken several times, once in private as he slipped into my ten-by-ten office, closed the door quickly behind him and told me how much my friendship meant to him.

  After I found out what was keeping Jeff from coming home until seven on Tuesday and Friday nights, though, and who accompanied him to Denver for the business trip in October, my thoughts turned to Max.

  “I have to see you,” I told him over the office phone, speaking to the instrument of my revenge three doors away. “It’s very important.… No, not here. Come by my house at five-thirty.… No, I can’t tell you over the phone.”

  Back in Cotton Hall at UNC—G, other girls in the dorm would beg me to answer the phone as their proxy when prospective blind dates from Chapel Hill called. Looks come and go, but a good voice lasts. When I say, “I have to see you,” better than Max Winfree have come running.

  It was a Friday in April, a week before we found out about Mom. Justin was spending the night with Trey Carlson, three blocks away. Jeff would be at his Friday after-work poker session, a habit he’d started last summer, shortly before Bev Lundquist started working for him. I wondered, grinding my teeth, if Jeff and his broker buddies got a few laughs out of the double entendre of “poker.” At any rate, I would count on him to arrive within five minutes of seven, faithful even in his infidelity. It had been all I could do the previous Friday to restrain myself from dinging him with a Jefferson cup when he came through the door, all fake cheerfulness, so full of guilt I couldn’t believe I hadn’t sensed it on my own.

  At 5:25, Max Winfree’s banged-up secondhand Isuzu pulled into the drive. He got out, closing the door carefully so as not to disturb the neighbors, and came up the walk to the front door. I waited until he rang the bell, looking nervously over his shoulder as if the irate husband might come wheeling up at any second.

  “Come in, Max,” I said, trying to put as much heat into those three little words as possible. I was wearing an old pair of form-fitted jeans and a silk blouse, no bra. I could feel my nipples puckering in the late-afternoon chill. I used to go braless around the house a lot because Jeff liked it, but I had seldom gone public, so to speak.

  He closed the door, leaned down and kissed me. I let him, meeting his tongue with mine as he placed his left hand on the small of my back and his right hand a bit lower.

  “Wait,” I said, moving back a step. “Go outside and move the car out of the driveway. I don’t want the neighbors to see.”

  In his present state, Max didn’t bother to dwell for long on how much more suspicious it looked for him to back his car down the drive, park it two doors down on the street and then walk back to our house. He was a bit distracted.

  When he returned, he let himself in. I had mixed a couple of black Russians, mine a bit stronger than his, and did my best to restrict things to kissing and a little petting for the time being. Relax, I told him, we’ve got all night. My son’s at a friend’s house, and my husband’s on a business trip. Monkey-business trip, I thought. On my way home, a little after four, I had detoured through a neighborhood I’d looked up on the city map. There, at 207 Park, was Jeff’s burgundy Cressida. I never have liked to leave anything to chance.

  Finally, at twenty minutes to seven, after two black Russians, a lot of kissing and a fair amount of fondling, mostly by Max, I stood up, unbuttoned my silk blouse and took it off. I felt a little foolish, but black Russians are great at drowning inhibitions. Max started forward, but I motioned for him to wait. He started to take his shirt off, but I told him, “I want to do that myself.”

  I laid the blouse on the floor, then took off my sandals, setting them down in a straight line between the couch and the master bedroom door. Next came the jeans and then, at heaven’s gate itself, my panties. I led Max inside and told him to wait. I guess he never bothered to wonder why I would be concerned enough to remove two drink glasses from the coffee table and put them in the kitchen.

  When I got back to the bedroom, I locked the door from the inside. Max was already down to his shorts and was out of them in about two seconds. Not bad, I thought, and realized maybe I was enjoying this a little more than I’d planned. Oh well, you can’t plan everything. I led him over to our brass queen-size bed, where he planted his tongue solidly in my ear and started stroking my thigh, higher, higher …

  “Wait,” I said, rolling away just before we went over the edge. I stood up and went to the dresser, opened the bottom drawer and pulled out the ropes.

  “Indulge an old lady,” I told him, stretching the two elastic cords back and forth like an accordion, trying to look like I did this all the time. I hit on this part of the plan the day I had to haul the lawnmower to the repair shop in the trunk of the car. Jeff had bought this elastic rope with hooks on each end to tie down the trunk lid when something was too large to fit with it closed. I bought another one just like it at the hardware store on the way home.

  I pushed Max back on the bed and crawled on top of him. I wrapped the first cord around his left wrist, hooking that end to one of the vertical brass posts at the head of the bed, then wrapped the other end around his right wrist and attached the hook to the bed on that side.

  “Boy, you older women are kinda kinky,” Max said, trying to inject a note of levity. I could see that he was a little taken aback at the thought of a woman seizing complete control. If he noticed the white rectangle on the sliding glass door that led out to the deck, or if he wondered why someone fastidious enough to clean up drink glasses wouldn’t bother to close the blinds before screwing one of her graduate students, he kept it to himself.

  I tied his feet the same way, leaving him spread-eagled on the bed. I sneaked a peak at my digital watch, my only item of clothing: 6:54. I turned on the lamp light, explaining, “I like to watch,” then mounted him. Just like that. Fifteen years of fidelity out the window.

  I was trying to keep control of myself and Max, and I wondered if this would be the one night that Jeff was both unfaithful and late. Then, after what seemed like a very long time, with the watch showing 7:02 and Max writhing and groaning underneath me, I heard the Cressida pull into the driveway.

  “Oh shit,” said Max, noticeably shrinking from the task.

  “Listen,” I said, shushing him, “if you remain quiet, and don’t panic, everything will be all right. You really don’t have much choice anyhow, do you?” and I gave him a reassuring smile as I wriggled a little bit to regain his full attention.

  I could hear the car door close, then heard Jeff fumble with the keys and, finally, open the front door. Our house is a contemporary, with a large living room, where Max and I had been, under a cathedral ceiling. The master bedroom is back and to the right, past the kitchen. I could imagine Jeff following the trail of clothes to the bedroom door, where my panties were hanging on the doorknob with a note pinned to them: USE THE OTHER DOOR.

  Jeff knows I like to play games. One Halloween, after he’d gotten up about a dozen times to take care of trick-or-treaters at the door while I worked on a research paper, I had slipped out of my clothes, into a raincoat and out the side door. I rang the front bell, and when he answered, I flung the coat open and said, “Trick or treat!” It was this, my willingness to go the extra mile, to give 110 percent, that really pissed me off when I found out about Bev Lundquist. I mean, what did he want?

  I figured Jeff was feeling a little gu
ilty right now, was depending on that, in fact. He would go back to the kitchen, then through the door to the porch, which led to the deck, which led to the sliding-glass door I was looking out from atop Max Winfree. Maybe Jeff wouldn’t want to be amorous tonight. Maybe he couldn’t be amorous anymore tonight, I thought, grinding my teeth and grinding Max a little, too.

  I could hear Jeff at the bedroom door, then listened as he walked back to the kitchen, moving, I thought, a little hesitantly. I saw him come out on the screen porch, then go through the door to the deck. He was about halfway across when he probably realized that having to satisfy two women in one night was not his biggest problem.

  Through the sliding-glass door that I had secured with the charley bar from inside, I saw Jeff go from sheepish to shocked as we stared at each other through the triple-pane glass. I worked up the most devastating sneer I could manage under, or rather over, the circumstances, slowly raised my right hand in his direction and offered him my middle finger.

  A husband with a clear conscience probably would have broken the glass door or gone back inside and kicked in the main bedroom door with my panties still hanging on it. But Jeff Bowman’s conscience was about as muddy as a mountain creek after a spring flood. If he needed any further evidence of my primary motive, he needed to look no farther than the cardboard message taped to the sliding-glass door, the one I’d written with a red Magic Marker just before Max arrived. It said: GO BACK TO 207 PARK, ASSHOLE. And so he did.

  He left quietly, and I eventually untied Max, with whom I slept two more times out of gratitude. But I didn’t want to be around when Max finally realized that a lack of talent would doom him to teaching others how to write.

  I left the door open for Jeff, leaving it for him to decide whether I sought freedom or just revenge. I wasn’t sure myself. We’re both strong-willed people, and neither of us ever apologized for much. He just came over during the day one Thursday and took away most of his clothes. It was almost a month before we spoke, and by then I think we both realized that any life we shared would be of a considerably diminished nature, accusations and despair no farther away than one wrong word.

  He still lives with Bev Lundquist, with no apparent plans to marry, and I’ve spent the shank of the summer traveling around Europe with Mark Hammaker. Mark’s forty-eight, he’s managing editor of the daily paper here, the Montclair Light, and we’ve had some good times. We might have some more. I don’t know.

  Justin stayed with Jeff and Bev as much as he wanted after we broke up. The reason Justin had to turn to his grandfather for help, I guess, is that I didn’t want him with Mark and me in Europe, and Jeff and Bev didn’t want him with them at Hilton Head, where they spent most of June and July. I told him there was no way we could afford for him to go to Europe, too. He didn’t take it well. I thought he’d get over his hurt spending the summer with Trey and the Carlsons.

  We had to sell our contemporary with the deck and porch after the separation and divorce, and Justin and I moved into a town house near the university and Justin’s high school. Justin seemed to take it all in stride, just grew quieter and taller. I never slept over at Mark’s unless Justin was staying with friends.

  The past school year, though, Justin’s grades started to slip. Most upsetting to me, he was doing poorly in English. This boy, who was read to from good books as soon as he could listen, who read Robinson Crusoe at eight and The Catcher in the Rye at twelve, almost flunked sophomore English, after nothing but A’s and B’s all through elementary and junior high school.

  He doesn’t like Mark much, which hardly surprises me. Mark is a disciplinarian. When his own son got a little wild his senior year in high school, Mark sent him to Fork Union, a military school, to “straighten him out.” He’d like to do the same with Justin. Over my dead body. Mark’s son now lives in San Francisco and visits him every two years or so.

  Justin seems to take a perverse delight in rejecting everything I’ve ever tried to teach him. Anything I think is trash, Justin immediately adopts. Pulp science fiction, rap music, sit-coms for the brain-damaged. His group at school seems to consist mainly of other professors’ sons and daughters, most of them suffering from an imbalance of love and knowledge.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  August 8

  It was early June when I looked up from my hoeing and saw a ghost coming toward me.

  Ever since Sara died, I had took care of the flower beds she used to love, and that morning I was hoeing away, thinking about Lafe, about how you could spy him half a mile away, walking in from the fields or from hunting, with that red hair of his that looked so much like Daddy’s in the old pictures. I always looked more like Momma, who was a Geddie.

  The ghost was maybe a hundred yards away, which is about all the far I can see anymore. It was walking kind of tired, like it was climbing uphill. It had a sack on its back, throwed over its shoulder and held with one hand, the other arm swinging free to help it get through the sand in the old rut road. Lafe had surely come back, was surely coming home with some Irish potatoes he’d dug out of the hill for Momma.

  “Looks like you got enough taters there to last us all winter,” I said to Lafe’s ghost. By now, it was close enough, maybe fifty feet away, for me to see that the hair was different. It was short, like Lafe’s, but it was spikier, rougher looking.

  “What in the world have you done to your hair?” I asked the ghost, leaning on the hoe handle to keep from falling.

  The ghost stopped five feet from me and said, “Granddaddy, are you all right?”

  It was Justin, my grandson.

  He set down this bag, the one I’d thought was full of potatoes, and said he’d come to visit me. He looked like he’d been rode hard and hung up wet. I reckon I took a little while to shift gears and get my poor addled brain back to the real world. Finally I asked him what in the world he was doing in East Geddie, and where his momma was, and then I remembered that she was in Europe somewhere.

  Justin reached out to shake my hand. He’s near-bout grown, must be at least six foot two, but he don’t weigh more than 150 pounds. Him and me never seemed like we had all that much in common, and it struck me as queer that he was telling me he’d just decided to come down for a visit, with Georgia in Europe and all. But he appeared to need some looking after.

  “I reckon we better get you something to eat,” I told him. “You look about half starved. Come on in the house.”

  I took some biscuits out of the freezer, wrapped them in tinfoil and put them in the toaster oven, then got some ham out of the refrigerator and started frying it in the skillet. We had three more jars of Sara’s peach preserves left, so I got some of them down, then got some apple jelly. I hadn’t done much entertaining here lately, so I was just reaching for anything that might of been good to eat. Lord, I don’t know what-all they eat up in Virginia.

  I found some cold fried chicken left over from some Jenny had brought me. I offered to warm up some collards, knowing Justin thinks about as much of them as I do, just to try and get him to smile.

  We set down at the big old dining-room table where eight of us used to eat three meals a day, and Justin started to spear a couple of pieces of ham with his fork. I reckon he noticed that I hadn’t moved yet, and he remembered where he was.

  “Would you like to ask the blessing, Justin?” I asked him.

  “No thank you, Granddaddy,” he said.

  I bowed my head.

  “Kind heavenly father, bless this meal we are about to partake of, and bless our loved ones here and abroad, that they may come back to us safely. Amen.”

  I opened my eyes and saw Justin staring from across the table.

  “Well, go ahead,” I told him. “It’s blessed. Dig in.”

  • • •

  Daddy’s name was John, and everybody called him Red John. He lost a leg somewhere in Virginia, maybe in the Wilderness Campaign. By the time he married Momma, he was forty-nine years old. Momma’s name was Faith Geddie, and she was Daddy’s
third cousin’s daughter, which wasn’t considered peculiar at that time. What was unusual was that she was just twenty-three and had already lost one husband, to the flu, three years earlier. They say that when her husband died, his folks sent her back with six hogs and twenty dollars. So I reckon she was happy to accept Red John McCain’s offer.

  Lex and Connie was born first. Daddy, who got to choose all the first names, named them Lexington and Concord, which was funny names, even for around here. You couldn’t hardly tell that they was twins. Since they was boy and girl, they weren’t hardly identical. The year after, they had another boy, John Geddie McCain after my daddy. He died when he was three weeks old. Gruff was born in 1898. His real name is Cerrogordo, after a battle in the Mexican War. Lord knows what possessed Daddy to name him that. They say he got his nickname because he had a pouty look to him all the time, and one time an old aunt said, “What a gruff young-un you are!” and it stuck, the way things like that will. I think anybody named Cerrogordo would be glad to be named Gruff.

  Because Century was born in 1900, that was her name. Another baby, a girl, was born dead the next year. Then, in 1903, Momma had Lafe. Daddy named him after the Marquis de Lafayette. Marquis de Lafayette McCain. He was real happy to be called Lafe.

  I come last. They said Daddy wanted to name me John Geddie McCain, but Momma wouldn’t let him, since it would insult the memory of her dead baby. Up to this point, she was in charge of middle names, and maybe to offset some of Daddy’s foolishness, she give every one of her children the same middle name: Geddie.

  “Besides,” she’s supposed to of told Daddy, “how are you going to explain to this baby how come there’s a tombstone out there in the graveyard with his name on it?”

  Daddy thought about it for a spell, and they say I didn’t have any name a-tall for several days. Finally, Daddy told the rest of the children that he had the perfect name. Considering his record to this point, I’m sure Momma was uneasy.