Rock of Ages Page 8

  Georgia first met him when she decided to get gas logs for her fireplace. She needed someone to repair all the damaged walls and ceilings left after the gas line had been run from her kitchen to the living room. A friend said Phil Macomb was the man, if you could get him to come. He was very busy.

  It took her two months to lure him out. He’d canceled twice by then, and she was not disposed to like him very much. She had told herself she would give him one more chance. She didn’t want to be rash. Good home-construction help was hard to find.

  She’d only talked to him on the phone, knew only that he had a thick, old-Virginia accent, the kind you usually heard among the idle rich rather than blue-collar types.

  When she answered the door that day, a tall, somewhat heavyset man with red hair and a neatly trimmed beard stood, holding his toolbox in one hand. He was not unhandsome, with a good nose, good chin, broad shoulders, and blue, untroubled eyes. He had an easy smile and an outdoorsman’s tan.

  He spent five hours there that day, constructing three different covers for places where the pipes wouldn’t go inside the thick terra cotta walls. He went out once to a local hardware store and came back with just the right materials to build her a cover for the shutoff valve. He even painted everything. When he was through, the violence visited upon her house by the gas man was invisible.

  She’d been home that day, and they talked. Georgia didn’t usually do that. She usually felt uncomfortable among the various plumbers, tree surgeons, and air-conditioning repairmen whose services she needed from time to time. But Phil Macomb was easy to talk with. Mark had said on more than one occasion that the best reporters who worked for him at the paper were all good listeners. She thought that Phil Macomb would have been a good reporter.

  He was from a reasonably well-off family that had made such fortune as it had on real estate, but he’d married young, divorced, and managed to flunk out of VMI, James Madison, and Randolph-Macon over a five-year span.

  He had always been good with his hands, he told her. (“Only thing between me and the poorhouse.”) He had been running his own company for more than a decade.

  “I doubt if my momma will ever think I’ve amounted to anything, though,” he said. “She thinks you have to have a couple of degrees on the wall to be a success.” He looked at her own wall, with the three diplomas hanging there, and blushed. “No offense.”

  “None taken. My father was one of the smartest men I ever knew, and he didn’t even learn how to read until he was older than you.”

  “Lot of that going around. I don’t suppose they even called it a ‘learning disability’ back then. ’Course, I had a judgment disability, too.”

  They made eye contact for no more than a second, but there was something she saw, some question that needed answering. It was a strange thing, Georgia thought later, how you talked to people all the time, face to face, without really making that one laser-sharp connection. Then, out of nowhere, a guy like Phil Macomb shows up, and there it is.

  She got him a beer after he was done, and they sat and talked for a few minutes more. He said he had another job to do, and when he waved goodbye, she supposed that she might see him again, the next time something needed fixing that was beyond her meager talents.

  Two nights later, he called her.

  “I don’t suppose you have a lot of free spots on your dance card, pretty as you are,” he said, with almost no preamble, “but it occurred to me after I left that I’d sure like to see you sometime. Socially, or whatever.”

  She told him that, actually, she hadn’t been doing a lot of dancing lately. She had turned into kind of a wallflower.

  He said he hadn’t been doing much shagging either, but he thought he remembered how, if she’d like to join him.

  “What kind of shagging are you talking about?”

  “Aw, Miz Georgia,” he said with an exaggerated drawl. “I love it when you talk dirty.”

  She went out with him two times before the night they slept together, once to a county high school basketball game because his son was the coach at one of the outlying schools, once to dinner. He turned down her invitation to come back to her place for coffee both times, kissing her goodnight at the door as if she were 17.

  He’d been married and divorced before he knew where babies came from, he told her on the first date, when she expressed surprise that he could have a son in his mid-20s. He kept up with his two children from a reserved, polite distance.

  “It isn’t much to brag about,” he said, “but I am a little better person now that I’m fully grown. I don’t suppose my son and daughter have a lot of great memories from back then. It wasn’t exactly the Waltons.”

  He had sent them checks and Christmas presents, mostly.

  After the basketball game, which his son’s team won, Georgia asked him if he wasn’t going to go down and speak to him.

  “No,” he said. “He doesn’t need me right now. When he needed me, I wasn’t there. I’ll talk to him later.”

  The third date, they went to a movie, one with more dialogue than action, recommended by Georgia. She moved close to him in the dark and chilly theater and felt for a moment like they should be doing at least some light petting. His body was warmer than hers, and she leaned into it.

  She had asked a friend who knew the Macombs how old her new boyfriend was. The friend said she wasn’t sure, but she thought he’d graduated from high school in 1969. Georgia wondered if she should lie about her age. Three years might be enough to scare even a seemingly good man like Phil Macomb away.

  That night, after the movie, they were sitting at a table in one of Phil’s hangouts when he took her hand in his and she realized that the hard piece of metal pinching her finger was his class ring from high school. She picked it up and looked at it as if admiring its workmanship.

  “Class of ’68,” he said, looking her in the eye, amused. “I’m two years younger than you. Cradle-robber.”

  “How … How do you know how old I am?” She realized she was blushing and hoped the lights were low enough to mask it. “And what’s it to you?”

  “Asked around,” he said, grinning. “After all, I need to know these things. I wouldn’t want to do something to get a senior citizen overexcited. Not sure your poor old body could handle a lot of vigorous activity.”

  She’d had a couple of drinks already, and she supposed that loosened her tongue a little.

  She told him that she was sure she could handle any vigor he might be willing to throw her decrepit way.

  “I might take you up on that,” he’d said, playing along, moving his head closer to hers across the table and lowering his voice. “You’d have to sign a release form, of course. Wouldn’t want you on my conscience.”

  She took her shoe off under the table and ran her foot up his pants leg.

  “You’re not just offering an old lady a mercy fuck, are you?” she asked, looking him right in the eye, smiling just enough to indicate that she might be kidding, or she might not.

  She didn’t know what made her say that. She didn’t want Phil Macomb to be some kind of one-night wonder. She’d had three of those in the last year.

  She’d heard the joke about a guy’s perfect date being one that turns into a pizza after sex. She was too kind to tell any of the men with whom she’d slept that it could work both ways, that she had a strong urge to call Domino’s after they had fully explored the only subject in which they both were interested.

  But Phil Macomb wasn’t like that. She thought he might be a keeper.

  He looked stunned, for a couple of seconds, and then he burst out laughing, drawing the attention of people at the tables around them. Most of what he did, Georgia was learning, he did loud.

  “Old lady,” he said, lowering his voice again, “if that were to happen, the one showing the mercy would be you. It would be one of the most merciful things anybody had ever done for me.”

  “Call me Mother Teresa,” Georgia said, never taking her eyes off
his.

  She had to concede that it might have been nothing more than pheromones that first drew her to him, although she had come, by the third date, to appreciate his sense of humor, his ability to listen, and what appeared to be a basic decency.

  Nevertheless, there was the sex. She didn’t remember having a better night in bed, and he swore she was the best he’d ever had. “‘Had?’” she’d said. “You make me sound like dinner.” But she was secretly pleased. She hoped he wasn’t just being kind.

  And, after two hours of pleasantly wearing each other out, they found that neither wanted the other to turn into fast food. They talked about things that Georgia had never talked about with Jeff, and certainly not with Mark. In the weeks to come, they explored each other like children with new toys, playing sexual games they would never reveal to anyone else.

  By April, she was more or less living in the old farmhouse he’d fixed up. She sometimes missed the comforts of solitary life, being able to do exactly what she wanted, dress how she wanted, eat what she wanted, but by May she wouldn’t have gone back for anything and accepted that some people are supposed to live with other people.

  They were married that June, in a very simple ceremony attended only by a few close friends. Justin came up from Atlanta, where he was in the first year of a master’s program in sociology that he still hasn’t finished, to give her away.

  It all seemed to Georgia like payback for a lifetime of struggling with bad marriage karma, or bad judgment. She and Jeff Bowman had been too immature. She and Mark Hammaker had been too ill-suited.

  But she hadn’t said yes at first. Phil Macomb had to truly beg her, sure as she was that she was doomed to suffer in marriage. Why, she asked him, can’t we just live together?

  “We can live together,” he said. “We can do that. But what I really want, more than I want food or air, is to have you with me in every way possible. I’ve been waiting my whole life for you, and I don’t want to cheapen it, don’t want to cheapen you.”

  Georgia thought the whole idea of cheapening anything was quaint, after everything that had gone before, but she came to see that he wanted her so much, that he wanted to always be there, that he would always be there. By the time she agreed, two weeks before the wedding, she was sure that he always would be.

  She pulls into Forsythia Crumpler’s driveway right on time and walks with no little trepidation toward the house.

  Her old teacher answers the door on the third ring and lets her in.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you like this,” Georgia says, “but there’s something I have to ask you.”

  “Before you do,” the older woman says, holding up her hand, “I’ve got to say something. I was wrong the other day, raking you over the coals and all, especially after all you’ve been through this year.”

  “It’s …”

  “No, I’ve always had a bad habit of butting into other people’s business. I don’t think you did Jenny wrong. I know you’d have helped her if you’d known. I ought to have told you. I was just so upset.”

  Forsythia Crumpler seems to be near tears, something Georgia hasn’t seen before.

  “No,” she says, putting a hand on Forsythia’s shoulder, “you were right. I’ve been thinking about it. I asked myself what Daddy or Mom would have done, and they wouldn’t have let this happen.”

  “People are busier today, get distracted more. They don’t live in the same town.”

  The old woman grows silent.

  “Thank you,” Georgia tells her. “Thank you for your forgiveness. It means a lot to me.”

  They go inside and sit down to teacakes and coffee. They talk about old times, former teacher and star student again. Forsythia tells her how sorry she was to learn about her husband.

  “I heard about it from Jenny,” she says. “I should have sent a card.”

  “Lucky in something, unlucky in love,” Georgia says with a shrug. “I can’t remember what it is I’m supposed to be lucky in, though. Maybe I ought to start playing the lottery.”

  “Lottery!” her host says, some of her old vinegar returning. “They’re trying to get it down here. A tax on morons.

  “Well, what was it you wanted to ask me about?”

  So Georgia tells her about the ring.

  Jenny McLaurin didn’t have much that the world might have called valuable. The house and land were about all she and Harold ever possessed. There was one thing, though. Harold had given her a wedding ring that was her pride and joy.

  He’d won it, she would find out later, off a rich young man in one of the Saturday night poker games that were held in the back of Dawson Autry’s store. The games were very egalitarian affairs, a chance for the dirt farmers and laborers to rub shoulders with lawyers and prosperous businessmen trying to show they had the common touch.

  They way it usually worked out, the rich got richer. It was much easier for a man with $200 in his pocket to bluff than it was for one with twenty that he really needed to turn into forty. If one was a politician or wished to be one, it was wise to lose a little back at the end, though, a gesture as close to noblesse oblige as one was likely to find in eastern Scots County after the war.

  One November night, though, Harold McLaurin’s luck turned temporarily good.

  He was in a game of seven-card stud, deuces wild, with two men he’d known since they were children, plus a barber from Geddie and a newly minted lawyer who’d come out from Port Campbell. The lawyer was the only son of a state senator, and everybody figured the boy would be one someday, too. He even had his father’s name, with just another roman number attached. They called him Trip. People in Scots County tended to vote for familiar names, preferring the devil they knew.

  The young lawyer had been drinking. What he’d had before he arrived, no one knew, but they’d encouraged him to try some of Parker Vinson’s moonshine, and he no doubt thought that was part of the whole slumming experience, something to talk about after church the next day with other young members of his father’s club.

  He was winning at first, and then he was losing. One man who was watching said he had $300 on him when he came in. By 1:30 that morning, he was down to a few dollars he’d fished from his pockets, the detritus of 20-dollar bills he’d broken much earlier.

  The last hand he played, he bet almost all of that on a pair of kings, a 5 and a 7, with two cards down. Only he and Harold McLaurin were still in the game and eligible to get the last facedown card. When he put the rest of his money in and got a third king, he knew he would win and have a great story to tell. One of his other “down” cards was a deuce.

  When Harold anted up five dollars on the strength of his last card, the young lawyer couldn’t find anyone to loan him the five he needed. There were a dozen people watching, and they were mostly pulling for one of their own.

  “Give me one minute,” the lawyer said, and he stumbled out the door to his car.

  He returned carrying a small velvet box.

  “Bitch gave it back,” he’d said. “What’m I gonna do with a used diamond ring?”

  He’d been carrying the two-carat ring around in the glove compartment of his car for two weeks, since Betsy McNeil found out who he had really visited on his last trip to Raleigh. (They would later marry anyhow after he bought her another, larger diamond. Then, a year later, they would divorce. The young lawyer would die a decade afterward in the snow outside a bar in Lincoln, Nebraska, shot through the heart, disbarred and disgraced.)

  Nobody in the back room had ever seen a diamond that big. A couple of the spectators, if the conditions had been right, would have bashed his skull in for it.

  “Tell you what,” he said over the raw pine table to Harold McLaurin, who had more or less quit drinking two hours before, taking only the tiniest sip when the communal jar came around. “I’ll bet this ring here against 50 dollars. If you’ve got the balls.”

  No one had ever accused Harold McLaurin of lack of nerve. His faults lay more in the area of patience and c
ompassion. He might have slapped the lawyer across the room, but he knew what that diamond was worth, how painful it would be in the morning for the city boy to realize he’d lost it in a poker game to some redneck. It would not be a story he would repeat at the club. He would be glad none of his friends had come slumming to East Geddie with him.

  Harold McLaurin was showing a jack, a 10, a 9 and a deuce. He counted his money, and all he had was 46 dollars.

  One of the men who had refused to loan the lawyer a five handed one to Harold and got a dollar bill back.

  To the lawyer’s hurt, accusing look, he shrugged, “Well, I didn’t think I could afford to lend five. Four, though, that’s another matter.”

  There was rough laughter around the room.

  “Let’s see what you got,” Harold said.

  The lawyer showed the deuce and the king to go with the other two.

  “Four kings.”

  Harold didn’t say anything, just turned over the pair of facedown aces he’d drawn first, to go with the wild deuce that was showing. Then, he flipped the last card to reveal the other deuce.

  The lawyer looked at the four aces. He looked at Harold, looked around the room, looked back at the table. His options seemed to be limited.

  He was still sober enough to grasp what he had done.

  “Tell you what,” he said to Harold. “If you’ll let me pawn this thing tomorrow, I’ll bring the fifty right to your house, have it in your hands before you go to church.”

  “I don’t go to church,” Harold said. He reached for the ring when the young lawyer did, and the lawyer yielded first. “We didn’t play for no IOU. We played for this”—he pointed to the velvet box, now closed—“and my fifty dollars.”

  There was unanimous agreement around the table, and Dawson Autry himself, who had suffered some property damage in the past from disagreements over cards and money, gently but firmly helped the young man back to his late-model car and pointed him toward Port Campbell.

  The lawyer actually did come to see Harold the next day, at his parents’ house, where he was living until he and Jenny could get married. He was sober and hinted at legal ramifications if Harold didn’t take the hundred dollars he had in his hand, five crisp twenties, double what Harold had bet.