Folly Beach (23 page)

While I stood there, dazed by the spectacular display seemingly just across the street, John popped the cork, poured two glasses, and handed me one.

“Yes,” I said and took a sip. “It looks like it’s coming to get us.”

He pushed away my hair and kissed the back of my neck.

“It’s okay, Cate. You’re safe with me. I promise.”

I turned around to face him and met his beautiful hazel eyes. His face was illuminated in the moonlight. I believed him and let him kiss me, which I already knew was going to be a pretty pyrotechnical experience. It was. I was still holding my glass, groping around for the edge of the bookcase so I could put it down. I thought I had it and I didn’t. The glass shattered into a million little pieces and wine went everywhere.

“It’s okay,” I said, in between some unbelievable groping and struggling for breath. “They’re really cheap.”

“I’ll buy you a dozen tomorrow,” he said and ran his mouth down the side of my neck.

“You don’t have to,” I said and let him pull my sweater over my head.

“But I want to,” he said while I unbuckled his belt and unzipped his trousers, with every intention of checking out the goods. Bad girl, I thought. Things appeared to be in working order.

“I know you do,” I said and thought, screw it if he never calls me again.

And that was it. We hurried to the bedroom where I slept, kicking off shoes, pants, his shirt . . . we were shedding as we went, hands everywhere . . . I pulled back the covers as fast as I could and rushed around to the far side.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“I just thought . . . you know, that’s your side and this is my side? What?”

“You come right back over here,” he said, looking very serious and breathing pretty hard. “You can pick your side later.”

“Right!” God, I was so awkward. But it didn’t seem to matter except in that split moment.

I wondered if the neighbors could hear the bedsprings squealing and making a racket or us moaning, screaming the occasional
Oh! Yes! God!
I had a fleeting thought that the bed was going to collapse as it rose and fell in rhythm like the bass on a Barry White CD, the headboard banging the wall like twenty hammers. Would I have to repaint? I got my leg tangled in the sheets and he ripped them away and threw them all on the floor along with all the pillows. It was insane. All I can tell you is that about an hour later, when I was lying there in the crook of his arm, covered in sweat, glad to be alive, dying for a glass of water and smelling like something only Satan would recognize, I had an important realization. When doing this dance, it was a far better decision to let John Risley take the lead. Whew.

Chapter Nineteen

Setting:
The Porgy House in the music room at the piano.

Director’s Note:
Photos of book jacket of
The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes,
the “Summertime” lyrics, the MacDowell parlor, Marjorie Flack, Janie Scriven Heyward, Eugene O’Neill, and Pearl Buck on the backstage scrim. Voice of DuBose comes from off-stage.

Act II

Scene 5

Dorothy:
I thought it might be important to tell you one last detail about my mother-in-law, Janie, because DuBose was an honest man and I know he would want the facts set straight. When our Jenifer was a little girl, Janie would make up stories for her, like grandmothers do all the time. But there was one in particular that Jenifer loved her to tell over and over again. It was called “The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes.” The last time we were at the MacDowell Colony, we were all gathered in the parlor, quite happy, listening to each other telling stories and applauding loudly after each impromptu performance. Then DuBose got it in his mind to tell a children’s story. He had everyone in the palm of his hand as they heard about the struggle of the poor little rabbit to become an Easter Bunny and how wonderful it was when she did. Afterward a good friend of ours, the illustrator Marjorie Flack, came up to us and insisted that DuBose write it down. Well, he did and it only took him two hours to do it! Of course, Marjorie illustrated it and Houghton Mifflin published it and it’s the only book by DuBose that never went out of print. It’s also the most money he ever earned in two hours. Anyway, I just thought the old girl should get her due.
The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes
was completely Janie’s creation but DuBose was given the credit. She never complained one bit. She knew that anything she could do to further DuBose’s reputation and his earning power was good for all of us. It was the one and only issue on which we always saw eye-to-eye.

And while we’re on the subject of credit being given to the right people, we need to talk about some of the lyrics to the songs in
Porgy and Bess,
because it will help show just how crazy and unpredictable the whole creative process is.

It was another terrible night of fog and rain and the temperature never climbed above forty degrees. We were out on Folly in that same little house that we paid for with the proceeds from
Porgy
the play and some royalties from the book as well. It’s still my favorite place I have ever lived. Anyway, we were having cocktails, martinis I think, and I sat down to the piano and began to play a little tune, just a few notes really.

And DuBose said, “Don’t be blue, little Dorothy, soon it will be summertime and we’ll be living calm and easy!”

“Humph,” I said and sang along with my few little notes. “Summertime and the living is easy!”

“Play that again,” DuBose said.

So, I did. I could just hear it in my head like someone was singing it to me. He got very excited.

“What is the matter with you, DuBose?”

“I
like
that, Dorothy! Summertime and the living is easy! I’m going to send it to George! Can you write down the tune?”

“Of course I can!”

“I think this could be the beginning lyrics for a great song for
Porgy and Bess
!” He refilled his drink and mine and took a pad and pencil from the desk. He was suddenly very animated. “Let’s see! What happens in the summer? Corn grows way up high!”

“So does cotton,” I said. “Well not so high as corn, I’ll admit, but it gets as high as it’s going to, doesn’t it?”

“Yes! Yes, it does! And what else? We go fishing!”

“Yes, when you walk down by the gullies and docks you can see all the little fish jumping in the sun!”

“Well, I suspect the poor little fellows are jumping because they’re trying to avoid being eaten by a bigger fish. But I’m writing this all down . . .”

And he wrote it all down and sent if off to George, who, along with his brother Ira turned it into one of my favorite songs in the whole play. And, lo! Guess what? They gave DuBose credit for cowriting the lyrics! Isn’t that swell? Isn’t that just the grandest thing? DuBose said oh, no no, he didn’t want the credit but they insisted. They absolutely
insisted
. George may have been a bit of a scene-stealer but his brother Ira was one of the finest men I have ever met and both of them had a terrific sense of fairness.

I’ll tell you this. DuBose could have been anything he wanted to—he was already a poet and a novelist of adult and children’s books and now he was going to be known as a lyricist! I was so proud of him. Oh! And he was a screenwriter, too! He wrote a script for Eugene O’Neill’s adaptation of
The Emperor Jones
for film, but he didn’t really enjoy the work so much. Eugene was an old classmate of mine. I introduced them to each other and I always wondered if DuBose was jealous of him.

Even though that didn’t end so well, DuBose tried screenwriting again for Pearl Buck’s
The Good Earth
and that was kind of a disaster, too, because they had twenty other writers working on it. In the end his name didn’t even appear in the credits, which he was glad of, because he didn’t like the movie at all. Anyway, the point is that Hollywood never really valued its writers much, which if you think about it makes no sense whatsoever. You could have all the Clark Gables and Vivien Leighs in the world but if the words they spoke didn’t enthrall you, what good was the movie? No, I don’t care what any of those Hollywood fools say, you have to start with a good story and that story is nothing without good writers.

Fade to Darkness

Chapter Twenty

The Piano

T
he movers pulled into the yard at around three in the afternoon and began to slowly unload the truck. They were supposed to have been there at noon, but I imagined they stopped for a nice long lunch somewhere and then had a nice long nap by the side of the road and then stopped for ice cream, so three was about right. I just loved waiting around for people to show up. But actually, on that afternoon, I was preparing dinner for John and I wasn’t going to let anything ruin my good mood. What was I cooking? Roasted chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, salad, biscuits, and Ella was making us a pie. It was a foolproof menu and there wasn’t a man alive who didn’t love biscuits and gravy.

And, at last, the blessed movers had arrived. I stepped outside into the brisk afternoon air to watch them.

I couldn’t help but to stop and reflect on my piano’s long and checkered history. It was the only thing of any consequence I still had that my mother gave to me. It probably wasn’t worth much but, you know how it is, it had great sentimental value. When I was just a little girl, I had pounded away on the keys in the house where I grew up, eventually learning to play simple pieces under the earnest tutelage of some poor bespectacled old man whose jacket smelled like mothballs and breath like peppermint. It’s funny what you remember and what you forget. Then it moved with me to Aunt Daisy’s where I continued my lessons but I took up dance with a vengeance. In its next incarnation, my piano became Addison’s jumping-off point in Alpine, New Jersey. Now my piano was back where it started on Folly. Full circle. I was dragging that thing around with me like Marley’s chains, except that Marley wasn’t so fond of his chains as I was of my piano. I loved it.

My childhood home, just an old clapboard house up on stilts, was washed away by a hurricane years ago. But I remember clearly how the piano came into our family. My mother bought it used from Siegling’s Music House for my birthday the last year she was alive. I’m told that she always thought I had some musical aptitude and that she thought every house should have a piano, because it added dignity to the home.

Aunt Daisy has pictures of it positioned in the living room of that house but when I look at them I can hardly remember being there, sitting on that bench, practicing scales. I was so little when my momma died and then Daddy, it’s hard to remember much of anything about how life was and there were so few artifacts remaining to jiggle my memories.

Even the land where the house once stood was completely eroded away, which had happened to lots of property on Folly Beach in its history. Beach erosion, which travels from north to south, was great for Seabrook and Kiawah Islands, because they picked up acres upon acres of accreted land traveling with the tides from Folly Beach. But it was devastating for our residents, because the jetties around Folly Beach blocked incoming sand from Sullivans Island. So, as a result, from time to time, second-row houses became prime real estate when the neighboring cottages across the street literally fell apart and into the sea. In any case, the hurricanes and erosion surely served as a Buddhist reminder about the impermanence of all material things.

But the sea-salted population of Folly Beach was nothing if not stoic. They simply shrugged their shoulders, told their stories, laughing and happy at their great fortune to be alive, and then they rebuilt on other land bought with the settlements from their insurance companies. “It’s why we pay our premiums,” became an often-used explanation for why no one worried too much about the weather. Hurricanes were usually simply an irksome fact of life and, to be honest, some of the construction on Folly Beach was, well, long past its prime anyway. In almost every single case, the new homes were sturdier and certainly much prettier than the old homes.

One of the deliverymen came up to me to scope out the destination.

“Where do you want us to put this, ma’am?”

“In the first room, under the window on the far left wall,” I said. “You’re welcome to have a look.”

“Thanks,” he said and stepped inside the door. He came back out, nodded to me, and called out, “Okay guys, let’s get this baby inside.”

Speaking of island construction, the Porgy House was as ancient a beach cottage as there was left on the whole island and I would bet you a dollar that you couldn’t find a right angle in the whole place. The way the house had settled in the sandy yard, probably sinking by a hair each year over many decades, had left the floors sloped and everything just a bit off-kilter. These varying depreciations of symmetry gave the house a distinguished character all its own. In the short time I’d been there I had come to feel some real affection for all the crooked windows and the musical creaks in the floorboards. After all, I was walking the floors where Dorothy and DuBose drank cocktails with George Gershwin and wrote the quintessential theatrical work that burst forth from the Lowcountry of South Carolina like a rocket to Mars. If that couldn’t inspire me to at least try and pen my own play, what would?

I watched as the men groaned under the weight of the piano, pulling it up the steps on a heavy plywood ramp they carried for just these kinds of occasions and then as they lowered it onto a heavy quilted mat they used to slide it across the floor and put it in position. You could keep that job. My back hurt just watching them.

They unbuckled and pulled the canvas belts from around the piano and lifted the quilted blankets away, folding them as they went. She sure was
yar
. (I’ve always wanted to use that word ever since I heard Katharine Hepburn say it referring to a boat in
The Philadelphia Story.
It’s probably a nautical term.) Anyway, I was thrilled with the glossy patina of the cabinet and the fact that they had not retouched the cunningham piano co. gold-leaf signature that was slightly faded from the years. Cunningham Piano Company, coincidentally also from Philadelphia, has been building pianos for symphonies, academies, and concert pianists since the 1890s and they were treasured by those who played them. Considering my rudimentary skill level, I was humbled to own one.

Every ivory and ebony key was immaculate and, miraculously, the bench still held all my old sheet music under the seat, which in the haste and tumult of that horrible day Tina had forgotten to remove. I couldn’t wait to sit down and play, even though the sound of my playing would surely send all the neighborhood cats screaming up the trees.

“Can you sign here?”

“Sure! Wait just a minute.” I ran upstairs and got my wallet to give them a tip. Fortunately, I had just made a withdrawal from the ATM, so I could give them a twenty. Now, I know, twenty dollars sounds like a lot of money for a widow of greatly reduced circumstances to be throwing around but it was to be divided among three men and when was the last time I tried to pick up a piano?

“Here we go.” I signed the receipt and handed the man with the clipboard the money.

“Thanks a lot, miss,” he said and went to join the others, already waiting in the truck.

I closed the door behind him and looked at my beautiful Cunningham, standing there all shiny and new-looking and wondered if I should give the room a fresh coat of paint. This is what happens when you start redecorating—you bring in new throw pillows and then you want to throw the old sofa out the back door. Ah well, I told myself, maybe it was because the piano was new to the room, still a stranger, and I should give my eyes a few days to get used to it and then decide. But one thing was certain, I wasn’t going to let the memory of Addison Cooper’s death spiral of insanity sully the regard I felt for my most important heirloom. The piano was washed clean of any sign of him and maybe in time I, too, would remember only the good things from the good years. One could hope.

I decided to call Patti and let her know that it had arrived in mint shape.

She picked up on the first ring.

“So, missy?” Patti said in a sassy, merry voice. “Just how long am I supposed to wait to hear from you? Do I need to go find a new best friend now that you’re gone?”

“Don’t you dare,” I said. “I’d die.”

“I don’t knoooow . . .”
she said in a singsong warning.

“Oh, please,” I said. “We can’t replace each other anyway. Who’re we kidding?”

“I guess you’re right. So what’s going on?”

“Well, first of all . . .” I told her about the piano’s arrival in such perfect condition and thanked her profusely.

“Don’t thank me. Thank old Ebenezer! I still can’t believe he prepaid the shipping. But, he did take that wine.”

“And maybe because he took Addison’s golf clubs and maybe he found out they’re worth like half a zillion? He must have thought he owed me something.”

“Yeah, probably. I married the last man on the planet with a conscience. But you know, not a day goes by that he doesn’t ask me about you and if I’ve heard from you and how you’re doing.”

“He’s really a precious guy, Patti. You’re very lucky.”

“Yeah, I know. So he’s a little tight with his money? You never get it all with one man.”

“Well, he has it all with you! Ha! So, when are you coming to see me?”

“How’s next weekend?”

“For real?”

I got very excited then. For the month since I had arrived here my new existence had everything in it except Patti.

“Yeah, I want to see how our sweet little Alice is doing . . .”

“You’re terrible,” I said.

“And the professor . . .”

“Listen, he’s unbelievable.” I told her all about John and his plans for my future as a playwright but I didn’t tell her about, you know, about us
moving the earth
.

Then she asked.

“So? Did you throw him down yet?”

“WHAT? What kind of a crazy question is that? I’m . . . speechless!”

“So, you did, huh? Wow. Tell me, what’s it like to make love to somebody new? I’ve been with Mark for so long I can make out a grocery list in my head and still not miss a thing. So how is it?”

There was no point in withholding anything from Patti. She knew anyway.

“Fucking fabulous, and the word order doesn’t matter.”

“OMG! Listen to you, you old perimenopausal slut! I’m telling!”

“Yeah? Go ahead. Tell the world! Listen, at my age? I’m going to do exactly what I want to do. Yeah, I finally am. But I wouldn’t bring it up to the kids quite yet.”

“Of course not!” There was silence for a second or two and then she said, “Well, it’s about time you took your life back.”

Is that what she thought? The more I thought about it I realized she wasn’t wrong.

“Well, if you meet him you’ll see why I’m so, so . . .”

I could hear her gasp.

“Jesus, Cate! Are you in
love
with this man?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, I could be at some point. Not now, of course . . .”

“Too soon . . .”

“Of course! It’s too soon. But you’ll see. He’s . . . well, he’s not like anyone else I ever dated. That’s for sure. But Patti, I have to tell you, he’s not divorced. I mean he’s not really married, but he’s not divorced.” I then proceeded to tell Patti about Lisa.

“I’m changing my ticket. I’m coming Thursday. Maybe Wednesday. This is worse than I thought.”

“Actually, you’re going to find out it’s better than you thought possible. You can bring Mark, too!”

“Are you losing your little cat-eyed marbles? You think I want to spend the whole time I’m with
you
worrying about if
he’s
entertained? No way.”

We laughed again and I said, “Look, get yourself down here as soon as you can. We’ll talk about all of this over some good but moderately priced vino.”

“We should’ve switched the cellar. Mark was right.”

She promised to call me with her final reservation information. I would pick her up at the airport. She could stay in the bedroom across the hall and it would be like old times. We’d be girls again. For a few days, we’d be girls.

It was time to put the chicken in the oven. It was already four thirty and he was supposed to arrive at six. I wanted the place to smell like roasting garlic and onions when he walked in the door. I wished there was a separate dining room, but alas, there was none. So for that evening we would eat in the kitchen. The table was set and I had to say, while it wasn’t something that would have thrilled Addison Cooper, I knew John Risley would appreciate every effort made on his behalf.

Earlier in the day, while I was shopping at the Piggly Wiggly for dinner, I bought a two-slice toaster, a drip coffee machine, a couple of inexpensive pots, and a cast-iron skillet. I also picked up some red and white dish towels, two red pot holders, and four red place mats. In a final nod to extravagance and in the name of beauty, I parted with ten additional dollars for a bunch of red tulips, hoping there was a vase in the house. I had checked out the flatware, dishes, and glasses and thought, well, they were good enough for a college student and they would have to be good enough for tonight. Spending money made me nervous and even though I was giving Aunt Daisy dozens of hours of help with her business we had yet to discuss a salary or any kind of compensation. After all, I was living in the Porgy House rent-free. But at some point I’d have to do it or get another job. I had to consider things like health insurance for Sara and me. It was foolhardy to be without it and I knew Addison’s policies had a time limit. I’d have to ask Mark to look at all of that for us, because reading insurance policies and trying to make sense of them made my teeth hurt. I think that’s a pretty normal reaction for most people.