Lookaway, Lookaway (11 page)

“Seems a bit familiar,” a transplanted Northerner pointed out.

“They were not eldest daughters and therefore the use of ‘Miss’ and the first name was entirely proper. And you underestimate the power of ‘Miss’ in those days, the awe and respect that honorific could wield. These women were fearsome tyrants of their subject and their curriculum. The principals were mere functionaries who shuffled papers and came and went; it was the Miss Mary Lees and Miss Elizabeths who ran the schools with an iron will. And there was no need to complain to your parents about being struck with Miss Mary Lee’s ruler or humiliated by Miss Elizabeth making you stand for a barrage of questions until your not having read the assignment was abundantly clear … because your parents likely endured the same torments under the same women—and still feared them!”

She loved to invoke the noble sisterhood of teachers, but one night a month ago, Gaston grew impatient with her routine and decided to romanticize the fraternity of writers, in mild opposition:

“I’ll give you a brutal occupation,” he began, warming to his audience of after-dinner drinkers. “It rarely leaves a man unmarked,” he said, before finishing off his bourbon, setting the glass down with a loud enough clunk that the bartender turned and was signaled with a head nod to refill it. “Robert Penn Warren, my old pal James Dickey—good Lord, Faulkner was in the bottle half the time.”

“Hmm,” Norma said. He could tell she didn’t approve of the premise.

“I remember after
The Rapeseed Field,
when I went to Connecticut to stay at Bill Styron’s and Jimmy Baldwin was there. Now there were two men who could put it away. Styron could drink. O. Henry lived in the bottle, too—Thomas Wolfe a manic-depressive and drinker—that’s just the North Carolina contingent. Writing well didn’t make them very happy, it appeared. Look at Tennessee Williams. Look at Capote. We didn’t care for each other, true enough…” Gaston was once at a publishing party in 1978 featuring a mobbed Truman Capote occupying the far side of the hotel ballroom, but that proximity would do in his cavalcade of name-dropping anecdotes. “But Truman ended up spectacularly unhappy. The most treacherous profession, don’t you think?” He dramatically took a sip and looked at his enthralled audience. “Southern writer.”

Norma held off for a moment, then let the counter-argument flow: “Well. Harper Lee and Eudora Welty didn’t end up all miserable. Katherine Anne Porter, Zora Neale Hurston, though God knows, she had every cause to drink. Flannery O’Connor was sick, but not spiritually miserable. Let’s see … Alison Lurie and Annie Dillard and the Ellens, Ellen Douglas, Ellen Glasgow. Toni Morrison, Valerie Martin—has she ever written one bad thing?—and Anne Tyler, Gail Godwin was in North Carolina for a while, wasn’t she? Jill McCorkle, Bobbie Anne Mason, Elizabeth Cox—”

“Your point being?”

“All these women seem to be able to whip up lots and lots of wonderful books without careening into the bottle or beating their children or publicly disgracing themselves.”

Among their laughing listeners, one older woman shouted, “She’s got you there, Gaston!”

“Norma,” asked one man in a seersucker sports coat, “to what do you attribute the fact that the Southern women writers are well behaved and the men less so?”

“Typical Southern male behavior. Lots of nonsense and noise and drama. I suppose we owe the Civil War to this strain of male self-dramatizing preposterousness. Wait—Carson McCullers. Wrote her first novel right here in Charlotte. She messed up her personal life in spectacular fashion.”

“Yes,” said Gaston, with his eyes narrowed to slits. “She kept taking up with homosexuals and wife-beaters, as I recall. Devoting her life to men who had no intention of loving her back.” He enunciated with surgical precision: “No future in that, hm?”

He didn’t look at her as he said it. Nor did he look at his embarrassed listeners who could barely imagine the lighthearted topic had ended with the plunge of such a dagger. He didn’t want to meet any eyes, so he looked into his drink. He heard her gather her things and leave. And he let her do it, no running after her. He hated to think of that now. Not so much the cruelty to Norma—she was begging for it. She knew better than to ruin one of his great literary musings … but the publicity of it, fighting like a real couple might in public.

It wasn’t like he did nothing for Norma. After each Dictation Day, Gaston rewarded his muse and life-manager with a dinner at Charlottetowne. She, too, was a resident member, vouched for by Duke Johnston, and fees paid for by Gaston. These nights out were her motivation, he supposed, for all the selfless hours of toil on his behalf. To be arm in arm with the celebrated Gaston Jarvis, a long candlelit dinner (with the impeccable service the CCC was known for, black middle-aged men and women in pressed white suits, some who had been there for decades, discreet, laconic, always at the ready, no request too much trouble). While Gaston had been here drinking all afternoon, Norma had been to the beauty parlor (where “the girls” requested every gossipy detail of these Tuesday dinners), before treating herself to a spa or salon or some alchemy to take a few years off. By evening she would look lovely in a dark conservative floor-length dress as she made a grand entrance into the Charlottetowne dining room and he stood at the table to greet her … how the heads would turn, how people would smile to be in the room with them.
Why did they never marry?
they must speculate. Some of them theorize that Gaston Jarvis must be homosexual.
He never got over his affection for his college roommate, Duke Johnston,
they would whisper.

Good guess, but wrong.

Yes, and speaking of Duke Johnston, his brother-in-law, he had put a foot wrong there, too, in the Nineteenth Hole for all to see. God, these public slipups were more and more frequent. Once again, he had a small coterie of Charlotte’s rich and powerful hanging on his words. He was up off his stool, sloshing his bourbon around, animated in his depiction of bitterness.

“I
love
bitter people,” he was saying. “No better conversationalists in the world than bitter people. We have it all wrong in this country.” He mocked some Polyanna somewhere: “Now now,
mustn’t be bitter
! That’s the refrain. It’s un-American to be bitter. We’re the land of pick yourself up and try try again.”

Norma was back to her usual role of feeding him straight lines. “Oh Gaston, please. What on earth could you possibly be bitter about? You write bestsellers!”

“I can’t think of a more fertile soil for bitterness. The paltriness of American success.”

“Bitterness,” Norma insisted, “is
not
a very attractive trait when you’re successful, Gaston.”

“My darling,” he answered, warming to his Oscar Wilde mode, “it takes true success to make for true bitterness. How important is the bitterness of the failure? It is an easy bitterness, hm? Simple to achieve, almost effortless. No money, no recognition—the resulting negative feelings are … child’s play.” His country club barroom audience was chuckling. “No, the real art is to succeed and find it all wanting, find it insufficient for petty and small reasons. To sour on a successful life … speaking of that, Benjamin, another bourbon sour, please.” More laughter. “This club is full of CEOs and rich entrepreneurs and the first families of Charlotte, and yet I bet there are subterranean chambers beyond chambers, fathomless caves unknown to man, of bitterness and smoldering disappointments. Lateral promotions so close to the top. Investments gone wrong—”

“With the Dow mired in the seven thousands, that would be most of us, Gaston!” cried one jolly red-faced man in a yachtman’s blazer while everyone laughed.

“Marriage to the wrong spouse,” Gaston continued his crisp adumbration. “Social slights. Children turning out to be layabouts.”

“Lord, that’s true,” said a white-haired queen bee known as Mrs. T., a woman who lived at the club as much as Gaston. “You have been reading my diaries!”

Another heavyset patron: “Not just the children, Mr. Jarvis—the grandchildren!”

Much laughter. A lively widow held her martini aloft: “Anyone here have grandchildren that aren’t spoiled completely rotten and incapable of working a day’s honest labor in their lives?”

Widespread agreement. The gentleman in the blazer, through laughter, cried out, “Three grandchildren, all propped before the TV or their video games every waking hour—and every one of them obese!”

“I would bet my brother-in-law Duke Johnston would be at the head of that line, if he ever had a moment’s self-reflection,” Gaston began, while he heard audible gasps and oooohs. Oh his hangers-on had been waiting for this one. “Duke had it all, family, money, he was a city councilman, before that a football hero and a scholar … and what’s it come to? He was expected to be our governor by now, if he hadn’t run out of steam.” One or two women smiled guiltily, another put her hand to her mouth. “Hope the money doesn’t run out on my old friend. I would hate to have to call a meeting of the equity members for us to decide his status…”

Suddenly, it appeared, his sister Jerene—Jerene who was never here at this hour, who
never
stepped into the Nineteenth Hole!—was hovering. “You should go home, Gaston,” she said calmly, but the worse for its being calm. “Everyone in the club knows what you were saying isn’t the least bit true.”

His assembled admirers had wincing expressions of uh-oh, and turned away to whisper among themselves, leaving the siblings to talk privately at the bar. Norma instinctively moved to sit at the richest of the tables; thanks to her, soon everyone there was laughing again.

Jerene stepped closer, still staring him down, speaking quietly now: “They built this place around Joseph Johnston, Duke’s grandfather. They were equity members, and your membership here, I apparently have to remind you, was due to Duke’s own kindness—”

“Yes yes, of course that’s how it is.” He swallowed the words, grinding his hands together as if that could snuff out this whole conversation.

Jerene wasn’t done. Duke, she reminded him, took him under his aristocratic wing at Duke University, introduced him to important people, befriended a young man of promise, a young man who became an ungrateful old man—

“All right, Jerene, I stand corrected.”

She then seated herself on the barstool next to him, smoothing her soft rose-colored silk dress. She always dressed like she was going to a wedding as mother of the bride where a conservative couture had been approved; her appearance often put him in mind of one of those severe Puritan portraits, high collars, erect carriage. Probably a first for her, sitting on a barstool in this much derided den of imbecility. “I don’t know when you started hating my husband, Gaston,” she said so no one could hear but them. “Your former best friend—probably one of the only real friends you have left in the world. I can see your contempt every time you raise your eyebrows and talk down to him like he’s … like he’s one of your annoying, senile fans you go on about. My land, Duke does not deserve that. And he lets you mistreat him because he loves you.”

It had been years since Gaston had apologized for anything, and his first impulse was to lash back. “Duke doesn’t provide for you or your family. I don’t find much to admire in that.”

“And you’re worried that I will come with my hat in hand to you?”

“I didn’t say that—”

“I am sure rather than objecting to my begging at your door, you would like it very much. You could lord it over Duke. Tell all your acolytes here in the Nineteenth Hole what a freeloader he is, the great Duke Johnston who all of Charlotte loves. How he would be nothing if it weren’t for the even greater Gaston Jarvis.”

Gaston threw back the icy remains of his bourbon, then set the glass down with a loud enough clunk to cue Dexter that he needed another.

“You may,” Jerene continued, “have already rehearsed that monologue, which I’m sure will feature your trademark wit and acid. Well, let me tell you, little brother, things would not be so tight around the Johnston household if we weren’t…” She paused as the inscrutable bartender set a new glass down quickly. “… if we weren’t taking on the lion’s share of the bill for Lattamore Acres. Poor Dillard, she can afford her share less well than we can.”

On this subject, Gaston could come to fiery focus. “That solution is the simplest. Let her wander downtown like a bag lady. Throw Her Highness out of the palace.”

“The simplest solution is for you to contribute your third like a decent human being. You would be doing it for us, not for her. An even more decent thing, since I observe you have millions of dollars, is to pick up the whole tab which would be as nothing for you. It would come to less than the bar bill in here, I suspect.”

“Not a dime for her, now or ever.” He smiled, taking a sip and actually savoring the bourbon for a change. “Not for that witch.”

“You would have us move her into one of our homes? I understand your ill feelings toward her, but toward us? What have we ever done to you that you would wish that fate on your sisters?”

He looked steadily ahead at the mirror behind the bar. He enjoyed playing this scene with the very same dialogue with both his sisters, every few months. “Turn
Maman
out in the goddam street.” He reached for the peanut bowl. “I will not lift a finger. She can have an old age as fine as the childhood she gave us. I wouldn’t have thought you had any mercy for Mother, after what she let Daddy do to all of us.”

Jerene stood from the barstool, straightening out her skirt, gathering her thoughts. She leaned into his ear and said, “And it doesn’t bother you to have the whole of this club, many of whom knew our parents in society, know that you are this Scrooge-like with your own mother?”

Gaston stopped popping peanuts as all that remained in the bowl was peanut dust. He leaned in another direction to nab the bowl of pretzels. “People put up with a lot from writers as successful as I am. It’s a free pass for bad behavior—trust me on this. Invitations will continue to pile up in my mailbox. Jerry darling, I’ve had everything said about me that can be said. I’ve heard I’m addicted to pills, that I’m an alcoholic, that I have a steady habit of prostitutes coming in and out at all hours. That other people write my books and I put my name on ’em.” He laughed, crunching a pretzel. “I am beyond the reach of scandal. So
Maman
shall not see one dime of my considerable fortune. You think I’m joking about the women’s shelter. Tell her to consider euthanasia. I’ll mix the hemlock.”