Lookaway, Lookaway (13 page)

“Gaston Jarvis.”

They shook hands and Duke did not let go, pulling him along toward the door. “Duke Johnston,” he reported, in that Southern baritone that could not have been more soothing and rich had he drunk all the whiskey in Scotland and smoked all of North Carolina’s cigarettes. “Come upstairs.”

Duke’s own attic bedroom under the eaves was tidy, with law books and dictionaries, pictures of family, a saber over a long-closed-off fireplace, and two Civil War–era pistols in a display box, propped on the mantel. Gaston thought how disgraceful his own ill-kept room was back in Craven Hall. Duke must never see it.

Duke opened a closet door and, rather than clothes, there were ten constructed shelves, an array of bottles, scotch, gin, vodka, bourbons, old dusty-labeled wines, ports, sherries, libation for all occasions. There was a clinking and tinkling of bottles colliding as he rummaged, before producing a bottle of Dunlap’s Hundred with about two shots’ worth of honey-brown liquid left in the bottle.

There was a young woman there who had been Miss North Carolina her junior year, had gone to Atlantic City to compete for Miss America. There were football buddies demanding Duke come down to the front lawn and referee a game of touch football, directing and officiating with his glass-knobbed walking stick, now a campus trademark. There were two female exchange students from France who looked as if they had walked in from a Paris runway; they took over the turntable and played a Françoise Hardy LP and sang along to the lyrics while the rest of the party’s males looked on adoringly and the females sulked. All of these and more, interrupting Gaston and Duke, begging Duke to come downstairs and join the party, to bestow a small unit of attention on them … and yet that night, Duke sat drinking with Gaston, for some reason finding in his young acquaintance someone he could trust and confide in.

And from there on, Gaston’s social accomplishment at Duke was secure; he was a regular at Arcadia. He joined the newspaper and the college literary magazine. His witty reviews, his editorials, all popular, all noticed—but he only wrote them to shine reflected glory on Duke, to win Duke’s praise. He loved Duke. He would drop anything, if Duke (always so busy with law school and exams and social calendars) called. Life was only where Duke existed and noticed, and what he disparaged or thought boring, Gaston thought worthless, too. Duke dated quite a lot, beautiful women, smart women, odd and talented women—he liked female company but not for very long, it seemed. Gaston would get a call in his dorm: “The girls are gone, and not a soul ’round here to have a drink with, wouldn’t you know.” And it wouldn’t have mattered if Gaston had an exam the next day or was attempting a date himself late that evening, it would all be flung aside in order to garner precious audience up in Duke’s room, to sample some new miraculous brew brought forth from the cupboard.

The friendship with Duke had faded, Gaston thought, sitting in his empty room with his laptop, but he had kept faith with the drinking. What had soured their friendship? As far as Duke was concerned, Gaston was still a friend. It was all Gaston’s doing, the deterioration between them. Was it that he resented Duke for marrying his sister? Was he supposed to choose a lifetime of solitary drinking with Gaston over marriage and children with Jerene? Duke had once pulled him close and said, charmingly, with an intimate catch in his voice, “Marrying your sister sets us up nicely, Gaston,” he said. “We don’t have to do without our talks and our nightcaps—I’ll always be close by. Thank God, you had a lovely sister or two—I’d have had to marry
you
otherwise.” Yes, it was said to be charming, but he meant it at some level.

So what went wrong? That was a question fit for a rainy September night, his laptop’s cursor blinking, waiting for him to do something. No, he did not mind Duke marrying Jerene. It was very strange, of course, weird to think of Duke screwing his sister. Jerene had been with that boor Beckleford Baylor, heir to a sock fortune. Then Jerene had dated Duke’s housemate Darnell McKay, who went on to be a rich tax lawyer … and then Duke—the one out of the three who had squandered rather than made a fortune. No, that was not the source of the resentment.

Gaston could always replay in his mind the night, two months into their friendship, when it was two in the morning and they had been at it, discussing
Flags in the Dust
and
Absalom, Absalom!,
the peculiar burdens of sons from great families or, at least, from families with fathers who had pretensions of greatness, military greatness, Southern greatness, wealth and a family name with status, when Duke looked squarely at him and asked outright: “You hate your father, don’t you?”

Gaston had talked with Duke about everything but this.

“I know you do. You don’t have to say it. I know because I hate mine, too.”

Major Bo Johnston, decorated hero of Patton’s African campaigns, then Sicily, then mainland Italy, the vanguard of every Veteran’s Day parade for twenty years.

“My father was traumatized by the war,” Duke pressed on. “It exposed him to terrible things—I can only imagine. There was nowhere to put that anger, that violence when he came home, so he let us have it…” Duke shot back the rest of the bourbon in his glass. “… his sons, me and my brother Carry. It would have made an absurd documentary film, had it been filmed. This little angry man, five-nine, maybe 180 pounds, gone to seed in fact, unathletic, unsteady on his feet, whaling upon his oversized boys. Carrington’s six-five, I’m six-three. We just let him do it. Put our heads down into the pillow and let him satisfy himself with his belt, like we owed it to him. In some twisted way, maybe we did owe it to him. All that we were, all that we had, was because of him.”

Gaston’s heart was in his throat. He had survived to this point with only his family knowing what went on, and even that was a silent acknowledgment with his sisters, briefly held eye contact, sighs, a shake of the head when the house fell quiet again.

“I’m presuming, of course,” Duke said, having refilled his glass with Dunlap’s Hundred. “But I recognized it in you early on. That you know, more or less, what I’m talking about.”

In time, Gaston, months later, would speak candidly about his abusive alcoholic father, as Gaston became his own person, gaining fame as a writer, as an Arcadia regular; slowly without any epiphany or joyous single moment, Gaston Jarvis Sr. began to seem powerless, dismissable, a failed life, a sad life, a failed sad life that wasn’t even original or damned in some special way but just the common mean old drunk way.

But that shared endurance of fathers only bound them closer! No, why had Gaston sabotaged their friendship, why had he ruined what was so necessary once upon a time …

“Lookaway, Dixieland,” Gaston said out loud.

Lookaway, Dixieland
. The book. They had been talking about it for at least a year, planning it out, arguing over the plot points.

“I prefer
Lookaway, Lookaway,
” said Duke. They had been raiding the lyrics of “Dixie” hoping to drop the perfect title. Gaston loved these sessions, up late until three or four, running out for more ice for the bourbon, or lying on Duke’s famous leather sofa—a relic of the Divinity School, put out to trash, hauled by four men to Duke’s room.

“That scans better,” said Gaston. “But it needs ‘Dixieland’ in the title.”

It was almost
their
book; Duke’s passion for it often seemed to exceed Gaston’s own. Faulkner, Duke declared, had masterfully written about the post-Reconstruction South—there was no need to ever visit any of that again, for a white writer, at any rate. But what of the way we live now? But Gaston imagined setting a book before, during and after the Civil War, which had always been a historical fascination.

“Why not write a contemporary book?” Duke asked, perhaps weighed down by his illustrious ancestors, weary of all things Civil War.

“What’s interesting about the New South?” Gaston insisted. “Nothing. The New South sinking into the monoculture of the United States, deracinated. No, it needs the grandeur of the earlier era.”

While Duke mused as to the grand overarching idea of the book, Gaston knew it had to be about a Southern family. They would start from nothing, rise to great heights, then lose it all … the essential Irish-inherited doomedness of the South. Fortunes were always temporary below the Mason-Dixon because they were based on commodities. Families rich because of hemp, of tar, of cotton—

“Of gold,” Duke reminded Gaston. North Carolina had boasted the nation’s first gold rush; Charlotte owed its pre-War population spike to gold.

“Yes, gold or whatever. If the whims of the market didn’t finish off the great families, then there was the Civil War, and if a family had survived that, then they were bust due to holding Confederate money, and after that, Northern predations during Reconstruction and countless panics.”

Duke egged them both on. “Yet through it all such a sense of … of honor and family survival, all of it so precarious.”

“One scandal could ruin a family’s name.” And that scandal always arrived fatefully, inexorably. Gaston’s plan would be to have a book divided into smaller books, like a Walter Scott or Anthony Trollope epic, as a great family fights to hold its fortune for a final generation before the collapse and ruin. Book One: Scandal Averted. Book Two: Scandal Regained …

“They must not simply rise and fall,” Duke had said. “They have to embody the central conundrum of the South.”

“You mean, race?”

“There’s something fatal from what the slave trade fostered, a kind of barbarism side by side with the civility.”

Southerners. Such literate, civilized folk, such charm and cleverness and passion for living, such genuine interest in people, all people, high and low, white and black, and yet how often it had come to, came to, was still coming to vicious incomprehension, usually over race but other things too—religion, class, money. How often the lowest elements had burst out of the shadows and hollers, guns and torches blazing, galloping past the educated and tolerant as nightriders, how often the despicable had run riot over the better Christian ideals … how often cities had burned, people had been strung up in trees, atrocities had been permitted to occur and then, in the seeking of justice for those outrages, how slippery justice had proven, how delayed its triumph. Oh you expect such easily obtained violence in the Balkans or among Asian or African tribal peoples centuries-deep in blood feuds, but how was there such brutality and wickedness in this place of church and good intention, a place of immense friendliness and charity and fondness for the rituals of family and socializing, amid the nation’s best cooking and best music … how could one place contain the other place?

Gaston had published a shelf of books now yet he had never felt more like a writer than on those nights in Duke’s room, dreaming of what was to come, what he would yet write, bourbon in his glass, a Lucky Strike consuming itself in the ashtray. Of course, his first breakthrough short story, published at twenty-two, was in
The New Yorker,
“A Brother’s Warning,” a sentimental but beautifully written piece, two brothers, one ready to ship out to Vietnam. Gaston took a larger than usual gulp of bourbon—if he were honest, the brother in the story was none other than Duke, and the story a projection of what it would have been to lose him to the Vietnam War meat grinder, if not for his football accident. Then came a story accepted by
The Atlantic,
“In the Pines, In the Pines,” taking a cue from the Leadbelly song which always was a late-night favorite on Duke’s turntable. That story was pure Southern gothic, woods and backwoods types, a town with too many secrets … maybe if James Dickey’s
Deliverance
movie hadn’t come out that year, he would never have gotten such an accidentally derivative piece published.

But 1972 was also the first novel,
The Rapeseed Field,
which was hailed as a short, brutal masterpiece. It was, in fact, a short story that got carried away to novella length and thankfully Alfred A. Knopf knew how to puff the thing out to an elegant 210 pages. As the too obvious title implied, there was a rape of a servant girl at the hands of a villainous patriarch. Gaston lifted his glass in a pretend toast to his father: they didn’t have a servant girl but if they had, his father might likely have done it. The villain was an homage to his father, featuring blistering, abusive quotes his family could privately recognize as their father’s repartee. The other characters gang up on Dad and kill him in secret, bury him in the yellow field of rapeseed beyond the homeplace. Gaston took another swig as if to wash the title from his mind—way too obvious, the whole book immature, too grotesque, too hysterical … yet, the critics saw promise, declared it a permanent addition to the canon of Southern Lit.

“When are you going to do it?” Duke persisted in saying, each time they’d meet in the years after Duke University, then rarer with Duke Johnston in his law practice. “When are we getting
Lookaway, Dixieland
?”

Gaston Jarvis began the book a thousand times. Gaston rented an antique attic room in eighteenth-century Hillsborough, in a colonial-era house falling down around its old-maid proprietress, writing most days and driving into Durham most nights … Yes, when indeed?

That was it, wasn’t it? That was why he had grown to despise his friend. Gaston looked at Duke and saw a washout, someone who fumbled away many chances for a great role in life’s pageant. And when the world looked at Gaston, everyone saw a success … except Duke. Duke looked at him and thought that they were partners in failed promise. To Duke—though he would never say it or remind him of it—Gaston was the writer who failed to write his masterpiece, who whored out his talent, who never wrote
Lookaway, Dixieland
.

Right now! Right here with the blank computer page before him, like Canute ordering the tides, the dark waters could be forced back, the novel could still rise!

Instead, Gaston sighed and clicked on
MY PICTURES
, and up popped a folder marked
GIRLS
, and he clicked on that and looked at some racy photos of Lucinda, a lovely ample black woman, of Maria, a saucy dark-skinned Latina, of Cherie, a thin smooth brown woman with sensuous eyes … he clicked on Cherie. He got to his feet and returned with the remote telephone. Cherie’s number was on speed dial.