Lookaway, Lookaway (44 page)

“How much?”

“Twelve hundred dollars.”

“Jesus Christ. Okay, these guys start small and then get you committed and you keep sending because you’ve already sent so much. This official will need more money, so Nonso will be back in tears begging for another installment.”

Josh blankly stared at the bookcase. Nonso had already asked for some more money. “It’s hard to think that…”

“These guys are
good
. They prey on lonely queers and desperate straight women, sometimes church philanthropy types who think they’re helping someone. No shit, it’s a billion-dollar industry; the biggest home-based industry in Nigeria. Cheating softhearted Westerners. C’mon, Josh, this is the home of the Nigerian prince who writes you by e-mail to share his immense fortune if only you’ll send him some money first.”

Josh breathed heavily. “Can you go now?”

Dorrie, correctly, heard no anger or resentment in the request, just defeat. “Yeah, baby. I’ll go. Call me later, okay?”

She let herself out.

Immediately, Josh turned on his laptop, waited for the endless assault of windows asking him to upgrade and renew programs he never used or didn’t know he had … the interminable wait until the wireless signal was captured and connection to the internet was achieved. Josh went to charlottedownlow.com and logged on.

Some guys sent him a smile, a flirt, stupid little emoticons popped up that some men hoped would lead to an online chat, a hookup.

An hour went by, then another. Josh stared at Nonso’s profile, that ludicrous smile, waiting for the green dot to glow in the corner, showing that he too had come online.

Another hour went by; it was getting dark in the room. An overweight older guy,
bigblk4white,
sent him a message telling him he “was lookin fyne.” A previous lackluster hookup,
hoodstar,
sent him a “wasup?” It would be after midnight in Lagos, but that’s when they often talked so Josh continued to sit and stare at his screen.

Finally, Nonso was online. Within a minute, a message arrived in Josh’s mailbox.

Nonso: hello my love it is nt long for we be toghter in Charlote

After they moved over to Skype, after an hour of accusations and tears (Josh’s and Nonso’s), and after some very complicated explanations, Josh and Nonso understood each other perfectly. As the blue candles burned down, as the webcam images got darker and fuzzier, Josh said good night and immediately went to his online banking site and transferred into Nonso’s account another eight hundred American dollars of Uncle Gaston’s check money.

Dillard

She lived on Elderflower Drive. At first she found mockery in the name, some bloom turned ancient, something for the potpourri basket, wilted, desiccate … but then she came to like the name. Elderflower: a flowering in old age, a late and splendid blossoming that the world would find unlikely. Dillard understood that no elderflowers bloomed in North Carolina or anywhere nearer than England. Once she had a friend very much a bore about tea and tea-making who brought her some dried elderflowers and prepared a tisane. It was divine, she recalled, but how precisely was it divine? She remembered a sweetness, some sugary floral taste without citrus or sharpness, a weak perfume, gentle.

Dillard of Dilworth, went the family singsong, like Tess of the d’Urbervilles or Catherine of Aragon (to name two other women disappointed in love). Dilworth was a venerable neighborhood, one of the most respectable in Charlotte, though it had never been particularly monied, or rather, the old families within it had not been conspicuous with their money. A mix of two-story Victorian frame houses, brick bungalows of the 1920s and 1930s with a hint of Asian influence in the roof tiles, properties politely separated by magnolias and clusters of azalea, ill-considered modern apartment blocks of the 1950s, brick ranch homes of the 1960s with big yards to be mown, each sweltering summer abuzz with mowers and teenage boys doing their expected chore or making a little pocket change in the yard of the nice old lady next door. Her own Christopher, shirtless, gleaming like a Nordic god, used to mow her entire cul-de-sac; the hustler in him had cornered the market.

Dillard owned one of the 1930s bungalows with a large bay window facing the sloping front yard down to the street, as well as a large bay window looking to the backyard and the small strip of woods behind. The living room received light throughout the day. One could sit in Dillard’s living room and face either of the two views, one capacious—the suburban street with the Bank of America Tower jutting above the neighborhood poplars—and the other cloistered—the cozy backyard against a small bank and its grouping of trees that, when the shadows lengthened, seemed like the edge of a greater forest.

That theoretical guest in the living room could also face north, to the portrait of her paternal grandmother, or south, to the fireplace and the mantel which at one time was a shrine to her son, Christopher. No other room in her house had so much to delight or sadden or provoke Dillard, but there were not many days when she didn’t come for a brief sit-down to be with her thoughts, or to empty her mind into the passing view, the bird feeders, the neighborhood children in the street growing up with tricycles, then bicycles, then skateboards, the prowling of an orange tabby in her backyard, the chattering chase of squirrels in the lower branches … these were the visual accompaniments to the sharp ticking of the chestnut cabinet clock on the mantel. There was no need to turn on the television, she often thought—right here was all the stimulation she required.

Dillard’s entire social landscape had changed since Christopher died. At times she felt a pang of loss for it, felt some last lifeline had been coiled and stowed out of reach. There was an annual gathering of Salem College alumnae in Charlotte, a springtime get-together, lots of gossip, shopping, dining, an en masse escape from families and husbands, which she had in the past looked forward to until this year when the day implacably arrived and Dillard found herself contacting the ringleader and begging off appearing, crediting “an unspeakable efflorescence of my fibromyalgia,” from which she suffered.

She had quietly withdrawn from the Sunday school class at Sedgewood Presbyterian; the sermon was sufficient and the gauntlet of greetings and well-wishing to and from the sanctuary was social whirl enough.

And there was her sporadic employment at Parminter’s, of course, but she had cut back her hours there. Lily Parminter herself called the house once, asking if she was all right, why they hadn’t seen her at the store in ages. Why, the new girls don’t know the first thing about pre-war china, and regular customers—wedding planners, caterers, old-family matrons maintaining a Smithsonian Museum’s number of china sets, always looking for rare, matching gravy boats or tureen ladles—they were
all
asking after her: “Lily, where is our Dillard?” But it was never as if the china shop paid her a living wage; she only had dwelled so long among the glass cases and cabinets for the social aspect, the antiquated spinsterish element that suited her. The all-female preserve of china, replacements, no-longer-made things, fragile things, beautiful things with hairline, barely detectable cracks, small flaws of art that eluded even the finest German or Asian porcelainist and yet there they were. And the little stories of loss, or how someone’s two-year-old pulled at the tablecloth and sent the priceless Sèvres cup and saucer to the floor, told and retold as if an epic tragedy had occurred, accompanied by female keening fit for Greek drama (“Oh you poor darling—and you just watched as it happened!”) and the final show of sympathy, Lily Parminter removing her chained glasses, pressing her delicate aged hands to the hands of the sufferer, with her assurances that a salad plate, a cream urn, could be found to match just perfectly, just you wait. That must have been the appeal of the place, the idea that losses could be met with restoration, not easily, but eventually. And there was esteem there for Dillard, a deference, an acknowledgment of her expertise. She, who had been so useless in the important matters of life.

Socializing with family was less avoidable but Dillard had made tactical withdrawals there, too. She had to be forcibly dragged by family, for Sunday lunch, to the Charlottetowne Country Club which she didn’t approve of, down deep, the origin of her social follies, the setting for her initial courtship with the roustabout Randy Revelle. (She remembered Joshua, her favorite of Jerene’s children, innocently asking about “Uncle Randy” and Annie piping up, asking, “‘Randy Revelle’ was really his name? Who was naming people back then, John Bunyan?” Well yes, his name alone should have foretold all that she was to endure.)

She had two very infrequent family visitors. Gaston would sometimes be overwhelmed with fraternal feeling and stop by the house when he was headed uptown, giving no more than five minutes of warning before he appeared at the door, and rarely staying for longer than twenty. He always offered money. Gaston’s social currency was his money—he would be pointless without it. His mountain of money, she imagined, must weigh on him when he considered his little sister, left a ward of the family, her solvency subject to stray generous gestures.

They would perform the same Edwardian parlor drama each time: her refusal to be a burden, her rejection of his latest offer, she simply couldn’t go on being such a charity case, his bluff insistence, her faint assertion that her work at Parminter’s brought in enough, his threat to go down to the bank and simply put it into her account without her permission so she might as well take the check he was dangling in his right hand. If Gaston had recently appeared at a family function drunk or had been especially nasty to everyone—he usually could not recall if he had particularly offended her among the many people he had certainly offended—then he would rise to extraordinary gestures, like paying off her home’s mortgage in 2001.

“I’m sure,” he said, “that my agent cheats me yearly for more than this little check I am writing.” He gave each check his oversized flourished signature honed at countless book signings. “It is nothing to me except that it could bring you a little security.” He looked up, suddenly shed of his half century, suddenly the bright-eyed boy she grew up with. “And I’m sure I got walloped half as much because you were there to head Daddy off at the pass.”

She was not in a position, in their long-playing melodrama, to actually refuse his money for reasons of pride—pride which she had dispensed with long ago. On this bit of charity she was serene: he had money, he was family. Any other avenue to money had some shame or degradation attached to it, or worse, sheer bother. Dillard had passed the age of bother, of complication.

The second family emissary was her niece Annie the barbarian who stormed Dillard’s citadel of quiet. At first so welcome, such an unexpected youthful envoy. Annie brought laughter to the house, talking at her high boisterous volume—and food. Naturally, poor Annie, like all fat people, Dillard speculated, wanted partners in gustatory crime. Annie would have a newly discovered ice-cream flavor she had brought or a fabulous ethnic find, a Persian pastry with pistachios and honey, this Chinese cake from the Asian market, a pound cake of sorts soaked in lychee juice—in Charlotte, North Carolina! In this backwater!—always a new discovery for poor Dillard, who never gets out much, who never goes anywhere, who probably, Annie must imagine, subsists on gruel or pet food.

“What possessed you, Annie, to think I need one
bite
of those cookies, let alone a hundred?”

“I wanted to bring you something, Aunt Dillie,” she said, setting the cookies on the kitchen nook table. “You hate flowers and said not to bring you any more knickknacks or bric-a-brac.”

“I don’t need to be brought something like some potentate of the East every time you want to come see me.” Dillard broke off half of a cookie and popped it into her mouth. “These are good, though.”

It was a way, Dillard reflected, of Annie justifying the pig-out (since Annie always ate four fifths of what she brought over), disguising it to herself as a mission of mercy. Dillard’s house had become a no-comment zone for eating, no scolding, no consequences, just us girls and our secret chocolate. Maybe she thought calories eaten in the service of keeping poor old Aunt Dillard company didn’t even count.

Last month her niece was desperate to confess her difficulties with her third husband, Chuck—oh what was she now? Annie Johnston Costa Winchell Arbuthnot, my goodness. A presumptuous solidarity with Aunt Dillard who made the bad marriage just as she had, the two reckless romantic outcasts against the rest of the family—that seemed to be the gist. Dillard did not accept this retelling of the myth. Annie had arisen in an age of complete freedom from social constraint and societal inquisition, where girls tried out their men pre-maritally, where they took themselves off to Europe for the summer and discovered all there was to know about sex and related misadventures. Annie, unlike sheltered naïve Dillard, who was seduced handily by Randy her junior year at Salem and was instantly pregnant, Annie had no excuse for her bad choices. Annie had followed one bad marriage with two others! At least Dillard had held it to the one. Another thing, Annie was always floating some disparagement of her mother, longing for her aunt to join in and be an ally with her against Jerene, who she feels is a perpetual outrage, some monster. Her visits were becoming a nuisance.

Among the younger generation, Dillard wished Joshua would visit more. Dear Joshua, so soft and sweet she continually wanted to hug him. How odd that the world had destroyed her rugged, athletic, hale and hearty son but had spared tender Joshua with his permanent look of bullied hurt on his face. Bo came by a year ago, and what a plodding sincere thing he was—though his wife is a firecracker. She wished she could get to know Kate better, but Kate was in motion continually, inexhaustible, dawn to midnight, doing church things, world-saving things. Kate had even taken over Dillard’s chair at the Jarvis Trust for American Art meetings—surely as a kindness, since what could she care about paintings and the rich-lady gossip of Jerene’s handpicked circle of sycophants. Yes, that too Dillard had quietly removed herself from. “You’re not to become a cat lady,” Jerene had said, rather than begging her to stay on the board. “You may not get strange and eccentric past a certain point, Dillard—I won’t have it.”