Peachtree Road (44 page)

A tootling fusillade of rock music from the old stone clubhouse signaled the band’s return, and we slid down off the hearse and began to move toward it, walking 340 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

slowly and in pairs, arm in arm. I remember that the moonlight lay so dense and shadowless over the surging hills of the golf course that it looked bathed in some ancient, awful silver sun, and the smell of mimosa was heartbreaking. Just as Sarah and I gained the door, a scream of engine and tires broke the thick night behind us, and we turned to see Red Chastain’s father’s black Rolls careen into the parking lot, rocking viciously on two tires. We all stood still, waiting for Red and Lucy to get out of the car and come toward us, but they did not. Rock music louder than that inside the club blared out of the Rolls’s open windows, and over it we could hear the sound of Red’s voice, and then Lucy’s, raised in a furious quarrel.

“Trouble in paradise,” A.J. said.

“Oh, just a little lovers’ spat, probably.” Snake grinned.

“Maybe we ought to go throw cold water on them.”

“Are they fussing, Shep?” Freddie asked, sweetly and avidly. “I heard they’ve been fussing all spring over Lucy running around with Mr. Cameron’s Negro houseboy, or whatever he is. Poor thing. I heard Red told her he’d take his pin back if she didn’t stop. And she didn’t, because I saw them out in the Camerons’ side yard the other day when I drove by there.”

She looked brightly at me, her red head cocked like a malicious little bird’s, and in that moment I truly hated her.

Freddie Slaton would always peck delicately at pain and trouble like a vulture in offal.

“I don’t have the slightest idea, Freddie,” I said. “I’ve barely seen her since Christmas.”

“Well, what about it, Sarah? Ben?” Freddie pressed. “You have to admit she’s around your place with that Glenn What’s-his-name an awful lot, whenever she’s not with Red.

What’s going on there, anyway? Tell!”

Sarah drew a sharp breath preparatory to answering PEACHTREE ROAD / 341

her, but Ben Cameron cut in with his smooth, dry voice which managed somehow to glitter.

“You probably see a lot more of Glenn Pickens and Lucy than Sarah and me, Freddie,” he said. “As much as you seem to ride by our house. Daddy said at breakfast the other day that if he didn’t know better, he’d think the little Slat on girl was thinking of buying the house.”

Freddie looked affronted, as she always did when one of her intrusions provoked the response it deserved, and huffed herself up like a bantam chicken, but whatever she might have said to Ben was lost in an explosion of sound from the far end of the parking lot. We saw a glass come spinning through the window of the Rolls and shatter on the asphalt, followed by something larger that might have been a bottle, and a shriek from Lucy. Even at this distance I could tell that it was rage and not pain or fear. I was embarrassed and angry with her, and with Red and Freddie, and ready to be angry with whoever spoke, but no one did. After a moment we went back into the club and the dance bowled on.

For the rest of the evening I kept an uneasy eye on the door, waiting for them to come in, but by the time the band finished the last throbbing, shouting chorus of “I Got a Woman” and segued into “Goodnight, Sweetheart,” they still had not appeared, and I figured that the quarrel had been serious enough so that he had taken Lucy home—or that they were coupled in furious atonement in the velvety backseat of the Rolls. The thought repelled and disturbed me as the image of Lucy copulating with Red always did, and I pulled Sarah closer to me and buried my face in the springy silk of her hair. She nuzzled her face into my shoulder, and we swayed together wordlessly and dreamily, abandoning ourselves to the myriad endings that were now upon us, drowning, at last, in them. All around us, couples were doing the same thing. As loud and

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explosive as the entire evening had been, these last few minutes of it were quiet, quiet.

So that when Lucy came pelting into the ballroom and across the floor, her breath sobbing in her throat, her sandals clattering on the waxed old boards, everyone stopped and looked at her. In truth, it was not possible to look anywhere else.

Lucy looked utterly wild, mad, almost dangerous. Her face was nearly as white as the silk dress. Her blue eyes had that eldritch white ring around them that I had rarely seen since the terrible nightmares and fits of hysteria of her childhood.

Her dress was pulled askew so that one breast trembled nearly out of it. The gardenias were gone from her hair, and it flew wild around her head; strands of it whipped across her forehead and her mouth. Her lips were reddened and puffed and bare of lipstick.

She stopped at the edge of the dance floor and looked around in intense concentration, seemingly oblivious that nearly three hundred people were staring silently at her. Her eyes scanned and scanned, and then found me, and she smiled. I had never seen such a smile on her face before, and could only stare. If it had not been for the dress and the indefinable Lucyness of her slender body and her lithe, free stride, I would not have known who she was.

She walked straight across the dance floor to where Sarah and I stood, and put her hand on my arm, ignoring Sarah as totally as if she did not stand there beside me. At this distance I could see the magenta prints of fingers on her upper arms and shoulders and throat, and smell a strong gust of bourbon. I did not doubt that she and Red had been drinking all evening. I knew that they did to some extent whenever they were out together now, but I had never seen Lucy drunk in public before. I would have known that she was tonight, though, even if I had not seen the hot, opaque, unfocused glitter in her eyes.

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“Hey, Gibby,” she said merrily and clearly. She did not slur. “I came to claim my dance. You know, you promised me the last dance.”

I did not reply for a moment, and Sarah did not either.

She stood quietly beside me, her hand still on my shoulder, looking gravely at Lucy. She knew I had not promised Lucy the last dance; this was historically reserved for the girl you came with. All of us knew that; had for years. It was a tacit rule none of us would have thought of breaking.

Lucy seemed to see Sarah for the first time, and smiled again, a great, broad, incandescent smile.

“Sarah won’t mind, Gibby,” she said, and this time she did slur just a little, and rocked on her high heels so that she had to put out one hand to steady herself against my arm.

“Sarah’ll wait for us to finish. Good old Sarah. Sarah’ll just sit all quiet like a little old puppy dog and wait for us…”

“Where’s Red, Lucy?” I said, steadying her and trying not to see the avid, embarrassed faces of my friends and classmates around me. I damned her silently. “Let’s go find Red—”

“No! I want you to dance with me!” she said. Her voice rose. “Put your arms around me, Gibby, and dance with me…dance with me…” She locked her arms around my neck and sagged against me, so that I was forced to hold her to prevent her from slipping to the floor. I looked at Sarah desperately over Lucy’s head; her face was scarlet, but it was still and composed.

“Why don’t you take her outside for some air?” she said to me, in a low, even voice. “I’ll be fine; I can get a lift home with Ben and Julia.”

“That’s right,” Lucy said in a singsong voice, her eyes closed, smiling, swaying. “You’re a nice girl, Sarah; go on home with your big brother and let me dance with Shep—”

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Rage flooded me coldly and fully then. I took Lucy by her upper arms and thrust her away from me so suddenly and sharply that her head bounced on her neck, and she opened her eyes and looked at me in the old simple, lost, Lucy bewilderment. I felt the traitorous twist begin in my heart, but the rage was stronger.

“Stand up, Lucy,” I said. “I have this dance with Sarah, and I’m going to dance with her, and then I’m going to take her home. If you need some help getting back out to the car, I’m sure somebody will help you”—I looked around and found Charlie’s calm white face, and our eyes met, and he nodded slightly. I thought there was a tiny flicker of triumph behind his thick glasses—“Charlie will help you. But I am going to dance this dance with Sarah.”

Lucy stared back at me, and her face blanched even whiter than I had thought possible, and a quick wash of tears filmed her eyes, and then vanished, to be replaced with a pure and silver glitter of something I could not name.

“You do that, Gibby,” she said. It was a drawl, low and controlled, all drunkenness gone as if it had never been. It rang in the huge room like a bell. “You dance with little Sarah, and then you take her home, and when you get there you roll her over and fuck her brains out, why don’t you?

Oh, but of course…you can’t do that. She doesn’t have anything to fuck. Red tried, he told me all about it; tried all one night while you were at Princeton, and you know what?

She didn’t have a hole! Got no hole at all, because Sarah isn’t really Sarah, you know; she’s one of those cute little plaster elf things that grin at you in miniature golf courses, and everybody knows elves don’t have holes….”

Sarah turned and walked off the dance floor and I followed her. It was very quiet in the big ballroom; Lucy had stopped talking and no one else spoke. It was a truly PEACHTREE ROAD / 345

terrible moment, and the worst and longest walk I have ever taken, or ever will again. I could not imagine how Sarah could keep her head erect and her shoulders even and her step firm and steady after those killing words, but she did.

It had been a uniquely dreadful thing for Lucy to say, a terrible analogy; it had always been her gift to find the kernel of unalterable truth in everything, and there was, in the analogy of those awful, grotesque, painted elf-parodies, grinning from among the little bridges and white, puffy toadstools of every miniature golf course we had ever seen, a tiny, caricatured core of Sarah. It was there in her carved, miniature body, her generous red mouth nearly always smiling, her high color and her huge sherry eyes under straight black brows. I knew that everyone in that room would, whenever they saw one of those ghastly homunculi, think fleetingly and guiltily of Sarah Cameron, no matter how much they might love her. I knew that I would, and Sarah would. At that moment I could have killed Lucy for that diminishment.

Sarah did not speak when I handed her into the car. I reached out to take her in my arms, but she gave me a look of such desperate control and entreaty that I did not. I knew she was fighting tears, and that any gentleness would break her. It upset Sarah so badly to cry in front of people that it almost made her sick, and so I just said, softly and helplessly,

“Sorry”; she nodded, and I nosed the car out onto West Brookhaven, and then onto Peachtree Road. As we came into Buckhead, deserted and lunar, she reached over and switched on the radio, and I knew she had won for the moment her battle with the tears, but I still did not touch her.

“Don’t come in, please, Shep,” she said, when I pulled into the cobbled courtyard of the Muscogee Avenue house. “I know I’m going to go upstairs and cry, and then I’ll feel better and I’ll be okay in the morning.

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Come talk to me then, and have some lunch. And don’t worry. You aren’t responsible for Lucy. I know that.”

“Sarah,” I said, tasting the words on my tongue in the darkness. “Sarah, I love you.”

“I know that, too,” she said, and let herself out of the car, and vanished into the door to the little sunroom.

I went home determined to wait up for Lucy no matter how late she came in, and confront her with her behavior.

I did not know what I would say to her, but I did know that what she had done to Sarah Cameron was beyond any pale I could imagine, and that I must not let her get away with it. It seemed the most important thing I would ever do; it seemed to me, that night, that great, profound things, things of deep and everlasting import, rode on my forcing some accounting from Lucy. But I had no idea what those things might be, and in any case, I did not do it, for she had not come in by full light the next morning, and I finally fell asleep in the hot, ashy dawn of a new spring day.

When I awoke, at eleven o’clock, she was sitting on the end of my bed in the summerhouse wearing black Capri pants and a fresh yellow blouse and smoking a Viceroy. I squinted stupidly at her through the smoke, and then the previous night came sliding back into my mind, and I sat up and took a deep breath and said, “Look, Lucy…”

She smiled. She looked as if she’d had ten hours of sweet, untroubled sleep, and only the faintest ghost fingerprints on her forearms and another set at the base of her throat remained of all the anger and ugliness.

“If it’s about last night, I’m sorry, Gibby, and I know I was horrible, and I’ll go over later and tell Sarah how sorry I am. I had a good reason for acting so awful, though, and I wanted to tell you about it.”

I could not imagine how she could look so PEACHTREE ROAD / 347

untouched and young and somehow clean and whole there in the dimness of the summerhouse, and I simply stared at her for a moment, and then I said, “Lucy, there can’t be any reason in the world good enough to justify how you acted last night, and whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.”

“Well,” she said equably, blowing smoke out in twin plumes through her nose, “you have to hear it, want to or not. You have to help me fix it. I’m three and a half months pregnant, and we’ve got to make some plans. I thought I better catch you before you went in for breakfast so we can figure out the best way to go about this.”

My ears rang. I simply could not answer her.

“I want to have an abortion,” she said, when I did not speak, “and I don’t have any money. I know a place in Copper Hill, Tennessee, I can go to, a real doctor in a real clinic, and perfectly safe, but it costs six hundred dollars and I can’t get that much. And I know you have that trust money from your granddaddy….”

“It’s Red’s, of course,” I said. My mouth felt stiff and clumsy, numb. My tongue was enormous.