Peachtree Road (98 page)
Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons
Let me give you some money, Sarah. I can’t stand it if you’re giving painting lessons in your basement because you need the money.”
She disengaged her fingers and covered both flaming cheeks with both hands.
“I don’t know what in God’s name is the matter with me tonight,” she said, and her voice trembled again. “I didn’t come over here to beg money from you. Mother and Daddy would give me all the money I needed, or Mother would, if I’d let her. I just didn’t want to take it from her. And I’m sure as hell not going to take any from you. I’m not really poor. It’s just that right now, with both girls in school…the painting lessons are just the ticket. They bring me just enough, and I can stop them when I don’t need the extra anymore. And then, one day the Muscogee house will sell, and that money will be mine—I’m appalled at myself for even mentioning it to you. I thought I was coming over to wish you Happy New Year and escape the club letches. It seemed like a good idea at the time….” Tears were close under the surface of her voice again.
“It was a good idea,” I said. “It was a magnificent idea. I was just sitting here feeling sorry for myself, and about a thousand years old. I didn’t even realize it was New Year’s Eve. I really would have put my head in the oven if I had.”
She laughed, a trembling little laugh, and the tears receded.
“I know,” she said. “Is there anything worse? All that horn blowing, and frantic smiling and dancing and 770 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
yelling, and kissing all those people you don’t even speak to the rest of the year…Shep?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember that first New Year’s Eve you were home from Princeton? And we went to Hart’s?”
“And it snowed, and we sat in the bay window looking over Peachtree Street and watched it come down, and drank Taittinger blanc de blanc? Yes,” I said, “I remember.”
“It was the last really, really good New Year’s Eve I can remember,” she said.
“Me, too,” I said.
“Let’s do it again,” she said, and fished the bottle from the sofa beside her and held it up. It was Taittinger. The black ice lock in my heart stirred a little, ponderously and far, far down.
“Let’s do,” I said.
I got a couple of stemmed glasses from the kitchen, and opened the champagne while she watched. It made a wonderful, festive whoosh, and fountained all over the hearth.
She laughed, a small, prissy sound, and sat with her hands folded in her lap and her ankles crossed, the old Atlanta Pink posture of genteel repose, watching me pour the fizzing gold into the glasses.
I handed her one and glanced at the clock on the mantel over the fireplace. Twenty of twelve.
“Happy New Year, Sarah,” I said.
“Happy New Year, Shep.”
We drank. We drank again. The clock moved, the fire spat, Ella segued into “Love for Sale,” and we drank again.
We finished the bottle of Taittinger in seven minutes flat.
We did not speak in all that time. When we both opened our mouths to do so at once, and stopped and laughed, and began again, I suddenly realized that I could not feel my lips, and said, “God, I think I’ve sat here and gotten drunk as a skunk.”
“Oh, I’m so glad,” Sarah said. “I don’t think I could PEACHTREE ROAD / 771
have done it otherwise.”
“Done what?” I said owlishly.
“Seduced you. That really is what I came for,” Sarah Cameron Gentry said.
I closed one eye and peered at her, to see if she would stop the slow spin she had begun. She did: The spin stopped and she became Sarah again, sitting bare-shouldered and beautiful and ripe as a small plum in my firelight, and literally terrified.
I stared with both eyes, squinting to focus. She was not teasing.
“Can you bear to do that?” I said. “Can you, after all those years and what I did to you and what I’ve turned into? Can you, Sarah?”
“I can’t bear not to,” she said, her voice very small, borne out on a long, trembling breath. “I can’t bear not to. I’ve missed you for almost twenty years. And I’ve just…been around women too damned long, Shep.”
I stood up, very slowly, my legs unsteady under me, my heart starting a long, dragging, heavy tattoo. I held out my arms to her. I had no idea on earth what I was going to do next.
“Then come here, Sarah Cameron,” I said. “Come here and seduce me for New Year’s Eve.”
She put her glass down and stood herself, looking at me almost defiantly, firelight leaping on her shoulders and face, her eyes glittering with liquor and tears.
“Wait a minute,” she said, slurring just a little. She was swaying very slightly, almost imperceptibly. But I had the sense that beneath the protective rush of the champagne she knew exactly what she was about, and it was that which so frightened her.
“I want you to be sure you know what you’re getting,” she said.
Sarah stepped out of her sandals. She slipped the straps of the red satin dress down off her shoulders, as slowly and delicately as if she were in a pool of blue 772 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
baby spotlight. She peeled the dress down to her hips and stepped out of it. Underneath she wore a scrap of black satin-and-lace bra, and black panty hose. Her rich, compact little body shone through the black, pale gold like new honey, white only where a recent summer’s bikini had shielded her from the kiss of her beloved sun. Good muscles slid in her stomach and arms and shoulders.
“Can you do it with this?” she said, running her hands down her body. “It’s not young anymore.” I stood staring, blood pounding dully at my temples, ears roaring. I could not speak.
“Can you do it with a middle-aged woman who hasn’t done it for years, and only once before with you? Can you?”
Sarah whispered. As she whispered she unhooked the brassiere and let it fall to the floor. Her breasts bobbed free in the firelight, sweet and heavy, the heft and fruit of them remembered in my palms and groin. Remembered from a night two decades before, in an apartment on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, in another time and another world altogether…Still, I could not speak.
“Can you, Shep?” Sarah said, and peeled the panty hose down, and stepped out of them. She wore, now, only black lace bikini panties.
“I don’t know,” I whispered truthfully, strangling on my own voice. I felt paralyzed, drowned in blackness and the heavy weight of time and the sediment of loss. A hunger as old and fierce as the world stirred in me. She was, in the dying firelight, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, riper and more complete than any young girl. But I had been alone so long, so long…Aloneness ran in my veins and weighed like cold iron in my groin. I did not think I could move.
“I think you can,” Sarah said, and came, near-naked, across the floor to me and moved into the wooden arms PEACHTREE ROAD / 773
I held out. “I think you can….”
She moved against me, pressing her body against mine, moving and moving, moving to the beat of the music and the rhythm of her blood, moving, moving. She arched her back and scrubbed her breasts into my chest. Her face was in its old spot in the hollow of my neck, and I could feel the wetness of tears, and the rush of breath as she murmured words I could not hear, soft, crooning words of loss and yearning and old, old love. My arms went around her automatically, and my hands found the smooth, warm hollow in the small of her back, and pulled her into my groin. As if they had life independent of me, they pulled the panties down on her hips, and, still moving against me, she wriggled them down and stepped out of them.
“Please help me,” she whispered. “Can you? Can you, Shep?”
Could I? I leaned onto and into her, mindless, moving with her. Could I? Could the cooled blood warm again, the banked heart flame, the body find the old, urgent moves, that long-forgotten ballet of thrust, thrust, thrust? Could the hopeless old love, so long starved and banished, find breath and being in her once again? Could I? Did I dare?
Sobbing softly, she pulled me down onto the sofa with her, and the small body squirmed under mine until it found the core of me, and opened in warmth and wetness and urgency to take me, finally, into the secret center of her. Yes.
I could. I could, I dared, I could….
The telephone rang across the room. I knew without a shaving of a doubt, without a silvery hair of uncertainty, who it was. Even as I rocked and plunged, rocked and plunged, liberation from the blackness and the aloneness of two decades gathering inexorably in the starved groin, I knew. I knew, muscle and sinew and bone and blood and skin. My pounding heart knew. My
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ragged breath knew. My penis knew, and wilted in despair at the knowledge. I lay still atop Sarah, eyes closed, flaccid and finished, desolation and ending bitter in my mouth.
Sarah knew, too. She was out from under me with one smooth, violent movement, utterly and icily white, eyes blinded and unfocused. She was back in the satin dress and the silver sandals, with the coat clutched around her, before I could sit up, and she did not speak until she was at the door of the summerhouse. I looked across the room at her.
She looked, in that moment, as old as Dorothy Cameron—older. She looked dead, like an animated corpse, come to call on the remorseless living in her mother’s old mink coat.
“I will not bother you again,” she said, in a voice to match the corpse-look of her. “I forgot. I truly forgot. But I won’t again.”
As she turned to go, the bells of Saint Philip’s Church just up Peachtree Road began to peal crazily through the wrecked night. Sarah turned back to me.
“I wish,” she said conversationally, “that Red Chastain had killed her when he had the chance.”
And she was gone into the first pealing moments of a new year.
The phone began ringing again even as the door slammed.
I let it ring ten or fifteen times, and then I plodded heavily over and picked up the receiver.
“Hey, Gibby,” she said. Pause. Deep, shuddering draw of cigarette. “It’s Lucy, honey. Happy New Year!”
L
ucy never knew, after that New Year’s Eve, that she had doomed me with Sarah. At least, I do not think she knew in her mind. Her conscious weapons had always been more direct. The midnight telephone call that drowned the ember of hope between Sarah and me was not even coincidental: Lucy had been calling me at midnight on New Year’s Eve for years.
But what she knew in her blood was another matter. There in that dark Styx of vivid, indestructible life which sustained Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable through so much horror, something was that met and knew every inch of me, perfectly.
It was not the leaping, singing thing that called between her and Malory, but nevertheless, it knew. The fact remained that twenty years after I had first loved and wanted her, Sarah Cameron was still lost to me, now irrevocably, and even given my own fecklessness, Lucy was the author of that.
Dorothy Cameron knew, too, and unlike Lucy, she knew with the full of her honed and prescient mind. Not far into the new year I took her a first draft of
The Compleat Georgian
, feeling as shy and tongue-tied as if I were calling at Merrivale House to pick up Sarah for a dance when I was fifteen. Ben had had a bad day, roaming and thrashing and falling, and had had to be sedated and moved to the infirmary, so we sat in the downstairs sun-room of Carlton House, drinking tea amid the bamboo furniture and tropical plants and caged birds which had, I suspected, been patterned after the decor of the sun-room at The Cloister on Sea Island, so as to give a dimension of familiar luxury and festivity to this last cloister of privileged old age. In the gray-white light from the window walls, fully half of the population of Carlton House took the winter sun like old turtles.
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The light, or more likely the long grief and strain of Ben’s deterioration, had leached the high color out of Dorothy’s face, that last brave ensign of youth. I wondered if Sarah would ever lose it permanently. She already had, in that last glimpse I had had of her.
“So here it is,” she said, hefting the thick folder of manuscript in her thin hands. “The house of Cameron, as seen through the eyes of Bondurant. An unbeatable combination.
I’m sorrier than I can say that it’s the only one that will ever be.”
I knew then that Sarah had told her mother about what happened on New Year’s Eve, or at least some of it. What she had not, Dorothy would have filled in for herself. I remembered that long ago, just before I had left on that fatal journey across America after Lucy’s frantic call, Dorothy Cameron had warned me about her.
“She is a danger to herself and a worse one to you,” she had said. To her credit, she did not remind me now of that conversation. She knew, of course, that it was far too late for that.
“I’m sorry, too,” I said. I started to go on, to amplify, justify, explain, offer hope, and then did not. There was nothing further to say, and so I said nothing.
“It would have almost made these last dreadful years worth it,” she said, in her usual rich, level voice, but when I looked into her face I saw an anguish that I had seen there only at young Ben’s death, and the start of Ben Senior’s long decline.
Her eyes were closed.
Oh, Lucy, so many lives, I thought wearily. I could not be angry at her. We were beyond that, too.
“But this is wonderful, darling, just wonderful,” she said briskly, and the anguish was gone and only her pleasure in the manuscript remained. I felt foolish elation.
“It is, isn’t it?” I said. “I did it, by God. I really did. And I didn’t even leave Atlanta. Most of the time if you PEACHTREE ROAD / 777
want to be a creative genius—or ugly, or anything outside the playpen—you have to leave.”
“Well, you didn’t,” she said. “You may have hidden out like a possum in a hollow tree, but you didn’t leave.”
“I amend that,” I said. “If you want to be creative or ugly or happy. You can’t stay here and be all of them.”
She smiled softly. “But does anybody have all those things, Shep?” she said. “Doesn’t everybody have to choose some things over others, no matter where they are?”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling an obscure annoyance at her. “But by God, I don’t know many places where your very life has to be one of the choices.”
