South of Broad (47 page)

As is usual in our encounters, once Starla has inflicted a sufficient amount of pain, her voice takes on a conciliatory note that is not to be trusted. “Are you mad at me, Leo?” she asks. When I don’t immediately answer, she puts down her wineglass and says, “Please, Leo! Don’t be mad. I didn’t mean to say that to you. I hate it when I hurt you. I’ve ruined everything for you, and you’ve got to hate me for it. I beg you to hate me. To hit me. To kill me. To free me from all this. I’m crazy, Leo. I’m completely nuts. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

This is Starla reaching the boiling point, which is the time she becomes the most dangerous woman on earth. She is feeling around deep inside her, trying to resurrect the ghost of the young woman I fell in love with. But that woman ceased to exist long ago, and so did that exuberant young man who fell in love with her and promised to spend his life with her.

“Hate you, Starla?” I echo. “Can’t do it. I can do a lot of things, but not that.”

“Toad, I can make you hate me. I’ve got powers that I haven’t used yet. The affairs I’ve had? I’ve had dozens of them. But no. Hey, I’ve got one—your kids! Abortion number one. I remember the nurses counting his arms and legs to make sure they cleaned everything out.”

As I take this soul-killing tirade into my already shut-down nervous system, I hear footsteps coming fast up the stairs. Then I hear Starla’s loud sobbing as she throws herself into her brother’s strong arms. Niles is always her safe house, her hermitage of last resort. How great to have a brother like Niles, I think.

And then the memory of Steve rises up in the room. It troubles me that I cannot even summon up the palest image of him. His face is lost to me forever, as though he never really lived at all. Even Steve’s photographs seem stillborn and shapeless to me. My memory has come to a terrible point, passing a statute of limitations from being able to call out my brother’s face from the void. While Starla weeps as Niles comforts her with a tenderness I seem to lack, I wonder where my brother would’ve lived in Charleston. I believe in my heart that he would’ve married a local girl, a good Catholic girl, and they would have a houseful of kids, living on James Island or maybe over in Mount Pleasant. I would be a real uncle many times over, and my nephews and nieces would love me, and I would volunteer to coach their Little League and soccer teams. They would grow up knowing everything about me. My brother’s kids, Steve’s kids, would be the ones to take care of me when I began to die. Yes, Steve’s kids, that noisy, chattering gang that lost all chances of being born when time and life went dark for Steve. I think of my own son, the one whose arms and legs were counted by an unnamed nurse—“One, two, three, four: all accounted for, Doctor”—and think of playing catch with him or taking him fishing in the Ashley River where my father fished with me.

I have an affinity for choosing the tightrope walk across the abyss and have developed a genius for the wrong turn. I chose a woman so broken along the soft tissues that she took me to her house of ash and veils. When did she disappear forever? What was the moment when I turned over in my marriage bed and found myself staring at the deadly black widow with the red hourglass on her abdomen? That hourglass keeps time for me.

Niles manages to calm his sister down. I catch his glances, feel the full weight of his great pity for me. I see him trying to make a decision about how to bring this enriching evening to a close.

Starla breaks away from Niles. She comes over to sit on my lap and weep hard against my chest. It would be becoming of me if I comforted her or hugged her or tried to ease her suffering in any way. I do nothing but let her feed on my coldness.

“Poor Leo. Poor Leo. You never should have married me! I knew the moment I heard you say ‘I do’ that you had destroyed your life.”

“It didn’t work out as planned,” I finally say, as her hysteria will not abate till some response is given.

“Let me take her to our house,” Niles says. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow. We all could use some rest.”

“I lied about the abortions,” she says as her brother leads her out. “I would never hurt you intentionally. I didn’t mean to have the abortions, Niles. I’m scared to death to have a kid like me. Leo, I stole ten thousand bucks from the wall safe. Take it back.” She throws her purse at me. It glances off my chair and hits the floor.

“I keep that money there for you, Starla,” I tell her. “That’s your money. You can always come get it, whether I’m here or not. You know where I hide the key. This is your house, and you can stay here anytime you want. You can live here forever. You’re still my wife.”

“Get me a goddamn divorce from the Toad!” she yells at Niles. “If you love me, get me out of the paws of this Roman Catholic fanatic.”

“We Catholics take this shit seriously, Starla,” I say wearily.

As Niles takes her out, her profanities resound through the gardens and courtyards of Tradd Street.

I
sleep late the next morning. It is about eleven when I awake to the smell of fresh-brewed coffee. Niles is waiting for me in the kitchen, badly shaken from the evening before.

“Starla took off sometime in the night,” he says. “I wish it didn’t turn out this way, Leo. I wish we’d all never met. We had no right to poison someone’s life like we did.”

“We’re all innocent,” I say as Niles and I embrace. Neither of us is embarrassed to cry about Starla’s ruined, thrown-away life.

I wonder how many more times we will have to weep for her.

A
lways, it takes weeks for me to recover from these blitzkrieg encounters with Starla. But I see a truth in the latest one that I have not faced before. I think I have come to an endgame at last, and a deal breaker. As I drive out to Sullivan’s Island, I try to figure out why I have stayed married to Starla for far longer than anyone thinks possible. My religion has certainly played in my stubborn choice not to take her through the divorce courts. Sheba and Trevor have always treated my unshakable faith as some teenage problem I failed to outgrow, like acne. I think I hold tightly to my religion with the same rigorous inflexibility as I hold the sacredness of my laughable marriage. The form of my faith appreciates the hardness and unapologetic rigidity of my church. It gives me rules to live by, and it demands I follow them twenty-four hours out of every day. It offers no time off for good behavior. The power of prayer has enabled me to survive the suicide of my only brother. And though I walked straight into a poisonous marriage with my eyes wide open, I take my vows to Starla to be permanent and sacramental even when I strayed. But something broke in the center of me when Starla flaunted the bloody arms and legs of a son I never knew I’d conceived. It is an image that holds mythical sway over me. I look at the water below me and try to think of what a life without Starla might bring.

As I turn into the driveway of the home I have always called Molly’s grandmother’s house, I realize that her grandmother, Weezie, died a good ten years ago. I park my car behind Chad’s Porsche convertible and leave my keys, in case anyone needs to leave before I do.

Sheba’s limo pulls in directly behind me, and I rush over to open the rear door for her. She swings her legs out of the backseat with the casual elegance of a vacationing queen, and tells the chauffeur she will catch a ride back to the city.

“How long do you keep the limo?” I ask.

“As long as I keep giving the producer blow jobs.”

“Forever seems like a long time,” I say. She holds on to my arm while I lead her toward the back steps.

“That’s my plan,” she says. “One that I can live with. The woman I hired to look after my mother is wonderful. She’s so patient she can even put up with my bitchy ass.”

“My God, she must be a saint.”

Sheba punches my shoulder. “Shut up. I’ve never been a bitch to the Toad.”

“You’ve always been great. I saw Trevor this morning. He looks better.”

“He’s getting stronger every day,” Sheba agrees. “I talked to David, and he thinks he can come home in a week.”

“Send him to me, Sheba. You’ve got your hands full with your mother.”

“Mom’s a lot worse than she was when you last saw her,” Sheba says. “No short-term memory at all. Sometimes she doesn’t know me from a Buick station wagon. And here’s the odd part: I thought people with Alzheimer’s are gentle and malleable. My mom’s gotten mean as hell. She bit my chauffeur the first night home, and she scratched my arm today. Look.”

Sheba unbuttons her blouse to show me four bloody lines running from her collarbone to her elbow. But that is not what I notice first: as usual, Sheba is braless. I stare at her magnificent and world-famous breasts.

“Sheba, I’m looking at your tits,” I say.

“So what? You’ve seen them before.”

“Not for a while.”

“I heard about Starla,” Sheba says. “You sound like you could use a soft body to lie down with.”

“I probably could,” I say.

“Why don’t you ask me to marry you?”

“Because you’ve dated Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood and about a thousand other movie stars. I don’t want my little wing-wang following those boys.”

“Oh, that,” Sheba scoffs. “They got me through some bad nights and more than a few jobs. Now ask me to marry you, Toad.”

“Sheba,” I say, dropping to one knee in a posture of grotesque overacting on the balcony of Molly’s grandmother’s house, “would you marry me?”

Surprising me, Sheba says, “I accept your nice proposal. And yes, it’s time for me to have a kid, and I bet you and I could have a sweet one.”

“What?” I echo, startled. But then Sheba makes one of her patented entrances for the crowd that awaits us. I stop at the refrigerator and open up a beer, then move into the sitting room where Sheba has just announced her engagement “to the Toad, of all fucking people.” She kisses me with real feeling, which takes me by surprise, and my friends laugh at my obvious discomfort, with the exception of Molly, who raises her eyebrows, and Niles, who doesn’t laugh at all. Despite his exhortations for me to leave Starla, the subject still carries the power to hurt him deeply.

“Sheba’s just kidding, Niles,” I assure him.

“I hope not,” Niles says. “That scene the other night was a nightmare.”

“Amen,” Fraser says. “You don’t know how bad it got when Niles brought her to our house.”

“Starla’s lost,” Niles says. “It’s over for her.”

Molly doesn’t allow herself to get drawn in, but says lightly, “Get on your bathing suits, everyone. The chief of police gave us permission to go swimming before he conducts his doom-and-gloom session.”

“I forgot to bring a bathing suit,” I say.

“I’ve got an extra one in the bathroom downstairs, Leo,” Chad says easily, with no sign of jealousy, no indication that he’s picked up on any clue that his wife’s friendship with me has changed. “It’ll be a little big in the crotch, but fit otherwise.”

“The last one in has the shortest pecker and the littlest tits in Charleston,” Fraser says, racing out the front door. She and Niles have a footrace to the beach. Both are still superb athletes and in perfect shape. Their sons are all ferocious competitors and eating lesser rivals alive in their sports teams.

I put on Chad’s swimsuit, then leave the basement on the run, onto the sand and into the ocean until I reach a depth safe enough for me to dive in. The heat of the day vanishes in a heartbeat as I swim underwater until I burst out into the sunlight, then a wave crashes over me. I look back at the house and feel a deep gratitude to that disheveled, shabby cottage with its sprawling rooms and comfortable furniture. The house has become a fixture in some of our lives, a place of safety and refuge for the others. Due to Molly’s generosity, I have always used the beach house as a place of escape and spiritual healing. She has always let me stay here at the house on Sullivan’s Island whenever Starla embarked on one of her desperate walkabouts. The first time Starla ran out of our house on Tradd Street, she stayed away for a month. The second time she stayed away for six months, the third a year. Then I stopped counting. On each occasion, Molly brought me the key to this house, and I went out and stayed here. It is a place of comfort in a falling-apart life. I know every inch of this beach the way I know the oddities and markings on my own body.

Swimming into deep water, I am blessed by the warm currents of the Atlantic. My body feels as though I am swimming through a bright veil of silk in the green caress of the waves. Looking out onto Fort Sumter, I watch as the last ferry leaves for the return trip to the city. The island seems much too small to have started the deadliest war in American history. But I am old enough to remember when it would’ve been against the law for Ike and Betty to swim in these waters or to set foot on these beaches.

Molly swims out to me. She balances herself against my shoulders as I stand on my tiptoes, and we ride the waves that answer some internal timepiece set by the laws of moonlight. This is the first time we’ve been alone since my bed in San Francisco, an evening that seems an eon ago.

“Cat got your tongue?” she asks. “Why are you being so antisocial?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t mean to.”

“Why didn’t you call me about Starla?” she asks.

“Bad night, Molly. The worst. And, I think, the last.”

“And your engagement to Sheba?” she teases.

“A joke. How else could Sheba grab center stage with all you pretty girls out here? She’s a pro. She knows how to do it.”

“I don’t think she’s joking.”

Sheba is riding the waves with Betty, Ike, and Chad. The tides are strong and moving us quickly, already three houses down from Molly’s grandmother’s house. Sheba waves to Molly and me, and shouts: “Keep away from my fiancé, bitch.”

Chad shouts, “Stay away from my wife, you horny bastard.”

He says it with a smile, and it occurs to me that Chad isn’t worried. The day has yet to come when a man of Leo King’s ilk steals anything from a man like him, his expression tells me. I glance at Molly for confirmation and it is written on her face, which is resigned and even a little comforted. I can feel a density in her sadness, but also resignation to the case-hardened life she was born to lead. We have lost the ease of communication we enjoyed when we first arrived in San Francisco, where the sun set over an alien ocean, far enough away that we could put aside the responsibilities that lay in ambush for us in Charleston, and say things to each other we could never utter in our South of Broad lives. We are now shy around each other; a dark star has grown between us. Words have gone on holiday. Molly swims ashore and walks into the house.