The Reading Circle (7 page)

B
ecca sat propped up on her bright blue pillows at nine-thirty one chilly February evening, working her way through more of
Forrest Gump
. Anyone walking into the Brachle master bedroom suite might have thought that she was also posing for a Victoria's Secret catalog, what with the see-through pink negligee clinging to her petite but inviting figure. She had read up to the point where Forrest and Jenny were playing together in a college folk music group, and she was wondering once again just how far her Stout Fella had gotten with his copy. Deeper into the novel than she had, she was reasonably certain, at least judging by the way he always immediately jumped into bed after dinner, found his place with the leather bookmark she had given him, and fell to with great relish. In fact, he was doing that very thing right now on the other side of the bed. He might as well have been a mile away.

“You really are living up to your promise, Justin,” she said to him, after coming to a stopping point in her reading.

“What?” he managed reflexively, his eyes still trained on the page in front of him.

“You told Maura Beth you were going to take The Cherry Cola Book Club seriously, and you have. I'm very impressed. Really, I was talking to Connie the other day about it, and she said that Douglas is digging into the novel, too. You boys are making us proud.”

“Wait a sec, honey,” he said, turning the page. “Let me just get through this part here.”

The nonchalance in his voice annoyed her. He was dismissing her as he had so often lately. And since when had reading become more important than a satisfying roll in the hay? That was most un-Justin-like, and she was missing the intimacy besides. “You've been at it for a half hour. Aren't your eyes getting a little tired? Don't you want to call it a night even though the night is still young?”

He glanced her way briefly, and she saw that he had become annoyed himself. “Seriously, Becca—Forrest and Jenny are making crazy love all over the house. This is a really good part I've gotten to. You know, the book and the movie aren't exactly alike, either.”

Those were difficult words for her to hear. Particularly since she had on her most provocative negligee, had shaved and rubbed lotion on her legs, taken extra time with the blow-dryer so she could drape her locks just so around her shoulders—and here he was enthralled with some steamy fictional action on the pages of
Forrest Gump.
It was unflattering, to say the least. Plus, he was all bundled up in his pajamas—tops and bottoms—in this case, the navy blue ones she had given him after he'd lost all that weight following the heart attack. Leading up to that traumatic event last year, he had never failed to come to bed in anything but his birthday suit—and what a big, burly birthday suit it was! But that was beginning to feel like a distant memory.

Becca decided to try a different tack. “As I said, you and Douglas certainly meant business about
Forrest Gump.
But we've got several more weeks until the club meeting at the library. No need to rush the way you are. It reminds me too much of the way you used to wolf down your food, and you know what that led to. That was the worst night of my life when you had your heart attack at The Twinkle.”

“Uh, huh,” he said, still glued to the novel.

“You're not even listening to me. You're treating me like I'm not even in the room.” Then she jumped out of bed and stood beside the nightstand, glaring at him as if he'd just told her she looked fat or needed to brush her teeth and use some mouthwash pronto. “What's up with you?”

He came to finally, looking baffled as he turned her way. “What are you doing out of bed?”

“Oh, that does it!” she cried out. “I want to know what's going on with you, Justin Brachle. Tell me the truth—let's get this out once and for all. Are you or are you not having an affair?”

Finally, he returned her glare after inverting the book and resting it on his stomach. “What the hell are you talking about?”

She pointed to her clearly visible cleavage and arched her eyebrows dramatically. “What else am I supposed to think when you've been completely ignoring me lately? Except for that one time.”

If anything, he looked even angrier as he gritted his teeth and exhaled. “I thought we weren't going to bring that up.”

She climbed back into bed, fluffed her pillows, and sank back against them before she answered him, softening her tone. She knew only too well that her Stout Fella had never responded to her nagging. “I didn't mean to. I'm just confused. Lately, you haven't even tried. Are you having an affair with that Donna Gordon from our ‘In the Flesh' meeting last month? I can't stand this not knowing.”

She was referring to the series of cooking demonstrations that the two of them had agreed late last year to undertake in the library, much to Maura Beth Mayhew's delight. It was another feather in her cap, yet another creative way to get more people into the library. The premise was that the programs would be an opportunity for Becca Broccoli of the eponymous local radio show to meet her public “in the flesh,” if you will, with Stout Fella thrown in for good measure as her smiling, eye-candy assistant. That first outing had gone over well, attracting a dozen or more people, as a recipe for white meat, chunky chicken salad with grapes and chopped walnuts was followed to mouthwatering perfection.

“Yes, ladies—grapes!” she had declared at the very beginning to pique their interest.

“White or red seedless grapes, by the way. And a handful of chopped walnuts. Oh, the textures and the savory and sweet you'll experience all in one here!”

But it had not been lost on Becca that the audience was composed entirely of women, and to Becca's experienced eye—unmarried women on the prowl at that. Especially Donna Gordon—she of the fluttering false eyelashes, age-inappropriate ponytail, and outdated pink Capri pants. Becca discovered she wasn't imagining things, either. She had excused herself to run to the ladies' room after the demonstration was over and returned to find her Stout Fella making a bicep for the gawking woman. She was actually trying to get her hand around his impressive muscle, saying things to him like, “Oooh! I bet you like to work out all the time, don't you? I bet you could ring that bell at the State Fair in Jackson!”

Becca was floored, to put it mildly. Really, how corny could people get? This silly woman talked and dressed like she lived in an alternate universe composed exclusively of '50s TV shows.

“I'm serious, Justin,” Becca continued. “I know you're not sleeping with me, so who is it?”

He spoke as calmly as he could, but the spacing between words betrayed his exasperation and the effort he was making to restrain himself. “I . . . am . . . not . . . sleeping . . . with . . . anyone.”

She mulled things over for a while. He had still not given her a straight answer about their sex life, and she was more frustrated than ever. “Is there something you're not telling me?” she ventured finally, hoping the question wouldn't trigger another display of barely controlled anger. “Do you think you need to see the doctor?”

He shook his head, staring straight ahead. “I'm taking all my medications. You see me doing it in front of you every morning and evening. No more disobeying doctors. I'm just fine.”

“So I should just shut up and go back to
Forrest Gump
?”

He turned the book over and brought it up to his face again. “For now, that's what I think we should both do.”

 

“This is getting way old,” Maura Beth said out loud as she climbed into her brass bed, holding her LSU journal in her hand once again. Here she was, revisiting page 25. How many more times would she do it in search of her dreams? In five more months she would be twenty-nine, leaving only one year to accomplish her bucket list before she hit The Big Three-Oh. It was the milestone she had always dreaded in theoretical fashion.

No, she had not won the directorship of a town of 20,000 or more. Cherico was only 5,000 souls with no real possibility of falling into the category of growing by leaps and bounds anytime soon. So that goal no longer seemed as important to her as it once had. She had fought too hard to keep The Cherico Library open to even consider abandoning it now. It was enough that she had held on to her job and overcome some significant obstacles in doing so.

No, she had not gotten married. Jeremy McShay had seemed like a promising candidate only a couple of weeks ago, but now their relationship was in limbo. Her feisty Scarlett spirit, so hard-won during the first few months of the book club's existence, would not let her be the first to break down and call, write, text, or e-mail. He had to be the one to make the first move. That was just the way it was going to be, and if he never darkened her door again—so be it.

And, of course, no, she had not yet borne children of any kind. Not a boy, not a girl, not a redhead of either gender. She had played a game in her head during the brief period things had been going well between Jeremy and herself; when they were finding a day in their busy schedules for him to drive down from Nashville, take her out to eat, and then back to her efficiency for some quiet, tender exchanges and explorations. After he had left, she would climb into bed as she had done now and think out loud.

“Okay, I'm a redhead,” she would say, sounding for all the world like she was ten years old. Then, “Jeremy has that dark brown hair.” Next came, “So what are the odds I'll get someone who looks like me on top?”

Fifty percent had never sounded hopeful enough. That was basically just the flip of a coin. So she would sometimes go online during slack times at work and try to find articles about dominant and recessive genes for hair color. In the end, however, she had to resign herself to the fact that inheriting genes of any kind was just a crapshoot. You ended up stuck with whatever came your way.

Tonight in bed, Maura Beth put the journal away early and returned to her copy of
Forrest Gump.
She must be thoroughly familiar with it to lead a literate discussion on March 9th, and she had never actually read it before. Nor even seen the movie. At least she still had her library and The Cherry Cola Book Club to shepherd, no matter what. But she couldn't help envying settled couples like Becca and Justin Brachle, and even the brave and daring Miss Voncille and Locke Linwood, who were well on their way to matrimony late in life, she suspected. Why, she had even thought about inviting them to hold the ceremony in her library when the time came!

Now, why couldn't she have a seamless relationship with someone the way those good folks had with one another?

T
his first early March outing with his wife Connie on
The Verdict
had Douglas McShay hoping for the best but steeling himself for the worst. What he really wanted to do was clear the air and call the whole thing off, but he felt compelled to at least give it the old college try. Nonetheless, why on earth had he agreed to go along with it all a few months ago in the first place?

“Take me out on the bass boat with you,” she had suggested back in November at the end of a polite argument they were having about the state of their marriage. “Teach me how to fish. We'll finally be sharing our retirement.” It was her idea of something that would bring them closer together; but after an initial surge of endorphins, he had become silently skeptical about it all.

Then he had summoned his courage and gone up one afternoon recently to Bass Pro in Memphis and bought her a Zebco spinning reel on sale. It had come to a little under eighty dollars and was widely acknowledged as the best reel for children and beginners. Connie certainly was the latter, and Douglas tried to remain hopeful that everything would be smooth sailing on the slack waters of Lake Cherico from that point forward.

Then came the balmy March afternoon that had coaxed them out of the lodge, taking them away from quietly reading
Forrest Gump
and sipping coffee in front of the great room fireplace. It had not started particularly well from Douglas's point of view. He had spent an inordinate amount of time assuring his wife that the combination of sun block and the big straw hat covering her bouffant hairdo would more than eliminate any possibility of a sunburn.

“I don't want to look like a lobster,” she had said. “I hate that look, and it takes forever for your skin to get back to normal.” She had then recited a litany of such unpleasant images as blisters, peeling skin, and vinegar baths.

But he had shrugged her off with authority. “I guarantee you won't. Now, let's get
The Verdict
under way, okay?”

That exchange had taken place on their dock. After they'd gotten settled in the boat and headed off to one of his favorite spots, Douglas had shut off the motor, taken a deep breath, and forged ahead with his wife's very first lesson. “I know you're gonna do just fine, honey. A child could operate this reel without half-trying. Don't be nervous. There are all kinds of fish just waiting for you to catch them in that cove over there. That's my favorite spot. All you have to do is push down on that little button right there,” he told her, pointing to it as he let her hold the reel for the first time. He could tell she didn't like the way it felt by the way her mouth went all crooked with her lips out of alignment. “Then all you have to do is let up, and the line will lob out on its own.”

Little did he realize that what seemed simple and straightforward to him was not nearly so cut-and-dried to her. “What do you mean? I thought you only lobbed in badminton and tennis.”

He told himself that, above all else, he must find a way to smile. “That's a different use of the term. Just trust me. All you have to do is press down on the button.”

And she did.

“Good girl!” he told her, gently patting her on the back. “Now let up.”

She did that, too, but only after twisting herself around and aiming the reel at the shore, whereupon the line quickly unspooled, made a noise like a dentist's drill, and headed straight for the branches of an overhanging willow tree in the cove Douglas had praised so highly. What had he been thinking? Why hadn't he just aimed the reel that first time for her and let her watch a pro in action? Visual learning—that was the ticket. Had he subconsciously sabotaged her? Whatever the case, he was already sensing that the worst might be well on its way.

Connie was tearing up now as she tried to pull back on the line. But the willow seemed to have the strength of a grown man and would not release the lure easily, at least a dozen of its young, spring leaves fluttering down into the dark water as proof of its exertion. “How did it end up going there? Oh, I've messed up, haven't I? What do I do next?”

He felt bad about the whole thing, stepped up and took the blame like a man, all the while hoping she wouldn't think he was being too patronizing. “No, no, I wasn't paying attention. I didn't tell you not to cast toward the shore, and I should have. It's all on me. You didn't do anything wrong, honey.”

But he spent the next five minutes standing up in the boat and untangling the line, grunting and muttering barely audible things under his breath all the while.

“You sound like you're mad at me,” she said, watching him intently. “I think I heard a
sonuvabitch
a second or two ago.”

“No, honey. I'm not mad at you. It's just that I haven't had to untangle a line since I was a boy with a cane pole using worms and crickets for bait. It's a pain in the butt, believe me.” When he had finally gotten the job done, cutting away a twig or two with a pocket knife and carefully prying the hook out of the wood, he took another deep breath and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. More willow leaves fluttered down from his shoulder as he spoke. “Let's take a break, why don't we? Get us a couple a' cold ones from the cooler, why don'tcha?”

That brought a smile to her face; then they both popped their tabs, sat back, and sipped for a while. Momentarily, Douglas was thinking that this part wasn't half bad. For him, drifting peacefully on the brown waters of Lake Cherico was what it was all about most of the time. Catching a big one counted, and mounting it when it deserved trophy status did, too, of course; but even when he came back with nothing, the time spent alone had always been worth it.

Then Douglas realized his mistake. Alone. That was the part he was giving up by letting Connie aboard
The Verdict
. By letting her talk him into it. She was distracting, even though he knew she couldn't help it and didn't even realize she was doing anything wrong. On the way over to the cove, for instance, she had rambled on about the muumuu she was wearing. It had little green fishes with bubbles coming out of their mouths all over it—against a sky blue background, no less—and she had bought it especially for her very first fishing lesson with her handsome husband. Did she look all right in it? Did he like it? It didn't make her look too fat, did it? Was it the sort of thing other wives wore when they went fishing with their husbands?

Now, what kind of questions were these to pose on a bass boat? Who the hell could see or would even care what she was wearing in the middle of the lake? And then it came to Douglas that he and Justin Brachle had nailed it when they had proposed that The Cherry Cola Book Club read
Forrest Gump
instead of
The Robber Bridegroom.
Men and women really did view things differently. They each had their own viable, separate priorities. It wasn't necessarily a good or bad thing. It just was. His lawyer's brain zeroed in on it exactly: Equality was a legal concept only.

“Ready to try again?” Douglas said, after they had drained their beers before the cans had warmed up too much in the sun bearing down. He tried his best to make it sound like it was something he really wanted to continue doing.

With a little help from her beer buzz, Connie saw through it, the straw hat on her head moving slowly from side to side in disapproving fashion. “This isn't fun for you, is it? I mean, I can tell that even what we've done together so far is not what you expected. Give me that much. We've been married too long for me not to recognize when you're trying too hard.”

He mulled things over an awkward amount of time without saying anything, and even that was a tip-off for her.

“Quite frankly, I wondered if I'd have the patience for this,” Connie told him. “I really don't think I do, you know. This whole thing is forced, isn't it? Here I am out here worried more about getting sunburned than anything else. I can't remember when you haven't come back to the house with a little extra color in your face, and it doesn't matter to you one iota. It just makes you look even more dashing than you already are, you devil, you.”

He was squinting at her, shading his eyes with his hand while accepting her compliment with a broad grin. “Well, we really haven't given it a shot yet. You haven't even made your first successful cast.”

She lifted up her chin proudly as if she were a soldier snapping to attention. “Okay, then. Let's make sure we can both say I've done that.” On her own she took the reel in hand, faced away from the willows overhanging the cove, and pushed the button down, making a perfectly respectable cast.

He applauded the light
kerplunk
it made out on the still water. “I'd give you a ten out of ten! Olympic gold quality!”

“Excellent. Then that's over and done with!”

“You really don't want to continue? If you're really serious about fishing, you have to start somewhere, you know.”

She handed over the reel and pointed to her big straw purse next to the blue plastic cooler full of beer and bottled water. “I came prepared in case things didn't go well. Or I chickened out, whichever came first. I brought along my copy of
Forrest Gump
to read, and that's just what I'm going to do. I'll keep you company, watching you fish while I see what mischief Forrest is up to next. How does that sound?”

Well, that was music to his ears, and he couldn't help laughing. “You know, I went along with all this to keep the peace. I haven't forgotten that you pointed out that we really weren't doing a lot of things together since moving down from Nashville. I certainly agree we shouldn't be off in our separate corners with our hobbies, though. So if this isn't the right thing to share, I promise we'll just find something else.”

“Spoken like a true retired lawyer,” she said, leaning over to give him a peck on his sunburned cheek. Then she reached into her purse, retrieved her copy of
Forrest Gump,
and picked up where she had left off. A huge sigh followed as she found her place. Even though she was still floating on the waters of Lake Cherico, she knew she was once again on solid ground.

 

It was Saturday night, the evening before The Cherry Cola Book Club would be reviewing
Forrest Gump,
and Maura Beth had just finished icing the chocolate, cherry cola sheet cake she was bringing to the event. Baking the cake in her kitchenette had given her a brief respite from her frazzled emotional state. It was driving her crazy that she had not heard a peep out of Jeremy since their fallout nearly five weeks ago. Oh, she was still holding on to her stubbornness, her absolute requirement that he be the first one to break the ice and apologize to her for his immature and outrageous display of temper in her apartment that afternoon. But she knew only too well that her rigidity was just that, containing nothing of the soft kisses and the tender touches she had enjoyed from Jeremy when things were going well between them. No consolation at all, this business of being unyielding because she knew he had been in the wrong.

“He must not care,” she had told Periwinkle over the phone somewhere in the interim, struggling to repress all the indecision and doubt that was dogging her. “Or he would have made a move by now.”

“I should just forget him,” she had also told Renette at work one day, sounding robotic and stern, yet somehow unconvincing. “It's obviously over, and I should just move on.”

Neither woman had the answer for her, and she had not been able to put him out of her mind. The whole quandary was even interfering with her preparation for the
Forrest Gump
meeting fast approaching, and she could ill afford that. Every review, every potluck dinner must leave the members clamoring for more. She must make every topic interesting, try to keep every discussion balanced and literate, not allowing anyone or anything to monopolize or scuttle the evening's agenda as Councilman Sparks had done last year. But she kept postponing an outline to fine-tune her role as moderator. Worse still, she had yet to collect her own thoughts about Winston Groom's work and the unforgettable, now-iconic character of Forrest Gump—simple and brave, loyal and straightforward to a fault.

It had gotten so bad that two days ago in her little office, Maura Beth had broken down and taken a stab at forcing the issue. She had composed an e-mail to Jeremy, taking the better part of an afternoon to get everything just the way she wanted. Over and over she had deleted and rephrased, sometimes only a word here and there. At other times she found herself thinking that several sentences needed to bite the dust. Finally, she finished.