“It’s okay for art to make you uncomfortable, even scare you.
It’s how we grow.”
I make a face. She sounds so damn condescending.
I didn’t just swing down out of the trees, and she knows it. On the other hand, if we got married or even lived together, it’d be my place, too. What would Sarah think of this? She’s gotten a lot more liberal in the last year, but this stuff would embarrass her. She thinks Amy is too young for me, anyway.
“I don’t mind a little growth, but I think Mapplethorpe’s stuff would prematurely age me.”
Amy chucks Jessie under her chin.
“I realize now who you named her after.”
I get it. Jesse Helms, the right-wing senator from North Carolina who messed with the federal arts budget.
“You artist types claim to be so open-minded,” I point out, “but as soon as somebody disagrees with you about something, you start calling people names.” Hardly role models for us hicks in the boonies.
“I just get so irritated with the attitude,” Amy lectures, “that art is supposed to be immediately absorbed like some comic book. Do you realize that when somebody goes through a museum the average length of time spent on each exhibit is about eighteen seconds?”
I nod, more than happy to keep the conversation on this level. Some U.S. Supreme Court justice, hopelessly muddled, endeared himself to future generations of law students by confessing in a written opinion that maybe he didn’t know what obscenity was, but he knew it when he saw it.
“People know what they like,” I say, knowing I sound hopelessly provincial.
“They don’t have to study it for a lifetime. You either respond or you don’t.”
Amy shakes her head. Trying to improve me is irresistible.
“That’s what you think,” she says earnestly.
“But it’s like trying to judge a book when you don’t understand half the words.”
Is Amy like this with her clients? No wonder she isn’t making any money. She is so damn earnest about it.
“It’s over my head is what you mean. I can live with that. But I don’t have to have it in my house.”
Jessie, sensing she is forgiven, raises her enormous muzzle and gazes at Amy with her big, beautiful brown eyes as if to say, this guy is full of it. Seeing that I am shifting the focus of the argument, Amy ignores my dog and says to me, “I wouldn’t expect to have it out in the living room if it upset you.”
Is every conversation we have these days about us? When I bought the house, I thought she got the message that I wasn’t ready to get married. I take off Jessie’s collar. The tinkling of her tags is driving me crazy. Despite our differences, Amy and I seem to be wearing invisible magnets that have each other’s names embedded in them.
How to explain it? Months ago she told me that I reminded her of her father. For her part she has Rosa’s spunky personality and irrepressible good humor. Too, like some magical property that is essential to life but poorly understood, there is between us a steady sexual buzz, a ubiquitous all-purpose emotional Super Glue that can temporarily seal every crack in the relationship. This strange attraction to my aging, soft-putty flesh is, to me, another sign of her kinkiness. But women are generally strange creatures. What drives them to seek solace in such a ridiculously unsubtle and ultimately woebegone-looking organ? This relentless, instinctive preference for the obvious proves they have no more intelligence or self-control than we do.
And tonight, like so many others, we end our discussion in her queen-sized bed, leaving Jessie in her crate in the kitchen, a decision naturally questioned by my girlfriend. However, this confinement,
instead of being cruel, is an act of kindness.
Used to a lifetime in tight spaces, Jessie feels secure in there.
Freedom always sounds better than it is. I’m surprised Amy hasn’t turned that argument on me. I haven’t quite been honest with her, telling her that the reason I’m not hungry is that I was given a bowl of soup by an old friend whom I stopped by to visit in order to get information on the case. I don’t mention that I kissed this old friend or that she responded. Amy, who used to be in the Blackwell County prosecuting attorney’s office, has been fascinated by my account of the intrigues going on in Bear Creek and has listened in wide-eyed fascination at the description of my family’s treatment at the hands of Oscar and Paul Taylor. Why should I tell her about Angela? I don’t even know how I feel about her myself.
Amy’s bedroom is even more bizarre than the rest of the apartment, probably because, in addition to nudes on the walls, she has pictures of her family on the nightstand by her bed. Her father’s pinched face shows scarring on both sides, perhaps from acne as an adolescent. Bald, withered, he was already worn out at the time of this photograph, taken five years before his death from prostate cancer, but Amy assures me that emotionally, at least, he is still very much a force in her life.
“Benign?” I ask, my arm around his daughter’s bare shoulders. Her compact body is delightfully voluptuous as well as athletic. As I’ve come to know it, I’ve been confronted by the knowledge of how much work she puts into it. In the corner is one of those Nordic Tracks a fitness torture chamber whose very name suggests an uncompromisingly bleak and sunless existence.
Waking up on occasion to my girlfriend trudging nowhere is unnerving.
What if she were to give up exercise and start eating? She claims she weighs herself every day. I believe her, having seen her measure herself in ounces. Only five-two, she doesn’t have any inches to give away to the never-ending battle of the twentieth century.
Light-years more comfortable naked than any woman I’ve ever known, Amy studies her father’s grim likeness and answers my question.
“Like you, not always,” she says, putting her hand on my thigh.
“I can feel his judgment even in my sleep. Actually, he tried hard to be tolerant, but his disapproval always found a way.”
Later, as we lie in the darkness, it becomes clear what our discussion was all about: whether she admits it or not, Amy wants a father figure.
Do I need another daughter? Surely not. Sarah is more than enough for me. Whatever the future holds, these few hours with Angela have made me wonder if I wouldn’t be better off with a woman who shares my past.
For better or worse, despite its past horrors and poverty, I have to acknowledge the Delta is still my emotional home. It is a generational thing: the visit with Angela has awakened feelings that I could never possibly have with Amy, who, growing up in the post-civil-rights era, understandably lives only in the present tense.
In the morning before we leave for our offices I talk almost
compulsively about Bear Creek.
Standing behind her in her bathroom and watching her put on her face, I explain about Bear Creek’s Chinese families.
“I never saw people work so hard. If they ever took vacations, I never knew it. And talk about family values: Their kids never got in trouble.”
Amy, squinting in the glare of so much light (the frame of her mirror looks like the marquee of a Broadway musical), sniffs, “They must have felt really out of place.”
Without her makeup, Amy looks pretty ordinary.
Most women do, I guess. Rosa was one of the few women who could look good without it.
Sarah has her coloring-an exotic blend of Negro, Indian, and Spanish blood and glossy curly hair and long lashes. In contrast, Amy begins each day pale as a premature baby and takes at least forty-five minutes to emerge from the bathroom as the more cute than pretty woman she presents to the public. I didn’t know it took so much work until yesterday when I watched the whole process intently. Rosa never took more than ten minutes, and she was out the door to rave reviews. In the outside world Amy relies on her high-energy, almost manic personality, which, I realize, is as carefully manufactured as her face. Behind closed doors the smoke and mirrors vanish, and a cooler, more calculating persona emerges.