I sip at my coffee, curious about what it was like to have lived as a gay man in a small town.
He must have felt like an animal in a cage. Always vague about his itinerary, he traveled during the summers. I know he lived with his mother at least until I went away to college. To keep his job, Mr.
Carpenter had to repress his sexual urges nine months a year. Even at my age I have trouble going twenty-four hours. Why did he stay in this fish-bowl, especially after his mother died? I can’t imagine.
Fortunately, we are saved by Mckenzie.
Mr. Carpenter raises an eyebrow at my meager order.
“I would have cooked you a decent breakfast,” he sniffs.
“Come see me, Gideon. I’m closed Mondays, home during the middle of the afternoon and by nine every night. I still live where I always did.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll be sure to,” I say, wondering if he must be lonely.
From his point of view, it won’t be for my intellectual stimulation.
Maybe he wants to tell me who murdered Willie Ting.
“I’ll do that.”
After Mckenzie serves us and departs, Angela remarks, “He’s always been thought of as a curmudgeon, but I think it has been a cover to hide the fact that he’s gay.”
I am pleased by her lack of prejudice (she must still be a liberal on some things), but I wonder if the obverse is true: Did Carpenter become a caustic old man because he was forced to suppress his sexuality? When I knew him, he displayed none of the characteristics I usually associate with homosexuality. I never thought of him as creative or artistic, and
certainly he hasn’t become so, judging by the decor of the Cotton Boll. As we are eating, a total of ten customers, including a family of five, enter the restaurant. Angela nods, but no one stops to talk. They are all younger by a decade. When I comment that she does not seem to know everyone, she acknowledges, “The older I get, the less curious about younger people I become. Unless they are my children or their friends, I’m not all that interested in them.”
I feel the same way. As we age, we begin to let go. Generation X. So what? They seem boring and self-absorbed to me. But now that Sarah’s gone, all I know about them is what is on the tube. It is hard not to feel a bond with this woman. She gets me to talk about Sarah again, which isn’t hard to do. I tell her how hard it was on Sarah after Rosa died.
“She was already insecure, and then I kind of went nuts and left her alone too much while I went prowling around for a while. I don’t know how she survived it. Maybe I should have sent her away to a girls’ boarding school, too.”
Angela frowns from behind her coffee cup.
“That’s ridiculous, Gideon, and you know it. She sounds fine. You just want somebody to brag on her besides you. I’d love to meet her sometime.
The next time she’s home from college you ought to bring her back over here with you.”
I smile at the thought. If Sarah is still in her morally indignant phase, as she was in November, she will denounce Angela as a racist. It
occurs to me that Angela was much like Sarah when she was her age.
“You might regret it,” I kid her.
“She can preach a sermon with the best of them.”
I tell Angela about our visit to Bear Creek in November and how appalled Sarah had been by old Mrs. Washington’s story.
“Granted, what my grandfather did was terrible, but Sarah doesn’t see the gray in history. It’s all black and white to her.”
Angela toys with her spoon.
“I heard that you were over here.”
I should have figured. Does nothing over here happen without the whole town knowing about it?
“Why didn’t you say something yesterday?”
Angela smiles sympathetically.
“I assumed you would tell me if you wanted to talk about it. I think I heard it at a party over Christmas,” she replies vaguely.
“Mrs. Petty isn’t the only one who likes to gossip.”
I decide to let it go and am cheered by the fact that as much as people talk over here, at some point if Paul was involved in Willie’s murder,
somebody is bound to spill the beans on him.
The next hour whizzes by. Angela likes to talk about her boys as much as I like to talk about Sarah. I try to reassure her without much success that they will settle down and graduate. Yet, as soft as the economy is and as worthless as a B.A. degree has become, the only jobs they may be qualified for are as chicken pluckers at Tyson Before we leave, Angela allows me to buy her “Deluxe” breakfast and nods approvingly as I leave a two-dollar tip for Mckenzie.
“I wonder if he hired her because he understands her isolation,” she says as we walk out the door.
“Maybe,” I say, thinking about my old friend Skip Hudson, who is happily living out his life as a gay man in Atlanta. I wonder if Angela felt isolated all those years married to Dwight. I sense an undercurrent of bitterness in her that I don’t understand. I remind myself that despite our two visits, Angela and I still know next to nothing about each other’s lives in the last thirty years.
Still, I want to know more.
“Listen,” I say, trying to sound casual, “I’m going to be over here again sometime next week. Is it all right if I call you?”
“Of course,” she says, her face serious as she briefly touches my arm.
“Thanks for breakfast.”
Though her hand is gone in an instant, it is as if I have been given an
electric shock. As I head north for my meeting at the Ting family home on Peach, I recall the pressure of her mouth on mine and wonder if our kiss meant anything at all to her. It did once, but three decades is a long time to try to jump-start a battery. I can’t tell if we are starting a new relationship or resuming an old one. Though there is much that is familiar about Angela, she is not the same, but I can’t put my finger on it. Perhaps, it is simply grief in addition to her uncertainty about the future that gives such an explosive feel to her personality. Though she was not emotional as she was yesterday, there was an edginess that I sensed beneath the surface.
Time has given her a dimension that a younger woman can’t match.
Whatever it is, it’s pulling at me.
As I near Tommy’s old neighborhood, I think of how undeveloped this area of the town was when Willie and Doris Ting first built out here. I would occasionally give Tommy a ride home from the tennis courts and was always struck by how isolated they were. Though their house is literally on the edge of town, it is now in the most impressive residential area of Bear Creek, new houses having been built one by one until the development was full. Each brick home is on two lots and surrounded by magnificent shade trees. I pull into the circular drive wondering how much the home is worth.
Connie opens the door before I can ring the bell.
“Come in, Gideon,” she instructs me without any warmth in her voice.
Not that I expected her to fall all over me, but I was hoping that once
she actually saw me, some of her natural friendliness would resurface.
No such luck.
“Hi, Connie,” I chirp, knowing I sound insincere, “you look great!” In fact, she does not.
Like most of us, she has put on some weight. Her face, once oval, is round as a volleyball, and her waist, so tiny as a girl, has thickened.
She is not obese by any means, but beneath her loose blue trousers and matching tunic, which remind me of those grim documentaries on China before they embraced capitalism, it is clear that her once delightful figure has taken early retirement.
“I would have thought you’d be a professional cheerleader by now, but Tommy tells me you’re just a physicist.” “I knew you’d become a lawyer,” she says, at least interested enough to banter with me. She always had less of an accent than Tommy, who, now that I think about it, seemed more Chinese than she did.