By then she would have crossed the Virginia line, driven through Pulaski and Roanoke and Lynchburg, the land leveling out as she skirted the lower Shenandoah Valley. Somewhere among the old killing fields between Appomattox and Manassas she would find a crossroads or hamlet with a name drenched in history. She’d be too exhausted to eat or take a shower. She would take off her shoes, blouse, and skirt and slip on her nightgown. Anna would turn on the bathroom light and pull back the covers, close her eyes and remember the warmth of fire and coffee as she lay down again with the dead.
Honesty
I met Lee Ann McIntyre on a date suggested by my wife. Kelly always read the personals as she drank her morning coffee. “Better than the comics,” she said and would read aloud the ads she found most amusing.
“Why not an article about what it’s like to meet your soul partner through a newspaper ad,” she said one June morning as we sat at the kitchen table. “You go out on the date and write about it. That could be amusing.”
“I don’t think so,” I replied.
I looked out the wide bay window where our cat stalked a chipmunk.
“I think it’s a very good idea,” Kelly said, and trailing her words like a shadow was the fact that my book The Myth of Robert Frost was stillborn at thirty-eight pages. I looked at her, dressed administratively in her dark blue blazer and skirt while I was barefoot, clothed in jeans and a T-shirt. Unlike me, she had somewhere to go, something to do.
“I’ve even got a woman picked out for you,” she said, holding up the paper between us. “Let’s deconstruct this, darling. ‘Hopelessly Lonely.’ Now would that be the signifier or the signified? No matter. ‘DWF, 32, brown/green, 5–6, 140.’ No mention of whether she still has any teeth. ‘Likes mountains, quiet evenings, and reading.’ See, you all are a perfect match, though you better bone up on Harlequin romances. ‘Seeks WM, 25–40.’ What did I tell you? That’s you exactly, it’s fate. ‘A knight in shining armor.’ We’ll have to work on that. ‘Who likes children.’ You like children, don’t you? How about three or four. This woman probably has them. ‘And understands the hardships of life.’ You understand the hardships of life, don’t you?”
Kelly took a pen from her briefcase.
“Here,” she said, circling the ad. “Call Carolina Tempo. I guarantee they’ll go for this idea. Then call Hopelessly Lonely. Leave a message that you want to take her to dinner at the Grey Pheasant. Tell her knights in shining armor don’t take their dates to Wendy’s or the Waffle House. That will put you ahead of the rest of the guys who call.”
“You’re not worried I might fall in love and leave you?” I said.
“No,” Kelly said, her smile much larger than mine. “I’m not worried about that at all.”
After Kelly left I took the newspaper into the den, what Kelly called my “writing room.” Like taking a year’s leave from teaching to write full-time, the room had been her idea. She’d been the one who picked out the bookcases, the huge oak desk, the new computer and printer. I sat down where I sat every morning, sipping coffee, sharpening pencils, looking out the window, doing everything a writer does but write.
I reread the first chapter of my book, thirty-eight pages of jargon and endnotes, just as tedious and silly as they were nine months earlier, when I wrote them. I pushed the manuscript to the table’s far edge as if it were some dead creature beginning to smell. I looked at a notebook page filled with ideas for articles, trying to find one that Larry Kendrick might like better than Kelly’s.
“I like the newspaper date idea,” Larry said when I called him an hour later.
“What about the old poverty in the New South article?”
“Look,” Larry said. “This isn’t The Daily Worker.”
“Okay,” I said.
A year earlier I wouldn’t have done it, but I had only three more months to come up with something to justify my year off. At least the article would be some sort of publication, even if in a magazine no one outside North Carolina had ever heard of.
By now I knew Kelly expected me to fail, had set up the room, the free time as a way of showing me that I was nothing more than what she’d known me to be all along, an actor who mouthed the clichés and jargon of others because he had no words of his own. That was the way she saw me, and that was the way she wanted me to see myself, stripped bare of props and pretense.
I picked up the phone and dialed the number in the newspaper, then the four digits after the circled ad. I heard the same message Kelly had read, but this time g’s left off endings, words stretched into extra syllables. I left my first name and phone number and said that I hadn’t ridden a horse in years, but I’d try to be a knight in shining armor. I told her I’d like to take her to the Grey Pheasant, a restaurant worthy of a princess. I played my role well.
I sat back down at the desk with no idea when, or if, my message would be returned. In the distance the college’s clock tower rose stern and gray above late May green. Three more months and I’d be back there, disabused of any notions of what I had to offer the world.
Kelly was home when Lee Ann McIntyre called.
“You get it,” Kelly said. “It might be your princess.”
“Is this Richard?” a woman asked, her voice doubtful, though whether about the number or about this whole venture was unclear. Kelly was in the other room, but I knew she listened.
“Yes,” I said.
“I liked your message,” Lee Ann McIntyre said. “I liked what you said, how you said it.”
“So you want to go out?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, her voice soft, still a little doubtful. “I think that would be nice.”
“So what did you arrange?” Kelly asked when I hung up.
“She works Friday and Saturday, so we’re going out Sunday night.”
“What else?” Kelly asked.
“Her name is Lee Ann McIntyre.”
“And she lives where?”
“Out on Highway Eight.”
“In a trailer, of course. No one named Lee Ann lives in a house.”
“Yes,” I said. “What of it?”
“The knight defends his princess,” Kelly said.
“This is a bad idea,” I said. “It could be cruel too.”
“You have an exaggerated sense of your charisma,” Kelly said. “She’ll be just as bored with you as you are with her. You’re giving her a free meal at a restaurant where they wouldn’t even let her waitress. That’s a good deal if you ask me.”
“This woman’s got enough problems without my adding to them,” I said.
“You mean ‘the hard considerations of the poor,’” Kelly said. “Though of course you argued Wharton was upholding the power structure even as she made that statement.” Kelly smiled. “See, I remember something from your class.”
I got up to go into my office.
“Why is it writers sentimentalize the poor?” Kelly asked. “And I mean a real answer, not some Marxist cliché.”
“Maybe because a lot of them didn’t grow up as privileged as you.”
“Or you, Mr. Prep School,” Kelly said. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how people used to be ashamed of being born poor and now they’re ashamed of coming from wealth.”
“I don’t sense it ever bothered you,” I said.
“Why should it? I’m glad my parents were wealthy. I’m glad I am too.”
I met her eyes.
“Why did you marry me?”
“Because you needed me, silly,” Kelly said and smiled the same tight smile I remembered from the evening three years earlier when she’d sat in on my class.
The college had instituted a “Knowing Each Other Better” program that year for faculty and administration, an effort, as our president put it, to narrow the divide between the two. There had been several receptions as well as visits of administrators to faculty classes. Kelly, who was associate dean of academic affairs, had attended my American literature class.