There is a lull, and I am caught looking at Patricia. There is no profit in looking away. She looks steadily and directly and tellingly back, and she throws in some of that cartoonish voluptuousness and smiles a little in recognition of it, to tell me it is camp. I am most encouraged, delighted by her wit. The wit to say things, to render things easy, to preclude blunder. To be acting this way is, in my view, worthy of my affection as well as my lust. I begin to love this Patricia. This Patricia plays by some fair rules. This Patricia plays. This Patricia.
I busy myself in the kitchen, wrapping the ham, which tomorrow goes in the bathtub. We can’t eat these nitrites for a whole ham.
“What firm in Atlanta do you have an in with?” my mother wants to know.
“Fitzsimmons, Trammell, and Blode,” I tell her.
“And who in … is it Georgetown?”
“Litchfield. A guy who smokes pot and wins awards.” It is true.
I hear her relate this — that I have, despite appearances, real direction in the world — to Patricia. I then hear talk of my father, in appropriately perfunctory tones and abbreviated rhythm. This will tell Patricia that I, too, struggle against the world of men. I take a look through the serving window at Patricia. Her head is back, as if she’s not altogether listening. Someone has seen fit to deliver me a fine woman in my own house.
“Patricia’s in your room,” my mother announces. “You’re in the front room.”
“Fine. Ladies,” I announce, “I shall take a constitutional on the beach. Leave the door unlocked.” Patricia’s expression is so perfectly neutral I fall in love, if not with her, with her face and what she can do with it. In my experience, loving a face is sufficient, but not necessary.
8
I HOPED THAT SHE WOULD make it easiest of all and take a beach constitutional herself. I could have just met her head-on and greengowned her, wind and surf noise too much to bother with any subtle talk. I went down to the shack and posted myself in the chair. The next absurdly easy piece in the puzzle of seduction would be to bed down with her in the shack, rat funk miraculously gone or insignificant in the face of our giant strangers’ passion. But she did not come. It may well be that she came down and looked around and, not seeing me, went back up; the shack is out of sight up the beach. Poor logistics on my part. I should have announced I was taking a constitutional up the beach, 150 yards north to the chair beside the shack in which, despite the rat smell, a couple of a mind to could secure their new lust for each other on a simple poor pallet and have theyselves a good time. But I did not. And sitting in the chair watching the desolate turbulence and phosphorus and being blown nearly over backwards, I counsel myself about putting mind in gear before mouth in motion. Courage now will need be screwed into one scary ball, and I must dribble that ball into her (my) room, if I want to play.
I want to play. The absolute nadir of eventuality? She screams rape, and my mother condescendingly puts her on a bus in the morning and clucks about naïfs when she gets home. Somewhat less improbable, and more damaging to esteem, this Patricia simply is surprised and finally not interested, leaving me with an endless analysis of how I misread all that camp voluptuousness all night and might-should check in for some IQ work somewhere. At the top end, she says about what half the women at Turtle Creek said to me: What took you so long?
I make goodly noise going into the dark house, fiddle in my temporary room, a little wash up, turn down my temporary bed, turn off my temporary light, and go to my (her) room, my upcountry cousin’s temporary bed. The door is closed. I open it, wide, and slowly enter, and slowly close it, not muffling the click. She does not move, but I do not hear the breathing of sleep: I am, we are, beyond the screaming point. The best way to get past the surprise point is to give her something to be surprised at; I don’t speak, I sit, easily, on the bed. She puts a hand on my thigh.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
“Thought you might be gay.”
“Apparently I’m not.”
“Are you taking advantage of me, or me you?”
“You me.”
“But you’re in here.”
“It’s my room.”
“Are you an alcoholic?”
“Not yet.”
“Your mother’s nice.”
“She holds up, yes.”
“The reason I’m here …”
“Yes?”
“Well, among others, I thought I was gay.”
“But you’re not?”
“Not yet.” And she laughed, and in that release I kissed her. In a couple of minutes, for a couple of hours, we could have both been gay, I do not think we knew or cared. It was a storm. She was firm and she used her firmness. Femininity, or that softness that passes for it popularly, has no place in bed.
Somewhere about three in the morning I asked, “What’s the plan here?”
“The plan?”
“How long you down for?”
“Don’t know. All summer, I think.”
That looked, at that moment, a delicious and correct period. All summer.
“Go to sleep, then.”
“Okay.”
“Night.”
“Night.”
A very tender and not self-conscious kiss. Gratuitous affection between adults is to my mind something you do not make fun of. The one thing you do not make fun of. I was, it is fair to say, wound up. The lust was tamped down for the moment, but tenderness and flutters were running high. She tasted good. She looked good. She made sense. I felt I had been agreeably run over, and I was agreeably getting twisted up underneath whatever vehicle it was; it was heavy and moving fast and had a two-range transmission like a rock truck. Trash was raining off the truck—“I thought I was gay”—and I did not care. Let it rain. Let there be trash. Intelligent, surviving animals make durable nests of trash. Trash is a precious commodity in our time. He who cannot look trash in the eye is lost. In a raiment of minor garbage walks the necessary hero today. Excuse me. It used to be a habit of mine, the boyish, untethered locution. Finding a woman in your bed can make a boy of you again, a cute, frisky boy.
When I woke up I was against the wall, looking over my cousin at the surf outside the window. Patricia Hod was looking straight up at the ceiling, unblinking, in a fixed eerie stare that would have given me the creeps if her eyes had not been themselves beautiful. They were the same blue as the ocean and the sky beyond them. She stared at the ceiling as if she knew about this marvelous optical composition. But of course she did not, and I touched her. She gave my hand a little squeeze, still not looking from the ceiling or even blinking, and smiled. I was relieved and not: she was okay, the squeeze and smile said, but staring at the ceiling (for how long?) said not. I kissed her neck just below her jaw, which is what you do in situations like this. A little awkward but delicate affection will secure a doubtful woman staring at the ceiling.
Her eyelashes stuck brightly and smartly up and out at angles from her eyeballs so that her eyes looked like miniature crowns. I thought of Orphan Annie. I watched her eyes gaze at the ceiling and held her hand and saw beyond, unfocused, the cool, rough, glassy morning surf thrash and roll and shine. Nothing could be finer than to be in Caroliner in the morning is about the way it felt.
9
I RESOLVED IN THE MORNING to try not to be so small. I know where to get more detailed self-improvement lists — Mr. Franklin’s comes to mind — but, for me, this is enough. I am supposed to be thinking about self-determination, about not wasting a life, about the large picture, and I am thinking about Patricia Hod’s early ass in my late bed. My old lady is asleep and my new girlfriend is asleep. Weather fair. Tide regular. Boats on the horizon. Birds afloat and a-peckin’.