For Emma he improved his history, sometimes believing it. After the collapse of the band he said he’d become a long meditator. It did not necessarily mean failure. It was a long wait with a nobler design. He had shed material wants willingly and sought different, wholer, more authentic company. These phases were not unknown to many great men, not that he was great. But he felt a mission, and had for a long time.
The term mission, in regard to Auntie Hadley’s request, still made him giggle, then snarl. He began writing even worse at school. He had never answered her. This was a petty and vile act, but it bought him his first taste of power in her petty and vile world. The only token in her land was cowardly muteness. Wasn’t it cowardly, after all, to nag and bite like she did? Wasn’t it the life choice of a nit? He pretended to be hurt by her comments against him and his family for much longer than he actually was. She was watching him cautiously now, and keeping her mouth shut more. It wouldn’t do to offend the author, for nit’s sake. Giggle. But he was not rotten enough to tell Emma about it. All in all, he couldn’t get away from pity for his aunt.
“Let’s go riding on the bike, you behind, Emma.”
“But I’m afraid.”
“You won’t be. And let me suggest something — take off your underpants and wear a dress instead.”
“Excuse me.”
“Please do it. Women find a whole new world, I hear.”
“Well, I’m all for that.”
She was game, and by Lake Tornado, she was hugging him with delight, bountiful sighs going in his ear. He was sly. Nature was with him. She liked that he’d had a wife and was experienced. She told him he was a new man, all bronzed and straight, on the motorcycle. They would have times, good times. Yelling back, he assured her—the best time, he shouted. Ah, he was all gone for her now.
They’d told him at the ward, just hang on, hang on. Good things would come, eternal things. It was a law of recovery, tested millions of times.
Take it at the flood, then, Edgar Alien Po’ Boy, which is what Emma now called him. Her love name. Oh, the wimmens, the wimmens. Their world — holy smoke! — and how he’d missed the light hands, the sly codes in the whole little city — its own language — they set up around you. The unexpected, priceless gifts, good nowhere but the city of love. “Give me some sugar,” she said. How long since he’d heard that. Despite her Emory degree, summa cum laude, Emma stayed more the congenial truck-stop waitress, the charity that most got near him. Maybe because of her many brothers she understood the good-natured cuffing that men did and the brawny highway troubles behind them. She was a pal, a corker, a skit, handed to him. Pale fire burning through it all. With her, Edgar found, in some discomfort, that he could write better, he could wax forth. But she was always a bit sad, though she worked diligently with her deaf people in the institution south of Atlanta. It was not an unworthy mission — here we were — to alleviate suffering: find its cause, cut it off, and kill it, as General Powell said he’d intended with the Iraqi army in Kuwait. Emma was a great cheerleader of the war. Her patriotism was caught up. Democracy, freedom! Protection of our sand brothers. The tattoo on his throat — Emma’d never seen it, they made love with her glasses off — caused him no end of grief. For he felt Southern now: proud and brave with no irony or cynicism. Leave that to the hag in the Tudor dungeon.
Yet Emma stayed sad.
There was something in her he could not yet touch.
Nobody had said of this mission that the good things wouldn’t be tough to get. He was with her a great deal. Good Michael the Math Monster, attuned quickly in his deafness, stayed out of the mobile home for long tracts of time. Edgar halfway moved in, while he worried about the feelings (and money) of his aunt.
After, at last, the long honest letter to his parents, Edgar shook with relief. They would go to Athens. It was time, and Emma agreed. He was gratified by her presence. He still did not feel worthy to meet them alone. Emma, a prize, would tell them he stood tall. A weak and dim man could not have her. A dim and weak man could not handle the BMW with this intelligent brunette frightened on the backseat. Deliberately he drove right into the racing ring-road fury of Atlanta traffic, cocky and weaving at seventy-five plus, envied. Emma almost died, a happy leech on his back. It was the city of her “ruin,” but she laughed at it, another whole venue. A woman’s shouts of pleasure could knock down buildings.
Athens had grown, of course. The university took in forty-five thousand now. Edgar got solemn when they rode into his block. He hadn’t remembered his house as this unprosperous. It was stained from tree sap. The yard was shaggy. All this dereliction was unlike his father in the old times. Inside it smelled like used lives — corpus smells in the homes of the meek, hard to believe of one’s people. His own smell was in there somewhere, he reckoned. But the chicory coffee his mother drank constantly — a special blend from the French Market in New Orleans — was sweet nostalgia. She’d cooked a raisin-apple pie for them, too.
For his advent, Edgar’s folks — Oliver and Sue — had dressed up. His father wore a tie and the gray strands of his hair were nursed back. His mother had on a blue churchy dress. She had a lot of hair, but it was white, a grief to Edgar. What did he expect though? Athens was out there, doing better than they were, that was all. His dad moved slowly with arthritis of the feet. His mother seemed resolute on showing off her younger health, bouncing a little with her coffee cup.
It went much better than he’d hoped. A taste of the coffee — like a swat — filled him with a glow. They said he looked wonderful, all grown and mature, maybe taller. He almost forgot Emma. Out back with his father, they laughed about his aunt. Edgar played her as a more minor crank than she was and spoke of “paying her off when I head out on my own.” On horn or in academe, his father wanted to know. Not the horn, Edgar said. His dad didn’t understand: why couldn’t Edgar recover it all? He was still young. What a gift, what years! Edgar turned and saw Emma with her coffee, not glad, eavesdropping from behind the kitchen door. The backyard was bleak, rutted with water drainage.
When he left, despite the small melancholy, Edgar felt fixed and relieved.
Emma did not. She didn’t speak on the motorcycle all the way back. In Atlanta, he thought he heard her crying through the wind.
He was attentive and wanted to help. But it was a cruel night for Emma. She claimed her back hurt and he could tell she wanted him to go. She’d been hurt and made sad all over again; she didn’t even try to smile. There was maybe even something like hate in her eyes. Well, Edgar Alien Po’ Boy’s out of here, he said. This got nothing from her. The mobile home looked glum, newly desperate, not the lake cabin it had seemed before.
At his aunt’s he sat unbending from his trip snags. After a while he felt there was something different about his plush garret. Then he saw — how could he have missed them? Stacked neat and high on his desk were handsome purplish leather-bound books. There were two stacks, each two feet up — her diaries and “jottings.” They made him angry. They were arrogantly under lock and key, but with the keys out for him to jump in and have a go. Hadley was away somewhere. He let go an uncommon obscenity. Then he went straight to bed.
At breakfast she was on him before he could dart to class an hour early. Quietly, more like a human being, she began.
“Edgar, one thing I notice about your graduate studies: you don’t really do that much. You’ve time for all kinds of things. I’ve seen your motorcycle at Emma Dean’s. . place, more than a few times.”