Christy considered it and then nodded, albeit reluctantly. “I know. You’re right. But… I can’t explain it. I’m… excited. I don’t know why, but I am. Do you want to swing with them?”
“I do,” I said after a moment. “I can’t explain it either, but I like Carter. He isn’t like Will. He’s older, for one, but he also seems to care about Kim. She annoyed him once, while we were talking, but he just smiled and moved on. It was kinda cool.”
“Do you think he’ll be okay that I won’t go all the way?”
“Who knows? We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it—”
“Ugh! You and your words. I don’t think you understand how weird it looks when you say things like that. ‘We’ll cross that bridge…’ That’s what you’re supposed to say. That looks normal. ‘Burn that bridge…’ adds this weird green to your voice.” She stopped and sort of shuddered, a whole-body frisson of rejection. “I can’t believe I’m even talking like this. I never talk about colors and sounds. Not even with my family. But… I’m glad you know. I don’t have to hide anything from you, do I?”
“No.”
She tested it out, “We’ll ‘burn’ that bridge when we get to it.” She wrinkled her nose. “Still weird, even when I say it.”
“Sorry,” I chuckled. “I’ll try to be more considerate.”
“Thank you. But… you were saying…?”
“Yeah. Carter and Kim. I don’t know. I’d like to, but we’ll have to see.” I let my words hang there. Then I glanced up. The sun had finally set, and twilight had spread her skirts over the world. “In the meantime, all this talk of swinging…”
“Mmm, me too. But I want you to make love to me first. Right here, in the water. Then you can fuck me and do whatever you want.”
I kissed her, and she tightened her arms around my neck.
“It’s like you read my mind.”
* * *
Trip and Wren loaded the pickup truck the next morning and left for Atlanta. Christy and I followed in the Rabbit. Trip had offered to let me drive it instead of my Land Cruiser. According to him, it was because the GTI got better gas mileage, but it was a bit of bragging as well. That was how guys kept score, after all. He had a sexy fiancée and a sporty car, and that meant he was ahead. I was happy for him, of course, but I glanced at Christy and decided I’d already won, game, set, and match.
She must have sensed my thoughts, because she smiled at me. An errant strand of flaxen hair blew across her face, and she tucked it behind her ear. She studied me from behind her sunglasses. I tried to look dignified but couldn’t stop grinning. She laughed, so I stuck out my tongue.
Trip interrupted our little game when we reached the main road. He honked the horn, and they waved goodbye. We waved back, and he turned the pickup toward the interstate. I turned the other direction and headed toward the architect’s house.
The man lived at the end of a tree-lined drive, in a white Plantation style mansion. I guessed family money, and probably a transplant from the coast, since that style of house hadn’t been as popular in the piedmont. The locals built their textile mills from red brick, and the wealthy owners tended to follow suit.
“Nice place,” I said as we pulled to a stop in the circle driveway.
“Very southern,” Christy agreed. “Do you think he designed it?”
“No. It’s at least a hundred years old. Not antebellum, though.”
“How can you tell?”
“Lots of little things. Second Empire elements, some early Queen Anne, that sort of thing.”
We climbed the steps to the front porch and rang the doorbell. The housekeeper answered. We introduced ourselves, and she invited us inside. Then she showed us to the parlor and went to fetch her employer.
Granville J. Blair, III, appeared after a suitable interval. He was a distinguished gentleman in his sixties, with thick white hair, an alcoholic’s florid complexion, and close-set eyes. He was a bit of a dandy, too, and wore a light blue monogrammed shirt, a paisley bow tie, and linen trousers, held up by suspenders instead of a belt. When he spoke, he lingered over his vowels and polished them like the family silver.
We sat and chatted about the weather for a few minutes, until his housekeeper returned with a tray bearing a pitcher of iced tea and three glasses. Neither Christy nor I particularly liked tea, but we smiled and sipped politely.
I asked about the house, and Granville gave us the family history instead. His great-several-times-removed grandfather had made a fortune in shipping in Charleston. The sons had been blockade runners during the Civil War, although one of them had been killed during the siege. The other had fled to Barbados and only returned after “Sherman and the Yankees ceased hostilities.”
I didn’t point out that South Carolina had started the war in the first place, and “Sherman and the Yankees” had only finished it. I rolled my eyes instead, which earned a warning glare from Christy. She agreed with me, but that wasn’t the point. Granville was our host, and I should be polite. So I pasted on a smile, sipped my too-sweet tea, and returned my attention to the Fable of the Blairs, Proud Sons of the Old South.
The family had eventually moved upstate, where they’d tried to resurrect plantation life. Granville described it in more genteel terms, but plantations couldn’t function without slaves, and the family had descended into rural obscurity instead.
He never mentioned a wife or children, and I guessed he was a lifelong bachelor. The Blair line would end with him. I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry. He was a nice man, but a relic of the past. He paused to reflect on it, so I gave him a polite moment and then leapt into the gap.
“The house is beautiful,” I said. “When was it built?”
“What? Oh, 1874. It’s been added to over the years, but it hasn’t changed much since I was a boy. Why, I remember…”
He talked about growing up in the deep south and life before desegregation and the Civil Rights movement. The unspoken message: things were better in the old days, when people respected “social order.” Once again, I kept my opinions to myself.
I turned the conversation to architecture instead. Predictably, Granville talked about himself. He waxed nostalgic about his time in Las Vegas in the fifties, Miami in the sixties, and Charlotte during the banking boom of the seventies. He’d certainly led an interesting life. Still, I had a job to do, so I brought up the reason for our visit, Susan’s project.
Granville had heard of the camp but never been there, although he didn’t seem bothered that a nudist camp existed less than twenty miles from his not-so-humble abode. He looked at my preliminary plans and asked intelligent questions. He wasn’t Joska, but he could’ve been a lot worse.
We eventually decided on regular visits, every Monday and Thursday. He agreed to review my drawings, correct anything he didn’t like, and then sign them for us when we were ready for permits. I suspected he wanted the audience more than anything, since he steadfastly refused when I repeated Trip’s offer to pay for his time.
He launched into another story before I could wrap things up, so we listened as he spoke about politics, religion, and what was wrong with America. In the process, he perfectly illustrated the very best and the very worst of the Old South.
Granville J. Blair, III, was an inveterate racist, and not the garden-variety George Wallace kind. Oh, no, he was the insidious kind. He didn’t wear a white hood or attend Klan rallies, but he talked about “negroes” as if they were children and needed someone to care for them.
He was the least racist person he knew, of course. Why, he didn’t have a racist bone in his body. He employed a Black housekeeper and a Black gardener, didn’t he? He’d worked with Black people for years, hadn’t he? He even boasted about the one time he’d hired a Black man instead of a more-qualified white man. And he hadn’t tried to lynch any of them, bless his heart.