Mainly their trouble — or good fortune, as the case might be — was that they were still out of phase, their fervors alternating and jostling each other like bad dancers. For now, back at the cooler and she then going ahead of him with her pitcher on the rim of her pelvis, desire like a mighty wind caught him from behind and nearly blew him down. He almost fainted with old motel lewd-longing. “Wait,” he whispered— oh, the piercing sorrow of it, this the mortal illness of youth like death to old age. “Wait.” He felt his way along the blotting-paper wall like a blind man. She took his outstretched hand.
“What is it, dearest?”
“Let’s go in here,” he said, opening the door to a closet which housed a giant pulsing Fedders.
“What for?” she asked. Her eyes were silvery and turned in.
“Let us go in the service room.” For it is here and not by moonlight — he sighed. Her willingness and nurse-tenderness were already setting him at naught again.
“There you are,” said Rita, opening the door opposite. “Where in the world was the ice machine?”
And off he went, bereft, careening down the abstract, decent, lewd Quality corridor.
The next day they went their separate ways as before, he mooning off with Jamie in the Trav-L-Aire, keeping the days empty and ears attuned to the secret sounds of summer. They met again in Beaufort. Kitty and Rita filled the day with small rites. They both took Metrecal and made a ceremony of it at every stop, lining up the wafers on a Sèvres dish, assembling a miniature stove from Lewis and Conger to heat the water for their special orange-flavored tea. Or if Kitty had a hangnail, the afternoon was spent rounding up Q-tips, alcohol, cuticle scissors.
One hot night they stopped at a raw red motel on a raw red hillside in Georgia. The women had got tired of the coast and took to the upcountry in search of hooked rugs and antiques. And the engineer had to admit that it was the pleasantest of prospects: to buy a five-dollar chiffonier and come down through six layers of paint to old ribby pine from the days of General Oglethorpe.
The two youths had dawdled as usual and it was almost midnight when the Trav-L-Aire came groaning up the hill, bucket swinging under her like a Conestoga wagon, and crept into a pine grove bursting with gouts of amber rosin still fragrant from the hot afternoon. It was too hot to sleep. Jamie sat in the cab and read his Theory of Sets. The engineer strolled over to the cinder-block porch of the motel, propped his chair against the wall, and watched a construction gang flattening a hill across the valley. They were making a new expressway, he reckoned. The air throbbed with the machinery, and the floodlights over the hill spoiled the night like a cast in a black eye. He had noticed this about the South since he returned. Along the Tidewater everything was pickled and preserved and decorous. Backcountry everything was being torn down and built anew. The earth itself was transformed overnight, gouged and filled, flattened and hilled, like a big sandpile. The whole South throbbed like a diesel.
“—but here am I, Ree, twenty-one and never been to college!”
“Then go to a good one.”
He knew now why he had left the camper. It had come over him again, the old itch for omniscience. One day it was longing for carnal knowledge, the next for perfect angelic knowledge. Tonight he was not American and horny but English and eavesdropper. He had to know without being known.
Not ten feet behind him and through the open window, Rita and Kitty lay in their beds and talked. The Trav-L-Aire had crept up the hill with its lights out — had he planned it even then? He had come onto the porch as silently as an Englishman entering his burrow in Somerset.
“Have I told you what I want to be?”
“I’m afraid you have.”
“I want to be an ordinary silly girl who has dates and goes to dances.”
“You’re in a fair way to do it.”
“I love to dance.”
“Then work harder at it. You’re lazy.”
“You know what I mean. I mean dancing cheek to cheek. I want to be broken in on.”
“They don’t dance like that now.”
“I want to have beaus.”
“You can have beaus in Tesuque or in Salamanca and not ruin your mind while you do it”
“I want to be Tri Delt.”
“Good God!”
“I want to go to dances and get a tremendous rush. That’s what my grandmother used to say: I went to such and such a dance and got a tremendous rush. Did you know my grandmother composed the official ATO waltz at Mercer?”
“Yes, you told me.”
“I want to talk the foolishness the girls and boys at home talk.”
“You’re on your way.”
“I want to go to school. I want to buy new textbooks and a binder full of fresh paper and hold my books in my arms and walk across the campus. And wear a sweater.”
“Very well.”
“I want to go to the Sugar Bowl.”
“Christ.”
“But you’re going to stay with us. I need you!”
Rita was silent.
“Remember our bargain, Ree.”
“What bargain?” said Rita in a muffled voice. She had turned away from the window.
“That you stay till Christmas. By then I’ll know. I could easily have flunked out by then just as I flunked out before. But even if I don’t I’ll know. I’ll know whether to go with you or not.”
“We’ll see,” said Rita absently.
They reached the Golden Isles of Georgia in time for the first tropical storm of the year. The wind whipped over the gray ocean, out of kilter with the slow rhythm of the waves, tore up patches of spume, and raised a spindrift. Georgians had sense enough to go home and so the Vaughts had the hotel to themselves, an honorable old hacienda of wide glassed-in vestibules opening into conservatories and recreation rooms, and rows of brass pots planted with ferns, great cretaceous gymnosperms from the days of Henry Grady, dry and dusty as turkey wings. They looked at stuffed birds and group photographs of Southern governors and played mahjong.
A hundred servants waited on them, so black and respectful, so absolutely amiable and well-disposed that it was possible to believe that they really were. One or two of them were by way of being characters and allowed themselves to get on a footing with you. In a day’s time they had a standing joke going as if you had been there a month. One bold fellow noticed the engineer take out his red book and read a few maxims as he waited for the elevator. “Now he’s gon’ be the smart one!” he announced to the hotel and later meeting him in the hall would therefore holler: “You got your book with you?” with a special sort of boldness, even a recklessness, which he took to be his due by virtue of the very credential of his amiability. The engineer laughed politely and even cackled a bit in order to appear the proper damn fool they would have him be.
By four o’clock the afternoon had turned yellow and dark. The engineer and Jamie found some rook cards and played a game in the conservatory, which still had a magic lantern from the days when lectures were delivered to vacationers on birds and sea shells. When the wind picked up, the engineer decided to go see to the Trav-L-Aire. Jamie wouldn’t come. He went out of his way to tell the engineer he was going to telephone his sister Val.
“What for?” the engineer asked him, seeing that the other wanted him to ask.
“When I feel bad, I call her and she makes me feel better.”
“Is she the sister who joined the religious order?”
“Yes.”
“Are you religious?”
“No.”
“Then what good can she do you?” They had fallen into the abrupt mocking but not wholly unserious way of talking which people who spend a lot of time together get into.