“Will she be famous for Foxy Frolics or for her violin playing?” He pricked up his ears. “Did you say Sarah Goodman?”
“Yes.”
“Is she Jewish?”
“Jewish? Why yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Her old man is Sol Goodman in dry-goods.”
“Did you say she was from Wilmington?”
“Yes, but—”
“Wilmington, North Carolina?”
“Why yes. Do you know her?”
“And you say she’s leaving? She’s going back to Israel, right?”
“Israel? Why no. If she passes her audition, she’s moving to Asheville. If not, she’ll come back to Highlands and make movies with Norma Jean. I think she ought to do that anyhow. She’s a real fine little actress.”
“I see.” He brightened. “Are you sure she’s Jewish? I mean, after all you can’t go by a name. Rosenberg was a Nazi.”
“Is the Pope Catholic? I’m telling you, I know her old man, Sol Goodman.”
“I see.”
“Cheryl could make it either way. She’s got it all. Do you know who she looks exactly like? Remember Linda Darnell? Imagine a Linda Darnell who can play the violin like Evelyn and Phil Spitalny. In fact, now that she’s finished this film, she’s getting ready for her first recital.”
He must have had a lapse of inattention or perhaps even another spell. Did he blank out? How much time passed? In any case, he must have seemed rude because the next thing he knew, Ewell McBee was standing directly over him, feet apart, hands on his hips, speaking loudly. He seemed to be in a rage.
“You want to know what your trouble is, Lawyer Barrett?”
“Why, yes,” he said with genuine curiosity, cocking his head to look up.
“The trouble with you is you always thought you were too good for anybody or anything. Nothing is ever good enough for you.”
“Really?” he said, peering up at Ewell with interest. “How is that?”
“You always thought you were so damn smart. You and your daddy. But I’m here to tell you something. The only difference between you and me is money. Outside of that, you and I are exactly alike. You and your daddy are smart all right but there is such a thing as outsmarting yourself. You even think you’re smarter than your daddy, don’t you?”
“Is that right?” Well, yes.
He gazed up at Ewell with curiosity. Enemies, he knew, often tell the truth. And these days enemies, honest enemies are few and far between. Nobody says anything unpleasant. Enemies will often tell you unsuspected truths about yourself, just as a photograph or a double mirror will show your snoutish nose.
“You know I’m right, Lawyer Barrett.”
“About what?”
“About us being exactly alike.”
“How is that?”
“You know as well as I do we could have us a fine time having a party with Cheryl and Norma Jean, looking at the film and having some drinks and later having a real party. I mean a fine time. A little pussy never hurt anybody. You like pussy as much as I do, don’t you?”
“I hadn’t thought about it lately,” he said, but thinking now of Kitty’s ass. Well, yes. How could it have slipped my mind? What time is it?
“But you don’t talk about it because you think you’re too good to have a party with me.”
“A party with Sarah Goodman is not out of the question.”
But Ewell’s anger carried him beyond listening. In a way, he’s taking another shot at me, he saw.
“Me and you are alike as two peas in a pod,” said Ewell, moving his shoulders. “The only difference between us is that me and my daddy had to work like niggers and you and your daddy had your own niggers and enough money to learn lawyering and how to talk. Otherwise, we just the same.”
“How are we the same?” he asked curiously, straining up to see and hear.
“Your daddy said it. What’s more, we both love money, only you were smarter about getting it and so you don’t have to talk about it. You marry the richest lady in the state, so you don’t have to worry about it. Then you can go around giving it away, so you can be man-of-the-year. Like money don’t matter to you. You’re right. It don’t matter if you got it. But if you didn’t have it, it would matter. You act like you was so sorry your wife passed. Maybe you was. She was a real fine lady. But maybe it didn’t exactly kill your soul that you inherited all that money. But you would never say. The only difference between us is that I would say. I married the meanest damn white woman in Henderson County and I was glad she passed and I don’t mind saying so. But you’re smart. And you’re ever bit as cold-blooded as I am, only you don’t have to talk about it because you got money. Money may not be everything but it sho lets you act nice. My daddy used to tell me: make the money then act as nice as you please. You’re even smarter than your daddy. Look what happened to him. But not you. You setting there right this minute eyeing me and listening and figuring something out, ain’t you?”
“What do you think I’m figuring out, Ewell?”
“I don’t know because you don’t say. You never did. But you’re figuring hard as you can. And you setting there acting polite and you ain’t about to come to my house for a party.”
“As a matter of fact, I would like to meet Sarah Goodman, that is, Cheryl Lee.” Kitty told him he had been Jewish in another life. Perhaps he had. Could it be that a native North Carolina Jewish girl was still here? that she had not only not returned to Israel but was hanging around Highlands making erotic movies and having parties in villas with Gentiles, Jutes like Ewell? If so, what did that signify? And why did he want to see her? to have her ass or to find out if she was going to Israel?
Ewell, he saw, had reached that degree of anger where everything is received as a provocation. On he came, shouldering. The only thing that prevented a fistfight was that he, Will Barrett was lounging at his ease on the steps, sitting-lying, propped on one elbow, head cocked, eyeing him.
A strange thought occurred to him. Perhaps Ewell was the last hater. Has a time come when not only has love left the world but hatred also and nothing is left but niceness?
Ewell went on talking but with a slackening of anger, with even a hint of affection, perhaps the sort of affection which follows barroom brawls, but he didn’t listen closely.
Ewell was making plans for the party. “Don’t worry about a thing. You and me going to have us a fine time.”
The white cloud which filled the wide doorway had grown as dense and solid as a pearl. No doubt the sun shone directly upon it, for it was shot through with delicate colors.
Again the ripple of darkness came forward at the corner of his eye but it went away when he tried to look at it. Instead, he looked at the three cars. The three, one English, one German, one Japanese, seemed as beautiful as birds poised for flight at any moment from the immaculate concrete.
Perhaps I am having some sort of an attack, he thought with interest, a stroke, hemorrhage, tumor, epilepsy. But if something is wrong with me, how is it that I can see so clearly and calmly, that I do not cast forward or backward from myself, am here in the here-and-now, and know what I am going to do?
But for a fact he may well have had one of his spells, for when he looked up, Ewell McBee had vanished without a trace. Swallowed up by the thick opalescent cloud.
9
So here he was, the engineer, as Will Barrett used to think of himself in the early days when he wandered around in a funk in New York trying to “engineer” his own life, now years later, after a fairly normal life, a fairly happy marriage, a successful career, and a triumphant early retirement to enjoy the good things of life. Here he was, more funked out and nuttier than ever, having experienced another of his “spells” as they used to be called in his childhood, which were undoubtedly a form of epilepsy to say the least and perhaps a disorder a good deal more serious. Here he was, pacing up and down his room, sunk in thought, smiling from time to time, and once snapping his fingers softly like a man who has suddenly hit upon the solution to a difficult problem. And indeed he had, or thought he had. So intent was he in planning his new “experiment” that he had forgotten about lunch, about his daughter’s impending wedding, about his guests downstairs and, for the moment at least, about his tryst with Kitty in the summerhouse. (Yet why did he look at his watch?)