The Annunciation, page 18
“Sissy, calm down a minute. Just listen a minute. I need to see you. Please let me fly up there and see you. I have to talk to you. I’m not going to hurt you…all I want is to talk…”
“What were you doing in New Orleans?” she screamed. “What were you doing down there!!!!”
“I was down there for a golf tournament. I won the NFL alumni tournament for my region and I went down to play in the finals.”
“I don’t believe you. I think you went looking for the child. You told me you wouldn’t do it, Guy.” Amanda was crying now. Guy’s voice still had the power to do that to her. All night she had kept from crying over Will. Now Guy was doing this to her. “Oh, shit,” she yelled at him. “Now I’m crying. Goddamn you, you always make me cry.”
“I don’t want to make you cry, Sissy. I only want to love you.”
“Then leave me alone. For God’s sake leave me alone. I’m going to hang up, Guy. I’m up here working my ass off trying to figure out how to live the rest of my life and I want you to leave me alone. I want you to leave me alone forever…”
She hung up the phone, took one of Will’s cigarettes out of the package and went out onto the balcony. She lit the cigarette and took a drag on it, feeling the hot assault to the lungs. Jesus Christ, she thought. Now I’m smoking.
She heard the door open behind her. Will was there, drunk, barely able to stand up, twenty-five years old, confused, drunk, wounded, crazy and wild and drunk and hers, hers to love and try to understand and try to care for, hers to sleep with all night long.
They got into bed and he sobered up enough to hold her in his arms while she sobbed out the story.
“Then they took the baby away. What could I do? I was fourteen years old, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t know I had a choice. I thought they were doing me a favor. God knows, maybe they did me a favor. All I know is that I don’t want to think about it. And if Guy goes and finds that girl he will ruin my life with it. He’s already ruined his own life. Now he wants to ruin mine. I saw him at my grandmother’s funeral and he promised me he wouldn’t go and look for her. And, goddammit, I know he’s done it.”
“It’s all right,” Will whispered. “It’s going to be all right. I’m here, Amanda. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
“Hold me,” she said. “Hold me close to you, Will. Make me sleep. Let me sleep. For God’s sake, let me sleep.”
They slept until late afternoon. When they woke they took coffee out onto the balcony and sat with their feet propped up on the railing, acting as if the night had never happened. The weather was getting warmer every day. The maple trees were filling with leaves. The crocus and daffodils and wild sedge were making.
Amanda’s balcony was surrounded by a wood railing. Along one end the oak board had split and a line of tiny orange mushrooms were coming up in the cracks, surrounded by bright green moss.
“Thank you for not being mad at me,” he said. “You’re different from anyone I’ve ever known.”
“This place is worse than New Orleans,” she said. “Look at those mushrooms. Talk about sultry. That’s downright indecent. This place is more verdant than the tropics.”
“A couple of more rains,” he said, “and it will be time to float the rivers.”
“Tell me about the rivers.”
“I’ve floated most of them,” he said. “They’re all different. The Mulberry’s the wildest, the White, that’s for trout fishing. And, of course, the Buffalo, that’s my favorite. The Buffalo’s really something. If these rains keep up it’ll be ready soon. I’ll be the first one down it if I can.”
“Will you take me with you?” she said.
“If you’ll open me a beer,” he said. “Don’t you know by now I’ll do anything you want me to? Don’t you know that yet?”
“I’ll make you a shirt the color of these mushrooms if you’ll take me down a river,” she said. “I’ll sew a hundred buttons on it. I’ll sew a thousand buttons on it.”
“Then I’d look like Conway Twitty,” he said. “I could wear it in my act. Make that a scotch and water, Amanda. I think I’ll have a drink instead.”
“How old is he?” Marshall asked. He and Katie were having lunch together at Bruff Commons.
“Oh, I’d say their combined age is about thirty. Fourteen for her, sixteen for him.”
“He plays a guitar?”
“Oh, yes, and he’s good at it. He’s a home-town boy, Marshall. A real Fayetteville iconoclast. Baseball shirt and Roger’s Pool Hall and everything. He has these long legs like a dancer’s. Well, it all stands to reason if you think about it. She was already in love with the town. And Clinton likes him. Clinton thinks he’s great.”
“A basketball guitar player,” Marshall said. “Well, it wasn’t what I expected but it suits her somehow. I think I like it, Katie. It should liven up everybody’s spring.”
15
It divides and divides and divides, then it folds. It becomes the spinal column and the brain. The vascular system is laid down, the center forms, the veins and arteries, the rivers of life flowing in and out of the great soft red pump of a heart.
In April Amanda started menstruating again and she thought she should go see Dr. Kincaid but that seemed like a silly thing to do. Besides, there never seemed to be time for anything anymore.
Will was playing music several nights a week in the little cafe. Amanda would go along with him, carrying a portable tape player to record his performances, sitting at a table near the bandstand, changing the tapes while he played every song to her.
“I can’t do this,” she said. “I’m too old to be a groupie. This is ridiculous.”
“No it isn’t,” he said. “It’s whatever we want it to be. Besides, I like to have you where I can look at you. You can pretend you’re my music coach if you like. Or my manager. How about that?”
“Your aunt,” Amanda said. “That’s the one I like this week.”
“You could be my aunt,” he said, smiling at her. “You look like my mother’s sisters.”
“How about her?” Amanda said. “Do I look like her? Like your mother?”
“Of course you do,” he said. “She has hair like yours. Didn’t I ever tell you that?”
The little café was a favorite haunt of Will’s old friends from high school. They would come and sit at the table with Amanda and she would talk to them as she would to any other young people, hanging on to as much dignity as she could under the circumstances, trying not to be caught looking at Will, trying not to return his looks as he sat across the room on the bandstand playing every song to her.
“Dance with me,” he would sing at the end of each performance. “I want to be your partner. Dance with me. Dance with me. Dance with me.”
“Do you two live together now?” a blond girl asked her one evening.
“I guess so,” Amanda said. “I guess you could call it that.”
“I think it’s neat,” the girl said. “I think it’s way out. My grandmother out in Texas lives with a young guy she isn’t married to. She doesn’t even make him leave when we go to visit.”
“That’s great,” Amanda said. “That’s really wonderful.”
One night two little six-year-old girls came to the restaurant with their parents and started dancing in the cleared space before the bandstand. They were lovely messy little girls wearing long skirts and cowboy boots and they danced the whole time they were waiting for their dinners, moving their limber little bodies enthusiastically to Will’s music, completely fascinated by his guitar.
After a while they brought their little brothers out onto the dance floor to use for partners, dragging them along, holding them around the middle like fat sacks.
“Those are the cutest little girls I’ve ever seen,” Will said. “They’re really nice to their little brothers, aren’t they?”
“Sure they are,” Amanda said. “As long as they get to be in charge. As long as it’s their dance and they get to lead.”
“What you got there?” Will said, turning to one of the little girls. She was standing beside the bandstand still holding her little brother.
“It’s Charles,” she said. “He’s three.”
“Go tell your daddy to come put some money in my jar. Then I’ll sing some more. Tell him the nice man needs some money.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She got a better grip around Charles’s middle and carried him over to her mother. In a minute she returned holding her father’s hand and stood primly by while he put a dollar in the tip jar and thanked Will for the music.
“Nothing to it,” Will said. “They’re nice kids. You’re a lucky man.”
Later, the waitresses started wiping off the tables and stacking the chairs in the aisle. Will put the guitar in its case, snapped the fasteners and came down off the bandstand. He picked up the big-mouthed mayonnaise jar and poured the change out into his hand.
“Cheapskates,” he said. “Well, what can you expect? It’s hard times, baby. Money’s tight. Everyone’s hurting.”
They walked across the street to George’s and sat in the outdoor beer parlor under the trees listening to jazz. Will was withdrawn, leaning up against the board wall drinking beer. The musicians were old friends of his from the days when he was making a living as a musician. Now they seemed far away, as if they had gone to a new country leaving him behind.
“What’s wrong?” Amanda said.
“Nothing you can do anything about,” he said. “Nothing I want to talk about tonight.”
“How do you know I can’t do anything about it?” she said. “Please tell me what’s bothering you.”
“What are we doing together?” he said. “Will you just tell me that? You’re older than I am and you’re wealthy and you’re good at what you do. I’m twenty-five years old and I’m flunking out of school and I don’t even have a job. I made three dollars an hour for four hours tonight. That wouldn’t pay your water bill.”
“Don’t talk like that. Don’t say those things.”
“Why not? They’re true. You asked me what was wrong. I’m telling you some of the things that make me look this way.” She was trying to think of an answer to that when some of his friends came and joined them.
In the morning it started again. Will woke up with Amanda’s body in his arms. He cupped her breasts in his hands. He put his face to her soft hair. He breathed deep of the clean April morning. It was almost a full minute before he remembered the letter from the bank.
He sat up on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. Will Lyons was young and proud and broke. What did it matter to him that the wonder of spring was happening all the way down the mountain and across the whole state of Arkansas.
“Is something wrong?” Amanda said, touching his back.
“It’s money, Amanda. I have to find some money to start paying back the student loans I owe. I’ve got to find a job. I don’t have fifty dollars in the bank.”
“I’ll lend you some money,” she said. “Please let me. I’ll lend you whatever you need.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if we should do that again. I’d better just go on and take the first job I can find, doing anything I can find to do.”
“Why not?” she said. “Just because you got wild the last time I lent you money. I mean, for Christ’s sake, can’t we learn from our mistakes?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let me think about it. I’ll let you know.”
“Bullshit,” she said and walked upstairs to her desk and wrote out a check and walked back downstairs and handed it to him.
“Now don’t dare thank me for this,” she said. “Or get mad at me. Just take it and go get your affairs straightened out. And stop looking so sad. I can’t stand it when you look sad.” He wasn’t smiling so she went on. “It isn’t my money, anyway. It came from the Mississippi delta. It came from land that was cleared and worked by black people whose children and grandchildren are dying in the slums of Detroit and Akron. I don’t have any right to it anyway. It’s money someone gave me. Now I’m giving part of it to you. Please just take it and don’t think about it anymore.”
Will took it. He took the check and stuck it in his pocket. It was worse than the last time. It was terrible. All the rationalizations in the world couldn’t make it any better.
Here I stand, he was thinking. In her living room, on her carpet, taking money from a woman. My daddy would have me killed.
By two o’clock that afternoon Will was drunk. By dark he was in Hot Springs at the races.
When he finished losing all the money Will hitchhiked back to Fayetteville. He was tired and hung over and broke and dirty. He felt better than he had felt in weeks.
“I can’t believe you did this to me,” she said when he called her. “I can’t believe you would treat me like this.”
“I’m going to pay you back the money,” he said. “You can depend on that.”
“I don’t give a fuck about the money. It isn’t that.”
“Well, it is that. It’s what’s wrong between us.”
“I’m sorry I gave it to you then. It was a stupid thing to do.”
“Can I see you?”
“No. I don’t want to see you. I want to go back to my own life. I want this to all stop.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll call you then. I’ll call you up. We’ll go see a movie.”
“Fine,” she said. “Or I’ll call you.”
She hung up the phone and went storming around her house cleaning everything, planning her monastic life as a great translator. She cleaned up the living room and the dining room and the bedroom and the workroom. She straightened up all her papers. She sat down at the dining room table and made a list of all the things Will Lyons liked that she had outgrown and grown contemptuous of. The title of the list was Junk Food. Pizza, television, Playboy magazine, music with words, beer, whiskey, marijuana, American movies, pinball machines. The list went on and on. A week before those things had been a trip to a foreign country. This week they were junk food.
16
All morning Amanda had been agonizing over two lines of a poem. It was a poem she had been arguing about with Marshall for several weeks. Faces of stone, faces of stone and underneath their skirts the same machines as mine must surely grind and itch all day, the same sweet sea. I know that’s what she meant. Walls of stone, faces of stone, what’s the difference. Except you can’t say stone walls now because it means Watergate. Well, Marshall will just have to listen to reason. What difference does it make if we fix a few of them to make them better? It’s stupid to leave them like this. Well, I’m not going to do what he wants. Goddamn, he’s not going to boss me around. No man is going to boss me around ever as long as I live.
Amanda sat at her desk with her face in her hands getting madder and madder. She hadn’t seen Will in a week. She hadn’t made love or even had a hot meal for a whole week. For a whole week all she’d been doing was sitting at her desk covering pages of paper with French words and English words. She’d been sitting at her desk fooling with the translations for so many days she’d begun to think the pieces of paper lying all around her on the floor were more important than real life.
Now she sat at the desk with her face in her hands thinking of people to blame for the fact that the translations weren’t as wonderful as she wanted them to be. She was blaming Malcolm Ashe and Marshall Jordan and Duncan Walker and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the poor taste of the American public and whoever it was in Paris that was holding up sending the diaries to her. Not to mention the woman in Albuquerque, that bitch.
Faces like stone, names like stone, “names like water poured from stone jugs,” no, that’s Philip Levine’s, blank faces, stones like walls, water like stones. “Oh, shit,” she said out loud.
Amanda got up from the desk, put on her shoes, drove down to Marshall’s office and laid the offending lines before him on the desk.
“I won’t leave this like this,” she said. “I can’t.”
“I’m glad you came over. Now, listen, Amanda. I have to have a manuscript soon. Have you fixed the things we talked about last week?”
“I can’t fix them,” she said. “It’s bullshit to leave them like that. They sound terrible. She wasn’t much of a poet, Marshall.”
“Well, we can’t change that, my dear.”
“Why not? We can change the French too. I mean, it’s our book.”
“We can’t change the poems.”
“I don’t mean really change them. Just make them better. Just make the crazy ones make some sense.”
“Well, we just can’t do that, my dear. It isn’t how it’s done. Even if I’d put up with it we’d never get Duncan to go along.”
“I hate translating. I ought to be writing my own stuff.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more. You aren’t suited for this temperamentally. Still, let’s finish this thing we’ve started. Let’s see this through.”
“If I were sure it was going to be published. If you’d give me some guarantee.”
“I told you I couldn’t do that at the beginning, Amanda. I told you it was a gamble.”
She sighed and looked glumly down at her hands. It was true. He had told her that from the beginning.
“How’s your love life?” he said, thinking it would cheer her up.
“What have you heard?”
“That you’re in love. Is there more? Is there blood on the lintel? Is the vice squad at the door?”
“He’s twenty-five, Marshall. He’s only twenty-five years old.”
“Good for him. That’s quite an accomplishment. Tell me about it. Tell me what’s going on.”
“There isn’t anything to tell.” She was looking at the sign over Marshall’s desk. Everything Will Happen, it said. “Last night I got so mad at myself I got out the Symposium to see if I could learn something to cure myself.”
