The Annunciation, page 8
“What will I do?” Amanda said. “How will I do it? I don’t know how to do it.”
“First you got to find something else you like to do,” Lavertis said. “You got to get you a baby or a job or something so you hadn’t got so much time on your hands.”
“It has to stop,” Amanda said. “I’m going to end up like my mother if I don’t stop. I’ll end up spending my life in a back room where the sun can’t even get in.”
“You’ll do it,” Lavertis said. “I know you’ll do it. You can do anything you want to do. A lady as smart and all as you are.”
It was not easy to stop drinking. I am a pocket of habits in a burning universe Amanda read somewhere and stuck up on her mirror. The hardest part was going to parties. The hardest part was not actually being there. The hardest part was thinking about it beforehand.
“You’re mindfucking, Amanda,” the behaviorist she went to said. “You’re spending more time dreading the party than you are being there. The party’s only going to last two hours. Just suffer those two hours instead of thinking about it for days beforehand. Or don’t go. You’re a rich lady. You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to go. Are you listening, Amanda? Listen to me. Please listen to me.”
“Do you want to fuck me?” she said.
“No, I want to make you well. Do you want a tranquilizer to take before you go to parties? To use for a month or two?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t like to take drugs.”
“Alcohol is a drug.”
“No it isn’t, Walter. Alcohol is a way of life.”
“All right. It’s a way of life.”
“It’s a religion. It’s Dionysius.”
“I’m going to tell you something, Amanda. You can serve that god sober. You can do anything sober you can do drunk, including ecstasy. You were capable of ecstasy when you were a child, weren’t you?”
“Oh, God, yes. When I was little I lived in the water. I am deliriously happy in water. I go crazy in water.”
“Do you want some Antabuse for the parties?”
“No, I wouldn’t be caught dead taking that stuff. Let me see how much longer I can do it this way.”
Needless to say Amanda’s friends were horrified that she quit drinking. What did it mean, they whispered among themselves. Did it mean she would be wandering around their parties listening to every word they said?
“Oh, come on, Amanda,” Dr. Lovett said. He was the Ashes’ family doctor. “You can have a glass of wine.”
“Leave me alone,” she said. “I don’t want a goddamn glass of wine. I quit drinking. I told you I quit drinking. Don’t talk about it.”
“What’s that you’ve got in the glass? Is that water? In a wineglass?”
“I’m made out of water, Drusy,” she said. “I’m ninety-eight percent water and the rest is a finely balanced highly sensitive delicately tuned chemical mix and I’m tired of pouring alcohol into it so I’ll be as dumb as all the rest of you.”
“Jesus Christ, Amanda, you ought to hear yourself. You sound like some kind of evangelist. Well, there’s nothing worse than a reformed whore, they always say.”
“I’m trying to save my life, Drusy. I’m sick of having hangovers all the time.”
“People have been getting drunk since the dawn of time, Amanda. The first thing men did with the first grain they stored was find a way to make alcohol out of it.”
“So it’s time to find something better to do,” she said. “Time to climb down out of the trees.”
“Are you still drinking water?” Monroe Frazier said, coming up to them, trailing his mannerisms. “Dear heart, that’s getting to be rather a bore.”
“Excuse me,” she said. “I have to be somewhere else. I have to collect Malcolm and get out of here.”
“Now don’t go off mad, Pussy Faye,” Monroe said. “Don’t go off in a huff.”
“Fuck you, Monroe,” Amanda said. “You’d give anything in the world if you could quit being a drunk. You’re just mad because I’m doing something you can’t do.”
She pushed him out of the way. She put her hand on his pin-striped Christian Dior suit and shoved him out of her way and made for the door, leaving her coat and purse and Malcolm behind. She headed down the stone stairs to the sidewalk. I’m leaving this behind me if it’s the last thing I ever do in my life, she told herself, moving on down Philip Street like a tank, head down, hands in the pockets of her three-hundred-dollar skirt, scuffing up her leather boots on the bricks. I’m leaving it. I hate them. I hate every goddamn one of them. I hate those goddamn little drunk Frenchmen and drunk Jews and drunk white Anglo-Saxon Protestant princes and princesses. I know there’s something better to do in the world than hang around doing numbers on each other in this fucking dead old anachronistic world. Goddamn it, I know there’s something to do in the world besides get drunk….
“Did you really shove Monroe into a mirror?” Malcolm said. “Did you really insult him in his own house? I don’t know about you, Amanda. I don’t know…”
“Don’t you dare talk to me about that,” she said. They were fighting it out in their bedroom. “You goddamn self-righteous bastard. Don’t you dare say a word to me about anything. I hate this goddamn place. I hate this life. I hate it, Malcolm, do you hear me? And I’m getting out. I’m getting out of here if it’s the last thing I ever do in my life.”
“I hate their guts,” she screamed at her behaviorist. “You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t imagine what it’s like at those parties.”
“Then don’t go,” he said. “Don’t go to the parties.”
“How could I not go? You have to go. I hate Drusy. He’s the worst one. Every time he sees me at a party he starts in on me about it.”
“Are you getting plenty of exercise, Amanda?”
“God, yes. I’m doing ballet and yoga and swimming an hour a day. All I do is exercise. Goddammit, Walter, what am I going to do about those parties?”
“You’re going to quit going. Now get in the chair. I’m going to hypnotize you and put some good ideas in your head. Then I’m going to take you to lunch.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to fuck me?”
“I never said I didn’t want to, Amanda. I said I wasn’t going to. And that’s another thing. I want you to find somebody to fuck. It’s unhealthy not to fuck anyone.”
“I can’t fuck anybody. I’m married. Malcolm would kill me.”
“Then stop being married to him. Come on, get in that chair.”
“Shrinks don’t talk like that, Walter. They’re going to kick you out of the club for saying things like that.”
“They already did,” he said. “Come on. Get in the chair. And I’m serious about you finding someone to fuck. If you keep putting it off, when it finally happens it’s going to hit you like a ton of bricks.”
“What a nice idea,” she said, settling down into his chair, imagining a love affair falling down on top of her like a disintegrating skyscraper. “I’ve been waiting all my life for that to happen.”
“Everything happens,” he said. “Anything we can think of happens.”
“I’ve stopped going to parties,” she told Malcolm. “I mean it. Not a single one.”
“Are you going to the firm dinner with me on Saturday night?”
“Nope. Those people bore the shit out of me. When they’re all in a room together it’s like some vast superego sucking the juice out of my brain. Or when we’re all sitting down at the tables like good little lawyers and wifelets. I always think maybe Jesus will come and nail us all to the chairs to punish us….”
“Well, you’re going with me to that dinner, Amanda. I don’t care whether it bores you or not. It’s something we have to do.”
“I don’t have to do a goddamn thing but get myself well. Besides, the Ballet of the Americas is in town. It’s the first time it’s toured in years. I’m going to see Maurice Bejart dance. He’s going to dance The Firebird.”
“I don’t know who you are anymore, Amanda,” Malcolm said. “I look at you and I can’t find the girl I married. I don’t know what you’re talking about half the time.”
But she had left the room.
“All I ever wanted from the stuff to begin with was the sugar,” Amanda told Lavertis one morning. “I think now I was in it all along for the sugar. So anytime I want a drink I’m going to eat all the candy and ice cream and cake I want. I guess I can work my way up to protein later.”
That afternoon Lavertis walked down to the store and bought all the ingredients and made a yellow cake and left it sitting on the counter in the kitchen. It had real caramel icing an inch thick that was made from scratch in an iron skillet. There was a note in Lavertis’s careful handwriting propped up on the cake cover.
I am so proud of you. Lisa’s husband came back. I think he’s planning on taking her child away. Grandpa got out the flower boxes for spring. Bob is back on the staff but he’s still mad at David. He and Lisa are going to get together for lunch. More next week.
It was something Lavertis had started doing to keep Amanda up with the events of As the World Turns. Amanda never had time to watch As the World Turns anymore. She had taken Lavertis’ advice and found something to do to fill up all the time she used to spend having hangovers. She had walked across the street to Tulane and signed up for five classes in the foreign languages and English departments. She was getting up at dawn to begin her work, sitting at the dining room table covering pages of paper with her huge illegible scrawl, relearning two languages and the craft of translation all at once, learning fast.
“I think I have enough left,” she said to herself, meaning her brain cells. “I think I have plenty.”
Soon she was the golden girl around the Tulane foreign languages department. Small magazines were accepting her translations almost by return mail.
Lavertis was as excited about Amanda’s new career as Amanda was herself. It was Lavertis who thought up turning a spare bedroom into an office.
“You can’t move those papers on and off the dining room table every time you want to have a meal,” she said. “Make Mr. Malcolm send you out a desk from the office. They got a hundred desks down there.”
“I think that old table in the basement will be fine,” Amanda said. “Go call Clarence and tell him to get over here and help us move it.”
Lavertis began to change her role in Amanda’s life. She brought endless cups of coffee into the room on trays as she had seen secretaries do on television. She answered the door and the phone and told everyone Mrs. Ashe was working and couldn’t be disturbed. She noticed if Amanda’s spirits got low.
“I haven’t heard that typewriter going lately,” she would say over her shoulder as she dusted the piano. “I read about some big translator coming to talk at UNO,” she would mention as she got out the vacuum. “Guess you’ll be going out there to hear him. Guess you’ll be traveling around giving speeches before we know it.”
Amanda began signing her maiden name to her translations. Amanda McCamey, it said. Translation by Amanda McCamey. The first time she saw her name in print it excited her so much she took the magazine home and hid it.
After a few days, she got it out and showed it to Malcolm.
“Oh, my God,” he said. Malcolm knew what he was seeing was more than a twelve-line poem in The New England Review. “Now you’re going to start that. Why don’t you go on and stop wearing my rings, while you’re at it. Go all the way. Stop spending my money.” This was an uncharacteristic thing for Malcolm to say. He never mentioned money to Amanda. He and Amanda just pretended money didn’t exist.
“I would if I knew some other way to get some.” She started out of the room. Then she came back and took his face in her hands. He was sitting in a high-backed Queen Anne chair looking so tired, looking so forlorn.
“Start thinking about a life without me,” she said, relieved to be saying it at last. “I was the Wasp princess and it didn’t work out. You don’t have to stay here forever with an idea that didn’t work. Get out of here and find a woman with black hair and have yourself some babies.”
“Don’t say that,” he said. “It’s like telling me my mother just died.”
“I’m not your mother,” Amanda said. “Your mother’s right over there on State Street waiting to welcome you home.”
“I’m sorry I said that about the money,” he said. “I didn’t mean that. You can have all the money you want as long as you want it. You know that.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with money,” Amanda said. “It has to do with us not having anything in common, not a single dream or idea. It has to do with the future. I want there to be one for me. As long as we stay in this dead marriage the future can’t happen for either of us. Pretty soon I’m going to have to leave here, Malcolm. I feel it coming like a storm across the delta.”
“Where are you planning on going, Miss Weather Barometer?”
“I don’t know. I just know life isn’t supposed to be a holding action.”
The next month Amanda’s grandmother died and left her half of Esperanza, seven hundred acres of delta land under cultivation.
Now, she said, driving home from the funeral. Now there is not a single thing to keep me from being free.
7
When he got back from Chicago after the funeral Guy couldn’t stop thinking about Amanda. He thought about his body deep inside of hers, long ago and last month and in every sort of dream and predicament. He began to dream of her, something he hadn’t done in years. Every woman he fucked became her. Finally he stopped seeing all the women he fucked in Chicago. Finally he only thought about Amanda, and about the child, the girl, the woman. He thought about the girl with different faces, at different ages. He imagined he saw her on the streets, in movies, in restaurants.
He began to cry in odd times at odd places and became so cold and distant to Maria that her whole family stopped speaking to him. He began to imagine that her father would have him killed, that he would turn a corner at any moment and the hit man would be laying for him.
One night he could stand it no longer. He had been off on a business trip during which he was barely civil to the men Maria’s father had sent him to see. When he got home Maria made him a late supper in the kitchen. He ate it in slow disinterested bites, listening to her ramble on about her sisters and their families. How did I get here with this ugly Italian woman, this big-nosed woman sitting across a table from me? Is this what I bought with my talent and my skills? This foreigner, this idiot, this invalid. Thank God there are no children. Thank God life didn’t do that to me. Imagine children with skin like that, with hair that thick and coarse, with eyes that stupid and permitting. This is what I sold out for? And for what? None of the power has passed to me. None of the money has come to me. It is all in her name still.
Across the table Maria rambled on, knowing he wasn’t listening to a word she said, content to have him there.
After Maria went to bed Guy walked around the house touching the dark shapes of the furniture. Light from a streetlamp poured in the windows of the living room.
“Goddamn that streetlight,” he said for the thousandth time. “It fucks up the stars.”
He sat down at his grandfather’s desk. It was the only thing in the house Guy felt was really his. Maria and her decorators tolerated it like some sort of an indictment, this old handmade plantation desk taking up a perfectly good wall in the contemporary splendor of the Mies van der Rohe living room.
Guy sat at the desk all night pushing the little drawers in and out, thinking of Esperanza, of the old days, of Amanda, and of the girl who was his daughter, asleep somewhere in a stranger’s bed.
At dawn he made some phone calls, drove out to the airport, got into a small plane that belonged to the family, and flew out over the lake, then banked and turned, headed for New Orleans.
Vaiden Canizaro was waiting for him on the porch of his lakefront mansion. He looked like the old emperor he was, watchful, intense, impossible to intimidate or overpower or fool.
He took Guy into his study and held out a manila envelope. “It is here,” he said. “I hope it will set your mind at ease.”
Guy could not move his hand. He stared at the folder. He could not reach out his hand to take it. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what it says.”
“That she is a grown married woman. That she is well. She was raised by the Allains here. That’s sugar plantation money. She’s married to a lawyer, a young partner in Putney, Carroll, the society law firm.”
“Where does she live?” Guy said. “I have to look at her. I have to see what she looks like.”
“I arranged for that. She plays tennis. My correspondent says she plays nearly every Sunday at a club. I arranged for someone to take you there. A man named Todd Denery, who moves in those circles, an asshole but you can tolerate him, I suppose. He thinks you’re looking the town over to see if you want to live here. He was impressed by your name. Of course, there’s no assurance she’ll be there tomorrow.”
“What is her name? What do they call her?”
“Barrett. Barrett Clare.”
“How will I know which one is her?”
“You’ll find a way.”
“I won’t forget this, Vaiden.”
“These things happen to all of us. We help each other. We fix them up. We go back home. It all works out.”
Sunday was a clear bright day. Guy had refused Vaiden’s offer of a bed and taken a suite at the Pontchartrain Hotel on Saint Charles Avenue. He was waiting in the lobby when Todd Denery came to pick him up.
“I used to watch you play,” Todd said, helping him into the car with elaborate courtesy. They drove off down Saint Charles Avenue. Guy hadn’t been in New Orleans in years. He was surprised at how little anything had changed. “The city never changes,” he said. “I had forgotten how quiet it is.”
