Lookaway, Lookaway (19 page)

Annie hated to concede any point to her mother, so she sat silently.

“Now Society,” Jerene Johnston continued, “is just as silly, but the debut is a time-honored way that good families have come up with to
increase the odds
of their decent young women marrying decent young men and not living in a shotgun shack, working two jobs, having been left by two or three good-for-nothing husbands, with a pickup truckload of screaming babies with full diapers.”

“Oh, please.”

“You have never listened to me for a second, Jeannette Johnston—not one full second on the clock! But I’m going to tell you something and it may take you until you’re forty to know I’m right about it. Class matters.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“You can be quite happy with some European foreigner or even someone from another race if they’re
from your class
. But marry beneath it—”

Annie exploded: “Class does not matter in America anymore! Are we back to Jane Austen again? I’d die if I were married to some frat boy asshole living in some big tacky Myers Park mansion made to look like something in Tudor England, watching Guatemalans clean up after me all day. It makes me sick.”

Annie remembered her mother’s familiar expression, used with all her children, but particularly her. A squinty countenance that showed all effort had been in vain, all arguments wasted breath, a look that said,
You have ceased to become sufficiently human for me to talk to, so I’m done
. Mrs. Johnston turned around in the seat and started the car, merged into traffic, concluding by saying, as much to herself, “I invite you not to live your entire life with the singular purpose of spiting your mother.”

Husband Number One. Vinicius Costa, the Brazilian pretty boy who wanted to gain American citizenship. That one was annulled.

Husband Number Two. Destin Winchell, married semi-facetiously for a gym membership and free use of a weight-loss clinic. Duration four years.

Husband Number Three. Chuck Arbuthnot, who loved her to death. Working class, a builder of beach homes, lifelong denizen of work sites and construction projects, happy to give her her independence, liked her big and beautiful, was the most regular and energetic lover since her college high-watermark (Michael), was in every way the ideal partner … except for the lack of shared real estate when it came to the life of the mind. Oh Chuck was plenty smart, street-smart, real-life smart, money smart—which Annie very much appreciated, somebody had to be—but there was never the option to talk books or aesthetics or philosophers or a deeper politics or what made a latex-splashed painting in the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art brilliant. He was open to it, happily gave an opinion or two a try, but he was not raised to care about this stuff. He could fake it for a while to please Annie, and he would do anything to please her, but it wasn’t in him. Doomed because of class, Annie thought years hence with pellucid, exquisite clarity.

Happy now, Mom?

*   *   *

How did it ever make sense to her to undertake a visa marriage to a guy from Salvador, Brazil? Sometimes Annie would reflect on her college days and wonder if all of it really happened—the debut as well as the two-month marriage. All things, she inwardly cursed, took their cue from that damn debut, that one expedient surrender.

Unbiased reflection, however, would reveal that she had been suffering self-created setbacks as long ago as high school. In her senior year, Annie ran up against a first unpleasant reality: she didn’t get into the out-of-state A-list schools she had hoped to. Annie applied to various good schools, sending out her spotty transcript (As and Fs) that had to be explained away by a cover letter, and a killer near-perfect SAT score. Her appeal was:
Look guys, I’m outrageously smart but I couldn’t endure all the horse dung of the elite private school they made me go to. So when I was interested I showed up and made As in classes, and when it was bullshit taught by asshole teachers, I cut all the classes
. She had had two instructors at Mecklenburg Country Day who wrote for her glowing recommendation letters about what a genius she was … but had they really done that? Mightn’t they have said she was bright but spoiled, terminally immature? As an adult, Annie was fairly sure that’s the sort of thing they probably did write.

And then to Harvard and Yale and Chicago and Stanford she let it rip in the cover letter about “bastions of privilege” and “white patriarchal superstructures” and they sent her polite form letters saying she need not storm those bastions. She thought her 1560 on the SAT would act as a talisman, a charmed magical shield against what must have appeared to them an academic record positively deafening with alarm bells. Having been rejected everywhere but the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the more artsy, less self-idolizing University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she decided on Greensboro. Many of the Mecklenburg jock-and-airhead crowd, the ones she and her clique dubbed
Les Intolérables,
would be at Chapel Hill, rushing the sororities and fraternities, putting together floats for homecoming, rah-rah-rahing for that goddam basketball team that was the center of all life and conversation across the state—screw all that. It briefly appealed, being a Tar Heel who didn’t root for the Tar Heels … oh, but the exhaustion of that social stance wearied her in advance. No, Greensboro was a smaller pond and she could be a bigger fish, perhaps.

Uncle Gaston approved. “Greensboro, huh? I suppose the
nouveaux riches
have to live somewhere and show off their Rolexes in strip clubs.”

“Strip clubs, huh? I think I see how I might make a little money between terms!”

Once Annie got ensconced at Greensboro, she faced a rocky social transition. She had always been an alpha female, always the leader of the private-school pack; her girlfriends tended to be girls who didn’t threaten her and laughed at her witty putdowns of others. It was harder to find such a tribe of followers at university. Junior and senior year of high school she had been a big deal in school plays, so she threw herself at college theater.

She auditioned for
The Merry Wives of Windsor,
looking every bit the part of the bawd Mistress Quickly at eighteen years of age. They trussed and girdled her up—in a “merry widow,” in fact—and she was all Elizabethan cleavage. She was audible to the back row and, throughout her college years, when a big voice or a big woman was called for (Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
Josie in
Moon for the Misbegotten
) she was every director’s go-to girl. The bohemian UNC-G world put her in touch with lots of cute, dim, possibly gay actors and nerdy weak-willed young men who were powerless against her tractor beam, who were pulled into her bedroom without much to say about it.

But she was working that trickiest of territories: being a big girl who acted like she didn’t mind being big, who let it all hang out and flounced, bounced, shimmied and shook it as an asset. R&B music told her she was big and beautiful but a number of her overt passes, to handsome preppy boys she
really
wanted, had been gently, ever so tenderly, set aside because the guys didn’t “feel that way” about her, guys who would be on some string-bean blond anorectic’s arm by the end of term. She didn’t get it: who wanted to see ribs and pelvic bones sticking out? Go get a boy, if that’s what you want! Of course, there were a slew of reasons a young man would steer clear of Annie Johnston romantically, but in her mind it was always the weight, and it usually was the weight.

And then came Michael Oxamander. Annie’s college-era great love. Tall, freckled, with dark red-brown hair in his chin stubble and, as she learned, all over his body in considerable amounts. Michael (never Mike) was a Sociology major, wore an earring, sandals, kept his hair a little long in front, necessitating a trademark head toss which cleared his vision. Thanks to the earring, her teenage brother Joshua, who visited UNC-G any weekend she let him, wondered if Michael was gay. Josh was annoying that way—everyone was gay. Just because a man dressed in pressed khakis or wore certain colognes or groomed himself deliberately, he had to be gay. Well, there was some slight cause to wonder; Annie had met him on a swingers-bisexual-anything-goes 1-900 telephone line, known for quick no-strings-attached hookups. Annie had tried it with a woman a time or two. (Hey, it was UNC-G where it was uncool not to experiment, where one had to cull oneself from the herd of bucolics the first week.) And though she and Michael threatened to stage orgies, mutually lusted after other women, contemplated threesomes with any cute man or woman in the cafeteria, they remained intensely fascinated with one another.

Annie’s sex pattern had gone unaltered since freshman year: she found someone willing, who liked an ample bosom and wide hips, she pinned him to the bed and proceeded through a routine of things that she liked to do while her willing servant obliged. Michael put up with that once and then flipped her to the mat like a wrestler and said, “Now we’re going to do what I want to do,” and took charge. Michael convinced her that if control had to be ceded somewhere, the bedroom was the place to do it. If she had been squeamish about any of the varieties or positions of sex acts, Michael cured it; he made sure her entire body was put to use, one big erogenous zone.

His libido was like one of those regularly erupting Yellowstone geysers—there was a morning session before the shower, sometimes a lunchtime canoodle, then at night, regular as the eleven o’clock news, they were at it again. And when you get a libido like that, you can bet there will be other outlets for it, and he was never a liar, told her up front: “I can see moving in with you but there’s not going to be one hundred percent fidelity. I wish I could do it but it’s not the way I work. And you can have the same openness if there’s someone else you have to be with.” Again, intellectually, that appealed to Annie: it was modern, it was worldly and sophisticated, a conversation European couples, no doubt, had every morning over croissants, and, appealingly, it was something her mother would be horrified at … but she was actually intensely bothered by it, deep down. Was there a thinner, more athletic girl out there somewhere? A blond raptor making a bony venture into her territory?

“What we have is central to my life,” he said once in bed, entangled in sheets and arms, when she had dared to broach the monogamy question. “You’re my number one. But you know my nature. If something presents itself…”

“You can’t possibly imagine summoning up the willpower to say no.”

“Why should I say no? To anything? Why should you? We’re young, life’s short—”

“I agree, I agree,” she said to forestall the familiar rote.

“You think there’s a Mean Old Man in the Sky looking down keeping track across the vastness of space with what we do with our genitals in our microsecond flash of human existence?”

“No, no, I’m an atheist, like you. Charter member.”

“So you’re bothered we’re not a Hallmark card? Only I get to touch this…” He demonstrated by tickling below the waist. “… and only you get to touch this?” He directed her hand between his legs, which soon became the catalyst for round two of the night’s lovemaking.

And when he broke up with her, it was sudden, unexplained, pretty much the way she thought it would play out. She had several rough weeks about it, glimpsing him during class changes. Twenty thousand students used UNC-G campus but she never failed to spot Michael between buildings, outside of dorms, at the Tate Street vortex of bars and bistros.

“That kind of guy,” her roommate Gillian said, “you only lease anyway. Be glad you had it while you had it.”

As a break from mourning, she excelled at history, became known and liked by her professors. She also saw herself, like her father, one day, whiskey glass in hand, holding forth knowledgeably before a table of admiring listeners. And she had majored in History, particularly the Civil War era, to better refute her father who was put on this earth for her to refute.

She had this idea for a senior project: researching the family past and seeing if she could find descendants of the Johnston family slaves. There certainly were plenty of black people named Johnston around this state.

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said her mother. “How will you possibly approach these people? ‘Pardon me, my ancestor used to own your ancestor. How do you feel about that?’”

“It could be a touching moment, connecting people back to their descendants who rose up from slavery. I envision some profound discussions.”

“I envision some black people hanging up on you.”

The real glory of majoring in History, of course, was more time at the dinner table, back in Charlotte on a weekend, tangling with her father. She had to admit he knew his Civil War history, and so did Uncle Gaston, though his version was more florid, a retail history of high drama rather than facts. Her father could be vague on politics, the Law (which he somehow, absentminded and diffident as he was, practiced once upon a time), fuzzy on when his children’s birthdays were or what they were majoring in at college, but he became incandescent on the subject of Chancellorsville, Shiloh, the Battle for Fort Macon, and anything to do with their esteemed ancestor General Joseph E. Johnston:

Duke Johnston pushed the salt shaker, the pepper shaker, the butter knife, his coffee cup, all to represent the play of battle. Three twisted napkins represented the Shenandoah River.

“Now,” said Duke, fondly aware that Joshua and Annie were indulging him without any true interest, “the river had many fords and they had to be guarded. Our ancestor, General Johnston, did all the fighting, far as I could tell. General Beauregard was wed to this false notion that Paterson and the Yankees would attack from the right, but of course Johnston was correct, and commanded all the fighting on the left flank. We had Ewell at Union Mills…” The pepper mill was slid toward the napkins. “Jones at McLean’s Ford, Longstreet at Blackburn’s Ford…” The salt shaker and coffee cup were scooted into place. “And of course Colonel P. S. Cocke guarded Ball’s Ford.”