Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (36 page)

Other visitors stared at them curiously as they came back down the winding staircase, holding hands. Roxy thought Willie and Lucinda would leave then, but they didn’t. Instead, they suddenly turned around at the bottom and went back up the stairs and stood in front of the long window on the landing for half an hour, whispering. Willie kept his arm around his wife and massaged her shoulder the whole time. At one point Roxy started up the stairs to speak to them, then just stopped on a step below, looking up at them from behind. The sun fell through the long window, spinning their hair into gold, as in a fairy tale.
He really loves her,
she thought.
Really really really
. Suddenly Roxy felt empty and foolish standing there in her little red suit and patent-leather pumps watching them. She felt hollow and fragile, like a wind chime, a thought so crazy that she went back downstairs and got a cup full of wine herself despite a frown from Irene Kramer, her more experienced co-worker.

Finally Willie and Lucinda headed back down the stairway like a bridal couple making an entrance. Lucinda was blushing, though she still looked down.

“We’ll take it,” Willie told Roxy when they reached the bottom.

“Don’t you want to look at the lower floor?” she asked. “The basement? There’s a whole guest suite down there, and an office — “

Willie looked at his wife, who shook her head slightly: no.

“That’s okay,” he said.

“Really?”
Roxy knew she was being unprofessional, but she couldn’t believe it. And they still hadn’t asked the price.

“We’re sure.” For the first time, Willie smiled directly at
her,
and then she could see the appeal, all right.

Irene Kramer moved forward like a bitch on wheels. “I’ll be glad to discuss terms with you,” she said. “We can step back here into the study.”

“Oh, we’ll just pay cash,” Willie’s wife spoke for the first time, in a surprising little-girl voice. Then she wrote out a check for ten thousand dollars and handed it to Roxy. “Is that enough for now?” she asked, and Roxy said it was plenty.

They left in an old red convertible with the top down, her yellow hair flying out behind them like a banner in the breeze as Willie gunned it down the long driveway. Willie always drove convertibles, and he always drove too fast. He always cooked on high, too. But Roxy would learn all this much later.

“Well, I swan!” she said, reverting to an old mountain expression of her mother’s, which covered just about everything.

But Irene smiled a practiced, calculating smile that crinkled her makeup. “Music people,” she said. “Wait and see. You run into every damn thing in this business.”

T
HE SECOND TIME
R
OXY
met Willie was twelve years after that, when she took a poetry class by mistake over at the
college. It all started the day after Livingston told her that he was contemplating a run for the state legislature. “Why not?” he’d said, striding back and forth across the new Oriental rug. He’d made partner at Massengale, Frankstone, and Hogue, he’d made over ten million dollars winning personal injury suits, his specialty. Both boys had just left for Virginia Episcopal School, the same prep school Livingston himself had gone to. They were doing great. Roxy’s decorator, David, had just put the finishing touches on this house they’d built at the Ambassador’s Club — right on the seventh hole, for luck. Now, Livingston said, he
felt
lucky. For years, people had been after him to run for office. He had headed up a list of volunteer organizations and fund drives as long as your arm, he had served on many boards. It was time.

Roxy cleared her throat. “Actually,” she’d said, “I was just thinking it’s also about time for me to go back to school and get that degree. I’d like to teach, like Mama. Maybe home ec, don’t laugh. Or maybe special ed. I’d like to be useful in the world.” She didn’t know she was going to say this before she said it, it popped right into her head.
Well
,
I
swan!
she thought.
I sound just like Mama,
who had recently died. Roxy had been feeling sort of shaky and weird ever since. Sometimes she felt like she was floating above herself, watching herself walk and talk and smile like an idiot. Or like she was in a play, or a pageant.

“Honey,” Livingston said, “you
are
useful in the world. You’re useful right here.” Livingston had been walking all around the new living room. Now he stopped and poured her a glass of wine. “I need you — the boys need you — just think how much I’ll need you when we run.”

“
We,
” he said, not “I.” And “
when,
” not “if.”

Immediately Roxy saw herself in a series of photographs taken
on a series of platforms, herself and Livingston, smiling, smiling, smiling ever more broadly until her whole face was stretched tight. He would need her on those platforms, and he would need her as a hostess too, for Roxy was already a famous hostess in Macon, where her Christmas Eve parties had become a tradition, with homemade gumbo and jambalaya and a Christmas tree in every room, each tree with a different theme. She’d always loved people, and she loved to cook. But suddenly Roxy had a vision of herself cleaning up from those parties, putting the Christmas ornaments into those special boxes with the little dividers, each box clearly marked with its own theme label, for all the Christmases of all the years of her life to come.

She raised her glass to Livingston. “To you,” she said. “Go for it, honey!”

But she called Continuing Education over at the college that very day and signed up for a class named Kid Stuff: Special Topics in Special Education.

F
IRST SHE COULDN’T FIND
a parking space on campus, and then she couldn’t find Lenore Hall, and then the doorknob wouldn’t turn, or at least she couldn’t turn it, maybe because her hands were sort of sweaty because she couldn’t find the elevator either and she’d had to walk up three flights of stairs, so that she burst, literally
burst,
into the classroom, immediately dropping her purse, which fell wide open spilling change and makeup and her driver’s license and about a million credit cards all over the floor.

“Is this it?” she asked wildly.

Fifteen blank young faces turned around to look back at her.

“Well, is this it or not?” she said into the silence.

Willie stood up at his desk. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “But why don’t you just take a seat and we’ll find out?”

I
RENE
K
RAMER HAD BEEN
right, of course. Willie turned out to be Willie Cocker who used to play with Lynard Skynard and then started the legendary group Desperado. They had had that huge hit back in the late sixties with “Heat Lightning,” which he wrote. In fact the whole album went platinum. Lucinda had left him three years after they bought the house, taking their only child, a girl, with her. A year after that, Lucinda killed herself. Willie got the child, Lilah, at that point, but since he was in no condition to take care of her, Lilah had lived with his mother, Miss Rowena, in the big house over on Virginia Place until he got out of rehab.

So Lilah, not Roxy, was the one who had actually saved Willie, in Roxy’s opinion. From then on, he raised Lilah by himself, if anybody could have been said to have raised Lilah at all. Mostly she raised herself, or maybe she raised
him.
Willie quit the band so he wouldn’t have to travel and started teaching music lessons at home, plus the occasional English course over at the college, his original occupation. He was keeping it, he told everybody,
very simple.
They lived in an old bungalow near the campus. Lilah was the envy of all her friends, with a bead-curtain door and a television and refrigerator in her own room, plus her own dog, Possum, who slept on her waterbed with her. Possum was mostly Lab. They had found him lost in the mountains while on a camping trip. Willie had a dog too — Gator, found injured in a ditch beside the road when they were driving through the Okeefenokee Swamp. “Shot and left for dead!” Lilah liked to announce dramatically, pointing at Gator, a big friendly yellow mutt with floppy ears.
Roxy thought it was so weird for them both to have dogs named for other animals.

And there were other weird things about them too, but what could you expect? After all, Willie was a genius, with a lot of fancy degrees from fancy schools up north, and geniuses are even weirder than rock stars, everybody knows that. Roxy was a practical person. Later, she would clean out their cabinets, get rid of the mold everyplace, buy new sheets that matched, and plant an herb garden. Willie was a gourmet cook but a terrible housekeeper, though a series of girlfriends (there was always a girlfriend, and she was always nice) had tried their best to organize him. “I have my own system,” he would explain, referring to the piles of papers and records and sheet music on the floor as his “files,” and in time these nice women would give up on organizing him, if their pet allergies or his unwillingness to commit hadn’t already driven them away.

The bungalow’s living room was filled with pianos, keyboards, and recording equipment, while the dining room table was piled high with papers and books. Willie slept downstairs back then, in the little room off the dining room, which used to be a sun porch. He liked it out there. He liked the weather, hot or cold. He liked to see the japonica bloom in the spring and watch the dogwood leaves turn red in the fall, up close. He wanted the moonlight to fall across his bed.

Lilah had the big sunny corner bedroom upstairs. She was never exactly sure who might turn up in the other two bedrooms when she woke up in the morning. Students, fans, relatives, friends — Lilah and Willie had a lot of friends. Sometimes the friends stayed for weeks. Sometimes Miss Rowena sent her hired man, Horace, over there to clean. Horace moved through the house mournfully and purposefully, mopping and vacuuming,
clicking his tongue; after he’d left, they couldn’t find
anything
for the longest time, until they had messed it all up again.

Yet Lilah emerged from this crazy house on time for school every morning, neat as a pin, and marched off to the Harper Hill Academy in her uniform, the blue blazer and plaid skirt and knee-socks in winter, the white blouse and khaki Bermuda shorts and sneakers in spring and fall. She always had perfect attendance and perfect grades. It was a miracle;
she
was a miracle. Lilah grew into a tall, blonde, beautiful girl like her mother but so thin that her knees knocked together when she walked. Roxy had an immediate impulse to feed her. Lilah had the same huge blue eyes that Roxy remembered so well, the same Kim Novak nose, but a big, generous mouth like Julia Roberts so that when she smiled, which she did often, she gave off light like the sun.

Or like a lighthouse, Roxy thinks now, walking out on the sagging deck to look across the marsh at her favorite view, the black and white striped Cape Plenty lighthouse built in 1910 and still in use. Roxy identifies with this lighthouse — she and Willie are getting pretty old themselves now, but by God they are still in use, both of them. Everything still works —
everything
. Suddenly she can’t wait for him to get here, she hasn’t seen him for three days because he’s been in Atlanta scoring a documentary film. Roxy smiles, putting cushions out on the heavy old cedar deck chairs, gray with age. She looks out at the horizon and remembers the night they pulled the mattress out here and drank champagne and watched the Perseid shower, those shooting stars all night long. She has just gone back into the house and gotten another armful of cushions when the phone rings. She puts the cushions down and picks the receiver up; somehow, she knows it’s going to be important.

“Roxy?” Lilah’s voice is about an octave higher than usual.

“Hi honey, what’s going on? I thought you were going to some golf tournament or conference or something with Kyle this weekend.”

Kyle is the current boyfriend.

“We are — I mean, we
were,
but then Kyle changed his mind and now he wants to drive down to the beach all of a sudden, so is that okay with you guys?”

“Well, sure, but you know it’s still kind of cold out on the island, and it’s a pretty long drive, and it’s not great weather or anything yet. In fact, I just got here myself, I’m just starting to clean up the house.”

“What about Daddy? Isn’t Daddy there? Kyle says he especially wants to see Daddy.”

“Lilah, tell me what’s going on. Are you okay?” Roxy sits down on Miss Rowena’s old sofa, she called it her davenport.

“I’m fine,” Lilah says in a cheery voice, though it’s clear that she’s not. “Where’s Daddy?”

“He’s coming, sweetheart. He’s driving down from Atlanta, I’m not quite sure what time he’ll get here. In a little while.”

“Well, we ought to get there about. . . . What time did you say? Just a minute.” Though Lilah has put her hand over the receiver, Roxy hears a man’s voice in the background — clearly she’s talking to Kyle.

“
Today?
You mean you’re coming today?” Roxy wedges the receiver under her chin as she lights a cigarette.

“Actually we’re already on the road,” Lilah says. “Kyle says we’ll be there by six.”

“Oh great! Can’t wait to see you!” Roxy lies, hanging up the
phone. Well shit. She sits on the davenport looking out at the line of waves on the empty beach. What if Lilah’s pregnant? But that’s impossible. Lilah has always been the sanest, smartest, most capable child in the world; now she’s got an MBA degree and carries a briefcase. MBAs don’t get pregnant, do they? But what else could it be? Now Roxy’s just
dying
to talk to Willie, but of course he doesn’t have a cell phone. He refuses to get one. He’s such a throwback, he won’t do e-mail either. He’s on the road by now too, loud music playing on his old tape deck, driving like a bat out of hell.

R
OXY REMEMBERS HOW
M
ISS
Rowena used to push that imaginary brake pedal on the floor whenever she rode with her son. “Slow down, honey, for pity’s sake!” she’d beg, stomping on the floorboard.