Peachtree Road (52 page)

Sarah visited me several times that summer, and each time she was witness to one of Lucy’s late-night calls. She would fall silent when they came, and her lashes would slip down over her great amber eyes, and her mobile mouth would tighten, but she never said anything about them.

On one such evening, something I said—or did not say—must have alerted Lucy to the fact that Sarah was in the room with me, because she said, “Oh, am I interrupting anything, Gibby? Like coitus interruptus, I mean? I can always call you back. But no, I guess not. Sarah no coito, does she? I swear, Gibby, if you marry that girl, PEACHTREE ROAD / 403

you’re going to have to get you one of those rubber dollies from Japan with the hole that the guys take on sea duty, because you sure aren’t going to get any from little Miss—”

I hung up on her, hot-faced and furious, and Sarah looked at me curiously, but I did not, of course, tell her what Lucy had said. It was insulting and outrageous, and Sarah had already suffered enough from Lucy Bondurant’s capricious tongue. And besides. Lucy was right. Despite the closeness we felt for each other, and the hours and days we spent alone in my apartment, and the real, aching sweetness and passion of our kissing and petting, Saran and I had not made love.

We almost had, many times, both of us wet with sweat and fairly shaking with need for each other. But we had not.

I think we were both a little ashamed that we hadn’t. Our times together seemed made for physical love. The grand scope and boundless largesse of the city itself fairly shouted for a grand passion to match it. New York in that last golden time before the sixties began to corrode was made for lovers.

All around us, both in Manhattan and in Atlanta, the marriages and beginning pregnancies of our peers spoke of what Sarah’s fierce grandmother, old Milliment, called sanctified joy. I think the bottom line, for Sarah and me, was that our joy was not sanctified. Absurd as it seems now, in my set at that time you did not casually sleep with, and risk impregna-tion of, the girl you planned to bring into your ordered and strictured world as your wife. And whole and fully passioned adults as Sarah and I were, we were denizens of that world first. Though we had not talked of marriage with any formality, we both assumed that we would take that step only after Sarah had her year at the Sorbonne. In that suspended and time-stopped summer of 1960, marriage seemed far more than a year and an ocean away.

404 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

We did try. Once or twice Sarah simply did not pull away from me, and we lay naked and joined but for a last crucial inch or two of scalding space. And once I actually entered her. But her little gasps and moans turned abruptly to cries of real pain, and I withdrew, cursing myself and her and our parents and the South and all the generations of women from out of both our histories who hovered over us on my narrow iron bed, crying “Stop! Shame! Wrong!”

Afterward, Sarah sat up amid the coiled covers and wept in shame and frustration.

“Oh, Shep,” she cried, “who the hell
am
I? Am I a lady or an artist or a cockteaser, or what? I’m not a complete anything! I’m not even a good wanton!”

After that, I did not let things get so close again. I was often the one to pull away. For us, we agreed, waiting was the right, if not the comfortable, thing. We agreed on everything in those days, shared all that we had. All we seemed to lack was a grand enough passion to get us properly fucked, but I guess that lack was in its way a lethal one. For myself, I despised my status as a virgin, feeling that it made of me both an emotional and an actual neuter. But a deep well of fear stopped me from seriously considering sex with anyone but Sarah. I had not, perhaps, actually had a woman, but I had had that desire and lost it to my cousin Lucy all those years before in the summer-house behind the house on Peachtree Road.

The week before she was to leave for Paris, in early September, Sarah spent a final weekend with me. Still blamelessly based at the Barbizon, she nevertheless spent all but a scant six hours of sleeping time with me that Friday night and Saturday, and at ten o’clock on Saturday night, after a day of soaking up enough galleries and museums and walking and looking and munching and hand holding and furtive kissing to last us the nine months until she came home again, we were just sitting

PEACHTREE ROAD / 405

down to a takeout pizza and a bottle of Chianti when the telephone rang. We both knew, with radars sharpened by impending separation, that it was Lucy. Sarah did not speak.

“I’ll cut this short,” I said, reaching for the telephone. Sarah still said nothing. She nodded.

But I did not cut it short. Lucy was calling from the apartment of one of the other marine wives at Pendleton, and between her incoherent sobs and the other girl’s indignant breaking in, it took me nearly an hour to get from Lucy that Red had blackened her eyes and cut her lip and locked her out of their apartment, and had threatened to split her skull if she came back in.

“Oh, Gibby, what should I do? He’s awfully drunk; he could kill me,” she wept. Her voice was slurred with liquor and the damaged mouth.

“Call the MPs, Lucy,” I said, fear and outrage at Red swamping and drowning my anger at her call. “Don’t mess around with him. Just call the MPs right now.”

“I can’t,” she wailed. “They don’t bother the rangers.

Everybody knows that. It’s like a club, or some kind of conspiracy. Nobody bothers the goddamned almighty rangers!

They’d put me in jail instead!”

“They don’t have any jurisdiction over you, Luce,” I said.

“Listen, are you drunk, too?”

“Maybe a little,” she sniffed. “But that doesn’t give him the right to beat me up. Listen, Gibby, you’ve just got to come.

You’ve got to get me out of here….”

At last I soothed her, and extracted a promise from the other wife that she would call me in the morning and tell me how things stood then. I knew that my concern for Lucy was audible; I could feel it thickening my voice like river silt. I put the phone down and turned to Sarah, who had not stirred from her chair. Her face was very white, and the high color in her cheeks burned even brighter, but her expression was mild and questioning.

406 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“She’s in awful trouble,” I said. “He’s beating her regularly.

He’s hurt her pretty badly this time. She wants me to come.

I really ought to go.”

And Sarah exploded.

“If you go out there, Shep,” she said between clenched teeth, the sherry eyes all pupil and spilling angry tears, “you’ll have her for the rest of your life. It’s what she wants. She always has. You’re a fool if you can’t see that. And maybe it’s what you want, too, no matter what you think or say.

But it’s not what I want. And I won’t have it. I’m not going to share you anymore with Lucy Bondurant! I’m
not
!”

And she frightened herself so throughly with her outburst, and her hurt was so deep, that Sarah, whose mannerly tears I had seen perhaps three times in our entire lives, burst into a storm of weeping. She ducked her chin down and crossed her arms over her chest and rocked back and forth on the spavined sofa, crying the square-mouthed, heartbreaking sobs of a suffering child. I had never in my life seen Sarah so abandoned, or heard her make such sounds.

The sight of her pain burst inside me like a rocket, purging me of Lucy and her three-thousand-mile tendrils of woe, and I moved over and took Sarah into my arms and pressed her so hard against me that I literally stifled the sound of her crying. But the great, racking, silent sobs continued, and a hard, continuous trembling, and I laid her back on the sofa and put my long body over hers, trying with every pound and inch of me to stop the terrible trembling and the cries, to scourge the anguish out of her.

“Don’t, Sarah, don’t, don’t,” I whispered into the drenched and matted hair, into her ear. “Please don’t…”

“Oh, Shep, do it now!” she cried out into my own ear—and I did. Without thought, without qualm, without regret, without consideration for the pain she must feel, or the fear, I shucked her out of her clothes and went PEACHTREE ROAD / 407

into her and plunged there, back and forth, back and forth, and felt her settle around me and find my rhythm and ride with it, and felt her hips rise and fall and quicken and her legs clench my back, and heard her great, hoarse cry as we came together and my own cry escaped me—a cry of gratitude and simple relief and a joy as old and deep as the world.

When my breathing slowed and I moved off her and propped myself up on one elbow and looked down into her face, she smiled a smile of utter luminosity and reached up and traced a track down my cheek. I realized then that the wetness on my face was partly from my own tears.

“We did it,” she said, grinning. I thought that I had never seen anything so beautiful as Sarah Cameron was at that moment, lying stained and red-faced and slack on my sofa, wet curls matted black around her face, crimson flooding her still-tanned skin. She looked to me then like a ripe and perfect plum.

“We did it,” I echoed. “And I’m going out and hire a cannon and give a twenty-one-gun salute. God! I had no idea!

You know, I guess, that I never have before…”

“I know,” she said.

“Has that ever bothered you? It’s not exactly normal.”

“What’s normal?” She said, stretching luxuriously. I watched the play of swimming muscles in her elegant little body, and the sheen of sweat on her. “It was the first time for me, too.”

“Well, God, of
course
it was,” I said. I had never considered that Sarah was not a virgin.

A thought struck me then, and wiped the goatish satisfaction clear out of me.

“Sarah, listen, do you think you could get pregnant? I mean, when’s your next…period?” And I appalled myself by reddening to my hairline.

408 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“In a couple of weeks,” she said, blushing herself. Inter-course did not make the Pinks and the Jells of Atlanta blush, but menstruation did, and so far as I am concerned, still does.

“But it’s okay. I won’t get pregnant.”

“How do you know?” I said. “I didn’t…use anything.”

Sarah’s face flamed even redder, and she dropped her eyes.

“I did,” she said.

I simply stared at her.

“I have a diaphragm,” she went on rapidly in a voice so low that I could hardly hear her words. “I put it on right after we came in. I got it from Snake a year ago, and I’ve worn it since then every night we’ve been together when I came to New York. You may think I’m trashy, but you don’t have to worry about me getting pregnant.”

“Sarah…” I couldn’t think of anything to say. I thought of what it must have cost her to go to Snake and ask for a diaphragm; would he have had to examine and fit her for it? I did not know. The idea was too appalling to entertain. Had she so mistrusted me, then?

“Were you afraid I was going to force you?” I said.

“Oh, Shep,
no
!” She was truly aghast. “I wasn’t
afraid
you would, I
hoped
you would! I just couldn’t get myself past the…the point of no return…but I always hoped that one night you’d just go on and…do what I couldn’t…”

I took her back into my arms and held her close, not speaking, rocking with her a little, consumed with love and gratitude.

“It’s a good thing you’re leaving for Paris,” I said finally,

“because I don’t think I’d ever let you out of bed if you weren’t across an entire ocean.”

“Am I worth waiting for?” She grinned.

“You bet your ass you are,” I said. “Your little perfect PEACHTREE ROAD / 409

pink and white ass. But, Sarah—no longer than it takes you to get off the boat and get here. And then, just think…all those days and nights and months and years of sack time ahead of us…”

“Yes,” she said. “All the time in the world.”

It wasn’t until she was getting on the plane at La Guardia the next evening that, typically, she turned to me and said, her amber eyes crinkled with mischief, “You know who we have to thank for everything, don’t you?”

“Who?”

“Lucy, of course. You ought to send her a dozen roses. Or I ought. Or on second thought, forget it. It would make her crazy. She’d be back here in three hours, sobbing on your doorstep, and I won’t be here to tell her hands off.”

“Then I’ll tell her myself,” I said, kissing her a last long time.

“Don’t forge,” she said, turning to leave me for Atlanta and then Paris, and taking what felt to be the bulk of my soul with her. “If I ever catch you in Lucy Bondurant’s clutches, it’s going to be curtains for us. I am a woman of few words and strong mind.”

And she was gone into a dazzle of late September sun.

I went back to the apartment on West Twenty-first and sat down to wait for her to come home.

Three weeks after Sarah sailed for France on the
United
States
, Red Chastain went out on his first long tour of sea duty, and Lucy was alone at Camp Pendleton for nearly eight months. She called me the night he left, the familiar liquor slur in her voice, the tears just under it.

“Gibby, can you come out here and see me? I’m going to die of loneliness by myself all that time.”

It was three-thirty in the morning, and it suddenly 410 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

struck me with the clarity of revelation that there was no earthly reason why Lucy had to call me at that hour to tell me she was lonely for Red Chastain. I took a deep breath.

“Lucy,” I said, “no. I can’t come out there to see you. I can’t and I won’t. You’re a grown, married woman. You’ve got eight months to be safe from Red, if that’s what you want, and nothing you have to do and nobody to be accountable to, and I don’t want you to call me again unless it’s a certifiable, life-threatening emergency, and then it better be in the daylight, my time. If you’re lonesome, make some friends. Take a course. Plant a garden. Plant a tree. Write a book. But don’t tell me about it.”

“What would I write about, Gibby?”

“Anything, Luce,” I said. “Anything at all that comes into your head. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

And I hung up the phone and turned off the light. The telephone rang twice after that, at thirty-minute intervals, but I ground my teeth and did not answer. It rang again the next night at eleven, and the next at eight, and both times I sat staring at it while it rang, fists clenched, teeth gritted, and after that it did not ring again. Whatever Lucy elected to do to pass the days and weeks and months until her husband came back to catch her up in their dreadful red waltz, I did not hear of it.