Peachtree Road (54 page)

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or of Charlie either, and that Sarah had instinctively taken refuge in the Plaza simply because it represented safety and comfort to her. That lucid fraction quivered for an instant with Sarah’s pain, as well as my own; actually felt it. But the cold nothingness in me froze it out. Let them do their worst, say their piece, be gone from my city. I would keep a noble silence; they would feel their own cravenness and deceit.

Sarah would weep; she would change her mind as they spoke, beg to have me back; it had happened. I ran lightly up the stone steps into the lobby, heart hammering under its glacier.

I had thought they would be waiting for me there, but they were not, and they were not in the Oak Bar or the Palm Court. I asked at the desk, not for Charlie, but for Miss Sarah Cameron. It never occurred to me that they would not have separate rooms, and they did.

“Miss Cameron asks that you join her in her suite,” the desk clerk said. “Mr. Gentry is with her. Please go up.”

I went into the paneled elevator, smelling of good carpet and lemon wax, and pressed seven. I had never been in an elevator or a room at the Plaza, and did not think that I would again. The thought came, unbidden and riding on a dart of promissory pain, that for the rest of their lives Sarah and Charlie Gentry could, if they wished, enter this elevator together and be borne swiftly up to rooms overlooking the park—perhaps the same ones that the Camerons always had here—and close the door upon the rest of the world, and that until a week ago, it would have been me beside Sarah, instead of Charlie. My presence beside Sarah in elevators and hotel rooms seemed as fantastic now, as unreal, as Charlie’s did. Unreality settled over me like a thick cape, and I burrowed gratefully into it, wrapped away from the pain.

As soon as Charlie opened the door I knew that coming here had been a mistake. He stood silently aside 420 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

for me to enter, and he looked square and sober and substantial in an olive summer suit that did nothing for his sallow skin and dark freckles, or his great brimming, magnified brown eyes. He looked years older. Only the eyes were the same, mild and bottomless with Charlie’s own mischief and goodness. He did not speak, but touched my shoulder lightly.

I went into the lamplit room.

Sarah sat on a small flowered sofa in front of a great window that did, indeed, overlook the darkening park, and she rose when I entered the room and started toward me, then stood still on the blue carpet, hands clasped loosely in front of her, feet in polished pumps set squarely together. She wore a yellow linen dress, and her curly crop of hair was smoothed down and back in some way I had never seen, and her smile was small and seemed to fight to stay on her mobile mouth.

She, too, looked older, suddenly years removed from the ardent, laughing, sweat-sheened girl who had lain in my arms on West Twenty-first Street a scant nine months before; and I remembered, dimly and witlessly, that of course, she had had a season in Paris since we had last met, and wondered at the change that those months had wrought.

But then I knew that it was not Paris that had changed Sarah, or the passage of time that had touched Charlie. They looked, in that warm-lit, gracious room hanging in the midair of Manhattan, irrevocably and every inch and for all time married. The wedding that was yet to be seemed already years past. There seemed to be no space between them, even though they stood a room apart, and I felt with a plummeting finality verging on physical nausea that somehow, if I had not seen them here, if they had come instead to me, there might have been some possibility of averting the thing ahead, some hope for me. Now, here, there was none. It was done, even though it still lay before us, and the great pain that PEACHTREE ROAD / 421

had been scratching and whining at my door now entered, roaring. I could not speak for it, could not get a breath around it, and so I simply stood in that night-floated frigate of a room looking at them, first at Charlie, and then at Sarah.

“Hello, Shep,” Sarah said, and her voice went into and through my heart like a rapier.

“Hello, Sarah,” I said. My own voice seemed to come from a source quite apart from me—the overhead light fixture, or the little flowered china clock on the dressing table. I was profoundly surprised that it sounded normal.

“I’ve called down for some drinks,” Charlie said. “I thought we’d have them here and talk a little, and then we hoped you’d let us take you to dinner. You pick the place.”

It was that “we” that did it; that “we” which included, now, nothing of me. Rage came riding cold and red and rescuing over the pain.

“I don’t think I want to drink with you, Charlie, old boy,”

I said. “And I believe I’ll pass on that dinner. Victory dinner, is it, or a little prenuptial chowdown? You don’t have to feed me. I could stay, though, and watch, just to make sure things get done right, you know, like they did in imperial Russia on the royal wedding night, to be sure everybody’s parts were working okay.”

I heard Sarah’s swift indrawn breath of pure hurt, and saw Charlie’s face flame dark and ugly. A furtive tongue of shame fed the fire of my anger and it leaped even higher. I knew I would regret my words to the day I died, but I wanted, suddenly, only to wound them, to hurt.

“I can set your mind to rest about Sarah’s parts,” I said.

“They work just fine. I’ve always wondered about yours, though. We all have.”

“God
damn
it, Shep—” Charlie began in a high, shaking voice, but Sarah overrode him.

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“Don’t take it out on him,” she said, and though I was still looking at Charlie, could not look at her, I knew from her voice that she was crying.

“Be mad at me, if you have to be mad at anybody. It was me who asked him. It was all my idea. He’d never betray you; he never would…. Don’t take it out on him, please, Shep. At least listen.”

I turned to her then. Sure enough, she was crying; she stood in the lamplight against the dark sky, beautiful in yellow and lost to me, and cried, now, for Charlie Gentry. Or at least, I thought that she did. I willed the rage to drown the pain again, and it did.

“What can you possibly say to me, Sarah, that you haven’t already said?” I said. “I thought we’d said it all. I know I did. I thought you had. You sure said a lot, the last time we were together. I can’t imagine that you have much to add to that.”

She turned and ran from the room into the bedroom and shut the door behind her, and I stood looking at where she had been, where now there was only glass, and beyond it, the spangled night. In it I saw, reflected, Charlie lift his shoulders and let them drop again, as if under the weight of great fatigue, and saw him reach a hand out to me, and turned to him. I looked at the hand that he held out. It was square and rough, with blunt-tipped fingers and numerous little scratches and half-healed nicks; Charlie would go through his entire life with the stigmata of his beloved relics on his hands, and the stains of the red Georgia earth that entombed them. It was the same brown hand that had reached for mine through all our shared childhood, that had steadied and supported and applauded and sometimes rescued me, and I saw it in that alien room through a sting of sudden tears. My own shoulders slumped and I lowered my head, but I did not take his hand.

He sat down on the edge of the sofa and looked up PEACHTREE ROAD / 423

at me, motioning me into a wing chair opposite, but I did not sit.

“I know you think I’ve betrayed you, Shep,” he said heavily,

“and maybe I have. Maybe I did. But I would have taken her any way I could get her. And it didn’t seem to me that you wanted her bad enough. Somebody ought to want Sarah more than anything in the world, and I always did, and I always will. She needs to be cherished. You never cherished her, Shep. I’m going to devote my entire life to making her happy. And maybe, between me and Atlanta, she will be.

She needs to be in Atlanta. She was born for it—”

“No!” I shouted. “She was not! No! She was born for me; you know that! She knows it! You’re such a poor second choice you’re not even close, Charlie! She was just trying to get back at me for going after Lucy; we would have worked that out, but there you were, sniffing around like a dog in heat, and all of a sudden she couldn’t even wait one week….”

The color drained entirely from Charlie’s face, so that I knew in a ghastly instant what he would look like dead, and he stood up and took a breath so deep that I could hear it tremble and shake in his throat.

“I want you to leave,” he said. “I thought we might talk this out with you. I thought we might be able to keep this friendship. I even thought you might give us your blessing; she wanted that, badly. We love you. I did, I do; she does, too. But not like this, and not ever again until you apologize to Sarah….”

The bedroom door opened again, and Sarah came out and stood in front of me and looked so searchingly into my face that I thought I would drown under the endless amber look, or faint from it. The little white lines that fanned out into the faintly tanned skin at the corners of her eyes were deeper, as if she had been squinting, or laughing into the sun, but I knew that Sarah had not,

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lately, been laughing. Her eyes, and the skin around them, and her short, tilted Cameron nose, were red, but her voice was low and composed. She leaned a little toward me, but she did not touch me. I don’t think I could have borne that.

“I have to matter to somebody as much as he does to me, Shep, or I’m…totally devalued,” she said. “I have to matter that much, or I simply don’t exist, somehow. It’s silly, maybe, but there it is. I saw when you went out there to get Lucy that I didn’t, to you, and that I never would. It would mean everything to me if you could understand how I feel.”

I abandoned myself to the rage. It was a feeling, almost, of luxury, of satiation; orgasmic. I had never felt it before, not with my mother or father, not even with Lucy. There was in it, under the sure and certain knowledge of unredeemable, irreparable damage, a kind of savage absolution. I laughed. It was an obscenity even in my own ears.

“You are wrong,” I said to Sarah. “You are wrong about me, and you are wrong about that, and you are wrong about everything. You lied. It wasn’t me you wanted. You wanted a pet dog, not a husband, and you got one. Enjoy it.”

And I slammed out, nearly toppling the room service waiter in the hall outside the door, and rode in a muscle-quivering silence down on the elevator with a flat-voiced man and woman wearing plastic name tags, and left, in the same instant, the hotel and the life of Sarah Tolliver Cameron. I knew that if I should ever meet her again—and I did not plan to do so—it would be Sarah Cameron Gentry I met, and that the meeting would be utterly insupportable.

There should be a body of literature for the male rejected in love. There is one for women. Women stricken by love, or pierced by the loss of it, are strewn PEACHTREE ROAD / 425

through the world’s literature like broken roses, and thus is the word made suffering flesh, if not actually ennobled. There are maps for women, blueprints, handbooks, as it were.

Emma Bovary lived in that country of pain, Anna Karenina did, Antigone, Mary Magdalene, thousands of their punished kinswomen. The world’s tears are their tribute.

But the rejected male is a joke, an embarrassment, a wimp.

Worst of all, he does not know how to go about the business of mourning a lost love; who is there to tell him? His discomforted friends will tell him to get going, get drunk, get laid, get another love. And above all, keep quiet about it. Literature and precedent tell him nothing at all. And so he blunders through pain as I did, inept and unconsoled and suspecting, rightly, that he is a figure as ridiculous as he is unwelcome.

Ultimately he, like me, withdraws.

After that unspeakable night at the Plaza, my world grayed out. The city that had so charmed and energized me seemed to have become, in some subtle way, almost my enemy. It was, all of a sudden, difficult to get around, to move through traffic, to thread my way through a day. My job and my small society no longer engaged me as they had done when I had the solidarity of Sarah beside me to give them resonance.

Even the rush and pour of jazz, which had run through my veins intermingled with my very blood, seemed flat and tepid. I sometimes played my clarinet and saxophone late at night, desultorily, noodling dispiritedly on the fire escape into the hot predawns until fatigue or a maddened neighbor drove me inside again, but I no longer went to Basin Street East or the Vanguard or the Half Note in the evenings. It seemed, not tragic to revisit those places where Sarah, at my side, had flamed with life and joy, but merely pointless. The only thing that did not lose its luster was the glimmering lure of antiquity deep in the stacks of the

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library, flashing like the golden carp in the pool at Versailles.

I was soon spending almost every waking moment that I was not down in the basement working there, reading, reading.

I drowned myself in Attica, Thrace, Mycenae, Crete. Long hours might slide by thus, without pain. I stayed until the night crew tossed me out and closed up. A long retreat, I think, began then.

It would not be true to say that every waking moment was filled with pain, but it is fair to say that those which were not were packed in numbness like ice. I learned in those days to will parts of my consciousness dead and cold and calm, and became proficient enough at it so that respectable parts of each day were spent out of the pain’s crushing path. Work was the anodyne all the truisms held it to be, and I became a tireless and awesomely focused worker. If my efforts had been bent on something more substantial and enriching than trundling rotting paper from one subterranean chamber of the library to another, I might have quickly made a lustrous name for myself in some worthy field. But I did not even think of changing my work; the labyrinths were as friendly and shielding to me as the poor, mutant Minotaur’s to him, and they performed the same function: they hid me. I burrowed underground by day and into miles and tons of leather and paper by night, and when both of those refuges were closed to me, I drifted home and tried to hide behind fast-tarnishing brass and wailing dissonance. That was not so effective as the maze and the stacks. That was when the pain came.