Rock of Ages (10 page)

Maybe he was just—like her—getting over the divorce. Jeff Bowman's departure had really kick-started that very bad year-and-a-half in which Georgia lost both parents and her first husband.

There was no more talk by Mark of Justin going to some military school, of “straightening him out.” Georgia never would have let that happen, but now it was a moot point. Justin had self-corrected, and while he would never really bond with Mark, there was a truce.

“As long as you love him,” Justin told Georgia when she asked permission to marry from the only other male who mattered to her anymore, “I'll keep my mouth shut. I promise. Just don't try to make me call him Dad.”

It wasn't a problem for very long. Actually, for the 13 months she and Mark were married, Justin was no problem at all. He made only one B his junior and senior years, got into the University of Virginia and was her rock.

She needed a rock. Mark Hammaker, it turned out, was more of a dead weight than something on which to lean.

They had their first married argument on their honeymoon. On a cruise of the Greek isles, he was appalled when he learned that Georgia had signed up for the optional parasailing excursion. He acted as if she had lost her mind, and he sulked when she floated back down, landing softly as a leaf on the small boat that had launched her.

“It's just like being strapped to a kite,” she told Mark. “You need to loosen up, sweetie.”

“You need to tighten up,” he responded.

Good God, she thought when they went back, silently, to the cabin, what have I done? Jeff Bowman, for all his faults, at least was capable of having fun. He just had a zipper problem.

They rode it out, and when they couldn't stand it any longer, they got a divorce that involved considerably less blood-letting and paperwork than her first one. They had agreed it would be wise to have a pre-nuptial agreement “just in case.”

By the time Mark Hammaker moved out, Justin was ready to graduate from high school and leave, too. He had a job that summer at a record store, and Georgia spent a lot of time getting used to, for the first time in her life, an empty house. She had gone from their old farmhouse in East Geddie to dormitory rooms and apartments to married life with hardly a night spent by herself, it seemed to her in 1990. After Jeff left, there was Justin to take care of, to keep her company.

Now she was alone.

She got a cat, and while it was rather companionable for a cat, it was not much of a conversationalist. Get used to it, she told herself. Be a big girl. This is how it is.

And that was how it was, for most of the next four years. She bought a new, smaller house, a mile from the university. She went out with old and new friends, she managed to get laid occasionally—it was easier now, with Justin gone at least nine months of the year. She threw herself into teaching. She took trips to Europe, using some of the money she inherited from her father. She even had a book published, by another university press, on Fitzgerald's short stories.

By the time she met Phil Macomb in January of 1994, she was not entirely unhappy with the thought of never again sharing her bed on a full-time basis. Only occasionally, on such occasions as snowy evenings or when the first dogwoods started blooming, did she think freedom might be overrated.

He was not part of her usual crowd. He was not part of any crowd with which she had ever associated. He could, she told friends, actually do things. He ran his own home-construction company that specialized in renovating the old redbrick Virginia houses in the Montclair area that were drawing the come-heres from all over the East Coast. He was a genius at doing small, creative work.

Georgia first met him when she decided to get gas logs for her fireplace. She needed someone to repair all the damaged walls and ceilings left after the gas line had been run from her kitchen to the living room. A friend said Phil Macomb was the man, if you could get him to come. He was very busy.

It took her two months to lure him out. He'd canceled twice by then, and she was not disposed to like him very much. She had told herself she would give him one more chance. She didn't want to be rash. Good home-construction help was hard to find.

She'd only talked to him on the phone, knew only that he had a thick, old-Virginia accent, the kind you usually heard among the idle rich rather than blue-collar types.

When she answered the door that day, a tall, somewhat heavyset man with red hair and a neatly trimmed beard stood, holding his toolbox in one hand. He was not unhandsome, with a good nose, good chin, broad shoulders, and blue, untroubled eyes. He had an easy smile and an outdoorsman's tan.

He spent five hours there that day, constructing three different covers for places where the pipes wouldn't go inside the thick terra cotta walls. He went out once to a local hardware store and came back with just the right materials to build her a cover for the shutoff valve. He even painted everything. When he was through, the violence visited upon her house by the gas man was invisible.

She'd been home that day, and they talked. Georgia didn't usually do that. She usually felt uncomfortable among the various plumbers, tree surgeons, and air-conditioning repairmen whose services she needed from time to time. But Phil Macomb was easy to talk with. Mark had said on more than one occasion that the best reporters who worked for him at the paper were all good listeners. She thought that Phil Macomb would have been a good reporter.

He was from a reasonably well-off family that had made such fortune as it had on real estate, but he'd married young, divorced, and managed to flunk out of VMI, James Madison, and Randolph-Macon over a five-year span.

He had always been good with his hands, he told her. (“Only thing between me and the poorhouse.”) He had been running his own company for more than a decade.

“I doubt if my momma will ever think I've amounted to anything, though,” he said. “She thinks you have to have a couple of degrees on the wall to be a success.” He looked at her own wall, with the three diplomas hanging there, and blushed. “No offense.”

“None taken. My father was one of the smartest men I ever knew, and he didn't even learn how to read until he was older than you.”

“Lot of that going around. I don't suppose they even called it a ‘learning disability' back then. 'Course, I had a judgment disability, too.”

They made eye contact for no more than a second, but there was something she saw, some question that needed answering. It was a strange thing, Georgia thought later, how you talked to people all the time, face to face, without really making that one laser-sharp connection. Then, out of nowhere, a guy like Phil Macomb shows up, and there it is.

She got him a beer after he was done, and they sat and talked for a few minutes more. He said he had another job to do, and when he waved goodbye, she supposed that she might see him again, the next time something needed fixing that was beyond her meager talents.

Two nights later, he called her.

“I don't suppose you have a lot of free spots on your dance card, pretty as you are,” he said, with almost no preamble, “but it occurred to me after I left that I'd sure like to see you sometime. Socially, or whatever.”

She told him that, actually, she hadn't been doing a lot of dancing lately. She had turned into kind of a wallflower.

He said he hadn't been doing much shagging either, but he thought he remembered how, if she'd like to join him.

“What kind of shagging are you talking about?”

“Aw, Miz Georgia,” he said with an exaggerated drawl. “I love it when you talk dirty.”

She went out with him two times before the night they slept together, once to a county high school basketball game because his son was the coach at one of the outlying schools, once to dinner. He turned down her invitation to come back to her place for coffee both times, kissing her goodnight at the door as if she were 17.

He'd been married and divorced before he knew where babies came from, he told her on the first date, when she expressed surprise that he could have a son in his mid-20s. He kept up with his two children from a reserved, polite distance.

“It isn't much to brag about,” he said, “but I am a little better person now that I'm fully grown. I don't suppose my son and daughter have a lot of great memories from back then. It wasn't exactly the Waltons.”

He had sent them checks and Christmas presents, mostly.

After the basketball game, which his son's team won, Georgia asked him if he wasn't going to go down and speak to him.

“No,” he said. “He doesn't need me right now. When he needed me, I wasn't there. I'll talk to him later.”

The third date, they went to a movie, one with more dialogue than action, recommended by Georgia. She moved close to him in the dark and chilly theater and felt for a moment like they should be doing at least some light petting. His body was warmer than hers, and she leaned into it.

She had asked a friend who knew the Macombs how old her new boyfriend was. The friend said she wasn't sure, but she thought he'd graduated from high school in 1969. Georgia wondered if she should lie about her age. Three years might be enough to scare even a seemingly good man like Phil Macomb away.

That night, after the movie, they were sitting at a table in one of Phil's hangouts when he took her hand in his and she realized that the hard piece of metal pinching her finger was his class ring from high school. She picked it up and looked at it as if admiring its workmanship.

“Class of '68,” he said, looking her in the eye, amused. “I'm two years younger than you. Cradle-robber.”

“How … How do you know how old I am?” She realized she was blushing and hoped the lights were low enough to mask it. “And what's it to you?”

“Asked around,” he said, grinning. “After all, I need to know these things. I wouldn't want to do something to get a senior citizen overexcited. Not sure your poor old body could handle a lot of vigorous activity.”

She'd had a couple of drinks already, and she supposed that loosened her tongue a little.

She told him that she was sure she could handle any vigor he might be willing to throw her decrepit way.

“I might take you up on that,” he'd said, playing along, moving his head closer to hers across the table and lowering his voice. “You'd have to sign a release form, of course. Wouldn't want you on my conscience.”

She took her shoe off under the table and ran her foot up his pants leg.

“You're not just offering an old lady a mercy fuck, are you?” she asked, looking him right in the eye, smiling just enough to indicate that she might be kidding, or she might not.

She didn't know what made her say that. She didn't want Phil Macomb to be some kind of one-night wonder. She'd had three of those in the last year.

She'd heard the joke about a guy's perfect date being one that turns into a pizza after sex. She was too kind to tell any of the men with whom she'd slept that it could work both ways, that she had a strong urge to call Domino's after they had fully explored the only subject in which they both were interested.

But Phil Macomb wasn't like that. She thought he might be a keeper.

He looked stunned, for a couple of seconds, and then he burst out laughing, drawing the attention of people at the tables around them. Most of what he did, Georgia was learning, he did loud.

“Old lady,” he said, lowering his voice again, “if that were to happen, the one showing the mercy would be you. It would be one of the most merciful things anybody had ever done for me.”

“Call me Mother Teresa,” Georgia said, never taking her eyes off his.

She had to concede that it might have been nothing more than pheromones that first drew her to him, although she had come, by the third date, to appreciate his sense of humor, his ability to listen, and what appeared to be a basic decency.

Nevertheless, there was the sex. She didn't remember having a better night in bed, and he swore she was the best he'd ever had. “‘Had?'” she'd said. “You make me sound like dinner.” But she was secretly pleased. She hoped he wasn't just being kind.

And, after two hours of pleasantly wearing each other out, they found that neither wanted the other to turn into fast food. They talked about things that Georgia had never talked about with Jeff, and certainly not with Mark. In the weeks to come, they explored each other like children with new toys, playing sexual games they would never reveal to anyone else.

By April, she was more or less living in the old farmhouse he'd fixed up. She sometimes missed the comforts of solitary life, being able to do exactly what she wanted, dress how she wanted, eat what she wanted, but by May she wouldn't have gone back for anything and accepted that some people are supposed to live with other people.

They were married that June, in a very simple ceremony attended only by a few close friends. Justin came up from Atlanta, where he was in the first year of a master's program in sociology that he still hasn't finished, to give her away.

It all seemed to Georgia like payback for a lifetime of struggling with bad marriage karma, or bad judgment. She and Jeff Bowman had been too immature. She and Mark Hammaker had been too ill-suited.

But she hadn't said yes at first. Phil Macomb had to truly beg her, sure as she was that she was doomed to suffer in marriage. Why, she asked him, can't we just live together?

“We can live together,” he said. “We can do that. But what I really want, more than I want food or air, is to have you with me in every way possible. I've been waiting my whole life for you, and I don't want to cheapen it, don't want to cheapen you.”

Georgia thought the whole idea of cheapening anything was quaint, after everything that had gone before, but she came to see that he wanted her so much, that he wanted to always be there, that he would always be there. By the time she agreed, two weeks before the wedding, she was sure that he always would be.