Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend (4 page)

Jellie’s grin twisted into a little crooked smile. “Exactly what did the dean say about your idea?”

“He didn’t say anything. Just shook his head and walked away. That was after I went on to tell him how the uniform could be
coupled with what I called the ‘administrator’s go-squat,’ a modified duck walk that would keep him down at desktop level.
I demonstrated the go-squat for him in the hall outside his office and guaranteed him he’d have the ultimate in close supervision
if he’d adopt the uniform and the walk. Guess he didn’t grasp the concept. Carolyn liked the idea, however.”

Small talk, nothing talk. It went on from there. Jellie began dropping by his office once a week or so, and she and Michael
whacked their way toward each other through the old thicket of ignorance separating strangers. Sometimes he had a partial
erection just talking to her and was glad he wore his jeans snug, which kind of held events under control. He’d given up on
organized religion years ago, but it’s handy when you need it, and he said over and over to himself, “O Absolute, give me
Jellie Braden; somehow You must do as much for a simple man.” The words became a mantra that never left his mind.

At the fall picnic on a Sunday, Michael sat on one end of a teeter-totter in a park along the river, languidly watching the
accounting department take on the marketing department as part of an exciting volleyball tournament organized by the dean
and his secretary. His secretary liked Michael even less than the dean did, calling him impertinent. Michael thought about
impertinence and factored in cigarette smoking, which the dean complained about. The result popped out:
Be gladdened in your heart you have tenure.
He was glad, and the sun was late-September pleasant.

The economists were anxiously waiting in the wings for their second crack at the marketeers, part of a double-elimination
scheme designed by a sports fanatic in the operations research area. The genius had used some fairly high-powered mathematics
to make up the pairings based on the departmental won-loss records from the last three picnics and had run off a four-color
diagram on one of the Apples.

The dean shot up into the far reaches of delirium when he saw the printout and insisted everyone look at “Don’s good work,”
as he called it (an extra two hundred for Don at salary time, Michael guessed). Michael thought it was using a sledgehammer
to drive a tack and said so when the dean asked his opinion of Don’s brilliance. What he said was, “I think Don-Don applied
high thinking to low living.”

Jesus, the faculty was out of shape. Flabby bodies whacking a volleyball into the trees, stumbling around, falling down, the
dean tooting on his whistle. He looked to see if the hospital emergency unit was standing by.

“Wanna teeter, Tillman-Michael?” Jellie was coming across the grass toward him, smiling. He’d seen her earlier from a distance.
Anytime he was in the same physical area as Jellie his radar kicked in, and he was aware of her location at all times. She
and Jim had arrived an hour earlier. Michael had come alone on the Black Shadow, goosing it a little as he passed the dean’s
car on his way into the park and waving to Carolyn when he went by. No
Deanette
T-shirt this year, and he felt bad for her. That’s why he had a bookstore make him up a T-shirt reading
Possible Dean
and was wearing it.

“No, I have the totter end. You’ll have to teeter. That’s the easy part, anyway, and it’s what I do during the week.” He stood
up a bit, lowering the other end of the seesaw. He outweighed her by about sixty pounds and scooted up the board to balance
things out, then tossed her a beer out of the little six-pack cooler by his feet.

“How does Jim feel about his wife sharing an unsanded plank with another man?”

“Mostly he doesn’t pay any attention to that sort of thing, but he can be jealous in a petulant way sometimes. And for no
good reason, I might add. But he likes you and knows we’re friends, so that’s different. Anyway, he’s totally focused on pounding
the marketing department to smithereens in the next round of wretchedness over there.”

She was luminous in the soft, slanting light of an autumn afternoon. Her breasts rose and fell pleasantly beneath her cotton
blouse as they teetered and tottered. Her jeans stretched tight across her hips and thighs where she straddled the board.
Did the Absolute build in this much torment as a last delicious bit of private entertainment for Him or Her or Whatever? Michael
Tillman wondered.

“No volleyball, Michael? You look like you’re in good shape, and judging by the pathetic little war going on over there at
the net, you’d be a dominant force.”

He glanced toward the net and saw James Lee Braden III in his horn-rims, sweatshirt, and floppy khakis doing side-straddle
hops as he warmed up for a second run at the marketeers. Braden HI went into the dirt when he tripped over Dr. Patricia Sanchez’s
foot. Then he realized he hadn’t answered Jellie’s question and she was watching him watch her. He took a hit of beer and
said, “Nope. I did my four miles on the road this morning at dawn. That’s enough for one day. Besides, I might fall into Kipperman-the-accountant’s
stomach and not find my way out by class time Tuesday.”

Jellie Braden laughed, and they went up and down on a September afternoon in Iowa.

I
n the countryside west of Madurai the morning was sweet and clear, in the way India feels before the heat and dust come up.
Especially sweet and clear, because if it all worked out, Jellie was four hours ahead in the high country of the Western Ghats.
Maybe tomorrow wouldn’t be as sweet and clear. Maybe he had no business doing this, following her. The old doubts again, bothering
him for this whole trip. Forget it, push on. Jellie had her problems, whatever they were, and Michael had his —forty-three,
sinking toward a time when it would be too late for this kind of thunder in his brain and body. If it came to war, it could
be sorted out in the hills of India, as good a place as any. She could send him away, and he’d be no worse off than he was
sitting back in Cedar Bend listening to gossip about Jimmy Braden’s wife running off on some existential quest.

*    *    *

At Thanksgiving their first year in Cedar Bend, the Bradens invited Michael for dinner. They’d only been in town for three
months, but Jimmy was set on having what he called “a major
do.”
Jellie protested, saying they didn’t know many people and somehow Thanksgiving had always seemed a special time for family
and close friends. Her parents were coming from Syracuse, that was probably enough. But Jimmy made up a list, looked at it,
and said if two-thirds of them came, it would be a respectable showing.

Jimmy’s list was predictable, safe. He said, “I thought about inviting Michael Tillman, but I doubt if he’d come. He doesn’t
seem the type for Thanksgiving dinner. Then again, Michael’s single and so is your friend, Ann Frazier, from sociology. They’re
both kind of different, maybe we can do a little matchmaking over turkey.”

Jellie thought about it. She imagined Michael sitting at their dining room table. Strange and different Michael Tillman, big-shouldered
and brown-eyed with brown hair longer than the approved length for a business school faculty member. A little something out
of the ordinary. Sunburned in the face, almost a workingman’s face, as if he’d be comfortable cashing his paycheck in a bar
across the street from where he might have worked as a machinist. And his long, smooth fingers with the faintest imprint of
grease even hard scrubbing couldn’t remove.

A month before, she and Jimmy had been coming home from a local theater production. The night streets were wet from October
rain, and suddenly there was Michael beside them when they stopped for a light. He sat on the Shadow, revving its engine.
She remembered the car radio was playing a song by Neil Diamond, “Cracklin’ Rosie,” while Jimmy was telling her to find the
public radio station devoting an entire evening to Beethoven. It stuck in her mind, the song playing at that moment. From
that time on, she could be anywhere and hear “Cracklin’ Rosie,” and instantly she was back on the streets of Cedar Bend, looking
at Michael on the Shadow.

Jimmy had leaned out the window of the Buick and said, “Hi, Michael.”

Michael—yellow bandanna tied around his head, leather jacket, boots, and jeans—turned and waved to the Bradens, then looked
straight ahead. When the light changed he gunned the Shadow and was gone, straddling that smooth black machine of his and
disappearing into the countryside.

Jimmy said, “I think it’s a bit chilly and wet to be riding a motorcycle, don’t you?”

But Jellie didn’t hear him. She was watching the Shadow’s taillight moving away from her. And she wanted to be riding with
Michael Tillman, to be going out there where she had once traveled and was now afraid to go again. She wanted to climb on
that black machine and feel the beat of its engine between her legs and the roar of wind in her ears.

Admit it, she’d always had a taste for a peculiar kind of man, the sort that seems ill designed for the world in which they
live (Jimmy is a whole other story—those were her break-even years). Michael Tillman was like that, she sensed, as if a great
fist had reached back and plunked a hard-drinking, hard-cussing, nineteenth-century keelboatman into the 1980s, given him
an intelligence out beyond where the rest of us live, and said, “Now, behave yourself,” all the while being doubtful that
he would. And he didn’t.

Her taste in men probably had something to do with the genes arching forward from her great-great-grandmother, Elsa, who had
been a radical feminist when it was considered improper if not immoral for a woman to think about such things, let alone speak
and parade in the streets on behalf of them. Elsa Mark-ham had left her husband, taken up with an equally radical socialist,
and gone on the road as a warrior for women’s rights and free love. The Markham family didn’t talk much about Great-Great-Grandmother
Elsa.

Jellie kept that side of herself hidden for a long time. Not totally suppressed, hidden, tucked way back where it couldn’t
get hold of her and disrupt the well-designed life her parents had drafted in clear terms for their two daughters. Jellie’s
older sister, Barbara, had shouldered arms and marched straight into that well-designed life. She got her degree in elementary
education, married a successful insurance broker, and stayed in Syracuse. The Markhams were pleased with Barbara’s choices,
and the world was good.

In their late girlhoods, Barbara read
Little Women
and loved it. Jellie told her it was cloying. Jellie read
Madame Bovary
and loved it. Barbara told her it was trash. Then she ratted on Jellie and told Mother Mark-ham that Jellie wanted to be
Emma Bovary. Mother grabbed Jellie’s copy of Flaubert and read it in one sitting, concentrating on the passages Jellie had
underlined. A lecture on virtue followed, but Jellie got out of it by saying she didn’t want to be like Emma at all and that
you could look at
Madame Bovary
as a kind of primer on how
not
to live. What she really wanted to say was Emma handled it all wrong by being loose with money. A true romantic would have
concentrated on the sex and let it go at that.

Given that Elsa Markham’s restless ways had somehow fluttered down to her, it was nearly inevitable Jellie’s life would turn
out as it did. Her India experiences early on gave her some pause, however, and Jimmy came along. She was in a space where
she needed to paddle flat water for a while, fatigued from the emotional roll and toss high adventure brings with it. Jimmy
looked stable, and he was. Jimmy looked comfortable, and he was. Jellie needed peace and quiet. When he proposed she said
yes for reasons she wasn’t sure of, but they had something to do with stability and comfort and peace and quiet.

Jellie fought hard against the tug of Elsa’s genes for years; still, they wouldn’t leave her alone. Inside the good faculty
wife with a degree in anthropology was a keelboatman’s woman who wanted to put her bare breasts against Michael Tillman’s
face and feel his mouth come onto them.

When Jimmy showed her his list of invitees for Thanksgiving, she hesitated. Her first inclination was to go for comfort and
stability. But Elsa Markham took hold of her arm, and Jellie scratched “M. Tillman” at the bottom. “I think that’s a good
idea. Ask Michael and see what he says.” She decided at that moment to wear her red dress with the long puffy sleeves if he
accepted their invitation.

Michael Tillman didn’t celebrate holidays—any of them—but Thanksgiving at the Bradens was a chance to be around Jellie, and
he couldn’t pass it up. Jim had said there would be a few other people, but he and Jellie especially hoped Michael would come,
and oh, by the way, bring a friend if you want.

He came in from his morning run, got his dog and cat fed and squared away, then read for a while. Around one o’clock he stood
before his bedroom closet and pulled out a gray tweed jacket and a blue, button-down-collar shirt. Most of his ties had fallen
onto the closet floor a thousand or so years ago and looked like it, the silk ones wrinkled and dusty. But a dark red wool
number, decorated with
Save the Turtles
rampant on a field of the swimming reptiles, looked like a candidate for resuscitation with the help of a good brushing.
He pulled out a pair of wrinkled charcoal slacks and held them up. Malachi, the border collie who was named after Michael’s
favorite professor in graduate school, put his head on his paws and made small, whining sounds. “No dice, huh, Malachi?”

Michael turned, showed the slacks to Casserole-the-cat, and asked, “Whaddya think, Cass?” She blinked, yawned, and headed
for the living room. With that kind of poll results on the slacks, he shoved hangers around, located a pair of presentable
jeans, and finished off this exercise in hesitant elegance with gray socks and the old reliable cordovan loafers.