The Edge of the Gulf (9 page)

Chapter 15

As Sydney strolled through Neiman’s looking for a few choice summer beach things, she recalled and reexamined a mild day in late March, one of those dazzlers that brought Atlantans out after their brief winter with a sense of ruffled entitlement, as if—instead of what really amounts to a few weeks of moderate chill—they were emerging from a protracted season of sunless hyperborean permafrost.

At one of the tables that had been insouciantly laid in the sun of the upper terrace at a small restaurant overlooking the river, Sydney and her old chum Daphne Kerrigan had chatted across a bowl of exquisite white and yellow tulips. They were finishing their lunch amid a merry Friday throng of executives and tennis matrons in sunglasses.

Although Sydney had more acquaintances than she could keep, despite her superb organizational skills, in strict Filofax order, she had never had many friends. The concept, especially, of “girlfriends” had always seemed repugnant to her.

***

There had been one girl she had cultivated in junior high school in Coweta County. The girl had been a grade ahead of her and Sydney sensed that they might strike some sort of delicate balance that did not characterize most of the juvenile clan-building she saw around her, defined so unabashedly by the Southern rural rubric of family financial status for girls and sheer alpha-animal brawn for boys. The two of them had bonded with rage over their outsider status and their disdain for their families’ severe financial and social limitations.

Her friend’s father worked for the railroad and seemed alternately away for long stretches or asleep in a back bedroom; her mother grew irregular lines of vegetables in their scraggy backyard and, very peaceably, drank. Sydney’s mother, a sad-faced wraith who managed day to day on religious fundamentalism, cigarettes, and misspent nervous energy, owned the two-chair beauty shop cum drug store in the neighboring burg of Moreland. Sydney’s father had left them when she was not quite two and her mother had desperately married a widower from the small church. Though he was grossly fat and rather slow-witted, he had inherited a small but still viable farm machinery franchise. He seemed mostly to sit around in his underwear, his pink flesh burgeoning out of his big chair as he slumbered intermittently in the window unit air conditioning, watching, when he roused himself with a series of ragged snorts, a mélange of CNN, soap operas, and television preachers. Sydney, early on, had trained herself not to look at him when he was thus enthroned. Though she suspected nothing dangerous from him, she did not even want to see him watching her pass quickly through the room. And she had noticed one too many times, as a small girl, some aspect or other of his squished scrotum oozing from his shorts.

She and her friend had shared a mutually nurturing belief in their unrecognized natural gifts. They were excellent students, already bored with the mediocre scope and pace of education at the small-town school; they devoured great literature, celebrity magazines, and trashy paperbacks with equal voracity. Physically, her friend was more precocious, and she experimented knowingly with cosmetics and hairstyles. Even so, it was she who eventually became something of an acolyte to her younger friend’s will and imagination. “You could be an actress, someday,” she said. “I already am,” said Sydney. And to prove it, she would enact scenes from favorite films they had seen at the theatre in Newnan or watched late at night on television or had read in books in her companion’s bedroom. Even more than the actresses or characters she evoked in these impromptu reinterpretations, it was Sydney herself her friend had found compelling. Not picture-pretty by regional prevailing standards, she seemed original in her good looks, with her dramatic, searching, yet oddly self-collected eyes, her glossy chestnut hair tailored in a Peter Pan bob to flout the big-hair fashion of the day. One day she might be the young Audrey Hepburn in capri pants, shirt tied at the waist, and a pencil behind her ear; the next an approximation of Bette Midler’s Rose, swathed in Joplinesque glad rags, rings, and beads. But never, thought her friend, was Sydney more infinitely watchable yet somehow unknowable than when she was herself.

The girl’s father was transferred to Indiana; they moved away during her junior year. Sydney finished high school without taking the effort to make a new friend. She had a few dates her senior year with a wealthy peanut farmer’s son who had some intelligence and, when they were alone and he felt less threatened by certain social stigma, sensitivity. But he was going to Charlottesville as a legacy, and she had been lucky to get a scholarship to little north Georgia college up in hill country. Already adept in picking her battles, Sydney saw insufficient reason to fight a four-year campaign for the relationship. They talked about movies, politics, music, who they were, what their futures might hold, took long drives in the country, passed a few Saturday afternoons in Atlanta, and had four stilted bouts of sex.

Unable to handle more than two years at the small backwoods college where she’d earned a free ride, Sydney escaped to the city, where she lived in a vile little studio, worked as a restaurant hostess and completed her degree in theatre and communication at Georgia State. She had done only a few shows at a couple of the better community theatres when she decided to go up for an audition for the Alliance Theatre Company. To the consternation of several more experienced actors with degrees from prestigious graduate programs at Vanderbilt or Northwestern, and pedigreed apprenticeships at the Arena, the Alley, or Actors’ Theatre, she was offered a contract.

It was during her six years as a member of the repertory company that Sydney struck up a friendship with Daphne. Three years older, Daphne had been with the Alliance for two years when Sydney arrived and seemed already, with her feisty irreverence, an old hand. Because they were different types—Daphne was a petite Irish redhead from New Orleans—their fondness for one another was never clouded by competitiveness. Their common ground was the lack of pretension with which they practiced their craft and for which they secretly reviled their peers. Not that they didn’t take the work seriously; they were dedicated. They simply could not abide the intellectual stuffiness and “furrowed-brow-late-night-high-art gobbledegook-chat,” as Daphne called it, in which most of the company engaged. They were just good. Better, by their estimation, than anyone else in the group, and quite probably, they thought, because they did most of what they did onstage without so much pale cast of thought and more through instinct. Instead of being self-absorbed, they were indefatigably outward-directed. It was as if they breathed life in with hungry scrutiny and reproduced it on the exhale. They did not so much act as channel, effortlessly and at will, human behavior.

This ability to participate almost borderlessly in, even to anticipate, life, had served both of them well when they set their professional sights beyond the footlights. Daphne’s impatience with her fellow thespians finally led her to pronounce that she would rather sell encyclopedias than have to sit backstage between scenes and hear one more conversation about Chekhovian subtext, and Sydney’s coolly realistic assessment of a professional population in which at any given moment only five percent are employed was that she simply couldn’t face the scenario that fifteen and twenty years from now she would be pacing a grungy flat in the East Village hoping desperately for a commercial or two each year. Sydney also, as the initial aura of glamour evaporated, increasingly found the idea of acting onstage a useless, rather arcane, confinement. The world loomed, and seemed more her size. In her years with the company, she carefully parlayed her currency as a big-actress-fish-in-the-small-Atlanta-pond into minor socialite, albeit bohemian, status. Her greatest performances took place nowhere near the Alliance stage. She was more focused on mastering the art of using the conventions of society in order to get what she wanted.

Far from selling encyclopedias, Daphne had in two short career steps become director of corporate communications for a new and rapidly expanding high tech firm. Sydney had signed on with a video production company as actor, producer, director, writer and talent recruiter, and, within a year, had also signed on as fiancée to one of her clients, Broward Boule Landerswaite IV, forty-eight, a perpetually tanned and twice-divorced son-in-waiting to a large agronomics corporation. Just in time, she came to realize that there was even more than met the eye to his fondness for bourbon, a variety of pills, mordant sense of humor, and other effete eccentricities, and to understand why one of her betrothed’s previous marriages had lasted three years, the other not quite as many months, and why daddy, at seventy-three, was still president and CEO and probably looking around hard for a good deal. Sydney certainly considered going through the motions and then getting out as soon as possible with a good settlement, but had to overrule herself in the early morning hours after the Swan Ball. Staying overnight, she had wakened to find “Bouley” standing beside the massive 18th-Century bed, two feet from her face, wiping his behind with a silk handkerchief. Nodding to the side of the bed where he had lain, the sheet and coverlet thrown back, he said: “I left you a little gift.” The worst of it was that he was giggling and held in his shaking hand, unknowingly it seemed, a heavy gold eight-inch letter-opener.

Four months after breaking the engagement and returning her full attention to her work, Sydney had met Charles Douglas Cullen at a festive opening in the Tula arts complex. Chaz was charming and handsome, and, though he was not apparently a weak man, a slightly haunted look behind his large, languid brown eyes told her that, despite his easy wit and physical confidence, he was looking for a kind of guidance. They sat at the far end of the parking lot, listening to WSB under an overhang of hackberries, and he talked freely about his wastrel phase, the boozing and hard drugs, even as they traded a few brief draws on a discreet cocktail-sized joint he had pulled from his jacket.

She joked about being an actress who was in flight from the stage but who kept being trapped in nightmarish training films not wholly of her devising. She acted out a particularly tedious passage a megalomaniacal manufacturer had not let her revise in his firm’s human resources video. He talked rather off-handedly about his little business and she guessed that perhaps he was trying hard to make himself believe he liked it more than he actually did, that perhaps it was a vanity venture, a passing thing.

“I’m really happy these days,” he said. Sydney thought that this, too, might be overstatement. But she thought that he could, indeed, be happier.

With her.

They made a stunning pair. She knew almost at once that she would never meet anyone who needed her as much and yet would manage to wear that need with such light, ironic grace. Chaz might not be perfect but she felt that she could optimize his assets. He was a gentleman with, though of course nothing like the Landerswaite fortune, some prospects and talents, he was sexy and fun and he had a good background and he absolutely adored her, and so she allowed herself, in so far as it seemed she ever might, to be in love.

***

Daphne’s idea of Friday expansiveness was to take fifty minutes for lunch, and even then she had used her cell phone twice. As Daphne talked, Sydney had looked down now and then, with a bemused smile, away, into the willows and oaks and beyond to the river, less from discretion than to indicate to her fellow diners that she bore in mortified silence her tablemate’s lapse in etiquette. They had not gotten together in three or four months, but had nevertheless managed quickly to dispense with Sydney’s engagement, Daphne’s Christmas escape to Barbados with a divorce attorney she’d been dating, and her impending promotion to vice-president. Also, a bit about Sydney splitting her time between the videos and Chaz’s business. And, finally, Chaz’s father’s death.

“Well, is Chaz, I mean, okay or whatever? Were they close?”

Sydney hesitated for a second. Instead of saying, “If you only knew how little love was lost there,” she said, “They were as close, I think, as most fathers and sons. He’ll miss him, but he’s all right.” It was not for nothing that Daphne was about to be made a VP for communications. She was a talker. And although most of her realm of influence lay outside the Perimeter, in the boardrooms, media outlets, and cocktail parties of the exurban counties, Sydney was nonetheless on guard.

It was over coffee, as Daphne looked at her watch for the third time, that she picked up Sydney’s earlier mention of Chaz’s recent visit to Old Laurel.

“Who is it, now, a brother?”

“No, his father’s cousin. I’ve never met him. He was apparently quite close to Chaz’s father. I’m eager to see his home in Laurel. Chaz says it’s really wonderful.”

“Old Laurel? Never been there. Near Destin?”

“Well, sort of, but it’s closer to Seaside, just three or four miles down the beach.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve never been. When I was growing up we’d go over to Pensacola and Destin, but I haven’t been in years. I admit it: I’ve become a Hilton Head kinda girl. At least those crackers know how to dress.”

She paused. “You know, it may be Laurel Beach. I don’t know, one of those, Santa Rosa, Seagrove, Laurel, Something Beach, where that sleazebag ex-husband of my cousin’s ended up.”

“Sounds like a story.”

“A dirty little one. It
is
Laurel. Yeah, that’s it. I think he’s a bartender at some restaurant or bar that’s some sort of a local big deal.”

Sydney never forgot a name, and although she had only heard Chaz mention once or twice the one that now leapt to her mind, she said: “Terry Main?”

“My God, I think that’s it! Martha and I weren’t especially close, she’s a second cousin, and I never met him, but, yeah, I believe that’s it. How in the world do you know him?”

Sydney didn’t miss a beat. “Never met him. But you know me and names, and I think Chaz just mentioned it in passing. His uncle…” she was editing herself as she went, “…lives near that place, I think, so they’ve been there. Laurel’s really just a village. The Green House? or the Blue Bar, or…”