Safe from the Neighbors Read online

  She wrote first thing in the morning too sometimes, and she was doing that when I got up the day after Ellis came over for dinner. Her classes started later than mine—ten o’clock most days—and she usually spent her extra time grading papers, but since the fall term had barely begun she wasn’t yet being bombarded with bad freshman essays.

  I tapped on the door. At first she didn’t react, just sat there in her bathrobe frowning at the screen. So I tapped again, harder.

  This time she looked up and frowned. “Yeah?”

  I cracked the door open. “Working on a poem?”

  “I was.”

  I’d love to say that the abruptness with which Jennifer responded to me when nobody else was present had its origins in her difficult artistic temperament. Unfortunately, that would be a lie. She hadn’t always been like that, but when our marriage was starting to sour I often was. I wanted to sit in my armchair every morning and read the Memphis paper, and sit there at night with big biographies of Southern demagogues like J. K. Vardaman, Theodore G. Bilbo and Pitchfork Ben Tillman. I’d react with annoyance when she interrupted me, wanting to discuss some problem one of the girls was having or to tell me about some administrator up at Delta State. Once, when I was engrossed in a Huey Long biography I’d probably already read three or four times, she pulled it out of my hands, stuck a finger in it to mark my place and held it against her breast. “Did you hear what I just asked you?” she said. I must’ve stared at her with a confused expression—I didn’t have the faintest idea. She gave the book back. “You aren’t interested,” she said, “in any life that isn’t over.”

  Now, seeing her sitting there looking pissed off, I was tempted to slam the door and break every pane of glass in the damn thing. This sudden rush of anger, if I’d taken time to consider it, should have puzzled me. Things had been like this for a long time, and I hadn’t thought of breaking anything before. “I was just wondering,” I said, doing my best to sound calm, “whether you’ve had any breakfast.”

  Winston Churchill is supposed to have once told Lady Violet Bonham Carter, “We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm.” For whatever reason, Jennifer made an instantaneous decision to treat me like a glow-worm that day. She quit frowning, reached for the mouse, clicked out of whatever file she’d been in and said, “I’m not hungry, but I’ll keep you company.”

  While I made a pot of coffee and popped a frozen bagel in the toaster, she perched on a stool near the refrigerator and told me about an e-mail she’d gotten first thing that morning from Candace. She and Trish were in the same dorm but had different roommates, and Candace was concerned about the girl living with her sister. She’d gone by there the night before to see if Trish wanted to walk downtown, get a latte and hang out on the balcony at Square Books. Her roommate said she’d gone to the library, which would explain why she hadn’t answered her cell phone, but Candace noted that the room smelled of pot and the girl’s eyes were the color of blood oranges.

  She was from Jackson. We’d met her when we moved Trish in, and I hadn’t been too taken with her. She had the kind of gothy look I’ve come to associate with bright kids who don’t do their homework, make snide comments about people like Lincoln or FDR and are always infatuated with the likes of Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Manson and John Wilkes Booth. “I had a bad feeling about her to begin with,” I said. “I hope to God Trish isn’t there in the dorm smoking pot all the time.”

  “Well, you always told them to let you know if they wanted to try it.”

  “No, I told them they ought to leave it alone, but that if they did decide to try it, they should do it at home.”

  “I seem to recall you even said you’d get it for them.”

  “Hey, I’d rather find some than have them get it from somebody else.”

  “What’d you intend to do, buy it off one of your students?”

  Since I knew they’d never take me up on the offer, I’d never really thought about it. “I was just trying to make the point,” I said, “that if they wanted to do something they shouldn’t, they didn’t need to slip around. It’s the hiding and lying that make it so attractive.”

  Jennifer let me pour her a cup of coffee, though she’d been trying off and on for the past year to give it up. I poured myself a cup, buttered my bagel, and we both sat down at the table. We agreed that one of us—me, most likely—would talk to Trish before the day was over and make sure she understood that smoking pot in a dorm could get her in trouble. “And as for the other girl,” I said, “she needs to exhale into that little refrigerator they rented and close the door on it.”

  Jennifer burst out laughing. I loved it when she did that. She tossed her hair, and the faint lines at the corners of her mouth deepened into valleys. “That’s what you used to do, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not saying if I did or didn’t. I’m just saying it hides the pot smell.”

  “What else did you hide back then?”

  “Nothing, not after I met you.”

  “Really?”

  “Not a single thing. I was a can, and you opened me up.”

  “My, what skill with metaphor.”

  I crunched my bagel. “Comes from living with a poet, I guess.”

  “So I’m a poet?”

  “You write poems, don’t you?”

  “Sure. And every now and then, the Potato Quarterly publishes one.”

  “From what I know, the Southern Review was founded by Robert Penn Warren and isn’t into vegetables.”

  She sipped her coffee. “Well, do I have to point out how long it’s been since they took anything of mine?”

  I knew how long it had been. Even when we were mad at each other, I hated seeing her with a rejection in hand, and some weeks she got as many as eight or ten. It seemed to me that anybody who loved poetry as much as she did deserved a little success, but that’s not how the world works.

  I’d always admired her perseverance. I was devoted to teaching—still got excited when a student won a scholarship to the kind of school I never could’ve dreamed of attending, and it happened more often than you might think—but I’d long ago lost the ambition to write about an event that occurred in Loring around the turn of the last century, when because of a racial incident Theodore Roosevelt closed down our post office. I’d done all the research, but never got very far with the actual writing. Determined to tell readers what really happened, to compose a narrative free of any bias whatsoever and let them draw their own conclusions about the motives and character of those involved, I wrote more than fifty-odd pages that stuck to the facts and avoided conjecture. But when I stopped to reread them, I knew immediately that nobody else would ever voluntarily do so. The average laundry list was more compelling.

  “You had something in that journal over at MSU last year,” I said. “I imagine that’s a pretty good magazine.”

  She grinned. “Jabberwock Review. As in jabberwocky. You know, nonsensical speech or writing? Thanks for helping me make my point.” She raised both arms, stretching and yawning, and when her bathrobe slipped open I saw she wore nothing beneath it.

  The timing was awful. It was already 7:20, I hadn’t showered, and for me school started at eight. What I’m saying is that any rational person would have concluded that our efforts were every bit as doomed as Pickett’s Charge, but I advanced onto open ground with greater gusto than those lost Virginians. After all, I knew it couldn’t cost me my life, just a little bit of dignity, and most of that was already gone.

  I reached across the table and, before she could stop me, put my hand on her breast.

  “Oh,” she said, color rushing into those cheeks that were naturally so pale. “Well.”

  A couple of minutes later, in bed, she said it again as I slid inside her and started to move. “Well … now how about this?”

  Her breath was hot in my ear. Rather than lying there stiffly, more victim than participant, she locked her legs around me like she had when we were younger, her heels riding t
he backs of my thighs.

  Our alarm clock had two settings, A and B. A was for me, and during the week, I always kept it set to go off at 6:45. B was for Jennifer, and since she’d gotten up early I figured it probably wasn’t set now at all. I was wrong, of course. About two minutes into playtime it sang its siren song, and the effect on me was both immediate and catastrophic.

  “Ignore it,” she begged. “Oh, please ignore it.”

  If Pickett’s men had retreated as fast as my erection, they might have lived to die another day.

  “Oh, no,” she groaned.

  Behind my eyelids, a film began to play: a woman lying on a couch under a ragged quilt of the type my mother used to sew, her head resting on a regular pillow rather than one upholstered in the same fabric as the cushions. Her mouth was open, her teeth perfectly white. Her hair was auburn and a little bit frizzy. Where the quilt fell away from her body, her right breast lolled to one side, the nipple big and brownish. As I stared, she opened her eyes. For the longest time she did nothing, just watched me watching her, and then, with no haste at all, she reached out and pulled up the corner of the quilt. From the distance of more than forty years, I heard her say, Luke … What’s the matter, honey? Having trouble sleeping?

  “There,” Jennifer whispered. “Oh, there.”

  “ACTUALLY, my degree’s not in French,” Maggie Sorrentino told me, “but in international relations.”

  People say asinine things when they’re feeling like asses, and I felt like one that day. I don’t think it was caused by what happened when the alarm went off—that, after all, had ended on a high note—but by my reaction to Maggie’s presence. Everything about her suggested that she was beyond the means of people like me. “You studied French to become more international?”

  Her voice, when she answered, was unnaturally quiet, as if she were working hard to restrain it. If she hadn’t been smiling, I would’ve thought my stupid question had angered her. “I guess I initially studied French because the man I wanted to marry was studying French. Of course he studied international relations, too, which is how we met.”

  We were sitting together at a table in the school cafeteria, off to one side by ourselves. Apparently, everybody else had also noticed her car the day before. Park a piece of equipment like that in the faculty lot of a public high school, especially in a place as poor as Loring, and it’s going to create a certain amount of distance between you and your colleagues, as will the kind of jewelry she wore. The one piece missing was a wedding ring. Yet when he introduced her, Ramsey had called her Mrs. Maggie Sorrentino.

  “Your husband,” I said, “did he move back here with you?”

  “My husband’s dead.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Oh, believe me, I am, too.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Almost eighteen months ago. He had cancer of the esophagus, though he never smoked and barely drank. People tell me it’s unusual to develop that unless you’re a heavy smoker and drinker. But then it’s unusual, too, at the age of fifty, which is how old he was when he found out about it.”

  “What did he do for a living?”

  “The last few years of his life, he taught public policy at Duke. Prior to that, he worked for CNN.”

  “You lived in Atlanta?”

  “Close by. And then, as I said, we moved back to North Carolina.”

  “Do you have any children?”

  She’d brought her lunch in a brown paper sack. So far I’d seen her consume a granola bar and three or four celery sticks, her mouth barely moving while she chewed, and the whole time she kept looking right at me. Now she withdrew a small carton of Dannon yogurt and said, “Maybe you could ask me something else.”

  I’d thought about her and Eugene and their parents a lot over the past day. Ellis had provided the crucial bit of information that caused my synapses to fire: namely, that her mother had been killed the night riots erupted at Ole Miss after the courts ordered the enrollment of a black student named James Meredith and folks poured in from all over the South to defend segregation, eventually forcing JFK to send in a huge number of troops. Ellis also told me that Arlan Calloway, though arrested for murder, was never indicted. When I asked how that could be, he said, “Supposedly, he shot his wife in self-defense.” He took Maggie and Eugene away, and his parents, who’d lived there most of their lives, left as well.

  Finding her response to my question about children plenty strange, I decided that maybe she herself would prove rather odd. But I went ahead and asked, “So where did you and Eugene and your dad go when you moved away from Loring?”

  She spooned some yogurt into her mouth and acted as if she needed to ponder this before replying. Something I’d learn about Maggie—and something I’d come to like—was that it violated her nature to answer any question quickly. “First,” she finally said, “we went west. All the way to Needles, California. My dad bought a gas station that went broke. Have you ever heard of anybody who couldn’t sell gas in Needles? Half the people who come there are running out of it, and the other half are scared they’re going to. But there were a lot of established stations, and in all fairness to my father, the last guy to own ours had gone broke, too. That’s why he agreed to sell.

  “After that happened, we picked up and headed back across the country to Virginia. That’s where my grandparents had moved, and where my grandmother was originally from. My father got a job at the Radford Arsenal, helping produce propellants for submarines. He died there, in fact, during my first year of college. One day a bunker exploded. They never figured out exactly what happened, nor did they ever find a trace of either of the men who’d been inside, one of whom was Dad.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I imagine you’d like to know about my brother?”

  By now I was scared to ask. Her dad had shot her mom, then been blown to smithereens, and her husband had died of cancer. And there was still the question of children, which she’d told me not to pose.

  “Nothing bad happened to Gene,” she said. “Just lots of good things. He’s a successful real-estate agent in Fort Worth, and he and his wife have four daughters between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. Those girls—well, they’re all gems.” I figured maybe she’d pull some pictures from her purse, but she didn’t. Instead, she ate another spoonful of yogurt and, while continuing to look at me, tipped her chin up ever so slightly. “You’re probably wondering,” she said, “why I’d come back to this particular place. Given what occurred here, I mean.”

  You have to understand that Loring, Mississippi, isn’t the kind of town people come back to, for any reason whatsoever. It is, in fact, the kind they leave. Very few of those I grew up with are still here, and most of them own large chunks of land that have belonged to their families forever. New arrivals are almost always drawn by the promise of low-wage jobs, either in the catfish industry or at the Wal-Mart Supercenter or the big Dollar General distributorship that opened a while back. Around here, true wealth comes coated with glue, and it’s always stuck to the same sets of hands. “I guess I am curious about that,” I said. “Though I don’t know how I’d react if something similar happened in my family, because it didn’t.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. A couple of months ago, I sat up in bed one morning and noticed how perfectly gorgeous the day was. I’m not trying to brag, but I own a nice house in the countryside between Durham and Chapel Hill, and I lavished a lot of care, during the last few years, on my garden. My bedroom there has a big window, and I looked out at the sunlight flooding my roses and heard the water trickling from the fountain my husband had built for me and it was all just perfect, except for one thing: I suddenly felt that if I spent one more moment in that house, surrounded by all that beauty, I’d go completely mad. I checked into the Carolina Inn that afternoon, stayed there for two nights while I arranged to have the place looked after, then I packed a couple of bags and started driving.

  “I went to Radford and visited t
he cemetery where my grandparents are buried, then drove aimlessly across the country, intending to end up in Needles, where I’d turn around and come back. I kept stopping in small towns, and some of them made a big impression on me. Especially one in Kansas. I ate a sandwich in this general store where they sold all kinds of things related to farming, including seed. I listened to what people were saying, but none of it made any sense, and I finally figured out why. It was because they all knew so much about one another that they’d lapsed into a kind of shorthand. It might as well have been a foreign language. And I realized that nobody on the face of the earth knew me well enough to do that.

  “I finally did go to Needles, where our gas station had been turned into an espresso stand, a faux Starbucks that was doing booming business—probably because there wasn’t a real Starbucks nearby. And it just fascinated me that my dad’s undoing could be the source of someone else’s success.

  “When I started back east, I knew I had to see Loring. So I got here a couple of weeks ago and checked into that motel across from McDonald’s. I guess I expected to stay just a couple of days before going back to North Carolina. I wanted to see the house I used to live in, and to see if I could find out where my mother’s buried. The first morning I went out and bought the Weekly Times and spotted an ad for someone who could speak French well enough to teach it. The ad sounded sort of desperate, so I found myself thinking, Why not? I went in and applied for the job, and when Ramsey gave it to me I rented a house.”

  In the face of such honesty, I experienced a range of emotions. And as odd as it may sound, given that personal tragedy had provoked her actions, envy was one of them. I couldn’t imagine being able to leave home like that and go wherever whimsy led me. This seemed to me the kind of thing only a young person would do, though I hadn’t done anything of the sort when I was young. So for the second time that day, I made a grossly inappropriate comment. “Well,” I said, “if you were trying to escape beauty, you’ve come to the right place.”