dating a man, mentioning it to her mother in their garden one Saturday afternoon and counting on her to convey the news to her father. And what does he do? her mother had asked. She was wearing a sun hat that hid her eyes, but her tone of voice suggested that she was asking for an appraisal rather than an intimacy, as if being a lady was a business, too.
He’s with his father’s firm, said Nicole, quite startling herself with the ease with which she lied. Something to do with wood: forestry, lumber, paper, something like that.
He sounds very promising, said her mother, as she primped a gardenia. Your father will be pleased. When will we meet him?
Soon, said Nicole. We’ll make a date and I’ll bring him by, she promised, but somehow she never did.
One morning John Brice made his morning call from a booth outside the supermarket; he was in there, just wandering around the aisles, looking at all that food, and he decided on the spot to make her a dinner.
When?
I was thinking tonight, he said, and she sighed to herself, disappointed that he was treating an occasion she found momentous with such lightness of intent.
All right, she said. Tonight, then. Let me go home and get myself fixed up, and you can come by for me at seven.
Hot damn! he said suddenly. Dinner tonight! I’ll be by at seven.—And he hung up the phone before she could ask what she could bring.
At seven he was at her door, and as he walked her to the car he gestured at the paper bag she was carrying. What have you got?
A pie, she said. Store-bought, I’m sorry. And a bottle of wine.
He kissed her. Wine, oh, wine, he said, and kissed her again. Spodee-o-dee!
He took a county road back up behind the town, beating softly on the steering wheel to the rhythm of the song on the radio. In time he turned down a bowered lane, and she asked herself if it was so wise of her to have come along, after all. I don’t really know that much about him, she thought. Do I? He was leaning far back in the front seat with his knees almost resting on the dashboard, and he didn’t appear to be looking at the road at all; it was as if he were navigating by the treetops. Then he slowed and turned down a driveway, up under the trees they went, and he watched with her as his headlights swung across the front of a little gingerbread house standing in a clearing.
You don’t get to see too many houses like this anymore, he said. Not really. This was a bootlegger’s house, going back to the last century. This was where they stored the whiskey, up here in the woods. Casks of it. That’s how my granddaddy got rich. He exited his side of the car, and she stayed in her seat until he came around and opened her door, not a courtesy she would ordinarily have waited on, but it seemed appropriate to the occasion. There was a wide wind coming across the hills; it was chilly, and she shivered. He put his arm around her and began to walk her to the door. He left the place to my folks, he continued, but they don’t want to be reminded that there’s some dirty money mixed in with their nice clean cash, so they stay in Atlanta. I always knew it was here, though, and when I had to leave Georgia, I knew I was going to spend some time here.
Why did you have to leave? she said, and she stopped, as if she was going to refuse to walk any farther if there was something wrong with his answer.
He turned, serious as a funeral: They were looking for me. Because …—she stared—I shot a man in Reno.
You did what?
Now he was singing, in a hillbilly voice: Just to watch him die….
She started to back toward the car. John.
I’m joking. I’m just joking. Nicole. It’s a song, one of those new songs, he said. I didn’t have to leave. Not like that, like you’re thinking. I wasn’t in trouble. I just had to leave because I didn’t want to be there anymore.
John Brice’s house smelled of the walnut boards they’d used to build it; she noticed that as soon as they walked inside. There were four rooms: kitchen, dining room, sitting room, study. This is my place, he said. The light from the lamps was as dim as an old man’s eyesight, and the pictures on the wall were dark and dignified. It wasn’t the sort of house she expected, and then she remembered that he wasn’t the one who had decorated it; the only sign that it was his at all was a saxophone balanced against a music stand in one corner. The rest was rather gloomy. It needed a lighter touch, something a woman would do, and she allowed herself to imagine for a moment…. There’s a big old cellar that’s empty, he said, and a bedroom tucked up under the eaves, upstairs. You can’t tell it’s there from the outside, in front, but there’s a window in back. She nodded; what was this talk of bedrooms, anyway? He took her jacket and hung it on a peg on the wall.
She looked at the saxophone again. Will you play me something? she said.
Maybe later, he said, taking her by the hand and leading her into the kitchen, where he hugged her so hard she cried out and then laughed. I’ll play you something I wrote for you.
Dinner was good, she didn’t know any boys who could cook, but John Brice got together a meal, broiled some steaks with a dry rub made from his grandfather’s recipe, and made mashed potatoes. Now the wine was done. Standing in the quiet kitchen, the dishes piled in the sink, the only light coming from a fixture over the stove, and she wanted to say something to him about how lovely the evening had been, he was before her, beside her, and—how did it happen?—he was behind her, and there was a hole in the back of her that she couldn’t see and couldn’t close. It ran all the way up to her heart, which was pounding and pounding, in anticipation of being crushed. Shhh, she said, and there was quiet. She didn’t want to miss anything; she wanted to feel every fluttering of experience. Don’t worry, he said, but she wasn’t worrying.
There he was, groom and spouse. Come here, he said, although she was already in his arms. He put his hands under her blouse, resting them gently on the warm flesh of her hip. How close did he mean to come? He kissed her, more than once but less than many times; then he led her by the hand into the living room and laid her on the couch. His hand was on her breast and she tipped her head back a little bit, a reflex; she didn’t know what she wanted. He murmured something, she couldn’t make out what, and she couldn’t tell whether he wasn’t talking or she couldn’t hear. She looked all the way across the room to a window. The moon had risen away, climbing up so far that it had disappeared, there was nothing but blackness where the sky would be, and all she could sense was the smell of John’s arms, the wetness of his tongue, his murmuring beneath the noise she made when the boundary broke, the tears and gore leaking out of her, making a mess, and the wind in the trees outside.
She had helped him rend her from the word Miss. What a good sport: so lovely: what a lustful thing. She wasn’t sorry to see it happen, but she lay awake for some hours afterward, gazing on her rags and tatters, until she roused him from his sleep and insisted he take her home before morning. By the time they got back to her house the sun was nearly up and she was exhausted, really so tired she could barely make it the last few steps to the door.
The next day she found that there was little she remembered about those final aspects of the night before: the smell of walnuts, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, and then taking a cool wet washcloth to her bloody thighs and carefully rinsing it clean in the sink when she was done. He said he had a song for her, but he hadn’t had a chance to play it, had he? She remembered his last kiss of the night, which penetrated past her mouth all the way into her skull.
