The Return of Lilith: Time and the Misbegotten
by Hunter James
The doctor dutifully rose to shake hands, taking my manuscript with a certain flair of gentility and then laying it to the side, no ostentation or ceremony in him today, only a deep sigh that I took to be a sigh of satisfaction, and nothing more than his flat, square face staring at me from behind great swirls of pipe smoke.
He sat back down and again took up the manuscript, looking at it for a good long while before tapping it therapeutically with his pipe-stem.
"Well, Emberly, my boy,” says he at last. “More here than I had anticipated. The way you get right into the thick of the story—that’s the real trick, isn’t it?” I glared at the old fraud. “Trick? Is that all? Just some kind of goddamn trick?”
He fell away with a start, knocked a little silly by my abrupt assault—though not for long. He laid his pipe aside and looked at me a bit curiously, as though meditating my dire and irrevocable fate.
I had often been disappointed by his criticism, to say nothing of his diagnoses, and was mainly coming in for my monthly supply of tranquilizers. So I sure didn’t want to throw him off his game: I needed those pills badly. The Grunt always liked to see the stories, a big help to him when it came to figuring out whether he had done a good job with the psychoanalysis. He looked at me again, still a little undone by my unaccustomed show of sarcasm and incivility.
“Sorry,” I told him. “It’s just that everything is so
damn hard anymore. And I’ve got these palpitations
now . . . “
He looked again at the manuscript, lifting his pipe for emphasis. “Yes, my boy. I can see that you do have a real knack for getting right into your subject.” He stuck the manuscript behind him on his desk.
“Ain’t finished.”
He turned back to the manuscript, looking mighty troubled. “Hmmm, I thought we were to have a completed copy this time. Finishing the work isn’t that part of the discipline we talked about?”
He began to read again, but I just wanted to get out of there. It was like my good friend Brandt Akers always said: “How the hell does a goddamn shrink get away with passing himself off as a literary critic?”
I went to the window and glanced down over the town to the waterfront. Lynchburg, Virginia, set high above the James River; an old place, full of antiquated buildings, each street terraced into the side of the hill, which ran almost straight down to the water. This was my first real fling at the craft of news papering.
Back in Carolina, I had worked for a couple of years as an organizer for the state Labor Federation, carrying the good news of Union Forever to migrant farmers, textile workers and hundreds of other laborers in a state that had never much cared for the idea. Union history down there had been one of riot and murder in the early days. My own history was a little different: plenty of time on the road, a good expense account, lots of sleazy women in bad hotel rooms.
As I stood there I found myself wondering again how I had ever found myself to this lost part of the world. Sometimes I felt like a sojourner on the Trail of the Lonesome Pine. But, of course, I knew only too well why I was there. Loftin Gray, an old soak I had befriended during his days as one of Carolina’s top sportswriters, had kept in touch after coming north to take a job as news editor for the Lynchburg Morning Daily. Now I was there, at his insistence, persuaded that, as a recent college graduate, labor organizer and despoiler of fallen women, I could make a real name for myself and go right to the top of the profession.
I looked back down at the river and noticed that the wind had picked up greatly while I was standing there. To the north, over the hills of Amherst County, it had begun to look like snow. Old Sawbones came over and stood a little behind me. I kept wondering if we were to have that other and slightly unsettling conversation that had occurred during my previous visit.
On that day I had been sitting in front of his desk in a blaze of bright winter sunlight. He looked at me thoughtfully and said, “Remarkable! The hair on your arm is absolutely remarkable. Like . . . well, I will declare, almost like spun gold!”
That wasn’t all: he was busy shutting the door to his secretary’s office all the time he was saying it. Spun gold? I didn’t need to hear any more. I knew right then that I sure didn’t much care for the way the conversation was going or for the way he kept trying to adjust the blinds so as to get the sunlight to fall on me in a certain way. He got caught up in quite a fit of excitement before I could get out of there.
“Now! That’s it. Yes. Is that better?” He had been talking about the blinds, pretending that all he wanted was to get the sun out of my eyes. I guess he only wanted to show off the spun gold at its best, like a horticulturalist at a flower show. Here I was thinking I was in the hands of a proper Virginian who could trace his lineage all the way back to the
decadent inmates of Newgate or Old Bailey only to find instead that I had fallen into the hands of a fellow with a taste for pederasty—or something anyway for which I had no taste at all. Naturally I couldn’t talk about it back at the paper. The other reporters would sneer and curse me for my lies. Because I was fresh up from Carolina, they would think I was looking to besmirch a good Virginia name.
He didn’t have to worry; I wouldn’t have talked it around anyway. I needed all those prescriptions in the worst sort of way, and here was a fellow who hadn’t once raised a question about whether I’d been exceeding his recommended dosage. I turned from the window and took a seat. No sun this afternoon, only a cold sky and a promise of snow.
He took a seat and got out his prescription pad. “Well, as I say, it’s pretty obvious that you’ve got a real knack—a real flair for the language. Hope you don’t mind if I hold on to your story for a while.”
The Grunt wrote out the prescription, scheduled another visit and looked at me even more steadfastly. “Maybe you’ve been going at it a little too hard. Eating regularly? You look as though you’ve lost a few pounds since the last time you were in.”
“Yeah, for damn sure. Need to get back on the weights.”
I had seen it myself, in one of the mirrors back at
the apartment: eyes too intensely bright, maybe from all the palpitations, my body thinner than at any time since my basketball days in high school, face too angular, needing a haircut, all those wisps of dullish brown hair falling down around my ears like anything but spun gold, fake grin beginning to look much too wide. I looked and felt gaunt—a sure prelude to early death.
Prescription in hand, I hurried across the street to the drugstore and waited outside, smelling the good smell of the coming snow, while the pharmacist filled it. I even thought briefly about going back to my lousy room on Washington Street and getting started on the weights right away. But what the hell, it was my day off—Thursday—and I just couldn’t face the room right now. Or even the idea of sitting up there writing some kind of gloomy story when I could be down at the M&J Restaurant, drinking beer and looking out the window at the snow and maybe catching Brandt Akers for a couple of drinks before he went off to supper.
I noticed there was a new waitress at the restaurant, a tall one. I sat watching her for a while and then, a little before dark, Brandt came in and joined me at the counter, placing his felt hat on the adjoining barstool. He lived on Court Street, a block behind the paper, but it was a steep climb up there, and he always came in for a couple of beers before striking out for home.
“Sure feels like snow,” I said.
“Weather bureau says we’re in for a big one.”
He was already looking at me with that funny, squinched look that told me he was about to have a big, though sympathetic, laugh at my expense. “Well, what did the quack have to say this time? Still trying to pass himself off as a literary critic? What about your latest story?”
“Said it was all windup and no delivery.”
“Well, to hell with that bastard. He probably read that somewhere.”
He looked at me again, his face flushed, ironical, half mocking, baldpate glimmering in the dull light. He put his hat back on, never feeling really comfortable without it, and again glared at me with a look of false mockery. He was getting ready to have his laugh now. “What’s that quack planning to do with it anyway? Look for hidden meanings? Peddle it to Esquire? Does he know an agent?”
Brandt had at least fifteen years on me. He was almost forty now, too old to count on a career in the big time. He had decided to cultivate me for that role, mistakenly thinking I had manifested a certain flair for the writing business even if I hadn’t read all the right books.
“You’ve got to know the Greeks,” he would say. “And I don’t see how you’re going to get by without reading the big English novelists. I mean, if you ever expect to amount to anything.”
We both looked at the new waitress. “Real class,” Brandt said. “Maybe she’s just what this dump has been needing. You thought about asking her out?”
“Dunno. She seems awfully cold and unresponsive?”
“How’d you figure that out in such a hurry?”
“Well, she isn’t anything like Terri.”
Terri, the other waitress, was short and dark and liked to talk dirty. Brandt had grown mildly interested in her now that his wife was in the last weeks of her pregnancy. He had talked seriously about inviting her up to his apartment during his wife’s “lying in.”
“Maybe we could make it a foursome,” he says. “Me and Terri, you and the new girl.” Then he looked at me with his sorrowful, pinched face, still grinning, and said, “What the hell do I wanta talk like that for with my wife expecting to go into labor at any moment? I hate men who do that. Actually I can’t think of anything more alien to my character.”
His grin had become twisted and more self- deprecating, his tone apologetic, as he ordered his third beer and again turned to me. “Where did you find this quack anyway? And where in God’s name did he ever get the idea that he was a literary critic?”
“Claims to have read Faust in the original.”
I was still trying to decide whether to tell him the rest of it. Now, after my third beer, I found myself
blurting out the whole story. “He’s queer, you know.”
Brandt looked around, not with surprise really, only with that same half-mocking smile.
“You mean you’ve fallen into the hands of a quack who’s trying to pass himself off as a literary critic and get you into the sack at the same time?”
“My second visit, I think that’s when I realized he was some kind of pervert. He really was quite beside himself that day; a big cumbersome falling- down sort of fellow. Kept getting up and knocking all the papers off his desk, and then moving all around the room with a sort of aimless jerk—sort of bumping into himself you might say . . .”
Brandt kept looking at me, his face flushed and comical beneath his hat and all squinched up with sardonic laughter, like a baby’s face grown old too soon. Halfway through his third beer he had started the bad habit of repeating himself.
“ . . . Kept talking about how the sunlight flashed across my arms in a certain way, really sort of crazy. Like some sort of ritual or something, like facing Mecca at a certain hour of day or uttering incantations over a conjure ball. A sort of rambling manner about the peculiar way the light had caught me—something about the way the sun had fallen through the window and lit up the hairs on my arm. I believe he thought he had struck gold.”
“Gold?”
“Spun gold. Talking about the hairs on my arms.”
“A Comstock lode? Imagine that fellow. Did you hear that, Terri? Show her your arm, Emberly. Jesus. Spun gold. Can you believe that?”
Terri didn’t take it up. And Brandt didn’t bring it up again. He was already on his fourth beer—a lot even for him at supper break.
“A quack like that and a pederast in the bargain. Or maybe you’re too old to be the target of a pederast. Maybe he’s just a plain old faggot. But, my God, some of the goddamndest things happen to you in this town.”
Brandt kept looking at Terri. Her husband was a blacksmith. I had interviewed him once. He was the last blacksmith in all of that part of the world. A right genial fellow, he was. And he had some real arms on him. Brandt would be taking a big chance even if by some quirk he got something going with Terri. He would look at me with his funny pinched look that was half the look of a child and half the look of an old man and say, “Helluva way for a new father to talk? My wife going off to the hospital at any time and here I am hot after other women.”
He looked back at me after finishing his beer. “Imagine that fellow. You say he hasn’t even sent you the first bill? What other sorts of things did he want to know? I don’t suppose it took him all day to figure out you were a raving madman.”
“Kept wanting to know how I’d feel about coming
in on a more regular basis. Wanted me to bring in a report on my dreams, all neatly done up in typescript . . .”
“For Chrissake, a goddamn plagiarist too? What’s he wanta do—sell them to one of the big slicks? A big critic like him, he oughta know there’s a law against that sort of thing.”
“ . . . Said if he could just see me on a little more regular basis we could go on and get into some of the areas he was particularly anxious to get into. He kept looking at my arms. I guess he’d finally got the light just right. I said, ‘Well, that will take a helluva lot of money, coming in every week like that.’ But he says, ‘Well, let’s not worry about that right now. The important thing is for you to get that old fastball back, and for us to make sure you’re at the top of your game so to speak.’ Then he just leans back in his big chair and after a long time of just looking me over he says he hopes I won’t mind if he asks me a personal question. Then he sort of leans forward and looks embarrassed, like he’d forgotten who he was exactly or what profession he was in. Starts shuffling through some things on his desk and then clearing his throat and saying, ‘What I was about to ask you is whether you have a regular girl . . .’”
“Very personal question,” Brandt said. “But I assume you had the goods on him by now.” “. . . I says, ‘Nobody regular.’ So he studies me a
while longer and brushes some imaginary ashes off his shirt and says, ‘But you do manage to keep female company?’”
“Feeling you out before feeling you up?”
“I figured it was about time to throw him off the scent. I told him about the night I picked up a girl at the bus station cafeteria—I think you already know the story—and how I took her up to the New Era Hotel, a real dump if you don’t happen to know it.”
“Only too well, I fear.”
“ . . . And how she wanted to know if it would be all right if she took off her wedding ring before I screwed her. Just like in all those dirty movies. He just sat there nodding and looking thoughtful. Then he says, ‘Sounds like the making of another story, but you do realize, don’t you, son, about the risk of disease?’”
“Imagine that fellow, won’t you? I can’t believe he ever read Faust in the original.”
Brandt laughed his half-mocking laugh as he rose uneasily from the counter and staggered toward the door. It had started to snow and coming down really hard by the time we got to the street. “You’re coming to supper, you know, and the way it’s looking now you’d better plan on spending the night.”
He started off in the storm and dragged me after him. The snow had first come down as sleet, but now all snow, and coming down harder all the time.
“Come on up to my place and we’ll have a real drink. Weather like this. What the hell, I might not even make it back down here tonight. Supposed to be off at nine anyway.”
I went out behind him and we made the long climb to Court Street by way of Monument Terrace, a magnificent stone staircase built in the gloriously decadent style of the Italian Renaissance. Then there was another climb to the third story of Brandt’s apartment building. I stood at the rear window while he stuck a glass of straight whisky in my hand and stood with me for a moment looking back down over the city, sleet, snow and now a regular damn blizzard. All I could see of the city was a blur and nothing at all of the river.
“One drink and then I’ll get on home.”
“Don’t dare think of it,” his wife Gloria said. “We’ve got a good hot supper—and more than enough to go around.”
She went to the window and looked out over the roofs of the town. She was a lovely woman—dark hair, skin almost milky white—and now in her full term of pregnancy. She was older than me by only a year or so and had divorced her first husband to marry Brandt. “What a storm! Sure hope we don’t have to try to make it to the hospital on a night like this.”
Not only that, it would spoil all of Brandt’s plans. Getting to the hospital. And then trying to arrange
something with one of the girls he was hoping to bring up. He and Gloria were still practically newlyweds; they had moved up to Lynchburg from an old textile town on the Virginia line and into this apartment only a week or so after their marriage. I was always a little surprised to learn that he was thinking about double-crossing her while she was in the hospital. Not that I wanted to betray my lack of sophistication by saying anything about it.
I had taken a chair by the hearth and Brandt got a fire going. He had brought in the bottle of whisky and set it between us. I was feeling a lot better now, with the whisky inside me and the snow coming down and a hard wind coming up from the river.
Brandt’s reddish flush had turned to a deathly purple, and he was increasingly repetitious. At this hour of the evening, with the snow piling up outside and the whisky getting steadily lower and a good blaze going in the hearth, he would always be at his most philosophical and start naming off all the hundreds of writers I hadn’t read, the great symphonies and concertos with which I was unfamiliar—a whole world of which I was almost entirely innocent.
Unlike me, Brandt was a Virginian, though not one of those who could boast of great wealth or famous ancestors. Still, he had come from a small town notable for aristocrats and since he had some age on me I suppose that gave him a certain
priority. “You can’t afford to leave out all the big English novelists or the Greeks or any of the really big names,” he would say. “You might as well be a shoe salesman.”
“Maybe the best thing.” “No, you don’t want that. You sure don’t want that.”
So there I would sit, making notes about all that was missing in my life—literature, trashy women, music, travel and all the rest. We often went together to a new paperback bookstore that had opened in the town that year. Before I left the town I had whole boxes of books that gradually lost their covers and gathered thick layers of mildew before I ever got around to reading them.
Thirty-five years ago and all the covers coming off and I still think of all those lectures by the fireside at Brandt’s apartment with the snow piling up against the window ledges. And about all the women he wanted me to romance. Sometimes, even now, I wonder how I would ever have found time to work in all of that literature amid the really hot life he was organizing for my benefit. On this snowy night my new life was supposed to begin for sure, possibly with the new waitress, the tall one, at the M&J Restaurant—depending on whether his wife had to be rushed off to the hospital, of course.
It was well after midnight when I stumbled out of the place, taking my time in the snow. It was still
coming down hard, the dull glimmer of lights barely visible along the two sides of the river. A real monster this time. And I knew how it would be the next day with the sun shining down blindingly all over the frozen city and me suffering from a hangover. No matter. All I was thinking about was getting back to my crummy apartment and enjoying one more drink alone and jotting down more notes on all the books I was supposed to read and trying to figure out how to make my first sally into the world of wholesale iniquity—or at least to ask the tall girl out.
“By the way.” Brandt said, pushing the door open again and following me down to the sidewalk. “Loftin wanted to know if you were coming in today. Seemed in a big hurry to tell you something. I think it had something to do with your lodgings. Knows of an apartment that you might like. Just down the street from us. Sounds like something you ought to look into.”
Then, dropping his voice a little, he elbowed me knowingly in the ribs, just as a fresh blast of sleet struck me in the face: “Good arrangement for both of us, if you know what I mean.”
I looked at him curiously. “The new girl and Terri?”
“Sure. I mean, if it all works out. Wouldn’t want to bring them here, and you sure wouldn’t want to take them to that dump of yours—the worst yet.”
“Stayed in so many I’m beginning to appreciate the underside of life.”
-2
There was drunken brawling all the time in those rooming houses, every place worse than the one before. But it had not begun that way. In the early days I had lived in the most elite part of town, on North Princeton Circle, just off Rivermont Avenue, out by Randolph Macon Woman’s College. Later I was cussing myself mightily for moving away from Rivermont, home of the bluebloods, and parting company with the aristocrats, devil of a mistake. How else was I to make anything of myself in a town like that? All I was just another guy from the North Carolina hill country. Wouldn’t know a genealogy from the backside of a mule—so Brandt was always telling me after killing his first six-pack of the evening.
Looking back on it, I guess I must have been awfully naive not to realize that fate had introduced me to an extraordinarily promising situation. Lord, some of the stateliest old homes in all of Virginia were along that street, with the James River coming down along its northern boundary and the great flank of the Blue Ridge rising just to the West. Besides all that, I was living in a house occupied by one of the most socially distinguished ladies in the
whole town, a niece of the late Sen. Carter Glass, and, one might suppose, distantly related to the Byrds, Bloods, Culpepers and maybe even to Thomas Jefferson himself. This was a long time before anyone found out that Jefferson’s favorite mistress was a black slave woman.
Leyton Wilder, our managing editor and himself a blueblood, had arranged the whole business and drove me out one afternoon to meet the genteel lady. Did she need the money? Perhaps. Old Uncle Carter hadn’t been much help. One look around and I could see that neither he nor any of her other famous relatives had done a whole lot for her. She appeared indeed to have fallen into that not- unhappy social state sometimes known as genteel poverty.
No one would openly say anything of the sort. Glass was a special favorite of the town. Everybody had forgotten that he began political life as a populist firebrand and had founded the Lynchburg News to further his cause. But the old boy eventually got some sense in his head and decided to put himself forward as a town aristocrat, eventually winning election to the U.S. Senate, where, in later years, he made a big name for himself as chief architect of the Federal Reserve System. He was still bossing the town from the grave. His descendants, down to the fourth generation, were getting richer by the day off the
two papers he had created, The News and Daily Advance.
My landlady was certainly as gracious as anyone could have wished. But I don’t know, for me, life on North Princeton Circle just never did work out the way I’d hoped. I spent more than eighteen months there and never really made the adjustment. It was as if something was always closing in on me, not giving me the time I needed to find my Voice. Maybe I never would find it even if my pederast did keep telling me that I had all the tools to make the big time.
As time went on I knew that somehow I would have to get out. Trouble was, I would also have to think of some mighty convincing excuse. How to convince Leyton that I had acted correctly just to walk out on one of the truly estimable ladies in all of Lynchburg? Well, before I could hatch up a real plan, the lady surprisingly gave me all the excuse I needed. Not anything I would want to spread around the office. And surely not anything I could ever mention to Leyton.
It wasn’t what one might think. No attempts at seduction or anything like that. It was real sad in a way. I had come in late one Saturday night after drinking way too much and had fallen asleep over my paperback copy of the Iliad when I heard it: mastodons plunging through the thick forests of the Pleistocene, cries of mayhem somewhere in the
primordial darkness and a mad clash of spears, brave Hector challenging the sullen Achilles again.
Come on out and fight, bastard!
I jerked awake to hear my landlady screaming at me from the back of the house: “Oh my God! Help me! Somebody please, please help!”
That was all. I sat up listening intently for a moment before lying back down. Maybe it would be all right. If it were a burglar or rapist maybe he had got what he wanted by now and had fled the place. Not being armed, I could only imagine that it was the essence of good sense to give him plenty of time to make his getaway. Or maybe it wasn’t anything after all. It was just too much archaic poetry after too much late-night revelry.
Then it came again: a cry of savages waiting for the kill, a clash of spears, bull elephants crashing through the undergrowth of distant rain forests.
“Oh my God. Can you hear me, Mr. McFeebe! Help me, my God, please help me!”
I leapt up and rushed screaming through the dark of the house. “By God, I’ll shoot to kill, you goddamn sons of bitches, busting in here like this in the middle of the goddamn night!”
I had expected to hear an abrupt scattering of feet as the intruders made for the door—or at least that was my hope. My plan was to knock over enough furniture and antique glassware and what-have-you to make the bastards think a whole army was
coming. Were they waiting for me somewhere back there in the dark? What a relief to find that it was only the sad old lady lying by herself in her own vomit and excrement. The old bad genes coming out.
She had been drunk and had fallen off the bed and turned the slop jar upside down on her and now her nightclothes were all sodden and I could see two huge scars from an old mastectomy and I tried to get her back in bed without dirtying my hands and then I turned the slop jar right-side-up and tried to get on out of there. Then I figured it would be more sportsmanlike for me to grab a mop or something and try to clean the place up. No mop. All I could find was a stack of old newspapers. I scrubbed up the mess as best I could, desecrating a lot of my bylines and smearing myself with the excrement.
She lay there in all that mess thanking me for coming to her rescue and promising me unending joy and prosperity for undertaking to “bring succor” in the most desperate hour of her life. I stood watching her with the excrement dripping off me and explained that that was about the best I could do and that maybe I’d better take a quick shower, and her saying, “Thank you, Mr. McFeebe. God bless you, young man. May He bring you prosperity and eternal solace.”
-3-
I had my bags packed by daybreak and was out looking for other lodgings without even waiting to say goodbye. A funny thing, though, I had discovered right away that one could fall into the dregs of life without every leaving Rivermont. The first rooming house I found was a real dump down by the tracks, where the street lifts itself out of the slums of Redline before turning west along the river and heading off into aristocratic confines of the city.
I would lie there in a bed that sank halfway to the floor, only half able to walk without a limp when I got up each morning and being shaken out of my wits every time the four a. m. train came by and then sitting up at first light reading The Confessions of Jean Jacque Rousseau while the drunken brawlers of the house were getting up and going out to work.
No coincidence that I found what consolation I could in the Confessions—not with the four o’clock trains rattling the place like an old set of false teeth and the drunken brawlers of the morning setting out loudly and profanely for work and my eerie landlady sniffing around for signs that I had ruined myself with dope and liquor—all of which had thrown me into a decline not unlike that which had all but destroyed the aging French philosopher. At least I hadn’t started wetting my pants yet; I figured all that would come later.
After that, it was just one bad rooming house after another. I was always on the move, into ever more darker parts of the city: broken down beds, ornery landladies, smelly kitchens, and drunks looking for a fight. Cheap rent, cheaper rooms—places where you could expect Jerry Falwell himself to knock on the door at any time. “Do you know God, my friend? Have you found Jesus?” And if you didn’t have a watchdog or a shotgun the answer had better be “Yes.” Or the next night you might find yourself trapped in a smelly alley. “You come to Jesus, boy. Or we sho gonna whup yo ass!”
Naturally Leyton wanted to know why I’d left Rivermont to take up lodging in houses where I was only one step removed from the city jail. I never could risk telling him the whole truth. He would never have believed anything like that about one of the most genteel grande dames in the whole town. I hated to insult him by explaining what he should have known already: that I sure as hell couldn’t afford anything better with the lousy wages he was paying. I just tried to avoid the subject altogether, anything to keep my Monday column and to grab more of the decent assignments that had started to fall my way.
I was in my seventh or eighth rooming house in as many months when Brandt reminded me that Loftin Gray was still seeking me out about a spiffy Court Street apartment. Sure enough, on my first day back at work after the big snow Loftin immediately sidled up to me and, dropping his voice as though about to betray a confidence, asked me how I’d like to give up my days of vagabondage in order to do some “apartment-sitting” for an old and dear friend of his.
Loftin had taken even more heavily to drink since running away from Carolina to escape a lot of bad debts and an angry wife. You could always tell when he had been on a real drunk. He would come in looking all puffy and bruised and sort of ducking his head every now and then as though somebody were about to swat him with a two-by-four.
Awful having to see how far he had fallen. He had been a legend in North Carolina as a reporter and sports writer, but he had failed to prosper in Lynchburg, just another guy working the wires, with no prospects for advancement.
Loftin explained in an air reeking with mystery how an acquaintance named Annette Minor, a Virginian with all the proper lineage, had been looking for someone to sublease her Court Street apartment while she was visiting relatives in Vermont. Her sister was quite ill, possibly dying,
and she had agreed to go up for what was likely to be a prolonged visit.
“No harm in talking,” he said. “She does some writing, you know, and a great deal of lecturing. Oh, yes, she has a very fine reputation as a historian. She has held teaching positions at some of our very best institutions, mainly at our own Sweet Briar.”
He arranged for me to go up and meet her that same evening. But the city desk had other ideas: an assignment to interview a famous, world-traveled hobo imbibing canned heat down by the river. When I told Loftin about the conflict, he only nodded and seemed agitated about something.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I said.
Tomorrow didn’t work out either or the next day, and by that time Loftin had was in quite a fidget, looking more than ever like a man who had lost control of his bowels. I wasn’t all that anxious to put it off. I was sure getting tired of going back to Falwell’s part of town every evening after work. So when Loftin mentioned his proposition again at supper break I told him to go ahead and give his famous acquaintance a call and tell her I was on my way. He perked up at once. But why was it eating away at him like that? Was it some sort of put-up job?
It was much more than that, and if I could have guessed what lay ahead I’m not sure I would not
have gone at all. Yet what would my life have been without the excitement of those days? A kind of gloomy old elegance hung over the place and indeed over the whole street and for that matter over Mrs. Minor herself, more elegant than gloomy in her case.
She wore a clinging dress in pale green voile or linen or something, most becoming, and there was sort of a subtle flash of diamonds and silver about her, though it was all quite stylish and in the very best taste. I had expected someone not necessarily younger—she must have been just this side of fifty —but far more matronly. She had a good, Oxfordian air about her, a nice body with newly coifed auburn hair and a smile so flawless I found myself wondering if she had her own teeth. She was quite a striking woman for her age—or for any age.
“I think you’ll grow to love the view,” she told me. “Especially mornings. With the sun coming up over the river, the town coming awake.”
Court Street had once been THE street in Lynchburg. That had been true from early antebellum times until after the turn of the century. Back when the town had been more famous for lynching than anything else—mostly Liberty Men hanging Tories during the Revolution. The twenties had brought prosperity and growth, mostly to the west, in Rivermont, and began altering the character of Lynchburg society. Nothing left but decay on
Court Street and environs. Dr. Minor, as the paper spoke of her, was one of the few real Virginians left in that part of town.
The street was now mostly a beehive of apartments and administrative buildings for the city and local court system. You had to look behind all the soot and decay to appreciate the best part of the street: the tall arched windows bespeaking the architectural style of a much earlier age, the elegant filigree of the wrought iron balconies, the old courtyards, the smell of flower gardens gone to seed and a whole lot more that had to be felt rather than seen.
Dr. Minor came toward me with a certain authority in her manner. “Come.” She took me by the arm, led me back to the dinette and stood reverentially at my side while I took in the good view from the window over her sink.
I had seen it all before, usually while killing a six- pack with Brandt Akers outside his rooftop apartment. Even though I was getting a little desperate for conversation, what with Mrs. Minor’s hand still at my elbow, I didn’t say anything about my drunken experiences with Brandt among the smokestacks or about the time the cops had tried to pick me up for urinating on one of the dead Court Street flower beds or about anything else that might have compromised the lies Loftin Gray undoubtedly had told her.
“Really, it would be such a comfort knowing that I had someone reliable in the apartment. And just one other thing, my own little crazy thought, but I’ve often wondered if the real reason I haven’t been able to leave this apartment is that it reminds me so much of so many other places—of Europe, of all the little towns that seem to thrive almost to themselves over there, as though they had never been discovered or even existed until the day you happen to walk in and all those storybook towns of Austria and Switzerland. Oh, I do hope one day you shall see it all for yourself.”
I wondered again if Loftin had simply tired of her and set me up as her next fall guy. Tired of her? Somehow it didn’t quite fit, not with all that dash and sparkle that seemed to come from every pore. She explained again that her older sister was quite ill and that she, Dr. Minor, had been promising for months to come up and do what she could to ease her travail. Now the tidings were such that she simply could put it off no longer. She never did completely take her hand away except to reach in her cabinet for a slender bottle of strange-looking liqueur. She poured each of us a drink, in a sort of vial. “You’ll be fine. It will most certainly see you through the rest of the night.”
“What is it?” “A special kind of absinthe, unavailable in this country, hard to find even in the back parts of
Europe. Bitter, very strong, but it will give you a lift like very few things in this world. A very special elixir from the glowing forests of the East, I so rarely have it available, Much too rarely. But I think you will find it to your liking.”
“You mean you’ve gotta go into a witch’s coven or something of the sort to find it. Maybe into a nest of vampires.”
She laughed a strange high mirthless laughter. “Lovely conversation for another day.”
I drank it right down, not bad, and instantaneously felt as though I was somewhere I had never been, somewhere a smell of roses and gardenias, and Dr. Minor’s laughter now coming from far away. Perhaps I was in the Hereafter. But where was my host? I wobbled all about the dinette, steadying myself with whatever implement seemed most at hand.
She pretended not to notice. She was again beside me. Perhaps she had never left. You could tell from the way she carried herself that her family went all the way back to British nobility and not to some scullery maid who had worked her way over turning tricks on the after-deck of the Susan Constant, a look of utter sophistication. Still, I couldn’t help wondering why she hung so close and why I still felt myself in a magical and marvelously seductive garden.
She took up the container of strange dark elixir.
“Another?” She poured the vial to the brim. “We do have to be careful. Wonderful if handled properly— but dangerous—even lethal if we don’t show it proper respect.”
There came again an overpowering scent of roses, of gardenias maybe, or jasmine, or all together. I found myself in a whole wasteland of flowers. Surely the potion had lifted me up to a Utopia I could never have imagined in my most drunken moments. I only realized after gaining some slight control over myself that she was no longer standing next to me or even in the dinette: she was all the way over in the middle of the parlor, almost laughing, as though somehow she had participated in my vision and knew precisely what I was thinking. Now she sat watching me from her sofa, patting the pillow beside her. “Come, sweetheart. Come join me. And call me Annette, will you?”
“Well, I really should be getting back to work,” my voice coming from afar.
“Think you are capable—I mean, of doing any more real work tonight? Let’s just say, that that has all been taken care of.” She patted the pillow. “Come. Come sit. I took the liberty of phoning your editor; a very dear friend of mine, and telling him that you’d fallen a little ill and probably would not be able to continue your shift. Come. Come and sit for just a bit.”
I did so. Except the world that had been so
familiar to me that afternoon had suddenly vanished into nothingness and left me in a flower-scented garden of seductive delight. Else why did I find myself placing my hand on her knee and, meeting no resistance, sliding it right on up her crisp thigh as she spread her legs and allowed me entry into the wonderful world of her moist and palpitant vagina. Her hand found my hard-on almost at the same instant.
She rose at once. “About to go off, aren’t you? Come. Please. All will be well.
Never could remember exactly how I got into her bed. I only remembered being there with her beside me naked and an overpowering scent of flowers and a night of lovemaking unlike any I had ever experienced. I held her close, my hand on her gorgeously rounded breasts, her nipples hard as rock. Awake or half asleep I fondled her lovingly, enjoying the smell of jasmine or gardenias or something wondrous for which there was no word.
By morning she still felt like a sixteen-year-old in my arms. She must have been plumb worn out, but still she bore that marvelous yeasty, unearthly scent of gardenias. Though I was out of the garden and back in the known world, she was still to me a fragrant delicacy such as I had seldom known. Dawn came and found us still in nubile embrace, as I found her mouth for yet another good full-bodied kiss before waking to the terrible thought that I was
thirsty not only for water but for one more taste of that strange dark elixir from the glowing forests of the East.
“Not now, sweetheart. Not because I begrudge it, but only because it is so scarce, not to be found at all in this country, not since the government banned its use in New Orleans half a century ago. You have to know where to find it, in what hill-haunted Bohemian village, or mountain grotto deep in the Balkans.”
We lay there till noon before staggering together into the shower and getting dressed and my how much more I wanted another taste of that absinthe rather than the tall glass of orange juice she placed in front of me! I drank it quickly and sat dazed on the sofa trying to make sense out of what had happened—how much Brandt would believe, how much anybody would believe.
She took up the empty glasses and went back to the dinette and stood waiting for the coffee to finish perking. From behind, she could have been twenty- three or twenty-four, much too regal for the likes of Loftin Gray. I suddenly had a vision—from where I don’t know—of her actually swatting him on the side of the head with a two-by-four and knocking him down three flights of stairs and then not even looking to see if he was able to pick himself up. Where did the crazy thought come from? I thought no more about it and was embarrassed to hear
myself laugh aloud, a jarring laugh completely out of place in such discreet surroundings.
As I wobbled about the parlor she came up beside me, still smelling of jasmine or roses or whatever it was that seemed to wrap her forever in a most marvelous and indescribable fragrance. She brushed a piece of lint off my shoulder and kissed me at the door, gently around my neck and then full in the mouth. “Such a wonderful night. I do hope there will be many more.”
I heard from her constantly in the days before her departure. Had it all been some sort of dream? Had I tasted the lotus buds of the ancients? Why did I still smell gardenias, roses, and jasmine and find it difficult to keep my balance as I walked? She was a woman of middle years as lively and passionate as an eighteen-year-old, something about it that made me a trifle uneasy. Or maybe that, too, is only the feeling I get from looking back on all that has happened since then. How, on that night, during that brief meeting, could I have ever foreseen that my life would never again be the same?
She had acted with such discretion, even while flinging off her clothes, and with such gentility, her manner and language so . . . well, Virginian, that I would never have been able to move in on her without an invitation, certainly not without a big swallow of her magical elixir. It would have been a little like assaulting the president of the garden club
while she was smelling a rose or marigold.
Why did I keep wondering if she still had her own teeth? I guess I just couldn’t stand the idea of them being stuck in a jar on a shelf every night. Really difficult, thinking about all that, seeing them up there at night and getting up and seeing them up there again in the morning.
Yet, what reason to think they weren’t her teeth? She still had her figure and her face hadn’t begun to melt and the streaks of gray in her hair were perhaps more to be praised than decried and there was no doubt that she at least had most of her teeth if not quite all. Anyway, it wasn’t exactly a crime if she only had a partial plate. That was nothing. I mean, what the hell?
