A Southern Exposure Read online

  “Afternoon.”

  “Afternoon.”

  They exchange bland smiles before the pause that precedes Harry’s getting down to business.

  He says, “You know that Mrs. Bigelow, the one you said did up our suite so pretty?” To his own ears, even, Harry’s speech sounds odd, for Harry is an automatic mimic; having recovered from his initial shock at this desk clerk’s diction, now quite unconsciously and uncontrollably he apes it, along with the general style of delivery.

  “Yes sir, Dolly Bigelow. Husband Willard’s head of the Greek department, or Latin, something along those lines. But Dolly, she’s a newfangled unique lady. Unusual! She is—”

  “Do you think she’d mind? I’d love to tell her how much I like—we like the things in our room.”

  “Why, she’d be just as pleased as punch! Just plum delighted. Here now, I can get you her phone number easy as pie, and the phone’s right over there.”

  “Mrs. Bigelow, we haven’t met but my name’s Harry Baird.” (Harry himself is now pronouncing it “Baaad,” in three syllables.) “And my wife and I are staying over to the Inn, in the suite, and I cannot tell you how much we admire your colors—it’s just plain beautiful, what you’ve done.”

  “Well, Mr. Bad, I am just plain delighted to hear that. And you-all are the first folks bothered to call! Sometimes I’ve heard, you know, like rumors, but no one has actually—I think you must be an exceptionally nice person. And your wife too, I’m sure she’s a lovely woman.”

  “Matter of fact, she is. And she is just crazy about those colors in that room. You must meet Cynthia. I know she’d be just so proud if she could meet you.”

  “Well, I’d rightly admire to meet her, you can tell her that.”

  A pause while both Harry and Dolly Bigelow consider options.

  Mrs. Bigelow, with a decisively drawn breath, takes the initiative. “Well, I don’t know if you are busy Sunday week, but Willard and I, we’re having this little party—”

  4

  In Kansas, at the Willistons’ tourist home, Brett is sick. Very sick. Bleeding, cramps. A fever. She knows what is wrong but she cannot tell anyone. Russell takes the children over to see Ursula and her grandchildren, and that seems to work out. So that all day Brett lies there dozing, alone on the long sleeping porch, in bed, while outside late September heat weighs down the remaining leaves on the sycamore trees, presses grass to the ground. Stills breezes.

  “But you have to see a doctor, I’ll get one.”

  “No—”

  “Brett, come on. Be sensible.”

  “I’m not sensible. I’m sick. I know it’s all my fault.”

  “Don’t give me that Presbyterian craziness. Forget your catechism.”

  “ ‘And there is no health in us.’ ”

  “That’s right, that’s what I meant. Brett, I’m bringing a doctor.”

  And so it is to the doctor, a mild bald man with silver spectacles, that she whispers, “I had an abortion. Two weeks ago in San Francisco.”

  Sitting on a bench on the Santa Monica pier, in the blazing, endless, and unnatural August sunshine, with her stupid white frilled parasol and her even more stupid hat (a white cloche) and dumb high white shoes, Brett knew from the quick rush of bile to her throat: she was pregnant. Well, of course she knew—after five? And never one miscarriage. The air smelled of dead fish, and candy, and gin; earlier they had all been drinking Pink Ladies from a shaker that someone had brought. Brett swallowed quickly and looked around, her first thought having been that no one should know. Her second, as improbable as the first, is that she will not have this child. (But of course eventually Russ will know, and they will have six children.)

  “Darling Brett, what heaven.” Flounced down on the bench beside her, suddenly, there is an apparition: Fleurette Fresnaye (née Edith Framer), an aspiring English actress, not doing too well, despite studio-ordered platinum hair and the nutty name. Lovely though weak large blue eyes, and a hopeless chin. Impossibly affected, but nevertheless somehow nice, Brett has felt. The two women instinctively like each other, perhaps in part because both feel themselves displaced, out there in California, in Hollywood, or Santa Monica.

  “My darling, how are you?” croons Edith-Fleurette, nearsightedly peering at Brett. “My angel, you don’t look well—”

  “I don’t feel—”

  “Sweetheart, tell Fleurette. Or, better still, tell old Edith.” Fleurette is fond of dividing herself in this way: Fleurette the vamp, and Edith the good old pal, whose accent is faintly cockney.

  “I don’t know, but I sort of think—”

  “Oh Mary, mother of God—you’re not, please don’t tell me you’re preggers.”

  “Well, I’m not at all sure—”

  “Let me look at your eyes. Oh dear Lord God, you can’t possibly want five children. Or would this make six?”

  “Six. No, I—”

  The next day on the telephone they talked again, and the next day and the next—by which time Fleurette had arranged for them to go to San Francisco.

  Russ was surprisingly pleasant about the trip. “I’ve heard that drive is something amazing. You memorize it for me, hear? And I think it’ll do you good, you’ve been looking a little peaked. You’re not stopping off at San Simeon?”

  Their California nanny, Suzanne, would take care of Russ and the children for the five days that Brett would be gone.

  There was the magnificent Pacific. Miles and miles of winding coastal highway, above the sea, flat and brilliantly shimmering in the sunlight. Brett closed her eyes against the terrifying drama of this view, its intensity. She is not thinking, though, of any of her ordinary concerns, not of Russ or the children. Certainly not of the word she does not use, “abortion.” Her mind is filled with the prospect just before her, what she will see as soon as she opens her eyes, and then tomorrow night San Francisco. A party in their hotel.

  “There’re just these rather fun people I happen to know up there,” Fleurette has said. “They drink rather too much, but it’s fun, and perfect to take your mind off things.” After a small pause she adds, “And my mind too. I can’t seem to stop dreading this bloody war, which of course most of you Yanks don’t believe is going to happen.”

  The day after that, on the way home, more or less, they will “stop by,” as Fleurette puts it, a little clinic out in the Sunset District (“Not quite as romantic as it sounds, sweetie pie. But there are some sand dunes, and more lovely views of the sea”). Their stay at the clinic should not take more than an hour; Brett can rest in the car as they slowly drive down to L.A., “and everything by then will be hunky-dory,” said Fleurette happily, clearly looking forward to the trip.

  That night, in a large suite in the Mark Hopkins Hotel—not her own suite, though hers is quite large enough—Brett tries to explain to a kindly older man just how she feels about the sea, and California. “There was absolutely nothing else in my mind,” she tells him. “All emptied out, no room for anything but all that light and water, everything blue and shining.” She realizes that she is a little drunk, her words spinning out of control, but realizes too that it doesn’t really matter; this man doesn’t matter, and then tomorrow the knife will possibly kill her (she had not really thought of this before).

  The older man, whose name is Barney, owns theatres, movie houses. He lives up here because he likes it better than down there. He has heavy white hair and a reddish face, with narrow sad blue eyes. Brett has the crazy (drunken) thought that if he were younger they could make love—something about him, his height, perhaps, and the hard molded shape of his mouth, is vaguely exciting. What would he do if she simply leaned forward and placed her mouth against his?

  As though he had read her mind, he moves slightly away from her, and he asks, “More champagne?” But then he says, “You do have the prettiest voice.”

  Brett smiles, and wishes that she had kissed him, after all. He did look sad, and the room is so crowded that she probably won’t see him agai
n at all.

  There seem to be mostly women in the room. Shimmering lean satin thighs and bare smooth white backs, all very slightly undulating as, glimpsed between all that shimmer, that flesh, the dark suits of men can be seen to move toward drinks, or to crowd toward certain women.

  Someone, not Barney, brings Brett a drink of something she does not want, something sweet and very strong. At which she obediently sips.

  “You’re a stranger here?” this new man asks her.

  “Yes, actually just up from L.A.”

  “I thought so.” He smiles amiably, his small eyes racing around the room.

  “I guess I’m not the person you were supposed to get a drink for,” says Brett. This has seemed the polite thing to say, but it came out somehow wrong.

  “Say, that’s quite an accent you’ve got. You pick that up in L.A.?”

  “No, it’s more from where I’m from.”

  “Well, you’ve done a great job. Sounds almost real. I’ve got a friend down there sells accents, can get you any kind you want. In case you want to change.” He grins at her in a congratulatory way, so that Brett feels it would be rude to explain. Besides, she is suddenly too tired, too tired for anything.

  “Well, my lady, did you think I’d got lost?”

  It is Barney, returned with champagne—Barney who suddenly seems an old, old friend. He says, “You look very, very tired,” as the other man smiles and goes away.

  Barney leads her naturally out of that room and down the hall and into her own (but how did he know where, she later wonders? Did she give him the key? She must have). Like an old friend then he undresses her, touching her soothingly, slowly, as Brett half thinks, half feels, No harm can come of this. Not possibly.

  Partly because of all the champagne, and because she was at first so tired, Brett finds it hard, later on, to reconstruct or to remember just what happened—or, rather, how; it was all so strange, so dream- or trance-like.

  She lay naked between warm silk-smooth sheets and Barney lay beside her. He had only taken off his coat and shoes; so reassuring, no harm possible. But as he began to kiss her, at first very gently, at first just on her mouth, as he gently explored her body with his hands, new sensations of the most extreme intensity began to run all through her veins, and then to concentrate in the joining of her legs, in what she thought of as her place. As his hands and then his tongue touched her more and more deeply. She felt the familiar heat that she knew, or used to know with Russ, but then more spasms, deeper, more entire, until she felt her whole body might burst. She could not, did not then or later, think of what he was actually doing to her, kissing her there; what she remembered was an endless, endless sensation, like a series of rooms, explosions of light.

  “I have the most terrible hangover,” she says to Fleurette, who calls to wake her early that next morning.

  “Then don’t drink any water—after champagne you’ll just get drunk again.”

  “But I’m so thirsty …”

  “Hold off for orange juice. Believe me. Just get down a couple of aspirin with as little water as possible.”

  The aspirin doesn’t work—nor does the orange juice, or the coffee. She crosses the city with Fleurette dazed and miserable, unseeing.

  The doctor, a chiropractor, is Chinese. Tall and thin, extremely polite, quick and nervous.

  “Don’t make noise,” he says to her several times, in the course of the work he does on her body.

  As though she would.

  The pain is so severe (no anesthetic) that Brett has instantly recognized that if she makes the smallest whisper, if she gives in to it in any way, she is lost, gone—is mad.

  On the drive south what looked so dazzlingly beautiful two days before now is ghastly, terrifying: the sheer drop to the sea, the dizzying curves of the road.

  “Are you okay?” kind, solicitous (silly) Fleurette keeps asking.

  And Brett murmurs, “Yes, yes, I’m okay.”

  By the time they get to Kansas, she knows that she is not okay. “I had an abortion,” she whispers to the doctor. “You mustn’t tell my husband.”

  5

  At the Bigelows’ party, that hot September Sunday, the guests were all such very old friends and had been to so many parties together that it hardly mattered anymore who spoke what lines; anything uttered by anyone could as well have been said by another person. Even the presence of the new Yankees, the Bairds, and the stray comments that their stylish presence occasioned did not radically alter the general tone.

  “Trust a Yankee to show up in black on the hottest day of the year.”

  “It is September.”

  “So smart of her to keep her hair so long. I always did like that old-style way.”

  “Such a lovely day for a party!”

  “Did you see? Dolly must have been making these beaten biscuits for weeks. Her icebox must be just jam-packed with those things.”

  “Dolly. More likely Odessa.”

  “Her roses never seem to last through early September. I wonder how come mine always do.”

  “… lovely day for a party.”

  “So brave of Dolly to invite these brand-new people.”

  “You have to admit, he’s real good-looking too.”

  This last was spoken in a slightly lowered voice as Harry approached the group.

  “Oh, how do you do, Mr. Baird. We were just standing here admiring your wife’s lovely dress.”

  “Well now, that’s right kind of you ladies. I’ll tell her what you-all said.” Harry smiled a new Southern smile, to go with his new accent, and moved along; an expert party guest, he was rarely still.

  “Are the Byrds really coming later on? I heard they had this terrible accident in Oklahoma.” Paying no further attention to Harry for the moment as local talk again predominated.

  “Look a there. Jimmy Hightower’s actually drinking iced tea.”

  “Kansas. Not Oklahoma.”

  “I just love that dress. I was so sorry when they went out of style.”

  “They ran over some little child. Was that it?”

  “Horrible!”

  “Black attracts heat. We all know that down here. It’s why in the tropics, English folk wear all that white.”

  “Well, you know Brett’s handwriting. ‘Indecipherable’ is just the beginning. So God knows what they actually ran over.”

  “Yes, she does look a lot like Carole Lombard. Especially in that black dress.”

  “Wouldn’t you say more Ginger Rogers?”

  “Well, whatever they had the accident with, you can bet Russ will get a lot of new poems out of it.”

  “Oh, sometimes you’re downright mean. Ginger Rogers! So cheap!”

  “Speaking of beauties, have you all heard that Deirdre’s coming back to town?”

  “No! Deirdre Yates?”

  “Well, of course, what other Deirdre is there around these parts? With her little brother. The one her mother died in California giving birth to.”

  These Yates events were both too confusing and too terrible to contemplate for long, and so attention shifted back to the Bairds—for a moment.

  “How old is their little girl, these Bairds? Bads, whatever they call themselves.”

  “She’s around here somewhere. They brought her to meet the boys. And the Lees brought their little Betsy, I think.”

  “Too bad the Byrd kids are all still out of town. Melanctha. Now isn’t that some name?”

  “Trust Russ Byrd to name a child after some colored girl in a book.”

  “For all we know, Brett meant ran over a pig.”

  “Well, if they do show up later we’ll hear all about it.”

  “Harry darling, I’m not understanding a word that’s said to me.” Some private signals brought Cynthia and Harry to a small space beside a giant boxwood, where they could almost privately talk.

  “It’s okay, angel. You look beautiful.”

  “I don’t know, I’m not sure this black was the best of all poss
ible ideas.”

  “You’re the most stylish woman for a thousand miles around, I’ll bet on that.”

  “Oh, Harry, you’re beginning to sound like one of these people. Do you think Abby’s having fun with those boys?”

  “I hope so, she could use some new friends.”

  “I’ll go check in a little while. They’re sort of cute, those twins.”

  “Yes, but Abby’s not really interested in boys.”

  “Of course not, she’s much too young. Besides, a girls’ school.”

  “We hope.”

  “Just that little Negro boy she liked so much. That Benny.”

  “We played doctor in Connecticut but that was back when we were little kids.” Feeling herself segregated with Betsy Lee and the Bigelow boys, Abby Baird’s tone was superior, and bored—a voice she had heard from her mother, on occasion.

  “Oh well, Betsy here’s not exactly grown up.”

  The Bigelow boy, who had suggested playing doctor, now tried to push the project off on Betsy Lee.

  “Archer Bigelow, I am not so little. I’m just as old as you are.”

  “What all did you play in Connecticut, now that you’d got so old?”

  “Oh, the usual stuff. Monopoly and card games, a few kissing games at parties. And some of us liked to play tricks on our teachers.”

  “That sounds good, you know any real good tricks?”

  “Well, this boy I knew, I told him I didn’t like the chemistry teacher at all, and so he got into the lab in summer vacation and changed all the names around. The names of the chemical things, in those jars.”

  “Oh, bang! How many people killed? Much blood around?”

  “Billy Bigelow, you are not the least bit funny.”

  “Then how come you laugh all the time?”

  “Billy’s practicing to be a doctor. He loves blood and all that stuff.”

  “My father told me he once saw a colored man’s thing, and it was purple.”

  “That’s silly. Negro boys’ things are just sort of darker. No different. It’s monkeys’ that are purple.”