Homeplace (21 page)

“Don’t be silly. You need to get out, and you haven’t ever seen my house,” she said, when Mike had protested that the little dinner party would be too much effort, with Duck’s mother needing so much attention.

“I’ll just sweeten up her five o’clock medicine a tad,” DeeDee said, dabbing at her sweat-bedewed upper lip with the tail of her astounding coral T-shirt. “I think it’s got belladonna or something in it. She nods right off, usually. You think I’m going to let my little sister sit over here in this heat eating in front of the television set when my house is all air-conditioned and my famous Coca-Cola ham is already in the oven?”

“Well, that’s sweet of you, and I’d love to come,” Mike lied. The thought of DeeDee’s great, fat-glistening ham, basted liberally with Coca-Cola, that she had been much praised for in high school home economics, was about as appetizing as eating boiled, rice-stuffed dog, Chinese-style.

“Oh, I’m glad,” DeeDee bubbled, and Mike thought that she did sound glad; sounded almost excited.

“I hope you’re not going to work yourself to death,” she said. “It’s just plain too hot to eat much, let alone cook all day.”

“Oh, shoot, I need a little festivity as much as anybody,” DeeDee said. “I don’t ever go anywhere or do anything but church, and I don’t even do that since Mama Wingo came. This will be a real treat for me. Duck, too. You come on, hear?”

“I will, then.”

“And Mikie, put on something besides pants, why don’t you? Something pretty.” DeeDee said it archly, but she was looking at Mike closely, and something in her gaze reminded Mike of Sam Canaday’s eyes as they had followed her into the house that afternoon.

Why does everybody keep
looking
at me? she wondered fretfully.

“What’s wrong with pants?” she said to DeeDee.

“Oh, nothing,” her sister said, smiling placatingly. “You just look like a skinny little boy in them, that’s all. And you could be so pretty. It sort of hurts me to see you looking so … thin and unfeminine. Not that you look
bad
, you understand, just …”

“I know,” Mike smiled at her discomfort. “Thin and unfeminine.”

She remembered what Priss had said about DeeDee, about how she must seem to her sister: slender and alien and severely chic in her narrow pants and shirts and expensive shoes.

“Okay, Dee,” she said. “I promise. The ruffledy-est thing I’ve got. Scarlett O’Hara wouldn’t be caught dead in it.”

“Good,” DeeDee said, waddling heavily across the parched grass to where her battered little Volkswagen beetle squatted under one of the great water oaks. It had a huge orange daisy fastened to the end of its radio antenna.

“You’ll be glad you did,” she called back over her shoulder.

“Sure I will,” Mike called back. “And Mama Wingo will be enchanted.”

“She won’t be the only one,” DeeDee caroled gaily, and got into the beetle and closed the door tinnily.

Mike went back into the house and shut the front door against the exhausted evening air. At a quarter of eight, the thermometer beside the front door read ninety-four degrees.

T
HE FIRST THING SHE THOUGHT WHEN SHE SAW HIM WAS THAT
she should have known from DeeDee’s behavior the previous night that he would be here. The second was that he had become the only kind of man possible to him: that he had been genetically programmed at birth to look like this in his fortieth year.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice sounded faraway and fragile in her own ears. “I might have known I’d find you here.”

And then, because it sounded so rude and abrupt, she flushed violently and was so embarrassed by the flood of heat on her neck and face that she reddened a second time.

“Hello,” said Bayard Sewell. “I
did
know I’d find you here.”

He rose from the La-Z-Boy recliner in the Wingos’ stunted, pine-paneled den and walked across the orange shag carpet toward her, hand outstretched, as she had last seen him in the foyer of her father’s house on a summer night two decades before. He moved as lightly as always, like a hip-hung jungle cat, and as deliberately, and Mike thought that she might have watched him walk toward her in just that way only hours before,
instead of years. She put out her hand, and he covered it with his.

“Cat got your tongue?” He smiled, his teeth flashing white in the sun-dark of his face. He had said it to her many times, she remembered, when anger or some other strong emotion had silenced her temporarily. He bent and kissed her cheek, and Mike made the ridiculous, automatic air-kissing motion that she had learned long ago in Manhattan beside his ear. He smelled of starched cotton and gin and something indefinable that had always been Bayard. Had she been long blinded, Mike would have known that it was Bayard Sewell who kissed her by the smell of him.

“It’s good to see you, Bay,” she said. “Priss told me you were still here. I was a little surprised. You look … just like you always did.”

What in God’s name is the matter with me? she thought detachedly, still smiling her cool social smile at him, her hand still in his. My brain has turned to syrup. He doesn’t look in the least like he always did. He is the best-looking man I have ever seen.

He was not, of course, but he was undoubtedly an arresting man. Heads would and undoubtedly did turn after him frequently in public places. He had the sort of visual impact that certain celebrities have, and heads of state; something indefinable that stopped the eye and breath without any debt to conventional handsomeness. On a trip to Washington with her sophomore class, Mike had seen President John Kennedy rise to throw out the first ball at a Senators’ game, and had felt the same leaping wildfire force about his sheer physical presence. Bayard Sewell was as apparently unaware of his aura as the young president had been.

He was lean to thinness, and his thick, dark hair was frosted now with gray, and there were deep creases in his narrow face, the kind that pain leaves, and webs of fine wrinkles beside his eyes that stood out like white
cross-hatching. He wore sharply creased khakis and a blue oxford shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled up to expose his forearms. His feet were thrust sockless into age-softened Topsiders. It was the uniform of her rime and caste, as familiar to her as any other accoutrement of her world in the East, but it seemed on Bayard Sewell as if some cosmic tailor had fitted him alone in the twentieth century to wear it. His hand over hers was warm, almost hot, and a small pulse leaped in the hollow of his throat. Otherwise, he might have been carved of ebony and blue ice and some sort of golden wood.

“You don’t,” Bayard Sewell said, leading her across the hideous carpet to the pine-and-leather sofa between the twin recliners, at the end of the room. “You look better than you ever did, and just as good as I thought you would. I like you in ruffles. You never used to wear them.”

“I never used to dare,” Mike said lightly, hating the ruffled skirt and embroidered blouse that she had bought on some long-forgotten impulse in Puerto Vallarta and seldom worn since. Derek Blessing had told her once that she looked like a plucked duckling in a doily in the clothes, and she had regretted the lapse from androgynous simplicity and not repeated it. She felt mild rage at DeeDee for tricking her into furbelows for Bayard Sewell’s sake, and disgust at herself for allowing the manipulation.

They sat down on the sofa, and he leaned back and crossed one bare ankle over the other knee and laced his fingers behind his dark head.

“You were probably lured over here under distinctly false pretenses, and I should feel badly about it, but I don’t,” he said. “I’m gladder to see you than I can say, and I was afraid you wouldn’t want to see me. I put DeeDee up to this, so you can spare her your considerable wrath.”

“Why on earth did you think I wouldn’t want to see
you?” Mike asked. Inside the bell jar there was a curious shortness to her breath, as if she could not lift her words out on it.

“After my performance the last time I saw you, you’d have every right to turn around and walk out of here,” he said simply, and all at once things were all right again, uncomplicatedly and ordinarily all right and okay.

“I haven’t thought of that in years.” She smiled, a free and natural smile now, feeling nothing so much as pure, unremarkable comfort.

“I have,” he said, but he smiled too. The smile deepened the creases beside his mouth and wrapped their last searing meeting in light and tossed it forever away.

The swinging door at the opposite end of the den opened, and DeeDee came sweeping into the room with a tray, propelled by a powerful gust of Krystle. She wore a vast peony-printed caftan that was caught under her huge breasts by a velvet drawstring, leaving bat-wing sleeves to fall free from her great white arms. The sleeves were so amply cut that Mike could see her sister’s fiercely boned and cantilevered brassiere, cutting so deeply into the bleached flesh that it lapped and surged over the stout nylon and buried it. DeeDee’s cleavage was beyond reaction tonight; the deep V of the caftan must have been chosen to showcase it. Pink crystal beads slid hopelessly into it, and matching crystal chandeliers swung at DeeDee’s shapely little ears. Her heavy black hair was loose down her back tonight, and gave her the look of an immense and terrifyingly arch witch. Her eyelids were the pure flat blue of a bluejay’s wing, and stark black rimmed her eyes and arched her brows. On her little feet were high-heeled gold mules. Mike wanted to avert her eyes and felt the heat rising again on her neck, but Bayard Sewell gave DeeDee an easy smile.

“The matchmaker cometh,” he said, and there was affection in his voice as well as amusement.

“Well, you two, are you getting reacquainted after all these years?” DeeDee piped, putting the tray down on the raw yellow pine coffee table in front of the sofa. The table was shaped, vaguely, like a kidney. On the tray were little frankfurters wrapped in bacon on toothpicks, and a bowl of something colored a primary purple.

She gave Mike a hostessy red smile and patted Bayard Sewell proprietarily on the shoulder and lowered her flowered bulk into the recliner nearest him. Her short legs flew a little into the air, and the gilt mules flashed up at Mike. The soles were so new that they bore no scratches, and as DeeDee pulled herself upright by the arms of the recliner, Mike caught a glimpse of a dangling price tag under one bat-winged arm. Her heart twisted suddenly with pity for the pretty, petite good girl buried somewhere deep in the hopeless flesh of this mountainous woman. DeeDee’s flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, as well as the new finery and the Krystle, spoke of the rarity of this small party. Mike resolved to take DeeDee into Atlanta soon and often for shopping and movies and lunches and such other treats as she would accept.

“What’s to catch up on?” Bayard Sewell said. “I know everything about Mike; I’ve read everything she’s ever written, and you’ve kept me posted on the rest of it. She’s left us all in the dust, and I’ve been applauding her trajectory for years. And God knows there’s precious little to know about me, and what there is I’m sure you told her before her feet hit the ground at the airport.”

His smile took the heat out of his words, and DeeDee made a grotesquely coy grimace.

“I never did, Mr. Smartypants, so there.” She dimpled at him. “I didn’t say and she didn’t ask. If she
knows anything about you, she found out from somebody besides me. Conceited thing.”

“I know about all the honors and the career and the legislature and being mayor and everything because Priss told me,” Mike said. “None of it surprised me. I was only surprised because he was still in Lytton. I thought he’d at least be president by now.”

She smiled at her sister and Bayard Sewell in turn, who gave her an exaggerated leer of mock modesty.

“What’s wrong with Lytton?” DeeDee cried. “Who’d appreciate him more than we do in Lytton? And
pooh
about being president; did Priss tell you he was Mr. South Fulton County last year? Nobody from Lytton has ever been that before. He got a plaque and a silver cup and there was an
enormous
banquet for him.”

“All that was missing was the white smoke coming out the chimney,” Bayard Sewell said. “But everybody
did
get to kiss my ring.”

“Kiss your ring? Nobody kissed your ring, you silly—” began DeeDee.

“Congratulations, your Holiness,” Mike said quickly. “Everybody must be awfully proud of you. Why aren’t you at Castel Gondolfo in this heat?”

“Bay’s just back from Tennessee,” DeeDee said.

“Just as good.” Mike twinkled at him. A secret glee seemed to bubble somewhere deep within her; a small part of her wanted to giggle and laugh and hold her sides. The rest of her stood far back and smiled with indulgent amusement at the silly-child part. It had not shown itself in many years.

“Were you waltzing with your darling?” the silly-child part said brightly.

“Well, not exactly,” he said. “But I did bring her home.”

Mike remembered Priss Comfort’s words about Bayard
Sewell’s wife and her illness, and flinched. He caught the movement, slight though it was.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I know Priss probably told you Sally wasn’t well. She’s been in the hospital in Nashville, and she’s much better. I’m glad to have her home. But she wasn’t quite up to tonight, so I came by myself. Dee and Duck are family enough so I felt like I could.”

“Bay!” Duck Wingo’s voice bellowed from behind the swinging door. “Get off your scrawny ass and help me with these martinis. Anybody that drinks these goddamn things in my house got to make ‘em himself.”

Mike frowned involuntarily at the bludgeoning familiarity of the voice and words, but Bayard winked at them and got up lazily from the sofa and padded toward the kitchen. In the dreadful, overcrowded, and bibeloted little den he looked more than ever like an attenuated great cat in a western doll’s house.

“Excuse me while I save the holy elixir from the infidel,” he said, and disappeared behind the swinging door. He moved with the ease born of long familiarity, but Mike found it nearly impossible to imagine that he had spent much time in this house. He might have been the spawn of an entirely different planet than DeeDee and Duck Wingo.