Off Season (26 page)

“Let’s see, what do I remember most?” I said to Kitty on this September day, when the sun was warm on our faces and forearms but promissory cool breathed in with the tide. It was utterly still and peaceful; tiny golden motes danced above the water in the slanting sunlight, and water bugs skated on its green surface, and the bay itself slapped and wallowed peacefully in the reeds along its shore.

“Well,
that
, of course.” Kitty grinned. “But I mean the ceremony itself.”

“I remember that some errant insect got up under Cam’s kilt and he nearly bolted like a spooked mule, and I had an asthma attack literally at the altar. It was the wedding of the century in Carter’s Cove.” Kitty turned over onto her back and laughed joyously. I thought her rich, deep laugh might have been heard far inland.

“I’d give anything to see Cameron McCall in a kilt. Those humongously long hairy legs under that little skirt, and those wild, Scot eyes. He must have looked like the original highland barbarian.
Braveheart
.

“Well, you could have had the big Tidewater wedding and reception at McCall’s Point,” Kitty continued. “Six hundred well-bred guests and little black boys in white aprons serving drinks in the gahdun, don’cha know, and the family silver shining like new money on a bare behind. Mama McCall would have loved it. She might even have come to like you. But no, you had to run off to some cabin on the rocks in Maine.”

“Edgewater isn’t some cabin on the rocks, as you well know, seeing as how you come up every summer. And Mama McCall wouldn’t have liked me if I had been deb of the year and had a dowry of five hundred elephants and trunks of gold,” I said. “Did you know that when Cam told her we were married, she said ‘You two?’ She was holding out for Beatrice Custis right until Cam and I said ‘I do.’”

“So was Bebe Custis, and all the assorted Custises who’ve been haunting this river for all these hundreds of years. Just think what vigorous new blood would have meant to that tribe—not only a fresh shot of McCall money, but blood, and blue blood at that. Not much money or blood left in the Custis coffers these days. Been marrying cousins too long. They look like a school of flounders, all those flat noses and lips and eyes out on stems. I bet they just couldn’t stand the idea of the family’s savior hooking up with a woman who was not even from the Tidewater, but D.C., for God’s sake. They think nobody lives in D.C. but lobbyists and little guys with plastic penholders and slide rules in their pockets. Oh—and of course maids and gardeners and things.”

“Oh, come on, Kitty. Most of them go to parties and dances at the embassies and clubs all the time, and to the White House, too, come to that. And lots of Georgetown dinner parties. Not all of them can still think D.C. is—déclassé.”

“Oh, it’s okay to party with ’em, but marry one of them? For that you’ve got to have a Tidewater plantation girl. Only trouble is, there aren’t any left who aren’t as inbred and fish-faced as the Custises. I can’t imagine what everybody said when Cam first brought you home to meet the family and the few hundred assembled neighbors. You with that hair floating all over the place, and those oceany eyes, and those boobs that weighed more than most of their firstborns.”

I raised myself on one arm and looked down at my chest. Under my Washington Senators T-shirt, faded no-color now with age and washings, my breasts looked flattened from the boards of the dock and wet with sweat from the sun and the occasional surly little splash from the bay.

“‘Alas, poor Yorick,’” I said. “‘I knew him, Horatio.’”

“You do okay for an old broad of fifty-six, married thirty-eight years and with two grown kids,” Kitty said, complacently regarding her own spectacular, beetling breasts. “But of course compared to mine, yours aren’t even in the ballpark. These are the jugs that launched a thousand ships, or a thousand Chevy backseats, anyway. They’re semi-retired, but they still do an exhibition game every now and then, anyway.”

“You wish,” I said fondly. Kitty was still a formidable-looking woman, but she was six years older than I—Cam’s age—and she wore the extra years in folds around her waist and stomach and her massive brown upper arms and thighs. Almost every inch of her in plain view was freckled. Her red hair was still a bonfire on her head, also like Cam’s, but she did not often bother to have it cut or styled, and it had a frothing, sometimes belligerent life of its own. The oversized tortoiseshell spectacles she wore magnified her hazel eyes into something exotic, if slightly buggish. I often wondered why it all added up to such a forcefully attractive whole, but the truth was that Kitty Howard still turned heads and elicited spontaneous smiles wherever she went.

“She’s everybody’s nanny and mother and favorite aunt and first lay all rolled into one,” Cam said once. He had known her since they were both children at the same country kindergarten, a rather tony one I gathered, since Cam’s mother would have sent him to no other sort, and Kitty’s family was as rich in land, if not dollars, as Cam’s. There was little about each other’s provenance they did not know.

“Did you ever date her?” I asked him once.

“God, no. I’d have bored her to death. She knew more about sex in the first grade than I did in the eighth. By the time I was running around with cheerleaders she had worked her way through the entire United States Naval Academy. I think they once considered putting up a bronze statue of her boobs on the parade field.”

“But she never married,” I said thoughtfully.

“I think she did, once,” Cam said. “When I went off to architecture school she just . . . vanished for a couple of years. Her parents said she’d gone west to school, and she may have; Berkeley would have suited her perfectly. But somebody or other said they ran into her at the Top of the Mark in San Francisco around then, and she was with a dark little man with a mustache she introduced as her husband—a Greek or something. He didn’t talk much. But she came back here without him a couple of years later, and refused to live with her parents, probably to their secret relief, and bought the old Eaton house and turned it into a B-and-B, and there she’s been ever since. I don’t know where she got the money to buy it. Not from her folks, I’m sure of that. They never did approve of her, and while she was gone they sold the old plantation to that resort development those beer people are putting up and moved to Palm Beach. I think they still live there, and I know there’s still a bunch of money in the family. My dad talks to hers sometimes. But I doubt she’ll ever see a penny of it.”

“Was it all those men that did it? There doesn’t seem to be a man in the Tidewater she doesn’t know—biblically, I mean.”

“No. It was probably Berkeley. They could handle the screwing around; every family around here has one or more Kittys in it. But by God, nobody has a liberal.”

I snorted. I knew this only too well.

“So what happened to the mustachioed Greek?”

He shrugged. “Nobody knows. I think he just . . . vaporized one night in the sack with her. She’s something else between the sheets, I hear.”

“You hear?”

“Yep. By the time I might have been tempted to see what it was all about, I’d met you and the screwing situation was taken care of.”

“Cam!”

“Well, it was. After we finally did it, I knew you’d always be my one and only screw.”

“I swear to God, you sound like that’s all we ever did.”

“Well, for a while it was. Especially after we got married and didn’t have to do it in the backseat of that old Porsche, or, even worse, on that grungy mat in your basement that was under the trapeze. I knew your dad was listening at the heat register. I once thought of trying it out on that trapeze itself, but it wasn’t a good time to bust my ass. What with us just getting started up. But sanctified joy is much better than sneaky screwing.”

“Sanctified joy?”

“It was what the first missionaries to Hawaii called married sex. If God is for you, I guess you can always get it up.”

“And you know this how?”

“Girl I used to know told me about it. I think maybe she was pushing for the sanctification before the joy.”

“Whatever became of that one?”

“Don’t remember. Just remember about sanctified joy.”

It was no secret even to me by now that Cam McCall had had more girlfriends than a shah. He told me himself right at our start, I suppose before I could hear it somewhere else. His friends had teased him about it when they were with us, and Kitty Howard had filled me in on all the details when we first met.

“Never more than one at a time,” she’d said, “but he started early. And while he was with a girl, he wouldn’t let her out of his sight. Just glued to her. It was almost scary. But none of them lasted. I asked him why once and he said that none of them ever really fit him. I didn’t know what he was talking about until he met you. He told a bunch of us at the country club that he’d found the only girl who’d ever fit exactly into his arms and up against him. Under him was implied.”

“The hell you say. We didn’t . . . do that until the night before we got married. And when we did do it we decided to get married right away, as soon as possible, the next day, and a honeymoon on the Friendship sloop my father had, way out into the Gulf of Maine and up as far as Campobello. It was a wonder we didn’t drown on that honeymoon. We let the sloop just drift for hours at a time.”

“It’s a wonder you ever got married at all,” Kitty said. “With the combined forces of the Tidewater and Kalorama Circle against you, I wouldn’t have given a plugged nickel for your chances when I heard you-all were married. I was in Italy then, for a year in Florence, or I would have come straight home and stood beside you on the ramparts.”

I looked at her. Not get married? Of course we would marry. We both knew that while I stood in the circle of Cam’s arms at Luigi’s the night we met and when he leaned over and kissed me before he even knew my name.

“I’m Cameron McCall,” he’d said into my hair. “I live down on the James River and I’m an architect. Do you think you might marry me?”

“I’m Lilly Constable,” I said against his shirt, feeling the heat and strength of his arms and his solid, tall body against mine. Safety. Utter safety.

“I live on Kalorama Circle and I’m starting at GW in the fall, and I think I might. Marry you, I mean.”

Kitty had been right about the outcry, though. The first came from Aunt Tatty, who stood in the door of Luigi’s and watched in disbelief when I ran into the arms of a big red stranger and kissed him. I don’t think she moved until I disentangled myself from Cam and turned and led him over to where she stood, iron faced, with two hectic red spots on her cheeks.

“I didn’t realize you were meeting a friend, Lilly,” she said icily.

“I’m not,” I said stupidly. “Or not until just now. Aunt Tatty, this is Cameron McCall. He’s an architect; he just finished his graduate studies at GW. He lives out on the James River. Cam, this is my Aunt Tatty Glover. Well, not really my aunt, but—you know.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Glover,” Cam said, putting out an enormous red-furred hand.

“Lilly, they’re holding our table, and your father will be here in a moment. Come along now,” she said, looking only at me and ignoring Cam’s outstretched hand.

She took me by the shoulder and started to march me away. I gave Cam a despairing look and he laughed. It was the same joyous, piratical laugh I had heard before. Then Aunt Tatty turned.

“Are your people by any chance the McCalls who live at McCall’s Point? Out near Williamsburg?”

“Yes ma’am. That would be us.”

“I believe I’ve met your mother. At the Sulgrave Club, I think,” Aunt Tatty said in a different tone. It was a silky, lilting tone. I stared at her and then at Cam.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Cam said. “It’s one of her hangouts.”

“Well, perhaps you’d join us for dinner,” Tatty said. “It’s just Lilly and me and her father, who’s a bit late now. He’s a professor at George Washington. English. You may have heard of him.”

“Professor Constable,” Cam said. “Of course, who hasn’t? He’s a legend at GW. I tried twice to get into one of his undergraduate classes, but they were full both times. I’ve always regretted that.”

“Well,” Aunt Tatty said, and smiled. “Let’s sit down. While we’re waiting for him you can tell me how you and Lilly met. I can’t remember her saying a word about you, but Lilly can be rather vague at times.”

“We just met tonight,” Cam said, grinning. “About ten minutes ago. I thought she was someone else. I’m very glad she wasn’t.”

“Oh,” Aunt Tatty said in a strangled voice. “Well.”

We were just sitting down, Cam pulling out first Aunt Tatty’s chair and then mine, when my father appeared in the door. He scanned the room for us, spied us, smiled widely, and then stopped in his tracks.

Oh God,
I remembered thinking wearily.
I can just imagine what we’re going to have to go through now.

Guilt flooded me then. I had never thought such a thing in my life about my father. Ever since my mother’s death, and longer, really, he had been my lifeline. My refuge, my future. Could a person really change as drastically and swiftly as I felt I had when I met Cam? Was it even possible, or was this whole thing a magical delusion born of a laugh, a pair of arms? It sounded absurd, impossible, and sometimes it feels so to me even today. But I knew in some down-deep way that it had indeed happened to me, and the world that had so threatened and confused me for so long was simply gone, and a world that contained Cam and laughter and love and physical longing so acute that it weakened my wrists and knees had been born. The rubber suit tore and peeled away. The helmet went spinning into forever. Before was then. Cam was now.

I knew that my father saw it too, and pain and guilt so flooded me that I simply wanted to take my father and run away from this place and Cam, back to where we had been before. But only for a moment. I took the only way possible for me now.

“Daddy,” I said, when he had come slowly over to the table trying so hard to look merely pleasantly interested that his face muscles bunched with the effort. “This is Cameron McCall. He just graduated from architecture grad school and he lives on the James River, and—I really hope you’ll like him.”