The Age of Miracles (2 page)

“What?” Doctor Brevard said, turning fiercely toward me. “He told your brothers that? He thought that was funny?”

“He's a great man,” I answered. “He doesn't have to worry about his masculinity. It's grounded in stuff much more imperishable than whether he can get it up or not.” I was laughing as I said it but Doctor Carter Brevard was not laughing. Maybe this is Atlanta society, I decided. Or what happens when people climb into society on their medical degrees.

 

So that sort of soured the evening, although I partially made up for it by making the doctors laugh by reading them a story about a woman who tries to stop drinking by going to live in the woods in a tent. It's a really funny story, a lot funnier than you'd imagine just to hear me tell about it.

Anyway, after the reading the doctor and his quasi-mousy interior decorator friend drove me back to the hotel and he walked me through the lobby to the elevator and stood a long time holding my hand and looking sort of half-discouraged and half-sweetly into my eyes. Then, suddenly, he pulled me to him and gave me a more than friendly hug. “I have a check for you in my pocket but I'm embarrassed to give it to you.”

“Give it here. I'm embarrassed to take it, but what the hell, I have to work for a living like everybody else.” I kept on holding his hand until he withdrew it and reached into his tuxedo pocket and took out the check and handed it to me. “You were marvelous,” he said. “Everyone was so pleased. I wish we could have paid you more.”

“This is fine. It was a nice night. You were nice to want me here.”

“Maybe I'll come and visit you sometime. I'd like to see where you live.”

“Come sit on the porch. I'll take you to meet my parents.”

“Your father really said that to your brothers?”

“He did indeed. Well, I guess I better go upstairs. Linda is waiting in the car.”

“She's only a friend. She's my decorator.”

“So she said.” I left him then and went up to my suite and turned on CNN and C-Span. Then I took a Xanax and went to sleep. What a prick-teaser, I was thinking. Is this what I've come down to now? Flying around the country letting aging doctors flirt with me and give me terrified hugs in hotel corridors? I stuck my retainer in my mouth to keep my capped teeth in place and went off to sleep in Xanax heaven. I only take sleeping potions when I'm traveling. When I'm at home I don't need anything to make me sleep.

Well, I didn't forget about it. When you haven't been laid in fourteen months and a reasonably good-looking doctor who makes at least two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year hugs you by the elevator, you don't forget it. You mull it, fantasize it, angelize it. Was it him? Was it me? Am I still cute or not? Could you get AIDS from a doctor? Maybe and maybe not. All that blood. All those C-sections on fourteen-year-old girls. There is always nonoxynol-9 and condoms, not that anyone of my generation can take that seriously.

So I was mind-fucking along like that and five or six days went by and I was back to my usual life. Writing an article on Natchez, Mississippi, for a travel magazine, exercising all afternoon, eating dinner with my parents. Then, one afternoon, just as I was putting on my bicycle shorts, the phone rang and it was Carter calling me from his office.

“I've been thinking about you. How are you? Are you all right?”

“Sure. I'm fine.”

“You were a big hit. You did the series a lot of good. Several people told me they'd attend more of the events if all the speakers were as entertaining as you were.”

“That's nice to hear. That cheers me up and makes my work seem worthwhile.”

“I don't suppose you'd like to come and visit me. I mean, visit in the country at my country house. It's very nice. I think you'd like it.”

“The one with the antiques?”

“Oh, you really don't like them?”

“I don't care if you like them. I just don't want to have to dust them.”

“Oh, I see.” Was I actually having this scintillating conversation? Was I actually going to buy an airline ticket to go see this guy and have conversations like that for three days when I could pick up the phone in Jackson, Mississippi, and talk to writers, actresses, actors, television personalities, National Public Radio disc jockeys, either of my brothers, any of my nine nieces and plenty of other people who would have talked true to me and gotten down and dirty and done service to the language bequeathed to us by William Shakespeare and William Faulkner and Eudora Welty.

You bet I was and that was not the worst of it. I was going to a wedding. “I'll tell you what,” he proposed. “I'm having a wedding for my daughter in June. Would you come and be the hostess? She's a lovely girl. I have four children. Two are my wife's from a previous marriage. Two are my own, also from a previous marriage. It's going to be a garden wedding in my country house.”

“With the antiques?”

“Very old-fashioned. The girls will all wear garden hats. The gardens will be in bloom. Some other famous people are coming. You won't be the only famous person there.”

“I'm not famous.”

“Yes, you are. Everyone here has heard of you.”

“Well, why not. Okay, I'll come and be your hostess. I won't have to do anything, will I?”

“No, just be here. Be my date.”

“Your date?” I started getting horny. Can you believe it? Talking to this man I barely knew on the phone I started wanting to fuck him?

Oh, yes. After the wedding, after the guests went away singing my praises, we would go upstairs and with his obstetrical skills he would make me come. Oh, life, oh, joy, oh, fecund and beautiful old world, oh, sexy, sexy world. “With everything either concave or convex, whatever we do will be something with sex.”

The next morning two dozen yellow roses arrived with a note.

I tried to lose a little weight. Every time he would call and do his husky can't-wait-to-see-you thing on the phone I would not eat for hours. Remember, it was late spring and the world was blooming, blooming, blooming, “stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

I had my white silk shantung suit cleaned and bought some new shoes. It is a very severe white suit with a mandarin jacket and I wear it with no jewelry except tiny pearl earrings and my hair pulled back in a bun like a dancer's.

“I want you to have gorgeous flowers,” he said on the phone one afternoon. It was raining outside. I was sprawled on a satin comforter flirting with him on the phone. “What are you going to wear?”

“A severe white suit with my hair in a bun. All I could possibly wear would be a gardenia for my hair and I'm not sure I'll wear that.”

“Oh, I thought you might wear a dress.”

“I don't like dresses. I like sophisticated suits. I might wear a Donna Karan pantsuit. Listen, Carter, I know what looks good on me.”

“I thought you might like something like a Laura Ashley. I'd like to buy you one. Let me send you some dresses. What size do you wear?”

“Those tacky little-girl clothes? No grown woman would wear anything like that. You've got to be kidding.”

“I thought. That picture in that magazine.”

“In that off-the-shoulder blouse? I only had that on because I was in New Orleans and it was hot as hell. Then that photographer caught up with me. It was the year I was famous, God forbid.”

“I wish you'd wear a flowered dress from Laura Ashley. I'll have them send you some. I know the woman who runs the store here. She's a good friend of mine.”

Wouldn't you think I would have heard that gong? Wouldn't you think that someone with my intelligence and intuition would have stopped to think? Don't you think I knew he was talking about his dead wife? A size six or eight from smoking who let him go down to Laura Ashley and buy her flowered dresses with full skirts and probably even sheets and pillowcases and dust ruffles to go on the antique beds and said, Oh, Daddy, what can I do to thank you for all this flowered cotton?

Listen, was I that lonely? Was I that horny? Right there in Jackson, Mississippi, with half the old boyfriends in my life a phone call away and plenty more where they came from if only I could conquer my fear of AIDS and quit eating dinner every night with my parents.

“All right,” I said. “Send me one or two. A ten will do. I can take it up if it's too big.”

So then I really had to go on a diet. Had to starve myself morning, night, and noon and add three miles a day to the miles I ran and go up to six aerobic classes a week.

By the time the dress arrived I was a ten. Almost. It was blue and pink and green and flowered. It came down to my ankles. Its full skirt covered up the only thin part of my body. Its coy little neckline made my strong shoulders and arms look absurd. Worst of all, there was a see-through garden hat trimmed in flowers.

Was I actually going to wear this out in public? I had the hots for a guy who had to have everything I take for granted explained to him. In exchange for which he had given me a dead wife, three C-sections performed in the middle of the night wearing double gloves, two dozen roses, a check for two thousand dollars, and one long slow hug by the elevator. You figure it out. Women and their desire to please wealthy, self-made men. Think about that sometime if you get stuck in traffic in the rain.

I found a Chinese seamstress and we managed to make the dress fit me by taking material out of the seams and adding it to the waist. We undid the elastic in the sleeves and lengthened them with part of the band on the hat. I found an old Merry Widow in my mother's cedar chest. Strapped into that I managed to look like a tennis player masquerading as a shepherdess.

In the end I packed two suitcases. One with the Laura Ashley special and its accoutrements. The other with my white shantung suit and some extremely high platform shoes, to make me as tall as he was.

I left Jackson with the two suitcases, two hatboxes, and a cosmetic kit. An extra carry-on contained my retainer, my Xanax, a package of rubbers and a tube of contraceptive jelly containing nonoxynol-9, and a book of poems by Anne Sexton.

He was waiting at the gate, wearing a seersucker suit and an open shirt. He was taking the weekend off. We went to his town house first and he showed me all around it, telling me about the antiques and where he and his wife had bought them. “My first wife will be at the wedding,” he said at last. “Don't worry about it. She's very nice. She's the bride's mother.”

“How many wives have you had?”

“Just those two. You don't mind, do you? There's a guest cottage at the country house. She and her husband are staying there.”

“Oh, sure. I mean, that's fine. Why would that matter to me?”

“You won't have to see her if you don't want to. I thought we'd stay in town tonight and go out there tomorrow morning. The wedding is in the afternoon. Everything's done. The caterer is taking care of everything, and Donna is there to oversee him.”

“Donna?”

“The bride's mother.”

“And I'm your date.”

“If you don't mind. I thought we'd go downtown and hear jazz tonight. There's a good group playing at the Meridien.”

My antennae were going up, up, up. This was turning into a minefield. I had starved myself for two weeks to show off for his ex-wife and tiptoe around this minefield? I could have been in New Orleans with my cousins. I could have been in New York City seeing the American Ballet Theatre. I could have been in San Francisco visiting Lydia. I could have gone to Belize to go scuba-diving. I could have driven to the Grand Canyon.

“I can't wait to see the country house,” I said. “Since you've told me so much about it.” But that was a thrill postponed. We went first to his town house.

He showed me to my room. A Laura Ashley special. Enough chintz to start an empire. So many ruffles, so many little oblong mirrors and dainty painted chairs.

“You want me to sleep in here?” I asked. “Where do you sleep?”

“You can sleep wherever you like. I just thought you'd like your own room. Would you like to see the other ones? To see if there is one you might like better?”

Always play your own game, my old man had taught me. Never play someone else's game. “The room's fine. I mean, aren't you going to sleep with me? I'm a grown woman, Carter. I didn't come down here to dress up like a shepherdess and let you show me off to your friends. I thought you wanted to make love to me. What was all that talk on the phone? I mean, what are we doing here?” I sat back on the chintz bed. It was not the sort of atmosphere in which a fifty-year-old woman can feel sexy, but I tried.

“I wanted to take you to dinner first. Then to hear some jazz.”

“What's wrong with now? We are alone, aren't we?”

“Now?” He stood very still. I could see the receding hairline and the bags under his eyes and there was no spark, no tinder, sulfur, or electricity.

“Never mind,” I said. “Well, if you'll leave me, I'll unpack. I wouldn't want my wedding clothes to be wrinkled.”

“If you really want to…”

“Never mind. I just wanted to know what was going on. Go on, I'll unpack and freshen up and we can go out to dinner.”

“I have reservations at the club at eight.”

“Fine. I'll be ready.”

I patted him on the arm and he turned and left the room. I opened the suitcases and hung up the dress and suit. I took a bath and put on a black silk Donna Karan with small pearl earrings and went downstairs and waited in the overstuffed living room. In a while he joined me and we went out and had dinner and he got drunk and then we heard some jazz and he got drunker and then we went home and he got into the chintz-covered bed with me and made me come with his fingers. I'll say this for him, he lived up to my expectations in that corner. He knew how to use his fingers. In maybe two minutes he made me have an incredible orgasm and he had done it with his fingers. “I can't make love,” he moaned into my shoulder after it was over. “I can't desire women I admire. I can only desire young girls that I can't stand to talk to. I don't know what's wrong with me.”