Happily, the drive turned out uneventful, though spooky. My thoughts ran amongst a matrix of remote associations. Thinking
of the old woman living in these foggy Georgia hills had mournful lyrics running around my brain, of a Civil War widow wandering
through the Southern mountains. The trick was that you really couldn’t say whether it were a madwoman or a ghost, weeping
there in the morning rain, who no longer remembered that the war had ended forty years before.
Old Dixie was certainly the place for time-haunted souls. I recalled Seabrook and his advertising agency in the ’teens, which
Ward Greene had portrayed setting up a reunion of the elderly Confederate veterans then still living. Someday soon, I wanted
to track down what records might still exist in Atlanta to confirm Greene’s image of the agency doing the publicity work on
Birth of a Nation.
I’d seen that classic reactionary film in Nashville, during the same long-ago Southern tour that had brought Linda and me
to
The Château.
“I’m hungry!” Justine startled me. Issuing a sleepy litany of complaints on everything
except
her unquestionable discomfort, she then dropped her seat back and turned away. That jogged my stream of consciousness back
toward boyhood, to the ruins of a Civil War–era structure, still standing alongside a shunned river-bottom road. My parents
would point it out to me during infernally hot automobile trips in a 1952 Dodge. I would kneel in the seat and watch out the
back window as it receded into the heat waves billowing off the Texas asphalt. It would seem to me that the mighty conflict
had been just over my shoulder, rather than a long lifetime before my birth.
Maybe that cast some light on how I’d been touched by the poignant conclusion of Ward Moore’s classic book,
Bring the Jubilee.
Perhaps derivative of Leinster’s original, his time traveler had lamented, after more or less accidentally changing the course
of the Civil War:
Are they really gone, irrevocably lost, in a future which never existed, which couldn’t exist, once the chain of causation
was broken? Or do they exist after all, in a universe in which the South won the battle of Gettysburg… I would give so much
to believe this, but I cannot… Children know about such things. They close their eyes and pray, “Please God, make it didn’t
happen.” Often they open their eyes to find it happened anyway, but this does not shake their faith that many times the prayer
is granted.
Adults smile, but can any of them be sure the memories they cherish were the same yesterday? Do they know that a past cannot
be expunged? Children know it can. And once lost, that particular past can never be regained. Another and another, perhaps,
but never the same one. There are no parallel universes—though this one may be sinuous and inconstant.
67
My reverie on continuities, or the lack of same, was hardly diminished as I eased the Del Sol through the fog-shrouded streets
of Buford and up to the house. Justine’s disoriented state had morphed into fitful sleep. I was concerned that a healthy young
adult should so succumb to the degree of physical stress she had endured. I felt certain that more was going on there.
As I beheld the gay window lights through the trees and fog, something of indeterminate origin twisted in my heart. Shutting
down the engine, I contemplated the drowsing girl. Matted hair curled about her face, like the photo I’d seen of a girl Seabrook
had trussed up back in 1930. The colors of the lamps across her face brought back lines…
“… the colors and the lines that trace the past will in the semi-darkness form a face, a sleeping face…” Where did that come
from? How did the rest go?
Remembering her little thought about the old woman wanting to have a light in every window, I shook myself to dispel something
cold that had crept in with the fog. Of course she had a connection with the old woman! She was of her flesh and blood. Perhaps
of Seabrook’s as well, it had been suggested. Of course echoes of those old selves would resonate within her being. Conventional
theory be damned, we
do
have a multifaceted connection with those gone before. We feel it in our very flesh.
The rain returned as I steered her inside, mulling her remarks in San Antonio about sugar imbalance. The lassitude and disorientation
might well have a physiological basis. Rummaging through her flatly disgusting kitchen, I could come up with only a package
of peanut-butter crackers. Justine lazily munched them while I sponged her off. I toweled her dry, salving the more acute
abrasions, then crawled into bed beside her. Such a rainy Wednesday morning was good for sleeping in. I roused only a couple
of times to the sound of the rain rattling on the tin roof.
_____________
I
LAY THERE IN A KIND OF TWILIGHT,
reconstructing what I could of strange dreams and consolidating them into memory. Figures like skydivers, in a snowflake
formation, reminded me of my ritual dancers, but I drew back from the association. Permitting such assignments may lead the
conscious layers to reinterpret images as stitched-together composites—images that, while unfamiliar, may be quite discrete.
I watched them turning and turning until they collapsed into one another like a string of paper dolls.
Another seemed even more the typical sort of mixed-image-fest. I was in the old shelter house at the lake. But rather than
JJ, I was talking with Justine, wearing the old party dress from the chest upstairs. She had been offering me a gift, a tray
on which, instead of hors d’oeuvres, there was an octagonal icon. As I watched, crystals grew out of it at strange angles,
like sections of a hypercube unfolding.
I awoke in the afternoon when I’d thrown my arm about Justine’s shoulders and she’d whimpered. I started away, but she reached
back for my hand. Turning over with a soft moan, she nuzzled my neck. “Can’t find a comfortable position,” she murmured.
“Sort of what we had in mind,” I ventured, “or didn’t you anticipate that going with the territory?” She giggled and hugged
me, inquiring whether I wanted to make love. “Yes, it’s true that we old men are best right after waking, but you must know
that’s going to hurt for sure.”
She bit my ear. “I’m a wreck, I truly am,” she teased sleepily. “Come on, lazybones. We’ll do slow-processing.” Loving her,
I was again home and happy. You have to understand that happy was something I had never expected to know again. Her movements,
that time, were slow and deliberate. She liked to talk after penetration, as do I. “Rewind what she said after they were finished
with the blonde.”
“That the girl would be working the next night; that her fresh marks would make her the favorite. For at least a week, she
would get the best tips.”
“How did Linda like that?” she sighed.
“She was squirming in her chair. While I’d been playing with the blonde, the old woman had sounded her out about finishing
her contract at
The Château,
instead of the strip joint. The drift was that Linda’s work with the magician led her to believe we might find all this attractive,
so she’d taken us to see the whole deal.
“She’d gone on about Linda’s regular acts fitting in but the punch line was that, she would have to be interviewed and initiated
like any other slave-girl dancer.” I gasped, as Justine reached between my legs and grasped the back of my scrotum, “You are
so
not
like your mother.”
“I should hope not,” she giggled. “Tell more!”
“She told her that, if she thought another girl’s punishment too severe, she would be allowed to take her place, that girls
sometimes expressed affection for each other that way.”
Justine shuddered, gently kneading my balls. “Thinking about that, much, would get me done way too quick-like. How did Linda
take to that idea on female bonding?”
Talking about my dead wife could have been just a bit distractive, had not Justine’s handling been keeping me aroused. “Linda
looked like a deer caught in the headlights, and she asked an odd question. Would the old woman do that herself, do it for
her?” Justine slowed our combined motion, looking up expectantly.
“She laughed about her skin being too old and thin; the members wouldn’t be particularly entertained by seeing her whipped.
Claimed, though, that she’d done such things more recently than we might have believed.” I recalled a detail I’d not thought
about in years. “She put her hand on Linda’s knee, saying that she reminded her of someone, that she might talk a girl into
taking her place sometime.”
Justine resumed her undulations, closing her eyes. “The blonde?” she sighed.
“Might have been. When Linda was being initiated the next night, I saw the blonde pause while waiting a table and focus on
her. Linda stared back at her, their eyes locked. They were thoroughly taken with each other and the reversal of their positions
from the previous night.”
Justine, building toward climax, yelped as I grasped her tender buttocks. “How, did that make you feel?” she stammered.
“Babe, I’m not still able to call up all this detail because I was so turned off! One night when Linda had been auctioned,
I asked the old woman to put the blonde up as well. She accommodated me. I think she even rigged it—there wasn’t much bidding
against me. The girl was still worked up by what I’d done on her initiation night, and she was just delicious. She knew I
was thinking about Linda. She kept me turned on by talking about what was probably happening to her right then.”
We had both been withholding climax for indeterminate minutes. As she began rhythmically squeezing me, her juices soaking
the sheets, I came almost involuntarily to ejaculation. My extended climax triggered her own shuddering spasms. It was as
if the long-ago erotic excitement had melded with our present passion, and through it, lived again. In the afterglow, I wrapped
up the story.
“Your great-grandmother blew our young minds. As it happened, Linda was whipped only on the night of the initiation but, during
the two weeks, was auctioned several times. I wonder now if that wasn’t contrived so Madeleine could spend more time with
me? She knew all the buyers and assured me there was nothing to worry about, which turned out to be the case.”
Justine sighed once more. “I can see you holding out your hand for the blonde when you bought her, like when you met me,”
she murmured before dozing off again. “Dead cool.”
After we finally got out of bed, Justine expressed an urgent postcoital necessity to go prowl a mall. I first made a run into
Buford to get us some burgers and use a phone. The house had only a dedicated line for her computer. Justine explained, “I
didn’t need Mother spitting in my ear.”
I called Cris to see about Kong and Joe to tell him I’d see him when I saw him. Beyond fully understanding the obvious, he
was ecstatic to learn that the mural was indeed there, and that this thing was
some kind of real.
Then I talked unpaid leave shit to my boss, feeling guilty for not just telling her that I wasn’t coming back. I would need
the unemployment when they deleted the position.
I took longer than intended, but it gave me time to think. I concluded that I was
way sure
it was the time to confront the previous night’s ghosts. However, in the full light of day, yet another apparition was awaiting
me. Climbing the creaking steps I could hear, as during the last night’s drive home, another ghostly lyric.
————————
“A
ROUND THE CORNER, AND UNDER THE BRIDGE,
a handsome sailor, made love to me. He kissed me once, he kissed me twice, and-ever-since-I’ve-wanted-to-go…”
Déjà vu
bites! Whereas the ghostly lyrics of the night before had been in my head, these were composed of definitely audible material
vibrations. Tr oubling with the sense of familiarity, I identified the tune as a round I could just recall my mother singing
when I was a child. It had been a song from her girlhood. My mother had been born in 1904.
“Around the corner, and under the bridge, a handsome soldier made love to me. He kissed me once…” Justine was bobbing her
shoulders with the old round in her characteristic fashion. In front of the long Adam mirror, she was wearing the party dress
from upstairs. She’d also found a long strand of beads and a Grecian-goddess forehead band that looked
art nou-veau.
It lay beside her on a small teakwood table, along with containers of the mascara, rouge, and lipstick that she’d applied
in a perfect period likeness. “I can’t get that tune outta my head.”
Riveting me with incredulity was what she had done with her hair. Its decidedly nonperiod crimson length was piled, in an
elaborate French wave, on the back of her head. A tube of styling gel, apparently attempted and abandoned, lay on the table.
She was using a curling iron and a card of bobby pins to frame her face with little spit-curls, in a mode that I could hardly
conceive a modern girl even knew.
“I wonder if they still make Dippety-Doo?” she mused, finishing her curls and placing the classical band on her forehead.
“Would you photograph me, tied to one of the columns and looking distressed? Wouldn’t I look scrumptious?” She peered at me
mischievously in the mirror.
I recalled Willie’s fantasies of the chained ladies, which he’d been convinced Grandmother Piny’s telepathy had helped generate.
“Seabrook would be
gaga,
” I answered, “though I’d as rather see both my goddesses and distressed damsels naked.”
She giggled and, turning about, curtsied with a slight lift to the tiers of her scalloped satin skirt. She had substituted
white panty hose for silk stockings, but the satin slippers were clearly originals matching her dress. She looked a vision
out of another age as she donned the flapper beads and beamed. “My heart, you have a most improper imagination. I’ve been
feeling quite all-overish since I woke up, I mean to say!”
She displayed the fact that she’d removed the backing, which would have preserved modesty behind the Georgette inlay over
her chest. What the hell had come over her while I’d been away? I wondered at “my heart,” which had been delivered like an
address rather than an exclamation. The old Bronx accent had become pronounced.