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  “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.

  DeeDee beamed after him and then turned conspiratorially to Mike.

  “He’s a saint, just a saint,” she said in a loud whisper. “Not well, my foot. She was drying out again; everybody knows that. Sally Sewell has been a drunk for years. She’s dying by inches with her liver, and none too soon, I say. She’s mortified him in public a million times. Everything from drunk driving to public drunkenness, and the men! She’s been in and out of all the motels around here so often they don’t even make her sign the register anymore. Just wait till the man leaves and then call Bay, and he goes and gets her and takes her home. Just a rabbit. But he’s never been anything with her but gentle and patient. It would break your heart to see them together. He hired her o
ld nurse to come and stay full time with her, and he built her a great big house not long before the oldest little boy died. I guess Priss told you about that, didn’t she? They’d named him Win, after Daddy, and he drowned in the swimming pool. Nobody comes right out and says so, but everybody knows she was drinking when it happened. He’s never really gotten over it. She wasn’t fit to raise the other two children—and they’re outstanding, Mike, just like him—so he and old Opal did that. He’s trying to get the Department of Transportation to back off Daddy’s old house; he’s got lots of influence in the legislature, even though he’s so new. But I’m afraid he’s putting his career in jeopardy. There’s a powerful lobby for the DOT there.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mike murmured, feeling the silly-child part of her vanish as if by magic outside the shell of the bell jar. “I’m sorry he’s had such a bad time. I’m sorry she has. Priss didn’t tell me that.”

  But there was a tiny part of her, tiny and ratlike and biting, that was not sorry at all for the ruin and shame of Sally Chambers Sewell.

  Duck came blustering into the den then, carrying a bottle of bourbon and two glasses, and Bayard came behind him with a stemmed glass, whisper-pale and frosted, in each hand. He handed one to Mike and lifted the other.

  “To us, one and all,” he said. “And to Mike in particular. Home is really home again now.”

  Mike nodded, suddenly shy, and they all lifted glasses, Duck slopping a little of his bourbon over his wrist and DeeDee taking a great gulp and squeezing her eyes fiercely shut in an effort not to cough.

  “How’s yours?” Bayard said to Mike. “I didn’t even ask you if you drank martinis. Hardly anybody does, anymore.”

  “I do,” Mike said. “I always did.”

  The evening that might have been such a strain wasn’t. That it was not, she saw later, was a triumph over the sheer awfulness of DeeDee and Duck’s mean little tinderbox house; tricked out in savagely yellow, shellacked Colorado pine furniture and ersatz varnished western artifacts, it reminded her of a plastic toy bunkhouse and stunted all feeling and nuance out of the air and the evening. It was simply not possible to sense subtleties, currents and eddies of resonance after an hour or so in DeeDee Wingo’s home. But in spite of the oppressive weight of the house, Mike realized gratefully and obscurely that what she felt at her sister’s dinner table was comfort. Looking around the round wagon-wheel table, she realized that DeeDee and Duck felt at ease, too, and under the ease there bubbled in each of them a sort of conspiratorial glee, the feverish excitement of sly children. DeeDee was even more arch and proprietary than usual, Duck even more gelatinously expansive. Bayard Sewell, on her right, was as loosely and dryly ironic with her as he was with DeeDee and Duck, as he had always been, and Mike knew that it was from him that the warm, fluid flow of the evening emanated. He generated good feeling like a fountain.

  He spoke of Mike’s work with a real and obvious respect and admiration, untainted by the sliding envy that she was accustomed to encountering among certain acquaintances who had known her for many years. For a few minutes, warmed at the fire of his interest, her work became real again to her, as it had not been since the first tongue of fear seared her on the train to Bridgehampton, and she could feel the cool, preternaturally focused wash of pure energy that she always felt in the midst of an actual story or during an interview. Her fingertips could, for a moment, actually feel the light, silky surge of the word processor keyboard under them; her eyes could see the liquid spill of the green letters and words across the black screen. Her whole being felt poised and concentrated again, as it did when a piece was going well.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “reading some of your stuff, I get the feeling that you’re not so much the writer as a kind of …”

  “… magnifying glass,” Mike finished the sentence for him, catching the thought from out of the air as she had done so often all those years ago. She stopped and stared at him, startled, and then flushed.

  “You always could do that.” He smiled at her. It was, as was everything else about him, a natural and spontaneous smile.

  Nothing else of their shared past was mentioned. They did not speak of John Winship or the DOT action, or of his life or her homecoming. He led the conversation like a dolphin leaping through warm seas, and DeeDee and Duck followed him with more grace and agility than they actually possessed, speaking and responding outside and above themselves. They talked of national and local politics, of the gossip of Lytton and the progress of Atlanta, of the rococo excesses and arabesques in the state legislature; his fund of anecdotes about his companions in the statehouse was extensive and bordered on the scurrilous, but he included himself in the dry japery and shared the laughter that he drew down on his own head, along with those of his fellow lawmakers. Mike said little, but laughed as heartily as the rest of them at his foolishness, and with the same honest savor. He was a genuinely funny man, and over the course of the evening, as DeeDee and Duck shone with a light brighter than either possessed under the sun of his wit, she began to sense the power of him.

  He’s wasted here, she thought. He’d be sensational in New York or Washington. Why in God’s name does he put up with DeeDee and Duck? He’s light-years out of their class.

  For toward the end of the evening, after the Coca-Cola ham had been reduced to glistening scraps of clotted fat on the platter and a second and third bottle of Lancer’s had been produced and drunk, they began to behave embarrassingly badly. DeeDee’s proprietary manner toward him slid over into the grotesque; she was as offensively bossy and familiar as if he had been a gifted, precocious younger brother, or a brilliant young monarch and she a privileged peasant retainer, and she twitted him continuously and with obvious strutting pride about the hours he worked and the state of his health and his tendency to let his fellow legislators, and indeed, according to DeeDee, most of the human race, take advantage of his good nature and kind heart. Duck, heavy-lidded and bursting-faced with wine and pleasure in himself, dropped incident after incident from their apparent long association into the conversation, each time cutting his eyes at Mike to gauge her reaction to his intimacy with this golden lion who was a willing captive in his house. Mike grew more and more annoyed with them and more and more mystified by Bayard Sewell’s tolerance, and when DeeDee leaned over him from behind to drop a loud kiss on the top of his black head, her great breasts swallowing his ears on either side of his head and bobbling against his cheeks, and shrilled bibulously, “I could just spank him most of the time, he’s so bad, but I can make him mind,” Mike’s entire chest and face burned with embarrassment and irritation.

  DeeDee and Duck rose to clear the table and sent Mike and Bayard back into the living room to “take your shoes off and get comfortable; it’s just the shank of the evening, and there’s some Amaretto and cream coming.” They obeyed. Mike dropped wearily into one of the La-Z-Boys, and Bayard sat on the end of the sofa nearest her and rolled his eyes goodhumoredly at DeeDee’s vast, retreating back.

  “It’s like being hugged by a 1947 Studebaker bumper,” he said, but there was no spite in his words. “She’s a little much sometimes, and he is pretty much all the time. But she’s been as faithful as a good dog to John—to your dad—and she hasn’t had a great life. I think of John as family, and so DeeDee and Duck are family, too.”

  Mike nodded, ashamed of her embarrassment over her sister. The comfort she felt in his presence expanded to include simple, one-celled gratitude. Even though she was bone-tired, marrow-tired, with the new, all-pervasive weariness that had come with the cessation of the great fear and the dropping down of the bell jar, and though she detested Amaretto among all liqueurs within her experience, she was content to let the night bowl on, humming along to whatever conclusion it might take.

  For a small space of time, they sat silently, and then he reached over and switched on a small, Stetson-shaped plastic radio. He fiddled with the dial until Bar-bra Streisand swam smokily into the room, and then leaned back and put his feet
up on the coffee table and closed his eyes. Mike saw that there were transparent bluish shadows under them.

  “I want to hear everything about you,” he said, eyes still closed. “What you think and eat and wear and laugh at, and what your daughter is like, and how you live. But right now I just want to sit here in this room with you and listen to that lady sing. There’ll be plenty of time for the other. At least, I hope there will be.”

  “I expect there will,” Mike said. “Don’t feel that you have to chat. You look tired.”

  “It’s been a godawful week,” he said. He did not open his eyes. It was the only time he came near to speaking of his life in Lytton.

  An avian caw from some out-of-sight room pierced the taut, satiny voice from the radio, and Duck and DeeDee came back into the den.

  “It’s your turn,” DeeDee said to her husband. “I did her before dinner.” Duck Wingo swore under his breath and went toward the sound, and Bayard Sewell rose, saying that he had to get home and let Opal get some sleep. Surprisingly, DeeDee did not press him to stay, but walked with him to the back door. Following them, Mike thought that he had probably long since stopped using the front one.

  At the door, he stopped and looked at them with the first hesitation and uncertainty Mike had seen on his face during the entire evening, or, for that matter, ever.

  “Do you think the three of you might come have a little supper with us toward the end of the week?” he said. “Maybe on Friday?”

  DeeDee’s face leaped immediately into lines of exaggerated concern.

  “Are you sure, Bay?” she asked solicitously. “You know, really sure?” Her lash-veiled look at him was avid with import.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Sally’s much better this time, really. She can handle a quiet dinner; Opal and I will come up with something. Kill the fatted calf for you, Mike.”