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  “Just for you, Mike,” she said. “I know Yankees can’t stand the way we cook vegetables down here.”

  “I was a Southerner before I got to be a Yankee,” Mike said. “But I never tasted vegetables this good, north or south.”

  Sally Sewell beamed. “Let me get you some more,” she said. “We need more wine, too. And I think there’s one more pan of rolls in the oven.” She rose from her chair and started for the kitchen.

  Old black Opal was there as if by magic.

  “I do it, Miss Sally,” she said firmly. “You set back down an’ enjoy yo’ comp’ny.”

  “Oh, Opal, let me do it! Bay, I want to do it; make her let me. I’ve been away so long, and you all hardly ever let me do anything … let me at least serve my own dinner to my guests,” she pleaded, looking from glowering Opal to Bayard Sewell at the head of the table.

  “Let’s let her, Opal,” Bayard said. “I know she’s supposed to rest, but it’s just tonight, and she’s doing wonderfully well.”

  The old woman looked at him with utter ferocity for a moment and then stalked out of the dining room. Sally Sewell slipped out of her chair with a triumphant smile and hurried into the kitchen. The swinging door shut behind her. There was a little silence.

  “Opal thinks Sally is still five years old and her own child,” Bay said into it. “Sometimes I have to sit on her a little, and she doesn’t like it worth a damn. She’s a proper old tyrant, but she’s been wonderful with Sally, and we couldn’t do without her. I’ll smooth her down later.”

  Sally Sewell came back into the dining room with wine, orange juice, and second helpings of everything, and the evening eddied and swirled and flowed on. They nibbled and talked for perhaps another hour; or at least Mike and Bayard Sewell talked. DeeDee and Duck and Sally mostly listened, laughing occasionally at the free-ranging banter. It was good talk; comfortable, easy.

  Bayard Sewell had just said, “I heard a rumor that there was fresh peach cobbler for dessert,” when Sally folded her hands carefully into her lap, nodded as if in prayer, and slid sideways out of her chair onto the floor.

  “Shit,” she said.

  For a moment they sat in simple disbelief, staring at her as she rose heavily, holding onto the table, and settled herself awkwardly back into her chair. Her face was, suddenly, flushed and loose, and her eyes were glittering and unfocused. Mike saw with incredulity that she was very drunk. The orange juice …?

  Bayard Sewell got out of his chair and started around the table, but Sally held up her hand, and he stopped. She looked at Mike, focusing her eyes with an effort. She smiled, a sly, confiding smile, with nothing in it of her earlier open, ingenuous sunniness.

  “You’re my punishment, did you know that?” she said to Mike, with dreadful precision. “My husband threatens me with you. He’s always telling me how he’ll put me in Parkwood for good, and divorce me, and set you up in my house if I don’t shape up. And I didn’t, and here you are. I used to hope you’d just die on one of those famous assignments of yours, and I wouldn’t have to hear about you anymore. But it’s too late for that; you can bet your skinny New York ass it’s back to the funny farm for me, in two shakes of a sheep’s tail. C’est la guerre, Mike. I hope you both fry in hell.”

  Her chin slipped out of her supporting hand, and she followed it over and onto the floor again, and this time she lay still on the beautiful muted Kerwin.

  DeeDee and Duck sat, stone-still and openmouthed, and Mike was frozen with cold horror, though her face was hot and stiff with pain. Her ears rang shrilly. Bayard Sewell did not look at any of them.

  “Excuse me,” he said briefly, and went around the table and knelt beside his wife. “Here we go, Sal,” he said, and scooped her into his arms, and carried her easily out of the dining room. The blond ponytail bobbed gaily over his arm as they went. The three left at the table did not look at one another, did not speak, hardly seemed to breathe. Outside the bell jar, the world roared, but inside, Mike felt only emptied out and drugged once more, content to study the uneaten food on her plate.

  In a long moment he was back. His face was very white, and ridges of muscle stood out on either side of his mouth, but he was composed and his voice was even.

  “I’m most terribly sorry,” he said formally. “She’ll sleep till morning, and then she’ll be okay, except for a roaring headache and an awful conscience. Of course, she didn’t mean anything she said. She’s been full of this terrible anger ever since Win—and sometimes she just can’t stand the weight of it any longer, and she drinks until it stops hurting. Then the anger comes out at other people. But it’s usually me. I don’t know where she got the booze tonight; she must have had it stashed out in the kitchen. It’s my fault. I should have seen she was still too fragile for a dinner party. I should have paid closer attention to her. She’ll call you all tomorrow and apologize if she remembers, but she usually doesn’t, and I don’t like to remind her …”

  “Don’t think of it,” Mike said. “I hope she’ll just forget it. I hope you both will. It doesn’t make a bit of difference.” Her heart pounded with hurt, his and her own, and her ears still rang. She wanted desperately to be gone.

  “It makes a terrible lot of difference,” he said. “But I can’t think how to make it up to you.”

  “Do you think you’ll have to take her back to the … you know?” Dee said in an apocalyptic whisper.

  “No,” he said. “I just can’t put her through that again. She hates it so much she doesn’t get any benefit from it any longer. And she simply won’t talk to shrinks anymore. Opal and I can look after her just as well here. Poor Sal. I really thought this time … she was so excited about having dinner guests. It’s been such a long time.”

  As DeeDee and Duck took themselves reluctantly out the door and into the fragrant night, Mike said, “I’ll just walk on home, Dee. It’s not half a block.”

  DeeDee started to protest, and Bayard Sewell said, “I’ll walk her, DeeDee. I need the air.” DeeDee Wingo looked from one of them to the other, but she said nothing further. She and Duck left with promises to call in the morning. Mike knew that her sister would, before the sun was full up.

  They walked in silence until they reached the bottom of the front walk to Mike’s house. The dissonant song of the cicadas in the dark mass of the trees and their own twin footsteps, slow and regular, were the only sounds in the night. Mike did not think it was late. The little wind that had followed the rain had died down again, and the incredible sweetness of the mimosa and wisteria and the cascading, old-fashioned sweetheart roses behind the fence between the Winship house and its neighbor were almost palpable on their faces. There was no moon, but the stars were very clear.

  “Don’t bother to come any further,” Mike said. “You need to get back, I know. I can find my way blindfolded, and there’s a light at the top of the stairs. Daddy may even still be up. It’s a real treat for me to be out at night; I never get to do it much in New York. Too easy to get mugged. But who on earth would mug you in Lytton, especially on a night like this? That mimosa …”

  She knew that she was chattering, but she could not seem to stop her words. She did not know what waited for her in silence, only that something enormous and immutable did.

  “It’s no bother to walk you to the door,” he said. His voice sounded ordinary, almost casual. “I’d like to do that, at least. Opal’s with Sally, and this air feels wonderful. Did you realize that you called your father ‘Daddy’? I haven’t heard you do that since you’ve been home.”

  “No,” Mike said. “I didn’t. I guess old habits really don’t die, do they?”

  “No,” Bayard Sewell said. “They don’t die.”

  Mike looked up at him, standing silently in the shadow of the old water oaks in front of the house on Pomeroy Street, and saw that he was crying.

  She did not know when her fingers reached up to touch his face and came away wet. Later, she could not have said how or when they moved silently together
to the old striped canvas glider in the shelter of the wisteria bower on the side porch, or precisely how she came into his arms, came to be lying beneath him on the plunging glider, her hands frantic on his half-naked body, her breath coming fast and ragged in her nostrils, her eyes blinded, both their cheeks wet with each other’s tears. She did not know when sensation became pain and went beyond, when urgency exploded into unendurable pleasure and became irrevocability, when she cried aloud and he stopped her cries with his hand and then half-choked on his own. But even before he entered her, and thrust and thrust, and burst with the unleashed force of twenty barren and blasted years, all within her that was Micah Winship … pain and pleasure, passion and denial, fear and joy and misery; the irreducible essence of her … surged out through her very pores and fingertips and mouth and eyes and into the flesh of him, and he was home. And so it began again.

  19

  ALL THAT SUMMER, IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, A PAIR OF RED-BIRDS came to the misshapen old magnolia tree outside the window of Mike’s room, and forever after, when she heard their joyous, “Pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty-cheer-cheer-cheer,” she felt again the sweet, heavy weight of satiation. It was an odd time of day for the birds; the wrong time. The other cardinals in her father’s yard fed and sang in the cool dawns and late twilights.

  “They approve,” she told Bayard Sewell. “It’s the official seal of approval. You don’t have to feel guilty.”

  “I don’t,” he said, raising himself on one elbow to look at her, flung out naked and boneless with completion in the tumble of the pineapple bed. “I wouldn’t feel guilty if every jaybird in South Fulton County was out there threatening to go tell the devil.”

  They met two or three afternoons each week in Mike’s upstairs room in the Pomeroy Street house. He came at three o’clock, instead of his customary four, and John Winship would have been asleep for an hour. Mike would be waiting for him in the darkened room, naked after the first two or three tentative meetings, and often he would have shed his coat and tie and belt by the time he rapped softly on her closed door. Lavinia Lester would have gone, John Winship was not due to waken for another hour and seldom did, and the house was hushed and somnolent in the heat. Bayard would be downstairs having coffee with Mike when her father woke, and Sam Canaday never came until after six. It was not ideal; was, they knew, risky, but it was the best they could devise, and Mike would have coldly and placidly killed anyone who tried to curtail the meetings.

  After the first night, they had met again a couple of times on the porch, on the old glider, but their couplings were too frantic and the porch too exposed to continue. The few days’ abstinence until they decided on her room in the afternoons was almost past enduring. Mike wanted to howl aloud, to pull him down when he came into the house to visit her father and have him on the kitchen table or the living room rug. She was, she thought ruefully to herself, frankly and rankly in heat, crying aloud her need and pleasure and fruition; there was nothing in their union of maturity or judiciousness. His touch plummeted her back into childhood—not the shadowed child she had been in this house, but a naked pagan child, obsessive and insatiable, like a starveling with periodic unsupervised access to a candy store, who came alive only when alone with the confections. Mike shimmered when she was with Bayard Sewell. The rest of her time she spent trembling under the sheer weight of appetite. None of her past physical relationships had so drowned and burned her.

  The room had been his idea; he had chosen it swiftly and practically.

  “I’ve told them at the office and at home that I’m on a new project that takes me out of the office a few times a week in the afternoon,” he said on the first time there, after he had taken her so silently and savagely and quickly that she had not had time to disentangle herself from the silk robe she had put on, nervously, for the occasion. It was crumpled and stained with the fury and substance of him. His own clothes were thrown anyhow over the booming air conditioner.

  “It’s the best way, I think. Everybody’s used to seeing me come in and out of here anyway, and even if your father should wake, he can’t leave his room. Christ, I hate the craftiness of it. I’d like to yell it from the housetops: ‘I’m fucking Mike Winship like I was always meant to do, and anybody who doesn’t like it can lump it.’ But we’ve got to be awfully careful. I don’t give much of a damn about my so-called position in this town, or even in the legislature, but I’m not going to hurt Sally or your father. Those are the two things I just can’t do. He’s crazy about Sally; did anyone ever tell you that it was he who introduced us? Her father was a client of his, and John practically took me by the scruff of the neck and presented me to her. I thought he was going to propose for me. He did pay for the engagement ring, and he’s never let me pay him back.”

  “She must have seemed as opposite of me as he could find,” Mike said. The thought did not trouble her in the slightest; it seemed to have formed beyond the bell jar.

  “Maybe so, at the time,” Bay said. “But she’s long since been a person in her own right to him. He calls her Miss Sally. She calls him Papa John. He may be the only man in Lytton who doesn’t know what she’s turned into. I hope he never finds out.”

  “Neither of them has to know about this,” Mike said. “I don’t really see how they could find out. But of course, I’ll be more careful than I’ve ever been in my life. I think it’s a great idea, your just walking into this house and strolling upstairs to my room and screwing the daylights out of me. It has the virtue of utter simplicity. I’d never have thought of it.”

  “Well, I’m an expert in guile after dealing with Sally,” he said, laughing. She laughed, too. There was nothing, no fiber or sinew or molecule, within her that tasted guilt or compunction.

  Never during that summer did Mike examine the morality of the affair, or even look ahead to its conclusion. She thought no further than the next time they would meet. He filled every fold and fissure of the emptiness within her that the recent howling losses and the new vulnerability had left. If she thought at all, she thought of herself and Bayard Sewell as casualties of some private catastrophe, clinging together for their very survival. His hands on her body were justification enough. Each afternoon together meant they could exist another day.

  “It can’t hurt anyone, she thought. Sally will never find out, and I would never ask Bay to leave her. Daddy won’t know. Who can it hurt?

  It was the first time in her adult life that she had been dependent on another person for her entire emotional existence, and instead of reacting with her customary cool wariness, she abandoned herself to it entirely and voluptuously. This is what love is, then, she would think as she felt him swell inside her until he filled the world. Yes. How could I not have known?

  On that first afternoon, he said, “I’ve never forgotten you, not for one minute of one day, after all this time. That last day—that was the worst day of my life, except the next one, when we knew you’d gone. I’d give anything I’ve got to be able to go back and undo that day. I should have gone with you, I should have looked for you until I found you—but I didn’t. I thought you would come home when school started. I waited and waited. I was so sure you would. And then we heard you were married. I thought I was going to die. I don’t even remember that fall and winter. And now I want you so much I think I’m going to die again, and I’m … locked in. I can’t leave. You do know that, don’t you, Mike? I can’t leave …”

  “I don’t want you to leave,” she said, burying her face in the musky wetness where his arm joined his chest. “I will never ask you to leave. I only want this, now, right at this minute. That’s all; that’s enough. I can’t really regret the way things happened, Bay. I can’t even say that my marriage was a mistake. Without it, I never would have had Rachel. I never would have had any sort of career …”

  “Is it so important, then? Your career? Is it enough?” he looked at her searchingly in the dim amber light from behind the Venetian blinds.

  “It has been,” she
said slowly. “It always has been. But now … I don’t know. I don’t feel like a journalist. I don’t feel like a mother. I don’t feel like anything but … a body with a huge hole in it. Which you are about to plug with extreme gusto, aren’t you? Right here? And then … oh, God, here …”

  Afterwards, his breath laboring in his throat, he touched the warm wetness between her legs.

  “I’d like to kill anybody who’s ever touched you here,” he said. “Your famous Richard, or anybody else. I don’t ever want to know about the others who have. But … oh, Christ, Mike, were there many others?”

  “Yes,” Mike said, in pain. “There were … a good many others. I’ve been looking for something … somebody … all my life who could … fill me up, I guess I mean. Stop that dull, awful, constant, itching ache in there. Nobody did, nobody could, but I sure gave it a good try. And I regret every one of them, Bay. It was just so obviously you that I wanted. All over me. And in me and through me and behind and in front of me … always you. You don’t need to hear about the men. You don’t need to know anything about how I’ve lived before now. It doesn’t matter. What comes next is not going to matter. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to talk about it … not yesterday, not tomorrow. And I won’t talk about it. I don’t give a damn about anything but now.”

  “Then now it is, and now it will be,” he said. “You’re home now. I’m here now.”

  Yes, Mike thought. I am home. Home is where Bay is.

  She was adamant about it. She would not discuss her life before she came home to Lytton. She would not discuss her father. She would not talk about the action that Sam Canaday was bringing against the Department of Transportation on his behalf. One afternoon, early on in their relationship, Bayard Sewell pushed her gently to tell him about the status of the action, and she demurred impatiently.

  “We’ve only got an hour,” she said fretfully. “I don’t want to waste it talking about that damned case. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know.”