Читать книгу The King is Dead - Jim Lewis - Страница 9

Back in the days when days were new, Nicole had met a man named John Brice. That was in Charleston, it was early in the fall, and all of her friends had thought he was strange. Yes, they said, he was handsome, lean and graceful, but he was strange. To begin with, he’d just appeared on the street one April day—Nicole had seen him standing outside the Loews in the middle of the afternoon, waiting all by himself for a matinee to begin—and then again, there he was on Broad Street a few days later. After that it was time to time; he was always alone, often with his hands thrust into his pockets. Sometimes it seemed as if he was dancing a little bit, dancing to himself as he went on his way. She’d seen him, a tall slim fellow with refined, almost feminine features and his hair combed back.

At the time she was just out of her parents’ house; an only child, imaginative and open. She’d spent two years in junior college, and then she came home again, took an apartment with a girlfriend named Emily, and started working in a women’s clothing store called Clarkson’s: some dresses, some underthings. Just a job, although she took pleasure in the details of the place, the feel of her fingers stretching over satin or the resistance of a band of elastic. Mr. Clarkson was usually at home, tending to his sick wife, so most of the time the store was hers; she even had keys to open it in the morning and close it at night, with only an hour or two toward the end of the day when he would stop by to empty the till and deposit it into the bank across the street. Otherwise, there she was, alone amid the cloth, the silks and nylons, and the ladies who came in.

This man, he must have been new in Charleston but he strode down the sidewalk as if he’d put a down payment on the whole town. That was something you noticed right away. Still, she didn’t think much of him; he was not-quite-regular and all alone, and it didn’t take much to make a young man wrong for a girl, in that city, in those days. At first she couldn’t quite tell what it was, exactly, and then it came to her: there was a slight eccentricity in the way he dressed, nothing that most people would have heeded, but she had an eye for the way a man put himself together. He would pass her on the street, wearing a pair of black dress shoes, perfectly acceptable, except that the laces were mouse-grey, and he had doubled them through the eyelets before he tied them. Was that on purpose, or couldn’t he shop for something as simple as shoelaces? One evening when she was walking home from work she saw him standing outside a florist’s in a seersucker suit, quite a nice one, actually, with narrow stripes of a deep rich blue; but it was a little bit late in the year to be wearing summer clothes, late enough that you would’ve thought he would be cold; and his belt was a few inches too long, so that the extending tongue turned and fell a few inches down over his hip. It was just the kind of thing she would notice, and she crossed the street instead of passing by him; but he turned and watched her all the way down to the end of the block, and she could feel his attention dragging on her at every step.

Then he came into Clarkson’s. It was a Tuesday, late in the morning, and he opened the door, peered in for a second, and then slipped across the threshold. He didn’t say a word, he just moved among the dresses and the blouses, along a line of girdles, back and around and back again, while she followed him from behind the counter and thought, What is this man doing? He took a little half step sideways—very gracefully—and she stood perfectly still. Then he did a little dance, maybe, a few subtle steps almost too soft to be seen at all, a slight gesture with his hip, his head cocked. He glanced up at her, studying her face, and she would have reddened before his eyes—but just then the telephone rang, she looked down at it, and he suddenly turned and left the store before she’d even had time to pick it up.

Then there was her father’s fiftieth birthday party, marked by a family gathering in their house outside of town—she remembered the weekend well and long afterward. So goes the tone of a time: not just forward over everything to come, but seeping outward too, in every direction, like wine on the figures of a carpet. She helped her mother in the kitchen, there was an aunt who got drunk at the party that evening, and wept noisily all night at something no one else had noticed and the woman herself couldn’t explain. That night Nicole slept in her old bedroom and listened to her parents in the room next door, arguing in soft voices and then, worse, giving in to that silence which had frightened her so when she was a child, and still made her uneasy. Poor father: a few years after she was born he’d contracted a fever, which was polio and paralyzed his left leg from the hip down. Poor mother: a local beauty alone with an infant, her husband quarantined and perhaps never to come home. By the time he recovered they were strangers again, the large family they’d dreamed of was not to be, he retreated into hobbled quiet, and she wore a seaside cheerfulness everywhere but on her mouth’s expression. Now Nicole listened as her mother sat heavily on the edge of the bed, and her father cracked his knuckles as if he would break his fingers right off.

The next day she was back at work, and that very afternoon John Brice appeared again. The same man, he walked around the store a little bit and then left. But she knew he was going to come back again, she knew she was going to know him, and she waited for him; a few days went by, and then right when she’d decided to stop thinking about it, he opened the door and came in. He had a look, didn’t he? Not just his expression, which was ready, but his clothes. This time he was wearing a grey double-breasted suit and a wide blue-and-grey tie, a foppish outfit, kind of high-toned, she thought, although he wore it very casually. He ambled up to the counter where she stood. Hello, was what he said.

She should have just said hello in return. Instead she fell back on her shopgirl manners. How may I help you? she asked.

He paused. I was just looking, he said, and motioned to the inventory with one long pale hand.

Anything in particular? she said

No…. He shook his head a little.

Maybe if you tell me who you’re shopping for, I can recommend something. The sun outside the windows shone down on an empty street, and she looked up and read the name of the store imprinted backward on the inside of the day-dark yellow glass.

What’s your name? he asked. She didn’t expect that, and she hesitated. It was something she didn’t want to give away, because she knew she’d never be able to get it back. Come on, now, he said, and made her feel foolish.

Nicole, she said at last. Lattimore. It was as if all the dresses and underthings were filled with silent women, watching women: were they smiling or shaking their heads? It didn’t matter anymore. It was done, really, with that. She gave him her name, and that was all he needed.