Читать книгу False River - Stinson Carter - Страница 8

Cam hasn’t worn a pressed shirt since his grandfather’s funeral, and hasn’t seen his mother in so much makeup since she chaperoned his senior prom. He drives them to the reception in her minivan––the last bastion of her young housewife days.

Cam pulls into the Norton Art Gallery’s broad circular drive, stops the car at the back of a line of idle taillights, and then trades the keys for a ticket from the valet. He steps around the car and helps his mother out by her proudly arched hand. He can tell by the way she takes his arm, and by the way her heels strike the pavement with steady, confident clicks that he is more man to her at the moment than he is son. They follow white paper luminaries to the ten-foot glass doors at the center of the modern brick building. Its boxy wings stretch out on either side of the front entrance into Azalea gardens that wealthy Shreveporters use as a backdrop for family portraits.

The foyer is watched over by the Mr. Norton Senior that the museum is named for. But most people wouldn’t know who he was anymore if it weren’t for the large brass plaque beneath his portrait. From the foyer, marble-floored exhibit rooms radiate off in every direction––walled with western landscapes and populated by Remington’s bronze cowboys and Indians.

Big band music barrels through the rooms from the main gallery. As they work their way into the crowd, a black-vested man passes by with a tray of Champagne flutes and Cam grabs two for himself and his mother. She awkwardly clinks her glass against his without a word of toast, as if rehearsing a ritual she doesn’t quite yet understand. Cam downs his glass in a few sips as he follows her lead into the crowd.

A rented parquet dance floor is laid out over the marble floor in front of the bandstand, and is alive with the elegant swishing of dresses and the stiff movements of dark suits that try to lead but usually follow. Women have a way with wedding dances, notices Cam, which only a few men share. And Cam isn’t one of those few. His mother leads him to the groom’s side of the room, a former student of hers. Cam vaguely recognizes many of the faces around them––some from church, some from graduation days at school, and some just from the Uptown grocery store.

“Oh my word, it’s Ms. Daltry!” says a woman whose sharp nose and cleft chin tell Cam she’s the groom’s mother. “And you must be Andrew,” she adds, upon noticing Cam.

“No this is Cam,” says his mother.

Good guess, thinks Cam, seeing as Andrew is a much better candidate for being at a wedding with his mother as his date.

“Last time I saw you Cam, you were up to here on me,” says the woman, indicating a place in the air level to her belly button. “You sure turned out good,” she says.

Cam chuckles at his own expense as the groom’s mother interrupts her tuxedoed son from a conversation.

“Blake, look who’s here!”

The groom turns, “Ms. Daltry!”

Cam watches his mother’s eyes dim with the matronly title. The groom gives her the same cautious hug he gave her on the last day of school when he was twelve.

“She looks like a lovely girl,” says Cam’s mother, dryly enough to take back a little of the power lost by her being seen as just the old teacher; the one who gets a place card at the table with third cousins and clergy.

“I wouldn’t have gotten into SMU to meet her if you hadn’t been such a good teacher,” says the groom.

“Awww,” says the groom’s mother, overwhelmed by her son’s compliment as she looks at Cam’s mother, expecting gratefulness.

Cam’s mother just smiles and says, “Well, you know I would have been proud no matter where you went to school.”

Cam knows what she’s doing. Southern women have a gift for using downplayed compliments to maintain a social advantage, and Carol Daltry can play this game with the best of them.

“So great you both could make it,” says the groom’s mother, gently brushing them off to move on to other introductions. The groom takes this as his out, too, and goes back to his conversation with an old man filling his ears about the bride’s beauty––tonguing otherwise innocent words as if he’s secretly conjuring up a splayed-leg image of her beneath the lucky groom in a few hours time.

The groom is still growing into his looks, with a rounded jaw and plump cheeks that will be nicely chiseled by the next ten or twenty years. But the bride has reached the crest of the beauty life has dealt her. Her hands stray compulsively down to her waist every few seconds,

advertising the fact that she’s more familiar with her weight six months ago and her weight six months from now than she is with the trim frame she slaved for in preparation for today. Cam decides that she has gotten the better end of the looks deal, but the fact that her father has the cash to rent this place out for the reception more than evens things up.

Cam remembers that his mother is a great dancer when she drags him out onto the dance floor. He used to watch her teach Andrew ballroom dancing in the living room with a metronome before his high school prom nights. Cam turned down the dance lessons when he got to high school, since his only interest in proms was what he’d do afterwards lying down. But his awkwardness on the dance floor makes him wish he’d taken his mother up on her repeated offers at least once or twice. She does what she can for him tonight on the fly, whispering his dance steps to him as they go. A few minutes into the song, as Cam is just getting comfortable with his feet, something over his shoulder catches his mother’s attention.

“Kelly Brady’s here,” she says.

The Champagne that Cam finished a few minutes ago comes up and tickles the back of his throat, and his palms leave sweat on his mother’s satin dress. He turns her around with a graceless twirl so he can trade his view for hers.

Kelly is with her parents, and Cam wonders whether they remember him as their daughter’s first love or first heartbreak. When they notice Cam’s glance, he gets a smile from Kelly’s mother and a look of slight recognition from her father before Kelly looks over with startled blue eyes and an open pair of bee-stung lips.

Kelly is prettier in her plain black silk dress than the bride in her four-figure gown, so the bridesmaids make a point of ignoring her as she mingles with the room. When Kelly catches on, she kindly pulls her hair up into a ponytail to help keep the men’s eyes on the female portion of the wedding party. But her parents still gloat around with the confidence that their daughter could upstage nearly any bride in town. Competition between people is a stronger force than reverence, Cam decides. People compare their babies behind glass in maternity wards, they compare their family headstones in graveyards, and they compare their way through every step in between.

Cam makes his way across the room to Kelly and her parents but he’s beaten to her by one of the groomsman, so he stops another tray of Champagne to give purpose to his useless position in the middle of the room. The groomsman doesn’t allow any lulls in the conversation, and eventually the bandleader interrupts the room’s chatter to tell them all to take their seats for dinner. People slowly scatter from their conversations to find their assigned places at the tables. The groomsman gets a spot at the table right next to Kelly’s––their chair backs nearly touch when they sit down. Cam finds his mom at the riffraff table at the back of the room, and takes a seat in front of the place card that reads “Melanie Thurmond.”

Kelly was Cam’s summer girlfriend between his junior and senior years of high school. They went to different schools, but their parents were in the same society. Or at least, his grandparents’ legacy was still strong enough back then to allow his parents a place in it. Munna still kept up with the annual dues at the Shreveport Country Club in those days, so Cam could hang around the pool in the summer. Andrew would play tennis in the mornings and caddy on the golf course in the afternoons, while Cam spent his days talking up the sorority lifeguards in their red one-pieces, stealing golf carts for joyrides on the green, and charging ten-dollar burgers and five-dollar milkshakes on the family tab.

Kelly took tennis lessons all summer, and would always take a dip in the pool afterwards. Cam first noticed her that summer on the high dive, her arms at her sides and her toes gripping the narrowed tip of the board. Her wet, thick brown hair was slicked down her back and her chest and hips cut a subtle hourglass form out of the cloudless June sky. The previous summer, at fifteen, she was still a skinny-legged child––her hip bones more noticeable in her bathing suit than her breasts. But just nine months later, she stood there on the high dive with the full breasts and rounded hips of a young woman, though she’d somehow kept the childish sweetness in her face. As she raised her arms above her head, her suit stretched tightly against her recently acquired curves. She bounced on the board to get a little momentum, her thighs flexing just enough to show their tone, and then she sprang off and took her time bringing her arms around in front of her––her flattened hands coming together at the thumbs just in time to break the surface and let her rigid body slip into the water with barely a splash. By the time she came up for air at the base of the ladder, Cam was on his way around the pool to where she’d left her towel.

At first, Cam was all nerves and no balls when it came to Kelly. He’d been dating seniors since he was a freshman, and could always talk his way through any of them. Yet there was rarely a single sentence he put together for Kelly that he didn’t want to do over once it came out. But he met her by the pool every day, nervous as he was, and every day they talked a little bit more. Other club brats talked about how Cam and Kelly were going out before they even realized they were.

Cam had had sex with six girls in the three years of high school before Kelly, but she was the one who had to make the move when they first kissed. By August he’d made it to third without any stolen bases, and she asked him if he’d ever done it with anybody. He said he had, but left out the plural. As she put it, she had decided that her first time would be with him, when the time was right. A hot-blooded eagerness shot through him when she said it. But then came a weight that he’d never connected to sex, a responsibility far beyond condoms and cuddling.

Two weeks later, the night came when they were making out under an LSU blanket on the couch in her basement, and her parents were in Houston for the weekend. He was on top of her, and in the blanketed darkness below their tongue-chafed lips and sweaty bare chests, he felt her hand start to slowly guide him around the wetted elastic of her panties. Their eyes met, and she nodded in the nervous permissive way that only virgins do; a nod he suddenly wished he hadn’t already gotten from other girls. As he slowly pushed inside her, she bit her lip, tensed her neck, and closed her eyes for the stinging initiation. He pulled out, against her ready assurances, and sat up against the back of the couch as his thoughts softened him up. He tried to make it about not having a condom, but she admitted to having started taking birth control. So he just sat there silently in the windowless basement darkness, numb to her adorably amateur invitations. Finally, he kissed her forehead, buttoned his jeans, and jingled his mother’s car keys in his hand. He wanted to tell her that she wasn’t the kind of girl who should lose her virginity to a guy like him, but all that came out was “I can’t.” Propriety kept her from begging and pride made her tell him to leave. He hated his obstinate silence, but knew that an explanation wouldn’t do either of them any good. How do you tell a girl that you have to hurt her a little so you won’t hurt her a lot?

When they started back to their different high schools, the thing they had together that summer didn’t end with a fight, but just quietly went away with no words at all. They’d see each other at parties during the school year––her with other guys and him with other girls. By Christmas, he stopped wondering which one of them had taken her virginity, and she stopped whispering distressfully to her girlfriends whenever they found themselves in the same room. By the time the next summer rolled around, the Daltrys were no longer active members of the Shreveport Country Club.

Tonight is the first time he’s seen Kelly in three years. As he watches her across the room, he holds a stare until she looks back, and goes through this unspoken exchange a few times to test if he’s on her mind or not. But it’s hard for him to know if he actually is, or if she’s just reacting to being stared at. When it’s time for speeches, he tries to enlist her in a few smirks and eye rolls, but she doesn’t play along.

The best man rambles on about his fraternity’s honor code and its application to marriage, causing visions of frat house date rape and initiatory ass paddling to float through Cam’s head. The father of the bride toasts the groom’s family and spills champagne on his patent leather pumps. The maid of honor uses the platform to brag about her own engagement and upcoming wedding with the ruse of using it as a way into the mind of the bride: “I know she’s never been happier in her life because that’s how I felt when my fiancé, Michael (then she smiles across the room to Michael) asked me to marry him,” etc. By the time everyone expected to talk has had their way with the microphone, the guests have learned more about the maid of honor’s fiancé, an SMU Greek chapter, and the father of the bride’s blood alcohol level than they have about the newlyweds.

Kelly gets up from her table and walks to the ladies room in the foyer. Cam waits a few minutes before excusing himself from the table to go after her.

He crosses the foyer past the restrooms and hides himself in the darkened entrance to the closed south wing. Kelly steps out of the ladies’ room.

“Kelly.”

She strains her glance into the darkness.

“It’s Cam.”

“Afraid you might catch the garter?”

“I just wanna talk to you for a second.”

“I don’t know… I’m really into the speeches.”

“Just for a second,” says Cam.

“Come over here then.”

Cam steps into the light and walks towards her. “I didn’t want to be rude,”

“Then maybe you should’ve waited.”

“I wanted to talk alone.”

“Well here we are,” she says.

Cam rehearsed his lines a few dozen times during the meal, but can’t come up with much of anything on the spot. “It’s… really good to see you,” he says, disappointed in the words before he even gets them out.

She smiles a tad, but doesn’t give him anything more than that to go on. The tables in the main gallery erupt in cheers as the bride and groom put the three-tiered cake under the knife.

Kelly starts back to the room, “I should…”

“Yeah…”

She heads back in for the cutting of the cake. As she passes Cam, he reaches to touch her arm but stops himself, and simply watches her slink back to her table as the bride and groom work forks into each other’s mouths and then kiss the smudged icing off each other’s lips. The caterers hand out cake as the band starts gradually back up with a snare and a sax, and Cam wanders off into the quiet darkness of the closed wing towards his favorite childhood exhibit.

It’s a small room, ten-feet square at most, with all four walls covered with floor-to-ceiling glass cases displaying Mr. Norton’s gun collection. Cam does a quick inventory of his old favorites, knowing where they are even in the dark: a single-shot Deringer, a Revolutionary muzzle-loader, a pair of flintlock dueling pistols, a Confederate rifled musket, and a World War II M1. The nobility of the collection isn’t tainted by anything from Vietnam. Standing in this room always made Cam feel part of a lineage of brave gentlemen. Depending on who had taken him there, he always got private lectures about the guns from his father or his grandfather, because Andrew hated the gun room and would always stay in the antique china and silver hollowware gallery next door until they were finished.

Standing here tonight in the dark, with just the guns’ angular black forms in the darkened glass––only the occasional pearl handle or mirror-polished barrel catching the distant light from the foyer––he feels a little bit a part of that lineage again. Not like he did as a kid, standing here wide-eyed while he listened to stories about every gun in the room, but just enough to give him sufficient pride to go back in and ask Kelly to dance.

Back in the reception room, Kelly is already dancing with her groomsman. Cam’s eyes lock on his hands––one is holding Kelly’s hand while the other rests on the arch of her waist. He gives her a spin, and she ducks and twirls with a smile as he pulls her in close again.

The guy is even with Cam on looks, but his jaw moves as coolly in the conversation as his body does in the dance. Cam doesn’t know his name, but he knows by the clever eyes, toothy smile and high forehead that he’s a McConathy boy, heir to an oil dynasty his father made on his own. “No lineage to stand on,” as Munna would say, but their new money is enough to secure a place at South Highlands’ school for any McConathy child, a membership at the new country club, and a prominent pew at the First Baptist Church. He and Kelly look like the kind of couple who send out photo Christmas cards with their pretty children; the family with a five-bedroom mansion on Richmond Avenue and a duck camp on Lake Bistineau that’s nicer than any home Cam will ever own.

As the song winds down, Cam gets up from his chair to ask for the next dance. But they don’t stop, they just slow down and wait for the next song. The McConathy kid cracks a joke and Kelly laughs and touches his bicep.

A flash goes off behind Cam. The photographer is trying to get a decent shot of the preschool ring bearer and flower girl, struggling to keep a calm voice as he orders them to stand still. The girl is sitting on the floor, unbuckling her Mary Janes, and the boy is standing up pinching his crotch. Cam approaches the photographer.

“The groomsmen want another group shot,” says Cam.

“Did Chad send you over?”

“Yeah,” says Cam, rolling with it. Then he crosses the room to where the best man is hovering around the back of his dinner chair, letting people congratulate him on his speech.

“Chad, right?” asks Cam.

“Yeah.”

“Great speech,” says Cam.

“Any speech is good when it comes from here,” says Chad, touching his chest in a moment of “why the hell can’t a man cry every once in a while” openness.

Cam keeps a straight face. “The photographer wants you to round up all the groomsmen for a group shot,” says Cam.

“Where?” he asks.

“Out in the foyer,” says Cam.

The best man starts rounding up his team and leading them out of the room. The photographer follows them out with the camera. One of the guys calls away Kelly’s dance partner, and Kelly is left alone out on the parquet, mid-song.

Cam intercepts her on her way back to her table. “May I?”

“You don’t waste any time, do you?” she says.

“Plenty,” says Cam, with a smirk he hopes might give the word some link to their history.

She silently opens her arms for him, keeping the past at bay. He takes her gently by the waist and hand, and tries his best to remember his mother’s dance lessons from earlier.

“You guys would make a great Christmas card.”

“What?”

“You know the ones people send out, arms around their kids, golden retriever in a Christmas collar.”

“Come on, Cam.”

“Could be a compliment.”

“Coming from anyone else.”

Cam snickers.

“You got some nerve.”

“So I hear.”

“If only you had the charm to back it up, there’d be no stopping you.”

“If only.”

The groomsmen break huddle in the foyer, and Kelly’s guy comes back in looking around for her.

“I’m gonna be home for a while,” says Cam.

“I’ll be sure to warn my girlfriends.”

“I’m not interested in your girlfriends,” says Cam.

Kelly steps back to be spun. He goes along with it, trying his best to lead.

“Let’s go out and catch up sometime,” he says, dropping his grin for a genuine attempt at sincerity.

“I’m sure I’ll see you around,” she says. She gives him a quick, consolation smile as her eyes wander to the McConathy kid. When they shift back to Cam’s face, there’s a darting impatience in their movement.

Cam chuckles to himself.

“What?” she asks.

“I’ve been gone so long, I forgot what Southern girls were like.”

“And what are we like?” she asks, unamused.

“Just ‘cause you leave a trail of sugar around the bush doesn’t make beatin’ around it any better.”

“I was just being polite.”

“Exactly,” says Cam.

“Would a simple ‘no’ be better?”

“If you meant it.”

“What makes you think I don’t?”

Cam grins. “The fact that you just asked me that.”

She looks at him, annoyed. Cam pushes her gently away for a spin, then pulls her back in. The song ends with a wail from the sax and a crash of cymbals. Kelly lets go of him and walks away, without even an over-the-shoulder glance for a goodbye.

The McConathy kid doesn’t waste any time finding Kelly again. But a minute or so back into their easy flirtation, Kelly turns her head slightly, like it’s just so she can brush her bangs behind her ear. And as she does, she looks over her shoulder at Cam, then quickly turns back. Cam smiles and goes back to the table to find his mother.

“You ready to go soon?” she asks.

Cam offers his arm, she takes it proudly, and the two of them stroll out through the foyer.

“What’re you smiling at?” she asks.

“Didn’t know I was.”

“Like the cat that ate the canary.”

Cam looks over his shoulder to get one last look at Kelly before they go.

“She’d be good for you,” she says. “Can you be good for her?”

Cam smiles and tucks in his arm to press her hand against his side as a little quiet thank you.