Chapter 35 #3
When I unbuttoned a button on his shirt, he started unbuttoning my dress from behind, his fingers moving faster and more nimbly than mine.
He slipped his hand inside the cloth and pressed it against the bare skin of my back, and I felt like I might melt right here.
I wanted him to strip me down so I could have that delicious bare-skin feeling all over me.
Another button, he was halfway there, my fingers were on his fourth button down—
“Why are you stopping? Again,” he asked.
“I just—am.”
I wanted to, oh I did. I’d never done this, though I certainly didn’t want him to know that.
It was more complicated, much more complicated, and I wasn’t sure if it was even logical, but I was afraid if I did, it could ruin my chances with him.
Because if he ever found out about the sordid, filthy business I was part of down the street, I had a feeling my innocence would be a lot more believable coming from somebody who hadn’t had sexual intercourse after church with a married man she’d known maybe three weeks.
“I think I need more time,” I said. Twenty-seven days to be exact, which was when we’d shut down, plus a day to erase the evidence.
“Hey,” he said, “it’s alright.” He pushed my hair out of my face. He looked down at his shirt, all the unbuttoned buttons. My God, I’d done that? “I’m just glad you’re here with me.”
We spent the rest of the rainy afternoon playing gin rummy and a card game he taught me called Russian bank and eating fried chicken.
I told him about my job at the Foote, and he told me more about his teenage son, Sam.
Normally a talkative, outgoing boy, quarterback for his high school team, Sam had grown quieter around Jack this year.
“He resents me terribly for leaving him and his mother alone. I miss him so much.” His face was grave. He sounded like he was getting strangled when he said this. “I need to be with him, Birdie. And it looks like the job at the bank’s winding up faster than I thought.”
“Oh.” Oh. “What does that mean?”
“I should finish up the last of the audit in the morning and then I go back to Jackson.”
“But are you … coming back here?”
“Yes,” he said and softer, “but I don’t know when yet.”
I felt stung, a little betrayed. He reached across the table and took my hand, and I studied the golden hairs on his forearms, wondering if there wasn’t more to this that he wasn’t telling me. “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”
He shrugged. “Because I didn’t want you to think I was, you know, pushing you to—like this was our last chance for a while to …
” He furrowed his brow and glanced at the bed, the covers rumpled but still made.
“But now that I think about it, it probably looks like I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to ruin my chances to … do what I still want to do.”
“If I’d known, I probably would’ve done it,” I said, and he groaned.
I stood up and he did too and took my hands in his.
He hadn’t stopped touching me more than a few minutes since we’d walked in here.
“I’ll be coming back as soon as I can, but while I’m gone, you think we could keep writing each other?
I swear, I get excited every time Mrs. Nutt at the post office gives me one of your letters. ”
“Sure,” I said.
He wrapped me up in his arms and leaned his forehead on mine and said, “Where did you come from?” like he had weeks before.
This time, I told him, “Mars.” It felt like an ending to something that’d only just started. I tried to make myself see the good in it. Least I wouldn’t have to worry about him driving out to the house.
We kissed goodbye and I walked to the depot and took a taxi home in the rain. So he wouldn’t drive me home, I’d lied and told him I was walking over to the Orphan, and he’d believed me.
At the tick of six on Monday evening, I gazed out at the empty road, kicking at the mosquitoes eating my ankles under the table.
Charlie paced along the hedge of privet, reciting the rules; the repetition of it seemed to calm her nerves.
“One dance minimum, ten dances max. If you hear ‘Night and Day,’ it means there’s trouble …
” In her puritanical black dress with the white collar, dark hair neatly curled at her neck, she looked more like she ran a girls’ school than a sporting club.
The girls at the cocktail tables mostly ignored her.
They knew the rules by heart by now and had their own set of rituals: Esmeralda squeezed a white rabbit’s hind foot before she walked outside.
It still had gray curved toenails. Trixie winked in a little compact mirror by the back door, then Dixie did it too.
Ruby spat on a lucky penny, then rubbed it between her palms. Flossy’s wasn’t a superstition, it was more of a checklist: adjusting the string that held her face taut, clacking her false teeth in place, rearranging the crackly tissue stuffed in the lining of her pink dress—
“Hey drop that!” she barked at Ruby. “That’s three fags you lit on the same match. You trying to ruin everybody’s night?”
Even I knew three cigarettes on one match was bad luck. Ruby threw the match down. “Thanks, fish face.”
“Don’t mention it, bone breath.”
That afternoon the girls had strolled around the Ole Miss campus, which was about a mile west of the square, asking boys for a light, for directions, for the weather—“by the way, you busy this evening?” They’d given out over a dozen cards.
But still, at six thirty, then seven, then seven thirty, no cars, nothing.
Then at quarter till eight, I finally heard a motor.
Flossy, who’d been sitting with me at my telephone table, said, “’Bout time.
” She laid her hand of cards facedown. “No peekin’,” she said and went to stand with the other girls.
I hated this part, them standing there like items on a shelf for sale.
I watched two boys get out of a taxi and come this way.
The short one had on high-waisted pants, his dark hair spread open, showing a long center part.
I could practically hear his daddy teaching him how to comb the Brylcreem through it.
The other was tall and skinny, studious looking, in a dark suit and large black glasses.
Mr. Binny began playing a terminally slow version of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” the beat an old lady with a cane and a flyswatter.
As they approached the opening in the hedge, they eased to a stop and stared, the way the only other “customer” had on Saturday before he’d run away.
I studied them, wondering, was that disappointment I was seeing on their faces?
Was it that our front simply looked too legitimate?
With its sparkly ornaments and lights in the trees behind the huge white antebellum home, ferns on the back porch in my mother’s same white wicker stands?
Would we do better if it was sleazier or more against-the-law looking? Smelling like cheap perfume and liquor?
The tall boy in the big glasses cleared his throat and approached my table. He looked like an accountant in the making. “Evening, ma’am. Is this the uh … establishment we were informed of by the lady with a card?”
Like I’d rehearsed it, I nodded and said, “It’s ten cents a dance, one dance minimum, cold drinks are a quarter, cigarettes a nickel.
” It felt like I’d been waiting years to say that.
He set what looked like four dimes down on the table but kept his fingers on them, looking back at the road—I guess nobody liked to be first to the party, though it seemed like in this business you really wouldn’t want to be last. Before he could change his mind, Ruby came and snatched his arm and dragged him to the dance floor.
I handed his friend their tokens. I was no expert but if it took that much muscle to keep a customer from leaving, something was not working.
The boy with all the Brylcreem and wide pants approached Dixie, but some unseeable force made him choose identical Trixie instead.
I took a deep breath and watched the two couples waltz to Mr. Binny’s slow, steady dirge.
The Brylcreem boy was a full, stiff arm’s length away from Trixie, while Ruby held the tall one a little closer, his lips moving silently, counting his steps, one-two-three, one-two-three.
After a minute, he snuck his friend a glance—Why are we dancing again?
The whole ruse was so awkward, so painful, they could easily have been dancing with their sisters.
When the song ended, Mr. Binny started a catatonic version of “Moonlight and Roses,” the notes turning like a very slow wagon wheel.
“What the hell? We dancing or dying out here?” I heard Ruby holler.