“Pat Conroy called Oxford the Vatican City of Southern letters,” he said as he stepped off the porch.
“I didn’t know that, but I do love the man’s books.” She scratched Gordon’s head. “My dog’s still alive, I see.”
“I’m nothing if not merciful.”
He wore a white sweater and an immaculate pair of gray slacks. The outdoor work had left him tan, and she was once again struck by the contrast between his masculinity and his elegance. He was a mass of contradictions, haughty and cynical, but also tender and a lot more sentimental than he let anyone see. How his wife’s suicide must have devastated him. “What’s this about?” she asked.
“I have something I want to give you.”
“You’ve given me more than enough. That plane ticket—”
“Faulkner has always been my favorite American writer,” he said, cutting her off.
“Not surprising. You share a fascination for the same literary landscape.”
“We don’t, however, share the same facility with language. The man was a genius.”
“I suppose.”
“Don’t even contemplate saying anything disrespectful about William Faulkner.”
“As long as I don’t have to read another one of his books, I’ll be completely respectful.”
“How can you say that? Faulkner is—”
“He’s a man, and I have a limited patience with dead white male writers. Or even living ones for that matter, you and Mr. Conroy being notable exceptions. Now Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Alice Walker, their books deal with things women care about.” She let herself rattle on. “Margaret Mitchell isn’t p.c. anymore, but that was one heck of a page-turner. Then there’s Mary Stewart, Daphne du Maurier, LaVyrle Spencer, Georgette Heyer, Helen Fielding—but only the first Bridget Jones. Nope, Faulkner just doesn’t make my final cut.”
“Your list is a little heavy on romance for my tastes.”
“You try spending six months sitting at somebody’s bedside waiting for them to die and then tell me that the happy-ending love story isn’t one of God’s good gifts.”
He planted a quick kiss on her forehead, and the tenderness of the gesture nearly undid her. “Let’s go inside.”
He opened the door for her, and as they entered the empty house, she gazed at the foyer, where a set of stairs led to the second floor. “Can you get me into George Clooney’s place, too?”
“Some other time.”
They wandered through the hallways of Faulkner’s home, gazing into each room but not entering. She couldn’t resist pointing out the stack of paperback potboilers on display in Faulkner’s bedside bookshelves, but Colin was more fascinated by his office. As he took in the old Underwood typewriter, he contemplated how modern word processing might have changed Faulkner’s writing. Sugar Beth refrained from pointing out that Microsoft wasn’t doing a thing for Colin’s output, and the only work being done at Frenchman’s Bride these days involved stone.
They left the house and walked around the grounds. Dusk was settling in, but she could still see the forsythia and wild plum blooming in Bailey’s Woods behind the house. Before long, the dogwood would be in flower. Gordon waddled at Colin’s side, occasionally stopping to investigate a shrub or sniff at a clump of grass. As they returned to the house, Colin took her hand. “I’ve missed you this week.”
She felt the hard ridge of calluses on his palm and didn’t want to draw away, but what was the point in torturing herself. “You’re just horny.”
He stopped walking and ran his finger along her cheek, regarding her with such tenderness that her heart missed a beat. “I want more from you than sex, Sugar Beth.”
She had a saucy comeback all loaded and ready to fire, but she fumbled with the trigger. “You…you know I don’t do windows.”
“Please stop it, darling.” The request was gently uttered, and the endearment, which would have sounded pompous coming from anyone else, fell over her like cherry blossoms.
She swatted an imaginary bug to give herself an excuse to move a few steps away. “What do you want?”
“I want you to give us time. Is that too much to ask?”
“Time for what? I’m a three-time loser, Colin. Four if you count Ryan.” She tried to sound saucy, but she was afraid she’d merely sounded sad. “I feed off men. I lure them with my sexual tricks, then bite off their heads while they sleep.”
“Is that how Emmett felt about you?”
“He was the exception that proved the rule.”
“I’m not too worried about my untimely decapitation, so I don’t see why you should be.”
“Okay, I finally understand why you’re being so persistent about this. You want to make me fall so desperately in love with you that I can’t think of anything else. Then, when I’ve turned into a big bowl of mush, and I’m begging for a few crumbs of your affection, you’ll laugh in my face and walk away. This is what you’ve been planning from the beginning, isn’t it? Your ultimate revenge for what I did to you in high school?”
He sighed. “Sugar Beth. The romance novels…”
“Well, it’s not going to happen, bucko, because I’ve spent way too much class time in the school of hard knocks. I’m past my obsessive need to center my life around another piece of beefcake.”
“As much as I appreciate the description, I think you’re just afraid.”
Something snapped inside her. “Of course I’m afraid! Relationships do bad things to me.” He started to respond, but the pain had gone on long enough, and she didn’t want to hear it. “You know what I want? I want peace. I want a good job and a decent place to live. I want to read books and listen to music and have time to make some female friendships that are going to last. When I wake up in the morning, I want to know that I have a decent shot at being happy. And here’s what’s really sad. Until I met you, I was almost there.”
His face set in hard lines. She knew she’d hurt him, but better this sharp, quick pain than a dull ache that never stopped. “I’m sick of this,” she forced herself to say. “I told you I didn’t want to see you anymore, but you wouldn’t listen. Well, it’s time to pay attention. I’m tired of you stalking me. Now get the message and leave me alone.”
His face paled, and his eyes emptied of all expression. “My apologies. It wasn’t my intention to stalk.” He snatched up a manila envelope from behind one of the columns and thrust it at her. “I know you’ve been looking for this, and now you have your very own copy.”
She watched him walk away, proud and haughty, his powerful stride devouring Faulkner’s lawn. “Gordon! Come back here,” she cried.
But her dog had a new master, and he paid no attention.
She heard the sound of his car driving away. Finally, she gazed down at the envelope and drew out what he’d brought her.
A copy of Reflections.
Colin was thirty miles outside Oxford when he heard the siren. He glanced at his speedometer and saw he was going eighty. Brilliant. He backed off and pulled over. Gordon sat up on the seat. The perfect ending to a miserable day.
A stalker. Was that how she saw him?
As he handed over his license, he thought about how much differently the evening had unfolded than what he’d planned. Getting Sugar Beth out of Parrish had seemed like a good idea, and Rowan Oak a convenient choice. He’d tried to impress her with a private tour, and he’d imagined the combination of a romantic setting and his personal charm would lull her enough so he could talk to her about Reflections, so he could explain. But he’d forgotten personal charm wasn’t his long suit, and she’d undoubtedly grown immune to contrived romantic settings before her twenty-first birthday. He hadn’t planned on throwing the book at her, that was for certain. He’d intended to lead up to it gradually, to explain how he’d felt when he’d been working on it and point out that he’d finished writing it months before she’d come back. Most of all, he’d planned to warn her. And then he was going to tell her about the painting.
“You??
?re the author,” the trooper said, gazing at Colin’s license. “The one who wrote that book about Parrish.”
Colin nodded but didn’t try to strike up a conversation. He saw no honor in attempting to talk himself out of a ticket he deserved. But the trooper had a book-loving wife and a basset hound, and he sent him on with only a warning.
Colin reached the edge of town, but instead of heading directly for Frenchman’s Bride, he drove aimlessly through the quiet streets. There’d been a fierceness about her tonight that scared him. She wasn’t playing games. She’d meant every word she’d said. And he’d fallen in love with her.
The knowledge felt old and familiar, as though it had been part of him for a very long time. With his lifelong appreciation of the ironic, he should be amused, but he couldn’t find a laugh anywhere. He’d misjudged, misplayed, and misbehaved. In the process, he’d lost something unbearably precious.
Sugar Beth wanted to be alone when she read Reflections, so she declined Winnie’s invitation to join her for church on Sunday morning. As soon as her car pulled away, she threw on a pair of jeans, grabbed an old blanket, and set off for the lake. She’d have liked to bring Gordon with her, but he hadn’t come back. It was beginning to look as though he never would.
She laid out the blanket in a sunny spot not far from the deserted boat launch and gazed down at the cover of the book. It was marked “Uncorrected Proof Not for Sale,” which meant he’d given her one of the editions printed up for reviewers and booksellers before the real book came out in another month. She ran her hand over the cover and braced herself for what she was fairly certain he’d written about her mother. Diddie might have been high-handed, but she’d also been a force for progress, and if Colin hadn’t acknowledged that, she’d never forgive him.
A church bell tolled in the distance, and she began to read:
I came to Parrish twice, the first time to write a great novel, and more than a decade later, because I needed to make my way back home.
He’d put himself in the book. She was startled. He hadn’t done that in Last Whistle-stop. She rushed through the opening chapter, which told of his first days in Parrish. In the second chapter he used an encounter with Tallulah—Your hair is far too long, young man, even for a foreigner—to take the story back to the late 1960s, when the town’s economy had begun to fall apart. His account of the near bankruptcy of the window factory read like a thriller, the tension heightened by funny, hometown tales such as the Great Potato Salad rivalry at Christ the Redeemer Church. As he moved into the 1970s, he personalized the human cost of the town’s racial politics through Aaron Leary’s family. And, as she’d suspected he would, he wrote of Diddie and Griffin. She didn’t care so much about the portrait he’d painted of her father, but her cheeks burned with anger as he showed her beautiful, high-handed mother marching through town trailing cigarette ash and condescension. Although he didn’t neglect her accomplishments, it was still a devastating portrayal.
With nearly a hundred pages left, she closed the book and wandered down to the water. She’d assumed he’d end the story in 1982 when the new factory had opened, but there were three chapters still to go, and apprehension had begun to form a knot in her stomach. Maybe Diddie wasn’t the only person she should have worried about.
She returned to the blanket, picked up the book again, and began the next chapter.
In 1986, I was twenty-two years old and Parrish was my nirvana. The townspeople accepted my oddness, my staggering shortcomings in the classroom, my strange accent and haughty pretensions. I was writing a novel, and Mississippi loves a writer more than anyone else. I felt accepted for the first time in my life. I was completely, blissfully happy…until my Southern Eden was destroyed by a girl named Valentine.
At eighteen, she was the most beautiful creature anyone had ever seen. Watching her saunter up the sidewalk to the front doors of Parrish High was watching sexual artistry in motion…
Sugar Beth finished the page, read the next, kept reading as her breathing grew shallow and her skin hot with rage. She was Valentine. He’d changed her name, changed the names of all of them who’d been teenagers at the time, but no one would be fooled for a moment.
Valentine was a teenage vampire, sipping the blood of her hapless victims along with her Chicken McNuggets after school. She didn’t turn truly dangerous, however, until she decided not to limit herself to the plasma of teenage boys and began looking for older prey.
Me.
The sun dipped low over the lake, and the air grew cool. By the time she reached the end, she was shivering. She set the book aside and curled into herself. Her story took up less than a chapter, but she felt as if every word had been written into her skin, like the ink tattoos the boys punched in their wrists with ballpoint pens when they got bored in class. Everything was there—her selfishness, her manipulations, her lie—all of it exposed for the world to see and judge. Shame burned inside her. Anger. He’d known from the beginning. While they were laughing, kissing, making love, he’d known what he’d written about her, what she would someday read, yet he hadn’t warned her.
She stayed at the lake until it grew dark, with the blanket pulled around her shoulders and knees drawn to her chest. When she returned, the carriage house felt empty and oppressive. Winnie had left a note on the table, but Sugar Beth walked past it. She hadn’t eaten all day, and now the thought of food nauseated her. She went upstairs and washed her face, lay down on the bed, but the ceiling Tallulah had gazed at for forty decades felt like a coffin lid. Her aunt’s life had been a dirge of regret and misery lived out in the name of love.
Sugar Beth couldn’t breathe. She rose and headed downstairs, but even here, Tallulah’s bitterness permeated everything. The shabby furniture, the faded wallpaper, the yellowed curtains—all of it stained with the anger of a woman who’d made lost love her life’s obsession. Her head began to pound. This wasn’t a home, it was a mausoleum, and the studio was its heart. She grabbed the key and made her way out into the night. She fumbled with the lock in the dark. When it gave, she pulled open the doors and flicked the switch on the bare, overhead lightbulb. As she gazed around at her aunt’s pathetic memorial to lost love, she imagined Colin’s explanations, his justifications. The book was written long before you came back. What good would it have served if I’d told you earlier?
What good, indeed?
She stepped into the chaotic heart of her aunt’s dark spirit and began ripping away the dirty plastic. She would not live her life like this. Never again. She wouldn’t be a prisoner to her own neediness. She’d strike a match to all of it, send this mad energy of paint and loss up in flames.
The colors swirled. Her heart raced. The frenetic dabs and splatters spun around her. And then she saw it.
The painting Lincoln Ash had left behind.
Miss Creed, going dejectedly up to bed, sat for a long time at the open window of her room, and gazed blindly out upon the moonlit scene. She had spent, she decided, quite the most miserable day of her life.
GEORGETTE HEYER, The Corinthian
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The painting had been here all along, a ferocious web of crimson and black, cobalt and ocher, with angry trails of yellow and explosions of green. Not a drop cloth at all. It had never been a drop cloth. She gave a choked sob and went down on her knees next to the enormous canvas spread across the concrete floor, ran her hands over an encapsulated paint lid, a fossilized cigarette butt. These weren’t objects dropped by accident, but relics deliberately left in place to mark the moment of creation. A strangled hiccup caught in her throat. There was nothing random about these dribbles and splatters. This was an organized composition, an eruption of form, color, and emotion. Now that she saw it for what it was, she couldn’t believe she’d ever mistaken it for a drop cloth. She crawled around the perimeter, found the signature in the far corner, ran her fingers over the single word ASH.
She fell back on her heels. Even in the garish light of the single bulb dang
ling from the rafters, the painting’s tumult spoke to the chaos in her own heart. She swayed. Let its angry rhythm claim her. Moved her body. Gave herself up to misery. Gazed into the painting’s soul.
“Sugar…Sugar…Sugar Pie…”
A hoot. A whistle.
“Sugar…Sugar…Sugar Pie…”
Her head snapped up.
“Sugar…Sugar…Come out and play…”
She shot to her feet. Cubby Bowmar and his boys were back.
They stood on the small crescent of lawn in front of the carriage house—six of them—beer cans in hand, faces turned to the moon, baying for her. “Come on, Sugar Beth…Come on, baby…”
Hoots and howls.
“Sugar…Sugar…Sugar…”
They chanted and chugged.
“Sugar…Sugar…Sugar…”
Wolf whistles, yowls, drunken, piggish snorts.
She stormed toward them. “Cubby Bowmar, I’m sick of this. You stop it right now!”
Cubby threw out his arms and fell into Tommy Lilburn. “Aw, Sugar Beth, all we want is some love.”
“All you’re gonna get is a big fat piece of my mind if you and your sorry-ass friends don’t haul yourselves off my property.”
Junior Battles lurched forward. “You don’t mean that, Sugar Beth. Com’ on. Have a beer with us.”
“Does your wife know you’re here?”
“Don’t be like that now. We’re just havin’ us a boys’ night out.”
“A morons’ night out is more like it.”
“You’re the mos’ beautiful woman in the world.” Cubby tucked his free hand under his armpit and flapped it like a one-winged rooster as he began the chant again. “Sugar…Sugar…Sugar…”
Junior took it up. “Sugar…Sugar…Sugar…”
Tommy threw back his head, spewing beer and woofing.
“Oh, for Lord’s sake be quiet.” She spun on Cubby, ready to light into him, when, out of nowhere, Colin appeared like a dark avenger and launched himself at them.