On this catwalk Mallory took Waters’s face in her hands and kissed him with infinitely more passion than he had known in his nineteen years. When she pulled back, he looked into her bottomless green eyes and knew that he was lost. He had a sense of being chosen—by her and also by something greater, something unknowable, the same amorphous force he had felt when Denton asked if he would drive Mallory back to Ole Miss. A sense that his destiny, whatever that might be, was gathering itself around him at last.
After the kiss, they walked hand in hand back to the car. Waters drove back to the campus, but when they reached the sorority house, Mallory simply shook her head. He needed no prompting. He drove to an empty athletic field on a hill above his dorm and parked the convertible in the predawn darkness. Mallory lay across him, and he leaned down to her uplifted face. In the timeless hour that followed, his hands never went below her waist, but the two of them left the physical domain of that car as surely as if they had lifted into the dark with wings. He sensed in Mallory a sexuality of limitless scope, like a man looking through an open door at a closed one, yet sensing that behind that door lay still another, an endless succession of doors, each concealing its own mystery, each mystery folding into another, the inmost circle unreachable, impenetrable, an essentially feminine core that he had no choice but to try to reach and understand.
Waters went through the next day in a trance, wondering if Mallory had felt what he had, whether she had seen that night as a beginning or merely an interesting Sunday diversion for a beautiful woman with nothing better to do. At four that afternoon, his telephone rang. Mallory had slept through all her classes, but she wanted to see him again. His exhaustion left him in a moment. They spent most of that night together, watching a movie, eating dinner, driving for miles, talking, and then not talking.
In the span of two weeks, they became inseparable. A wild euphoria permeated their days, yet it was shadowed by an unspoken reality. Mallory was still technically dating Dr. Denton, and Waters, the girl from Tulane. For this reason, and others, they kept to themselves much of the time, and stopped their impassioned couplings short of intercourse. But by the end of the first month, it was becoming difficult to restrain themselves. One rainy night in Waters’s dorm room, Mallory straddled him, took him in her hand, and guided him to her opening. She started to sit, moaned softly, then sobbed once and got off the bed. While he stared in confusion, she pulled on her jeans and ran from the room. Waters put on his pants and gave chase. By the time he reached the door of the dormitory, Mallory was running up the hill toward the library, her hair flying behind her in the rain. Barefoot, he sprinted after her, dodging cars to cross the road, finally coming within earshot on the library lawn. Under foot-high letters trumpeting Faulkner’s assertion that man would not merely endure but prevail, he screamed for her to stop. When she turned, he saw that her eyes were not red from tears, but filled with wild joy.
“Do you love me?” she cried.
“What?”
“Do you love me?”
He stood there in the rain, knowing only that he could not stand to be physically apart from this woman. “Yes,” he replied.
“What?”
“I love you!”
She came back to him and kissed him, and then the tears did come. After a time she dragged him toward the library door.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
Just inside the doors were two pay phones. Mallory lifted a receiver and handed it to him.
“Who am I calling?”
“You know.”
And then he did. She wanted him to call his girlfriend at Tulane and break off the relationship. He hesitated only a moment. He told the girl he was finding a long-distance relationship too hard to sustain. She asked tearfully if he had met someone, and he said yes. When she asked who, he looked at Mallory, and for the first time she looked uncertain. Waters lied and said he’d met someone from another state. As they spoke, he felt strangely detached, as though discussing the death of a distant relative, but as he hung up, he felt angry. He handed Mallory the phone.
“Do you want me to call David?” she asked.
“You’re damn right.”
She bit her bottom lip, then took the receiver and started to dial his number.
“Wait,” he said.
“Why?” She kept dialing. “You’re not sure?”
“I’m sure about you. About how I feel. But…telling David is different from what I just did.”
She looked intrigued. “How?”
“He’s a friend of mine…of my mother’s. Of your parents. My brother’s supposed to work for him next summer, for God’s sake. Taking care of his horses.”
Mallory nodded. “I know all that.”
“Is he in love with you?”
“He says he is.”
“Shit.”
She laid a hand over his and looked deep into his eyes. “I’m ready, if you think I should.”
“You should do it face-to-face.”
She hung up the phone. “This weekend. There’s a big party at his house.”
His anger took him by surprise. “You didn’t tell me that. You were going home this weekend? To see him?”
“No. I wasn’t going to go.”
He wasn’t sure he believed her.
“You should come too, John.”
“No, I shouldn’t. Besides, I wasn’t invited.”
“You weren’t?” Her eyes narrowed. “That’s weird. A lot of college people are going.”
A shiver of apprehension went through him. “Jesus. You think David’s heard something?”
Mallory shrugged. “We haven’t been as careful as we should have been. And there are only, what, like five hundred students here from Natchez?”
He nodded, wondering if David Denton already saw him as a son of a bitch.
“You should come anyway,” Mallory told him. “It’s a masquerade party. For Halloween. No one will know.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Sometimes I think so. You really should come though.” She laughed and hugged him tight. “In fact, I’m not going unless you do.”
So he went. Mallory rented him a Sir Lancelot costume in Memphis, and three nights later he walked into David Denton’s house wearing a visored metal helmet. If anyone asked who he was, he planned to say he was Cole Smith. Cole had been invited to the party but had chosen to go deer hunting instead (which struck Waters as hilarious now). There were between eighty and a hundred masked guests, so remaining incognito turned out to be no problem. People drank in grand Natchez style, and dancers spilled from Denton’s great room onto the huge stone patio behind his house.
Mallory had come as a ballerina, with a white tulle skirt blossoming over her leotard and a glittering mask adorned with pearls. Her regal bearing and fluid dance style drew the eyes of everyone, and Denton—dressed as Louis XIV—almost never left her side. Waters watched them dance from a distance, mingling with people who didn’t know him well. Mallory seemed to be having the time of her life, and after an hour—and three stiff drinks—he began to feel resentful. Mallory had asked him to the party, even rented his costume, yet she acted as if he weren’t there. He was at the point of doing something monumentally stupid—like asking her to dance—when he realized he’d lost sight of her. Suddenly, a hand squeezed his behind.
“Feeling neglected?”
He was almost sure the person whispering in his ear was Mallory. Reaching back, he felt the tulle skirt and pinched her thigh hard enough to hurt. He heard a laugh and another whisper: “Meet me behind the stables.”
He slipped outside as quickly as he could and made his way across the lawn to Denton’s capacious stables. He waited in the dark with the smell of hay and horses, wondering if Mallory would be able to get away without Denton noticing. Suddenly, a white apparition materialized out of the night, floating toward him as though borne on the wind.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” he hissed as s
he neared him.
Mallory pulled up her mask and smiled mischievously. “Do you want to talk or do you want to kiss me?”
He pushed her against the stable wall and kissed her, and in seconds they were panting in the dark.
“Have you told David anything?”
She shook her head. “I’m going to do it after. When everyone’s gone.”
He kissed her again. Her fingers dug into his back, then raked around his ribs to his chest. He wanted her badly, but he could almost see Denton searching the house for her now.
“You’d better get back.”
She nodded and put a finger to his lips. “Are you all right?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
She smiled knowingly, then put her mask back on, slid to her knees, and lifted the tunic of his knight’s costume. He sucked in his breath when she took him into her mouth, then closed his eyes and tried to stay silent as she went to work with feverish intensity. Once, he thought he heard voices nearby, but when he touched Mallory’s head to warn her, she slapped his hand away and continued with more fervor. Seconds later he cried out and started to push her away, but she grabbed his wrists and finished while music and laughter echoed across the lawn and horses stamped in their stables and he shuddered in the dark.
She rose to her feet, her eyes twinkling. “Better now?”
Without waiting for an answer, she kissed him, then took off across the lawn, the tulle skirt trailing after her like a fallen angel’s wings.
When Waters returned to the party, Mallory was dancing with Denton on the patio. Through the mesh of her skirt he saw two oblong grass stains on her knees, but no one else seemed to notice. He went inside for another drink.
All masks were to be removed at midnight. At five ’til, someone turned off the stereo, and Waters prepared to slip out a side door. Before he could, he heard someone ask Denton to play his piano. The doctor looked thoughtfully at the Kawai concert grand and said, “I wish Johnny Waters was here. I thought that kid couldn’t play anything but third base, but he’s a genius on piano.”
“Why didn’t you invite him?” Mallory asked casually.
“I meant to. It just slipped my mind. I’ll remember next time.”
A wave of guilt surged through Waters, and instead of leaving, he signaled Mallory to follow him down the hall to the bathroom. When she did, he pulled her inside and said, “Don’t tell him tonight.”
She shook her head. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“You still want to?”
“No. But we’re just putting off the inevitable.”
“I know, but…Look, just do whatever feels right to you.”
Mallory nodded and went back to the main room, where guests were beginning to remove their masks and pop the corks on champagne bottles. Waters stole a last glance at Mallory and Denton at the center of the crowd, then faded through the garage door, more confused than he’d been in a long time.
At 2:00 A.M., Mallory knocked at his window, and he learned that she hadn’t told Denton anything. Thus began a two-month period of secrecy that nearly caused both of them to fail the semester. When they returned to Ole Miss, they camped for a weekend at Sardis and made love for the first time. But they did not go out together in public. They frequently drove the hour to Memphis to avoid prying eyes, and even there they spent most of their time in hotel rooms. When they returned to Natchez for the Thanksgiving holiday, Mallory accepted only one date with Denton, and that night she made excuses and went home early, so that later—as she had every other night—she could slip out to meet Waters and make love in his car. It was a ridiculous situation, but Waters couldn’t bear the idea of hurting the man who had helped him so unselfishly during high school. Beyond this, he knew that Mallory’s parents would be enraged when they learned she had cheated on their ideal suitor to “go in the street” with a boy from the wrong side of town. But as the Christmas holidays approached, Natchez students started to gossip at Ole Miss, and it was only a matter of time before Denton heard what was going on.
It took an almost unbearable irony to bring things to a head. Three days before Christmas, Denton called Waters and asked him to accompany him to an antebellum home to look at a piano. The doctor was thinking of buying an antique Bösendorfer brought from Berlin to Natchez during the 1850s. Driven by a desire to maintain the illusion of normalcy—and not least by morbid curiosity—Waters agreed. As he and Denton examined the piano and discovered dry rot inside, Denton asked him what he thought of Mallory Candler. Waters swallowed and said he thought she was a “great girl,” which was the ultimate Ole Miss stamp of approval. Did Waters see Mallory much in Oxford? With his nerves stretched to maximum tension, Waters replied that it was a small school, and everyone saw everyone pretty regularly. Denton said he was only asking because Mallory had been acting a bit distant, but he thought he knew the reason. Mallory Candler was the kind of girl who didn’t get too involved with a man unless she knew the relationship was more than a passing affair. Then he smiled and confided that he planned to ask her to marry him on Christmas Eve. She was a little young, Denton conceded, but Mallory’s father was all for it, and he was sure Mallory would be too. As Waters sat frozen, his heart thundering in his chest, Denton said he’d just wanted to make sure he wasn’t reading Mallory wrong, that there wasn’t another man in her life. Waters almost confessed everything then, but he stopped himself. That was Mallory’s duty, not his. Besides, if Denton was considering a marriage proposal, maybe Mallory had been encouraging him more than she let on to Waters.
When Waters recounted this conversation to Mallory, she turned white. That night, she went to Denton’s house and told him she was in love with another man. Yes, it was someone he knew. She elided some details, such as the rendezvous behind the stables, but for the most part she told him everything. At two that morning, Waters, his mother, and his brother awoke to a pounding on their front door. Waters answered in his underwear, and found a drunken David Denton on the front porch, his BMW idling in the street behind him. Denton greeted Mrs. Waters with a rant against her “worthless” son, and Waters asked her to go back to bed. He listened to Denton’s railing for as long as he could. Then he looked at the doctor and said, “David, I’m sorry it happened the way it did. We should have told you from the start. But the woman chooses in these things. Okay? The woman chooses, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”
“You could have done the decent thing!” Denton yelled. “You could have been a friend! And if not that, you could at least be a goddamn gentleman!”
This wounded Waters deeply, but he’d only begun to wallow in his guilt when Denton added, “I should have known better though. You’re no gentleman. You’re trash. That’s why you live over here with the rest of the goddamn trash. I ought to kick your ass.”
All his guilt forgotten, Waters clenched his quivering hands into fists. In his mind he saw his father, and he felt as though Denton had just called his father trash. In a barely audible voice he said, “Go ahead, if you think you can. But you’d better be ready to kill me.”
Denton took a wild swing, and Waters easily ducked it.
“You’re drunk, David,” he said, trying to restrain himself.
Denton punched him in the stomach. As Waters drew back his fist to throw a punishing right, he saw his mother silhouetted in the window behind him.
“Go home!” he shouted. “And don’t come back!”
Denton blinked in confusion, mumbled something unintelligible, then turned around and stumbled back to his BMW, cursing and sobbing as he went. When Waters walked back inside, his mother shook her head.
“Is this over that Candler girl?” she asked, her face tight and vulnerable without makeup.
Waters nodded.
“She’s no good, John. I know you won’t listen to me, but that girl’s not right, not for you or anybody else.”
He asked what his mother knew about Mallory, but she just turned away a
nd went back to bed. That night was the beginning of his public relationship with Mallory, a brief window of bliss during which all seemed golden, when the horrors to come still lay out of sight.
Now—driving down the deserted road by the paper mill—he thought again of Mallory at Denton’s party, but this time, when she pulled down her mask by the stables, he saw not her face but Eve Sumner’s. He tried to push the image from his mind, but the harder he tried, the clearer Eve became. He could not see Mallory’s face. It made him crazy, like trying to remember the name of a familiar actor whose face was right in front of him on television. Frustration built in him with manic intensity, like the feedback loops he’d read about in obsessive-compulsive people. He had to see Mallory’s face.
He swung onto Lower Woodville Road and sped up to sixty. He kept a rented storeroom less than a mile away, a climate-controlled cubicle filled with furniture and boxes from his mother’s house and his own. His mother saved everything, and somewhere in that cubicle was a footlocker containing whatever junk was left from his Ole Miss days.
He turned into the storage company lot, punched a code into the security gate, and parked by a long aluminum building. The room was near the end of the inside corridor, the PIN code for its lock his social security number. When he opened the door, the musty smell surprised him, but he felt for the light switch, flicked it, and went inside.
Furniture and boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling. Plastic bags held old clothes—some his father’s—and broken lamps sat on all available flat surfaces. Even his father’s old power tools were here, saved like the instruments of a renowned surgeon. Another time, Waters might have stopped to go through some of the stuff, but tonight there was only one thing on his mind.
He found the old footlocker behind some boxes of books. It wasn’t locked, and he tore open the lid like a heart-attack victim searching for nitroglycerin. Here lay several chapters of his past, deposited in no particular order and with no particular intent. He found football programs, grade reports, the tassel from his graduation cap, love letters with a rubber band around them, geological specimens, a guitar pick from a Jimmy Buffett concert, a box of snapshots from Ole Miss and another from his summers working the pipeline in Alaska. He was about to go through the photos when he saw a banded portfolio near the bottom. Something clicked in his mind. Inside the portfolio he found everything dating from the time he spent with Mallory—everything that had survived, anyway. At some point he must have grouped it all together, but he didn’t remember doing it.