Jim Lewis - The King is Dead

The door opened and a woman came in, and without breaking her gaze through the window, Nicole said, May I help you?

Darling, it looks like you could use a little help yourself, said Emily. I was going to invite you to lunch, on me.

Nicole blinked in surprise. I just ate, she said.

You look like something just ate you.

I got a letter, you know—she gestured—from John in New York.

He still trying to get you to come up there with him?

Nicole shook her head. No, she said. He’s gone.

Then forget about him, said Emily. You’re twenty years old. There’ll be another, believe me. There’ll be another.

But Nicole wasn’t sure there’d be another at all. What if he was the only one, ever? For a few days she thought about writing him back, but she couldn’t have told him anything; it was a madness that started anew each evening, a paralysis in her blood that prevented her from sending so much as a note to him. It was too much for her: the weeks of wandering around with a blank look on her face, an entire symposium she conducted all by herself. Answers, another idea, another question. She never did decide what to say to him, where to start, what good any of it would do, so she never wrote back to him at all.

One morning in early March, Mrs. Murphy with the red hair and white gloves came gliding into Clarkson’s, accompanying her fourteen-year-old daughter for her first brassiere, in preparation for her journey to the city’s most exclusive finishing school. She got to chatting with Nicole while the girl was in the dressing room. Now, love, a woman like you can’t spend the rest of her life working in a place like this, said Mrs. Murphy. Mr. Murphy’s cousin works for a radio station in Memphis, and he was just telling us how they were looking for a girl to work there, someone to help around the office. Maybe you should call him, Howard Murphy. He’s in the directory.—Oh, look, and here’s my baby all dressed up like a woman. Lift it up a little, honey. In front. In front, just a little. The girl watched as her mother slipped her thumbs under the top edge of her own cups and tugged them gently upward. The girl did the same.—There you go. Mrs. Murphy turned back to Nicole and unsnapped her little black clutch. We’ll take three, she said with a small smile, and drew out a carefully folded bill with her fingertips.

Thus Nicole took herself to Memphis. She called Howard Murphy: The radio station was looking for a Gal Friday, they were hiring—yes, right away, if she was qualified; she mailed a letter detailing her skills and received a phone call two days later; she took a train out for an interview and returned to Charleston to find the job offer waiting for her; she made up her mind, she accepted, and she made plans; she packed a trunk with dresses and effects, and she moved, walking through the door of her new house—a tiny little furnished place a woman at the station had found for her—only six days after Mrs. Murphy had stopped into the store.

There was so much to do, and so much that was different: the wider accent and stronger sibilants, the lights on Beale Street, the new fortune of a new city. Now she and John were two giant steps apart and facing farther away. Maybe a seam in her mind had come undone, all of her love had spilled out into Memphis, and Memphis didn’t care at all, and swept it away. But there was this: the strangest thing. She began to miss John’s car terribly, it was a helpless assignment of her affections, and she wrote in her diary that if she were to sit in it again she would fill it with tears. Then she tried to put it out of her mind; but every so often, and for a few years afterward, she would turn her head whenever a car of a similar blue went by on the street, knowing it wouldn’t be John, knowing it wouldn’t be a happy day even if it was. Still she turned her head, because she was looking for herself at twenty.

Walter Selby’s throat was stopped with visions; sex trickled down it like whiskey, the blood behind his eyes was doped a desperate shade of blue, and nonsense verse rang in his ears, a singsong of refraction and perfection. When the car pulled away that night, with Nicole in it, the neighborhood was quiet and he was dazed; already she was not just gone but missing. He went into his house, took his jacket off, and walked to the bathroom to wash his face, pausing before his reflection and rubbing his cheeks with his hand so that his features distorted. Then he shook his head, took one last look at himself, and walked into the living room, where he lowered himself slowly onto his couch. Over and over he went up to touch the night’s events; again and again he retreated, as if he were unsure that they were real. He opened the telephone directory and looked her up: and there she was, a plain entry in the order of names—and there was her address, a road he recognized. He gazed at it briefly and then closed the book and carefully put it back beneath the base of the phone, as if this small gesture of control would be sufficient to prove that he wasn’t such a fool after all, he hadn’t lost his dignity and he wasn’t a boy.

He didn’t sleep well that night; he didn’t work well the next day. He arrived at his office dead tired and distracted and paused in the dark cool hallway before the door pane of frosted glass. Behind that door, and every door on the floor, and every floor in every building, there were men and women conducting the business of the day.

Q: What were they making?

A: Everything but love.

He entered and his secretary looked up with a slight grimace. The Governor’s called three times already, she said.

He’s still in Nashville, isn’t he? said Walter, worrying for a moment that the man might be holed up in his suite downtown, on some surprise visit to his western constituents.

He’s in Nashville, all right, the secretary said. He’s upset about something.—The phone rang, she answered, Yes sir, she said. He just walked in.

Walter Selby nodded, went into his office, and picked up the receiver. Selby, the Governor said. He made no introduction, he needed none: his voice—soft, insistent, and musical—could not be mistaken. Where were you last night, my friend? I tried to call you about a half dozen times. There’s a senator from Knoxville who wants forty thousand dollars attached to the Parks bill for some war memorial, and we don’t have it. He’s threatening to make a big deal about it, and it’s going to make us look like we don’t care about the war dead. Forty thousand dollars. Of course, it’s his brother-in-law who’s going to build it, but who’s going to listen to me on that? War dead…. War dead…. Forty thousand isn’t a lot, but we don’t have it. We don’t have the money: we just don’t have it. And you’re off at a ball game….

The Governor knew everything, that was given; the Governor was a magic priest of populism, a genius at the whip, and Walter hardly noticed the trespass. Instead, he found himself trying to remember what he had just heard, the words and the Governor’s exact intonation, so he could relate it to Nicole when he saw her again. The Governor had become a portrait of the Governor, and all its colors were richer than real. Are you listening to me? said the portrait, its voice heavy with political emotion.

Of course, said Walter. This is Anderson we’re talking about.

This is Anderson, said the Governor. I need you to get him to back down. I need your voice: you talk to him. Appeal to him. If that doesn’t work, think about what we’ve got that he wants more than he wants a war memorial, and then tell him you’re going to take it away from him.—And without so much as a good-bye, the Governor hung up the phone.