Dan Wakefield - Starting Over - A Novel

When she finally stood up, opened her eyes, and got herself a drink, Potter felt he could talk to her again. Rationally.

“Where’d you get that goddamn stuff?” he asked.

“A friend,” she said coyly.

“Come off it. What’s going on?”

It turned out that Marilyn had seduced a cute hippie dropout boy who worked in the mailroom at her office, and he had given her the grass.

“What’s he like?” Potter asked.

“Beautiful,” Marilyn sighed, “and only nineteen.”

Potter felt a flush of anger rising, and then it just as suddenly subsided as he saw that she was doing what he had so often done. She had simply gotten herself a young pretty one of the opposite sex to forget things with, no doubt providing an instructional and enlightening experience for him, too, in the process; hopefully a matter of mutual profit.

“Hey,” he said, “that sounds terrific. Your boyfriend.”

“It is,” she said. “Just what I need now. Mindless fucking.”

“Terrific. But now that you’re all set, what about me? Alone in the world.”

He expected friendly mockery, but instead Marilyn smiled, and gazed mysteriously at her glass.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said.

“You have? Tell me!”

Marilyn lit a cigarette, slowly, and took a long, dramatic drag, blowing a line of smoke at the ceiling. “What do you think of Southern girls?” she asked.

“As a rule, they smell good,” Potter said. “Also as a rule, they are not very bright, or they go to great lengths to pre tend they’re not very bright. But they make up for that by this delicious odor they have. Per capita, they probably bathe more often than your average Northern or Western girl. Why do you ask?”

“There’s the Southernest girl you ever saw in my office. In accounting. She and her roommates are having a Sunday Brunch, and you know what they need for it, honey-chile? The lacking ingredient?”

“Let’s see—a sack of grits?”

“No. They have plenty of that.”

“What do they need, then?”

Marilyn smiled. “Men.”

“Aha.”

“Do you volunteer?”

“It’s the least I can do.”

“OK, but try to behave. These are delicate flowers.”

“Of course. I’ll do anything you want.”

Marilyn smiled. “Try not to let your nostrils flare,” she said.

Potter had thought that Marilyn would take him to the Southern Girls’ Sunday Brunch, but she said she preferred to stay home and smoke grass and fuck her new hippie dropout boyfriend, so Potter had a bracing Bloody Mary for breakfast and set out all by himself.

The Southern Girls’ Sunday Brunch was at a large, sunny apartment on Mt. Vernon Street. The “good side” of Beacon Hill. It must have been expensive as hell. The place was beautifully furnished, and there were lots of plush pillows and cushions all over the place. The apartment had two bedrooms, and was shared by four girls.

Amelia, Lilly, Samantha, and Pru.

It sounded like a garden. Potter wondered which flower to pick.

The four roommates were all from Georgia. There were also girls at the party from Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina. They seemed to have banded together in the cold, foreign clime of Boston according to their states of origin, rather like the Puerto Ricans who settled in New York with people who hailed from the same hometown on the island.

Only one man at the party was an identifiable Southerner, an insurance man from Savannah. None seemed to be native Bostonians. They were the usual male Singles crowd that is almost interchangeable in any large city, former fraternity types grown into accountants and bankers, realtors and lawyers, ad men and department store buyers, not really rooted anywhere, looking for the action, saving their money for orange Porsches and mirrored bedrooms, subscribers to Playboy who ski and scuba-dive according to season, have their own home wine-making kits and hang their college diplomas in the room they refer to as The John. Many of them belonged to churches, few had abandoned their faith in God, and most believed secretly that if they lived a reasonably honest and hard-working life they would go to Swinging London when they died.

The brunch featured marvelous homemade biscuits laden with hot butter and thick preserves. There was also scrambled eggs, ham, and fried apples. There were weak Bloody Marys and strong coffee. Potter snuck into the kitchen hoping to perk up his coffee with a secret shot of whiskey, but finding none, resorted to sousing it with cooking sherry.

One of the Georgia Peaches caught him. The tall one, with thick brown hair the color of molasses. Large chocolate-y eyes. Cherry red lips, moist and sweet-looking, as if they might be sugar-coated. She smelled of marmalade and honeysuckle.

“Mistah Potter!”

“Oh, I was just—”

“Heah,” she said, extracting the coffee cup from his hand and pouring it down the sink.

Oh, God , he thought, I have sinned and been seen. I will be given a lecture and asked to leave. All of Boston’s Southern society will scorn me. Magnolias will close when I pass. Honey will harden at my touch, and biscuits will burn in outrage.

But the sweet peach only smiled, her perfect teeth gleaming in friendly glory, and said, “That stuff’ll curdle a man’s stomach.”

“Well, I just—”

“You just thought you wanted a good, stiff drink, and if that’s what you want you should have one. Now heah.”

She stretched to reach a high cabinet, and pulled down a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label.

“You just pour some of this over a little ice, and enjoy yuh-seff.”

She whispered it, conspiratorially, as if such pleasure and privilege were reserved for him alone.

“Hey, thanks. That’s great. No kidding.”

Her head tilted, her lips made a pout, and she said, gently cooing, “Honey, a man should have what he wants .”

A tingling sensation swept over the surface of Potter’s whole body.

That night, he dreamed of molasses.

“So you liked Amelia?” Marilyn asked.

That was the one who had caught him in the kitchen. Amelia.

She was the one he had picked, of the four roommates.

Pru was too much like her name; tight-lipped and careful.

Samantha seemed prone to eating too many biscuits; she wasn’t quite yet an out-and-out fatty, but a couple of extra pralines would do the trick.

Lilly was quiet, fragile, and her eyes were sad.

He might well have gone for Lilly, though, or the dark, husky-voiced Alabama girl, or the bouncy little lollipop from North Carolina, but it was Amelia’s act of mercy in the kitchen that he couldn’t forget, and the way her big brown eyes fixed on him when she said, “Honey, a man should have what he wants .”

A world of honeyed comfort seemed promised in the phrase.

Marilyn, pouring a second martini, asked that most unanswerable of questions. “What do you see in her?”

“Molasses,” Potter said.

“Mo lass es?”

“Don’t you think her hair is like that? Brown and rich and thick?”

“Oh, fuck,” said Marilyn.

Amelia would never say that , Potter thought warmly. She is a lady .

He smiled. “You asked what I see in her,” he said. “I guess I see—everything I’d like to imagine.”

Marilyn sighed, shook her head, and took a drink.

“Do you understand what I mean?” Potter asked.

“Molasses,” said Marilyn.

Potter splurged.

On his first date with Amelia, he took her to Locke Obers. Just because it was supposed to be the best, the most chic, expensive, grandest place in all of Boston. He knew that with many girls that might blow the whole thing, make them suspicious or contemptuous of his showing off, or coolly reserved in knowing they already had the upper hand because he was going all out.