Barry Hannah: Ray

One night, when I was in Saigon, a chicken colonel’s wife walked past my Yamaha motorbike on the street. My eyes got wide and my heart was molasses. She walked by me, clicking her heels, tanned legs so lean, a fine joyful sense of her sex uplifted at the juncture of her thighs. Her face was serene, her eyes were blue, and she was, as they say, music. I recall the Rolling Stones’ “Lady Jane” was pouring from the door of the nearest bar. But she was not mine. I could never have her, and my heart was broken. The image of her kept me pure for years. I resisted the whores in Saigon, mainly out of a horror of VD, and never cheated on my first wife, mainly because there was nothing I ever saw like the chicken colonel’s wife again. Until I met Westy.

Westy does not talk much about the act of love. She just does it with all her heart. Her children are beautiful and polite, and she has never threatened suicide, which my first wife was good for at least once a month, maybe thinking her period entitled her to it. We’re all God’s creatures, but some of us can be especially ugly. I had from this union three beautiful children to present to Westy. She liked them, and the second night we were together, with my two youngest heavenly blessings running around, Westy said, “I want you and all of it.”

“Hey, Doc, I hear you’re getting married,” says Mr. Hooch.

“That’s right.”

“You look happy and good, Doc. Me and Agnes wanted to invite you to have the wedding right here at the house. We’ll clean it up and the preacher will be free.”

“Thanks. I got a lot of sentiment for the place, John, but this lady is really fancy and I’m afraid it’s going to have to be at the old Episcopal Church.”

“Well, could we get invited?”

“You didn’t get the engraved invitation yet?”

“I don’t know. I don’t read much mail.”

We went out to a heap of circulars, letters from the police, utility bills, pamphlets from the Cancer Fund, and unread newspapers in the front hall. I picked through it awhile, but I couldn’t find the envelope from Westy. Then there was a shriek from the top of the stairs. It was Sister.

“I’ve got the cocksucking invitation up here I”

Mr. Hooch looked very sad.

“She ain’t right, Ray. She sings at night and smokes that marijuana all day and don’t eat much. Go see to her, if you would.”

Her room was well set up. She had an expensive stereo system with Devon speakers, a microphone stand, a Martin guitar on the bed, which was brass and costly, a thick oyster-shell carpet on the floor, a tape deck, rugged white thick curtains on the window, and the walls were solid acoustic tile as well as the ceiling. It was a studio. It smelled like she’d lit ten joints about eight seconds ago. It had its own refrigerator. The door shut behind me as if in a vacuum unit.

Sister was wearing only panties and a red halter. I’d never seen her look better. Actually, in good light, I’d never seen this much of her.

She had the invitation from Westy in her hand and sat on the bed.

“Ray, you told me once that you needed to make love twice a day or you got very tense and had headaches. But I need it four times a day and I’m getting to be a better singer every day.”

I didn’t say anything. I was still taking in her and the room.

“There’s a man with a glorious voice I sing with named Marcel Smith. We do duets and we are making a lot of money around town and we might get an album contract with some people up at Muscle Shoals.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

“Just like your marriage,” Sister said.

“I’ve got this woman. You’d like her,” I said.

“I probably would. What do you want to do?”

“Find it and live it,” I said.

“Don’t you want me too?”

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” said I.

AFTER a Ray kind of honeymoon in Florida, where I composed myself as a father and husband, children from seven to twenty running around my mind and knees, I get a jet, the DC-8, a lovely bird that flies a lot of people, and sit back and dream until La Guardia in New York, queen of the Eastern shore.

At Columbia University there are fifteen doctors, three from the South I know, alcoholics themselves. I read them my paper. I get the applause and the check.

(I have another paper on women, unfinished. Like Freud, I threw up my hands.)

Columbia University got me a companion for dinner at the Russian Tea Room. She was Laurie Chalmers, a Jewess with large bosoms, very visible in a velvet dress. She was a tall, frank girl. After the meal we went back to the room they gave me at the Cornell Club, where Laurie Chalmers disrobed and lay on her back on the bed and described herself as constantly starved — for food and liquor and Southerners. Her family was in Charleston, South Carolina, and she said she missed the South despite her job, that was high-paying. She was an anesthetist.

She was a gorgeous and restless lady, with an amazing amount of beard around her sex. While she talked to me, she chewed a corner of her pillow. Her feet were perfect and unlined and un-knobbed in any way. She ate me, just like another delicious thing on her menu. I felt rotten, cool, and unfaithful, yet I came with an enormous lashing of sperm, which made her writhe and lick. Then Laurie Chalmers fell sound asleep.

Ray, listen, I said on the plane back. You don’t have the spiritual resources to cheat on your wife. You feel wretched and sinful and hung over, without having had any liquor. Adventures in sex are just not in your person anymore. You know too many people already. Your conscience is banging your head off and you can’t even eat your eggs.

So I ordered a double vodka to hose down my conscience.

The idea to keep at it came on, but I beat it back with thoughts of Westy.

Westy fixing up our house in Tuscaloosa.

Westy with her big blue eyes.

But this lousy barnacle of unfaithfulness would not leave my mind. It is enough to be married to a good woman. It is plenty.

Ray, the filthy call of random sex is a killer. It kills all you know of the benevolent order of your new life.

Then the plane is in trouble. The bad things in my head have passed through the air and gone into the engines of the DC-8. Starboard engine is gone, finished, and the plane begins rolling. The stewardess loses everything. Her poise is all gone.

So I go up in the cockpit. One of the pilots has fainted. They’re young boys, about twenty-eight.

“Want me to take it?” says I. “There’s no big disaster,” I say. “Keep the nose up, asshole. Keep the nose up. Yes. Pull back all the way. What’s wrong with him?”

“We’ve never had any trouble before.”

I get the fainted pilot out of his seat, and while the other boy is leveling it, I try to get some action on the bad engine, meanwhile putting in my order for a second double vodka.

We’re headed the wrong way, but that’s okay. We set it down in Birmingham. Suits me. I didn’t have to get another plane to Tuscaloosa. I called Westy and she came over to pick me up.

“Ray, are you all right?” asks she.

I asked her to pull over so I could get out and vomit.

“Darling. Did you drink liquor in New York, darling?” she says.

“Yes. I violated my rules,” I say. “Darling, let me have a piece of your Big Red gum.”

“I missed you, Ray,” she says.

Says I, “I missed you, Westy, in the worst way.”

She is such a clean German. The car is clean. I invent cheerfulness from my heart, the biggest engine.

“Ray, there’s something else wrong. Not just the liquor,” Westy says.

“There’s nothing wrong,” I say.