Padgett Powell - Edisto Revisited - A Novel

“Your mother’s on a toot, I hear.”

“My mother’s an ass ,” she said with some force.

“She doesn’t touch you in the morning.”

“Brief miracle.”

“Where were you?”

“When?”

“Before going home.”

“London.”

“And?”

“Some trouble.”

“Ah.” I said this as if I understood.

“I swam the English Channel, if you want to know where I got these legs.”

“I read Moby-Dick when I was nine years old.”

“Any rip currents out there?” She indicated the surf.

“Current out there suck you into Parris Island, put you in the lesbian brig.”

“Funny. Excuse me.”

She went in the house. When she emerged she was in a Speedo and cap-and-goggle headdress and she walked down the steps, looked at the wrecked Carrier compressor, raised her brows at me as if to say, Shouldn’t that thing be in working order if we’re to cohabit without a serious outbreak of cabin fever? walked smoothly into the surf, swam north once the breakers left her alone, and was out of sight relatively quickly because I refused to turn my head to follow, acknowledge the elegance and horselike power with which she pulled all this off. I set to making club sandwiches and thinking about what I was going to do with myself, seriously, now that I apparently had a woman who knew what to do with herself. That changes things a bit.

THE WOMAN WHO KNEW what to do with herself came in an hour later with a man-of-war sting on her calf, claiming she nearly drowned because there were so many washed ashore up the beach, she had to swim back.

“You get that,” I said. “The purple and red, stringy tide.”

“What makes you … so superior?” she said, very casually, and accenting the word—“superior”—in such a way that it didn’t sound altogether like an accusation.

“I sound superior ?”

“You don’t try to. But you do.”

“It’s because, madame, I’m inferior.”

“Too easy.”

“Shall I modify behavior to suit my cousin on the lam from unspecified trouble abroad and at home?”

“There you go.”

By this at first I thought she meant There you go, being superior, but she took a big bite of sandwich, looked up at the ceiling to contain an errant dollopette of mayonnaise at one corner of her mouth, and pushed it in with her little finger. She said no more, so that I decided “There you go” meant That’s the solution, do modify behavior, for me.

“Okay,” I said, fully intending any modification she felt in order, and knowing none would obtain. People do not change behavior, though they do, of course, popularly label a lot of their behavior changed, when some of it has been deemed in need of such a label. A person is as capable of a true change of behavior in equal degree to a planet’s capacity to change its orbit.

“Patricia Hod,” I say, “forgive me this, but I want your—” I couldn’t say it.

“My bod?”

“Dante made me configure that trope.”

“Understandable. There was a girl at school named Trott the boys just had to call Twat.”

She leaned over the expert lay of smart club sandwiches and kissed me: mayonnaise, bacon, and salty girl. Or: tongue tomato tart and salty lip of girl. Or: tart tomato, salty lip, and woman.

PATRICIA HOD AND I did not go the distance, or anything like the distance, whatever the distance means these days. But we had what might be called a good preliminary, of about four rounds. Round one was even carnal scrapping (bliss); two was revelation on her part that the lesbian experimenting was related to bad weather with all her men; three was my supplying evidence that bad weather was in me; four was her confiding that one of her busted affairs had left her briefly catatonic with grief (vide supra staring at ceiling) until she came out of it and painted her appliances, and the sidewalk outside, orange, and drowned the cat before setting the apartment containing the orange toaster and popcorn popper and smoothie blender on fire. This last business engendered in me the opinion — I’ve heard boxing strategies called “opinions”—that the safest thing for me, dash honor, was not to answer the bell for any more rounds. I got nervous, and that was it. A lover scared of you is less useful than one altogether impotent or unfaithful or uninterested. The orange toaster and dead cat put a perhaps outsized fear in me: I saw butcher knives late one night for trifling transgressions somewhere down the road. For a month we were as in love as people can be who are not altogether green, and then I was ready to go, simple as that.

Patricia understood this when I announced my unease, but she could not just accept it, so she sweetly laced her hands behind my neck and kissed me goodbye before dropping her weight and me to the floor and trying to kangaroo me. I left the Cabana to her. The Doctor would go down and rescue her with some solid girl talk and bourbon and approve of the entire affair, beginning and end. Patricia will do all right, I trust. I will see her when I see her.

The loose cannon in this, despite demonstrable psychological stolidity, is me, the fugitive from justice, or from cat-killing women who are your cousin, if the two are different. I would yet check into Parris Island if the forms were shorter. I swear it makes more sense than checking into Vecchio, Vecchio, and Cupola and making more buildings on our hallowed talked-to-death old ground. It would be better to fight Arabs on it, possibly better, morally, to fight Arabs on theirs, but that I honestly doubt, and do not see our letting them get here, so I will probably be an architect of some kind before a Marine of any. I regret this not joining as much as having to leave my cat-drowning, sidewalk-painting cousin, but see the pedestrian necessity in both, and see that I am finally a pedestrian, not much more. I am in something like life, and it is, I am afraid, not four or six or fifteen rounds once or twice or forty times, but something like a hundred thousand forgettable rounds unpunctuated by bells, unrewarded by belts, prize of contest not glory or money or domination but death. How did I get to this bright plateau so early, or at all — I once some species of child poet? Some cuddly seer of the verities, precocious prevailer? Upon all precocious prevailer the chickens of dailiness come home to roost.

Would I not be the architect born to design the fairway homes of the South? And the twenty-first century’s nineteenth holes? Is that job not, by birthright, mine? At the moment this idea swelled up solid in my brain, I decided to become a commercial fisherman, sort of. And it was not fish or commerce that got me: it was paint, marine paint, how it fails virtually by definition but hangs on, gets renewed, endlessly, with an eye to some hope, some faith that it, the new coat, will hold long enough for you to take the boat out and get it back a sufficient number of times to call the endeavor, overall, successful, and for you to call yourself whatever you choose to, in this case a commercial fisherman. I had a friend from college who could build, fish, shoot, drink, womanize, fraternize, skin turtles, and thought me an egghead. He was the ideal partner for a venture predicated on a fondness for brave paint.

Jim Ball (“Do not call me Jim Balls; if my brother is with me, you may call us Balls”) hesitated to venture into fishing, or anything else, with me, when I called him. His grounds, solid enough, were that I could not do anything. It was conceded I could do things inessential to the enterprise: keep books (there’d be no money), run the office (there’d be none), write letters (to whom?). I could not pull an oil seal at sea, pull a trotline, pull a full crab pot — he did not see how I could pull my weight.