Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

He paused and took a breath and said, “Also, I’m clumsy except on the dance floor; I can do a mean shag. And I’m cranky and bone-lazy and absentminded and I play a good blues guitar and have one of the best collections of blues tapes in the Western world, and I read constantly and unselectively and take in stray animals and play a little tennis every now and then but no golf, and I’m a terrific cook, and I am prone to have a snort more often than not. I have no significant other, but I do, as we say in the South, entertain friends once in a while. I am clean, disloyal, not at all brave, and trustworthy to a limited degree. You, for instance, could trust me with your life, but not many other Southerners can, or do. They’re right not to. I am not, as has been pointed out to me on many occasions by my family and in-laws, a responsible provider. There. Anything else you want to know you’ll have to ask me yourself.”

“Wow,” I said, grinning a little ruefully.

“Didn’t I tell you never to ask a hermit a question?”

“Do you really think of yourself like that? As a hermit?”

He frowned slightly, and the brown forehead furrowed under the flag of black hair that fell over it.

“I think of myself as someone who has to live like this,” he said slowly. “Or maybe it’s that I have to live up there. I’m not quite the same person even down here in town. I’m certainly not the same one back there in the Delta. And it’s that mountain person I need to be, not those others. So…I guess in a way I am a hermit. I don’t know what else you’d call it, and in any case it doesn’t matter.”

“I can sort of see what you mean,” I said. “About not being the same up there. There’s…something…isn’t there?”

“Yeah. I thought you’d see. You’re different up there, too. I’d bet the farm on that. Not the same person as you are back home. It doesn’t mean you’re better or worse, just different. Somebody else. You don’t need or want the same things as that other person.”

I did not reply. How could one person suddenly become two? I hated the thought, and said as much.

“God, how could you not be two people?” he said. “You can be fifty people, or a hundred, if you need to. Lots of people are, but they never know it. They try to bring the person they were in one place to another completely different one, and nothing fits, and they’re restless and unhappy, and likely to be that way all their lives. You’re lucky you felt the difference. You’re at least able to realize that there is one. Whether or not you can be who you need to be up here, is another matter. But I’ll tell you one thing: If you try to force the person you were back there to live up there in those woods for long, you’ll end up hating them and yourself, too. If I went back home I’d turn back into the person that was of that place, and nothing about it would work. Poor Annabelle, it was that person she married. But that person couldn’t stay in the Delta or in his own skin. Just could not. Up there, I’m finally me—but she hates this me. I can’t go back there and she couldn’t come out here with me. I’m making a real hash of this. I think I mean that you need to go with who you are wherever and whenever you find yourself. That’s what I mean by carpe diem. I think.”

“Carpe diem…”

“Yeah. Live like you need to wherever you are, every day. How could you be unhappy then?”

“How could you be with anybody else, living that way?” I said in real distress, wanting to understand.

He shrugged.

“Maybe you can’t. Maybe people like that aren’t meant to live with anybody else. It turned out that I couldn’t. Maybe I could with somebody who was…of my place. But so far, nobody else has been—”

“It sounds like Joseph Campbell,” I said. “You know, follow your bliss? I never really liked that idea. It seems so self-obsessed. But maybe it’s the only honest way to live—”

“Yeah, well, it’s why I don’t talk about this to people,” he said. “It does sound like New Age shit, and it’s as self-absorbed as hell.”

We were both silent for a while. I thought about what he had said. It would not fall into a neat pattern.

In a moment he said, in a different voice, “I’m glad it wasn’t you who’s Pringle’s lady. At first I thought it was.”

“Why on earth would you think that?” I said.

He stared at me.

“Are you kidding? You’re so pretty. You must know you are; I thought when I saw you, ‘Damn, it’s got to be her, and she’s such a classy woman, so much better than his usual ones.’ When your sister said it was her I almost cheered.”

I felt the hot color run up my neck and into my face.

“You must be kidding,” I said. “I wish you wouldn’t. I hate that kind of stuff—”

“I’m not kidding,” he said, and I saw that he was not.

“But…Lord, you saw Laura. I mean, she’s a movie star; she’s always been the beauty, a real one. People stop her on the street and in malls—”

“And here you are, a tall, skinny lady with freckles and a mop of curly hair like Brillo and a smile that could smelt ore. Who on earth would find you pretty? Beautiful? Only about a million people like me, Miz Merritt Fowler. Don’t sell yourself short. You are one terrific-looking woman, and, I think, a nice one, too. So what’s eating you? Your daughter? Your airhead little sister? You got troubles back home? Fighting with your husband, are you?”

“No,” I said coldly. “I am not. Why did you think I was?”

“Heard you on the phone.”

“I don’t remember saying anything that sounded even remotely like I was fighting with my husband. I did not even speak with my husband. That was his secretary—”

“Look, babe, I know the tone. It’s one thing I do know, the tone of a woman’s hurt and anger. I’ll shut up about it; it’s none of my business, of course. But I do know the tone.”

Abruptly the cold anger left me. I looked down at my hands. They were clasped whitely on my empty glass.

“It’s not a fight,” I said. “It’s more of a misunderstanding. They happen in all marriages. I’ll get things straightened out when I get home.”

“You’ll get,” T.C. said. “You’ll do. You’ll fix. Who does all those things for you?”

Incredibly, I began to cry. I sat in the waning sun and cried silently and for a while I could not stop. He wet a napkin in his water glass and mopped my face with it, and in a little while the ridiculous tears slowed and stopped, and I looked blearily up at him. He looked back mildly concerned, but mainly serene and focused and very interested.

“Tell me,” he said, and I did. I sat there, alternately sniffling and hiccuping and laughing, and I told him all of it. It seemed to take a very long time. I left out little, from my mother’s death up to the present, except that I did not mention the beautiful, selfless, saintly black UN doctor who was perhaps moving even now by Pom’s side through places where he and I once went as a unit. Somehow I could not manage that. To name it is to make it real, to make it yours.

When I finished, I said, “Well, that’s it. The world according to Merritt Fowler. I’m sorry I cried. Hearing it out loud, it all sounds pretty trivial. I’ve had a charmed life, really.”

He snorted. “Yeah, right. Just like I had. Listen, Merritt, don’t let all that stuff ruin this for you. This right now, that up there…it’s too good, too special to spoil. Leave that woman back home. Be here now; be all the way here. Let’s see who you turn out to be up there. Let me show you the woods.”

I was suddenly embarrassed and tentative. We had shown each other too much, talked too much. It was too soon.