I have an affinity for choosing the tightrope walk across the abyss and have developed a genius for the wrong turn. I chose a woman so broken along the soft tissues that she took me to her house of ash and veils. When did she disappear forever? What was the moment when I turned over in my marriage bed and found myself staring at the deadly black widow with the red hourglass on her abdomen? That hourglass keeps time for me.
Niles manages to calm his sister down. I catch his glances, feel the full weight of his great pity for me. I see him trying to make a decision about how to bring this enriching evening to a close.
Starla breaks away from Niles. She comes over to sit on my lap and weep hard against my chest. It would be becoming of me if I comforted her or hugged her or tried to ease her suffering in any way. I do nothing but let her feed on my coldness.
“Poor Leo. Poor Leo. You never should have married me! I knew the moment I heard you say ‘I do’ that you had destroyed your life.”
“It didn’t work out as planned,” I finally say, as her hysteria will not abate till some response is given.
“Let me take her to our house,” Niles says. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow. We all could use some rest.”
“I lied about the abortions,” she says as her brother leads her out. “I would never hurt you intentionally. I didn’t mean to have the abortions, Niles. I’m scared to death to have a kid like me. Leo, I stole ten thousand bucks from the wall safe. Take it back.” She throws her purse at me. It glances off my chair and hits the floor.
“I keep that money there for you, Starla,” I tell her. “That’s your money. You can always come get it, whether I’m here or not. You know where I hide the key. This is your house, and you can stay here anytime you want. You can live here forever. You’re still my wife.”
“Get me a goddamn divorce from the Toad!” she yells at Niles. “If you love me, get me out of the paws of this Roman Catholic fanatic.”
“We Catholics take this shit seriously, Starla,” I say wearily.
As Niles takes her out, her profanities resound through the gardens and courtyards of Tradd Street.
I sleep late the next morning. It is about eleven when I awake to the smell of fresh-brewed coffee. Niles is waiting for me in the kitchen, badly shaken from the evening before.
“Starla took off sometime in the night,” he says. “I wish it didn’t turn out this way, Leo. I wish we’d all never met. We had no right to poison someone’s life like we did.”
“We’re all innocent,” I say as Niles and I embrace. Neither of us is embarrassed to cry about Starla’s ruined, thrown-away life.
I wonder how many more times we will have to weep for her.
Always, it takes weeks for me to recover from these blitzkrieg encounters with Starla. But I see a truth in the latest one that I have not faced before. I think I have come to an endgame at last, and a deal breaker. As I drive out to Sullivan’s Island, I try to figure out why I have stayed married to Starla for far longer than anyone thinks possible. My religion has certainly played in my stubborn choice not to take her through the divorce courts. Sheba and Trevor have always treated my unshakable faith as some teenage problem I failed to outgrow, like acne. I think I hold tightly to my religion with the same rigorous inflexibility as I hold the sacredness of my laughable marriage. The form of my faith appreciates the hardness and unapologetic rigidity of my church. It gives me rules to live by, and it demands I follow them twenty-four hours out of every day. It offers no time off for good behavior. The power of prayer has enabled me to survive the suicide of my only brother. And though I walked straight into a poisonous marriage with my eyes wide open, I take my vows to Starla to be permanent and sacramental even when I strayed. But something broke in the center of me when Starla flaunted the bloody arms and legs of a son I never knew I’d conceived. It is an image that holds mythical sway over me. I look at the water below me and try to think of what a life without Starla might bring.
As I turn into the driveway of the home I have always called Molly’s grandmother’s house, I realize that her grandmother, Weezie, died a good ten years ago. I park my car behind Chad’s Porsche convertible and leave my keys, in case anyone needs to leave before I do.
Sheba’s limo pulls in directly behind me, and I rush over to open the rear door for her. She swings her legs out of the backseat with the casual elegance of a vacationing queen, and tells the chauffeur she will catch a ride back to the city.
“How long do you keep the limo?” I ask.
“As long as I keep giving the producer blow jobs.”
“Forever seems like a long time,” I say. She holds on to my arm while I lead her toward the back steps.
“That’s my plan,” she says. “One that I can live with. The woman I hired to look after my mother is wonderful. She’s so patient she can even put up with my bitchy ass.”
“My God, she must be a saint.”
Sheba punches my shoulder. “Shut up. I’ve never been a bitch to the Toad.”
“You’ve always been great. I saw Trevor this morning. He looks better.”
“He’s getting stronger every day,” Sheba agrees. “I talked to David, and he thinks he can come home in a week.”
“Send him to me, Sheba. You’ve got your hands full with your mother.”
“Mom’s a lot worse than she was when you last saw her,” Sheba says. “No short-term memory at all. Sometimes she doesn’t know me from a Buick station wagon. And here’s the odd part: I thought people with Alzheimer’s are gentle and malleable. My mom’s gotten mean as hell. She bit my chauffeur the first night home, and she scratched my arm today. Look.”
Sheba unbuttons her blouse to show me four bloody lines running from her collarbone to her elbow. But that is not what I notice first: as usual, Sheba is braless. I stare at her magnificent and world-famous breasts.
“Sheba, I’m looking at your tits,” I say.
“So what? You’ve seen them before.”
“Not for a while.”
“I heard about Starla,” Sheba says. “You sound like you could use a soft body to lie down with.”
“I probably could,” I say.
“Why don’t you ask me to marry you?”
“Because you’ve dated Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood and about a thousand other movie stars. I don’t want my little wing-wang following those boys.”
“Oh, that,” Sheba scoffs. “They got me through some bad nights and more than a few jobs. Now ask me to marry you, Toad.”
“Sheba,” I say, dropping to one knee in a posture of grotesque overacting on the balcony of Molly’s grandmother’s house, “would you marry me?”
Surprising me, Sheba says, “I accept your nice proposal. And yes, it’s time for me to have a kid, and I bet you and I could have a sweet one.”
“What?” I echo, startled. But then Sheba makes one of her patented entrances for the crowd that awaits us. I stop at the refrigerator and open up a beer, then move into the sitting room where Sheba has just announced her engagement “to the Toad, of all fucking people.” She kisses me with real feeling, which takes me by surprise, and my friends laugh at my obvious discomfort, with the exception of Molly, who raises her eyebrows, and Niles, who doesn’t laugh at all. Despite his exhortations for me to leave Starla, the subject still carries the power to hurt him deeply.
“Sheba’s just kidding, Niles,” I assure him.
“I hope not,” Niles says. “That scene the other night was a nightmare.”
“Amen,” Fraser says. “You don’t know how bad it got when Niles brought her to our house.”
“Starla’s lost,” Niles says. “It’s over for her.”
Molly doesn’t allow herself to get drawn in, but says lightly, “Get on your bathing suits, everyone. The chief of police gave us permission to go swimming before he conducts his doom-and-gloom session.”
“I forgot to bring a bathing suit,” I say.
“I’ve got an extra one in the bathroom downstair
s, Leo,” Chad says easily, with no sign of jealousy, no indication that he’s picked up on any clue that his wife’s friendship with me has changed. “It’ll be a little big in the crotch, but fit otherwise.”
“The last one in has the shortest pecker and the littlest tits in Charleston,” Fraser says, racing out the front door. She and Niles have a footrace to the beach. Both are still superb athletes and in perfect shape. Their sons are all ferocious competitors and eating lesser rivals alive in their sports teams.
I put on Chad’s swimsuit, then leave the basement on the run, onto the sand and into the ocean until I reach a depth safe enough for me to dive in. The heat of the day vanishes in a heartbeat as I swim underwater until I burst out into the sunlight, then a wave crashes over me. I look back at the house and feel a deep gratitude to that disheveled, shabby cottage with its sprawling rooms and comfortable furniture. The house has become a fixture in some of our lives, a place of safety and refuge for the others. Due to Molly’s generosity, I have always used the beach house as a place of escape and spiritual healing. She has always let me stay here at the house on Sullivan’s Island whenever Starla embarked on one of her desperate walkabouts. The first time Starla ran out of our house on Tradd Street, she stayed away for a month. The second time she stayed away for six months, the third a year. Then I stopped counting. On each occasion, Molly brought me the key to this house, and I went out and stayed here. It is a place of comfort in a falling-apart life. I know every inch of this beach the way I know the oddities and markings on my own body.
Swimming into deep water, I am blessed by the warm currents of the Atlantic. My body feels as though I am swimming through a bright veil of silk in the green caress of the waves. Looking out onto Fort Sumter, I watch as the last ferry leaves for the return trip to the city. The island seems much too small to have started the deadliest war in American history. But I am old enough to remember when it would’ve been against the law for Ike and Betty to swim in these waters or to set foot on these beaches.
Molly swims out to me. She balances herself against my shoulders as I stand on my tiptoes, and we ride the waves that answer some internal timepiece set by the laws of moonlight. This is the first time we’ve been alone since my bed in San Francisco, an evening that seems an eon ago.
“Cat got your tongue?” she asks. “Why are you being so antisocial?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t mean to.”
“Why didn’t you call me about Starla?” she asks.
“Bad night, Molly. The worst. And, I think, the last.”
“And your engagement to Sheba?” she teases.
“A joke. How else could Sheba grab center stage with all you pretty girls out here? She’s a pro. She knows how to do it.”
“I don’t think she’s joking.”
Sheba is riding the waves with Betty, Ike, and Chad. The tides are strong and moving us quickly, already three houses down from Molly’s grandmother’s house. Sheba waves to Molly and me, and shouts: “Keep away from my fiancé, bitch.”
Chad shouts, “Stay away from my wife, you horny bastard.”
He says it with a smile, and it occurs to me that Chad isn’t worried. The day has yet to come when a man of Leo King’s ilk steals anything from a man like him, his expression tells me. I glance at Molly for confirmation and it is written on her face, which is resigned and even a little comforted. I can feel a density in her sadness, but also resignation to the case-hardened life she was born to lead. We have lost the ease of communication we enjoyed when we first arrived in San Francisco, where the sun set over an alien ocean, far enough away that we could put aside the responsibilities that lay in ambush for us in Charleston, and say things to each other we could never utter in our South of Broad lives. We are now shy around each other; a dark star has grown between us. Words have gone on holiday. Molly swims ashore and walks into the house.
When Molly calls us in, we go inside wordlessly, and go about helping, laying out food on a sideboard. The food is simple and perfect for a summer day. Niles made coleslaw and potato salad and baked beans, while Ike brought take-out pork barbecue and ribs. Molly puts out a stack of her grandmother’s finest china and her best silverware and insists we use it, even as we raise our voices in a collective complaint and argue for paper plates and plastic utensils.
“I’m not a paper-plate kind of person,” Molly insists, her face strained, but always the perfect hostess. “So kill me.”
We spend a half hour listening to reports about news of the children and how the various sets of grandparents have managed to spoil them, to set them on the path to ruin, all the disciplined and well-trained children of my friends.
“My father took our kids over to our house on Edisto Island and went on a fishing trip that lasted a week. None of them brushed their teeth that week. Or changed their clothes. Or took a bath. He managed to turn them into savages in the time it took us to find Trevor,” Fraser says.
“They had a blast,” Niles says.
“Let’s call Trevor,” Molly suggests.
“Great idea,” I chime in. Molly dials the main number for the Medical University. Sheba talks to her brother first, and I talk to him last. When I take the receiver from Betty, Trevor sounds exhausted. I say, “Just wanted to say hi, Trevor. Get some rest.”
“Come see me and I’ll promise to talk dirty to you,” he says. “I think I’d be dead now if you guys hadn’t found me.”
“Old news. Now you’ve got a whole bunch of tomorrows to get ready for.”
After I hang up, Ike rises. His innate authority brings the room to a hushed, patient silence. Though he is dressed in shorts, a billowy Hawaiian shirt, and flip-flops, his carriage lends him a gravity that is inseparable from his character. He clears his throat, takes a swallow of beer, and checks several handwritten notes on note cards. “As Betty and I see it,” he says, “we still got one big problem. We don’t know where Trevor and Sheba’s daddy is. But we think it’s a pretty good bet he’ll end up in Charleston.”
“How can you be so sure?” Fraser asks.
“We can’t,” Betty answers. “The guy may be a psycho, but he’s a sophisticated one and a weirdly obsessive one. We’ve been looking at case studies today. We can’t find anything like this in crime literature. This guy’s special and he’ll go to extreme measures to get at the twins.”
“Betty and I are convinced that he will come here. From everything Sheba has told us, he started out as a run-of-the-mill pedophile; this usually stops when the kids hit puberty. But something snapped in this guy, and Sheba’s fame as a movie star clearly drove him around the bend. We’re lucky he didn’t kill one of us in San Francisco. The authorities at Sing Sing sent his mug shot and fingerprints and his psychiatric evaluation when they transferred him to a mental hospital. They don’t like to send their prisoners to a mental hospital; otherwise, all of them would act crazy, just to get out. You’ve got to be a special nutcase with a real gimmick to be transferred.”
“I give up, Ike,” Sheba says. “What was my dad’s gimmick?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you this,” Ike says reluctantly, “but since you asked—he had a bad habit of eating his own feces.”
The room fills with howls of disgust. Betty passes out copies of the mug shot, and we study the face of a moderately attractive middle-aged man who looks far more quizzical than monstrous. Sheba explains that when she was growing up, her father seemed like a hundred different men inhabiting the same face. There was no role he could not play with the mastery of a born actor, except he never let anyone know the moment when the games ended and the man himself stood facing the world without artifice. He had a flair for accents and costumes and personas. He forced Evangeline Poe into home-schooling the twins as he rented country houses and farms, and they sometimes found themselves living in homes with no address. He was a jack-of-all-trades and he would come home dressed as a minister, a rural surgeon, a veterinarian, a TV repairman. For each role, he perfected different ma
nnerisms; he dyed his hair so many times that the twins used to argue over its natural color.
They moved every year, sometimes twice a year. In isolation, they grew up terrified and abused. Finally, their alcoholic mother made contact with someone in her family. Evangeline discovered that an aunt she’d never heard of had left her money and a run-down house in Charleston, South Carolina. It took her two years to make a break, but she finally summoned the courage to leave. She took the money the aunt left her, plus what she’d hoarded for years waiting for the chance to escape. She got a moving van to take them across the country for the chance of a renewed life. They were living in Oregon then and, of course, their father tracked them down because of the van. Sheba said her mother had always managed to make such small errors of tactics and judgment.
Now Evangeline is sick of running from this creep and can accept whatever fate is due her. Sheba Poe has returned home, and she is certain that her father will be making his way south. Besides, Sheba says, she is dead set on marrying the Toad, having a couple of kids, and settling down for the rest of her life. She has known too much chaos in her life and has caused too much of it in the lives of others.
“Sheba, would you knock it off about our marriage?” I ask. “You know I was fooling around.”
“Actually,” she says, “I wasn’t. You proposed to me and I accepted. It seems simple to me.”
Fraser is worried, though, and ignores both of us, addressing her question to Betty and Ike. “What about our children and our families? Are we placing them in danger?”
“We think everybody surrounding Sheba and Trevor are potential targets for this guy,” Ike says. “He doesn’t seem to set any limits.”
“Then we can’t help you anymore, Sheba,” Fraser says. “We went to San Francisco gladly. But the stakes have changed. This is asking too much.”
“Speak for yourself,” Niles says. “I’ll guard your house at night, Sheba.”
Chad scoffs. “Don’t be ridiculous, Niles. Our children and families are the most important things here. They trump everything.”