Chapter 44 – Time With Gwendy
It was hard giving it a rest for a day, especially with the dog giving me shit the entire time for not setting him up with the babe shepherd, but I felt I owed Gwendy some quality time. The next morning I called Tommy at the museum and asked him if he was up for a road trip the next day.
“Where to?”
“Jekyll Island. South of here three hours.”
“What’s there?”
“Not much.”
“This an overnighter, or down and back?”
“Over. Two nights.”
“Where?”
“Historic hotel on the island called The Jekyll Island Club.”
“What are we going to do there?”
“Nothing.”
“Ok. Can I drive the Mustang?”
“No.”
“Sounds exciting. Can we leave today?”
“No, I have to see someone. Spend some time with someone I’ve been neglecting?”
“Anyone I’ve met, anyone I know?”
“Not yet.”
“Ok, what time you going to pick me up?”
“Nine. We’ll be down there for lunch. Great dining room. Robert Redford filmed a scene from a movie he directed in there.”
“See you, Gwenny.”
“See you, Tommy.”
I hung up, poured myself a second cup of coffee and went into the living room, saying to myself, ‘Here we go.’ I set the coffee on the table in front of the sofa, opened the curtains, and went over to the painting. The second the blanket was off, Gwendy screamed at me, “Jesus H. Christ, I was smothering in there. Two days. Two days, where you been? This how you treat a guest, a family member? I was shagging the Charleston gents up and down Broad Street before you were a gleam in my great great great great grandson’s eye. You got no respect for your elders? That custom been lost to your ge....ge....ge....generation? And what’s this about a road trip to Jekyll Island? We used to go down there, hunt ducks. With that idiot that’s trying to put us in jail? Well you, put me back on the museum wall, which is worse than jail, all those tourists gawking all day long, listening to those horrible Philadelphia and Boston accents. Maine, those are the worse, can hardly understand what those frigid New Englanders are saying.”
I stood in front of the painting looking at her, which was like looking in a mirror, and said, “Now he’s an idiot? Two days ago you were dying to meet him.” She seemed to calm down, so I went back to the sofa. “Sorry we didn’t come in to see you yesterday.”
“That’s ok. I guess I’m just not yet used to the new surroundings; it was so exciting to be here with you and the gang the first couple of days. I know you’re not going to be able to be with me every day. I’ll get used to it. Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well did you screw his brains out yet? Where? Great?”
“No.”
“You telling me you’re still doing the Plato thing?”
“Platonic, not Plato. Plato was a guy; platonic is an ideal.”
She shrilled at that, a sardonic laugh, said, “How’s that going, giving up the real for the ideal? Fun? Satisfying? Make you quiver and feel alive? HEAR me, alive! You got something not all of us have. Use it, girl, fore you get to be like me, stuck in this 2D thing, bounded by a frame. Better than the black zone but no bowl of cherries.”
I sipped on the coffee, thought about what she’d said, replied, “It’s about as exciting as a no sex life can be. We play chess, take fast drives, eat great food and drink great wine, hang out with friends, talk about stuff. It’s exciting just being across the table from him.”
“He ever play footsie under the table? I used to do that with the boys a lot, get ‘em steamed up.”
“Yes, he does.”
“You get steamed up, hon?”
“Yeah, I do, impossible not to.”
“And?”
“And we sit there together under pressure for a while, and then we open the valves and the pressure dissipates.”
“And you like that?”
“No, but....I love Roger.”
“I tell ya Roger’s getting his chain yanked by those French babes. They know how to do it, how to play the game. You think he can stand up to that stuff, to them?”
“Yeah, he can. He’s the best.”
A snorting sound came from the painting, but she left it off and said, “Ok, so what do we do today? Where’s Gale and Jinny? Where’s the canine? Even he’s better company than the museum people.”
“You knew Elspeth and Lowndes, didn’t you? Tell me about that, what you used to do together.”
“Oh, god, they were some of my best friends, absolutely wild, both of them. She was my cousin, her father Gillespie was my father’s brother. We grew up together and spent most of our lives together. Even after Lowndes became mayor he still was wild, riding a huge quarter horse around town, running people out of the way, shooting a shotgun in the middle of the street just for the fun of it. We used to hang out at the Luxembourg Hotel, drink and eat and have a great time.”
“I’ve read stories about them at the hotel, before they were married. You know them then?”
“Oh yes. And the stories are all true. Someone like you, doing the platonic thing, I don’t think you’d appreciate some of them.”
“Gwendy, I’m not a prude. Tell me. Did you use to....?”
“You bet. Lowndes was something, and Elspeth and I loved the girly thing, made for double the fun. But it wasn’t just that, it was the drinking and the wilding and the fun and the living. Our lives were not boring. Manigault, now he was boring; but not me and my friends. We knew how to wind it up.”
“So you admit there’s more to life than sex? That other things can be worthwhile, things allowed under Plato’s ideal?”
“Gwenny, I look at things like this: the appetizer can be good, and the meat course can be great, and the side dishes can be interesting, and the wine can be divine, but if you don’t top it off with dessert, well then, the meal wasn’t complete. Capice?”
“Where’d you get that from, capice? That’s Italian.”
“Antonio. Ship’s captain. We sailed over to the Frenchie island of St. Barths once. That guy knew how to ride the waves.”
“Manigault let you go alone to the Caribbean with an Italian sailor?”
“I told him I was going to shop for a new housemaid, I wanted a French one.”
“You mean a slave?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Hon, that’s frowned on nowadays, you know that?”
“So I’ve gathered from conversations I’ve heard in the gallery. All I can say is that we’re all products of our times.”
I decided not to pursue a moral debate and said, “So you can at least conceive of a platonic relationship?”
“That’s not what Antonio and I had, I can tell you that. But yes, I can conceive of it, sort of like I can conceive of someone someday going to the moon.”
“We’ve done that, hon. Been there, done that.”
“No shit?”
“Where’d you get that saying from?”
“God, sorry, dreadful saying, dreadful language, picked it up from the crowd in the gallery, it's all gone downhill since my time. Sorry.”
“What about clothes?”
“Don’t get me started. We knew how to dress back then. You like this dress I’m wearing? Came direct from Paris; and this was just everyday stuff. Now y’all look like a bunch of slobs, especially those horrible shoes everyone wears.”
“You mean sneakers? Reeboks?”
“We wouldn't have made our pigs wear them.”
“On that I agree. What about t-shirts with things written on them?”
“Those tops without buttons? Short sleeves, men and women both?” I nodded. “Wouldn't have disgraced our slaves by making them wear those.”
I got up from the sofa with my cup and sauce
r and headed for the kitchen, saying as I passed her, “I’m getting another cup. You want some?”
“Very funny.”
I came back and we talked for another couple of hours, her telling me about the early nineteenth century and me telling her about the early twenty-first. After I told her about the recent productions at The Hall, her laughing at the story of Shalome and the moron neo-nazi, she said, “So, you’re not a total bore after all, are you my dear. You do appear to have some of the Bedgewood genes in you.”
“We have our days, me and Roger.”
“And tomorrow, dear, with the Tommy guy from up north, the investigator who’s trying to hang me back on the gallery wall, shut me up again. What are you and him going to do down at Jekyll Island? Hunt ducks?”
“We’re gonna hunt for something; I’m not sure what. This whole thing is a big experiment.”
“Good luck, dear, and remember about the dessert.”