Sweet Water, Page 2

  “Constance Clyde,” he whispered that first night as he unbuckled the belt of my going-away dress in our little room in the Sewanee Inn. “Constance Clyde. Constance Clyde,” as he lifted my skirt. By the time Horace was born, Amory was saying, “What’s for dinner, C. Clyde?” “C. Clyde, where’d you put my coat?” But soon enough it was just Clyde, and nothing else. I kept thinking that someday it would shrink to C.; and then after a while, maybe so I didn’t even notice, I would have no name at all.

  Sitting in the studio, on the kickwheel, I watched my foot as it pumped hard, then lifted. The wheel flew, specks of dried clay becoming a soft blur. I put my heel against the wheel to slow it. The clay pieces I’d finished were awkward and ungainly, misshapen bowls and off-center urns scattered on newspaper around the floor. I was determined to get the next one right.

  In the evenings and on weekends, whenever I could, I came to NYU to work with clay. In college, when I was learning to use the equipment, everything was free; now I had to pay to use the space. “When you start to work with the kickwheel you’re going to feel overwhelmed,” a teacher had explained one September day long ago. “Try not to think about it. The brain can be a potter’s worst enemy.” She had put her hands out in front of her like brakes. “Don’t feel you have to learn everything at once. Take your time. Experiment a little.”

  Ever since I was a little girl I had wanted to be a sculptor, maybe because I knew that my mother had been an art teacher before I was born. In elementary school I used to go home with my best friend, Dee Dee Harrison, in the afternoons. Her mother was a sculptor; she had a small studio in what had been a closet off the kitchen. Dee Dee and I would color or paint on construction paper at the kitchen table while Mrs. Harrison worked in the room next door. One day we came home with a story about a sculpting project we’d been assigned in art class: we were supposed to mold one of three Disney characters and then paint it to look like its cartoon self. Mrs. Harrison was furious. “What kind of learning … Our tax money going to waste …,” she ranted, pacing around the kitchen. When she calmed down she said that since the school wasn’t going to teach us to sculpt, she would do it herself.

  The clay was cold and hard to the touch, and smelled of deep dirt on autumn mornings, of damp leaves at the bottom of a pile. When I squeezed it, it molded to my hand. When I took my hand away, it retained the imprint of my fist. When I started working with clay, I felt I had control over something for the first time in my life. That first day, and for a long time afterward, my awkward fingers could not manipulate the clay into the shapes I envisioned. But every time was new, and each piece had potential—and someday, I knew, I would make my imagination manifest, for everyone to see.

  Now, on the wheel, I kneaded a lump of clay until it was silky and supple, and set it in the middle of the plaster bat on top of the revolving wheelhead. Holding my hands steady, I worked the clay into a concave shape. When I first started on the large wheel, it was like learning to ride a bicycle; I was clumsy and slow. I couldn’t keep up with the ceaseless turning. But once I mastered the movement it began to feel natural to me, and I could work fast. Carving a curve into the clay on the wheel was like taking a swift, smooth turn on a bike around a narrow bend: the way your body and mind lean into the curve simultaneously, as if one with gravity; the way you feel lifted up, as if on wings.

  As I learned about throwing clay, I taught my hands how to move in to center it, how to glide up the sides of the bowl to cut the excess or save a weak rim. The process became intuitive; my mind threw out messages, and my hands worked them into the clay, responding to unplanned patterns and rhythms. Working with clay, I decided, was like being in a relationship: as you move with and against it, as it moves with and against you, you put part of yourself into it and it takes on part of you and supports you. That’s why you have to work quickly; you need to do it, as my teacher said, without thinking too much.

  I could feel the energy in the air, my energy, as I worked through the afternoon, my mind racing beyond thought. When I looked up I was surprised to find the daylight faded, the room dark and quiet, the flowing shapes in front of me the only signs of turbulence.

  There was a time before all of this when I was young and Amory touched my body as if it were a shrine. When I was beautiful, or thought I was because he thought so. When we shared secrets instead of hoarding them. When we stayed together not because of the children, not because of the past, but just because. When, if I had danced, we would have danced in step.

  There are so many ways to tell this story.

  This is the story I told my children.

  The first time I ever saw your father he was playing the piano at a party in Chattanooga. He was tall, even sitting down, with large ears and great big watery-blue eyes. I had never met a man who could play the piano, and I was impressed. Everyone was singing along. I even remember the song; it was “Mood Indigo.”

  Your father looked up, across the crowded room, straight into my eyes, and smiled at me. And then he sang the words directly to me: “You ain’t never been blue ‘til you’ve had that mood indigo.” My girlfriends pushed me forward, and I mouthed the words back at him, and soon we were singing it together, as if we were the only people in the room.

  When the song ended he asked my name and I told him it was Constance Whitfield.

  “That’s a very pretty name,” he said. “Mine’s Amory Clyde. How do you like it?”

  I told him it was real nice.

  “Good,” he said. “I’m glad you like it, because it’s going to be yours someday.”

  Four months later, we were married in a small Baptist ceremony in my parents’ house at 11 Edgeley Drive in Chattanooga. My dress was silk, simple and white, with embroidered rosebuds and silvery beads, and it came almost to the floor. Your father wore a blue suit with a black tie. Your aunt Clara was maid of honor, and she wore a rose-colored dress with matching ribbons. Granddaddy Whitfield gave me away. For our honeymoon, we went to Atlanta. I’d never been there before. We stayed at the Sewanee Inn, and when we got there your father carried me across the threshold into a room that was filled with flowers, top to bottom. There was a piano in the lobby of the hotel, and that night your father started to play and people gathered around. It was just like being at that party where we’d first met, except that now I had a wedding band on my finger and our smiles weren’t shy anymore. We sang “Mood Indigo,” and everybody moved aside. I harmonized, singing soprano to his strong alto, and at the end everyone clapped. When we got back to our room, we found a bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket of ice, compliments of the hotel. And the next morning they served us breakfast in bed.

  Ellen would ask, “Was he handsome, Ma?”

  “I thought he was the most handsome man I’d ever seen.”

  “Was it love at first sight?” This from Elaine.

  “From the moment I saw him.”

  “Would you do it again?” Horace wanted to know.

  “I can’t imagine life without my three beautiful children,” I’d say, and that would be the end of the story.

  This is the story I told my father.

  I met Amory Clyde at a piano recital he was giving. Afterward, he walked me back to the gates of the college and asked if he could see me again. From then on, one thing just seemed to lead to another.

  * * *

  This is the story the family Bible tells.

  Amory Vincent Clyde, born January 27, 1913. Constance Winn Whitfield, born October 14, 1917. United in Matrimony September 22, 1937. Horace Whitfield Clyde, born March 15, 1938.

  This is the story I tell myself.

  The dance hall was dim and smoky, like a grainy photograph. Tricia and Marie, my roommates from the teachers college, had persuaded me to come, though I’d told them I was not allowed to dance. The week before, they’d convinced me to climb through a trapdoor to the roof above our bedroom in the women’s dormitory, which was guarded like a citadel, and smoke cigarettes. The first time I inhaled, I fe
lt my stomach flip with nausea, but I didn’t choke. Soon we were going up there every night.

  The night we went to the dance hall, we waited until all the lights in the dormitory were out and then escaped down the fire stairs. We’d brought high-heeled shoes in a paper bag, and Tricia had rouge and lipstick, which we applied squinting into the circular mirror of a compact under a streetlight. The three of us entered the hall as though we were on a mission. The few cigarettes we’d smoked outside in the dark had made me heady.

  When I first saw Amory he was standing at the bar with a drink in his hand. His hair was golden, wavy and long in the front, and his fingers, wrapped around a whiskey glass, were narrow and delicate. He didn’t look as if he had done a day’s work in his life. I liked that about him. He was talking to a woman with her back turned to me. When she took out a cigarette he set down his drink and produced a silver lighter, flicking it with one hand, cupping the flame with the other. He was smooth, I could see: smooth bordering on slick.

  When he started playing the piano I felt something ignite in the pit of my stomach. His playing was butter on corn. I felt myself swaying to the music, almost dancing, and the thrill of taboos breaking one after another was like fireworks in my head. A song I didn’t recognize turned into “Mood Indigo,” and suddenly I was humming along and then singing, and then, somehow, standing at the piano with him, looking into his cloudy blue eyes.

  I always get that mood indigo

  Since my baby said good-bye

  In the evening when the lights are low

  I’m so lonely I could cry …

  When the song ended we were staring at each other. He picked up his drink, took a swallow, and said, “You’ve got quite a voice.”

  “Thank you.” I leaned a little closer to the piano. “Where’d you learn to play like that?”

  “Oh, here and there.” He ran his fingers up and down the keys. “Do you play?”

  “Used to,” I said. “But then, everybody takes lessons, I guess.”

  He laughed. “Maybe where you’re from. What’s your name?”

  I told him.

  “Pretty name for a pretty dame.”

  I blushed. Part of me wondered how many times he’d used that same line; but a bigger part of me didn’t care.

  “I’m Amory Clyde,” he said, extending his hand. When I reached out to shake it, he held mine tight. “I hope you like my name, Miss Constance Whitfield, because someday I’m going to give it to you as a present.”

  That night, behind the dance hall, I was kissed for the first time in my life, by a man I had known less than two hours. He touched my breast beneath my thin polka-dotted dress, and I, intoxicated by his whiskey breath and virtuoso hands, did not even try to stop him. His tongue moved inside my mouth as softly as his hand caressed my nipple. All the while, he moved his thin, lithe body against mine in precisely the kind of dance that the Baptists tried so hard to prevent.

  To his credit, when I found out three months later that I was pregnant, Amory asked me to marry him on the spot. My father was enraged and then heartbroken that I could not be married in Chatanooga’s largest Baptist church, to which our family belonged. He hadn’t liked Amory from the beginning. With his delicate bones and sensitive mouth, his cigarettes and indolent smile, Amory struck my father as a dilettante and a dandy. But above all else my father believed in respectability and family honor, so the wedding was held in the front parlor of our enormous house. My mother cried through the entire ceremony.

  After Horace was born, my father sent Amory to Baton Rouge to learn how to run a cotton mill so he could eventually expand my father’s dynasty to Sweetwater, Tennessee. I moved into a lonely house with too many windows that had been built for us on the outskirts of town. A man named Jeb Gregory came out a few times a week to tend to the garden and fix up the place, and his daughter Lattie, who was fifteen, lived with me while Amory was away.

  As the months went by, I met the ladies of Sweetwater, especially Bryce Davies and May Ford, who welcomed me into their circle. I’d get Jeb to take me into town for bridge and tea parties and other things that ladies do. Bryce and I became close friends; she’d drive out to my house with Taylor, her little girl, and they’d stay all day. We’d sit on the porch drinking lemonade, and in the afternoons we’d put the babies to bed and have long talks in the summer heat. She had straight black hair, which she wore up on her head, and she confessed to me that she was part Cherokee. She said I was the only person she’d ever told. Her husband was working at Daddy’s mill down in Athens, but when Amory came back in the fall he would work for him.

  That time when I was alone and missing Amory, receiving each letter as if it were a priceless treasure, rocking Horace to sleep on the wide, cool porch and watching summer fall into autumn, jeweled vistas turning almost perceptibly into colors of blood and flesh: I think now that that time may have been the best and sweetest of our marriage.

  The woman from the Sweetwater courthouse said she thought I could get good money for the land.

  “That’s a pretty piece of property your granddaddy’s left you. Developers have been itching to get their hands on it for years,” she said. Her name was Crystal. Her voice was slow and sweet. “We’re not exactly a booming metropolis, but people come and go.”

  “What’s the house like?”

  “Well, it’s not much to look at, but the location’s great. About five minutes outside of town, running parallel to the highway. Easy to get to. That’s why I say you won’t have any trouble getting rid of it. They can chop it into three or four subdivisions, pave roads all through it, and even the farthest houses won’t be more than ten minutes from town.

  “But I don’t imagine you’ll get much for that old house. They’ll probably tear it down and start from scratch. Too much of a pain to work around it. I’ll tell you what, though, you ought to get somebody to help you if you’ve never handled land before. You’ll get swindled if you’re not careful.”

  It was quiet in the gallery, a typical weekday morning. A blond, Nordic-looking couple in their thirties were the only visitors. I smiled at them politely, cradling the phone on my shoulder with my chin, and wrote down the names Crystal was giving me. To my surprise, the list included my uncle Horace, a local real estate developer.

  My grandfather had left me sixty acres. Sixty acres—I couldn’t even visualize it. The land stretched across my imagination like a continent, a universe of dying grass and scrubby hills, with an old abandoned house at the center. Crystal, who seemed to know everybody, told me that Clyde, my grandmother, hadn’t wanted to live there. She thought it was inconvenient, too remote and old-fashioned. She lived in a modern housing development closer to town, with electric garage doors and access to cable TV. Horace and Elaine, my mother’s siblings, lived with their spouses near shopping malls. Their children were grown and out of the house.

  “I wouldn’t call your uncle first on this one,” Crystal was saying. “To be honest with you, it was a surprise to everybody that old Mr. C. left you that land. Not that you don’t deserve it, seeing as you’re Ellen’s daughter and all, but I think people had just plain forgot about you.”

  In his will, my grandfather had said he wanted to leave his three children sixty acres each but since my mother was dead her share would be passed on to me. From what I could get out of Crystal, it seemed that Horace and Elaine had thought it would be theirs to divide.

  It occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea what the property was worth. Thousands of dollars? Five, ten, fifty? Crystal said she had no idea either. She gave me a name to call for an estimate. “And after you talk to him, take some time to think it over,” she said. “You don’t have to decide what to do right away. That land ain’t going nowhere.”

  When I hung up the phone, the blond woman looked over at me. “Such an interesting collection you have here,” she murmured, tapping one long fingernail on the wall next to a dark abstract acrylic. “Vietnamese. Quite unusual, no?”

 
I handed her a flier about the artist, and she rolled it up and used it to point out features of the painting to her friend.

  I looked around the gallery. The place seemed absurdly small, despite all the work Adam and I had put in trying to make it feel larger: eggshell walls, track lighting, bare, polished pine floors. Geometrically arranged paintings and drawings, each separately lit, lined the walls. The current exhibit—attenuated wire sculptures that resembled cyclones—hung from the ceiling on long wires or rested on butcher-block pedestals we had retrieved from a defunct meatpacking plant. Brochures were stacked on an old wooden desk near the entrance next to an open guest book and cards that read:

  Rising Sun Gallery

  Contemporary Vietnamese Art

  304 Hudson Street, NYC

  Adam Hemmer, Owner

  with the hours and a phone number.

  In the seven years I’d known him, Adam had always wanted his own gallery. In college he studied Asian languages and art history; his mother was a collector of Vietnamese art, so he had a ready field of interest. When he came into some family money in his early twenties, all the groundwork had been laid.

  I was with him from the beginning. The two of us spent countless hours finishing the floor and arranging the lighting and seeing to hundreds of details. On opening day we worked through the early hours of the morning, completing final touches as the opaque slice of sky outside the window became transparent: gray, then misty yellow tinged with rose. At five o’clock, as the sun was edging around the corner of the building and spilling in shards across the canvases, over the sculptures, he reached for me in the stillness and we made love for the first time, on the hard wood floor. I remember the smell of paint and polish, the sounds of us echoing in the high-ceilinged room. I thought at the time it was like making love in a church.