Liberating Paris Read online

  LIBERATING PARIS

  LINDA BLOODWORTH THOMASON

  For my father,

  who swam the river with me on his shoulders,

  my mother, a rose-maker,

  and Pauline and Trav’s boy,

  Harry

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  Imagine a town that hardly anyone has ever heard of.

  CHAPTER 2

  Earl Brundidge was in his kitchen, watching the toaster and…

  CHAPTER 3

  Milan stretched her newly waxed, artificially tanned legs inside the…

  CHAPTER 4

  Somewhere between the El Presidente limo and the Lanier brothers’…

  CHAPTER 5

  Here’s what Slim McIlmore knows about gardens. You can’t get…

  CHAPTER 6

  Earl Brundidge Jr. had himself a “situation”—his favorite term…

  CHAPTER 7

  Mavis put another log in the little fireplace in her…

  CHAPTER 8

  All the breakfast dishes had been cleared at the Pleasant…

  CHAPTER 9

  Several pages of the Paris Beacon drifted like tumbleweed along…

  CHAPTER 10

  The little clock on Jeter’s nightstand glowed 11 P.M. A…

  CHAPTER 11

  It was Halloween. Mavis was seated at her kitchen table,…

  CHAPTER 12

  Brundidge had just paid his check and was telling Shandi…

  CHAPTER 13

  Mary Kathleen Duffer—that was her full name—was on…

  CHAPTER 14

  It was Thanksgiving morning and Milan had already whipped through…

  CHAPTER 15

  Monday morning. Milan was lying in her bed, partially covered…

  CHAPTER 16

  It was twenty degrees and the wind was whipping through…

  CHAPTER 17

  Mavis was making glorious beignets as Mary Paige read aloud…

  CHAPTER 18

  Charlotte Rampling was returning to Arkansas. And not just for…

  CHAPTER 19

  Charlie McIlmore made good on his promise. At Thanksgiving, he…

  CHAPTER 20

  Charlotte and Brundidge and the girls were the first to…

  CHAPTER 21

  Lottie Paris Pinkerton was born at 11:03 on the evening…

  CHAPTER 22

  Duff was lying on her back with her buttocks raised…

  CHAPTER 23

  On Friday, the bride and groom arrived in Paris. Wood…

  CHAPTER 24

  It was after midnight and Wood was lying around in…

  CHAPTER 25

  The sun was just stirring the Champanelle River when a…

  CHAPTER 26

  It was almost 10 A.M. and Fast Deer Farm resembled…

  CHAPTER 27

  The brand-new wedding party was now standing just inside the…

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CREDITS

  COVER

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  CHAPTER 1

  Imagine a town that hardly anyone has ever heard of. Yet everyone has seen one like it. It is just before daylight and the Main Street is coming into view. There are cracks in the sidewalk with stubborn little patches of grass sticking through them. Most of the stores are boarded up, but one that isn’t has a lot of naked mannequins lying around in the window. A fall breeze comes up and blows some leaves lightly against the cracked glass pane, blows the stoplight where no one is waiting, until it swings drunkenly from its cable.

  Just past all this, if you look hard, you will see the fire station and the football stadium and then the interstate where something large and pitifully ugly has been put up. Something to take the place of the town. There is a fifty-yard banner stretched across the front of it that says: “Home of the new Fed-Mart Superstore.”

  A few miles beyond that is a much smaller sign, really about the size of a world atlas. It’s nailed to a wooden gate, and you can tell by its shabby condition that it’s been there a long time. The sign reads FAST DEER FARM, but there aren’t any deer around. Just a middle-aged man on a horse. He is wearing some red-checkered pajama bottoms and drinking whiskey from an upturned bottle and riding as fast as he can toward the sun. If you lived around here, you would know that his name is Woodrow Phineas McIlmore the Third. But most people call him Wood, except his mother, who calls him Woodrow. Even though Wood and Sook—that’s his horse’s name—take this same ride every morning, they are in no hurry to arrive anywhere. They already know the bright light on the horizon moves farther into the distance the nearer you get. Well, really, Wood and Dapplegreys Ultraviolet, the granddaddy of Sook, figured this out when Wood was still a boy—it was the ride itself that was worthy—the swift exhilaration of speed and spirit, the complete aloneness of two equestrian astronauts hurling themselves through the green space of a thousand velvet acres—cool customers in their youth, now just two old friends trying to prove one more time that they can still ride the ride.

  The boy and his horse had once set out for the sun and quickly learned what others had tried to put into words—that becoming is probably better than being, that there is only one thing in between and that is the ride. The ride is everything—not the arrival at some distant or imagined spot of light from which you would probably just see another spot of light and then another until you didn’t know where you were or maybe you would even fall from the sky like Icarus for flying too near the sun or end up floating facedown in your swimming pool like Gatsby, who had worshipped too closely to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. No, there was no question about it: Forget about the light. Just keep your head down and stay on the ride.

  Wood felt lucky to know such a thing. And if his morning workout with Sook didn’t make it clear, the walls of his study were lined with the favored novels of three generations of McIlmores. Books that were full of myopic, vainglorious fools who had not only failed to appreciate the ride, they had gotten off, like some fevered hoboes looking for Big Rock Candy Mountain, and wandered stupidly into irony, mayhem, and even the jaws of a killer whale.

  That wasn’t Wood. He knew what a fine meal had been laid upon his table. He retrieved the whiskey bottle from the hip pocket of his pajama bottoms and unscrewed the cap—“Whoa, slow her down now, girl, that’s the way,” he coaxed Sook as she adjusted her pace to his need. He brought the flask to his lips, turning it up full tilt and draining the remainder of the whiskey inside. It went down smooth, warming him, like the maple syrup Mae Ethel used to make for his pancakes. Try as he might, he had never been able to reproduce for his own children the thick, sweet texture that flowed like a small mudslide across and then down the lightest, fluffiest pancakes ever poured on a griddle (nor could the cooks at the local Waffle House, despite his meticulous embellishments). Fluffy was not a word Wood used often but that’s what they were, damnit; they were fluffy and he missed them! He missed Mae Ethel, too. For some reason he thought of her whenever he drank whiskey. Maybe that was her secret ingredient for the syrup or maybe it was just that the liquor and the woman warmed him, especially on fall mornings like this when he rode without a shirt. Ah, Mae Ethel, his jolly, all-knowing angel who was colored when he first knew her but later became black. The person who used to scoop him up like warm laundry and press him against her huge, pillowy bosom, laughing her high-pitched approval at his simplest declaration.

  His parents were equally doting, but it was Mae Ethel who physically loved him up each day, squeezing his flesh, swinging him, holding him. Mae Ethel, filling every inch of the doorway with her hands-on-hips massive pre
sence, a symphony of happy, human noise moving joyfully through the McIlmore house. Mae Ethel, who had no expectations and therefore no judgments of him other than “do right” and “be happy,” and who had been born before self-esteem was discovered but had somehow managed to electrify her charge with the simple admonition, “Study hard now, Peaches.” It wasn’t a warning, really. It was more like a good tip. But by the time she said it, she had already filled him up with so much highly combustible good stuff, all she had to do was light the match and the boy was on fire. He would have slain any dragon, conquered any portal of academia to please her. For Mae Ethel, he would become the greatest this or that who ever lived, the swellest human, the champion, king, and valedictorian of everything.

  Once, he had ridden his bike to her house without permission and seen that she had children of her own—seen her actually hugging, holding, and swinging them in their yard. He was inconsolable for days. He was Mae Ethel’s boy, who knew she was a widow and had never even considered that there could be anyone else. That was the power of their connection. That was why he had attempted to immortalize her in his English comp short story at Duke—the one where his professor had unbelievably given him a “D” for “building a story around a cartoonlike character” and “fostering unimaginative racial stereotypes.” Well, you know what?—Fuck him. And the horse he rode in on. Who did that asshole think he was, anyway? It was Mae Ethel he was writing about, not Aunt Jemima! It was the only “D” Wood had ever received and it happened because he was at a southern school where intellectual southerners, the ever vigilant keepers of the new South, were not about to let some rich, smart-ass white kid wax eloquent about colored servants. Wood’s dad said he should have gone to Yale or even Columbia, where he had also been accepted. New Yorkers love southerners who write about their mammies. Hell, they would even throw a party for you.

  He brought the flask up to his lips again, then, when it surrendered nothing, went back to cursing. It was just as well the flask was empty. He was beginning to feel the whiskey and he had a hysterectomy later in the day, though thankfully, not a full one. Wood hated removing ovaries because doing so made him feel mean, as though he himself had personally snuffed out a woman’s femaleness, though he knew it wasn’t so. Of course, if medically dictated, he would do it, but he never failed to be surprised by how many of his patients wanted him to make the call—how easily they surrendered their most private places and thoughts to him. Lately, when he was in the middle of a gynecological exam or even surgery, he’d been struck with the overwhelming sensation that he was an impostor. What right did he have choosing chemo over fertility, deciding what goes and what stays, and who should or should not have children—all this because you tested well in math and science?

  He was burnt out. That was the reason he was getting home later and later and channel surfing and reading till all hours of the morning, well, not all hours, just till Milan went to sleep. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about her pressing her breasts and pelvis into his backside, running her tongue along the nape of his neck, behind his ears, inside his ears, and dragging her finger, just one, slowly down his spine, then down the back of each thigh, ending at his feet and kissing his insteps for a long, long, long time. I mean, who had a wife, who, after twenty years, still relished these things? It was unbelievable. Milan, who was so into perfection, got up every morning and put on makeup before she would let him see her, so into her club meetings and small-town triumphs—Miss I - May - Have -Come-from- the-Wrong- Side-of- the-Tracks- but-I- Can-Sure- as-Hell- Run-This-Committee-and-Be-Better-Looking-Than-Anybody-on-It. No one in Paris would have guessed the desire and abandon that poured out of her in bed—desire that he had made it his business to meet in full for their entire married life. The girl who hadn’t gotten enough of anything had attached herself to the boy who was overflowing and it was good. So good, in fact, that he had never strayed. Not once. They didn’t want the same things—they hadn’t even gotten married for the right reason. But who can say what the right reason is? One of his elderly patients got married because he needed someone to drive him to the Rexall and the Dandy Dog.

  Anyway, no matter what doubts he and Milan harbored about each other, the raw unrestrained joy of their physical union eclipsed everything. “Raw unrestrained joy of their physical union”? Now he knew he was drunk. That sounded like a damn romance novel. But there it was—and this is the truth—it didn’t matter if they were even speaking. As long as they could get their clothes off and wrap their arms and legs around each other with him turning her like some flesh-colored kaleidoscope so that they never ran out of sexual configurations, and as long as Milan could feast on him for hours, sometimes, he thought, trying to eat her way into his soul (not that it would do her any good to get there—they were not “soul mates,” they were fornicators extraordinaire and Charlie and Elizabeth’s parents and that was about it), but as long as the sex stayed so deliciously damn good, well then, they would still have that. But the problem was, he was losing his appetite for it, for her, and she could sense the absence of his enthusiasm, as though he had already been unfaithful.

  Wood turned Sook around a wide half circle and started back toward the old meandering farmhouse built by his Grandfather McIlmore. He loved every board and brick of it as much as the house he’d grown up in with his parents. Especially the old back porch with the kerosene lamp (Milan had since converted it) with a tall ship etched on the globe. And the foldout Hide-A-Bed with the feather pillows and dank old quilts where he and his grandfather slept after Belle died. This was where his Pa had read to him Great Expectations, Treasure Island, Peterson’s: A Field Guide to Birds, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Tarzan. Milan had recovered the Hide-A-Bed with some sissy designer animal print because she thought it would please him. He never made love to her on it again. She could nibble on him for the rest of his life and still never understand who he was, is…. Maybe he didn’t even know anymore himself. But he sure as hell wasn’t going to wander around like some self-indulgent asshole in some hackneyed midlife crisis movie. He sure as hell wasn’t going to buy himself a new red sports car, or trek up some frozen mountain in Nepal and have to be rescued after his nose falls off, or grow a beard, or file for divorce, or have an affair with the babysitter, or worst of all get in some crybaby men’s support group and start sobbing because his Jim Johnson doesn’t come out to play as much as it used to.

  No, none of these things were going to happen to Woodrow Phineas McIlmore. He had been alive for four decades now. And some pretty fine people had put themselves out a considerable amount for him. Mae Ethel had made him feel like the most important living person while his Pa had shown him, against a dreamy starlit sky, how insignificant he was. His Grandmother Belle, the mad scientist who could put fruit in a jar and make it last a couple of years, also showed him, with her skirts gathered around her knees, whether a snake was worth killing or saving. From his father, he learned that a man who puts people together for a living can still become too soft to shoot a deer. From his mother, he got the audacity to be the first white boy to swim at the municipal pool on “Colored Day.” And when the hate mail began to roll in, his old man had shown him that nothing looks more powerful than a simple “Kiss My Ass” on monogrammed stationery.

  No one could deny that Wood had already had a pretty good run. Maybe not everything had fallen perfectly into place, but his days were more than good enough. And he had no reason to believe that luck wasn’t going to hold. No way he could know that in a few short moments, the phone would ring and, within the breadth of three or four spoken words, start a chain of dramatic events that would change his world forever.

  Wood and Sook lumbered past the house toward the barn, bathed in their commingled sweat. “That’s my girl. My girl, you know you are, now.” He patted her like a fond, old lover. Suddenly, an expertly manicured hand appeared in the upstairs bedroom window, brushing back happy Brunswig & Fils (“Morning Glory,” dye lot MC6) chintz curtains. Milan stepped in
to frame, wearing pink silk pajamas, looking newly awakened, all perfect and dewy. Lots of southern women look dewy, but Milan was more dewy than most. It was as though her entire skeleton had been strung with skin from a baby’s butt and then infused with this perpetually damp, flushed color. Wood had never seen anything like it. They exchanged a long, pleasant stare that gave nothing to the other. It didn’t matter anymore how Milan looked or whether he even still wanted her. He wasn’t going to stir the waters. He knew what he had, knew what he was going to do. He was going to lay low, keep his head down, and stay on the ride.

  CHAPTER 2

  Earl Brundidge was in his kitchen, watching the toaster and talking on his cell phone. “Look, we’re trying to raise little girls down here and you’ve got a show on national television sayin’ that we’re ignorant and sleepin’ with our relatives.”

  An officious male voice responded, “I think you’re overpara-phrasing.”

  “Do you? Well, I’ll have to watch that. In the meantime, what they said was that everybody in Arkansas has big eye–little eye syndrome, ha, ha, ha—which I’m pretty sure means what I said it means. And when you say that we have one book and it’s called the State Book, that implies that we’re all illiterate.” Two pieces of toast popped up and he began buttering them. “Do you know how many books my seven-year-old daughter has already read? A thousand. You got a little seven-year-old girl out there in Hollywood who’s read a thousand books? C’mon, bring her down here. My little girl will whip her ass.”