Lisey's Story(9)

No. She didn't think so. What she thought was that this clipping and the jotted, fulsome note were Dashmiel's petty revenge on Scott for . . . for what?

For just being polite?

For looking at Monsieur de Literature Dashmiel and not seeing him?

For being a rich creative snotbucket who was going to make a fifteen-thousand-dollar payday for saying a few uplifting words and turning a single spadeful of earth? Pre-loosened earth at that?

All those things. And more. Lisey thought Dashmiel had somehow believed their positions would have been reversed in a truer, fairer world; that he, Roger Dashmiel, would have been the focus of the intellectual interest and student adulation, while Scott Landon - not to mention his mousy little wouldn't-fart-if-her-life-depended-on-it wife - would be the ones toiling in the campus vineyards, always currying favour, testing the winds of departmental politics, and scurrying to make that next pay-grade.

"Whatever it was, he didn't like Scott and this was his revenge," she marvelled to the empty, sunny rooms above the long barn. "This . . . poison-pen clipping."

She considered the idea for a moment, then burst out into gales of merry laughter, clapping her hands on the flat part of her chest above her br**sts.

When she recovered a little, she paged through the Review until she found the article she was looking for: AMERICA'S MOST FAMOUS NOVELIST INAUGURATES LONGHELD LIBRARY DREAM. The byline was Anthony Eddington, sometimes known as Toneh. And, as Lisey skimmed it, she found she was capable of anger, after all. Even rage. For there was no mention of how that day's festivities had ended, or the Review author's own putative heroism, for that matter. The only suggestion that something had gone crazily wrong was in the concluding lines: "Mr Landon's speech following the groundbreaking and his reading in the student lounge that evening were cancelled due to unexpected developments, but we hope to see this giant of American literature back on our campus soon. Perhaps for the ceremonial ribbon-cutting when the Shipman opens its doors in 1991!"

Reminding herself this was the school Review , for God's sake, a glossy, expensive hardcover book mailed out to presumably loaded alumni, went some distance toward defusing her anger; did she really think the U-Tenn Review was going to let their hired hack rehash that day's bloody bit of slapstick? How many alumni dollars would that add to the coffers? Reminding herself that Scott would also have found this amusing helped . . . but not all that much. Scott, after all, wasn't here to put his arm around her, to kiss her cheek, to distract her by gently tweaking the tip of one breast and telling her that to everything there was a season - a time to sow, a time to reap, a time to strap and likewise one to unstrap, yea, verily.

Scott, damn him, was gone. And  -

"And he bled for you people," she murmured in a resentful voice that sounded spookily like Manda's. "He almost died for you people. It's sort of a blue-eyed miracle he didn't."

And Scott spoke to her again, as he had a way of doing. She knew it was only the ventriloquist inside her, making his voice - who had loved it more or remembered it better? - but it didn't feel that way. It felt like him.

You were my miracle, Scott said. You were my blue-eyed miracle. Not just that day, but always. You were the one who kept the dark away, Lisey. You shone.

"I suppose there were times when you thought so," she said absently.

-  Hot, wasn't it?

Yes. It had been hot. But not just hot. It was  -

"Humid," Lisey said. "Muggy. And I had a bad feeling about it from the get-go."

Sitting in front of the booksnake, with the U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review lying open in her lap, Lisey had a momentary but brilliant glimpse of Granny D, feeding the chickens way back when, on the home place. "It was in the bathroom that I started to feel really bad. Because I broke.

3

She keeps thinking about the glass, that smucking broken glass. When, that is, she's not thinking of how much she'd like to get out of this heat.

Lisey stands behind and slightly to Scott's right with her hands clasped demurely before her, watching him balance on one foot, the other on the shoulder of the silly little shovel half-buried in loose earth that has clearly been brought in for the occasion. The day is madden-ingly hot, maddeningly humid, maddeningly muggy, and the consider-able crowd that has gathered only makes it worse. Unlike the dignitaries, the lookieloos aren't dressed in anything approaching their best, and while their jeans and shorts and pedal-pushers may not exactly make them comfortable in the wet-blanket air, Lisey envies them just the same as she stands here at the crowd's forefront, basting in the suck-oven heat of the Tennessee afternoon. Just standing pat, dressed up in her hot-weather best, is stressful, worrying that she'll soon be sweating dark cir-cles in the light brown linen top she's wearing over the blue rayon shell beneath. She's got on a great bra for hot weather, and still it's bit-ing into the undersides of her boobs like nobody's business. Happy days, babyluv.

Scott, meanwhile, continues balancing on one foot while his hair, too long in back - he needs it cut badly, she knows he looks in the mirror and sees a rock star but she looks at him and sees a smucking hobo out of a Woody Guthrie song - blows in the occasional puff of hot breeze. He's being a good sport while the photographer circles. Damn good sport. He's flanked on the left by a guy named Tony Eddington, who's going to write up all this happy crappy for some campus outlet or another, and on the right by their stand-in host, an English Department stalwart named Roger Dashmiel. Dashmiel is one of those men who seem older than they are not only because they have lost so much hair and gained so much belly but because they insist upon drawing an almost stifling gravitas around themselves. Even their witticisms felt to Lisey like oral readings of insurance policy clauses. Making matters worse is the fact that Dashmiel doesn't like her husband. Lisey has sensed this at once (it's easy, because most men do like him), and it has given her something upon which to focus her unease. For she is uneasy, profoundly so. She has tried to tell herself that it's no more than the humidity and the gathering clouds in the west presaging strong afternoon thunder-storms or maybe even tornadoes: a low-barometer kind of thing. But the barometer wasn't low in Maine when she got out of bed this morning at quarter to seven; it had been a beautiful summer morning already, with the newly risen sun sparkling on a trillion points of dew in the grass between the house and Scott's study. Not a cloud in the sky, what old Dandy Dave Debusher would have called "a real ham-n-egger of a day." Yet the instant her feet touched the oak boards of the bedroom floor and her thoughts turned to the trip to Nashville - leave for the Portland Jet-port at eight, fly out on Delta at nine-forty - her heart dipped with dread and her morning-empty stomach, usually sweet, foamed with unmotivated fear. She had greeted these sensations with surprised dis-may, because she ordinarily liked to travel, especially with Scott: the two of them sitting companionably side by side, he with his book open, she with hers. Sometimes he'd read her a bit of his and sometimes she'd vice him a little versa. Sometimes she'd feel him and look up and find his eyes. His solemn regard. As though she were a mystery to him still. Yes, and sometimes there would be turbulence, and she liked that, too. It was like the rides at the Topsham Fair when she and her sisters had been young, the Krazy Kups and the Wild Mouse. Scott never minded the turbulent interludes, either. She remembered one particularly mad approach into Denver - strong winds, thunderheads, little prop-job commuter plane from Death's Head Airlines all over the smucking sky - and how she'd seen him actually pogo-ing in his seat like a little kid who needs to go to the bathroom, this crazy grin on his face. No, the rides that scared Scott were the smooth downbound ones he sometimes took in the middle of the night. Once in a while he talked - lucidly; smiling, even - about the things you could see in the screen of a dead TV set. Or a shot-glass, if you held it tilted just the right way. It scared her badly to hear him talk like that. Because it was crazy, and because she sort of knew what he meant, even if she didn't want to.