Trial, page 9
God, he wondered to himself, am I falling in love with this woman?
Afterward, he waited outside the theater in the cool night air. When Allie appeared, he kissed her, for once letting it linger.
She responded in kind before, stepping back, she gave him a somewhat puzzled look. “What was that about?”
“You’ve already forgotten the play? I fell in love with Juliet.”
“Just as long as you don’t get us confused. So where are we going?”
“My place, I thought. My roommates have taken off for the weekend, and I was hoping we could celebrate with champagne and pizza.”
She hesitated, just long enough to signal her misgivings. “As far as I know, I don’t drink champagne. But I guess pizza’s OK.”
The rambling two-story house he lived in, a worn artifact of early-twentieth-century elegance, featured wood paneling, overstuffed furniture, and a long dining room table bespeaking a formality alien to four disorderly college guys. Chase ordered a pizza split between pepperoni and sausage, his preference, and tomato, mushrooms, and red peppers for Allie. Then he dimmed the lights, lit two candles, and opened a bottle of Pol Roger—his father’s favorite, he explained to Allie, even though it was also the favorite of Winston Churchill, who Jean Marc Brevard insisted was a dangerous egomaniac dragooned into greatness by Adolf Hitler. “One Christmas,” Chase concluded, “I suggested to him that the total collapse of the French army must have figured in there somewhere. As they say, he was not amused.”
“What does amuse him?”
“My mother. Sometimes intentionally.”
When the pizza arrived, Chase filled two water glasses with champagne and placed them on the dining room table. “Just for a toast.”
“OK. I guess one sip won’t hurt.”
Gazing at Allie across the table in candlelight and shadow, Chase touched his glass to hers. “To you, Allie. For being so good, it’s hard to describe.”
She tasted the champagne on her tongue. “Sort of fizzy, but not sweet. I actually like it.”
“My dad would be thrilled.” He paused to look at her intently. “Seriously, do you have any idea what you did tonight? You had a theater full of people watching you like they were hypnotized. You must have felt that by the end. It sure looked like you did.”
“Yeah,” she acknowledged. “I kind of did.” She took another sip of champagne, and then her tone hovered between rueful and confessional. “I loved it, all right? I had this feeling of complete elation, like translating Juliet through my own experience was this special kind of magic. Then I found myself wondering who they were seeing—an actress, or a Black woman they wanted to like for doing something different.”
His own impatience surprised him, not least because he had always treated her with a certain studied caution. “Jesus Christ, Allie. Does it always have to be about that? Can’t you just let people appreciate you for being fucking amazing?”
Her eyes glinted. “Easy for you to say,” she snapped back. “You haven’t spent the last four years walking into a room and wondering what people are thinking, and who they’re seeing.” Abruptly, she stopped herself. “I’m sorry. But you and I can only be who we are, and that means we’ve spent our lives navigating different spaces. It’s unfair of me to expect you to get it, and unfair of you to expect me to forget it. So why not just say we’re two pretty OK people who both do the best we can.”
Finishing his glass, Chase tried to organize his thoughts. “I’m sorry, too,” he said at length. “But to me that feels like surrendering to a world neither of us made. So let me try again.
“I don’t know if anything about me is really OK with you—what I am, who I am, or where I come from. Maybe you think that I’m hopelessly oblivious to your experiences as a Black woman, whether from Georgia or anywhere else, and that I can never get inside you enough to be the company you need. From what little I know you may well be right, and for sure I can never tell you otherwise.” He leaned forward, watching her face. “Because of that, I always feel off-balance with you, no matter how confident I may seem on the surface. But to me you’re not just an OK person; you’re a terrifically interesting and talented woman with a whole lot of stuff going on inside you. I feel lucky to hang out with you. As best I can manage I want to know you, really know you. But I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance, and that’s started making me sort of sad.”
Even as he spoke, Chase realized that he was revealing things to her that he had barely realized himself. But he no longer cared. “About tonight,” he hurried on, “you were completely astonishing. I felt proud of you, even though I have no right to, and I was hoping like hell that you felt proud of yourself. You looked happy, and I wanted you to have that so much it took me by surprise. I felt a whole bunch of things I can’t put a name to. But here’s the point—all that’s about you. For sure you’re a Black woman, which for whatever little it’s worth to you is more than fine with me. But you’re also Allie Hill. And that makes you way more special than any woman I’ve ever known.”
In the candlelight, he could not quite read her expression. What he felt most acutely was her unwonted silence.
By instinct, he came around the table and gently lifted Allie from her chair to face him. The look in her eyes, he realized, was somehow different.
When he kissed her, her answering kiss went deep. Then she drew back, resting her face on his chest. “I guess we can reheat the pizza,” she said softly.
They climbed the stairs to his bedroom.
Silent, he unbuttoned her blouse, removed her bra. The slender perfection he uncovered only made him want more, as though he would never get enough of her.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Peeling off his sweater, Chase held her against him, kissing her neck, both of them swaying a little as they pressed closer. For all that this was the first time, for all that she so often put him on edge, he felt no anxiety or rush. To him it felt like they both knew something no one wanted to say.
Finally, he knelt, unbuckling her belt and sliding down her jeans. Stepping out of them, she did the rest herself.
He did not stand. Instead, he kissed the soft place between her legs, felt her stroke his hair as she murmured something indistinct.
Standing, he undressed, then took her hand as they walked toward his bed. In the faint glow of a nightlight, he saw she was lean yet muscled, a ballerina who moved with a dancer’s grace.
He lay beside her, kissing her mouth, her nipples, her stomach before rediscovering the softest part of her with his tongue. He stayed there, the fingertips of both hands on her nipples, as he slowly drew the faintest of sounds from within her. He felt her tighten, pressing against him until, all at once, she bucked and then shivered in waves of release that, diminishing, subsided into stillness accompanied by a wordless sigh of contentment.
He raised himself, placing his torso between her legs. “OK?” he asked.
After a moment of mute hesitance, she nodded. As he slid inside her, they looked into each other’s eyes as if to seek out what this meant. Then he felt her arms encircle him, and they began to move together. Chase had never felt this lost, or this much at home.
Afterward, they lay beside each other, languorous, gazing into each other’s faces. Then, to her own surprise, Allie laughed aloud, a happy sound that seemed to come from deep inside her. But what struck her next was how vulnerable he looked, how different than the face he presented to the world. “Chase Brevard,” she said softly. “Who knew? For sure not this girl.”
“Really?”
“Really. My mom always said that it’s foolish to be surprised by your own life. But tonight wasn’t in any plan I knew about.”
“That’s because I’ve always been the one who sought you out. So maybe it’s less of a surprise to me.”
“Hard to be surprised by what’s been on your mind since the first time we said a word to each other. Can’t say you exactly sneaked up on me—it’s more like I sneaked up on myself. So now I guess I have to give up and go on the pill.”
He gave her a somewhat tentative smile. “Am I imagining things? Or are you actually suggesting some kind of commitment?”
“Some kind.” She summoned a deep mock sigh. “All this time, I’ve been telling myself that what you wanted from us made no sense. It still doesn’t. But in spite of all that, there’s so much about you I really do like. I even like how careless you are, and that sometimes you make me feel that, too. Like tonight—for better or worse.”
“For better. Can’t you feel it?”
Suddenly Allie experienced a kind of wistfulness, as though she needed to console him for something only she knew. “Wish I could,” she answered gently. “But here we are. So I guess I’m going to ride with this until we run out of time. At least I’ll have something sweet to remember on those hot, muggy nights in Cade County, Georgia.”
It was strange, Allie realized, to hear how sad that sounded, and how true.
16
“Martha’s Vineyard?” Allie asked. “That’s not exactly next door.”
They were sitting with their backs against the tree in Harvard Yard, studying together on an unseasonably warm day in late April. “It’s not in the Aleutians, either,” Chase answered.” My parents have a place there. It’s beautiful, and with luck the weather in early May will be OK.” Seeing her skeptical expression, he added, “You said it yourself: We don’t have a lot of time. I was hoping you’d get someone to cover for you at the Coop, take a long weekend.”
She raised her eyebrows. “So let me get this straight. Your parents just let you bring stray women to their summer place for a long weekend doing whatever, whenever you choose and whoever she is. If my mom and dad had a second home—which is ridiculous even to think about—I’d be no more welcome to take some guy there than to sleep with him on the living room couch. And if you ever ran into Janie Hill coming out of my bedroom, her first look would terrorize you so much you’d never have sex again.”
Chase laughed. “When it comes to the details of my relationships, my parents have a driving lack of curiosity. Anyhow, the Vineyard is a special place to me. I’ve spent my summers there since I was a kid, and I’d like you to see it.”
This time her expression suggested fond exasperation. “A long weekend on Fantasy Island, or any kind of weekend, won’t change anything come graduation. But I guess I’d rather be with you than straightening shelves.” Briefly, her eyes softened. “I should know better, and so should you. But we just keep right on doing this, don’t we?”
The ferry to Martha’s Vineyard was a large double-decker boat that labored across the channel between Woods Hole and the island. So that Allie could see the panorama of water and land, she and Chase sat in the outside chairs atop the ferry, wearing sweaters to cut the breeze.
The surface of the water was blue in the noonday sun, the waves glinting a silver white. Allie saw Chase’s look of pleasure at leaving the “normal” world of Harvard—which to her wasn’t normal in the first place—as they entered a wrinkle in time. She discovered that her cell phone didn’t work.
“Welcome to the land that technology forgot,” Chase told her.
They landed in Vineyard Haven, a working harbor dotted with small boats, and took a taxi to Edgartown. Entering Main Street, they passed uniformly white wooden homes with manicured gardens, some with picket fences; the Old Whaling Church, an imposing building with large pillars and a tapering white spire on top; a redbrick courthouse; and then rows of shops with modest signage.
“Where’s the McDonald’s?” Allie asked.
“Not allowed. You have now entered Theme Park, New England.”
They ended up at a large three-story home from the nineteenth century, with a rear porch overlooking a harbor graced by sailboats, dinghies, boat tenders, and yachts of various sizes. Inside, Allie discovered, the Brevards’ summer home featured a first floor with high ceilings, a formal dining room, and a commodious living room that faced the rear porch. Allie put down her roller bag to look around.
The decor was perfect, she decided—too much so. Every piece of furniture—the off-white couch and chairs, the wooden end table with Chinese vases, the glass coffee table, the white curtains that Chase drew aside to admit sunlight, the paintings of seascapes and landscapes—made the space feel more like a photograph from a magazine than a place where people lived. “I know,” Chase observed. “My mother turned the whole place over to a decorator. It’s like an expensive museum to someone else’s taste.”
Allie kept looking. “I mean, it’s pretty. But it kind of makes you afraid of sitting down.”
“Can’t say I spend too much time in this room. Neither will we, I hope. Places to go, things to do.”
“Like what?”
He kissed her. “It’s like that Andrew Marvell poem. If you can’t stop time, make it vanish.”
In late afternoon they made leisurely love in Chase’s bedroom upstairs, sunlight through the window grazing their skin. She liked feeling him get lost in her, liked his lean, athletic body, the appreciation in his green-flecked blue eyes as he looked into her face. “You really are beautiful,” he told her.
“You’re the beautiful one. At first it annoyed me, but now I’ve gotten used to it.”
“Thanks for your tolerance.”
She scanned the room, registering clues to the boy he had been: a trophy from sailing camp, a signed baseball, Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a history of the Boston Red Sox, a group photograph of his soccer team at Middlesex, a group of grinning teenagers who looked like overgrown adolescents.
“When you were a kid,” she asked, “what were you like?”
“At first? I was a big daydreamer, perpetually lost in my own head. It made them both crazy, especially my dad. For a literature professor, he’s unsentimental in his ruthless pursuit of reality. I don’t know that he ever had a daydream in his life.” He lay back, gazing at the ceiling as if at whom he once had been. “Anyhow, they’d send me upstairs to get dressed in the morning, and forty-five minutes later they’d find me staring out the window in my underwear, living in God knows what imaginary world. Even then I read a lot, and that was my King Arthur phase.”
“Which knight were you?”
“Lancelot, of course. I wanted Guinevere to pine for me hopelessly. In desperation, my parents sent me to sailing camp, where the choice was between paying attention and falling overboard. It worked. Not only did I learn to love sailing, but I became insanely competitive when something matters to me. If I ever become a trial lawyer, that’ll probably help.”
It made sense to her, Allie thought—the romantic subordinated to the concealed drive she had begun to perceive in him, ready to call on when he decided that he needed it. She felt a kind of tenderness for the boy he no longer was, innocent of purpose or entitlement. “Sort of wish I’d known the daydreamer,” she remarked. “But I guess in some ways you still are. You sure want to make things turn out the way you imagine them.” She kissed him. “Tell you what. You be Lancelot, and I’ll be Black Guinevere. It’s been nearly an hour, and I’m tired of pining.”
That evening they walked a few blocks for dinner at the Charlotte Inn, a converted home on a tree-shaded street. Entering, Allie found herself in a large anteroom with burgundy wallpaper; ornate carpets; antiques of all varieties; walls covered with paintings of landscapes, birds, or horses in gold-filigreed frames; elaborately designed curtains; and overstuffed chairs. The side dining room, where Chase had reserved a quiet table, featured burnished wood paneling, another painting of someone who looked like a nineteenth-century captain of industry, and yet more depictions of horses doing the various things horses do—racing, jumping, or just standing around.
“Is this where you come to commune with your ancestors?” she asked.
“Not unless they were horses.”
“Not necessarily. There’s a painting of a white guy on a horse right in my line of vision.”
Chase grinned. “The Bancrofts,” he informed her, “preferred dogs. Less poop, and you don’t need a barn.”
To start, they ordered a bottle of chardonnay. Though Allie retained her wariness of alcohol, she had taken to sharing wine with Chase—perhaps, she admitted to herself, to dull the increasingly unhappy knowledge that they were running out of time.
He raised his glass, touching it to hers. “To us, Allie Hill.”
At that moment, like others, she sensed that he had grasped her thoughts. “To our weekend,” she amended. “I’m enjoying it so far.”
He put down the wineglass, absently touching the rim as he continued reading her face. “Why do you always qualify things, or talk like we’re about to turn back into pumpkins?”
“Because we’re going to turn back into the people we actually are.”
“As people,” he retorted, “we have free will. You’ve heard of that concept, I guess.”
“Amazingly, yes. What does it mean to you? That I get to choose what you want me to choose?”
With a tentative air, their waitress approached, formal in a crisp white blouse and black bow tie. “Do you have any questions about the menu?”
Allie saw Chase stifle his irritation at having their conversation interrupted. “Ever had escargot?” he asked her.
She smiled a little. “You mean snails?”
“If you prefer. My dad likes them here, and as a native Parisian he’s annoyingly particular.”
“Speaking as a native of Cade County, Georgia,” she rejoined, “snails stayed in the garden until Mama tossed them in the garbage can. She never thought they were food.”
