Thirty Two
They both had troubling weeks. Scootie’s visions of a
December marked only by a craft festival and the obligatory Christmas Carol were obliterated by a
memo from Garth. He was requesting complete budget projections for the coming
year. Assuming that Garth would never do anything like this of his own
volition, Scootie guessed that the idea came from the trustees and their new
president-elect.
Juliana emerged from a meeting of the finance committee with
more challenges than she had bargained for. The gala and the shooting fees for Sophomore Jinx had barely made a dent in
the long-growing deficit – a number destined to double in the next five years
as the mansion underwent a seismic retrofit. Juliana called for an immediate
budgetary analysis, so she could get a better picture of the beast with whom
she would be wrestling.
Then there was Juliana’s message, which read: The hammer god ascends lucidly at the
squid’s cousin. The egret is eating snails off fine flatware. Ares means
“Hello, Mister Spalding!”
At first glance, Scootie assumed that Juliana had taken up
chance poetry. After two 12-hour days of juggling figures, he found the return
to language rough going, and took a half hour just to get through the first
sentence. The hammer god was Thor, after whom Thursday was named. The squid’s
cousin would be the octopus, beginning with the Latin prefix “octo” for eight,
so the meeting was clear, or lucid, for eight o’clock Thursday. Any bird these
days meant Scott, and fine flatware was China. The snails either meant he was
eating escargot, or he would be slow in returning. The third sentence was an
utter mystery. After 15 minutes of staring, he gave up and brought it to
Jackie. She took one glance and began laughing hysterically.
“Ares is Mars,” she explained. “The red planet?”
“Yes?”
“She’s having her period. As for ‘Hello, Mister Spalding!’
that’s the opposite of ‘Goodbye, Mister Spalding!’ which is what great baseball
announcers say when someone hits a homer. So...”
“So?”
“You ain’t goin’ all the way, pal.”
“Oh.”
Jackie looked at the rest of the note, written in sloppy,
left-handed script to disguise Juliana’s handwriting. “You two are quite a
case.”
“Yes,” Scootie sighed. “I am Batman, and I’m sleeping with
The Riddler.”
“Not this week you ain’t.”
Scootie went to the statue of Pan and left a patriotic
message: Keep your eyes on the flag.
Then he went back to his budget.
The final needle in the voodoo doll. came from Scootie’s
failings in meteorology. The day brought a sky full of clouds, but he took them
as the usual coastal overcast, and flew the golden flag. His own trip was easy
and dry, but Juliana arrived a half-hour later good and soaked, her shoes
coated with mud. He handed her a towel while she lined up some insults.
“Goddamn newspaper coulda done a better job than this,
Scootie. Why didn’t you just play it safe?”
“I honestly thought it would stay dry. And I missed the
Villa.”
“The Villa’s been here a hundred years, Scootie. I’m sure
the ghost of Fetzle will not come back to claim it.”
“Who made me Nostradamus? You’ve lived here longer. Why
don’t you fly the fucking flags?”
“And have half the town discussing Juliana Kross and her
flags of mystery.”
“Especially now that you’re president of the board.”
Juliana tossed the towel on the table and glared. “What the
hell is that supposed to mean?”
Scootie ran a hand over the top of his head, trying to
figure out what the hell that was supposed to mean. “Before you became
president.”
“President-elect.”
“President-elect, we seemed to be approaching something...
normal. Comfortable. Now you’re getting a little fixated on your civic identity
– and a little paranoid. It took me all afternoon to dissect that message, for
Christ’s sake. I didn’t even get the last part – I had to show it to Ja...”
Whoops.
Juliana’s eyes became black holes. “You... You showed the
message to Jackie?”
Scootie looked heavenward and sighed. “Yes. But... she
already knew... about us.”
“Why?”
“I had to tell her.”
“Why?”
“She wanted to sleep with me.”
“Oh, say no more! That explains everything.” She put a hand
to her forehead and stormed off to sit in Miguel’s chair. The size of the chair
produced an unintentionally comic effect, but she looked up to reveal tears of
frustration.
“Do you realize what you’re putting at risk when you do
something like that?”
Scootie leaned forward with his hands on the table. “You
don’t understand. She was drunk, heartbroken. Her ego was shattered. I know it
sounds... unusual, but I couldn’t turn her down without a good reason.”
Juliana answered through clenched teeth. “I’d rather you’d
have slept with her. This isn’t some small... recreation, Scootie. The Fetzle
Center and Hallis need me right now, and they need me to be stable. If word got
out about us, the whole thing would... well, I don’t want to think about it.”
“Listen to yourself!” said Scootie. “Listen to what you’re
defending. You’re married to a ghost, Juliana. You’re one half of a sick
marriage. But now, just because you’re a more important person, that sick
marriage is the lynchpin of your existence.”
Juliana sank behind a wall of her own making, the placid
face she used in committee meetings and business lunches. She asked the next
question as quietly as she could.
“Why are you acting like this? Why are you different?”
Scootie stretched his hands over the low rafters, looking
away in order to gather the real answer: all their time together, the narrow
margin in which their lives were allowed to meet. He tried to match the calm of
her question.
“I have given great parts of myself to you, more than you
know, more than I have told you. What I want is for you to give a part of
yourself back to me. I want you to live in shame. I want to see what you and I
can become, together, in this shamed world. I want us to love one another,
because underneath all these trappings of society, and art, and marriage, lies
the single truth that you and I belong together.”
In the careful arranging of her life, the multicolored
boxcars of her appointment calendar, Juliana had never planned for anything
like this – this ebony-eyed Ovid spouting passions at her from a lowered
ceiling. The fright came over her in stages. The first brought her to the front
door. She opened it, looked out at the rain, her heart beating rapidly. The
second was a loud, dark wind, driving her into the woods. She picked up speed
as she turned on Miguel Barran’s smooth stones and tumbled, her legs twisting
beneath her. She found her bearings in the word Califa, not remembering where the word came from, then spied a
black-maned creature running up to her. She felt his hands at her ankle and
swatted them away.
“Juliana, you can’t...”
“I’m fine.” She stood up briskly, using her fright to drive
down the pain in her left shin.
“Let me help you,” said Scootie. “You’re hurt. You can’t
walk alone.”
“I have to.” She limped away, then turned. “We can’t let
anyone... see us together.”
Scootie stood at the gate marker, rainwater streaming down
his face, the thought of what more he might have to give up focused on
Juliana’s fading shoulders. He would not realize the depth of her fright until
four days later, when she entered a meeting with a cast on her left leg. A
hairline fracture, said Jackie. Fell while she was jogging. That’s what Aggie
tells me.
Photo by MJV
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