But she didn’t say either of those things. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Hair on her shoulders. Top two buttons of the man’s Oxford-cloth shirt beneath the jumper undone. Earrings gleaming. Then we were together, first fumbling, then holding on tight. It was kissing, but it was more than kissing. It was like eating when you’ve been hungry or drinking when you’ve been thirsty. I could smell her perfume and her clean sweat under the perfume and I could taste tobacco, faint but still pungent, on her lips and tongue. Her fingers slipped through my hair (one pinky tickling for just a moment in the cup of my ear and making me shiver), then locked at the back of my neck. Her thumbs were moving, moving. Stroking bare skin at the nape that once, in another life, would have been covered by hair. I slipped my hand first beneath and then around the fullness of her breast and she murmured, “Oh, thank you, I thought I was going to fall.”
“My pleasure,” I said, and squeezed gently.
We necked for maybe five minutes, breathing harder as the caresses grew bolder. The windshield of my Ford steamed up. Then she pushed me away and I saw her cheeks were wet. When in God’s name had she started to cry?
“George, I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I’m too scared.” Her jumper was in her lap, revealing her garters, the hem of her slip, the lacy froth of her panties. She pulled the skirt down to her knees.
I guessed it was being married, and even if the marriage was busted, it still mattered-this was the mid-twentieth century, not the early twenty-first. Or maybe it was the neighbors. The houses looked dark and fast asleep, but you couldn’t tell for sure, and in small towns, new preachers and new teachers are always interesting topics of conversation. It turned out I was wrong on both counts, but there was no way I could have known.
“Sadie, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I’m not-”
“You don’t understand. It’s not that I don’t want to. That’s not why I’m scared. It’s because I never have.”
Before I could say anything else, she was out of the car and running for the house, fumbling in her purse for her key. She didn’t look back.
I got home at twenty to one, walking from the garage to the house in my own version of the Blue-Balls Scuttle. I had no more than turned on the kitchen light when the phone began to ring. 1961 is forty years from caller ID, but only one person would be calling me at such an hour, and after such a night.
“George? It’s me.” She sounded composed, but her voice was thick. She had been crying. And hard, from the sound.
“Hi, Sadie. You never gave me a chance to thank you for a lovely time. During the dance, and after.”
“I had a good time, too. It’s been so long since I danced. I’m almost afraid to tell you who I learned to Lindy with.”
“Well,” I said, “I learned with my ex-wife. I’m guessing you might have learned with your estranged husband.” Except it wasn’t a guess; it was how these things went. I was no longer surprised by it, but if I told you I ever got used to that eerie chiming of events, I’d be lying.
“Yes.” Her tone was flat. “Him. John Clayton of the Savannah Claytons. And estranged is just the right word, because he’s a very strange man.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Forever and a day. If you want to call what we had a marriage, that is.” She laughed. It was Ivy Templeton’s laugh, full of humor and despair. “In my case, forever and a day adds up to a little over four years. After school lets out in June, I’m going to make a discreet trip to Reno. I’ll get a summer job as a waitress or something. The residency requirement is six weeks. Which means in late July or early August I’ll be able to shoot this… this joke I got myself into. .. like a horse with a broken leg.”
“I can wait,” I said, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wondered if they were true. Because the actors were gathering in the wings and the show would soon start. By June of ’62, Lee Oswald would be back in the USA, living first with Robert and Robert’s family, then with his mother. By August he’d be on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth and working at the nearby Leslie Welding Company, putting together aluminum windows and the kind of storm doors that have initials worked into them.
“I’m not sure I can.” She spoke in a voice so low I had to strain to hear her. “I was a virgin bride at twenty-three and now I’m a virgin grass widow at twenty-eight. That’s a long time for the fruit to hang on the tree, as they say back where I come from, especially when people-your own mother, for one-assume you started getting your practical experience on all that birds-and-bees stuff four years ago. I’ve never told anyone that, and if you repeated it, I think I’d die.”
“It’s between us, Sadie. And always will be. Was he impotent?”
“Not exact-” She broke off. There was silence for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was full of horror. “George… is this a party line?”
