The King is Dead

She frowned, she didn’t think he was all that serious. New York? The words meant nothing to her. I’m not going to New York, she said. I’ve never been and I’m not ready to go now. Why do you want to do that? I don’t. What do you want to go up there for?

He said, Everything I need is up there, all the people I want to meet.

People? Meet?

Other musicians, songwriters, arrangers. I can’t stay around here forever, I’ve been here too long already, I can’t stand it. It’s time for me to go.

She thought she was everyone he’d ever want to know, and she went cold, inside and out. Well, you go to New York if you want, she said. I’m not going. You go make yourself into a big man.—She made a mockery of the last two words. If he noticed he ignored it.

I want you to come with me, he said. I’m asking you to come. Nicole. Nicole. I have enough money to keep us for a while.

She shook her head. You’re crazy. Go if you want, but I’m staying here.

She thought that was the end of it; either he would go immediately and leave her to childlike Charleston, or he would stay for a while and change his mind. But she was wrong: they talked about it all through the following days; always he said he had to go, always she said she wouldn’t, and always there was the next day, the next discussion, dissection, dissension, another day of putting off disaster.

It’ll be so easy, he said, on the drive back to his house one night.

It’s not easy at all, said Nicole. My family, my friends are here. You and I are here. She waited a moment, gazing at a cream-colored quarter moon out the window on her side of the car, but he said nothing in response, and when she looked over at him his stony face was illuminated in the glare of an oncoming car.

That was December 1st, and she felt the ends of things overhanging. Three days later he disappeared, just like that. He didn’t warn her, he didn’t explain. His calls stopped coming, and she waited, she thought it was because they’d fought. But a week went by and still no word, so she borrowed a friend’s car and drove out to his house, only to find it empty and dark. Then she realized he’d left for good and without a good-bye. He’d gone to New York.

She imagined that the city had swallowed him as soon as he set his first foot down on the sidewalk. In her head New York was hell, and he was innocent but there he was. Hell, because there were so many, many people, none of them had faces, and there was no escape, and no way for them to love each other. She couldn’t imagine what kind of experiences he might be having. She tried to picture it, but all she could see was his back as he walked down the street, because he, too, had lost his features. She worried and wept; she’d never realized she was capable of such misery.

She would be tempted to ask the women who shopped in Clarkson’s: Should a woman travel to hell in order to be with a man she loves? Seven dollars and fifty cents for a girdle. Three dollars for nylon hose, beige, package of three.

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One sunny Friday morning just after New Year’s a woman came into Clarkson’s, someone Nicole had never seen before: bleached blonde, her makeup hastily applied and unflattering, no smile and no gaze. Maybe the woman was thirty, maybe thirty-five; she shopped a little bit, she looked around at this and that. She took a dress down from its stand and turned it forward and backward to get a better look. There’s a fitting room in back, if you’d like to try that on, said Nicole. The woman merely nodded, replaced the dress, and turned away to another part of the store, where there were lacy underthings. Just about then Nicole realized they were running out of the tissue paper that they kept below the counter, so she went into the back room to get some more. When she returned the woman was gone, arid it was only an hour later, when she was going through the store, primping the stacks, that she discovered an entire shelf full of hosiery missing, and she was halfway to the stockroom for replacements before she realized that the woman must have stolen them. How very strange, the more so since they were different sizes, and so she couldn’t possibly have had any use for them all herself. Well, thought Nicole, I’ll have to tell Mr. Clarkson, and he won’t be happy about it. He can’t really blame me, though. Who would have thought a woman was a thief? It made her sad to think about it, and sadder still to think she had no one to share the story with.

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Nicole put a sign on the door of Clarkson’s that said:

CLOSED FOR LUNCH OPEN AGAIN AT 2:00

She locked the front door and stepped out on the sidewalk. It was chilly, and the sky was shallow and grey as ashes. She hurried the few blocks home. In her mailbox there was a small lilac envelope with the address of a high school friend’s parents engraved on the back flap.—And a letter from New York City. She opened the lilac envelope immediately; it was an invitation to the girl’s wedding, and she put it down on her kitchen table and sat suddenly. Well, weren’t they all grown up? She had no way of explaining how such a thing could be happening.

She went to a tea shop for lunch; she ordered, she ate, she wondered where the new year was taking her. Back at the store, an empty afternoon, she opened John’s letter, accidentally tearing right through the return address, which was just as well: she didn’t want to know exactly where he was.

Dear Nicole:

Please forgive me because I don’t write very well. I’m sorry I left without saying good-bye. I didn’t know what to say. I love you very much but I had to leave Charleston. I wanted you to come with me, but I did not want to fight about it anymore.

New York is even bigger than I thought it would be. Yesterday I saw Robert Mitchum right on the street. I am playing with some fellows, and they are very good. I hope that someday I will see you again. Please do not be angry with me. Write to me at the address on the envelope if you want to.

Love,

John

She’d never seen his handwriting before; it was crude, unschooled, a cursive script with wide, fat loops, as if he were roping down each word. She could imagine him buying the paper at some corner store, reaching into the pocket of one of his suits for his billfold, with that funny expression he got on his face whenever he spent some money, his eyebrows raised as if the transaction was a surprise to him and he was a little bit worried that he’d get it all wrong, somehow; she could picture him sitting at his desk in some cheap hotel, brown eyes swimming; she could see him putting the letter in a mailbox and then disappearing into the crowds on Broadway; and then she couldn’t see him anymore. She folded the letter slowly, put it back in its envelope and put the envelope back in her purse. Through the plate glass in the front of the store she could see an old man in shirtsleeves and a white panama hat, shuffling off to the left.

John Brice had ventured to Babylon with his faithful genius about him; and if that was where he wanted to be, what was hers to add? He didn’t love her, she thought. He didn’t mean it; either he was living in a dream or he was lying. So sooner or later he would have grown tired of her and he would have started to hate her, and she’d be alone and not so young anymore, and stranded in New York City.

The door opened and a woman came in, and without breaking her gaze through the window, Nicole said, May I help you?

Darling, it looks like you could use a little help yourself, said Emily. I was going to invite you to lunch, on me.

Nicole blinked in surprise. I just ate, she said.

You look like something just ate you.

I got a letter, you know—she gestured—from John in New York.

He still trying to get you to come up there with him?

Nicole shook her head. No, she said. He’s gone.

Then forget about him, said Emily. You’re twenty years old. There’ll be another, believe me. There’ll be another.

But Nicole wasn’t sure there’d be another at all. What if he was the only one, ever? For a few days she thought about writing him back, but she couldn’t have told him anything; it was a madness that started anew each evening, a paralysis in her blood that prevented her from sending so much as a note to him. It was too much for her: the weeks of wandering around with a blank look on her face, an entire symposium she conducted all by herself. Answers, another idea, another question. She never did decide what to say to him, where to start, what good any of it would do, so she never wrote back to him at all.

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One morning in early March, Mrs. Murphy with the red hair and white gloves came gliding into Clarkson’s, accompanying her fourteen-year-old daughter for her first brassiere, in preparation for her journey to the city’s most exclusive finishing school. She got to chatting with Nicole while the girl was in the dressing room. Now, love, a woman like you can’t spend the rest of her life working in a place like this, said Mrs. Murphy. Mr. Murphy’s cousin works for a radio station in Memphis, and he was just telling us how they were looking for a girl to work there, someone to help around the office. Maybe you should call him, Howard Murphy. He’s in the directory.—Oh, look, and here’s my baby all dressed up like a woman. Lift it up a little, honey. In front. In front, just a little. The girl watched as her mother slipped her thumbs under the top edge of her own cups and tugged them gently upward. The girl did the same.—There you go. Mrs. Murphy turned back to Nicole and unsnapped her little black clutch. We’ll take three, she said with a small smile, and drew out a carefully folded bill with her fingertips.

Thus Nicole took herself to Memphis. She called Howard Murphy: The radio station was looking for a Gal Friday, they were hiring—yes, right away, if she was qualified; she mailed a letter detailing her skills and received a phone call two days later; she took a train out for an interview and returned to Charleston to find the job offer waiting for her; she made up her mind, she accepted, and she made plans; she packed a trunk with dresses and effects, and she moved, walking through the door of her new house—a tiny little furnished place a woman at the station had found for her—only six days after Mrs. Murphy had stopped into the store.

There was so much to do, and so much that was different: the wider accent and stronger sibilants, the lights on Beale Street, the new fortune of a new city. Now she and John were two giant steps apart and facing farther away. Maybe a seam in her mind had come undone, all of her love had spilled out into Memphis, and Memphis didn’t care at all, and swept it away. But there was this: the strangest thing. She began to miss John’s car terribly, it was a helpless assignment of her affections, and she wrote in her diary that if she were to sit in it again she would fill it with tears. Then she tried to put it out of her mind; but every so often, and for a few years afterward, she would turn her head whenever a car of a similar blue went by on the street, knowing it wouldn’t be John, knowing it wouldn’t be a happy day even if it was. Still she turned her head, because she was looking for herself at twenty.

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Walter Selby’s throat was stopped with visions; sex trickled down it like whiskey, the blood behind his eyes was doped a desperate shade of blue, and nonsense verse rang in his ears, a singsong of refraction and perfection. When the car pulled away that night, with Nicole in it, the neighborhood was quiet and he was dazed; already she was not just gone but missing. He went into his house, took his jacket off, and walked to the bathroom to wash his face, pausing before his reflection and rubbing his cheeks with his hand so that his features distorted. Then he shook his head, took one last look at himself, and walked into the living room, where he lowered himself slowly onto his couch. Over and over he went up to touch the night’s events; again and again he retreated, as if he were unsure that they were real. He opened the telephone directory and looked her up: and there she was, a plain entry in the order of names—and there was her address, a road he recognized. He gazed at it briefly and then closed the book and carefully put it back beneath the base of the phone, as if this small gesture of control would be sufficient to prove that he wasn’t such a fool after all, he hadn’t lost his dignity and he wasn’t a boy.

He didn’t sleep well that night; he didn’t work well the next day. He arrived at his office dead tired and distracted and paused in the dark cool hallway before the door pane of frosted glass. Behind that door, and every door on the floor, and every floor in every building, there were men and women conducting the business of the day.

Q: What were they making?

A: Everything but love.

He entered and his secretary looked up with a slight grimace. The Governor’s called three times already, she said.

He’s still in Nashville, isn’t he? said Walter, worrying for a moment that the man might be holed up in his suite downtown, on some surprise visit to his western constituents.

He’s in Nashville, all right, the secretary said. He’s upset about something.—The phone rang, she answered, Yes sir, she said. He just walked in.

Walter Selby nodded, went into his office, and picked up the receiver. Selby, the Governor said. He made no introduction, he needed none: his voice—soft, insistent, and musical—could not be mistaken. Where were you last night, my friend? I tried to call you about a half dozen times. There’s a senator from Knoxville who wants forty thousand dollars attached to the Parks bill for some war memorial, and we don’t have it. He’s threatening to make a big deal about it, and it’s going to make us look like we don’t care about the war dead. Forty thousand dollars. Of course, it’s his brother-in-law who’s going to build it, but who’s going to listen to me on that? War dead…. War dead…. Forty thousand isn’t a lot, but we don’t have it. We don’t have the money: we just don’t have it. And you’re off at a ball game….

The Governor knew everything, that was given; the Governor was a magic priest of populism, a genius at the whip, and Walter hardly noticed the trespass. Instead, he found himself trying to remember what he had just heard, the words and the Governor’s exact intonation, so he could relate it to Nicole when he saw her again. The Governor had become a portrait of the Governor, and all its colors were richer than real. Are you listening to me? said the portrait, its voice heavy with political emotion.