The Last Gentleman

woman’s knack of cutting loose from the ache, putting it out to graze. She knew how to moon away the time; she could doze.
    â€œWhy don’t we go to college?” he said at last.
    â€œIt’s forty miles away,” said Jamie, almost looking at him.
    â€œWe can go where we please, can’t we? I mean, do you want to live at home?”
    â€œNo, but—”
    Ah, it’s Sutter he has in mind, thought the engineer. Sutter’s at home.
    â€œWe could commute,” said the engineer.
    â€œThen you’ll go?”
    â€œSure. We’ll get up early in the morning.”
    â€œWhat will you take?”
    â€œI need some mathematics. What about you?”
    â€œYes, me too,” nodded the youth, eyes focused happily on the bright mote of agreement in the air between them.
    It suited them to lie abed, in the Trav-L-Aire yet also in old Carolina, listening to baseball in Cleveland and reading about set theory and an Englishman holed up in Somerset. Could a certain someone be watching the same Carolina moon?
    Or they joined the Vaughts, as they did in Charlestown, where they visited the gardens even though there was nothing in bloom but crape myrtle and day lilies. Evil-tempered mockingbirds sat watching them, atop tremendous oily camellias. Sprinklers whirled away in the sunlight, leaving drops sparkling in the hairy leaves of the azaleas. The water smelted bitter in the hot sun. The women liked to stand and talk and look at houses. They were built for standing, pelvises canted, and they more or less leaning on themselves. When the men stood still for thirty minutes, the blood ran to their feet. The sun made the engineer sick. He kept close to the women, closed his eyes, and took comfort in the lady smell of hot fragrant cotton. A few years from now and we’ll be dead, he thought, looking at tan frail Jamie and nutty old Mr. Vaught, and they, the women, will be back here looking at “places.”
    It was like home here, but different too. At home we have J. C. Penney’s and old ugly houses and vacant lots and new ugly houses. Here were pretty, wooden things, old and all painted white, a thick-skinned decorous white, thick as ship’s paint, and presided over by the women. The women had a serious custodial air. They knew the place was theirs. The men were not serious. They all but wore costumes. They plied their trades, butcher, baker, lawyer, in period playhouses out in the yard.
    Evenings the Vaughts sat around the green chloriniferous pools of the California motels, Rita and Kitty swimming and minding their bodies, Mr. Vaught getting up often to monkey with his Cadillac (he had installed a topoiler and claimed he got the same mileage as a Chevrolet), Mrs. Vaught always dressed to the nines and rocking vigorously in the springy pool chair and bathing her face with little paper pads soaked in cologne. When she was lucky, she found some lady from Moline who shared her views of fluoridation.
    Kitty avoided him. He sought her out, but she damped him down. She must think badly of him, he decided, and quick as he was to see as others saw, was willing to believe she was right. Was it simply that she took the easy way: she was with Rita and not with him and that was that? At any rate, if she didn’t love him, he discovered he loved her less.
    When they met by chance in motel passageways they angled their shoulders and sidled past like strangers. At Folly Beach they collided at the ice dispenser. He stood aside and said nothing. But when she filled her pitcher, she propped it on the rim of her pelvis and waited for him, a somewhat abstracted Rachel at the well.
    â€œIt’s a lovely night,” she said, stooping to see the full moon through the cloister of the Quality Court.
    â€œYes,” he said politely. He didn’t feel much like waiting upon her. But he said, “Would you like to take a walk?”
    â€œOh yes.”
    They put their pitchers in the chest and walked on the beach. The moonlight curled along the wavelets. She put her hand in his and squeezed it. He squeezed back. They sat against a log. She took her hand away and began sifting sand; it was cool and dry and left not a grain on the skin.
    He sat with his hands on his knees and the warm breeze flying up his pants leg and thought of nothing.
    â€œWhat’s the matter, Bill?” Kitty leaned toward him and searched his face.
    â€œNothing. I feel good.”
    Kitty shifted closer.