Part 2 (1/2)

”It can't be all that easy to have affairs in Charleston,” I said. ”You'd be b.u.mping into everybody you knew all the time.”

”From what I hear, you'd be surprised by how easy it is,” she said. ”Either that, or lots of people don't really care who's diddling around with who.”

”So why didn't he leave her?”

”The girls, I'm sure. And then I hear he was totally in love with her. I think the divorce almost killed him.”

”Why did he finally divorce her?” I asked. I was ashamed of myself, but I could not stop probing for facts about Lewis Aiken. He had seemed so open with me the night before, but I saw now that I had not caught the sense of him at all, and I wanted to know him. I hurt for his hurt.

”She did, not him. They were renovating the house on the Battery-not fancy enough for her, I guess-and she had a really steamy affair with the architect. He wasn't a local guy, but he was a real stud and he had a good practice here. I don't think the poor guy had a chance. They were all over the place with it; everybody was talking. Dr. Aiken moved to the country with the girls and she filed for divorce. He just let her. She was going to marry the guy and they were going to live in splendor in the Battery house-on the Aikens's money. Of course, his family loathed her, and hadn't spoken to her for ages, and she retaliated by not letting them see the girls. I hear he was going to contest the divorce, but when she went after the house, that was it. The architect didn't marry her after all, and she hightailed it home to California, where her parents had moved. I hear they bought her a house next door to theirs. I think she got a generous settlement, but it wasn't what she had had with Dr. Aiken. I'll bet she regrets that little fling. She had it all, and blew it.”

”What happened to the architect?”

”He went back home to his wife in Orangeburg.”

”What a comedown,” I said, laughing. ”Marcy, it's incredible to me that you know all this.”

”Everybody knows. He's a catch.”

Lewis Aiken called the next day and asked me to dinner.

”I hear you're a catch,” I said.

”Blue-plate catch of the day,” he said. ”Wear your jeans and your dancing shoes, and bring some bug spray. This place doesn't have much but mosquitoes and a jukebox and the best oysters in the Low Country. Pick you up at six.”

Booter's Bait and Oysters lies at the end of a flimsy dock that stretches out over the marshes to Bohicket Creek, which separates Wadmalaw Island from John's Island. I never could have found it on that evening. It seemed to me so deeply embedded in the wild heart of the marsh and swamp country, so far from even the spa.r.s.e filling stations and cinder-block stores and garages we pa.s.sed on the way, on the little country road, that we were in another country, one that lay a continent away from Charleston. And in a sense it did. This wild, swamp-cradled, salt-infused country had far more to do with alligators and rattlesnakes and eagles and ospreys and the occasional bobcat than it did with men and their doings. The houses we did pa.s.s were shacks and trailers sliding slowly into the tangles of vines and encroaching live oaks. Rusted cars decorated dirt yards; old gut-sprung sofas sat on porches. Skiffs and rowboats had pride of place in what pa.s.sed for most driveways.

”I guess you're sure about this,” I said.

”Oh, yeah. Booter and I grew up together, summers. Our place is not so far from here. We ran wild all over the place. There isn't an inch of Bohicket Creek we haven't fished or hunted. He's a better shot than anybody I know, and he's the best fisherman in the Low Country. He keeps boats for some of the guys at his dock, and it got so that people just hung around when they came in, and chewed the fat and drank beer, and finally he put a roof over the end of it and a couple of tables and benches, and got a jukebox and a beer license...though I've never been so sure about that. People come from all around here for the oysters. Oh, not the town crowd that thinks roughing it is the Wreck on Mount Pleasant. But folks around here. The oysters come out of the water the day you eat them, and there's only two ways that you can-roasted and raw. Junior Crosby, an old black man who used to work for my father on the Edisto place, does the oyster roasts. He's got a gallon drum and a sheet of iron and he builds a fire and gets it just right, and then plunks a croker sack full of oysters on it and yanks 'em off when they're ready, and you take the clumps and open them yourself. Somehow I didn't think you'd have one, so I brought oyster knives for both of us.”

”Well, I certainly know what an oyster roast is,” I said. ”I've been to them at some pretty fancy places, at benefits for the foundation. But you certainly didn't have to open your own oysters. There were people to do it for you.”

”You'd get thrown in the creek at Booter's if you asked somebody to do that,” Lewis said. ”But I'll show you how. And if you slice your finger off, there's a doctor in the house.”

We b.u.mped down a dirt road so thickly overhung with moss and branches that it was like driving through a tunnel and abruptly came out into a clearing. I gasped. The creek here was just widening out into a sea of marsh gra.s.s, silvered by a small breeze and flushed pink by the setting sun. The line of the trees against the far edge of the marsh was black. Over it all a high white ghost moon rode.

”It's beautiful,” I said.

There was a long dock and the promised pavilion at the end, roofed with tin, and a cl.u.s.ter of fis.h.i.+ng boats waddled back and forth on their tethers at the platform below. Trucks and old sedans and motorcycles crowded the rutted parking lot. Jukebox music thumped into the quiet twilight, over the whine of insects and the slap of water on pilings.

”Let's do it,” Lewis said, and we parked and went inside.

There were no walls, but a central island held a bar and a sink and an old red Coca-Cola cooler the likes of which I had not seen since I was a child. It looked fully that old. Men in dirty jeans and T-s.h.i.+rts and a few women in tight jeans and cutoffs and midriff-baring tees stood at the bar or cl.u.s.tered around the picnic tables on the open deck. They were all laughing and some were doing little cut-up dance steps to the jukebox, and most were drinking beer. Everybody looked up when we entered. My heart dropped. I thought with shame of my ironed jeans and new pink T-s.h.i.+rt, and my new, blinding-white sneakers. I had slumming written all over me as surely as if I had worn satin. Lewis, who wore rumpled scrubs again, and sandals, somehow did not stand out. You could tell by the way he walked in that he was at home in this place.

A chorus of greetings rose to meet us-”Hey, Lewis!” ”How you doin', boy?” ”Been cuttin' up any more kids?” ”Where you been? Thought you'd gotten yourself into that movie they're shootin' downtown!” Fondness and equality swam in the air like the swarm of mosquitoes that had already found my face and arms. No one looked directly at me, but I could feel eyes on me like little pits of fire.

A grizzled, red-brown man at the bar grinned, showing a gap in his tobacco-stained teeth, and pulled a Budweiser out of the cooler and opened it and thumped it down in front of Lewis.

”Hey, Booter,” Lewis said. ”This is my friend Anny Butler. She takes care of sick kids and we work together sometimes.”

Apparently, it was important that I be qualified. Set into the scheme of things. Booter turned his grin on me.

”Get you something, ma'am?”

”Please call me Anny. I'd like a Diet c.o.ke.”

The crowd at the bar snickered and I flushed.

”Got Mountain Dew and beer,” Booter said. ”I could make you some coffee, though.”

”Beer's fine.”

It was. It was cold and sweating in my hand, and drops of condensation fell onto my arms and hands, cooling them. It was airlessly hot under the canopy of tin. The squadrons of mosquitoes were vicious and relentless. I had lathered myself all over with the strong, piney-green liquid Lewis had given me, but apparently I was fresh meat. No one else at the bar or tables seemed to be bothered. I drank another beer quickly and the bites seemed to sting less.

Junior Crosby came in toting his paraphernalia then, and the steaming of the oysters got under way. The crowd descended on them like locusts, piling the great clumps of adhering sh.e.l.ls onto tin plates and attacking them with oyster knives to pry them open and pop the roasted oyster into their mouths. They tasted wonderful, the few that I managed to get open. By the time I had finished my first plate, everybody else had gone back for thirds and fourths, and the beer flowed. Night fell, thick and black and moon haunted. The creek water was silvered with it out into the marsh.

Lewis finally relented and opened the oysters for me, and bought me another beer, and another. I did not even like beer, but this tasted wonderful, somehow, all of a piece with the salt of the marsh and the scent of the faraway mimosas.

”I'll be drunk,” I said.

”Well, I should certainly hope so,” Lewis said. ”Because I promised you dancing, and dancing out here is far better accomplished drunk.”

He went up to the jukebox, a battered old Wurlitzer that looked to me the same vintage as the cooler, and made a selection. All over the dock people were dancing; I had scarcely noticed them, but now I could not look away. Apparently, the only songs Booter had on his jukebox were the old rock-and-roll and country-and-western songs of the fifties, which I barely remembered from my childhood. All around me, burly, light-footed men and willowy, big-haired women were stomping and swaying and undulating to the Platters, Bill Haley and His Comets, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Little Richard, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps.

”It's a time warp,” I said. ”Where's Elvis?”

”Too upscale for this crowd,” Lewis said, grinning. ”Fats Domino doing 'Blueberry Hill' is about as highbrow as it gets.”

He swung me up and out onto the dance floor, and the music caught me as surely as his red-freckled arms, and I was dancing as I had never danced before, intense, sweating, as sure and light of foot as any of the other women present, utterly lost in the beat and the vibration of stomping feet on the wooden boards. They sounded hollow, as wood does over water; it was all a part of the magic of the night. I have never been so sure, before or since, that I was as seamlessly good at anything as I was that night dancing on Booter Crogan's dock.

Finally, when I was panting and laughing and wilting into his arms, sticky with oyster juice and sweat and wild haired with creek humidity, Lewis put on another record and pulled me against him. This time, it was not rock and roll, but Percy Sledge wailing, ”When a Man Loves a Woman.” The beat was slow, insinuating, heartbreaking. I put my face into his shoulder and he rested his chin on the top of my head and we swayed close together, hardly moving. I was lost in him, the feel of him, the smell. I did not want the song ever to end.

When it did, I moved back and shook my head as if I was coming up from underwater.

”Let's get a beer and go sit on the end of the dock and put our feet in the water,” he said. And we did. My head was spinning so that the moon seemed to double itself, and swim back together before splitting apart again.

”I've had too much to drink,” I said. The water was still warm from the day, but just under the surface was the chill of the past winter. It felt wonderful on my burning feet, like bathing them in champagne.

He put his arm around me and I rested my head on his shoulder.

”Why don't you have a boyfriend?” he said. ”Why aren't you married?”

”I don't know,” I said honestly. ”It just never came up. For a long time the only kind of men I knew about were my mother's 'friends,' the ones who came to the house all the time. We had to go to our rooms when they visited, and one night when I was sixteen or so one of them came after me when my mother had pa.s.sed out on the sofa. It was no big deal; he was too drunk to do anything to me, and I hit him with a tennis racquet. My mother woke up and threw him out, and promised me it would never happen again, and it didn't. She drank after that, but she didn't have any more friends, that I know of.”

”You hit him with a tennis racquet?” Lewis said, beginning to laugh.

”I'm certainly not helpless,” I said. ”And I do have boyfriends; I always did. I dated a good bit in school. But I had the kids then, and up until they went away to school, and after that...I don't know. I just wanted to be still and quiet. It got to be a habit.”

We were quiet for a while, and then I said, ”I heard about your wife. About the divorce and all. I'm really sorry, Lewis.”