Owning Jolene Read online

  I wish to thank the

  Ingram Merrill Foundation

  for its support

  FOR BILL,

  MY HOME

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1987, 1988 by Shelby Hearon

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United

  States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously

  in Canada by Random House of Canada

  Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House,

  Inc., New York.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hearon, Shelby.

  Owning Jolene.

  I. Title.

  PS3558.E25609 1989 813′.54 88.45261

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80037-4

  Portions of this novel appeared in earlier versions in Cosmopolitan and Mississippi Review.

  v3.1

  ALSO BY SHELBY HEARON

  Armadillo in the Grass

  The Second Dune

  Hannah’s House

  Now and Another Time

  A Prince of a Fellow

  Painted Dresses

  Afternoon of a Faun

  Group Therapy

  A Small Town

  Five Hundred Scorpions

  Contents

  Cover

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Other Books by This Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  A Note About the Author

  1

  I’M LEARNING to pose.

  At first it made me nervous, standing here with the sheet knotted below my navel, the rest of me with nothing on, holding the hand between my breasts.

  I’d forget and slip back into myself—wonder if I was ever going to see L.W. again, or wish it was time to eat—and then Henry would tell me to think about the hand, concentrate on the hand, get rid of everything on my mind but the hand.

  Now it’s mostly automatic with me, the way it is with Henry when we do it. I don’t mean that in a bad way—I never had anybody make love the way he does, and I like it a lot. It’s hard to explain, but it’s the way people who live with dogs or cats deal with them without ever having to think about it.

  You’ve seen a cat lover sit down, and maybe she’s talking to whoever is there about something absolutely major, but because of knowing about cats, her fingers will sort of move by themselves when one walks into the room. She’ll scratch against the couch a bit, scratch, scratch, until the cat moseys over to see what’s going on. Then she’ll move the scratching up to the cushion beside her, hold her fingers out for a sniff, and the first thing you know the cat will be up there, in her lap, and she’ll be rubbing it behind the ears and down the back, deciding where to stop her hand if it’s in heat and you shouldn’t go too far toward the tail, and then she’ll concentrate on the best places behind the ears and maybe under the neck if the cat likes that, and pretty soon the cat is digging into her thigh like a kitten kneading its mother, and the purring sounds like an air conditioner on high, and all the while the person is continuing to talk to her friend about this matter of life and death.

  What I’m saying is that it isn’t routine; it’s automatic.

  It doesn’t bother me that Henry paints in his head the whole time his body is doing it any more than it bothers me that he has sex while he’s painting. And in a way he does. I mean, I see sometimes that he has a hard-on standing there in his drawstring pants and no shirt, and his bony face with the deep eyes has that look that would scare you to death in a man if he touched you looking like that, worrying he wouldn’t know when to stop, but I see him working on the canvas, miles away, and I know it means he’s on automatic.

  When we make love, he makes me come until he sees I’m not going to come any more, when it’s reached the way for me that your body feels when you’re outside taking a sunbath all warm to your toes with oil, and then your skin feels scratchy and the sun is too hot and you’re ready to cool off, or you’ve been dancing until your feet feel like they can fly and nothing is as wonderful in all the world as dancing, and then you want to sit down and mop up and lean back and gasp for breath a lot. Then Henry comes—which lately is mostly sitting up (he has some ways he likes to do it sitting up)—and when we’re through, he wraps me in a sheet and goes to the easel.

  Then, if it takes me more than five minutes to sort of snap out of it, wake up and stretch and get ready to pose, I hear him making these noises, setting a glass down or scuffing his feet a lot, and I jump up and hurry in here.

  Sometimes I look around the studio to get in the mood. Henry works in a very ordinary house, on a street of ordinary house (Mom would admire his choice), in a quiet part of the city, but then he’s added on a two-story room with an all-window wall on the back so there’s a lot of light that has an almost good glare about it, yet at the same time a feeling of privacy, because no one can look in, because the yard has a high screen of bamboo around it. I think about how safe it feels and that I wouldn’t mind living here sometime.

  But mostly I think about the hand. Its fingers are slightly spread, the way a little girl would spread them if she were keeping someone away. It’s a hand you could hold up if you wanted to say, “Stop right there,” or “Wait a minute.”

  Henry says I’m great. That he’s never had anybody who could pose for hours; who didn’t fidget. But it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone wouldn’t like to stand here with her mind on just one thing, not having to pay attention to anyone and with nobody paying attention to her, all morning long.

  2

  “WE’RE GOING to Purloin Letter it,” Mom told me the first time we ran away.

  She had packed our stuff, our bags and boxes, what we could take with us, and was putting the finishing touches on us in the airport bathroom. She’d got this idea that my uncle Brogan was going to have a description out for us, that he was tired of her and Dad stealing me back and forth and meant to keep me at his house.

  “This suit’s too little,” I said.

  “You’re a four-year-old boy. It fits fine. That’s a genuine Florence Eiseman. I hit on a real bargain. Seventy-five cents.”

  “I’m a seven-year-old girl.”

  “Don’t be difficult, Jolene. When you’re in this Dutch boy blond wig and that blue suit, you’re a four-year-old boy. Now this is what you’ll do. Are you listening to me?”

  “I think so.”

  “A certain man may be waiting out there. I’m referring t
o a man named Brogan Temple.”

  “Uncle—”

  “Not uncle. Nobody to you. Nobody you know. He might be the uncle of a certain girl named Jolene Temple, but he is nothing, nobody, a total absolute stranger to four-year-old Sonny. Got that?”

  I nodded. “I’m supposed to pretend I don’t see him.” I looked up, expecting her big toothy grin, the one I got, and her pupils got, when we gave the right answer.

  “Wrong.” She tugged a wig down on my head, stashing my dark hair under it. “Wrong, wrong, wrong. You are not going to pretend you don’t see him, because you aren’t going to see him, because you don’t know him. You, Sonny, do not know him.”

  “I don’t know Uncle Brogan.”

  “Christ.” She left me with the bags while she went to pee. When she came back, I thought some stranger was trying to pry Mom’s purse from between my feet. She had on some jacket thing, I guess also from the thrift shop, and this sort of clinging dress and heels. Now my mom did not even own a pair of heels, and seeing her in them was something like seeing your very first transvestite, something like your very first realization that the woman you’re watching has an Adam’s apple. Here was my mom in a ton of makeup and these spike-heeled fake skin shoes. She didn’t have a wig on, but instead of her hair being held back as usual with the kind of dime store rubber band that’s made to look like something else, metallic and shiny, it was down by her face thick and straight. “Rich hair,” she said, pleased with the effect. “Brogan could take me to bed and not know it was his sister.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “One thing at a time. We’re getting out of here. Then we’ll see. I have my eye on a certain suburb. The world is full of neighborhoods just lying there waiting for the plucking.”

  “What if it’s Aunt Glenna Rose out there?”

  “Who?” She bent down and stared at me.

  “What if it’s somebody I don’t know, the wife of that man I don’t know. You know, Mom.” I was tired of the game.

  “No sweat. She’ll be looking anyway for a little crying girl dressed in the pink ruffles she gave you Christmas. But she won’t be out there. Glenna Rose is going to be too embarrassed to show up in an airport in her fur coat and grab a kid. That’s not her style.”

  I knew she was right, but I thought I wouldn’t mind just then feeling my aunt’s arms, furry as a great wild animal, holding me tight as a bear in the Big Thicket, not letting me go, forgetting that she was holding on, talking to Brogan about something else, while he stewed around about how my mom was going to come back and take me, or even my dad. The two of them, Brogan and Glenna Rose, going at it in their big house, with me wrapped in Blackglama and all the air conditioners going full blast, because how else are you going to wear a fur coat in San Antonio, Texas?

  “Okay,” Mom said, bending down to give me a face full of mothballs. “Okay. Now this is it. We’re going to stride right out there through that gate. The only way not to be spotted is to be noticeable. Got it?”

  “I think so.”

  Mom’s number one rule was: the best way to hide is to be conspicuous.

  When we weren’t on the run, she was a piano teacher. A young mother, she would say by way of making her point, moving into a neighborhood of young mothers, comes under instant scrutiny. “What does your husband do, Mrs. Temple? He left eight years ago? Then who is the father of seven-year-old Jolene? You got the dates mixed up? I see.” It was not possible, she said, to escape curiosity, comparisons—in short, trouble—if you were the same as everyone else.

  But go in generic, and immediately your work was done for you. No one asked piano teachers over for morning coffee; you weren’t expected to know which pony park was the preschool birthday party favorite. Hearing the words “piano teacher,” the young mothers instantly attributed to you all the biases and memories of their girlhoods (boyhoods, too, she would add; don’t forget all those boys in short pants, aimed for the concert stage, who now sell life insurance), and—in the blink of an eye—you simply disappeared.

  “Now, Sonny, here’s what you do. When I’m handing the boarding passes to the stewardess, here’s what you do. Are you with me?”

  I nodded, not as sure it was going to work out as she was.

  “The thing to remember is that whoever it is, they’ll be looking for a girl. They don’t care about me, Midge; they wouldn’t a one of them care if they never saw me again. But you, that’s the ticket. You’re the one. You’re their cause celebrity,” she said, mimicking Aunt Glenna’s bad French. “And there’s only one way to get past them if they’re watching the gate. And they will be, because they know—with my car sitting in the drive with two flats and a dead battery—that we’ve got exactly two options: we can catch a bus or we can take to the air. My guess is that their guess is a plastic card is easier to use for wings than for heading up IH35.

  “Now, here’s what you do. They’re looking for a little girl, okay? This is crucial. When I hand over our boarding passes—are you getting this, Jolene? When I hand over our boarding passes, you, Sonny, are going to grab your wienie. They’re looking for a girl. It’s a subliminal trick, see? You grab your wienie and so you’re immediately not who they’re looking for. Okay? So at that minute—look at me. Pay attention. At that minute you grab your wienie and holler, ‘I need to tinkle.’ ”

  3

  WHEN I FIRST got together with Henry, I thought we would get to be in love. I thought painters were the kind who would be in love with their models; that I was the kind who would be in love with a man that I screwed almost every day.

  But it never came to that.

  At the start, I had the idea I would be his girlfriend, the night I met him at the gallery opening and picked him over the other painters.

  So at first I was always nagging him to take me to meet his folks. I don’t know why—I wasn’t about to take him to Brogan and Glenna’s, where I lived, on account of his being their age. And also because Brogan would have taken one look at Henry and seen that what was going on with us was not okay by his standards.

  But I figured it would be different with Henry’s family. He had been divorced for a long time, from two wives. Surely his mother and his daughter, who was just a kid (or I thought that at the time), wouldn’t be any problem. I mean, he must have brought women around to meet them before, in all those years.

  “Just once.” I begged him a lot, in the beginning.

  “Home and work mix like oil and water,” he said. This was when we were first getting into the sitting-up phase. He had my head still in his lap, and he hadn’t wrapped me in the sheet yet, and I was feeling sexy all over.

  “I want to meet them.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Then I’m not going to pose any more.”

  “Fine with me. I’ll check who’s hanging out at openings wearing lizard shoes.” But I knew he didn’t mean it.

  Finally, I nagged him until he said, “Okay, there’s an exhibit of Southwest stuff this weekend. We can check it out, then have lunch at Mother’s. Will that satisfy you?”

  He told me to think up a story for my aunt and uncle about why I was going to be gone on Saturday, and to wear my silk suit.

  • • •

  First we stopped by the Sun Dog art gallery to see a show of what was called Southwest Artifacts. Collected items that Henry said were now considered real antiques, but that to me looked like old cowboy and Indian props. Frontier things that practically created their own stage sets just hanging on the walls or sitting on the floor.

  There were gourds and cow skulls—lots of these—and cactus clocks and beaded pouches and cowhide chairs. Then there were some pieces of wooden furniture, sort of standing clothes closets, some of which were priced as high as ten thousand dollars. I couldn’t believe it.

  I liked best of all an antler-framed mirror; I mean it must have had forty deer antlers all locked together in a circle like a Christmas wreath around this old tin-looking mirror. Henry said if I liked it
so much he’d buy it. I thought he was kidding, but in a minute the gallery owner handed it to him, wrapped in orange paper and tied with a string.

  Henry also bought a turquoise necklace, which I guessed was for me, too, but I didn’t ask, in case it wasn’t. Besides, by that time I had the idea that everything was a hundred times more than seemed possible, so I felt bad about hinting for the mirror.

  Mostly we stood around and talked to the man who had brought the show. You couldn’t call him an artist, so I guess he was more like a dealer. He talked to Henry about how he had Indian pieces that were going to be worth a fortune one of these days. That he was thinking of making a separate exhibit out of his collection of leather chaps. That he’d already sorted out the boots and the jewelry. That the turquoise lot, but the rest had gone on to Paris for another show.

  Henry wasn’t really listening to him. He was looking, studying everything, in the fast way he has. Sometimes asking me to move around and stand by an old fiddle or the cow skulls, or to pretend to wear a pair of spurs, and then moving me somewhere else, all the time the man was talking to him. Maybe the man thought Henry, because of his way of noticing everything, was going to buy a lot. Or maybe he just wanted to have somebody to talk to; there were only two other people in the Sun Dog’s orange interior, and they were looking for earrings.

  Afterwards, we walked along the river and then up to the streets in the heart of downtown. We passed the HemisFair grounds, and then a tiny restaurant with a Mexican name where about fifty Anglos in business suits, couples, were standing in a long line halfway around the block waiting to get in. Henry said they were all going to eat Saturday’s soup, but I didn’t know if he was kidding me.

  Finally, we turned into this beautiful street of really huge houses. Henry explained this was where the original Germans had settled, the ones with music and education, and that a lot of the same families who had come over back then still lived here. But that his mother wasn’t one of these. That he’d bought the house for her a few years ago, after his first big show. But for me not to mention that I knew that she hadn’t lived there all her life.