A Southern Exposure by Alice Adams Read Free Book Online Page B

trembling pale green leaves illuminated. The road, almost never used, enforces a silence, a tense slowness. Jimmy feels his breath tight, as though he feared to make noise, and beside him he can feel the tension in Cynthia.
    This must be Russ’s secret road, Jimmy instantly thinks, and does not say. This is how Russ escapes; he sometimes goes off into town or wherever, without passing the Hightower house. A great puzzle to Jimmy, watching.
    It is impossible to drive more than about a mile an hour, and not to stop. Almost whispering, Jimmy asks Cynthia, “Want a cigarette?”
    “Sure, I’d love one.”
    He gets them out, lights hers. As he does she cups his hand, for the tiniest instant only as, for that instant, a flicker of sexuality passes between them. They make no move, do not look at each other, but continue to smoke, indifferently. But they both have noticed.
    Some minutes later they are stubbing out the cigarettes, and still in a whisper Cynthia asks him, “Does anyone ever use this road, do you guess?”
    Meaning: does Russ? And so Jimmy answers her, “Russ does. Sometimes.” He has spoken with authority, about his buddy. He starts up the car, his quiet Buick whose slightest noise he now resents.
    Driving along, still quietly, still with the most infinite slowness, Jimmy’s mind races; it is one of those times of lordly clarity—past, present, and future all spread before him. He sees that Cynthia brought herself and her small family to Pinehill for Russ, very much as he himself did; he sees this clearly, and just as he imagined an important friendship, himself and Russ, big literary buddies, so Cynthia, being a woman and a beauty at that, must have imaginedsome love affair with Russ. Dear God, maybe even some fantasy of bearing his child. And for all he knows, she too has some literary ideas, some little poems somewhere. But he, Jimmy, seeing and knowing everything at just this moment, as he is able to do—Jimmy knows that on certain scores at least she is wrong. For just as he and Russ are not even casual friends and will probably never be so, she and Russ will not be lovers, or anywhere near.
    Whereas by the end of the fall, or somewhere in between, he, Jimmy, and she, Cynthia, will be kissing. Kissing each other in stolen places, as often as they can. He feels no hurry, though; he can wait (not knowing that every single one of his predictions is wrong).
    The woods on the sides of this road begin to thin out, a few small shacks appear: small boxes, high up on stilt foundations, above their bare mud-rutted yards. Then more houses, somewhat better, bigger houses—and now they are back in town. It is several minutes before Jimmy quite knows where they are, but then he recognizes the outskirts of Deaconville, the “colored” part of town, adjacent to Pinehill. Where people’s maids live, and the men who work around town at odd jobs, the janitors, men who hose down the filling stations, men who stand around on street corners on Saturday nights with their cousins in from the country—all in their dusty bib-front overalls, their dusty shoes.
    Between Deaconville and Pinehill there is no exact border—or perhaps in the county courthouse there is, but otherwise the distinction is unclear. There is, for example, a row of old brick houses, none now in good shape, but all once handsome and upright and trim. Are these houses in Pinehill or Deaconville? No one knows, but since all the inhabitants are white—not exactly poor whites but people more or less down on their luck, widows who take inboarders, that kind—the block is thought of as being in Pinehill.
    “What nice old houses,” Cynthia now remarks, as she and Jimmy Hightower pass them by.
    “They’re in pretty bad shape,” he tells her. “You don’t want to buy one out here.”
    “But couldn’t they be fixed up? You know, that’s exactly what I’d really like to do. Buy something old and just terrifically shabby and make it all grand again. And