Richard Woodbridge

by Mary Gayle Newton

“What woman would leave a seven-year-old boy outside a bar? Then disappear through the back door, with a man, and not come back?”

“Buckley Roe’s mom.”

Through the kitchen door I glimpsed my mother with little lines between her brows. Her friend Virginia stood with her back to me.

“How long’s she been gone?”

“Since last night. Her mother’s worried sick because she didn’t show up for work today. No one’s seen her since she left the place.”

“Buckley’s with his grandparents now?” The lines above Mom’s eyebrows looked cut by a knife. “How did the child get home from this bar?”

“Somebody noticed him out there when she’d been gone over an hour. They drove him to his grandparents’ place. He had the address memorized.”

“I hope nothing’s happened to her.”

“Really. They say it’s not like her. Little blond that looks too young to even have a kid.”

“Hope she turns up.” Mom turned away, toward the coffee pot, but I could tell she thought something bad had happened to Buckley’s mom.

And, in fact, Charlene Roe had been dead a long time when her body was found in the Santa Monica Mountains. There was no way they could tell how she died, but it was assumed it had to do with an unknown man she’d gone to meet. How Buckley and I ended as lovers is a much longer story.

We lived near a beach on the edge of L.A. At twenty-one he worked as an orderly at the VA hospital, where he was known for being good with damaged men. At twenty I cleaned houses and read a lot of books originally written with feathers. I bought the yellowed editions with gold titles on their spines at the used bookstore near our rundown cottage. Sometimes the bookstore guy let me have them for free.

So the day I got a worn volume of Persuasion, Buckley came home at 3 a.m. with a deep cut in his chest, saying it had been done by a knife-wielding man with a gray ponytail. He refused to say more but slathered the wound with rubbing alcohol and went to bed. He went to work the next morning.

“Why did the guy stab you?”

This was after he got home.

He wandered to the pot of stew and sipped from the ladle.

“Cut, not stabbed.” He spoke with his back turned. “You wouldn’t believe what happened if I told you.”

“Oh, wouldn’t I? You went to one of those bars. People got in each other’s faces, and one of them was small, and it looked like they might get hurt. And you got involved. This time you got knifed.”

“Thanks for the sympathy. I’ll return it next time you get injured.”

“If I ever go to a sleazy bar and get knifed, you have my permission to be concerned.”

“Are you concerned, Carolina? To me you seem judgmental. And I don’t need to be judged right now. I’m getting gangrenated.”

I tried to unbutton his shirt to see this horrible gangrene, but he grabbed my hands and held onto them. We stared at each other, and there was no gangrene really, and we both tried not to laugh. This happened when we touched. We could not stay mad.

“I want to know how you got cut.” I pulled my hands back.

“Okay.” He sank onto one of our rickety chairs. Then picked up the butter knife and looked at himself in it.

“There was this little dude. In fact, he was a dwarf.”

I gazed down at him, arms folded across my chest.

“Didn’t I say you wouldn’t believe me? So this old guy with a ponytail. He’s talking to me and the dwarf.” Buckley gazed at his reflection in the knife. “About the ways people can die in places like Madagascar. He says Komodo dragon bites are fataler—lethaler—whatever. Than dengue fever. The dwarf disagreed. They put money on it.”

“How on earth could they settle that?”

“A dude from Mozambique claimed to know.”

“Okay. So the dwarf won Ponytail’s money. And it made him mad.”

“No, Carolina. The short dude lost. He grabs a bottle that used to have German beer in it. And clubs Ponytail, who pushes him off his stool.”

“So you got knifed over some—some dwarf’s opinion on Komodo dragons. A dwarf you don’t even know.”

“I’d met him before. And what does his size have to do with it? Anyway, I got knifed for decking the ponytail dude by accident. The dwarf was a badass, but three feet tall and getting kicked in the head by this dude with no teeth—they call him Popeye. They’d gotten into it previously about something more justifiable. He kicks the dwarf while he’s down and kicks me while I’m picking him up. Then it’s reflex. I let loose and get Ponytail in the face by accident.”

“So he stabbed you?”

“Cut. He was old and scared. And didn’t know me. I took his knife away.”

“Damn, Roe. You said you’d stay out of these places.”

But Buckley was staring at the copy of Persuasion on my side of the table. He knew the bookstore guy had given it to me.

“You look pale,” I said. “Maybe you should lie down.”

But he went to the sink and ran water to wash his dishes, an attempt to make me feel guilty about my long conversations with the bookstore guy. I countered by clearing the table, but he stood with his hands in the suds. When he was done he went in the bedroom and lay down gently, careful not to hurt his chest.

I sat in the living room armchair with Persuasion.

I tried to enter Austen’s world, where fires burned in Georgian fireplaces and there were no bar fights, but that night the stately sentences knotted up like snarled chains in a box of old jewelry. I read some of them many times, distracted by wanting to tell Buckley, once again, that the bookstore guy was just someone I talked to about David Copperfield. At the same time there was a coldness in my gut because I was sick of worrying about him.

Finally Sir Walter Elliott emerged from the tangle. A jerk who lived beyond his means and neglected his daughter, Anne. But Admiral Croft had been in “the Trafalgar action,” which made the necklaces re-snarl. I guess because the bookstore guy had told me about the Napoleonic Wars in one of our talks, and I began to think about that. And after a while my eyes started trying to close.

“Miss Marylebone, come see what Mr. Woodbridge has brought dear Charlotte,” a woman in black said. She sat by a fire in a long room with wing chairs and oil paintings.

A sullen brunette moved toward me.

“It’s lovely.” Her bored gaze rested on what hung around my neck: a clear, rectangular gem on a strip of lace.

“It shows his regard for you, Charlotte dear,” the lady in black said. “But there is nothing improper in it. And when you’re married it shall remain a comfort.”

“Married? Who am I to marry?” I scanned the room but no one looked like a fiancé. Plus “who am I to marry” wasn’t my usual grammar.

“Who are you to marry?” A quick, worried smile. “Why, Mr. Woodbridge, of course. Richard Woodbridge.”

I woke in the armchair, facing the lace tablecloth I’d tacked over the window for a curtain.

Dennis, the bookstore guy, had hair with silver strands. However, his eyes were young when we talked about David Copperfield, Persuasion, and things like the Napoleonic Wars. I went to see him the day after Buckley came home with his chest cut. I needed to talk to someone.

There were no customers and he was reading in the window nook when I came in. He closed his huge tome when he saw me, and I felt very young and beautiful, even wearing an old peacoat with a button missing.

“Can I confide in you?” I seated myself in the other chair.

Dennis smiled.

“That depends. You haven’t witnessed a murder, have you?”

I found myself chickening out.

“I don’t think I like Persuasion.”

“Not like Persuasion? Egad.”

“I don’t like Sir Walter Elliott.” I felt surprisingly defensive. “And it’s giving me weird dreams.”

“As your literary father confessor, I counsel you not to indulge in guilt over this.” He took his glasses off. “But I’m curious. What kind of dreams is Persuasion giving you?”

The door opened, jingling the bells attached to it. And, yeah, Buckley’s eyes had something empathic in them that made ailing veterans trust him. But he had dark glasses on that day, and you couldn’t really see his eyes.

Buckley and Dennis stared at each other. Something like tomcats I once saw in an alley just before they ripped each other to shreds. It was disturbing as hell. Then Buckley walked to me, grabbed my hand, and pulled me toward the door like the father of a teenage daughter found doing drugs at a wild party.

His face pale, Dennis asked if I needed help. But there was no time to explain that this dark-glasses guy was my boyfriend and only dangerous to strange men kicking dwarfs in bars.

At home we stared at each other in the living room. And it was unfair. I couldn’t see Buckley’s eyes because of his dark glasses.

“We have to talk,” I said. “Things can’t go on like this.”

“Let’s talk about the bookstore dude. You obviously like this guy because he reads all that junk. That I haven’t read. And don’t want to read.”

He launched into a speech I’d heard before. About the old tough guys he took care of at the VA hospital and how my written-with-feathers books were nothing but self-indulgent escapism that kept me from facing the gritty realities of the real world. Which had engendered my friendship with a bookstore clerk who knew nothing of the realities of the world either. I said nothing about his going out and getting knifed, but we both knew I was thinking of it.

“I won’t live with you unless you quit going to these dives,” I said. “We have to have clear terms. That each other accept.” This was horrible grammar and I knew it. But Buckley didn’t care about such things. He took his shades off. His eyes were stony, like those of some basilisk. He sank into one of our rickety dinette chairs and pulled me into his lap, his arms creeping around me. We sat there a long time and eventually ended in the bedroom, where we forgot our problems. After that we fell asleep.

In the room with the fireplace, the woman in black still sewed. A tall guy, wearing a wig, entered and said, “Richard Woodbridge.” He bowed and disappeared. I felt my heart beating as Richard came in.

He would have been cute if it wasn’t for that sad, dignified expression. His long, brown hair was tied back, and he wore the jacket of an officer in the British Navy. He wasn’t smiling but I knew that, when he did, his cheeks got these lines in them. I loved those lines.

“Charlotte.” His eyes were blue.

I held my hand out, though my name isn’t Charlotte under normal circumstances.

“Richard,” I said. “Do sit.”

He took my hand and bent over it, then sat. Tensely, like he was about to get up.

“I hope my gift pleased you.”

My hand went to the square gem on its lace.

“I’ll wear it always.”

Richard smiled, but sadly.

He began to speak, inscrutably, about Bonaparte, Lord Nelson, and his duty to his father and the king. The gist was that he was going away to join his commander near Trafalgar, off the coast of Spain.

“Richard.” I began to weep. “Don’t go.”

A wave of shadow washed him into darkness, along with the oil paintings and warm, crackling fire.

“Richard, don’t go?”

The man in bed with me wasn’t wearing the jacket of an officer in His Majesty’s Navy. He wasn’t wearing anything at all. Had I said Richard’s name in my sleep? What a cliche thing to do.

I raised myself on one elbow and looked at the bedroom door.

“He’s not here, Carolina. Try the bookstore.”

“I can’t believe you dragged me out of there. God knows what Dennis thinks.”

“I thought his name was Richard.” Buckley was sitting up now, cross-legged in the half-dark.

“The bookstore guy’s name is Dennis. Richard is—is just some name from a dream. And he’s one of the few people I can talk to. Dennis is.”

“You talk to me all the time.”

“Yeah. About fighting dwarfs. And—”

“I didn’t fight the dwarf!”

He took hold of my chin and forced me to look at him, which was hard because there was very little light

“I know the story.” I pulled his hand away. I knew perfectly well he hadn’t fought any dwarfs, but I’d just been in Georgian England and still had one foot there. “We spent an hour last night talking about your crazy doings.”

“I wouldn’t fight a dwarf, Carolina. I got cut by a bastard with a ponytail. For trying to help a dwarf. You’re the one to talk about not listening.”

“You’re full of deep concern for strange dwarfs in sleazy bars. You’ll do anything for them. But what about your promises to me? You said you’d stay out of those places.”

“Why did I break my promise, Carolina?”

“You ran out of here after punching a hole in the wall. Because I spend too much time at the bookstore.”

We sat cross-legged, staring at each other’s faces in the half-light.

“Okay, I shouldn’t have tried to help a dwarf. I promised to try to quit protecting people. So you wouldn’t leave me. But this bookstore’s taking a toll on my sanity. What if you go there and never come back?”

I wanted to say, “What sanity?” Instead I said, “You just blew up your promise with a ton of dynamite.”

I woke with a headache.

“We have to talk.” I addressed Buckley’s back.

“Forget it.” He pulled the blankets around him. “It doesn’t help.”

I got up and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror.

“We can’t go on like this.”

His answer was to rise and stagger to the shower. Shortly afterward we ended back in bed. Then he got dressed and went off to work, but at least my headache was gone.

It came back on the way to the bus stop with a disturbing intensity. It throbbed, blue and deep, like the cloudless sky with its too-bright sun. Which brought back Richard Woodbridge and his sea-blue eyes. I remembered them better than the hole Buckley had punched in the wall. They seemed to fill everything. The sky with palm trees leaning into it, a teal-colored Chevrolet by the curb.

At the masseuse’s house I couldn’t find the vacuum at first, and while dusting the elephant statuettes, I kept knocking them over. By the end of the day, I was ready to collapse. But my way home took me past the bookstore.

Dennis stood behind the counter, selling a Bible to a shaggy man. When the customer was gone, he went to the door and locked it.

“So that guy who barged in. He’s your boyfriend?” His tone was cool.

“He’s intense. And has a fear of abandonment.”

Dennis shook his head.

“Now I understand why you escape into novels that take place in Regency drawing rooms.” He opened the cash drawer and counted the day’s revenues in silence. Then put the money in an envelope.

“He’s jealous. Sometimes. And overprotective. It’s a long story.”

“I’ll bet it is. But do you feel unsafe with him?”

I thought about this.

“No.”

“I mean, I’m not much use in a fistfight. I’d be like Pocket in Great Expectations. The ‘pale young gentleman’ Pip beats up in Miss Havisham’s garden. But if he ever lays a hand on you, you call the cops. And then call me. You could stay here until further notice. There’s a pull-down couch in the back room there.” Dennis nodded toward the back of the store. “I’d make sure you’re safe.”

He opened a drawer under the register, put the envelope inside, and closed the drawer. But not before I glimpsed a gun lying in it. Dennis saw that I saw it.

“I’ll probably never have to use that,” he said. “And I wouldn’t use it just to protect my store’s revenues. Only if my life was in danger.”

This changed the moment when Buckley stood staring at him. And he stood staring back. At the time it had just been embarrassing. But what if Dennis had believed his life was in danger?

“I haven’t read Great Expectations.”

“You should. When you’re done with Persuasion.”

Really, all I could think of was the handgun in the drawer. And Buckley, standing there in his dark glasses.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m not well.”

At home I barely had the energy to take off my coat and one of my shoes before crawling onto the bed.

It wasn’t the drawing room this time. It was a hall decorated for an evening party, with candelabras full of burning tapers. A solo violinist played something soft, and wigged servants glided about with trays of crystal glasses.

“Isn’t that Richard Woodbridge?” Marylebone, the brunette from my first dream, pointed. But the man wasn’t Richard.

He looked like my idea of Sir Walter Elliott. Stout, with a conceited expression. Wearing a fussy ensemble with lace protruding from the cuffs. He sipped from a goblet while his eye followed the youngest girls around the room.

“The elder Richard Woodbridge,” her friend said. “The son is lurking somewhere.”

So this was my future father-in-law.

I felt a gentle pressure on my elbow and found Richard, my Richard, standing next to me.

“My father is to announce the engagement shortly.” He looked so sorrowful I began to wonder if our marriage had been arranged. Like, maybe he didn’t want to marry me? “You understand that my father’s will must supersede any selfish wishes of my own. My duty to him is second only to that I owe king and country.”

“Of course, Richard.”

“But I must speak one last time about my enduring feelings. Charlotte, I remain—” but I never got to hear what he remained because Woodbridge the Elder stood in the middle of the room, his glass raised.

“Beloved friends,” he said. “We gather here to celebrate a most joyful circumstance. My engagement to Miss Charlotte Wilson.” There were cries of “long live you both!”

I felt a chill. Richard wasn’t my fiance. It was his horrible father. Buckley woke me by whamming the front door open.

“You think about him all the time now.” He stood in the bedroom door, leaning against the frame, a hard, bitter look in his eyes, like when war veterans died, slowly and alone, and he couldn’t do anything to help them. “But for some reason I still love you.”

“Would you quit? There’s no one else.” But I remembered Richard’s blue eyes and sad, dignified expression.

With Buckley tears meant standing with his back to me, giving off really bad vibes. He seemed dangerous at such times, so I said nothing when he turned toward the wall. “You have to pick one of us,” he said. “And if it’s me you have to get those books some other way.”

“Roe. There’s no one.”

“Then what’s this?”

He came at me, dangling a glass prism on a strip of lace. The bookmark I’d left in my volume of Persuasion, a bookmark Dennis had sold me for a dollar. Sunset from the window passed through it, making chips of light dance everywhere.

“Dennis didn’t give me that. I bought it.”

I tried to snatch it from his hand, but he threw it across the room with this look in his eyes.

“Not now,” I said. “Are you crazy?” But he kissed me and I forgot we were in an argument.

Afterward we fell asleep, my head on Buckley’s chest, which rose and fell and didn’t seem to hurt him anymore. My head had quit hurting as well.

Spoons were still dinging glasses, and things were as they had been before Buckley came home, with people toasting to my marriage to Richard’s father. In a panic I ran out onto the balcony.

Richard followed.

“Dearest Charlotte.” He took my hand. “We must try to be patient and look for our reward in heaven.”

I woke to find Buckley pulling on his jeans.

“You’re thinking about him right now,” he said with quiet dignity. He pulled his t-shirt on over his head.

“I am not thinking of Dennis.”

“I should go to that bookstore.” He started putting on a boot. “And confront him.”

“Stay away from him! He hasn’t done anything to you!”

“I know that,” Buckley said with a scary calmness. “We’re not talking about what he’s done to me. It’s what he’s doing to you.”

“Talking to me about David Copperfield? Oh, yeah. It’s so romantic when he goes on about Wilkins Micawber.” But Buckley had both boots on now. And his jacket.

“Don’t go.” My eyes filled with tears. I hated that.

“You must really care about him.”

“No, Buckley. It’s what could happen to you.”

“Me?”

“He has a gun. In case of holdups. And he said he would only use it if he was—you know. Afraid.”

“I took the ponytail dude’s knife away. I think I can handle myself.”

“Buckley, please. If I’m into anyone else, it’s—it’s this guy in my dreams.” I fell back on my pillow.

He stared.

“I have these dreams. That’s all I was talking to Dennis about when you barged in. A dream.”

“So you talk about your dreams with a bookstore dude. Okay. So I’m not surprised you mess around in them either. Who is he?”

“Richard Woodbridge.” I fell back on the pillow again. “And we don’t mess around. We’re engaged. I mean, I’m engaged to his father. It’s hard to explain.”

“That’s who Richard is?”

Buckley continued to stare.

“Yes, Buckley. I admit it,” I whispered, my eyes closing. “I’m seeing someone. His name is Richard. Richard Woodbridge.”

It lay on the bureau by the basin and ewer. A letter from Richard, predicting a horrific battle in which many would lose their lives. I understood that this violence was his duty, but the red blot of sealing-wax seemed to burn my eyes like the sun sinking into the sea.

I took a pair of pattens that belonged to a servant. Women’s heavy shoes made for walking. I was going to Spain to find Richard and stop him from fighting.

In my hooded cloak I followed pathways that led through gardens and around sundials. I had no idea where Trafalgar was, but on the high road, with its ruts from farm carts, I stumbled doggedly. The muddy track twisted and turned, leading back to itself in hopeless knots.

Buckley loomed in the doorway.

“You were just with Richard, weren’t you? That’s why you’ve been sleeping all the time. So you can see him.”

“Richard’s gone. He had to join his commander.”

“I was all ready to visit the bookstore dude. And confront him. But I feel sorry for him now. Because you’re messing around on the guy. With Woodbridge.”

He disappeared into the night.