evening? In that moment, Waters had a sense of massive stones sliding into place somewhere, and he saw a glint in Mallory Candler’s eye that he would see many times over the next two years.
Denton treated them all to dinner at a restaurant on the bluff, and then it was time to begin the five-hour journey back to Oxford. In the parking lot of the restaurant, Waters’s date climbed into the doctor’s BMW, and Mallory crammed her suitcase into the trunk of Waters’s TR-6, a symbolic switching of partners that gave Waters a chill.
They began the ride in silence, and the silence lasted forty miles. Occasionally he or Mallory would glance over the console, but their eyes did not meet. Then-at the turn for the northbound interstate-they shared a gaze during which a full conversation took place without words. With Ole Miss still four hours away, Mallory entwined her hand in his and began to talk.
She spoke first of Dr. Denton, how she had accepted his request for a date to prove that “age was no big thing” to her, and also because he was a close friend of her parents. She’d continued dating him because it was fun to shock people and because she liked watching how far Denton would go to win her approval. But he was more a businessman than a physician, she said, and she knew she could never be with “someone like that.” She asked Waters about his relationship with her Tulane sorority sister, and he was cautiously frank. He was sleeping with her, and they had agreed not to see other people. Mallory asked about his family but confided little about her own. She wondered aloud how they had lived in the same town for so long without more than a cursory acquaintance. Waters pointed out that she had attended preppy St. Stephens, while he’d graduated from public school “with the blacks.” Mallory made light of this difference, but that was easy to do when you were from the rich side of the tracks.
Soon she was asking Waters about his dreams, his thoughts on God, his sexual history. As for her own past, she professed one “serious” relationship in high school with an older boy who had known nothing beyond “basic high school football player stuff,” and another in college during which she’d done a lot of experimenting. Her relations with Dr. Denton had not progressed to intercourse; the age difference made him especially solicitous of her, and she’d taken advantage of that. By the time they hit Oxford-at 3:00 A.M.-Mallory said there was really no point in going to sleep. Better to push through till morning and do Monday classes on adrenaline.
Instead of driving to campus, Waters drove out to Sardis Reservoir, a massive, man-made lake held in check by a three-mile-long dam. At one end of the dam was a single-outlet spillway, where a juggernaut of water thirty feet thick blasted through the concrete with earth-shaking force and spent itself in a rocky channel. A narrow catwalk crossed above this spillway, where you could stand above the thundering jet and feel the spray swirl around you like gravity-defying rain as the primal roar filled first your ears and then your mind.
On this catwalk Mallory took Waters’s face in her hands and kissed him with infinitely more passion than he had known in his nineteen years. When she pulled back, he looked into her bottomless green eyes and knew that he was lost. He had a sense of being chosen-by her and also by something greater, something unknowable, the same amorphous force he had felt when Denton asked if he would drive Mallory back to Ole Miss. A sense that his destiny, whatever that might be, was gathering itself around him at last.
After the kiss, they walked hand in hand back to the car. Waters drove back to the campus, but when they reached the sorority house, Mallory simply shook her head. He needed no prompting. He drove to an empty athletic field on a hill above his dorm and parked the convertible in the predawn darkness. Mallory lay across him, and he leaned down to her uplifted face. In the timeless hour that followed, his hands never went below her waist, but the two of them left the physical domain of that car as surely as if they had lifted into the dark with wings. He sensed in Mallory a sexuality of limitless scope, like a man looking through an open door at a closed one, yet sensing that behind that door lay still another, an endless succession of doors, each concealing its own mystery, each mystery folding into another, the inmost circle unreachable, impenetrable, an essentially feminine core that he had no choice but to try to reach and understand.
Waters went through the next day in a trance, wondering if Mallory had felt what he had, whether she had seen that night as a beginning or merely an interesting Sunday diversion for a beautiful woman with nothing better to do. At four that afternoon, his telephone rang. Mallory had slept through all her classes, but she wanted to see him again. His exhaustion left him in a moment. They spent most of that night together, watching a movie, eating dinner, driving for miles, talking, and then not talking.
In the span of two weeks, they became inseparable. A wild euphoria permeated their days, yet it was shadowed by an unspoken reality. Mallory was still technically dating Dr. Denton, and Waters, the girl from Tulane. For this reason, and others, they kept to themselves much of the time, and stopped their impassioned couplings short of intercourse. But by the end of the first month, it was becoming difficult to restrain themselves. One rainy night in Waters’s dorm room, Mallory straddled him, took him in her hand, and guided him to her opening. She started to sit, moaned softly, then sobbed once and got off the bed. While he stared in confusion, she pulled on her jeans and ran from the room. Waters put on his pants and gave chase. By the time he reached the door of the dormitory, Mallory was running up the hill toward the library, her hair flying behind her in the rain. Barefoot, he sprinted after her, dodging cars to cross the road, finally coming within earshot on the library lawn. Under foot-high letters trumpeting Faulkner’s assertion that man would not merely endure but prevail, he screamed for her to stop. When she turned, he saw that her eyes were not red from tears, but filled with wild joy.
“Do you love me?” she cried.
“What?”
“Do you
He stood there in the rain, knowing only that he could not stand to be physically apart from this woman. “Yes,” he replied.
“What?”
She came back to him and kissed him, and then the tears did come. After a time she dragged him toward the library door.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
Just inside the doors were two pay phones. Mallory lifted a receiver and handed it to him.
“Who am I calling?”
“You know.”
And then he did. She wanted him to call his girlfriend at Tulane and break off the relationship. He hesitated only a moment. He told the girl he was finding a long-distance relationship too hard to sustain. She asked tearfully if he had met someone, and he said yes. When she asked who, he looked at Mallory, and for the first time she looked uncertain. Waters lied and said he’d met someone from another state. As they spoke, he felt strangely detached, as though discussing the death of a distant relative, but as he hung up, he felt angry. He handed Mallory the phone.
“Do you want me to call David?” she asked.
“You’re damn right.”
She bit her bottom lip, then took the receiver and started to dial his number.
“Wait,” he said.
“Why?” She kept dialing. “You’re not sure?”
“I’m sure about you. About how I feel. But…telling David is different from what I just did.”
She looked intrigued. “How?”
“He’s a friend of mine…of my mother’s. Of your parents. My brother’s supposed to work for him next summer, for God’s sake. Taking care of his horses.”
Mallory nodded. “I know all that.”
“Is he in love with you?”
“He says he is.”
“Shit.”
She laid a hand over his and looked deep into his eyes. “I’m ready, if you think I should.”
“You should do it face-to-face.”
She hung up the phone. “This weekend. There’s a big party at his house.”
His anger took him by surprise. “You didn’t tell me that. You were going home this weekend? To see
