him?”
“No. I wasn’t going to go.”
He wasn’t sure he believed her.
“You should come too, John.”
“No, I shouldn’t. Besides, I wasn’t invited.”
“You weren’t?” Her eyes narrowed. “That’s weird. A lot of college people are going.”
A shiver of apprehension went through him. “Jesus. You think David’s heard something?”
Mallory shrugged. “We haven’t been as careful as we should have been. And there are only, what, like five hundred students here from Natchez?”
He nodded, wondering if David Denton already saw him as a son of a bitch.
“You should come anyway,” Mallory told him. “It’s a masquerade party. For Halloween. No one will know.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Sometimes I think so. You really should come though.” She laughed and hugged him tight. “In fact, I’m not going unless you do.”
So he went. Mallory rented him a Sir Lancelot costume in Memphis, and three nights later he walked into David Denton’s house wearing a visored metal helmet. If anyone asked who he was, he planned to say he was Cole Smith. Cole had been invited to the party but had chosen to go deer hunting instead (which struck Waters as hilarious now). There were between eighty and a hundred masked guests, so remaining incognito turned out to be no problem. People drank in grand Natchez style, and dancers spilled from Denton’s great room onto the huge stone patio behind his house.
Mallory had come as a ballerina, with a white tulle skirt blossoming over her leotard and a glittering mask adorned with pearls. Her regal bearing and fluid dance style drew the eyes of everyone, and Denton-dressed as Louis XIV-almost never left her side. Waters watched them dance from a distance, mingling with people who didn’t know him well. Mallory seemed to be having the time of her life, and after an hour-and three stiff drinks-he began to feel resentful. Mallory had asked him to the party, even rented his costume, yet she acted as if he weren’t there. He was at the point of doing something monumentally stupid-like asking her to dance-when he realized he’d lost sight of her. Suddenly, a hand squeezed his behind.
“Feeling neglected?”
He was almost sure the person whispering in his ear was Mallory. Reaching back, he felt the tulle skirt and pinched her thigh hard enough to hurt. He heard a laugh and another whisper:
He slipped outside as quickly as he could and made his way across the lawn to Denton’s capacious stables. He waited in the dark with the smell of hay and horses, wondering if Mallory would be able to get away without Denton noticing. Suddenly, a white apparition materialized out of the night, floating toward him as though borne on the wind.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” he hissed as she neared him.
Mallory pulled up her mask and smiled mischievously. “Do you want to talk or do you want to kiss me?”
He pushed her against the stable wall and kissed her, and in seconds they were panting in the dark.
“Have you told David anything?”
She shook her head. “I’m going to do it after. When everyone’s gone.”
He kissed her again. Her fingers dug into his back, then raked around his ribs to his chest. He wanted her badly, but he could almost see Denton searching the house for her now.
“You’d better get back.”
She nodded and put a finger to his lips. “Are you all right?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
She smiled knowingly, then put her mask back on, slid to her knees, and lifted the tunic of his knight’s costume. He sucked in his breath when she took him into her mouth, then closed his eyes and tried to stay silent as she went to work with feverish intensity. Once, he thought he heard voices nearby, but when he touched Mallory’s head to warn her, she slapped his hand away and continued with more fervor. Seconds later he cried out and started to push her away, but she grabbed his wrists and finished while music and laughter echoed across the lawn and horses stamped in their stables and he shuddered in the dark.
She rose to her feet, her eyes twinkling. “Better now?”
Without waiting for an answer, she kissed him, then took off across the lawn, the tulle skirt trailing after her like a fallen angel’s wings.
When Waters returned to the party, Mallory was dancing with Denton on the patio. Through the mesh of her skirt he saw two oblong grass stains on her knees, but no one else seemed to notice. He went inside for another drink.
All masks were to be removed at midnight. At five ’til, someone turned off the stereo, and Waters prepared to slip out a side door. Before he could, he heard someone ask Denton to play his piano. The doctor looked thoughtfully at the Kawai concert grand and said, “I wish Johnny Waters was here. I thought that kid couldn’t play anything but third base, but he’s a genius on piano.”
“Why didn’t you invite him?” Mallory asked casually.
“I meant to. It just slipped my mind. I’ll remember next time.”
A wave of guilt surged through Waters, and instead of leaving, he signaled Mallory to follow him down the hall to the bathroom. When she did, he pulled her inside and said, “Don’t tell him tonight.”
She shook her head. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“You still want to?”
“No. But we’re just putting off the inevitable.”
“I know, but…Look, just do whatever feels right to you.”
Mallory nodded and went back to the main room, where guests were beginning to remove their masks and pop the corks on champagne bottles. Waters stole a last glance at Mallory and Denton at the center of the crowd, then faded through the garage door, more confused than he’d been in a long time.
At 2:00 A.M., Mallory knocked at his window, and he learned that she hadn’t told Denton anything. Thus began a two-month period of secrecy that nearly caused both of them to fail the semester. When they returned to Ole Miss, they camped for a weekend at Sardis and made love for the first time. But they did not go out together in public. They frequently drove the hour to Memphis to avoid prying eyes, and even there they spent most of their time in hotel rooms. When they returned to Natchez for the Thanksgiving holiday, Mallory accepted only one date with Denton, and that night she made excuses and went home early, so that later-as she had every other night-she could slip out to meet Waters and make love in his car. It was a ridiculous situation, but Waters couldn’t bear the idea of hurting the man who had helped him so unselfishly during high school. Beyond this, he knew that Mallory’s parents would be enraged when they learned she had cheated on their ideal suitor to “go in the street” with a boy from the wrong side of town. But as the Christmas holidays approached, Natchez students started to gossip at Ole Miss, and it was only a matter of time before Denton heard what was going on.
It took an almost unbearable irony to bring things to a head. Three days before Christmas, Denton called Waters and asked him to accompany him to an antebellum home to look at a piano. The doctor was thinking of buying an antique Bosendorfer brought from Berlin to Natchez during the 1850s. Driven by a desire to maintain the illusion of normalcy-and not least by morbid curiosity-Waters agreed. As he and Denton examined the piano and discovered dry rot inside, Denton asked him what he thought of Mallory Candler. Waters swallowed and said he thought she was a “great girl,” which was the ultimate Ole Miss stamp of approval. Did Waters see Mallory much in Oxford? With his nerves stretched to maximum tension, Waters replied that it was a small school, and everyone saw everyone pretty regularly. Denton said he was only asking because Mallory had been acting a bit distant, but he thought he knew the reason. Mallory Candler was the kind of girl who didn’t get too involved with a man unless she knew the relationship was more than a passing affair. Then he smiled and confided that he planned to ask her to marry him on Christmas Eve. She was a little young, Denton conceded, but Mallory’s father was all for it, and he was sure Mallory would be too. As Waters sat frozen, his heart thundering in his chest, Denton said he’d just wanted to make sure he wasn’t reading Mallory wrong, that there wasn’t another man in her life. Waters almost confessed everything then, but he stopped himself. That was Mallory’s duty, not his. Besides, if Denton was
