Only the Strong

by Jabari Asim

  “It’s you that’s afraid,” she said. She turned again and never looked back.

  Hours passed. Goode sat and simmered in silence, sucking bourbon until his legs got heavy and his head dipped dangerously toward the bar. When he got to their room, she was gone.

  On the train back from Chicago, Artinces sought comfort in the book she had unearthed in Old Town. Its author, a specialist in diseases of women and children, had worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War to provide care to more than 30,000 former slaves in Virginia. Artinces flipped intently through Dr. Crumpler’s observations, looking for a consoling turn of phrase that might take her mind off her recent drama. But instead her eyes landed on a passage that appeared to mock her. “It is best for a young woman to accept a suitor who is respectable,” Crumpler wrote, “vigorous, industrious, and but a few years her senior, if not of an equal age.” Artinces sighed. Crumpler began practicing in 1866, just after the Emancipation Proclamation, and the relationship difficulties that would continue to plague black women a century later were already in full flux. Artinces had so many more privileges than her emancipated sisters had ever known. How was it possible that she had the same problems?

  She’d spent much of the sixties with a man who was indeed a few years her senior, and vigorous and industrious to boot. But respectable? Apparently it was going to take more than the acquisition of a few upstanding businesses to smooth his jagged edges.

  As far as Artinces was concerned, respectability was not in itself a quality that made a man automatically appealing. But that very attribute propelled her through a series of unfortunate encounters in the years after she left Goode to wallow in that Chicago hotel bar.

  When the spring of 1968 announced its early arrival in an eruption of bright blossoms and exuberantly budding trees, she hardly noticed all the color around her. By then she’d suffered through enough joyless pairings to reduce the world to splatters of beige and gray. In her mind, she’d begun to compose a long letter. “Dear Dr. Crumpler,” it began. “Did you ever arrive at the conclusion that respectability is perhaps overrated?”

  She started dating a dull, dignified deacon. He was the kind of man she could be photographed with in the papers, a man far more likely to thump a Bible in righteous glee than harm another human being.

  Her office staff, all but Billie, declared him a keeper. But when he finally bent his tall, angular frame to kiss her, she smelled liniment, slippery elm, and dust. No honey, no hickory. She felt dry as a dead leaf. If their lips touched she would crackle into bits and be swept away by the wind. So she turned away from him, cleared her throat, made an excuse.

  Instead of enduring another dinner or concert in the company of men who put her to sleep, she took to spending evenings on her terrace, watching people stroll along the path in the park across the street. If she slipped into a certain frame of mind and squinted her eyes just right, she could almost imagine the path was the same one that led to the little shack where she was raised.

  There was no chance at all that Artinces’s mother could ever have read A Book of Medical Discourses, but somehow she’d managed to follow Dr. Crumpler’s relationship advice to the letter. Although Sadie and Luther Noel had a limited education, they were smart and had big hearts. Both of them had no problem with hard work and they were, as church folks liked to say, equally yoked. Between them they could birth a foal, plow a field, slaughter a pig, and turn a croaker sack into a satin dress.

  Artinces had her own set of skills, talents that she was sure her mother would be proud of. But Sadie would never have slept with a married man and quite likely would never have condoned it. Things were different then, Artinces told herself. Her mother had been with her father from the age of 14 until his death. Artinces had never again known a couple so closely attached. She always chuckled when she heard talk of spouses who finished each other’s sentences. “That’s nothing,” she’d want to say. “My parents had whole conversations between them without opening their mouths. They’d simply exchange a look, one of them would nod, and that would be that: an agreement had been reached.”

  The widow Sadie Noel lived just long enough to see her girl graduate from medical school. She stopped eating after that, and went back to doing what she had done for years: sitting on her porch and staring out at the path. Artinces knew her mother was waiting for her long-dead husband to walk up that path and extend his hand. Sadie’s faith guaranteed an afterlife, a place where she and Luther could reunite and love forever, perhaps without having to work so hard.

  One day, three spectral women would pop up in Artinces’s backseat and challenge her routine dismissal of what she called “hocus-pocus.” Until then, she believed that once a person was dead he stayed dead. There were no clouds and harp-strumming angels. No mountaintops overlooking streets of gold.

  In the meantime, she had her own terrace overlooking a park. A park with a path where lovers strolled hand in hand. She was on the terrace the night Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis. She had been staring at the path, thinking of her mother and imagining a man of her own—a man with a hat rakishly angled over one brow, gesturing to her with an outstretched hand.

  The announcement came over the radio she’d put on the terrace to keep her company. Fearing trouble in the streets, she went inside and shut her windows. But the Protected Zone held, and her neighborhood remained as quiet as on any other evening. Inside, she marveled that King had lived so long. Four years ago, she’d met him on two separate occasions when he’d presided over successful fundraising rallies in Gateway City. She’d been happy to write a check both times, while her physician’s eye couldn’t help but notice that he was a good 20 pounds overweight, obviously exhausted, and suffering from high blood pressure. She had suspected that a stroke would get him before any assassin’s bullet.

  The next morning, she drove tentatively through smoldering streets to find her office miraculously intact. A sign had been posted on the door; when she got close enough to read it, she gasped and pressed her hand to her mouth.

  Under the Protection of Ananias Goode.

  She gave her staff the day off (she couldn’t really expect them to come in under such circumstances) and retreated home. That evening, she sat on her terrace and waited for sunset. To the north, sirens, shouts, and blaring horns erupted in intermittent bursts. To the south, the park seemed to exist on a different planet. All was green and quiet. Fewer people than usual frolicked near the pond or sat in the grass, but otherwise there were no visible signs that anything had changed. Local news programs had reported a police cordon surrounding the West End and lining the border of the South Side; they weren’t even letting buses through.

  City authorities had made it nearly impossible for ordinary North Siders to darken any territory beyond Delmar Boulevard. Of course, Ananias Goode was not ordinary and had never claimed to be.

  When Artinces looked out and saw him appear on the path, she could tell that he was looking right at her. But he didn’t reach out his hand. He took his hat off and held it in front of him with both hands, like a humble suitor. Then he took a seat on a nearby bench.

  It was almost dusk. Goode sat and watched Artinces approach. Here and there, families and couples tried to make the most of the receding sun. Since their last breakup, Goode had secured a woman for Wednesday, a woman for Thursday, another for Friday. Even when he had them all at once, they failed to add up to Artinces Noel. He didn’t say that, however.

  What he did say, when at last she sat down beside him, was, “I figured out why you aren’t scared of me like other folks. It’s because of what you said to me once—that when I’m with you I’m at my best. But it seems like you don’t want to see nothing but certain parts. I wish you could see more.”

  “I can’t,” Artinces said. “It hurts my eyes.”

  Goode frowned. “Why would it hurt to look at it me? To really look at me?”

  Artinces stared straight ahead. A little boy was playing near them, pulling
a plastic duck on a string as it floated on the pond. When his mother took his hand, he began to scream and stomp his feet.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe it’s the light bouncing off your wedding band.”

  Goode didn’t wear a band but he glanced at his hand anyway. He looked tired, uncertain. “I appreciate the way you spare my feelings.”

  “Who’s talking about you? Has it ever occurred to you that I’ve been thinking about your wife? About her feelings?”

  Goode stared at her but she avoided eye contact. She was lying. She hadn’t been thinking of Mrs. Goode at all. Not once had that exemplary pillar of virtue, the humanitarian whom folks in Gateway called Saint Noel, thought about her lover’s wife.

  “Well, I think you know that she can’t feel anymore, Artinces. Not for a long time,” he said softly. “She can’t feel, can’t see, can’t hear, can’t think.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “But you do. You’re a doctor. After all this time? She’s not going to wake up, is she?”

  Finally she felt strong enough to turn to him. “No,” she said. “She isn’t. But your ring is on her finger, not mine. It doesn’t matter that she can’t hold you, can’t—she’s still your wife.”

  “That hasn’t seemed to bother you in the past.”

  She shook her head. “It’s always bothered me.”

  “Well, it hasn’t always showed. Tenderness, I don’t know how to solve this problem. But I can’t go on being a stranger to you.”

  She shifted on the bench, turned her body toward him. “What’s my middle name?”

  Goode twisted his hat in his hands. She’d never seen him so careless with his clothing. “I don’t know,” he answered.

  “Exactly. You don’t even know.”

  “That’s not my fault. You never told me.”

  “I’ve hardly told you anything.”

  “There’s things you can say without talking. In bed, you used to tell me everything I needed to know. Everything that matters. I didn’t complain. It seemed to be fine with you until Chicago.”

  “I didn’t say a word against you in Chicago.”

  “You didn’t have to. I could see it in your eyes when we ran into Dr. Pickle.”

  “Who?”

  “That doctor. He smelled like pickles. I know you smelled it too.”

  She smiled. “Formaldehyde. He smelled like formaldehyde.”

  He waved a hand. “Whatever.”

  They both laughed before settling into a silence that felt natural and comfortable. For a moment, Artinces had the sensation of being one-half of an old couple sitting on a porch. She wanted to see that, tried hard to see it: sipping lemonade on a veranda with Goode, watching the world unfurl beyond their picket fence. But the image wouldn’t hold.

  “Lula,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s Lula. My middle name.”

  “Lula?”

  “Don’t wear it out. It’s after my grandmother, Lula Mae.”

  “Well, at least they spared you the Mae.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Dr. Artinces Lula Mae Noel?”

  “A mouthful, I know.”

  Goode put his hat back on. He pressed his full lips together and nodded, nearly choking himself until the impulse to laugh subsided.

  Artinces watched and waited. “Now you,” she said. “Your turn. Tell me something.”

  He looked away from her, staring at the pond so intently that she turned to see what he was looking at. There was nothing there. The protesting boy and his mother were gone, along with his floating duck.

  “I’m 56 years old and I’m drowning,” he said at last. “The years are like water, you know? They keep rising and rising. I feel like I’m running out of air.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Save me. You could do that. You could save me.”

  Artinces said nothing. She slid her hand across the bench toward his until their fingertips barely touched. They remained like that, side by side, as night fell.

  The next day, in a motel called the Riverbend, across the river in a little town that hip folks were starting to call East Boogie, Artinces laid down the law. But first she took Goode to bed.

  They panted and sweated, going after each other like two hormone-struck teenagers.

  To get there, they’d crossed the bridge and taken the second exit. The long, squat structure was built of blond concrete and garnished with turquoise shutters. Bright and ultra-modern, it was totally out of place amid the bleak splintered wood, crumbling brick, and rusty corrugated aluminum of East Boogie. Its unorthodox brightness totally defeated the purpose of a motel, in Artinces’s view. But she might think differently, she conceded, if she were a road-weary traveler, lulled to drowsiness by the highway’s dividing line and desperate for a blanket, a pillow, and a warm place to snore.

  Once inside the fake-wood-paneled room, decked out in Early Proletarian furniture and daringly adorned with a brilliant orange blanket and a Magic Fingers bed, Artinces delighted in the scandalous squalor of her surroundings. As Goode moaned and muttered and urged, she shouted in perfect counterpoint, wondering all the while how anything so good could ever be bad. Why did it have to be a secret? Why shouldn’t she be proud to walk with this man in the bright light of black society, bedecked, beribboned, and arm in arm? She’d take him anywhere, follow him anywhere, stamp his initials on her forehead—whatever it took, just as long as she could do this wonderful thing forever.

  But her bad-to-the-bone alter ego faded as soon as her hunger was emphatically and completely satisfied. Of course you could think such foolish thoughts in the middle of the deed, she chided herself. In the unforgiving glare of day, going public with their affair seemed patently unreasonable. So she issued her ruling. “This is how it will be,” she said.

  Goode, silent, was nuzzling her breasts, her belly.

  “Once a week,” she continued. “Wednesdays. My office closes early on Wednesday. You’ll have to get your fill of me.”

  Goode looked up. He had made his way to her hips. “That’s crazy,” he protested. “A man can’t live like that. I could never do that.”

  “You’ll have to. Or you’ll get nothing.”

  Goode sighed. “Whatever you say, Tenderness.” He lowered his lips to her thigh but she reached out and lifted his chin.

  “On any other day, we hardly know each other. In fact, we don’t even like each other.” She looked gravely into his eyes before pulling his face to hers.

  According to her edict, they bickered at board meetings and brushed by each other at public events. She learned to curl her lip in disgust when they had no choice but to interact in the presence of others. They were like oil and water, people said.

  By the summer of 1970, they were going strong as ever. Goode liked the Riverbend so much that he bought it and decorated a suite to which they had sole access. All the furnishings were purchased to suit Artinces’s taste and designed to create the illusion of a bedroom in their imaginary private home. She had to admit he’d done a good job. All they needed was that picket fence.

  Later, much later, Billie would ask Artinces why she never noticed an elegant Eldorado trailing her a few cars back as she made her way to Goode one Wednesday, shifting lanes smoothly in tune with her own steering. Why, Billie wanted to know, did she think she could carry on with a notorious gangster without anyone getting curious enough to follow her trail?

  Artinces would shrug her shoulders and change the subject. She decided not to tell her that when you are preparing to wrap yourself around the man who, despite everything, fits you perfectly, you might not be aware of the curious stares of others. You might not notice a sharp-featured man picking his teeth in his rearview mirror while idling behind you at a random red light. When the man with the perfect fit will soon be moving in you and you will feel nothing besides the sweet pulse of his thrust, the rhythm of his hips as he holds you while chanting, “Tenderness,
Tenderness, Tenderness” over and over, you aren’t likely to think of anything else at all.

  “HELLO, NORTH SIDE,” the Man in the Red Vest bellowed. “Welcome to Afro Day in the Park!”

  The quiet corner of Fairgrounds Park where Guts Tolliver spent his favorite mornings had been transformed into a carnival. Banners, hung the previous month by the men of the Black Swan, draped the gates at Kossuth and Fair Avenues. A Tilt-A-Whirl, a Ferris wheel, and a carousel surrounded the Abram Higgins memorial garden. Nearby, the Harry Truman Boys Club sponsored a dunking booth. An elaborate sprinkler set, vast and tentacled, sent prismatic spray in the air. Families relaxed on picnic blankets and enjoyed the shade beneath beach umbrellas along the path on which Crusher Boudreau usually ran his miles. Crusher stood a few yards off the path in his standard workout gear, but he wasn’t exercising. He’d been drafted to oversee the Swing the Hammer, Ring the Bell game. On the stone bridge, Reuben Jones and Lucius Monday sat behind easels, offering instant portraits and caricatures for three dollars each.

  At Softball Diamond No. 1, a bandstand had been erected in the shallow outfield. The Man in the Red Vest presided there as master of ceremonies, strolling a stage festooned with his radio station’s call letters. Teenagers gathered at the foot of the stage to mingle and flirt. From her booth between Stormy Monday’s pie stand and the autograph kiosk manned by Rip Crenshaw and the home team’s fleet center fielder, Artinces offered free blood-pressure screenings and lead-poisoning tests. Charlotte was supposed to assist her, but hadn’t showed up yet. It was just about noon.

  The last of the lingering morning mist had all but burned away, leaving behind a shimmering curtain of heat. Artinces watched as, on the far side of the pond, the curtain parted and the three women stepped through. Barefoot, they strolled to the edge of the concrete dock jutting into the water. Two of them shielded their brows with their hands. The other twirled a parasol. Fairgoers moved around them as if they weren’t there. Oblivious to the trio, a fisherwoman, her hat pulled down low over her eyes, set out a metal lawn chair and fishing gear on the dock. The women apparently didn’t mind or notice but they did seem to be aware of Artinces. They were staring right at her.