Third Girl from the Left

by Martha Southgate

  “If you’ll accompany me down to the theater, I will. I expect you’d like to see the projection room.”

  How did he know that? She had never been in a projection room, but she’d always wondered what made the films glow in front of her. Sometimes, if it wasn’t such a good movie, she’d turn her head a couple of times to look at the square of light that the image emanated from and try to figure out what was up there. What made everything happen? When she was little, before her mama died, she was always trying to take stuff apart to figure out how it worked. Her mama told her it wasn’t ladylike. And then her mama was gone and there wasn’t anyone to stop her. But by that time she couldn’t get herself to care. What was the point of trying to understand? None of this went through her head at his words. She just knew a wild willingness was on her. “Well, let’s finish up, then. I believe I will join you,” she said, sliding a hank of hair back into place under the scarf. There were no questions in her mind. Every proper thing she’d ever been told, every proper thing she’d ever done, seemed to have utterly left her.

  They finished the laundry together, William keeping up a steady stream of chatter, asking her what her favorite pictures were and who were her favorite actors and actresses. He had opinions about just about every movie actor there was. His favorite was Errol Flynn—though he confessed to great affection for Harry Belafonte too, which made Mildred squeal a little and confess her Carmen Jones-going, something she’d never told anyone else. He smiled at her gently. He worked with a cheerful will Mildred had never seen in a man, asking her for clothespins and moving swiftly around the clothesline just the way a girlfriend might have if she’d had a girlfriend to speak of. When they were finished, he said, “Let’s go,” and they went out the gate—he let her go first—and walked down the dusty road to town. Mildred found herself questioning nothing, just going along to see what would happen. “So, Mildred,” he said, “I’ve been talking a lot and you’ve barely said a word. What are you thinking, Miz Edwards?”

  “I’m thinking I’ve never met anyone from New York before. What’s it like there?”

  William’s eyes clouded over. “Tall. The tallest place you ever did see. With people rushing all around wherever you go. Did you ever see His Girl Friday?” Mildred nodded. “People talk like that. Just that fast. Even the colored folks.”

  Mildred was shocked. As much as she liked Cary Grant, she’d had trouble following that movie, the language spilled by at such a speed. “Really?” she said. “I didn’t think folks could talk that fast. Not real folks. Ain’t that something.” She paused. “We must seem kinda country to you then, huh?”

  William laughed. “Country? Hell, yeah.”

  Mildred blushed. She’d never been walking alone with a man who swore before. She kind of liked the way he dragged out the ll’s.

  “Oh, pardon my language, Mildred. But, yeah, it seems country to me here. But my mama and daddy left me a little bit of a place. They come here in 1930, didn’t socialize too much with other folks. They liked to stay off by themselves. Anyway . . . it was time I left New York.”

  “Why?”

  He looked up at the sky briefly. “Did you ever see a blue like that before? Like being under a teacup. Couldn’t never see a sky like that back east. I come to miss that after a while.”

  Mildred looked up at the cobalt bowl over their heads, then back at William. “Yeah,” she said, her feet slowing into an easy lope. “I could see how you would miss that. But is that the only reason?”

  “Well, that and a broken heart,” he said.

  Mildred drew in her breath.

  “Oh, don’t look like that, Mildred. It’s a few broken hearts in Tulsa, I bet. Gotta go a long way to get away from that. One way or the other. I need to see what I need to see every day. A sky like this. Don’t nobody understand that here. But that’s OK. I’m paying my bills. The rest will take care of itself in time.” He drew a deep breath. “Hard to find that kind of time back in Harlem. That’s the one thing it’s very hard to find enough of.” He leaned to the side of the road and pulled up a long blade of grass. Stuck it between his teeth. “I like to see a sky like this. A pretty ol’ gal walking with me.”

  Mildred giggled. She felt . . . well, she plain didn’t know what she felt. Except that she’d never been with anyone that she felt she could talk to about the way the sky changed from blue to silver to orange back to blue, depending what time it was. Who had time for such foolishness? But she felt that if she shared her thoughts with William, that he would listen. That he was the kind of person who exulted in the colors of the sky too.

  They fell quiet as they approached the theater. Without speaking, Mildred began to lag a few steps behind William, trying to make it seem as though they weren’t walking together. When he came to the theater, he unlocked the door, looked quickly both ways. No one passing. He beckoned her in, a wicked grin on his face. She scooted in behind him, laughing.

  The theater was hushed and black inside. It smelled slightly of popcorn, the carpet gritty underfoot. She stood uncertainly just inside the door, until William stepped toward her. “No one’s gonna come in.” She just looked at him. He extended his hand, kept his gaze steady. “Here,” he said quietly. “It’s up this way.” He led her up the stairs, so easily and quickly she didn’t even have time to think about it. Her hand was right where it ought to be.

  The projectionist’s booth was tiny and airless and warm. It was lit from overhead by a bare bulb, casting harsh shadows. There was one tall stool, a huge machine with many sprockets and gears that Mildred supposed was the film projector, a small, thin shelf on which rested copies of Ebony and a few heavy books. On the walls were movie posters of every sort, Gable and Garbo and Lena Horne. But what really made her stop was over in the corner, the most beautiful thing of all: a painting. She walked over to it as though pulled. “What’s this?” she said, never looking away.

  “It’s a poster from an art show I saw back in New York. There were something like sixty paintings in that show. All about going up north. The painter lives right in Harlem. Colored man. Dark as you please. His name’s Jacob Lawrence.”

  “A colored man painted this?” Colored people painting pictures? Pictures about going north?

  “Yeah.” William came and stood just behind her, so she could feel the warmth of him. “It’s something, ain’t it?”

  It looked like church. A wide flat pew ran up the middle of the painting, the floor various shades of brown and gray and white. And then people sitting on either side, wearing bright yellows and reds and blues, their dark brown faces suggested by swatches of color. A door was at the front of the painting. But you couldn’t tell where it led. Outside or just into another part of the painting. It made her eyes hum, her heart tighten in her chest. The way the colors lay so close to one another but never together. And people like the ones she’d always known. The ones who lowered their eyes when white people came through town and held them up so proudly the rest of the time. The ones who lay in the streets dead all around her all those years ago. She hadn’t thought about that before she came up these stairs into this strange room, with this man she didn’t know. But she felt something slide into place in her chest. She touched the back of her hair. William’s breath warmed her neck, but she didn’t move away from him. She just gazed into the image, so familiar, even though she’d never seen it before. “It sure is something,” she said.

  “It looks like my dreams,” he said. She turned, laughing a little with the strangeness of his comment. But when he looked away from the painting and then down at her, the laugh died away. She could hear her heart in her ears. She stepped backward away from him and toward the painting, and he reached out and touched the side of her face gently. “I thought you might like it,” he said quietly. “That’s why I wanted you to come up here.” He smiled a little. “You smell like lavender. That’s what all the ladies around here use.”

  “Yes, I guess I do.” She didn’t move away, but she couldn’t have
said why. He dropped his hand back to his side.

  “I thought you’d like the painting. You’re the only one around here I’ve showed it to.” They smiled at each other, and the feeling of a kiss about to happen fled the room. But they both knew it had been there. Mildred looked at her feet for a moment, then turned back to the painting. The long hallway that Lawrence painted with a dark doorway at the top of the frame was almost something she could walk through. She could imagine the texture of the floor underneath her shoes. William breathed quietly behind her. Neither of them spoke for a long time. After a while, he said, “So this is where I spend my time.”

  Mildred looked away from the painting, feeling bold. “Can I see the rest of the booth?”

  “That’s why I brought you up here. I see you come in with your kids every Saturday.” He paused. “I wanted to show it to you. Do you have time?”

  “Yeah, sure. A little bit. They at school ’til three.” She looked at her feet quickly, then up, and she stepped over to the projector. “So how’s this here thing work?”

  William smiled and then proceeded to talk her through every detail of the projector: how the film threaded through it, how the pictures were broken up into tiny frames that gave the illusion of movement. (Twenty-four frames to the second, he told her. “Really?” Mildred said. She plain couldn’t believe it.) He let her load the heavy reel onto the projector, allowed her to touch the glossy celluloid leader. She’d never been so freely invited to touch machinery she was curious about. As she got more and more interested, her awkwardness fell away. She asked a thousand questions, until, finally, William said, “It’s almost time for the first show.” Nearly two hours had passed. “Oh, my Lord,” she said, clapping her hand to her mouth. “I’ve got to go.”

  “OK,” said William. “But promise me you’ll come back.”

  She looked at him steadily. Something was starting. “I promise.” And then she left.

  That night, cooking dinner, she let the rice water boil clean away, nearly burning her good pot. She forgot that Otis and Jolene liked string beans but Angie didn’t so she always got only one. Angie cried for five minutes at the indignity of having a pile of green beans on her plate. The hair stood up on the back of Mildred’s neck as she listened to her child’s sobs over this tiny, tiny matter, but she drew four deep breaths and took the other beans onto her plate. Johnny Lee talked about something that had happened at the pharmacy earlier that day. She wasn’t sure what. When she was still for a moment, she could still see the smoothly machined angles of the film projector, feel the celluloid under her fingers. And she could almost taste the reds and blues and yellows of Lawrence’s painting even though she might not get another chance to see it. She felt a little easing, a sense of contentment. She was interested in how things worked for the first time in a long, long time.

  The next morning, she woke up happy. She couldn’t think why for a minute. She stared at the ceiling, as Johnny Lee’s warm, familiar bulk breathed next to her and the children’s sleeping breath filled the house. Then she remembered. She felt a slight twist of guilt at being alone with a man like that, but then she recalled the gentle, respectful way he’d showed her all that machinery and let her look at the painting and she didn’t care how scandalous it was. She curled her toes. Johnny Lee woke up with a sigh. “You up, Millie?”

  “Yeah, I’m awake. How are you?”

  He rolled over and rested his arm across her chest. “I’m all right. You?”

  “I’m all right. Couldn’t sleep.” He grunted and started moving his hand experimentally around her nipple. She felt her legs starting to shift around, that feeling gathering between them. She embraced him with a little sigh. They made love with quiet pleasure, like always. But as she came, William’s name floated into in her mind. She wondered what his breath would feel like on her neck. She closed her eyes, embarrassed and guilty to be thinking such things. Johnny Lee asked if she was all right. She said yes, it was good, that she loved him and it was good. He kissed her throat, murmuring, and she held the back of his head. She imagined it was William’s. Tears gathered behind her eyes, but they did not fall.

  A week went by. Two. The days were long, longer, longest. It was getting to the meat of summer. Mildred couldn’t stop thinking about that painting, about the time that William had taken with her, the way his hands moved over the film projector. She’d be washing the dishes or sweeping the yard and she’d find her mind had wheeled entirely away, was entirely with William. Finally, the third laundry day, she found her feet walking down to town of their own volition after she’d hung the wash. I’ve just got to see that picture again, she thought. That was all she let herself think. When he greeted her at the door, his eyes dark and pleased, she was thinking about the painting.

  He had acquired a small cast-off love seat for the room and wedged it into a corner. A book called The Migration of the Negro: A Catalogue rested on it. She sank onto the seat without thinking, her hand caressing the glossy cover, which showed another painting. Black people again. “Oh, William. Where’d you get this?”

  “At that show I told you about. Before the war. Want to look at it?” But she had already opened it and was gently thumbing through the pages.

  She looked up again, the book on her lap, her hands resting on it. “How’d you know I was gonna come back?” she asked.

  “I’m a patient man,” he said. “And I missed you. I knew you musta missed me.”

  “How’d you know that I missed you?”

  “I know all about you. I know you ought to be making something with those beautiful hands of yours. I know how much you love these paintings. I know you should have left Tulsa a long time ago and if you was a man and didn’t have your family to take care of, you surely would have. And I knew you’d come back.”

  “I did miss you.” It was almost a sigh at first. “I did miss you. I had to come back.” He was sitting next to her now, so close she could smell him. She didn’t see him leaning toward her. But it was happening, at last. His tongue was in her mouth. She put her hand on the back of his neck, felt the muscles of her face relax. She was herself at last. No one’s mother. No one’s child. No one’s wife. She was only herself.

  She shifted her legs apart, opened her mouth a little wider. Thought nothing. There was nothing to think. His hands were on her waist, now on her breasts, now gently pushing her dress up. She wasn’t wearing stockings. She never wore stockings on laundry day. When he touched the inside of her thighs, she gasped and he stopped. “Is this all right?”

  “Yes.” She breathed. “It’s just fine. Don’t stop.” So he didn’t.

  She left the book with him. He said he’d keep it for her.

  After that, being with him was all she could think of. He was the air she breathed, the words she said, the light around her. They couldn’t meet often; everybody knew everything in Greenwood. It was so easy for people to talk. But they met when they could. Mildred felt guilty. She looked at Johnny Lee and thought, He is so good, so kind, I love him. How can I? But William was a new life for her, one she’d never imagined, one with her mind and her heart at the center. While she felt guilty, she didn’t feel wrong, which surprised her down to her shoes. Being with William was inevitable. She needed to see him periodically in order to keep breathing. When she was home, she talked to the kids, made love with her husband, did the wash, ran the house, but when her mind was at rest, it rested on William, on something he’d said, or the curve of his throat or the way the back of his head looked as he walked up the stairs. Or the feeling of his tongue in her mouth, his mouth on her breasts. The feeling that she would never need another thing.

  On Sundays the longing stretched before her, a featureless plain. The snap and chase of getting the kids ready for church distracted her for a while. It wasn’t until Mildred sat in church, Pastor Tyson’s voice rolling over her, that she gave herself over to that endless distance.

  She sat, tears like needles behind her eyes, praying to be delivered. When
she closed her eyes, voices rising all around her in song, she saw only the base of his throat, that small, sweet depression in his skin before her, the taste of salt. She saw her mouth resting there. There was no deliverance. She was not to be set free.

  All day, every day, her lips moved soundlessly saying his name. William. William. William. Her tongue rested on the syllables, they caressed her teeth. William. William. She lay her hand on her stomach where he’d lay his hand, she felt her tongue in her mouth where his tongue had been. No one saw her but he. At last she was comprehended. At last she comprehended someone else. She hadn’t known she was missing that until he brought it to her, a feast she could not enjoy, a blessing she could not celebrate, a gift only partially hers, water in the desert. His name was her prayer, his touch her church. But no one knew.

  One time when they were entwined in their small dark space, he took her head in both hands, ran his thumbs over her closed eyelids, and whispered, “Look at me. I’m here. Look at me.” She opened her eyes. Even as she came, crying out the words he’d given her, she didn’t look away. Neither did he. She took up the words. “I’m here. Look at me. I’m here.” And with him, she was.

  15

  SOMETIMES THEY DIDN’T EVEN MAKE LOVE, THEY played checkers or just sat together and looked at the Lawrence book. William talked with her about the colors he used and why he might have chosen them. She helped him thread the film through the projector before showtime, and he complimented her when she did it well. William told her all about New York and Chicago and other places he’d been. He showed her paintings he’d made. He sketched her once. She’d never even seen a black man hold a pencil for anything other than writing. She sat as still as a stone as William looked from her to his pad, to her again, his face beautiful and intent. When he showed her the sketch, she started crying. “Oh, I don’t look like that,” she said, pushing at her tears with the heel of her hand.