CHAPTER 19
Charlie McIlmore made good on his promise. At Thanksgiving, he had told Miss Delaney and Brundidge that he would take them to a rap concert. Brundidge, who had tried without success to get his money back, had said it was the most appalling entertainment experience of his entire life. But Miss Delaney was now lying in her bed, listening to her new CD and thinking about the young black rappers who had sent her mind reeling. (She had even told Serious that she was too tired for their usual hot tea and whiskey nightcap.) Almost none of the singers and musicians who so captivated her students over five decades had intrigued her ear at all. But this was something completely different. She had never heard anything like this before in her life.
Yes, she’d caught bits and pieces of rap on her radio, but it had only made her angry—the vulgarity (as much as she could understand) and the lack of form. And even worse, she had seen one of these hip-hop characters on her television, standing in front of his multimillion-dollar, empty mansion. “This be my Escalade. This be my Bentley. This be my Jacuzzi where it all happens, dog.” She had felt outraged that a society that had failed to educate these children was now throwing money at them and telling them that their little poem was really good. “Don’t wanna suck on your sweet li’l thing. Just wanna do you doggie ’cause I’m the Bonin’ King.” But she knew if white educators like herself criticized it, then the money-grubbers would say, “Well, you just don’t understand the black experience.” Black experience? “I’m the Bonin’ King.” Where were Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou? What might these young street artists come up with if you laid a little Maya or Langston on them? That was her thought at one time and then she had forgotten about it until the concert, which was electrifying. And she had been right there in the middle of it—the charged-up people and the way they began moving and chanting to the exotic, erotic, hypnotic drumbeat that started on the stage and then drifted out across the audience, engulfing them in its easy, swampy vibe. And then there were the rappers themselves, who had at first seemed powerful and frightening, but somehow, before it was over, had shown her a sweetness inside of themselves and a depth of despair she had seldom seen in people so young. They railed about the things that poets have always railed about, the absence or presence of love—and also about the women who had given them life and then denied them the sustenance to maintain it and the grandmother who had pulled them back from the urban cliff, lifted them up, and breathed her own strength into their lungs, because strength was all she had.
This was heart outside the body truth-telling—“No matter how gangsta you are, you need that mama love.” And then on top of the sweetness and the unmet need, there was rage. Miss Delaney was knocked out! It was the rage of Dylan Thomas, only born of the black experience. What might these ranting ghetto dreamers come up with if they actually read Dylan Thomas? Or Shelley or Byron? Or even Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the American rock star of his day. What she would give to be teaching again, to have a crack at these best of young people who had been left behind, who were now telling the truth of their lives but had not been given the tools to do it with. So that all you had to go on were these glimpses of raw genius and promise. But sometimes a glimpse was enough. And sometimes, as Margaret Delaney had once taught her students (and not without controversy), even vulgarity is legitimate—the rebel muscle of Catcher in the Rye youth, flexing itself. And these rappers were powerful, primal, and pissed, as they skulked and strutted to a drumbeat that seemed not to come from fifty-foot speakers, but from Africa itself. “You brought us here. It’s been hundreds of years. You’re out of time.” Miss Delaney had been thunderstruck by the power and audaciousness of it. You could hear in their awkward, righteous tomes the voices of people who had been chased like dogs, exploited, beaten, and lynched. And these are the grandchildren, who carry not shovels and dishrags, but boom boxes—who have figured out that talking is even more powerful than singing and playing basketball or winning the Golden Gloves. Have figured out that truth-telling to the drumbeat of their ancestors is exhilarating and profit-making and race-building. And what Miss Delaney was thinking, was, that if these children ever get books, they can rule the world.
After a while, she put on her robe and gathered up her CD player and carried it to a door across the hall. A door that had been closed for too long. This particular rap was something she wanted Serious West to hear. A few minutes later, she was sitting next to him on his bed. The CD was playing and she was telling him how she felt about it. Serious was lying on his side, taking her in and trying to picture her at the concert. As she spoke, she noticed his eyes were growing soft.
“What is it, Serious?”
“Nothing. You’re just crazy, that’s all. And I was wishing I was twenty years old so I had longer to love you.”
She took his large, sweeping hand and held it to her cheek. Then she stretched herself along the full length of him. They had not spent a night together, ever. And for some reason, she was thinking that they should. Or maybe it was just the need for this white woman to lie in the arms of this black man tonight, and have him hold her tenderly and kiss her, as they experienced this mysterious and powerful new music together. So that at least she might be reassured that they and their kind were not yet lost from one another.
Milan was in her garage, using a hair dryer to defrost an old freezer that belonged to Wood’s grandparents. It was the kind of thing she often did when she was upset. And this morning, she had been up since 4 A.M., beating her rugs and cleaning out her cupboards. But so far, no amount of activity had been able to quell the disturbing notion that she was no longer in charge of her own life.
How could her dearest and truest friend have failed to tell her one of the most fundamental pieces of information that one can know about another human being? A little thing? Was Mavis serious? They had been sleeping together and putting suntan lotion on each other’s backs for thirty years. And not once had Mavis ever had the presence of mind to say that she was gay. Anyway, what the hell was she doing, coming out now? Just as Milan was losing her daughter and trying valiantly to hold on to her marriage. Wood was already the talk of the town and now, with Mavis’s new revelation, it was just a matter of time before someone came up with the notion that Wood had left Milan for Duff because Milan was sweet on women, too. That’s how information worked in a small town. A few facts got seasoned and rolled around and puffed up until they became a big story that suited everybody’s liking. A story that wouldn’t even faze Wood or Mavis. The truth was he was too spoiled and she, too insensitive, to give a damn what people thought. But Milan did. She didn’t have the luxury of driving golf carts into the pond at the country club or publicly dating women. She knew and had always known that with her, it was one false move and she was out. Or at least that was the feeling that always settled in, once she arrived somewhere good.
She had wanted to be brave. That’s why she had pretended to Mavis that she would’ve been fine with the liking girls thing. That simply not being told earlier was what hurt. But Milan knew that wasn’t true. She wasn’t fine with it. It was strange and new and embarrassing, and she couldn’t even fathom her lifelong friend dancing in the arms of another woman and meaning it. And that’s why she was mad, why she was now chipping the last piece of ice with the tip of the dryer and blowing it to smithereens. Because Mavis had seen straight into her heart and called it right.
It was still early morning at Pleasant Valley and Judith Nutter was seated at her desk, weeping. An efficient woman, she usually cried only about things that pertained directly to her, but today, that was just half true. Rudy had arrived for work around six and found Tommy Epps frozen to death in the snow. The sometime artist was lying just outside the window to the maintenance room, the one the staff left open for him and the one he always climbed through when he was ready to go to sleep. Rudy checked the window and discovered that it was locked. Then he saw the empty whiskey bottle in the pocket of the Michael Kors shearling coat and decided that Tommy ha
d been too drunk to figure out what to do. (He didn’t like to stay at the bus station or the truck stop because he had been beaten up there by strangers.)
Now the entire nursing home and the town were in an uproar. Judith Nutter had decided to start locking the window because she did not want vagrants sleeping in the maintenance room, but she had failed to tell Tommy about it. Certainly, she felt badly about what happened, but this was obviously a young man who was deeply troubled. Some of the old folks agreed that he was indeed troubled, adding that was why they had left the window open for him.
Tommy was a true son of Paris. He had grown up here. People knew that he was a crazy misfit, but he was their crazy misfit. Like his counterpart in other small towns, they felt that he belonged to them. And now Judith Nutter had killed him with her arrogance and efficient ways. Even Serious West, who was the resident diplomat, could not help her on this one. Besides, he and Margaret Delaney had been offended when Judith had offered to convene a seminar on interracial relationships because she was getting a lot of questions about theirs.
Judith had spent a good deal of the morning wondering what she should do. She hadn’t intended to kill anyone, but after all, she did have a responsibility to protect the residents and their possessions. Maybe she would call for a state regulatory commission to investigate this incident and then make new recommendations after determining what went wrong. Another option would be to have a panel discussion among the residents themselves. Or she could reach out to the community and put together a town meeting. Until Serious West had finally said, “Why don’t you just say you’re sorry?”
Brundidge paid for the funeral, just as he had always paid for Tommy’s expenses. He told Cotrell’s they could go ahead and bury Tommy in the Canali suit jacket that Brundidge had given him, adding that they might as well let him wear his old sweatpants too, which Tommy would be more comfortable in. At the service, Brundidge and Wood served as pallbearers and Miss Delaney read a passage from the Bible. Afterward, there was so much hostility directed at Judith Nutter that she ended up making the very first appointment with someone who had been twiddling his thumbs for months—the grief counselor.
For weeks, a pall hung over the residents of Pleasant Valley. They couldn’t seem to shake off the idea that someone they had known, a person who was mentally ill, had been left out in the snow to die, and only a few yards from where they all slept. It didn’t make any sense. What was so hard about leaving a window open that had been left open for years? They felt they didn’t understand the world anymore or anything in it. This strange new place where rules took precedence over common sense and committees were formed to deduce things that children would know. Where people told all their secrets on national talk shows and appeared on the covers of magazines, not for their strengths, but their weaknesses. Where even criminals had no honor now, but killed people just for the fun of it and destroyed things simply because they were there. These old people were glad to be going deaf so they couldn’t hear the songs that no one could hum. They were happy not to have cars, because there was no one left to put the gas in. And they seldom made phone calls anymore, because what they mostly got were recordings. Unbelievably, some had even switched off their television sets, giving up one of their last bridges to the outside world, because they could no longer comprehend the things that were on it, and especially not the girls who looked like Mary Tyler Moore but had semen on their faces.
Mavis and her dog, Chester, were in the kitchen, watching Brundidge savor the last bite of his apple-walnut pancakes. He was absentmindedly humming some juggling music from the old Ed Sullivan Show, a habit that drove Mavis crazy. Finally, when he was finished, he turned his fork over, the way Miss Phipps had taught him to. Then Mavis said, “I have something to tell you.”
“Damn. I knew there was somethin’ going on when you invited me over here for breakfast.”
“I’m a lesbian.”
He stared at her for a long time, then, “What in the hell do you want to go and do that for?”
“Because it’s who I am. Until now I never had the courage to say so.”
Brundidge let out a long sigh.
“Well, that’s just great. Now we got one more thing that’s gonna be fucked up. When did this happen?”
“It’s always been true.”
“Oh, man. Now you’re gonna bring your girlfriend over to my house and I have to explain to my little girls how you’re just like everybody else except nobody wants to be friends with Mr. Penis and then we’re gonna have to go out and buy some stupid book called Jeremy Has Two Mommies and sit around and discuss it.”
Ordinarily, she would’ve been fascinated by his colossal insensitivity, but not about this.
Her voice was trembling. “Okay, thanks. I just wanted you to know.”
Now he could see that she was hurt. He opened an arm to her. “Well, come on. Come here. You don’t have to get all Glass Menagerie on me—”
“You know, this was very hard.”
“Okay, well, just shut up and let me give you a hug. Come ’ere.” He did so, then, “You big ol’…lesbian.”
Mavis broke away. “That’s it. Get out.”
“Hey, it’s a joke.”
“Well, it’s offensive.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but you just sprung this on me. I mean, give me time to shit or go blind here. What if I told you after forty years that I was queer?”
They regarded each other for a moment, then she asked sincerely, “You really had no idea?”
“Hell, no. I just thought you were…I don’t know what I thought. I just know you always gotta take everything too far.”
“You have absolutely no understanding of this, do you?”
“I get it, okay? I just don’t do well with weird stuff.”
“Why do you have to call it weird?”
“Because it is weird. It’s not regular. Now I’ll be imagining you lying around naked in bed with some girl.”
She studied him for a moment. “I thought you men liked thinking about lesbians.”
“Yeah. That’s right. But not you and some big ol’ missionary girl.”
Mavis shook her head. “You know, it’s funny, but I can’t even remember now why we ever became friends.”
He was starting to get mad. “Well, I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve spent about half my life doin’ stuff for you, including hauling around…” He sputtered, “…a bunch of baby juice and, and, all those discount bricks out there for your damn patio!”
“And I’ve fed you for twenty years! So let’s don’t go any further with the one-sided friendship crap!”
“No, let’s do. If that’s how you feel, then send me a damn bill!”
“Just stop it! Okay? Just go.”
He started for the door. Then he turned back. “I think this went pretty well. I mean, you know, for somethin’ dramatic like this. Just getting it all out on the table. That’s the hard part.”
She mulled this over. “Yeah. I guess it coulda been worse.”
He laughed a little to himself. “Could’ve been a lot worse.” He put his hands in his pockets. “At least we can still watch the Miss America Pageant together.”
She smiled a little. “Right.”
He opened the door and left. She sat back down and picked up a small notebook and turned to a page that contained a list of names. At the top, scrawled in large letters, were the words, “People to Tell.” When she came to Brundidge’s name, she drew a thick line through it.
In February, Rudy and Mary Paige threw a surprise shower for Mavis, to which about a half dozen of the most forward-thinking women in Paris and all the homosexual men were invited. Right after Wood had determined that the baby would be a girl, Elizabeth went out and found a perfect old clothbound version of Huck Finn, the same gift her father had once given to her. And Milan, who claimed to be under the weather, sent along a wonderfully huge English pram, while Rudy spent a whole week’s salary on a baby bed, for which Dwight and Denny
fashioned an over-the-top silk canopy made of flowers and ribbon.
Duff, who had learned about the shower from Elizabeth, mailed a card that said a tree had been planted in the baby’s honor in some woods that had once been stripped. Rudy and the two florists, who missed Milan, simply could not get over this, asking party attendees, whenever the opportunity arose, “What in the world does a baby want with a tree?”
It was spring and Sidney and Slim were walking along the road to Fast Deer Farm, having just entered Casablanca. In spite of several months of dismal Arkansas weather, they had made good time and today the sun was out. Slim was actually beginning to enjoy the stories of pirates and the descriptions of art deco influence on Moorish architecture, and she was even a little fascinated to learn that (Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman aside) Sidney had found Casablanca to be singularly unromantic. This led to a discussion of whether Slim was prettier than Ingrid Bergman, with Sidney insisting that, indeed, she was. Then Slim, who rarely said anything, told him she wasn’t going to walk with him anymore if he was going to spout such ridiculous nonsense. And anyway, she had warned him about flirting. Sidney countered that she could call it flirting if she wanted, but that he was not going to stop speaking the truth. And that nothing could make him admit that Ingrid Bergman looked better than Slim. That he would rather die first than say it. And this made her laugh a little, an event he found so noteworthy, that he got out his small map and made a notation that she had done so outside the Mosque of Hassan II, whose minaret contains laser beam lights that shine toward Mecca (this in celebration of Slim laughing).
And then Sidney added that even though he was getting tired of doing all the talking, this fact would not discourage him from continuing their journey and that she had better get ready, because when they got to Marrakech, he was going to make her laugh again. Slim was looking at him now and thinking that she had her doubts about that, but certainly not his charm.
Liberating Paris Page 24
