Love

by Toni Morrison

  Beneath the house under the light of a single bulb, Sandler chuckled. Vida was on her game. He had been struck by the girl’s legs. In freezing wind, not a goose bump in view—just tight, smooth skin with the promise of strong muscle underneath. Dancer’s legs: long, unhappy at rest, eager to lift, to spread, to wrap themselves around you. He should be ashamed, he thought, as the chuckle grew into smothered laughter: an over-fifty grandfather faithful and devoted to his wife giggling into a boiler dial in the cellar, happy to be arousable by the unexpected sight of young thighs. He knew his gruffness with her had been a reaction to the feelings she stirred and believed she knew it too.

  Sandler peered at the dial, wondering if an 80-degree setting would be likely to produce 70 degrees in his bedroom, since the current 70-degree setting was equaling 60 degrees there. He sighed over the problem: a furnace seldom needed in that climate seemed as confused about its workings as he was. And sighed again as he recalled the underdressed girl who must be a northerner indifferent to 30 degrees. He could not imagine what she wanted with either one of those Cosey women. He would ask Romen to check it out. Or maybe not. Asking his grandson to spy would introduce the wrong element into a relationship already lopsided with distrust. He wanted Romen upright—not sneaking around women on some frivolous errand. It would undermine his moral authority. Still, if the boy happened to report something, he would be as pleased to hear it as anybody. The Coseys had always been a heated topic. In these parts—Oceanside, Sooker Bay, Up Beach, Silk—their goings-on had splattered conversation for fifty years. Naturally so, since the resort affected them all. Provided them with work other than fish and pack crab; attracted outsiders who offered years of titillation and agitated talk. Otherwise they never saw anybody but themselves. The withdrawal of that class of tourist was hard on everyone, like a receding wave that left shells and kelp script, scattered and unreadable, behind.

  There were cold spots in the Oceanside house, places the heat seemed never to enter. Hot spots too. And all of his tinkering with thermostats and base heating and filters was just that—tinkering. Like his neighbors’, his house was built as a gesture: two-inch nails instead of four, lightweight roofing guaranteed for ten years instead of thirty, single-thickness panes rattling in their molding. Each year Sandler became fonder of the neighborhood he and Vida had moved away from. She had been right, certainly, to leave Up Beach when they did, before the drought that ended in flood, and she never gave it another thought. As he did almost every day, as now, on a very cold night, longing for the crackle of fire in a stingy potbelly stove, the smell of clean driftwood burning. He couldn’t forget the picture the moon turned those Up Beach cabins into. Here, in this government-improved and -approved housing with too much man-made light, the moon did nothing kind. The planners believed that dark people would do fewer dark things if there were twice as many streetlamps as anywhere else. Only in fine neighborhoods and the country were people entrusted to shadow. So even when the moon was full and blazing, for Sandler it was like a bounty hunter’s far-off torch, not the blanket of beaten gold it once spread over him and the ramshackle house of his childhood, exposing the trick of the world, which is to make us think it is ours. He wanted his own moon again releasing a wide gold finger to travel the waves and point directly at him. No matter where he stood on the beach, it knew exactly; as unwavering and personal as a mother’s touch, the gold finger found him, knew him. And although he understood that it came from a cold stone incapable even of indifference, he also knew it was pointing to him alone and nobody else. Like the windblown girl who had singled him out, breaking out of evening wind to stand between garage light and sunset, backlit, spotlighted, and looking only at him.

  Bill Cosey would have done more. Invited her in to warm herself, offered to drive her where she wanted to go, instead of barking at her, doubting her accuracy. Cosey would have succeeded, too; he almost always did. Vida, like so many others, had looked on him with adoring eyes, spoke of him with forgiving smiles. Proud of his finesse, his money, the example he set that goaded them into thinking that with patience and savvy, they could do it too. But Sandler had fished with him, and while he did not claim to know his heart, mind, or wallet, he knew his habits.

  They were lee, bobbing in a cove, not out to deep sea as he had expected.

  Sandler had been surprised by the invitation, since Cosey usually shared his boat only with special guests, or, most often, the sheriff, Buddy Silk—one member of a family that had named a whole town after itself and gave epic-movie names to its streets. Cosey had approached him in the road where Sandler was parked waiting for Vida. He aligned his pale blue Impala with Sandler’s pickup and said, “You busy tomorrow, Sandler?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Not working?”

  “No, sir. Cannery’s closed on Sunday.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “You need me for something?”

  Cosey pursed his lips as though second-guessing his invitation, then turned his face away.

  Sandler contemplated his profile, which looked like the one on a nickel minus the hairdo and feathers. Still handsome, Cosey was seventy-four years old then; Sandler twenty-two. Cosey had been married over twenty years; Sandler less than three. Cosey had money; Sandler earned one dollar and seventy cents an hour. He wondered if any two men had less to talk about.

  Having come to a decision, Cosey faced Sandler.

  “I aim to fish a little. First light. Thought you might like to join me.”

  Working fish all day, Sandler did not connect catching them with sport. He’d rather shoot than fish, but there was no way to decline. Vida wouldn’t like it, besides he had heard that Cosey’s boat was smart.

  “You don’t need to bring anything. I have it all.”

  You can say that again, thought Sandler.

  They met at the pier at 4 a.m. and pushed off immediately, in silence. No weather chat or wagers about the haul. Cosey seemed less hearty than the evening before. Sandler put the change down to the seriousness of handling the little cruiser, tacking into the ocean, then landward to a cove Sandler knew nothing about. Or else it was the oddity of their being alone together. Cosey didn’t mix with local people publicly, which is to say he employed them, joked with them, even rescued them from difficult situations, but other than at church picnics, none was truly welcome at the hotel’s tables or on its dance floor. Back in the forties, price kept most neighborhood people away, but even when a family collected enough money to celebrate a wedding there, they were refused. Pleasantly. Regretfully. Definitely. The hotel was booked. There was some spotty rancor over the undisguised rejection, but in those days most didn’t mind, thought it reasonable. They had neither the clothes nor the funds, and did not wish to be embarrassed by those who did. When Sandler was a boy, it was enough to watch the visitors, admire their cars and the quality of their luggage; to listen to the distant music and dance to it in the dark, the deep dark, between their own houses, in shadow underneath their own windowsills. It was enough to know Bill Cosey’s Hotel and Resort was there. Otherwise, how to explain the comfort available nowhere else in the county, or the state, for that matter. Cannery workers and fishing families prized it. So did housemaids traveling to Silk, laundresses, fruit pickers, as well as teachers in broken-down schools; even visiting ministers, who did not hold with liquor-fueled gatherings or dance music—all felt a tick of entitlement, of longing turned to belonging in the vicinity of the fabulous, successful resort controlled by one of their own. A fairy tale that lived on even after the hotel was dependent for its life on the people it once excluded.

  “Bonita come back in here,” said Cosey. “Way station for them, I guess.” He brightened and pulled out a thermos of coffee that, Sandler discovered, was so laced the coffee was more color than flavor. It did the trick. They were soon deep in the merits of Cassius Clay, which quelled an argument about Medgar Evers.

  The catch was poor, the banter jovial, until sunrise, when the alcohol leveled and the t
alk turned gloomy. Cosey, looking at some lively worms in the belly of a catfish, said, “If you kill the predators, the weak will eat you alive.”

  “Everything has its place, Mr. Cosey,” Sandler replied.

  “True. Everything. Except women. They’re all over the damn place.”

  Sandler laughed.

  “In the bed,” continued Cosey, “the kitchen, the yard, at your table, under your feet, on your back.”

  “That can’t be all bad,” offered Sandler.

  “No. No. It’s great. Great.”

  “Then why ain’t you smiling?”

  Bill Cosey turned to look at Sandler. His eyes, though bright from drink, radiated pain like cracked glass. “What do they say about me?” he asked, sipping from the thermos.

  “They?”

  “You all. You know. Behind my back.”

  “You a highly respected man, Mr. Cosey.”

  Cosey sighed as though the answer disappointed him. “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t,” he said. Then, in the sudden shift of subject that children and heavy drinkers enjoy, “My son, Billy, was about your age. When he died, I mean.”

  “Is that right?”

  “We had some good times. Good times. More like pals than father and son. When I lost him . . . it was like somebody from the grave reached up and grabbed him for spite.”

  “Somebody?”

  “I mean something.”

  “How’d he die?”

  “Damnedest thing. Walking pneumonia they call it. No symptoms. A cough or two and the lights go out.” He scowled into the water as though the mystery was floating down there. “I lost it for a while. Took a long time to get over it.”

  “But you did. Get over it.”

  “I did,” he answered, smiling. “A pretty woman came along and the clouds just drifted off.”

  “See there. And you complaining.”

  “You’re right. Still, I was so caught up with him, I never took the trouble to know him. I used to wonder why he picked a woman like May to marry. Maybe he was somebody else and I made him my . . . shadow. And now I’m thinking I don’t understand anybody. So why should anybody understand me?”

  “Hard to know people. All you can go by is what they do,” Sandler said, wondering, Is he trying to say he’s lonesome, misunderstood? Worrying about a son dead for twenty-some years? This man, with more friends than honey had bees, worrying about his reputation? With women fighting so hard for his attention you’d think he was a preacher. And he moaning about the burden of it? Sandler decided the whiskey had pushed Cosey to the crying phase. It had to be that, otherwise he was in the company of a fool. He could swallow hot rocks easier than he could the complaints of a rich man. Vaguely insulted, Sandler turned his attention to the bait box. If he waited long enough, Cosey would skip to another topic. Which he did, after singing a few refrains of a Platters song.

  “Do you know that every law in this country is made to keep us back?”

  Sandler looked up, thinking, Where did that come from? He laughed. “That can’t be true.”

  “Oh, but it is.”

  “What about . . .” but Sandler couldn’t remember any laws about anything except murder, and that wouldn’t help his case. Everybody knew who went to prison and who didn’t. A black killer was a killer; a white killer was unhappy. He felt sure that most law was about money, not color, and said so.

  Cosey answered with a slow wink. “Think about that,” he said. “A Negro can have A-one credit, solid collateral, and not a hope in hell of a bank loan. Think about that.”

  Sandler didn’t want to. His marriage was fresh, his daughter new. Vida was all he knew of A-one; Dolly was all he needed for hope.

  That was their first of many fishing trips, confidences. Eventually Cosey persuaded Sandler to stop cleaning crab at the cannery. With tips, waiting tables at the hotel would put more in his pocket. Sandler tried it for a few months, but in 1966, with riots in any big city you could name, a cannery boss offered him a supervisory job, hoping the gesture would forestall any restlessness that might infect the all-black labor force. It worked out. Cosey felt easier in a friendship between himself and a foreman than with one of his own waiters. But the more Sandler learned about the man, the less he knew. At times sympathy conquered disappointment; other times dislike overcame affection. Like the time Cosey told him a story, something about how when he was little his father made him play in a neighbor’s yard to see who came out the back door. Every dawn he was sent to watch. A man did slip out one day and Cosey reported it to his father. That afternoon he saw the man dragged through the street behind a four-horse wagon.

  “You helped catch a thief, a killer?” Sandler asked in admiration.

  “Yep.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Bunch of kids ran after the wagon, crying. One was a little girl. Raggedy as Lazarus. She tripped in some horse shit and fell. People laughed.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “You were a kid.”

  “Yeah.”

  During the telling, Sandler’s quick sympathy changed to embarrassment when he wondered if Cosey laughed too. Other times he felt active dislike for the man, as when he refused to sell land to local people. Folks were divided on whether to blame him or his wife for selling it to a developer cashing in on HUD money. By way of fish fries, bake sales, rummage sales, and tithing, they had collected enough for a deposit. They planned some kind of cooperative: small businesses, Head Start, cultural centers for arts, crafts, classes in Black History and Self-defense. At first Cosey was willing, but he stalled the deal so long the decision was left to his widow. She sold it off before his tombstone was set. When Sandler and others moved to Oceanside, he was still of two minds about Cosey. Knowing him, watching him, was not so much about changing his mind; it was more like an education. At first he thought Cosey was a dollar man. At least people said he was, and he certainly spent his money as though they were right. Yet a year or so into those fishing trips, Sandler began to see Cosey’s wealth not as a hammer wielded by a tough-minded man, but more like the toy of a sentimental one. Rich people could act like sharks, but what drove them was a kid’s sweet tooth. Childish yearnings that could thrive only in a meadow of girlish dreams: adoration, obedience, and full-time fun. Vida believed a powerful, generous friend gazed out from the portrait hanging behind the reception desk. That was because she didn’t know who he was looking at.

  Sandler climbed the stairs from the basement. The early retirement he’d been forced to take had seemed like a good idea at the time. Walking malls at midnight rested the mind without slowing it. Now he wondered if there was brain damage he hadn’t counted on, since he was becoming more and more fixed on the past rather than the moment he stood in. When he entered the kitchen, Vida was folding clothes and singing along to some bluesy country music on the radio. Thinking, maybe, of those cracked-glass eyes rather than the ones in the painting, he grabbed her shoulders, turned her around, and held on tight while they danced.

  Maybe his girlish tears were worse than the reason he shed them. Maybe they were a weakness the others recognized and pinpointed even before he punked out. Even before the melt had flooded his chest when he saw her hands, curving down from the snow white shoelaces that bound them. They might have been mittens pinned crookedly on a clothesline, hung there by some slut who didn’t care what the neighbors said. And the plum polish on nails bitten to the quick gave the mitten-tiny hands a womanly look and made Romen think she herself was the slut—the one with no regard for what people might think.

  He was next in line. And ready, too, in spite of the little hands and in spite of the mewing in her throat. He stood near the headboard charged by Theo’s brays and his head bobbing above the girl’s face, which was turned to the wall and hidden beneath hair undone by writhing. His belt unbuckled, anticipation ripe, he was about to become the Romen he’d always known he was: chiseled, dangerous, loose. Last of a group of sev
en. Three had left as soon as they were finished—slapping fives on their way out of the bedroom and back to where the party raged. Freddie and Jamal sat on the floor, spent but watching as Theo, who had been first, took seconds. Slower this time, his whinny the only sound because the girl wasn’t mewing anymore. By the time he withdrew, the room smelled of vegetables and rotten grapes and wet clay. Only the silence was fresh.

  Romen stepped forward to take Theo’s place, then watched in wonder as his hands moved to the headboard. The knot binding her right wrist came undone as soon as he touched it and her hand fell over the bedside. She did not use it at all—not to hit or scratch or push back her hair. Romen untied the other hand still hanging from the Pro Ked laces. Then he wrapped her in the spread she was lying on and hoisted her into a sitting position. He picked up her shoes, high-heeled, an X of pink leather across the front—good for nothing but dancing and showing off. He could hear the whooping laughter—that came first—then the jokes and finally the anger, but he got her out of there through the dancing crowd and onto the porch. Trembling, she held on tight to the shoes he handed her. If either had been drunk earlier, they weren’t anymore. A cold wind took their breath away.