His flapping coat struck her on the chin and she said, “Were you shell-shocked?”
His hollow laugh rose higher and he clasped her shoulder for a moment. “Shell-shocked is World War I vintage. They had other names this time. No”—he sobered, his hand fell away—“you can’t blame the war. That would be much too simple. Come, let’s sit in the pavilion for a minute. I don’t go for all this walking.”
With a slight misgiving she followed him up the wide stone steps and amid the tall fluted columns and stone benches. “Come, let’s sit in the caretaker’s place. In these last dark days of neighborhood decline it’s probably open. We might have to clean out a few winos though.”
But the small dark room with its warm small of leaves was deserted. While she stood in the doorway he found a bench, then called, laughing, “You can come in, I promise not to talk about the war.”
They sat close on the bench but not touching and the echo of his laugh was the only sound. He had forgotten her. Whenever he drew on the cigarette and the bud of light illumined his face, she saw that his eyes were abstracted, almost closed, and that he was absently wiping his long spatulate fingers on his knee. Gradually she picked out gray patches of light in the room. Ghosts of the summer lovers, she thought, and knew that she should leave. The same cautioning voice that had urged her to withdraw her arm before warned her now. He might not even hear her good-by or notice her leaving. She would be quickly home, finding Ina just returned from some meeting at the church and undressing by her rose-shaded lamp. She would submit to the mother’s tirade on her behavior at the Association, then go to bed—frighteningly alone with her rage and desolation until sleep came. Or she could remain and hope that he would, in talking, touch her again, causing that warm, almost painful, burst of pleasure.
“Y’know,” she said very gently, not wanting to startle him, “I could never guess anything about you.”
His fingers paused on his knee and she sensed him slowly relinquishing his thoughts. “What?”
“I could never guess a thing about you even though you’re a Bajan.”
She discerned his wry smile.
“Why not? All you have to do is look in my palm. It’s all there.” He placed his hand in her lap.
“I can’t see it in the dark.” She pushed it off, laughing.
“You don’t have to see it. Just feel the lines. They tell all.”
“Impossible.”
“Try it.” He replaced his hand. “See if it doesn’t work.”
Finally, because his hand remained insistently on her lap, she took off her glove and with her forefinger traced his smooth dry palm.
“What do you find?”
“You work,” she said.
“I do not.”
“You’re looking for work.”
“I am not.”
“You go to school.”
“I do not.”
Remembering his fingers on his knee, she said, “You give piano lessons.”
“Hell no, the piano teacher I had saw to it that I hated the piano at an early age.”
“I give up.” She pushed his hand away. “You have no fortune.”
“Ah, you finally read the lines right. You’re very good.” He lit a cigarette and the struck match threw his suddenly pensive face into relief. It was then that she saw why his mouth appeared so expressive. There was a small muscle just below his lip which pulled almost imperceptibly now at his skin. Only when he clenched the cigarette between his lips was it still.
“You mustn’t get frightened if I talk oddly at times,” he said softly.
“It doesn’t frighten me. It just makes me think you’re shell-shocked.”
His laughter and the smoke came in a warm gust against her cheek. “I love your simple, to-the-point diagnosis,” he said and rested his forehead on her shoulder.
It was such an innocent, tired and impersonal act that for a moment she did not move. Then she said, “I’d better be going. My mother might be home wondering what’s happened to me.”
“Yes, and thinking the worst too.” He raised his face and rested his lips lightly against her cheek. For a time she permitted this with the same startled passivity, then turned away, but his mouth caught hers as she turned, and the hand with the cigarette held her firm. She did not protest, but stiffly accepted his light kiss. Only when his mouth pressed harder and the little center of heat they created between their mouths flowed inward did she respond.
Her mouth opened to his and her arms opened and lifted slightly in a lovely pose that described her wonder. Her arms remained like this as his hands and warm mouth explored her face, as he laughingly pushed back her tam and kissed the line it had left on her brow. His lips brushed her closed eyes and he said, “Your snow’s all gone,” and at her questioning glance, added, “You were carrying your weight in snow on your eyelashes back there at the White Drake.”
She laughed—a low sound that was caught and held between them. It was a little like drinking rum with Suggie, she thought—the same airy sensation in her head, the same feeling that she was suddenly luminous inside and festal. Now her arms dropped and her faltering hands caressed his rough hair, her fingers lightly traced his features as they had the palm of his hand before. And her touch confirmed what she had seen in the lobby: the passionate line of bone that belied his eyes’ indifference, the silken texture of his skin, the full expressive mouth. She whispered quickly, “What do you do that you like?”
His mouth paused on her cheek and his fingers reached thoughtfully for his knee. Then his laugh shook them both. “All right, you win. I’m like you. Nothing. Only this perhaps.” His hand brushed her breast. While he gently unbuttoned her coat and sweater, while his hands and mouth discovered her slight breasts and the tiny nipples formed under his lips, one part of Selina thought of the mother. She might be awaiting her in the kitchen, the angry words building up inside her. Or still at the Association, in the lobby perhaps, performing the long ritual of saying good night, or Beryl and the others might be clustered, outraged, around her. If only the wind would rise strong enough to sweep them all like scraps of paper down Fulton Street, past the White Drake, through the park to the pavilion—so that they might witness how utterly she renounced their way, and have the full proof that she was indeed Deighton’s Selina!
At her small vengeful laugh, the man’s body fused into one long insistent piece. His eyes lifted to hers with an impassioned question, his lips formed some amazed apologetic word. Clumsily, she touched his hair to quiet him and pressed him to her with a permissive murmur. Then, deftly, he swung her around so that she lay on the wide bench with her coat under her.
It was as if the night had mounted her, as if that was the thing intruding between her slim legs and bringing the first bright pain and then slowly, steadily, rhythmically piercing her. The night, not the man, had the feel of wool and warm flesh and the smell of old cigarettes. She lay open to the night and it came rushing in like the sweet dark burst of life itself, and behind the broad slant of its shoulder the world dropped away and time and the long hurting memories, the dead faces.
Then, slowly, images, long imbedded in her mind, rose and died with each intrusive thrust: that Sunday long ago in Prospect Park—the lovers on the slope, the sense of being free of herself on the ridge above the ball field, then Beryl’s secret and her despair . . . Suggie languorous and laughing amid her tumbled sheets . . . the girl proudly whispering of her seduction in the lunchroom . . . it was like being sick and having her father carry her up to the high bed and sinking, feverish, into its soft depth . . .
Words from the mother’s daily lectures (wild-dog puppies, concubines) were vivid with meaning. A concubine was someone who lay impaled by a stranger’s body, open to his dark intrusion, and who felt only innocent and created. She was someone who knew that it was a sin without propitiation yet gladly committed it . . .
After the long final shudder they lay like lovers in a summer field, sharing an immense peace and exhau
stion. Slowly the world filtered back and time and the small room that had been filled with the rustling of their bodies. As the mist over her eyes cleared, she saw the man peering down at her, his eyes like gashes in the blackness of his face and the amazed apologetic word still on his lips. He sat up, fumbling for a cigarette, and smoked quickly, his face averted. She sensed him returning to his detachment and was suddenly cold.
Finally he turned and leaned urgently over her, the smoke screening his face, and said in a tense whisper, “Look, I’m not just some low bastard who goes around deflowering young girls.”
“I know that,” she said tenderly, putting her hand over his mouth. “Besides, it was not your fault.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
He bowed over her in an odd gesture of obeisance, his face touching her shoulder, his body spreading its warmth over her again. “Oh, Christ, how I know what it is at eighteen . . . all that goddamn pain and waste . . .” Suddenly he raised up, the lurid brightness in his eyes. “Look, how would you like to take lessons from me—so that when you’re my age you won’t be like me. Shell-shocked, as you so succinctly put it. Oh, I love your style, you know.” He kissed her. “Your swinging nothing style.”
“I don’t know,” she said warily. “What are you like now?”
“You’ll see,” he said gravely and drew her coat around her.
VI
It was a season of forgetting, the remainder of that winter and the oncoming spring, for her body, joined with his, drove the past deep into the obscured reaches of her mind. At first, she went to him nearly every day after school. He lived apart from his parents in a brownstone rooming house they owned, in the large basement kitchen which he had converted into a kind of studio. A closed grand piano, scarred by cigarette burns, was near an old-fashioned coal stove; an easel with an unfinished painting stood beside the sink under the window, with the palette, brushes and oils on the drainboard. There were books instead of dishes in the closets, and an old oversized Victorian sofa sagged against a wall, a telephone concealed under its collapsed belly. The room was barren of color except for a few oil paintings scattered around. They were mostly of human figures—broken distorted shapes in a violent setting of primary colors—done in impasto, so that the colors rose in clamorous relief from each canvas, dazzling, almost assaulting, the eye. Beyond the room was a wind-trodden garden.
“I once had plans for in here,” Clive told Selina a few days after their first night, his somber eyes moving absently over the room. “Take down the front wall and put in glass so the place wouldn’t be so gloomy and moribund, fix up the garden, get some decent furniture . . . But since I’ll be splitting soon . . .” At her frightened start, he smiled. “Oh, not until I get enough money to go far enough this time.” After a long pause, he added, chuckling, “My mother cries whenever she comes here.”
They were lying at either end of the long sofa, facing each other, their legs entwined. His lax form was strewn amid the cushions as if carelessly thrown there, his eyes overcast and distant and the cigarette held tightly between his expressive lips as if to control them. When the ashes fell he carelessly rubbed them into the sofa. Selina’s eyes, unlike his, roamed the room. To her, the few objects there and their simple arrangement formed a still-life of their afternoons together. The feeling it evoked reached back in time. She and Clive were joined, just as she and her father had been, in an intimate circle, with the world driven off. She leaned up, laughing down at him. “She probably cries at the thought of your living in a kitchen. Hasn’t she ever said anything?”
“No, I cured her of commenting on my life when I was living in the Village. Oh, don’t get wide-eyed.” He waved her down, laughing. “It was more the lower East Side than the Village, it wasn’t romantic and I failed miserably. I lacked real dedication. When I was broke I saw no point in going without a meal or scrounging one off someone when I could be home in forty minutes eating good Bajan peas and rice . . . Anyway, about my mother.” He paused, the smoke twisting up. “Well, I had just come through my baptism of fire in the army. Therefore I was a man. As a man I was entitled to my own place. Sic, the Village. It was faulty reasoning but, after all, I was only twenty-four.” He gave her a sad fleeting smile. “So I had my cold-water flat where the light was bad, my weird friends and an income from Uncle Sam. I went back to college, but just to get the money and keep peace with my mother. I was even painting . . . but talking mostly, endlessly, philosophically—invoking the name of Bergson and never having heard of élan vital—that kind of thing. Our presumption was appalling. It was at one of those intellectual Bacchanalias—with everybody on the floor talking at once, shoes off, the Chianti flowing—that my mother dropped by. God only knows how she found the place! But there she was, in the doorway.” His hooded eyes shifted suddenly from her rapt face to the doorway but mirrored nothing. Only his mouth tightened around the cigarette. “. . . All unstrung from the subway ride and awed by those white weird faces. But not awed enough not to say in raw-raw Bajan: ‘But c’dear, Clive, where this bunch come outta, nuh?’ I got to the door fast and said something which I’ve very conveniently forgotten, but to the effect of ‘get the hell out.’ ” He broke off, his eyes sweeping back to Selina, alive now with pain. “Try to see her,” he said urgently, his body tense. “She’s the small hard dry type of West Indian who lives endlessly and endures all. And she endured that. For a moment anyway, and then left.”
Selina averted her face, shaken by the same paroxysm of anguish that seized him, cowering helplessly for a moment as he cowered as though about to be struck. Gradually he fell back limp amid the cushions, his eyes emptying, but the small muscle at his mouth still pulsed.
He said casually, “As you can imagine my days there were numbered. The disgrace of one’s mother stalking one down! But what the hell, I had been planning to leave anyway.”
“Why?”
“Those damn dirty feet. Everywhere I went people were always shedding their shoes and displaying their grimy feet. Now I have the sensibilities, if not the soul, of the artist, and those feet offended me to the core . . .” At her uncertain smile, he laughed—a full boyish sound—and pressed her legs between his. “Oh God, I love to shock you. You so want to be shocked. No, it wasn’t the feet or my mother even.” He sobered quickly. “The whole pathetic Village scene got to me after a while. All that passion and poverty. That horde of colored cats in hot pursuit of a few mangy white chicks—desperate for a sponsor and a taste of the forbidden. The few sad colored chicks enacting their historic role with the whites. And those others of confused gender: he-whores and bullers as the Bajans would aptly call them. All mixed together in one desperate potpourri . . . Sweet Selina, beware Bohemia!”
“Weren’t you in on the chase?” she said coldly.
He irritably spat out shreds of tobacco. “Look, I told you I was only twenty-four, and even though I had been to war and buried the dead I was much less of a man then than you are a woman at eighteen. Of course I chased, but again my sensibilities defeated me after a time. The ones I knew were so sorry-looking and used . . . I couldn’t bear being the instrument of their vengeance or using them as mine. Besides, I passed through Korea on my way home and the Korean women spoil you—it’s an art with them . . . So home to Brooklyn!” he cried, pointing wildly. “Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again. But it costs. And he was right. Only the dead do know Brooklyn! So here I lie, surrounded by certain remnants: this sofa, which was so damn sacrosanct when I was a boy that I could never sit on it. That piano, which you know about already. Those chefs-d’oeuvre”—he fanned down the paintings—“which you don’t know about. Let’s just say they’re the painful attempts of one little colored boy to make it on the strength of a nonexistent talent . . .”
His eyes closed wearily. “Selina, you make me talk too much. I had taken a vow of silence after that session of verbal diarrhea in the Village, and now you come with your wild hungry eyes and I gladly start talkin
g away what little substance I have left. I don’t want to talk!” he suddenly shouted so that she started. Laughing, he leaned over and pulled her down on him. “I don’t want to talk. I just want to forget inside you,” he said softly against her mouth. “When we wake it’ll be evening and we can take a drive before you go home.”
“I’m afraid it won’t be Korean art,” she said, smiling as he undressed her.
He kissed her breast. “Forgive me for that. It was a cheap attempt to impress you. Anyway, you’re far more original than your lost sisters in Bohemia. There, they run to type. Either so frantic that before you can say hello you’re hauled off to bed and the whole thing is like giving an injection that means the difference between life and death, or the analytical type, where you have to be a past master at coitus reservatus in order to discuss your souls’ sicknesses midway. No, I like nice healthy girls who get in and out of bed with style and the least amount of fuss.” He bowed to her.
Even though she laughed with him, she said, “I do feel badly in the mornings though, Clive,” and stiffened, thinking of how the ashen light filtering through the bedroom each dawn became the specter of her guilt. How regret pricked her, looking at her sister’s smooth innocent face. How her body—still loose from his and warm from her brief sleep—would chill at the thought of the mother unsuspectingly awaiting her with breakfast and that apologetic look . . .
“I know you do,” he said softly. “And I love you for not giving way to it. This damn puritan morality decrees that we pay for the night’s pleasures with the morning’s remorse. But we’re getting around it. The guilt is fast becoming our real pleasure. Think of your Catholic sinning, his exquisite guilt on his way to the confessional—only to rush from there to sin again and suffer. Oh Christ, I want to stop talking, Selina. Please. Stop me . . .”
Brown Girl, Brownstones Page 24
