Seen It All and Done the Rest

by Pearl Cleage

  Mr. Charles and Mr. Eddie nodded and turned back to the fresh cups of coffee Henry was pouring for them.

  Abbie smiled at me and her long silver earrings caught the sunlight pouring in through the window. “Do you have time to talk?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, pointing to the table where my empty cup and untouched newspapers awaited my return. “Pull up a chair.”

  “Not here,” she said quickly, dropping her voice. “They’ll be listening so hard, one of them will have a stroke.”

  “I heard that,” Mr. Charles said over his shoulder.

  “Ain’t nobody studying you,” added Mr. Eddie, who seemed to favor that response over all others. “We got more on our minds than you think we do.”

  “I stand corrected.” Abbie laughed and turned to me. “You ready?”

  I had no idea where we were going, but finding a long-lost friend so far from home is the best kind of good omen. I grabbed my coat and tucked the papers under my arm. “Ready.”

  NINE

  When we stepped outside, Abbie adjusted her shawl and linked her arm through mine like we were French schoolgirls on our way to an early class.

  “I didn’t mean to snatch you away like that,” she said, “but I’m on my way out of town and I wanted to grab a few minutes so we could at least exchange numbers or schedules or whatever it is you’re supposed to exchange after being out of touch for so long.”

  “We can do all that,” I said, sorry she was leaving and hoping she’d be back soon. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m driving down to Tybee Island for a couple of days. Do you know it?”

  “Off the coast near Savannah?”

  “That’s the one. I have a friend who just opened a restaurant there and commissioned a photograph from an artist who lives up here. We’re driving down together to deliver it. Have you met Aretha?”

  I shook my head. “I just got here, remember?”

  She laughed and squeezed my arm. “You’ll meet her and Peachy, my friend who owns the restaurant and…How long are you going to be here?”

  “A month or so,” I said. “I want to spend some time with Zora, and I own a duplex over on Martin Luther King that I need to check on.”

  “Wonderful.” She beamed at me. “For me and for Zora. I think she needs a little nurturing right now, even though she would never admit it.”

  “I think so, too,” I said, pleased her assessment echoed my own. “Were you here when all that stuff was happening last year?”

  “I was, but I had some of my own stuff to deal with right then, so I wasn’t much help.” A shadow of something flickered across her face, but she banished it with another bright smile. “That’s a story for another day.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Where are we going now?”

  “Well, why don’t you tell me about the old crowd? Do you ever see Howard Denmond? Weren’t you all good friends?”

  “I see him all the time, but I meant where are we actually going?”

  “Oh! Good lord! I thought you meant conversationally.”

  “I figure the conversation will take care of itself. I just wondered where we were headed.”

  “I’m sort of house-sitting, too,” she said as we turned off Abernathy down one of the tree-lined residential streets. “My niece, Regina, and her husband are on vacation with their new baby and I’m keeping an eye on things. I thought we could go over to my place and talk until Aretha comes to pick me up.”

  An interesting piece of Abbie’s current life fell into place. “Your niece is married to Blue Hamilton?”

  “Yes. Two years last Christmas. Do you know him?”

  “I know enough about him to know that he probably doesn’t need you to keep an eye on things.”

  “He’s a good man.” She smiled.

  “Everybody says so,” I agreed. “Zora showed me their house on the way home last night.”

  “You should have stopped,” Abbie said, sounding disappointed. “I’m always up late.”

  “I didn’t even know you were here yet.”

  She laughed and squeezed my arm again. “In that case, I forgive you!”

  She stopped in front of what I already knew to be her niece’s front gate. The house looked even bigger in daylight and the magnolia was even more magnificent. There is no more beautiful symbol of the South than the magnolia tree, but I knew it would drive Howard crazy. Whenever he even sees a picture of a magnolia, he starts humming Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and muttering about lynching parties.

  Abbie opened the front door, tossed her shawl on a narrow table in the hallway, and reached for my coat. She stashed it in a small closet while I took a look around. Inside, the house had high ceilings, an abundance of windows, and from what I could see, an appealing mixture of big leather chairs, soft couches with enough pillows to get lost in, and a traditional rocking chair with a high back and a cane bottom. There was also a huge toy chest tucked next to a tiny replica of the larger leather chairs that I assumed belonged to the baby of the house.

  In the hallway, there were photographs of family, friends, and faraway places, much like the arrangement in the kitchen at Zora’s place. The study off the living room boasted floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a small chess table with the intricately carved pieces neatly arranged in what looked like a game in progress. I never liked chess. It reminds me of baseball. Long stretches of nothing much going on that anybody else can see, interrupted by bursts of excitement when somebody hits a home run or crows “checkmate!” I like checkers.

  “Come on back to the kitchen,” Abbie said. “I can make us a pot of coffee or we can just share this cup of Henry’s famous cappuccino.”

  “I think I’ve had enough caffeine for the time being,” I said. “How about a glass of water?”

  “No problem,” she said, leading the way to a lovely, light-filled kitchen with a long table that could easily seat eight, ten if they squeezed a little, more photographs, and two huge wall maps, one of the world and one of the United States. The world map had colored pushpins stuck in it like they used to do in elementary school to show you where a particular story might be taking place in some part of the world you probably couldn’t quite pronounce yet.

  As Abbie went to the refrigerator, I leaned over for a closer look, my eye unable not to clock the distance between Atlanta and Amsterdam. There was a whole ocean between me and everything that had defined my life for the last thirty years. I suddenly hoped Howard knew what he was doing. I was a long way from home without even a reliable pair of ruby slippers to get me back. What if the theater didn’t come around? What if François didn’t have the guts to stick up for me? What if nobody else would cast me? What if I really was too old to play Medea?

  Abbie’s voice broke through the sudden swirl of my worrying like a sunbeam on a cloudy day. “How about champagne instead?”

  I turned around to find her holding up a bottle of Dom Pérignon and two graceful flutes. “That is an inspired idea, but are Americans allowed to drink champagne before noon?”

  “It’s midnight somewhere.” Abbie laughed.

  “You got that right!” And I laughed, too.

  She set the glasses down and opened the bottle easily. I like women who can open whatever they’re drinking without looking around for a man to pop the cork. She poured us each a glass and we raised them for a toast.

  “To friendship,” I said.

  “To friendship.”

  We each took a sip to seal the deal and settled in at one end of the long table to catch up a little.

  “You know I think this champagne was meant for you,” Abbie said.

  “I’m glad,” I said, “but how do you figure that? You didn’t know I was here until an hour ago.”

  “I didn’t know all the details,” she said, “but I’ve been feeling an arrival for almost a week.”

  She sounded like the Jedi Master in Star Wars who is so highly evolved he can identify even the smallest changes in the universe
as disturbances in the Force.

  “So you went out and bought a bottle of Dom Pérignon, just in case?”

  She smiled and took another sip. “Something like that. I have great faith in my instincts.”

  I raised my glass. “Then here’s to your instincts.”

  My instincts would probably have told me to get a bottle of André’s in case things didn’t work out, but I admired her style.

  “Things always work out,” she said, as if she could read my mind. “Who would have thought I’d run into you at the West End News after all these years, but I did.”

  “It’s so good to see you,” I said.

  “Ditto,” she said and we just sat for a minute, sipping our champagne and enjoying the lovely coincidence that had brought us together.

  Abbie was one of those friends I had made when I was traveling so much I literally lived out of a suitcase. François had gotten a grant to do a series of workshops and performances and we never stayed anywhere longer than three weeks. It was exciting and exhausting and taught me more about doing theater than any class ever could have. The process lent itself to the formation of very intense relationships that developed quickly, flamed or sputtered just as fast, and left you either sorry to say goodbye or relieved to be moving on.

  I met Abbie in Paris. She was married to a painter who was a good friend of François’s and after she saw our opening performance, she came to the show every night. Afterward, the four of us would meet at their apartment, drink cheap wine, and talk about art until the wee hours, when François and I would walk home, make love, and fall asleep in each other’s arms so we could get up the next day and do it all again.

  François had lots of interesting male friends who I had met on the tour, but the women who adored them fell into two main categories: rich and long suffering; or young and bedazzled. In both cases, when the men were present, these women spent their time glued to the side of the beloved, hanging on his every word, no matter how banal, and waiting to refresh his drink without being asked. Alone, their conversations consisted mostly of reverential reviews of the great man’s talent or brokenhearted revelations of frequent and unrepentant infidelities.

  But Abbie wasn’t like that. She was in love with her husband and she clearly respected his work, but she never seemed to worship him or think his life more worthy of attention than her own. Recognizing a kindred spirit that first night when we talked until dawn almost as if our significant others weren’t even there, I invited her for lunch before the show the next day, in addition to drinks with the guys after. For the next three weeks, that became our very pleasant habit. We’d meet at noon, then talk and eat until three when I had to start getting ready for the show.

  She was a few years older—I discovered this was her second marriage—but we were being molded and marked by the same movements for change that were stirring people up all over the world. She wasn’t an artist, but her perception of herself as “a free woman in process” mirrored my own. We encouraged each other to savor the adventures, to push the boundaries, and to demand of our lovers not only good sex but absolute truth and absolute tenderness, not necessarily in that order.

  When our troupe packed up a few weeks later and headed back to Amsterdam, Abbie promised to write and I promised to visit, but we saw each other only one more time before this morning. She came through with her painter on the way to Madrid and confided that she’d be leaving him in Spain and heading back to D.C. for a while. At first, I didn’t realize what she meant until she said she intended to file the papers in the United States since he was an Italian and it was much harder to get a divorce there. I expressed my sympathy at the dissolution of her marriage and she looked sad, but not inconsolable.

  “He’s a lovely man and a great painter,” she said, “but he’s just not the one.”

  I had been surprised at the idea of “the one” coming out of Abbie’s mouth. I guess I believe in it, too. At some level, we can’t not believe in it. Great love stories are always built on the quest for, or loss of, the one. But Abbie was realistic, just like I was. Maybe more so. When I met her, she’d already been married twice and I had heard through the grapevine later that she’d tried it twice more, once with a cellist and once with a writer, with an equal lack of success. I wondered if she was married now.

  “Last time we saw each other, I was still married to the painter,” she said, reading my mind again.

  “Antonio,” I said.

  She laughed. “Isn’t it funny how I always identified them by their jobs, not their names? The painter, the writer, the guitar player…”

  “The cellist.”

  “Same guy,” she said.

  “Wasn’t there one more?”

  “Nope. Three’s the charm,” she said. “I think I’m done. Did you and François ever get married?”

  I shook my head. “No. We still work together, though.”

  “I know. I’ve seen the reviews.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “Online, of course. All I have to do is type in The Human Theatre and it gives me everything. Schedules, stars, ticket prices. I’ve kept up with you. What are you opening with next season?”

  The question was still too new for me to answer without a little twinge of anxiety. “I’m not sure yet. Part of the reason I’m here is to try and figure that out.”

  She looked surprised. “Really?”

  I nodded. “It’s a pretty weird time to be an American. People are mad at us all around the world. I got thrown out of an Iraqi friend’s funeral just for being an American citizen.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I wish I was. That’s why the board at the theater hasn’t confirmed a schedule yet. I always open the season, but they’re afraid to cast me because I’m an American.”

  She shook her head sympathetically. “Be careful what you ask for.”

  “I never asked for this!”

  “Yes, you did,” she said calmly. “We all did. We demanded it. We wanted to be first-class American citizens. And we won! That’s exactly what we are, with all the rights and responsibilities thereto, ’til death do us part.”

  She was sort of starting to piss me off, although I couldn’t argue with what she was saying.

  “So does that mean I now have to answer for every arrogant white boy these fools send to the White House?”

  “These fools,” she said gently, “are your fellow citizens and yes, you have to answer for each and every choice they make because there is no they. That’s the whole point. It’s us. All of us Americans together.”

  I looked at her, sitting there in the little Chinese shoes, and the hippie skirt, looking as bohemian as she ever had, but sounding like Pete Seeger’s ghost. “When did you get to be so patriotic?”

  “Last summer.” She grinned at my surprise. “Me and Peachy drove across the country. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it, but I needed a new perspective and I really wanted to see the redwoods. All my life, I had wanted to see those trees, but I had never gotten around to it, so last summer, we took off down historic Route 66, with Nat King Cole on the CD player, and it absolutely changed my life.”

  My only driving trip across the country had been with my parents many years ago when there were no hotels or motels for black folks between Gadsden’s in Birmingham and the Dunbar in Los Angeles, with nothing but Texas in between. It was memorable in my mind, primarily for the excruciating embarrassment of having to pee by the side of the road while my mother held up a tablecloth to shield me from the curiosity of passersby.

  “Driving across the country made you feel like a citizen?” I could hear the skepticism in my voice.

  “I know it sounds corny,” she said, “but the farther away we got from the cities and the more I saw of all those amber waves of grain and purple mountains majesty, and met all those people who talked about the weather by going outside to actually see it, the more I felt like it was my country, too, in all its messy, multiracial, multicultural madness and I
had a right to claim it as my own. You can, too.”

  She was getting a little worked up, but I couldn’t see it. “Go on.”

  “I felt something shift in how I look at things. How I see myself in relation to those things and to the world. I don’t even really understand it myself yet, but I’m planning to go again as soon as I can. You know how much I love to chase a new idea.”

  Curiosity was one of Abbie’s two defining characteristics. Optimism was the other one. In her latest quest to fully embrace our motherland, she had a perfect place to express both. We had fallen back into conversation as easily as we had the summer we met and I realized how much I’d missed her.

  “I wish you’d gotten in touch,” I said.

  “I thought about it,” she said, “but I guess I figured we were both probably too busy having our adventures to keep up much of a correspondence and I’ve always hated telephones.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “Besides, look at us,” she refilled our lovely glasses, “together again, drinking champagne in the morning just like in the old days.”

  “Tell me you’re not the designated driver,” I said, remembering she was leaving for her friend’s restaurant in a little while.

  “Don’t worry. Aretha’s driving. It’s her pickup. I’m just a passenger.”

  “How big is this photograph anyway?” I said, surprised that they needed a truck to transport it.

  “Well, now that she’s got it all framed, it’s pretty big. Peachy wanted one of those big ornate gold frames they always have in the movie saloons, so Aretha found one. It’s huge!”

  In those movies, that frame Abbie’s friend remembered was usually holding a painting of a voluptuous woman, posing comfortably without a stitch. I wondered if she was going all the way with the saloon motif.

  “Is it a nude?”

  “The photograph?” Abbie said, and started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” I said as the doorbell announced an arrival Abbie may or may not have felt coming.

  “Nothing,” she said, still laughing, as she headed for the front door. “Except I’m a little too long in the tooth to be hanging over anybody’s bar stark naked, even if the frame is a real antique.”