Society had put her in this place of advantage and she had accepted it, had accepted its values. She had accepted the condescending smiles of her white employers whenever she referred to him, simultaneously indulging her and denying him any claim to achievement. Even the foreknowledge that in a predominantly masculine society the pattern for oppression would be masculine too did not inspire the rejection of the values, for these were what you lived by, black or white, or else they killed you.
But, dear God, please send him back tonight, she prayed. And it will be different. I promise, God—
She rose and hunted for the Bible. Finally she found it, dusty and unused, wiped it off, and opened it. The line stared out at her: “They came unto the Sepulchre at the rising of the sun.”
She went to sleep sitting in a chair with the Bible in her lap. When she opened her eyes it was early afternoon and the sunlight streamed in over her. And she looked at the Bible on the floor at her feet and did not believe. For now it was day and there were the merciless facts to face without faith, for faith was only for the dark.
Now she admitted to herself what she had long since known: that he was at Jackie’s. And her imagination rose to torment her. She could see him kissing Jackie, laughing down into her face. His white teeth would be flashing in his lean, dark face, and his deep, wonderful eyes would be as impressed with himself as if he had accomplished something great to be holding a white woman in his arms.
A deep humiliation sapped the strength from her spirit. Why did it have to be a white woman of all women; and Lee of all black men? And why should this happen to her, who had never hated people for their color, who had never once thought that white women were different from her other than in their color, or better, or more attractive? It was all the more tormenting because she had never seen Jackie and did not know how she looked.
She went into the bedroom and looked at her face in the mirror and felt ashamed that she was brown. And this was the first time in all her life she had ever felt a sense of inferiority because her skin was brown. She powdered her skin a sickly white and painted with garish rouge and then screamed at her reflection: ‘Take off the paint, you fool!”
Crying hysterically, she flung herself across the bed and beat at the covers with tightly clenched fists. “You fool! You fool!” she kept screaming into the tear-dampened pillows, biting the covers, filling her mouth with the tasteless cloth as if clinging to sanity with her teeth. Finally she sunk into subdued desperation and lay crying quietly, holding on to her mind only by the strength of her will.
If she could only stop thinking about it! If she could just get her mind on something else! Please, God, just for a little while, she prayed. But the picture of him lying nude beside a nude white woman kept moving through her mind. If it would only stop there, dear God, with his lying with the woman and having her. But it would not stop. It went into all the details, moved him through all the motions, placing his lips upon her breasts and his hands behind her back. And yet it would not stop. It went through all the scenes that they had gone through together—their own sacred love scenes, profaned with this white slut. And even then it would not stop. It made a travesty of their own love and a mockery of the act. For she could see him holding this white woman in just that certain way—through her closed eyelids and the bed beneath and through the solid earth. And she could hear him calling her “baby doll,” with just that loving tone of voice through the silence of the house and of her soul—giving to one white woman in these few days all the graces of their passion it had taken them years to acquire. And she hated her! God, oh Lord Jesus Christ, how she hated her, and all white women, and all white men, and the goddamned white world and the white babies in their mothers’ wombs! She hated them!—
Though exhaustion had turned her body into a senseless hulk and dry rot filled her brain from the torturous imagining, she could not sleep. For one thin thread of hope, a ghostly thing not contained within herself but anchored to her will, not yet broken, kept her awake to wait for him.
With the coming of night came complete despair. She no longer cared whether he came or not; she only wanted to sleep—just to sleep a little bit. Just for ten minutes, God, for ten short minutes. But she did not sleep. Once she went off into a fantasy where he came back to brush his faithless lips across her dead mouth and caress her body with the formless fingers of her memory, and suddenly she became alert to think of him in Jackie’s bed. And she wished that she could die.
That morning she knew that the thing within herself that had given life its meaning—the thing that unknowingly supported her personal ambition, that gave her the will to accomplish, the desire for self-importance—was the belief that above everything Lee loved her. It was not egoism or a defensive mechanism, but the essence of her life. And though in all other respects she could see him in relativity—his faults and his weaknesses, capabilities and inadequacies, thoughts and reactions, changing as her viewpoint changed—in his love for her she saw him as absolute. She would not recognize him otherwise, she knew—the expression of his face, the set of his body, the tone of his voice. She had one picture of him loving her that had never changed—although all other pictures against the light of living had suffered from comparisons.
It was this belief in the end that had given her personal security—the simple profound belief, over and above its fact or fiction—that had given her self-assurance in a world of hostile whites. Beyond the belief that he still loved her there was nothing. Now more than the certainty of his infidelity was this doubt in her belief.
She had not thought of returning to work because now there was no point in it. To her it had only had meaning in its relation to Lee, even in its equations of resentment. But even now she could not go in search of him. She could not beg him back. For now there was this doubt that might become a certainty, if she tested it like the certainty of his unfaithfulness. And when he did return, she would rather cope with the one than with the other.
On the sixth night she called him, driven to it. For the time had passed for him to return to her. Now it would be from necessity. But going to him, she could keep alive the one faint hope that regardless of his infidelity he still loved her.
Pride? What was pride in an extremity like this? She had no pride. Those six days in Gethsemane had taken all of pride. They had bruised her soul and mangled her mind to a weird infirmity as she clung to life and sanity with this one faint hope.
Lee and Jackie were in bed when the telephone rang. With that uncanny presentiment of guilt, both knew instantly that it was Ruth—and both hoped it was not.
Finally, as the phone continued to ring, Lee said: “You better answer it.”
Watching Jackie’s face whiten as she held the receiver to her ear, and her features tauten into sudden ugliness, Lee knew it was Ruth’s voice, more than her actual words, that had so profoundly shocked Jackie, and wondered how the voice of Ruth could sound.
“He’s not here,” Jackie said softly. “No, he isn’t—I tell you he isn’t.” And she hung up fearfully.
“What did she say?”
“She said if you didn’t come home she would send the police here.”
For a moment Lee could not speak and Jackie asked in a tight, frightened voice: “Would she?”
“I don’t know.”
“You ought to know!”
“Why the hell ought I to know?”
So driven were they by their fright, they were at each other’s throats before they caught themselves.
“I’d better call her,” Lee decided.
“Don’t call her from here!”
“Why the hell not?”
“She’ll trace the call and know you’re here.”
“She knows I’m here anyway.”
“You’d better leave.”
“There’s no danger of her coming here.”
“I don’t want to get into any trouble, Lee.”
“How in the hell can you get into any trouble?” he shouted, snatch
ing the telephone. But calling his home, he received no answer.
Then the phone began to ring as soon as he hung up. Jackie answered, again denying his presence, but she turned on him with naked panic in her face. “You’ve got to go! She’s coming with the police!”
And now her panic seized him. He jumped to his feet, scrambling into his clothes. She rustled about handing him the wrong garments at the wrong time, her nude body grotesque in its frantic posturing.
“Oh, goddamnit, you’re taking all night!” she cried.
“I’m hurrying as fast as I can!” he shouted back.
“Here! Here’s your tie!”
“Will you sit down and shut up!”
“I want you out of here!” she screamed.
Finally he started toward the door, unshaven and disheveled and incompletely dressed. She did not actually push him with her hands, but with her mind, and closed the door on his heels, locking it securely. Unorganized and demoralized, he started down the exit stairway.
Just as he turned at the landing, looking down, he saw Ruth at the bottom. He saw her thin, haggard body in the wrinkled, threadbare suit, and thought with a sudden sense of shock: “Good God, she looks old!”
And then for an instant they stood looking at each other. In her eyes, even at that distance in the dim light, he could see the hurt, overflowing like a flood of emotion running out of her. A sharp, constricting pain came up in him, solidifying in his chest. He looked quickly away from her, focusing on the wall, and went down the stairs to meet her.
“What are you doing here?” he said harshly. “What did you want to come here for?”
She could see in his face and hear in his voice his extreme attempt to be angry. Now, on top of all the rest, he was trying to build up a self-righteous indignation and a brutal rage that would impel him into striking her. And it did not matter. For at the first sight of him turning at the landing, the last thin thread of hope inside of her had broken. And as she stood there, watching him look at her and look away and come down the stairs to speak to her in that unnatural, grating voice, it was as if he were already dead, and that part of her to which this made a difference also died.
When it became apparent that she was not going to answer, he took her roughly by the arm and tried to steer her through the doorway. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”
But she held her ground with the strength of desperation. “I want to talk to Jackie.”
“Come on! Come on!” he said, tugging at her. “There isn’t any need of making any trouble.”
“I’m not going to make any trouble. I just want to talk to her.”
“She hasn’t done anything to you and I’m not going to let you hurt her.”
“I don’t want to hurt her. I just want to see how she looks and talk to her.”
“I don’t want you to talk to her. What could you say to her?”
“I just want to ask her if she loves you.”
“Come on! Come on!” he said, yanking at her savagely. “I’m not going to let you go up there and start any trouble. She’s had trouble enough as it is.”
“Please let me talk to her, Lee,” she pleaded. “Please—I’m not going to make any trouble.”
“Oh, come on!” he cried impatiently.
“Please, Lee, please. If you ever had any feeling for me in your life, please let me go and talk to her.”
Since he had first looked at her, he had not looked at her again. Now he stole a glance at her and quickly looked away. But in that brief glance he noticed how red were her eyes from crying, and how swollen were her eyelids and the flesh all around them. Her face seemed loose; the skin was slack and fell in folds beside her jaws. She seemed so thin and broken. It was as if some inner support that had held it in shape all those years had suddenly broken apart. And he knew that it was not only because he did not want her to see the sickness and guilt and remorse in his own eyes that he did not look at her, but because he did not want to see the grief and sudden age showing in her face—as if not seeing it would keep it from being there. But he knew that it was there.
And suddenly he thought of all the times that she had said: “All I ever wanted was just to love you, Lee.” Pity came up in him in overwhelming waves, and he was blindly furious with himself because he felt it.
He dragged her away and hailed a taxi and took her home. And now began the bitter necessity of facing themselves as strangers within their own home. She sank into a chair and looked at him as if she had never seen him before. And she never had, this Lee. Long ago she had ceased to brush at the slow growth of insanity that trickled through her mind, and now even the raw and eternal emotional hurt within her soul had no meaning. She was the calmer of the two.
“Lee, why didn’t you tell me you were having an affair with the woman? Why did you have to let me find out like this?”
“I wasn’t having an affair with her,” he said.
“But you went to her without even telling me you were going to be away. You must have known that I would worry.”
“I didn’t know I was going to stay when I went there.”
“But you could have called and told me you were there. I would have been hurt, but not like this. You have been through so much lately I could have understood that you needed some emotional release.”
“I didn’t need any emotional release,” he said sullenly.
“Then that makes it worse. Why did you go to her?”
“I don’t know, Ruth, goddamnit! I was sorry for her, I guess.”
She was looking at him with a cold, dispassionate scrutiny, measuring the guilt in his face; but he would not look at her. He could not look at her.
“Do you love the woman, Lee?” she asked in that calm, deadly voice.
For a moment he said nothing, waiting for the answer to form within himself, and then he began to softly cry.
“I do love her,” he said, and even then he did not know whether he lied or not. But deep inside of him he knew he told her this to hurt her, although he could not understand why he should want to do so at this particular time. Perhaps because she had so often hurt his pride and ridiculed his honor that he took his vengeance now, knowing that to confess he loved another woman was the only way. He could not understand himself at just this moment.
She did not move or flinch; nor did the calm deadliness of her voice change one whit. “You do not love the woman, Lee. You envy white men. That’s why you want their women—because of what they’ve made of their women, which you could never do. You’d like to be the kind of a white man who could say: ‘Here’s fifty thousand dollars, go to Reno and get a divorce and enjoy yourself.’ But you are a Negro. You are cheap and vicious and craven. And if you think you are going to marry this woman, you are mistaken. Because she wouldn’t have you. I am the only fool who ever wanted you. And I don’t want you any more.”
She knew as she said it that it was not true and would never be true. She would always be in love with him, no matter what he did. But she sat there, rigid as death, watching him pack his bag and leave, and did not change a line.
“Well—yes,” Lee Gordon thought as he returned to Jackie.
But Jackie was now thoroughly frightened and demoralized. She had heard vague stories of the savagery of Negro women where their men were concerned. She could picture Ruth attacking with a knife and cutting her to death. Never having seen Ruth, she now imagined her as a huge, dark Negress of tremendous strength and possessed of a vicious temperament, against whom she had securely locked and barred all the doors and windows of her flat.
But equal to her fear of violence was her fear of public condemnation. It had been all right to flaunt Lee Gordon before white eyes as a Negro male with whom she dared to have a sex affair. That was her own business as a prostitute’s business is her own. Her body was hers to bestow on whom she pleased.
But to be caught in a Negro emotional mess—and as the other woman!—was altogether different. She could not fight with a Negro woman for the a
ffection of a Negro man—or even bear the thought of it.
And now in this chaotic fear Lee Gordon became not a man, but once more a Negro. For over and above whatever passionate attachment she might have had for him was the simple fact of race. She would take him and have him and hold him and love him. And if she wanted him badly enough, she would fight for him with any white woman in the world. But she would not fight for him with a Negro woman—she would not sink so low, she thought.
And now at sight of Lee returning with his bag, trepidation seized her. “You can’t stay here!” she said in alarm.
“Why not? Ill keep out of sight,” he told her.
“It isn’t that, it’s your wife. This will be the first place she’ll come looking for you.”
Placing his bag on the floor, he closed the door behind him and halted just inside the room. She stood a few paces in front of him, as if to bar his coming further, and neither in their uncertainty made a move to touch the other.
“We’re through,” Lee told her. “She won’t do anything.”
“We can’t fight her, Lee. Don’t you understand that?”
“We won’t have to fight her—”
“Don’t you see what would happen? She’s a Negro and you’re a Negro and I’d be an outsider, breaking up her home. I couldn’t do that to her, Lee. I couldn’t take advantage of her like that. Can’t you understand?”
“I told her that I love you.”
“No, Lee, no! You didn’t!”
“I already have, Jackie.”
“Then go back and tell her that you didn’t mean it! Tell her you were just infatuated for a time. She’ll understand. And she’ll forgive you, darling.”
“She’ll give me a divorce, Jackie.”
“No, Lee, I can’t do that to her.”
Lonely Crusade Page 33
