The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

  We talked until other hungers came over us, and we made love again, slower, not so urgent, deeper and more tender, more gratifying. By the time I woke again, it was full dark, and I got out of bed, drank a glass of wine, read a little, and then came back and slid in beside him. I put my arms around him, whispered as he tossed and turned. “I’ll always be here.” He eased, and reached over and patted my behind before he slept again. I lay awake for a long time listening to the sound of his breathing, gratified that Terrence had come home to me unharmed, that he was home to stay.

  But Terrence had brought a thousand strangers with him. These strangers filled up the house and spilled out onto the porch and down to the beach. Montgomery seemed to move into Malibu. Over a big breakfast he talked about the people he had ferried back and forth to work in his old Ford. Some were nameless but vivid. Some specific people I could see as clearly as if they stood in front of me, like a scrawny little firebrand named Miss Jessie, and people like Jo Ann Robinson, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Mr. E. D. Nixon, the Reverend Elijah Cooke, Mrs. Cooke, the Cooke daughters, the Cooke grandchildren, Mrs. Cooke’s great-aunt Patience and their neighbor Alice Washington.

  Yes, Terrence was home for good, but he was significantly changed in ways great and small, not just his speech patterns. He sugared his coffee and used milk in it, when he used to take it black. He had put on weight. He said it was all those meals with the Cookes—Mrs. Cooke’s cocoanut cake, Aunt Patience’s snap beans, and Alice Washington’s short ribs took him right back to childhood. He spoke of a Mrs. Gilmour’s pork and greens and sweet potato pie. He spoke of music I had never heard of before, music he had never heard of before, for that matter, blues musicians who played in Montgomery bars and honky-tonks. He had brought back some records, Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, music utterly unlike the sophisticated West Coast Cool of the Comet Club. On the old upright he thumped out some of their bluesy chords, repetitive progressions with a melancholy undertow and a rumbling bass line. He played for half an hour and then looked up and smiled. “Sorry,” he said, “I just got lost.”

  “I missed you every minute you were gone,” I said, going to him, putting my hands on his shoulder and my cheek against his hair. “I love you, and I will always love you. Do your worst. I will always love you best.”

  “My worst? What does that mean?”

  “Just some lyrics rolling around in my head, I can’t remember the song. Put a dime in the juke box, and see what you get,” I said, as he turned to me, wrapped his arms around me, pressed against my breasts, ran his hands up under my shirt.

  “You’re not wearing a bra,” he whispered, “not even a lacy one.”

  “I wanted to be ready for you.”

  His hand slid down between my thighs. “Are you ready for me?”

  “Oh yes. I’m ready.”

  Later that afternoon Terrence took Charlie’s surfboard out, but it was too cold to surf, and besides, Bruno jumped his enclosure and raced to the water’s edge, mad with doggy delight to see Terrence home. Terrence splashed out of the water, lay the board on the beach, knelt, and greeted the dog. Shivering, his teeth chattering, he wrapped up in a towel and sat down beside me. I shared my body warmth with him, and Bruno plopped down on the other side. The brief saltwater swim seemed to have washed off the last of his weariness, and his old energy returned.

  “You know, Liza Jane, I look out to that horizon and all I see is middle age staring at me. I’m twenty-seven, and I oughta do something now if I’m ever gonna do it.”

  “I thought you loved being a reporter.”

  “Alabama made me think. A reporter sticks to the facts of that one day, he sees things in dollops, this day, and that day, this fact and that. He writes it up in dollops. I keep thinking there’s a book in this, in what I experienced down there. Because the facts themselves don’t answer, don’t tell the whole story. You gotta look beyond the facts. When you write a book, you gotta ask what things mean, make sense of the whole. What I experienced in Montgomery, it was biblical, Roxanne, biblical. I thought I was going down to Montgomery to report. I didn’t know I was going to watch a whole city play Moses. In Montgomery they weren’t just staying off the bus, they’re leading ourselves out of bondage.”

  “Turn it into a novel.”

  “Oh no. In August Branch’s world, you make stuff up, you going to hell.”

  “All right. Not a novel. Write about Moses Shaw. You made him into a powerful figure. Heroic.”

  “Well, he was heroic, baby, but that’s just it. He went about being heroic just as if he was plowing a furrow. Up one side, down the other. He never protested his arrests, never fought back when they lit into him. He seemed unchanged. Like Job. How does a man live like that?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied truthfully.

  “He was old, with white nappy hair, broken teeth, sleepy eyes. He didn’t talk much, and when they arrested him, he just said ‘Yessir.’ He couldn’t read or write. He signed his papers with an X. But it was like he’d seen everything and this was his part and he was content with it. I admired him . . .” Terrence watched a gull circle overhead, and Bruno jumped up and chased it away, fearlessly returning to us like a champion. “I admired Moses Shaw, but I sure as hell don’t want to be him, Roxanne. Every furrow he dug with that mule drove him deeper till he can’t see out of it, can’t see over it. Everything he did, every time he drove those mules into the city and picked people up, every time he was arrested, he did it without vision, or maybe even hope. His name didn’t suit him. He wasn’t a leader, a Moses looking for a sign from a burning bush. He just did this one heroic thing, not even thinking, not even knowing it was heroic, taking these people to work, just because it needed to be done, not that there was any reward or satisfaction in sight. But that kind of patience, it won’t answer anymore. We’ll never get what we want, what we deserve—what we need—and I don’t just mean riding the bus and sitting where we damned well want to. I mean freedom for a man to be a man, and not a boy or a sexless uncle, or for a woman to be a woman, and not a victim, or a sexpot, or a fat old mammy. The absolute right to assume that our children deserve the same education as white children, that we deserve the same pay, and we’ll never get that if we wait for it like Moses Shaw. Moses Shaw”—Terrence shook his head—“damned if he didn’t just get to me, baby. More than anyone. More than Elijah Cooke, more than Martin Luther King. Moses Shaw taught me it’s not enough to endure.”

  I ran my hand over Terrence’s hair. “You need to write this book, baby. You do.”

  “He made me think of all those beaming colored folks who been standing at attention for two hundred years, smiling, Little Black Sambo, Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, like Clarence Goodall, just waiting to serve you fine white folks.”

  “That is a pretty cruel thing to say about a man who loved you like a father.”

  “Uncle Tom,” he said again. “It’s no worse than you’ve said about Leon rooting out the Red vermin. You can love someone without admiring everything they do. Clarence Goodall looked after the Greenes, your family, before he looked after his own. What else can you call a man who didn’t have Christmas day with his own people for thirty years?” He stroked Bruno’s shiny coat and stared out to the ocean. “I’ve been changed forever, Roxanne. Forever. I tell you when I tried to buy the Ford from that white man, and he put me through my groveling paces, all that jive shit, I wanted to kick that cracker’s teeth in. But Elijah Cooke? I watched him—an educated, upright man, a wise man, a good man, a better man than that cracker could even dream of being!—and he expected to be treated like Uncle Elijah. He was ready. He knew what he had to do. And that cracker was ready. They were all ready to say what needed to be said. Just like everyone knew they would.”

  “Everyone but you.”

  “Everyone but me.” Terrence shook his head slowly. “But you know what, Roxanne? When Elijah Co
oke was done with his routine, with saying what that cracker wanted him to say, behaving like he was expected to behave, he looked at me, and with his eyes, he told me, you better do the same, Terrence. And by god, I did it. I hated myself, but I did it. I knew if I didn’t, the suffering would spread far beyond me and this cracker. I did it. You see what I’m telling you?”

  “I do. A year ago I would not have, but I do now.” I leaned my head against his knees.

  Terrence took a steep breath. He swallowed audibly. “I think my daddy grew up just like that. Up from slavery, but he couldn’t wash it off. Maybe when he left us, he went back to Alabama where everyone expected his hands to be dirty.” He paused and gulped with emotion. “Maybe that’s why he left us.”

  I raised my head up and looked into his eyes. They were round with pain suppressed; his lips roiled briefly with words unspoken. He was shivering. “Let’s go to bed, honey. Come on.”

  He threw the towel over his shoulders and picked up the board, and we started back toward the house. George Wilbur came out and called for his dog. Bruno, seeing we were going inside, ran to him. George put a leash on the dog and turned away without so much as a wave.

  I went to the grocery store that evening and came back with champagne and steaks and all the newspapers—LA and out-of-town—I could find. (Terrence always liked to spread them out on the bed and see who was covering what.) I came up the steps and stopped for a moment, listening to him pounding on the Royal, the regular ping of the carriage, Muddy Waters low on the hi-fi, sounding from the inside, the slow insistent roll of the ocean on the outside. My heart soared with happiness: I opened the door, and he looked up from the Royal and smiled at me. He feels it too, I thought, this happiness, this love, this strength we take and give to each other. I went into the kitchen to pop the champagne and panfry the steaks. Even I could panfry a steak.

  Later, finishing the last of the champagne by the fire, I said, “Does Mr. Branch know you’re back?”

  “No, but he knows I’m coming back.”

  “Let’s go to Baja for a few days. We can just be ourselves there.”

  “Can’t. I gotta lot of work in front of me.”

  “Can’t it wait a day or so?”

  “It’s already waited a day or so. I’m here with you, aren’t I?”

  The phone rang and I reluctantly got up to answer, wishing immediately that I had just let it ring. Charlie Frye started lambasting me with every vile name he could think of, and then finally he blurted out in what sounded like a rush of tears, “Leon is going to fire me, Roxanne!”

  “What? Who told you this?”

  “It’s gossip. All over the Writers’ Building, all over the studio. People look at me like I’m a zombie, the walking dead.”

  “You have a contract.” In the background I could hear a low buzz of voices and laughter. “Where are you?”

  “Max Leslie had a contract, didn’t he?”

  “Please don’t use his name.”

  “Your old pals Simon and Nelson had contracts! Leon hates me. He hated me from the time the picture started shooting. Leon knows I fronted for a Red.”

  “He doesn’t know,” I said with more conviction than I felt, since I was certain he had guessed. “Your name is on both scripts. You wrote them.”

  “Like hell. What about the rewrites? I couldn’t do those until you started taking them out to Max’s place.”

  “I never took them out there.”

  “Well, whatever the hell you did. Before that . . .” He fell into a weeping spasm.

  “Where are you?” I asked again.

  “I’m in a fucking phone booth in a bar, Roxanne. I’m drunk and I want my old surfboard back. I miss it. I want my old life back. I miss it. I wish I’d never met you. I wish I’d never heard of Max Leslie.”

  “Please don’t use his name.”

  I heard the door of the phone booth squeal open, and he yelled out, “Max Leslie is not rotting down in Mexico! He’s here in California turning out comedies for his old studio using a stooge for a front. A stooge who is about to be fired!” The door on the phone booth squealed shut, and Charlie started to hiccup.

  I wanted to slap him for that, but I made my voice low and comforting. “Fly Me to the Moon is doing well, Charlie. It’s a huge success. Why would they fire you?”

  “I didn’t have any real part in that picture. I was nothing but an errand boy for Max, and Leon knows it. I’m suing you and Leon and Empire.”

  “Rethink that. Remember Melvin Grant.”

  “Fuck him, fuck all of you! You talked me into fronting for a Red!”

  “You said you were honored!”

  “Well, I’m not honored anymore. I’m screwed! I’m sick of it. I’m sick of all the pretending, of the lying and sneaking around and the rewrites that had to come by way of Covina.”

  “Covina?”

  “Yeah, you called me that night, remember?”

  Only vaguely. And I surely did not remember telling him where I was calling from.

  “I’m a damned good writer! You just never saw it. You never believed in me. Coast of Heaven—”

  He rattled on about his masterpiece and how I had neglected it and him, and I wanted to say maybe they were firing him because he’d rather surf than work, but I could not be that cruel. I tried to soothe him, but finally he just blew himself out, like a storm, and I heard him sobbing against the phone, and with one last “Fuck you,” he clicked off.

  Terrence had sat silent through all this, his brow knitted. When I finally hung up, I felt weak, light-headed; he rose and came to me, put his arms around me. I sagged against him.

  “Oh, Terrence, I’m scared . . . What have I done?”

  “Come on, baby. It’ll be all right. Charlie will sleep it off. Come to bed. It’ll be a long day tomorrow.”

  We slept badly, both of us. We both woke before the alarm. I showered and made the coffee, and when Terrence came out to get a cup, he was dressed in the same rumpled, travel-worn clothes he’d brought home with him, and he carried the suitcase.

  “You don’t need to take all those clothes back to Naomi Avenue. I’ll wash them at the office.”

  “No. I don’t want you washing my shirts, doing my laundry. You’re not a wife.”

  “I don’t mind. I don’t see it as some sort of comedown.”

  “No. I always take everything to the dry cleaner next door to the Challenger.” He poured the coffee, laced it with milk and sugar. “Let’s go. Are you still putting the matchbook in the door like I showed you?”

  “Yes. Every time I leave the house.”

  “Good.” He picked up the suitcase and went downstairs.

  The MG, as if on its best behavior, started right up. “I’ll take you to Naomi Avenue,” I said, “so you can change before you go to work. I’ve never seen this famous place with its hot plate and garage.”

  “No. I’ll go to Clara Bow Drive with you. I’ll call a cab from there.”

  “I can take the time.”

  “No. I’ll call a cab. It’s better that way.”

  “What way?”

  “Just let’s go to the office.”

  “Why can’t I drive you to Naomi? What’s suddenly so wrong, Terrence?”

  Terrence took a deep breath, like the kind you do when you’re out there in the ocean, and you see a really big wave coming at you, and you know the only way to avoid its crashing down on you is to go under, deep down, to duck beneath the onslaught. “When there comes the day, Roxanne, that whatever’s wrong or right with us is just you and me, well, fine, but it ain’t that day now. Not in Montgomery, and not in Malibu, and it sure as hell ain’t that way on Central Avenue.”

  “I don’t understand.” I took my eyes from the road and glanced over at him.

  His gaze was straight ahead, his mouth firm, emotionless as
a figure on a medallion.

  “I been gone five months to Alabama, and when I come home, I cannot be driving up Central Avenue, or anywhere near it, with you in a fine little British sports car.”

  “Is it the car?”

  Terrence gave a harsh, rueful laugh. “You are the living end, girl! Do you really think that?”

  My birthmark flushed. “You don’t want to be seen with me.”

  “It’s not personal.”

  “You always say that.” We rode in silence. The tension between us seemed to generate toxic fumes, or maybe that was just more trouble with the MG. “Are you ashamed of me? Of loving me?”

  “I came to you first. I missed you something terrible. Isn’t that enough for you?”

  Terrence turned on the radio, and the Platters came on with “The Great Pretender.” He turned his face away from me, and switched off the radio before it finished. He kept his gaze out the window.

  “You are ashamed, aren’t you? You are ashamed of me, of loving me!”

  He didn’t answer right away, and when he did, it was as if this were a question he had long pondered. “I suppose I am. I suppose I’m ashamed that I had to come to you before anyone else, before anything else. I should have gone to the paper. The Challenger needs me. I should not have come to my white girlfriend first.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell me again that it’s not personal?” I snapped. “It’s pretty damn personal to me! Far be it for me to—”

  “Don’t do this, Roxanne. Don’t make me choose.”