“I’m not making you choose! But I want to know what’s wrong with loving me!”
“Everything. Everything! Oh, Lord! Don’t you get it? If I drive along Central Avenue with you, anyone who sees me, they’re not gonna ask, ‘Well, Terrence, tell us what was it like in Alabama during the bus boycott? How was the fight down there, Terrence? What did you think of all those folks walking back and forth to work, miles every day now for five months?’ No, they’re gonna say: ‘Who was that white woman?’ Can’t you dig it, Roxanne? That’s not what I want to talk about when I come back home!”
“Malibu isn’t home to you?”
“No.”
“Just where you get laid regularly, is that it?”
“Sure. That’s it. Just drive, will you?”
We did not speak again until I turned on Clara Bow Drive. I pulled in behind the oleander barricade and got out of the car, and without another word to Terrence, I unlocked the door and went directly through to my office. I heard the dialing of the phone, Terrence calling for a cab. I wept quietly until the tears seeped between my fingers and mascara streaked my hands. I wanted him to come to me. To take me in his arms.
He knocked gently on the door. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. It depends on how much they need me at the paper.” When I did not answer, he added, “I’ll wait outside.”
“Wait wherever you want.”
“You can always tell the neighbors I’m the guy who mows your lawn if you need a reason for me to be in this neighborhood.”
I heard him close the door, and ten minutes later I heard a cab pull up and drive away.
By the time Thelma arrived at the office, I was a sodden mess of tears, smeared makeup, red eyes, and mussed hair. Still blubbering, I told her about Charlie’s phone call, and that he was being fired.
“All right,” she said, “so Charlie’s on the rampage. I’m not sorry to lose him for a client, are you?”
“No, but he might be dangerous now.”
“He’s always been dangerous, Roxanne. He’s like Jonathan Moore. These are men who cannot see beyond their own shadows, who don’t want to see beyond their shadows, who don’t give a good goddamn for anyone but themselves, but Charlie Frye doesn’t mean enough to you that you’d cry your eyes out over him. What’s happened with Terrence?”
“Nothing.”
“Horseshit. You were on cloud nine when he came home. Now look at you.”
Wadding a Kleenex, I told her of our fight in the car this morning, and she shook her head.
“But can’t you really see! Don’t you understand what he’s telling you? When he comes back—he’s been writing about the Montgomery boycott for months, months of struggle, black people against white people, and when he gets back to the Challenger, he’ll be the hero of the hour. You want him to drive up with a white girl?”
“But I’m not the enemy, Thelma! I love him!”
“Then have the wisdom to let him be! Jesus Jumping Christ, Roxanne! He’d look like a hypocrite. He owes it to the Challenger—and the people who read the Challenger—not to come driving back home with you.” The phone rang. “If people knew how much love can hurt, they would take better care of their hearts,” she said on her way to answer it.
I went to the bathroom to wash my face and restore my makeup, and when I came back out I heard Thelma desperately trying to placate whoever was on the line.
“Don’t cry. Don’t cry,” Thelma pleaded. “Look, I don’t know who. Jesus. Yes, you did the right thing. You both did. No, I’m not leaving you there alone. I’ll be there in the next couple of hours.” She offered more soothing words, then put the receiver down. “That was Marian.” Her hands trembled as she held a match to her cigarette. “Max went out for a pack of cigarettes and a process server showed up at their door. Another subpoena from the Committee. If he ignores it, it’s contempt of Congress. Marian packed up Max’s passport, their checkbook, and a suitcase with his clothes, climbed out the back window, and waited at the end of the alley for him. She told him to leave right away.”
“Where can he go? Mexico?”
“No, he’ll never go back there. Probably England, if he can still use his passport. He’ll leave the car at the San Francisco airport. She and I will drive up and get it sometime when . . . Oh, Roxanne! We were all so careful! How did they know where to find him?”
I sank down in the chair across from her, blistering my brain for possibilities. “Charlie?”
“Did he know about Riverside?”
“No, but he knew about Covina. I must have let it slip.”
“Covina isn’t Riverside. Maybe they traced Marian through her dead sister who lived in Riverside for years.”
“Maybe they found out where Norman was.”
Thelma’s face went a ghastly gray, and she nodded. “They found out where Norman was, and they waited for Marian to show up, and they followed her home.”
“That’s why we haven’t seen Popeye. They found out where Max was. That’s what they wanted.”
She reached in her desk drawer and took out her purse. “I’m going out to Riverside to get her, to take her to my place. You want to close up, and come with me?”
“No. I have to telephone Terrence and apologize for having a hissy fit.”
Oh yes, I now knew what that was. Roiling with self-recrimination, kicking myself for how I had gotten everything wrong, I called the Challenger but I could not get through to Terrence. I called so often even the paper’s operator lost patience with me, declaring that she had given him the message and would I please quit calling. The Challenger was beset with important calls. I wanted to say, hey, my call is important, but I didn’t. I canceled my appointments for the rest of the day and waited for Terrence to phone.
When finally he did, late that afternoon, I could hear all the noise of the newsroom in the background and I knew he couldn’t really talk. It was a short conversation. Even though I apologized at tearful length, I did not whine or ask when he was coming home. Terrence said I shouldn’t worry about a little spat. He had to go.
“All right,” I said, “I love you.”
He said he loved me too, but his voice was neither rich with emotion, nor urgent with lust. Wistful, maybe.
Chapter Thirty-two
Terrence Dexter was a returning hero. A photograph of Terrence and Mr. Branch ran two columns across the pages of the Challenger, along with a long, eloquent thought-piece about what the bus boycott had achieved, even though no immediate victory was in sight. The president of the LA chapter of the NAACP came to thank him personally; that photograph too was splashed across the front page, with an article about the boycott and its political and social significance written by none other than C. Vann Woodward, a famous historian. A two-column photo accompanied the Challenger piece about Jefferson High School students honoring him with a certificate of merit, and pastors of a dozen churches extolled him from their pulpits and in print. He recorded many radio interviews with those stations that played black music, talking about the appeals going through the courts, about the people still walking to work, the necessity of the Shoe Drive, the moral and civic strength of the Montgomery Improvement Association and their commitment to change. The major LA dailies, the Times and the Herald-Examiner, interviewed Terrence.
In all this time, I did not see him once. Talked on the phone, now and then, short conversations. I kept my promise to myself, no pleading for him to come home, none of that. I had other things to worry about as well. I had to cancel any appointments that took me out of the office because (given our situation) we could not hire a temp, so I had to answer the phones while Thelma was driving Marian all over the San Fernando Valley looking for a facility that would take Norman. Finally they found a sort of residential hospital, but before Marian could move him from Riverside, a lot of money needed to change hands. I told Marian I would personally pay whatever w
ould be necessary to place him there. That she should not worry. When she said a thousand dollars, I blanched, but since we were on the phone, she couldn’t tell.
I went to the bank late that afternoon and got out the thousand dollars, cash, from my savings account to give to Thelma the next day. By the time I finally got on PCH late in the afternoon it was one long, clogged artery. As I sped around big, lumbering cars, sometimes passing on the shoulder, drivers honked at me and waved their fists out the window. Sirens blared behind me as I quickly eased back into my lane, and cop cars sped by on the shoulder, lights flashing. I finally came upon an awful wreck; a produce truck had smashed head-on into an Oldsmobile, and cantaloupes and melons were splattered across the road, and ambulances were roaring away.
Traffic thinned out further north, but when my house came into view on the left, my heart stopped in my chest. I thought to myself: Wake up, Roxanne, wake up, wake up . . . Because surely, surely, surely this is some sort of awful nightmare. Wake up. A sheriff’s car was parked behind my place, lights flashing. Wake up. It was blocking in the Porsche and Charlie’s woody station wagon. Wake up. As I leapt out of the MG I heard Bruno yapping, squealing in canine pain.
At the foot of the stairs I found the cinched-lip Wilburs. George held the struggling Bruno’s collar. I raced up to find Terrence Dexter spread-eagle, facedown on the porch, handcuffed. Two cops standing over him, one with his foot on Terrence’s neck. As long as I live, I will never forget that sight. As long as I live. And there was Charlie Frye, beat up, his knuckles bloodied, holding a handkerchief over his bleeding nose but satisfied. No mistaking that.
“Hey, Roxanne!” he cried. “I came to take back my board, and I looked in the window and saw this jungle bunny through the window and—”
“Let him up! This instant! For god’s sake, take your goddamn foot off of him, and let him up!” I pushed the cop who had his foot on Terrence’s neck, and he stepped back while the other one, the younger one, murmuring Now, miss, pulled me away. “I am Roxanne Granville. I live here! This is my place.”
“Well, you was about to be robbed, miss, and—”
“—He broke in,” said Charlie, waving a finger at Terrence. “I went in to stop him, and there was a fight and—”
“That’s ridiculous! Terrence! Oh, Terrence, what’s happened?” I knelt down on the porch. Blood from his nose dripped over the bright red slash on his lower lip. His eyes blazed with rage.
“You know this man?” asked the older cop, a laconic middle-aged white guy with crew-cut hair and heavy, dark jowls.
“Yes. He’s Terrence Dexter!” I stood up. “Take those cuffs off him immediately.”
The cop yanked Terrence to his feet. There were bloodstains on his shirt. My gaze was riveted to Terrence, whose face was a mask of cosmic pain. “We think this boy is a burglar. Your friend”—the first cop nodded toward Charlie—“tried to stop him, and your neighbors saw the fight and called us.”
The Wilburs, still holding fast to the barking setter, came up the stairs. “We saw a fight. Heard it too,” said Mrs. Wilbur.
“How could you! You know Terrence! You know—” But I did not go on, because of course they did know Terrence, and that was exactly why they’d called the cops. Bastards. I took a deep breath. I put my hand on Terrence’s arm, and to the older cop, I said clearly, slowly, “This man has every right to be here. He lives here.”
“He lives here?”
“Show him the key, Terrence. Terrence has a key. Undo his hands and he can show you his key!”
Terrence controlled his voice with difficulty. He spoke as though spitting pennies. “The key is on the desk. Or it was before the fight.”
“I insist you take those cuffs off him.”
“You show me the key, miss, and I’ll think about it.”
“Wait here,” I commanded, pushing past them, pushing past Charlie, who blathered at me about being finished with me, and coming to get his surfboard back because . . . I ignored him, and stepped into the house. Carnage everywhere: Pictures on the walls were all askew and the andirons lay abandoned on the floor, except for the one that had smashed the coffee table in half. Cushions were strewn about, and the place smelled of Scotch from a broken bottle. Terrence’s shirts lay splayed across the floor like lily pads on a sea of unrest. The desk chair was overturned, and the vase was broken, the flowers lying in a sodden clump on the floor beside the antique music box. No key in sight. Maybe he meant the kitchen table. I ran in there, eyes darting everywhere looking for that goddamned key. The chairs were upended and the radio had been pulled from the shelf, and the coffeepot had fallen off the stove and coffee was puddled on the floor. There was broken crockery and jagged bits of broken glass and the oven door gaping open, but where, where was the goddamned key? I went back out to the living room and thrashed through the mess where, beneath the framed snapshots on the floor, I saw a glint of brass.
I snatched that key up and ran back out to the porch. I put the key in the older cop’s hand. “This is the key. This is his home. Take those cuffs off of him.” Trembling, I turned to the Wilburs and screamed, “Get out of here! Get out and don’t ever come back!”
“Now, miss,” said the younger cop, a kid who still had acne scars. “No need to yell. Your neighbors was just thinking of you.” He nodded to the Wilburs, who had not moved, and to Charlie, who had smeared the blood from his nose across his cheek. “Everyone was thinking of you, miss, trying to keep your place safe. That’s all.” At a nod from the older cop, he unlocked the handcuffs on Terrence.
“Yes,” Terrence growled through clenched teeth. “That’s all.”
“So . . .” the older cop said dubiously, “you two married?”
“No.”
“He’s your boy-friend?” He put unfortunate emphasis on boy.
Before I could answer, Terrence grabbed my shoulders, turned me around to face him, and brought his bloodied lips down to mine, kissing me, his tongue seeking mine, kissed me with the kind of passion that in other circumstances would have had my skirts up instantly, except this was not an expression of love or even lust. This kiss was a slap. An act of ownership, as though I were property to be disposed of however he liked. In front of these cops, and at the expense of my own pride, I let him do that to me.
“I’ll be goddamned,” said the older cop.
“Shit,” said Charlie, going gray. “Jesus.”
“No charges, right?” I said, rubbing Terrence’s blood off my lips. “No burglary. No harm done.”
The older cop considered this. Lit up a cigarette and considered it.
I turned to the Wilburs again. “Get your dirty butts off my porch and don’t ever come back!”
By the time they had oozed down the stairs, taking Bruno with them, the cop had gathered himself, and he asked the younger one for a sheaf of papers. “Let’s see now . . .” He ruffled through them. “We actually have made an arrest here already. We have the paperwork, see? We’ll need your information, Miss . . . ?”
“Granville. Roxanne.”
“ID?”
“Here, Roxanne,” said Mrs. Wilbur, coming back up the stairs, her voice huffy with outrage, “you dropped your handbag. You should thank me,” she added. Her husband called her down.
I rummaged about and found my driver’s license and gave it to him, and he duly noted the information: age, address, phone number. He asked my occupation. “I’m an agent. Granville Agency. Charlie is my client.”
“Your ex-client,” Charlie snarled. “I’m done with you. I only came here because you kept my old surfboard all this time.”
The older cop took his time while we three stood trembling with rage, anxiety, hatred, a bubbling gumbo of awful emotions I hope never to experience again.
“I dunno,” he said as he gave me back my license. “It was a suspected burglary, and a definite fight. Property damage. I might sti
ll have to report this.”
I swooped up my handbag, opened it, and found the envelope with the whole thousand dollars in it, which I counted out, one hundred dollars at a time into the cop’s hand. His eyes widened as the bills piled up. The younger cop inhaled a great big breath. I was shaking, but I mastered my rage, controlled my voice, so much so that I might have been Edward G. Robinson himself. “I’m sure everything will be fine now, Officer. It was all a misunderstanding.”
He shoved the money into his pocket, then regarded Terrence with a judicious frown. “Any harm done? What do you think? What about you?”
Please God. Please don’t let him say, “What about you, boy?” I feared for the look on Terrence’s face. I stood in front of him.
Terrence cleared his throat and spat the words out like phlegm. “No harm done.”
“And the . . . ?” The cop motioned over his own face.
“Did you do that to him?” I burst out. “Did you beat him up?”
“No harm done,” said Terrence, his voice guttural.
The older cop looked at the papers in his hand. “So, you’re a reporter? Who do you report to?”
“The Challenger.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Oh shit,” said Charlie. “Are you the guy who just came back from Alabama reporting on the buses down there for that colored paper?”
“Nah,” said Terrence in a manufactured drawl. “Us all looks alike. Y’all thinking of someone else, boss.”
I leaned against Terrence’s bloodied shirt. He gave off an electric current that felt like it would fry me on the spot. He took a step to the side. He did not want my protection. To the older cop I said, “He has a key. He lives here. There was no burglary.” I stapled a smile across my mug. “It’s a simple mistake. Right? Charlie?”
“I guess I made a mistake.” Charlie felt gingerly over his swelling eye. “How was I to know you and—”
“Shut up. It’s a simple mistake.”
The Great Pretenders Page 29
