The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

  “Well, maybe.” The cop folded up the paperwork, and would have pocketed it.

  I stopped him. I know how this works. I was not Leon Greene’s granddaughter for nothing. I held out my hand. “No, I need you to tear that up and give it to me.”

  “But it’s official.”

  “Not anymore, it’s not. It just cost me one thousand dollars for it not to be official.”

  Reluctantly the older cop tore up his forms and put them in my hand. They gave Terrence back his wallet, but not before he opened it, took out the cash, and gave it to the kid with acne scars. He opened Charlie’s wallet and took out the cash, and gave that to him too. They both went down the stairs, the older one whistling “Dixie.”

  Terrence walked to the rail that framed the porch. Stood there, clutching, roiling his fists around the banister.

  Charlie’s lip curled in disgust. “I don’t care what you paid that bastard cop, Roxanne, the world’s gonna find out you’ve been sleeping with a Negro, and you’re gonna be murdered in the press, and I’m gonna laugh.”

  “Get the hell out of here,” said Terrence over his shoulder. And at that Charlie and his surfboard went downstairs.

  People who had been watching this fracas from the beach slowly broke up their little gawking groups, and went their own ways. The waves washed in and out. Otherwise everything was eerily quiet; a muffled sunset floated uneasily at the horizon. I moved to embrace Terrence, but he shook me off. He stood as though rooted, as though he were some ten-ton black marble idol. His face was devoid of emotion, but his eyes were alive with fire. I felt as though I were living in geologic time, waiting for the rough fissures of earth to creak and teeter and realign the universe. After an eon, Terrence finally turned to me. I wrapped my arms around him, held him, pressing my cheek against his chest. I could hear his heart thudding, and his breath rasping, as though choking down emotion he could hardly control. Then he let go of me and went inside. I heard the bathroom door slam shut.

  I followed him in. As I picked up the photographs, broken glass cut my fingertip. Drops of blood fell to the floor as I went into the kitchen and put my hand under the faucet and stood there weeping till I turned the faucet off, and I found I could not breathe. I had to think about breathing. In and out. In and out like the waves.

  Terrence came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders, turned me in his arms, held me. “Look at the mess they’ve made of what we had, Liza Jane.”

  “They didn’t! They can’t!” I moved to kiss him, but he drew back. “Don’t pull away from me, baby. Please. They don’t matter. Let’s go make love, honey. Make love like we mean it! Like we mean it forever and ever. Don’t give them the power to hurt us.”

  “We’ve lived with that power every day. I’m surprised it took this long, really. We never had a chance.”

  “Yes we did! We do! We—”

  “Don’t you want to know why the key was on the desk?”

  “What?” I ran my hands roughly over my face. “It wasn’t on the desk. The key was on the floor.”

  “Don’t you want to know why it was on the desk before the fight?” He spoke slowly. Carefully.

  “I don’t care why. I don’t care, baby. I don’t care about anything except you.”

  “I was returning it to you. I was about to write you a note when your boyfriend, Charlie—”

  “He’s nothing to me!”

  “—saw me from the porch, and came bursting in to save the white girl’s house from being robbed by a black criminal. That’s his first thought. Any of them, that’s the first thought. Criminals. It’s still the same old story. No matter what. No matter where. What happened here tonight has happened before. And it will go on happening. It will never change. This was Charlie being white and me being black. This was the Wilburs being white and me being black. They been waiting for this day, ever since they first saw us together. They loved seeing that cop cuff me, rough me up.”

  “They are bastards and they can go to hell!”

  Terrence shook his head wearily. “That’s why I gave you back your key, baby, because even before Charlie burst in and attacked me for a thief, before that sonofabitch sheriff beat the shit out of me, I knew it’ll never change.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You really don’t have any goddamned idea what I’m talking about?”

  “I love you, Terrence. What else matters? You love me. We can—”

  “No, we can’t.”

  “We can!”

  “Are you really going to tell me you have the strength to fight this shit on a daily basis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t. And I don’t think you do either. I don’t think you even know what’s at stake. You don’t know. How could you? Never in a million years. I came here to tell you goodbye, Roxanne. I came back here to leave off your key and write you a note telling you it’s over before you got home.”

  I wanted to protest and fume and fight and swear, to pound his chest and fling myself across his body, but I stopped blubbering long enough to look deeply into his eyes; they could not have been more opaque if he’d had shutters pulled over them. “I don’t understand.”

  “Exactly,” he said quietly. He placed his hand on my birthmark. “You are always afraid that this is what people see of you, first and foremost, this color on your face, before you open your mouth, before they know anything else about you. That’s how they remember you. The girl with the stained cheek. Being instantly judged for something you cannot change. Being black isn’t a choice. I cannot change that. That bastard tonight with his foot on my neck, he was just loving the power he had over everyone like me, my daddy, my granddaddy, my brother. Moses Shaw.”

  “Oh, what has Moses Shaw got to do with me! With us? I don’t care what all this means, I only want to hold you, to be with you forever!”

  “It means I can’t be who I am and come home to you. I can’t do it. I’ve had enough.”

  “Look, I know I was wrong the other day. I understand why you didn’t want to be seen with me, why you didn’t want me to drive you back to Naomi Avenue.” By now I was smearing snot and tears away from my face, wiping my hands on my skirt. “I’m sorry I didn’t understand at first. I do now. Really. It’s—”

  “It’s over. When I came back from Alabama, I wanted you, I needed you, I needed to hold you and love you and be with you.”

  “You love me! And I love you, and we—”

  “I don’t want to love you anymore.” Terrence breathed a long, sad sigh, the longest, saddest sigh I knew I would ever hear if I lived to be a hundred. “The truth is, baby, I do love you. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have brought the key back. I would have just dropped you like I’ve dropped a hundred other girls.”

  “So you’re leaving me just because I’m white?”

  He dropped his hands from my shoulders. “I don’t have the strength to explain everything to you, to fight every hour of my waking life just to be with you, just to take on the world that’s going to kick the shit out of me because I’m with you. You are a battle I don’t want to fight, Roxanne. I want to have my strength at hand.” His dark eyes searched my face, and he held out his powerful right hand. “As a man, I can’t do the things I need to do with you as my woman. You know I’m right.”

  “Didn’t you ever hear of Romeo and Juliet!”

  “If they’d lived, the world would have beaten them down, to pulp. To dust. They’d have lost each other anyway. That’s the real tragedy, not that they died. And that’s what the world would do to us. Maybe one day in the future it won’t cost a black man and a white woman everything they have, every ounce of strength and sinew and courage just to love each other, but that day sure as hell ain’t now.”

  “That’s what you learned in Montgomery? You’re leaving me because I’m white and you’re colored,” I lashed out
, knowing how he hated that term, using it like the vicious little tool I knew it to be.

  “I can’t believe you said that, Roxanne. Are you willing yourself stupid?”

  “A brave man would stand by a woman he loved!”

  “Not if every time he looked at her he saw the very thing he needed to defeat. You compromise me. It’s that simple.”

  I felt those words as though he had struck me. I could feel my birthmark throbbing with blood and anger. “It’s not simple!”

  “It’s not, but I’m done talking about it. Some things you just need to know in your bones, and if you don’t know it in your bones, you never will know it at all.”

  “People who love each other need to be strong together. We can be strong together.”

  “I can’t, not anymore, not and do everything else I need to do. I don’t have that kind of strength, and neither do you.”

  “I do!”

  “I don’t.” He ran a hand over his face and stared at the dried blood on his palm. “I had to kiss you in front of them like I did to prove to those bastards that I had a right to be your man. They’ll never grant me that right, and don’t you mistake, Roxanne, it’s theirs to grant. Not yours, and not mine. I’ll never be humiliated like that again, as long as I live. I’ll kill someone first.”

  “Oh, Terrence, please take your key back. Let’s be strong together. Aren’t you the one who’s always saying if you stumble, if the person you love helps you, you’re both stronger for it?”

  “Yes, and if you’re not, then it’s time to just pull up your pants and go home. And that’s what I’m doing.” He swooped up his shirts that were strewn among the debris, and he left. The door closed behind him. I heard his footsteps down the stairs and the Porsche as he fired it up and drove away.

  The taste of ash in my mouth felt gritty, and my skin seemed to be breaking up, and cracking open, exposing my heart, my liver, my guts to the pyre. Something inside me was burnt up, and gone forever, and I was living in the crucible of my own life. With shaking hands, I poured myself a stiff drink and swilled it, just like they do in the Westerns before they dig the bullet out. I stumbled into the bedroom and fell into bed, crying until finally an uneasy sleep put me out of my misery, though sleep was punctuated with bizarre dreams from which I would wake, remember, and ache. I hurt, physically hurt, like the night of the fight at the Comet Club. When I woke in darkness, and further sleep eluded me, I slid my feet into some sandals, wrapped myself up in a blanket, and waded through the carnage out to the porch, down to the dunes and the beach. I sat, my knees pulled up against my chest, my head resting there, so deep in anguish I thought I might dissolve altogether. The waves swept in and out in their careless fashion, and the moon finally paled against a brightening sky.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “What the hell happened here?”

  My eyes blinked slowly open to see Thelma wavering above the bed, her face contorted.

  “Roxanne, talk to me!”

  Groggy with sorrow so thick it lay leaden on my tongue, I could hardly speak. I roused slowly and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Oh, god, Roxanne. Look at you. Tell me what happened. I called and called and got a busy signal. I knew something must be wrong. The phone was off the hook.” Thelma went to the bathroom and dampened down a towel. She mopped my face while I sobbed out the story of yesterday. Was it only yesterday? I felt as though I had aged a decade. Thelma muttered over and over, Oh god, oh god . . . When I finished, she ordered me into the shower.

  “I can’t. I can’t move. I’m dead inside.”

  “You can. You must.” She went in the bathroom, started the shower, roused me from the bed, and walked me in there.

  By the time I emerged, my hair dripping, clad in Terrence’s robe, debris from the fight had been swept, much of it, into piles.

  “Wear your sandals,” she called out. “There still might be glass on the floor.”

  I lurched into the kitchen and fell into a chair. The Royal in its case sat on the table.

  “I found it underneath the desk,” said Thelma as she put a mug of hot tea laced with sugar and milk in front of me. “Drink. You need it.” She sat down beside me, put her hand gently on my arm. I had never noticed she had such knobby knuckles, or that her veins stood up like thick blue skeins. “He’ll come to his senses, Roxanne. Terrence will be back. He loves you.”

  I started to cry all over again, and confessed that I had given the bastard cop the whole thousand dollars I intended for Marian. “Can Marian wait a few days? I don’t think I can go to the bank today. I don’t think I can move at all.”

  “Of course. Drink the tea. I’ll make you some breakfast.”

  “I can’t eat.”

  “You can. You have to. You’re going to need your strength, dear.”

  I ate, got dressed, moved like a zombie back out to the living room, picked up the framed snapshot of Terrence and me, clutched it to my heart, and cried. At lunchtime, Thelma put a sandwich in front of me, and she sat by my side till I ate it, still holding the snapshot she had taken of the two of us.

  I dialed the number at Naomi Avenue. The phone rang and rang. I dialed the Challenger and asked for Terrence. The switchboard operator said he was no longer there. “What do you mean?” But she hung up. I dialed Ruby’s and when she came to the phone, I said, “This is Roxanne, and I’m looking for Terrence.”

  “Oh I just bet you are!” She gave me a nonstop five-minute tongue-lashing, no chance to defend myself, and finished up with “Handcuffed like a common criminal! His neck under the boot of some peckerhead cop! This man is a hero, and because of you, he’s beat up and disgraced? Disgraced! You been bad for him all along, and now this? You go to hell, missy, and don’t you never come back. Don’t you never come back here, that’s for sure!” The phone clunked once as she banged it against the wall before she hung up.

  I called again, and this time Coralee picked up, as if she had been standing at the ready, knowing I would call back. “You think a man like Terrence is gonna take that kind of shame, and just say, it’s all right, just give me another fist to the face, white boy? Handcuff me, facedown with your stinking foot on my neck? Treat me like a criminal? You think a man with any kind of pride gonna take that shit?”

  “He’s been handcuffed before. He was arrested at the Comet Club! What about Alabama?”

  “The Comet Club, he was swooped up with a lotta others just happened to be in the wrong place. In Alabama, he’s arrested ’cause he’s part of something big, something grand, something gonna make a difference in the way people get to live in this world! But your place? He was a black man in a white woman’s house, a thief sniffing up a white girl, whupped by some peckerhead because he must be a burglar. His loving you done him in.”

  “So you do know he does love me.”

  “He was leaving you, missy. Oh yeah, you think I didn’t know that? I knew. He was leaving you, no matter what. He was going there to do the right, the decent thing, and give you back your damned key, and write you some sort of damned note. That’s what got him arrested. And now’s he’s gone, and he ain’t coming back and it’s your fault.”

  “What do you mean, gone? There’s no answer at Naomi Avenue. The Challenger said he wasn’t there. Where has he gone?”

  “You think I’d tell you shit about my little brother? Hell no.”

  “What do you mean, he’s gone?”

  “He sold the Porsche, and he’s took the money and he’s gone far away from you, Miss Summit-Drive-Ain’t-I-Special. He’s gone far from you and all your people. He’s gone”—sobs caught in Coralee’s throat—“and he ain’t coming back.”

  “Where? Where did he go? Oh, god, don’t tell me he went back to Alabama. Did he?”

  “I ain’t telling you shit. No one in my family gonna tell you shit. I never seen my brother so broke up. His pride ain’t
never gonna be the same.” She slammed the phone down.

  An intense headache descended on me, as if billiard balls suddenly cracked inside my head, that sharp, unmistakable sound of the laws of physics smashing into one another, hurtling toward some unseen destination. I placed the phone on the hook and turned to Thelma. “He’s sold the car and gone somewhere, someplace I can’t reach him, where love can’t reach and love won’t matter. Maybe he went back to Alabama. To look for the father he hasn’t missed for twenty years? Terrible things can happen in Alabama.”

  “Terrible things happen right here in Southern California.”

  “How will I live without him, Thelma? How?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but you will. You will have to.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  I am a daughter of Empire, born on a movie set and raised by a studio mogul and his wife, so I knew from experience that despite the thousand-dollar payoff, that deputy would find a way and a place to sell his information. And he did. Within a few days the story splashed all over the gossip columns and movie rags. The prose was mostly tittering, naughty-naughty accompanied by a picture of me taken at some society event placed beside a recent picture of Terrence, the much-lauded reporter just back from Alabama. There we were, white and black, so that there shall be no mistaking just how naughty-naughty we had been. Additionally Al Gilbert for Secrets of the Stars dug up Terrence’s mug shot from the Comet Club fracas, as well as the picture of me, Diana, and Jonathan from that same night, thus resuscitating that whole scandal with the salacious imputation that I had followed Diana’s lead and her bad behavior. Hedda Hopper’s column was particularly outraged as she described the “foiled burglary” at the Malibu home of agent Roxanne Granville. Charles Frye, screenwriter of the recent hit Fly Me to the Moon, had arrived at her house to find an intruder, one Terrence Dexter, “a reporter for the Challenger recently returned from helping to organize radical Negroes in Alabama.” Hedda clearly took especial relish in finishing up with “Mr. Dexter had his own key to their love nest.”