“Yes,” Tacker said, and she skipped off to the kitchen while Tacker put on his shoes.
“You drive, Tacker.” Kate handed him the keys.
Valentine sat between them in the front seat, her legs straight out in front of her.
* * *
• • •
BACK AT THE foursquare Tacker parked in the back.
“Great little car,” he said, patting the hood.
They walked up the slanted yard. By the light of the back porch, a bed of late-blooming daffodils glowed.
“May I pick some?” Kate said.
“Fine with me,” Tacker said.
Kate pushed dead leaves aside, getting to the base of the stems. “I was depending on Mr. Fitzgerald too much. I needed a car so I could get out to take pictures.”
“I’m all for it,” he said.
“And to get to the coast to see Brian,” she said, wondering why she was defending her purchase when he’d given her no reason. In the kitchen, Tacker produced a glass and filled it with water. She released the stems into it.
“Want to split a beer?” he said.
“Yes.”
He poured the beer into two jelly glasses and handed one to her. Kate felt a cooling breeze waft over her face from the screened porch they had passed through. The wind picked up, overturning a cardboard box. Tacker closed the door and picked up the vase of daffodils, and they found themselves sitting in the dining room, the flowers on the table before the window of fading light.
“How’s Brian?” he said.
“Fine, I think. Some other fellow is renting a room in the house so he’s not alone.”
“Tell me what you’ve been up to,” he said.
“I’m now formally on the library board,” she said.
He seemed to make a calculation. “A toast,” he said and they clinked glasses.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said. “You’ve got good news. When we first got together, we were both pretty bleak. I’m just wondering.”
“Wondering what?”
“If we could be a real couple.”
He was looking at his hands, not her face.
“Why do you say that?”
“We’ve been on different tracks,” he said.
“With lunch counters?”
“We’ve always been on different tracks,” he said. “It’s why I like you and sometimes think it would be easier to tame a peacock than keep constant with you.”
“Why?” she said, humored by his poetry.
“About different tracks or keeping constant?”
“You can start with one and move on to the other,” she said.
“My family’s in the grocery store business. Your mom’s family is from old Winston stock. Even when I get my license, I won’t be from good Winston stock.” She couldn’t tell if he was teasing. “Though I suppose that chasm can be breached”—he was ribbing her—“since you appear to find my mind subtle enough. You wouldn’t converse with a dull man.”
“That last is true,” she said, meaning it but also pretending haughtiness.
“You’ve been woven into the city’s governing class since you were born.”
“That’s an overstatement and you know it,” she said, slapping at his hand.
“It’s not a bad thing,” Tacker said. “Sometimes I envy you.”
His face bore a look of loneliness Kate had not seen before. She caught a whiff of the daffodils. The greening, molting smell of living stems, and she recalled the day last fall when she combed leaves from the monkey grass. The press of leaves, the smell the earth produced in fall and spring, opposite seasons threaded on wet leaves, green or brown, turned in her like a dial.
“It’s hard to believe anyone is envious of me,” she said, and it was true. What she remembered from childhood was the privilege of being her father’s daughter, the light in his eyes when she walked in the room. And she had lost that. Also true was her sense of Tacker’s confoundedness. Secretly she reveled in his athleticism though she could not celebrate it since she had molded her identity in part by shunning whatever was popular. He had passed her in worldliness by living in Nigeria but he needed to stop hobbying in these Negro campaigns. Still she admired his conscience and so she was caught. She could not imagine stepping out of her social world, which meant, of course, she was not as free as Tacker. And she was a woman, so anything she did would be easier to fault and more dangerous, too.
The long beam of a car’s headlamps on Jarvis illuminated the darkening window. Da Vinci jumped onto the table, upsetting the daffodils; the glass tilted and the stems spilled onto the floor.
Tacker placed a hand over hers. “I’ll get them,” he said.
When he had the flowers back in water, he took her hand and led her to the living room. Without a word, they settled onto the couch. “I want to kiss you,” he said and he did. They made a good deal of sound in the quiet house. He ran his hands down her sides and she twisted around this way and that. He held gobs of her hair in his hands and kissed her harder. After one particularly long kiss, they stopped to look at each other. Her hair was damp. She lifted an arm to raise the mass from her neck and he kissed the place she exposed. He pressed himself upon her and she pressed herself into him, her shoulders fitting perfectly into his cupped hands.
Kate pictured them in a river. By turns each was drowning and being saved. Tacker swiveled on one arm so they were side by side and then he pulled Kate so she was on top of him, astride him. He pushed her up and Kate looked at him and watched as his hands went to her breasts. Then he pulled her over him like a sheet and she felt his mouth on her clothed breast and was glad for the thinness of her garments and the warmth of his mouth. He stopped and held her tight.
* * *
• • •
THEY SAT ON the rug, their backs to the couch, cradling bowls of ice cream.
“It makes me hungry,” Kate said.
“What?” Tacker said.
“Kissing like that. It makes me so hungry.” She leaned over her bowl.
“I hope that’s good,” Tacker said, laughing.
“Don’t let me have any more,” she said, licking the spoon. “Here.” She handed the bowl to Tacker.
“What have you been up to?” she said.
“I’ve been hired to do my first rendering for Tom Driskell Architects,” he said, smiling, kissing her forehead. “I’m charging a hundred and fifty bucks for every one I do.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“And mess up that good kissing? Your doubts about me make me more alluring, or didn’t you know that?”
“I thought you were jealous of my car,” she said.
“I thought you were going to ditch me because of the protests.”
“Are you still going?”
“I’m taking care of Valentine instead, started a couple of weeks ago.”
“A Negro boy asked me for a book,” she said.
“What did you say to him?”
“He had to leave before I could answer.”
“If you’d had time what would you have said?”
“I’d have offered him some of my own. I still have all my childhood books.”
“If he had access to Main Library, he could have books for the rest of his life.”
“I already thought about that,” Kate said.
She rested her head in his lap and he told her about Samuel’s letters. He told her about Joshua and his betrayal. She thought he was going to say something else but he stopped.
Chapter Twenty-six
THE NEXT NIGHT, Tacker took his initial sketches for the Firestone building and sat down with paper and pen in the dining room. He’d decided on an angled view that allowed him to sketch in the dogwood but also open the skyline behind the building. H
e studied the plans one more time before committing himself to the central portion of the design. The roofline was the most interesting part. Because he was drawing from ground level, the shadowed underside of each peak accentuated the gentle upward thrust, like a series of waves frozen in eternity. The next morning he was up early to finish the sketch. That evening, he added some embellishments, using colored pencils. The dogwood gained a green blush in its crown. A pink-and-orange sunset brought the sketch into greater relief. He added three metal benches to the right side of the building, facing away from the glass windows, a nice accessory, Tacker imagined, for a customer waiting for his tires to be rotated. Lightly he sketched in existing buildings. Tacker drank a beer and admired his work before laying it carefully on a shelf in the music room.
Thursday during his lunch break, he delivered the rendering. “Nice work,” Tom said and wrote him a check before pressing him with another project, a split-level on Hertford Road. “We’re under the gun on this one. The sooner the better.” Tacker promised to have it Monday morning, which shouldn’t be a problem. He had all of Sunday. But then Kate asked him to take her to the beach.
They took her car, heading out on 70: to Raleigh, Goldsboro, Kinston, and New Bern, and finally Morehead City, where they would cross on the drawbridge into Atlantic Beach. The land leveled out the farther they went, trees changing from deciduous to white pine to loblolly pine. Skirting Kinston, they pulled over and ate pimento cheese sandwiches. In Morehead City the gulls appeared, and blue water. They spotted a yellow cinder-block house in Atlantic Beach with a ROOMS FOR RENT sign planted in a garden.
Mrs. Johnson, the proprietor, placed them in rooms on opposite sides of the house. “We have one other guest,” she said, peering at Kate as she spoke. “A nice lady who comes every spring for the air. She had polio as a child but she gets around pretty well. I offer breakfast but not dinner. You’ll need to eat at one of the restaurants. Rainey’s Market makes sandwiches.”
* * *
• • •
IT WAS TWO o’clock in the afternoon. In an hour, they were on the beach. Kate kept on her short cover-up and they walked away from the populated area of mothers with children and fathers fishing. Tacker figured they had gone two miles when Kate said she wanted to sit down. They watched waves rushing in, slipping away, always the same, every time different. An ibis landed, studied them awhile, decided they were safe enough, and began to fish. Out over the water, five pelicans flew low and steady, as perfect as a line drawn against a ruler.
“It’s going to be cold,” Kate said.
“Race you to the water,” Tacker said.
They fell together into the sea and rode the waves in. Kate climbed onto Tacker’s back and he turned them in circles and then they swam up and down the shoreline, keeping to regions where their feet could touch the sandbar beneath them. Warmed to the water, they stopped and kissed, bobbing in the waves beyond the breakers.
“Let’s go in and get dressed and find dinner,” Tacker said.
Their clothes were damp and they held them aloft to dry as they walked back toward the pier, the sun blazing down.
* * *
• • •
AT THE FISH House, they sat next to each other in the booth. After dinner, Tacker scribbled circles on his napkin.
“What?” Kate said, glancing at him sideways.
“Make a hut round and it’s a nest. My friend Samuel said that. An octagonal house has the most wall space,” he added.
Kate tipped her head until it rested on his shoulder.
“You tired?”
“Very,” she said. “Maybe we could take a nap.”
“At seven o’clock?” Tacker said.
“If I try to sit in Mrs. Johnson’s living room and read a book, I’ll fall asleep,” Kate said.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Outside, a handful of people gathered around an ice-cream vendor. Tacker claimed Kate’s hand. He led and soon they were alone, the wooden pier sounding faintly with their footsteps.
“I wonder what it’s like here when it snows. If it ever snows,” Kate said.
“It probably does sometimes,” Tacker said. He thought of his bed in the foursquare, topped with a blue quilt his grandmother had made. He thought of Kate in the bed. He tried to count the months they had known each other, really known each other. But there were the on-and-off times and it was hard to figure.
“I think it would all fly away,” Kate said.
“What would fly away?”
“The snow. What are you thinking about?”
“You,” he said.
“Ha!” she said. “You were not. You were thinking of triangular houses. If we had a blizzard in Winston and the electricity went out, would you come rescue me?”
“Of course.”
He could see the snow falling slantwise, filling West End Boulevard and Glade Street, filling up parking lots. Snow followed by ice. So they must stay in the house an entire week.
They reached a bench at the end of the pier and sat down. An austerity seemed to envelop Kate. Perhaps she thought of her father. The wind was mild with only a hint of chill to come late in the night. Fishing boats bobbed and rocked. Occasionally Tacker heard a wave smack a hull. Kate sat silently next to him. “What are you thinking?” he said.
“I’m trying to remember a poem by Robert Frost,” she said, “a snow poem. We read it in high school. I can’t remember how it begins. There’s some question.” She closed her eyes. “‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep.’ I remember that. ‘And miles to go before I sleep.’”
She spoke as if she were uncovering all she had been lonely for, all she had held inside. He wondered if she had carried these thoughts for years, unwrapping them and laying them before him, in this talk of winter and woods and miles to go, as they sat before boats bobbing at the pier on a May evening. He pulled her to him and her hair smelled of salt. He felt the sun still in it and kissed her and tasted sun and salt in her mouth and listened to the surf and wind, his hands tight around Kate’s waist. Somewhere a bell sounded.
They found their way back to their rooms, tiptoeing into the living room around ten thirty. Sounds came from the kitchen and soon Mrs. Johnson’s voice. “You lovebirds want some chamomile tea? I’m just fixing some myself.”
“That sounds lovely,” Kate said.
Her eyes were wide and Tacker thought she was going to laugh.
They sat in the kitchen and drank their tea and said good night and Tacker headed to the once-garage, which had been converted to an extra room, while Kate headed down the hallway to her room at the opposite end of the house.
* * *
• • •
AT MIDNIGHT, TACKER slipped out a door of his room that led directly outside. The moon was up and the low, sweet smell of early gardenias filled the air, the scent as sweet as frangipani blossoms in Nigeria. He headed toward town. Only at the service station did he see another soul, someone at a phone booth. He took the boardwalk and the stairs leading down to the beach. Tacker walked in the opposite direction from the one he and Kate had taken in the afternoon. He could see everything, the lull and fall of waves farther out, even shells tumbling in and falling back. He found a high reef of sand cut earlier in the day by the incoming tide and he sat. In the dark of one o’clock, he watched a sea turtle come in with the tide. It was huge and took some time to maneuver the dunes. An hour later, she had found her nest. She would lay her eggs. He had learned about the habits of the sea turtle in sixth grade. She returned to the same nest every two or three years. Only a few of her hatchlings would survive. Those that did would spend up to ten years in an ocean current far from shore, maturing.
Should he go back to Nigeria, the place he had left, and to his place in it? He could get on with the company that had hired Samuel. There was all kinds of building going on over there. He would marry Kate. They would go
together. A return wouldn’t be about confronting Joshua. It would be about his own soul. He had been unjustly treated, wounded. Gaines would laugh. Wounded? You, wounded? Let me tell you about wounded. And he would go on about someone whose father had been hung in a tree and he would be right of course.
Yet there was some irreconcilable dislocation even if it wasn’t an issue of justice. He could not get entirely into one life or the other, here or there. Gaines was all the way in. So was Samuel. The last time he had run the track in Hanes Park, a crew was laying tile on the upper surround of the pool, blue and white, the colors that dominated Kate’s mother’s book on Greece. How was he to reconcile a swimming pool in Winston with the Osun River in Osogbo? The moon was in its descent. Tacker headed back to his room, thinking of Kate asleep at the other end of the house.
* * *
• • •
“MRS. JOHNSON TOOK her other guest to visit a friend.” Kate was in the kitchen eating toast with grape jelly. “She told me we should help ourselves to breakfast. When did you get in?”
“How did you know?”
“A woman knows,” she said, her eyes bright.
“Two o’clock?”
“You want to rent some bikes? Mrs. Johnson said the grocery rents bikes.”
“Sure,” Tacker said. “But right now you better make way or I may have to eat you. I’m starving.”
“Not so fast, Mr. Wolf,” Kate said. “I want more toast.”
They bantered and teased and ate and cleaned up the kitchen. It was almost too easy and delightful and Tacker felt a bit frightened as he brushed his teeth. They got to the grocery before it was crowded. “I’ll buy the sandwiches since you made yesterday’s for the trip,” he said.
“Suits me, but how will we carry them?”
“Some of those bikes have a basket,” the proprietor said.
But none did. “I guess they’re already rented,” Tacker said.
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