by Alice Walker
And so, after innumerable fears, false starts and stops, after much, as he liked to say, mocking Goethe, strum und drang, he had “won,” as he thought of it, a few years, at least, with this charming creature, Orelia.
How would they live? Where would they? What work would they do?
“I will support myself, and live in my own space. You and your children, my husband and his children, will sometimes be welcome.” This, from Orelia, which settled quite a bit.
John continued to teach, college-level, now. Slightly better paid. Orelia’s business was very slow. She was black, a woman, the service she offered only vaguely understood. She named her company Genuine Illusions. They struggled. They ate a lot of what a friend called le cuisine de pauvres, the food of the poor: beans, noodles, suspicious-looking cuts of meat. John lived in a garret. But they were happy.
In fact, they became two of those irritating people who begin a remarkably large number of sentences with the words: “We are blessed …” and “I love …” Said with big irritating smiles that made friends want to hit them.
Except that friends felt happy around them, too. For one thing, they were totally without guile, and any fight or disagreement they had, they never considered hiding; and their love for each other, so total and so cherishing, made their friends think automatically of protecting them from any possible damage caused by their own injudicious tongues. It was clear that they thought of themselves not as a couple with private problems, but rather as a private twosome with any couple’s problems. And those problems, generously shared, always seemed more interesting to them than whether they could endure having their friends know “the worst” about them.
For instance, when Orelia, while professing love for John, and obviously feeling it too, still managed to become infatuated with a woman she met at a music festival, their friends, some of whom were, in truth, borderline homophobes, were informed of this. Nothing had “happened”; she’d touched the other woman’s face (and breast); she’d been too frightened at the strong attraction she felt to go on. But there it was.
Some of their friends thought John should leave her; they felt Orelia’s attraction to another woman invalidated her as a woman, and called John’s manhood into question as well. Some thought Orelia was using her relationship with John as a screen behind which to … but this view could not be maintained in the presence of so much kissing and cuddling between the scrutinized pair. In fact, though much concerned and humanly fearful of losing her, John loved Orelia’s spontaneous access to her own feelings, and her lack of shame in expressing them. And even as she struggled with her feelings for “the other woman,” as they both referred to her, she did not withdraw from John. If anything, she depended on him to help her sort it all out.
Then too there had been the times when John fell off the wagon and back into his old habits of marijuana and drink. It did not seem to occur to them that this was anything but possibly a universal problem: that people slipped into drugs and alcohol when life frightened and appalled them. For John’s repurification, Orelia and some of their Native American friends had organized a day of prayer and a sweat. It worked.
A short time after it became clear that Orelia was gone, women began to invite John to their homes for dinner. Soon he was seeing a lot of a woman named Belinda, who taught in his department. She was a divorcée with two children, Ansel, four, and Louise, twelve. At first it was simply awkward, and no matter how warmly she welcomed him each visit he felt like an intruder. Belinda and the children lived in a tiny, neat apartment near campus, with walls so thin he could hear every word of the children’s prayers when she put them to bed. After she turned off their lights she came in and flopped down beside him on the scruffy sofa, and leaned her elegant dark head on its back. If she were Orelia, he thought, she’d kick off her shoes and put her feet on the coffee table. No. Not on the coffee table; in his lap. But Belinda kept on her pumps.
Their affair had started when John, thinking of Orelia, asked Belinda if she’d like a foot massage.
Looking questioningly at him out of large, tired, startled eyes, she slowly raised one foot and then the other into his lap. Carefully, he eased the pumps off her feet and began automatically, as he did with Orelia, to rotate her toes.
In a short while she had begun to cry.
“No one ever did that before,” she said, wiping her tears and settling into the pleasure. It always amazed John that there could be so many inept, thoughtless lovers in the world, but he did not comment on this now. The heat in her feet seemed dramatically to increase, until his hands were hot and sliding more and more up her very shapely legs. When he reached her knees—a ticklish spot sometimes on Orelia—Belinda raised herself and met him halfway in a kiss.
Oh, shit, he had thought.
Whereas with Orelia he was treated as an important and crucial part of her life—as she muttered over her work, often not looking all that attractive as she did so, and clearly not caring what he thought about that—John was thrilled to find Belinda eager to make him all of hers. She shopped with his wants foremost in mind. She cooked expressly to please his palate. She dressed in outfits that revealed the luscious curves of her body, and when he showed an interest in lingerie from Victoria’s Secret, she ran up an enormous charge for it on her credit cards. In bed she did everything she possibly could to make him happy. They did not talk much, and she did not seem interested in the work she did at school. But they did not need a conversational life, or so he thought.
It wasn’t her fault that he could not forget Orelia, and that even after making the most tender and involved love with Belinda, his thoughts returned instantly to the anticipation of her next phone call. She would be eager to tell him about a new book she’d read, a play she’d gone to. She’d want to talk about how, in the city she was now in, she could make a fortune redesigning houses, because all the houses she saw were so dark, so closed in.
“Nobody on the East Coast”—where she was—“remembers they used to live in trees!” she cried.
“That’s because they actually lived in caves,” he’d replied.
To which she’d said, “Right.” After a long pause.
On weekends he and Belinda took the children to the zoo, to scientific exhibitions, to museums, to the beach. He imagined how they must appear to the people around them: a happy married couple and their two kids.
Unfortunately, this image was one shared by Belinda herself, and he began to feel her attachment to it the nearer the time approached for Orelia to come home.
Belinda knew Orelia; not well, but they’d met at the occasional (and Orelia muttered, unavoidable) campus affair. She knew Orelia and John had a life together. She even liked Orelia: liked a middle-aged (Orelia was several years older than Belinda, and looked it) woman who’d reorganized her life; left home and husband, arranged a new life for her children, started her own company. But at the same time, she resented her because she had John, with whom, since the night he’d massaged her feet (and to whose extraordinary ability to comfort and soothe her, she was by now addicted), Belinda had fallen in love.
Oh, shit. John was saying to himself more frequently than ever.
Belinda was not a bad woman, he thought, even as she began to express a lot of verbal fault with the absent Orelia. She had heard Orelia was a man-hater. That she browbeat John. She didn’t believe a woman who loved a man should leave him behind for six months.
“She couldn’t take me with her,” John joked. Then saw the hurt in Belinda’s eyes. “She has dreams of living in the country.” He shrugged. He listened patiently to Belinda’s complaints about Orelia, and sometimes even tried to feel self-pitying, as he studied himself from Belinda’s point of view. However, he couldn’t stop thinking how tired Orelia sounded some evenings when he talked to her on the phone, her clear homesickness almost made him weep. He found himself beginning to regret the intimacy of this new relationship.
Belinda, whose former husband, a judge, never came to see his c
hildren, did not support them, or even, apparently, care that they were alive, insisted that John notice her children’s growing dependence on his presence.
Oh, shit. He moaned, to himself.
“The kids think you are just great!” Belinda said, hopefully.
And John began to feel extremely guilty, even as he continued to take them to baseball games and to the movies and to the ballet.
In the end, two weeks before an exhausted, delighted to be back Orelia returned, he’d done a despicable thing. He’d simply left Belinda and the kids after dinner, as he had for the past five months, waving and smiling and blowing kisses, and never, except in formal settings—school affairs, church—set smiling eyes on them again. He continued to see Belinda every week on campus, and he saw the look in her eyes. One day she stopped him as he was getting into his car: “Why?” she asked.
He’d shrugged lamely, feeling like a cad, and said, “I’m sorry. I just knew I couldn’t be what you need.”
“Am I the only woman you’ve slept with since she’s been gone?”
And John answered truthfully, because he hated lying to women, “No.”
“You shit,” she said, scornfully. Her anger at least making John feel somewhat cleansed.
He thought about what he should tell Orelia, if the subject of his affair with Belinda (and her children, he always added under his breath, because he realized the children had been wooing him as earnestly as she: and why not, they needed a father) ever came up. Eventually he remembered her telling him about a visit from an old lover and how she had gone out with him and his wife, and how much she still liked him but also how much, unfortunately, she had liked the wife.
The thought that she was still attracted to an old lover drove John into a fit of jealousy. But Orelia had only laughed.
“Everybody I’ve ever loved, John, I still love.”
“What does that mean?” he’d asked, pouting.
“I think it means, my love, that you will always be safe.”
But he had, in imagination, invented trysts between Orelia and the old lover. He remembered Orelia had said that one of the things she’d loved about him was the fact that he dared to be daring even though he was poor.
“We’d take long trips in his raggedy car, with just enough money for gas. When we came to tollbooths we ignored them. We drove right through. We’d laugh to hear the bells go off.”
John couldn’t believe or imagine it. “Why didn’t the cops ever stop you?” he’d asked.
Orelia frowned as if she’d never wondered this herself, though of course she often had. “I don’t know. They never seemed to be around. The real reason though,” she smiled, remembering, “is that we were charmed.”
“Charmed.” He wanted her only “charmed” life to be with him.
And one day, in the country, with Orelia puttering happily in her new home, John intercepted a letter to her from Belinda. First he sat Orelia down and told her what he thought was in the letter, then he gave it to her to read.
He was wrong to have been suspicious. Belinda was simply passing along the phone number of someone who wanted Orelia’s services as a designer, but the damage had been done.
“Oops,” said Orelia, as the letter dropped from her hands to the floor, like an egg.
THERE WAS A RIVER
There Was a River
There was a river, and they were sitting beside it. It was the only river Marcella had seen in New Mexico. Actually it looked like a canal, it was so straight, as was the path beside it, as was the wooden bench on which they sat. Wordlessly, as if all three had reached a common realization about straightness and man-made designs, they stood up, walked a few steps to the right of the bench, and sat down carefully in the dry grass, balancing gingerly against the pull of the sloped bank.
“We felt we must talk about things,” said Angel. He was short, pale, and closed in, his mouth tense, as if he anticipated unpleasantness. For a long time now Marcella had felt he lacked radiance. Even now, as she looked at him, she wondered: Did he ever have radiance? Or did I create it for him because his mother named him Angel?
Sally, plump and the luscious darkness of a ripe fig, sat between them, her large eyes filled with pain. She had wept so much already she thought no more tears would come. Yet, as Angel spoke, she felt them start up behind her eyes. Damn, she thought.
Marcella also felt out of control. Here she was on a riverbank in the middle of nowhere, between her lover and her best friend, compelled, she thought, to choose between them. There was no doubt in her mind that she loved them both, and that to lose either would be devastating.
It had all started because Sally had had a dream in which she’d replaced Marcella in Angel’s arms. Marcella had simply disappeared.
“But where did I go?” Marcella had asked, as Sally told her, laughing, about the dream.
Sally didn’t know where she went. If she did she never told Marcella.
One evening when the three of them were together in Marcella’s house, with its green shutters and wine-colored walls, Sally acted out the dream, flinging herself into Angel’s arms and lying back as she’d seen Marcella do. It had been painful to watch, amazingly so.
Now Marcella struggled to articulate a feeling that seemed ridiculous, even to her.
“When you didn’t know what happened to me, I felt abandoned.”
“But it was only a dream,” said Sally, pleased that her tears had decided not to flow. Partly, she knew, because her emotions had changed. Angel, as usual, having introduced the agenda, left the two of them to pursue it; suddenly he appeared so vacant it was almost as if he were merely a form. A male form without substance, sitting between them. She wanted to smack him, and say something deeply vulgar and cruel.
Angel was in fact wishing he were someplace, anyplace, else. Marcella, whom he knew so well, was clearly suffering. Her eyes were sad and her voice shook. He felt how awkward his position was: a straw man, a hollow man, between two flesh-and-blood women. Why could he not feel himself, as he was at least capable of feeling for them?
“I thought you wanted to hurt me,” said Marcella; bravely, Angel thought, considering how she liked to act as if nothing ever could. “I also thought you …”
There was a pause, as Angel read her mind. The word she chose not to say was “cowardly.”
“I also thought you didn’t want to be responsible for it.”
“For what?” asked Sally, screwing up her face, on which the sun shone brightly, causing tiny purple shadows beneath her ears.
“For hurting me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We are not responsible for what we dream,” said Marcella. Wearily.
Angel, from a distance, thought along with her. Yes, he mused. If you tell someone, Hey man, I dreamed about you last night and crushed your nuts with a hammer, what can they say? It was your nightmare. And yet.
“It wasn’t so much what happened in the dream, as out of it.”
“Come again,” said Sally.
“That you didn’t care what happened to me in the dream I could understand, but when I asked you what happened to me, in your imagination, while I was cooking food for you in my kitchen later, you couldn’t even invent something. I disappeared. Okay. I accept that. But what happened to me, in your mind, after you were awake?”
Sally sighed. She really hadn’t wanted to tell Marcella, who was, after all, her best friend.
“You were hit by a car,” she said. “A white Peugeot, moving very fast.”
FIVE YEARS LATER
Marcella had cooked Sally’s favorite dinner, Senegalese chicken and new potatoes in peanut sauce, and Sally had done justice to it by eating every bite on her plate. They sat by the fire after dinner listening to a new CD by a singer Marcella had heard recently in London. Just as she’d anticipated, Sally loved it. Sally had brought her seventeen-month-old grandson, and the two women took turns dancing about the room with him and smiling into his bemused, easily dist
ractable face. During one of these dances, as Marcella swooped and swung and dipped the child to the passionate beat of the music, the phone rang.
Angel, his voice very happy and his speech quite fast, announced he was returning the call Marcella had made the night before, when she called to say good night (just because the moon was full and this had reminded her of Angel and how his fangs seemed to grow on such nights) and had gotten his answering machine. He hadn’t answered the phone he said because he’d been “with someone.” He sounded so pleased with himself, and full, Marcella could practically feel his radiance over the phone. It struck a chord in her; she had a feeling of relief.
They talked, easily, over the phone, Angel describing the color of skin of his new lover—beige, like his own—and quality of hair—curly, like his own—to Marcella, and Marcella describing her evening with Sally and little Basho to him. She mentioned the glowing fire, the crisp cold night outside, the brightness of the moon, the satisfaction she felt sitting and talking and eating with Sally and dancing with the child, who had Sally’s dark and soulful eyes and lustrous dark brown skin. She told Angel how “in himself” he sounded and advised him to do more of whatever it was he was doing. Obviously his one night with the new love had begun to bring him back to himself.
“Don’t forget the years of therapy!” he joked, reminding her that for much of his life he’d felt unlovable. The only time he’d felt loved as a child was when his mother approved of his performance in school. He’d been a brilliant scholar, for her sake; left to himself he felt he would have been happily mediocre. He’d confused love with approval and felt condemned to perform—in every relationship.