“While we were flying.”
Another person telling her another dream. Usually she envied Canary her birds. Another not usually.
Nicholas Gordon rolled the cuffs of his blue-gray linen pants that exactly matched the color of his eyes, propped his white Gucci loafers up on two coconuts on the deck, then began to wade to shore.
Halfway to the island he looked back at the open boat outfitted with a sputtering outboard motor that had brought him to this edge of paradise. The boat was headed for the next atoll, an uninhabited as opposed to sparsely inhabited destination. He had instructed the boatman, a lazy boy, to have a look-see around the spit, find and feed himself lunch, probably a coconut, and return in two hours.
If there are ten thousand islands in the Philippines there are too many tiny spits and sandbars to count. And too many pirates down round Mindanao for tourists to come looking for pretty beaches. If anything happened— a heart attack, a pirate attack, a bout of radical disobedience— it might take Nicholas days to get off this little empire of palm trees, if he got off.
Wading through the soft warm water with museum-quality seashells scratching his toes, Nicholas inhaled his own scent, the scent of expensive cologne and old-man sweat, thinking that some ends of the earth are far more beautiful than others.
Out of the jungle came what appeared to be a woman, wearing a kind of sarong and a large hat woven of palm fronds. The person was wearing a cross like a timeless necklace and Chanel sunglasses that signaled a recent connection to the larger world.
Nicholas and the sarong wearer greeted each other affectionately. Bumping arms, they walked the path from the beach to the house, a quarter mile. At the house they didn’t go inside; they walked around and sat in the courtyard. There was a book on the table, The Thirty-Nine Steps. The island was so small that this courtyard overlooked the sea.
“Abel’s dead?”
“Abel’s dead.”
“Everyone’s certain?”
“Everyone’s certain.”
“Excellent.”
“Where are you actually staying?”
“If I told you that . . . I would have to kill you.” It was a bad joke but they both laughed.
“There is that. Are you a woman, too, wherever it is?”
“No.”
“A pity. You’re quite pretty.”
“I came back to you.”
“What will you live on?”
“General Yamashita’s gold.”
Nicholas laughed. The laughter didn’t stop Nicholas from worrying that the woman Abel would hit him up for funds.
“Really?” Nicholas was incredulous. He wasn’t of the camp that believed that the gold Japan had stolen from Manchuria and China in the 1930s had ended up in booby-trapped underground mazes in the Philippines under the direction of General Yamashita. Nicholas would pay if need be. Pay and be amused by his front-row seat to the destruction of colonialization. Even Fanon could not have imagined the “new woman” sitting before Nicholas. The moment would stay absurdly delicious even if it became expensive.
“No. My book.”
“Book?”
“I’m writing the death of the protagonist this very afternoon.”
“Your title?”
“Spooked:The Life and Death of a Black Southern Conservative.”
“Spooked.”
“Or, RebelYell.”
“I prefer Spooked.”
“I prefer Rebel Yell.”
“Who did it?”
“I suspect various people will have various opinions. There will be consensus but not conclusion. Perhaps consensus will go only as far as agreeing Abel’s dead.”
“And you, what do you think?”
“I think he decided to grow up and disappear.”
“Why would he do that?”
“The picture.”
“The man covering himself?”
“Absolutely.”
“A man covered himself. Why was that significant?”
“Just that he was a man.”
“The dignity of Adam.”
“There is that.”
Nicholas offered sarong-wearing Abel a cigarette. Abel accepted. Nicholas lit one for Abel, then another for himself, off Abel’s.
“We did not go the wrong way. We went too far.”
“You went the wrong way.”
“Spoken like a commie.”
“I am a commie. But you could have saved me the trip. I’m old.”
“While they were chasing you, they didn’t chase me.”
“Thank you.”
“And now they’re chasing Hope. The Lord didn’t show up with mercy.”
“Your lovers did.”
“Each in their own way.”
Nicholas looked at Abel dressed so strangely. Soon it would be time for Nicholas to wade back to his boat. Now was a time to kiss and know Abel was right. Kiss and know Abel was gone. Kiss and move beyond policing evil toward increasing good. Kiss and know and never tell Abel good-bye. Kiss and play Sheherazade.
“Abel was a cross-dresser?”
“In my dreams.”
“You didn’t come in a professional capacity.”
“I lied.”
“Not about anything important.”
Hope kissed Nicholas on both cheeks, then again on the first, kissed him formally. They had gotten back to good friends.
TWENTY-NINE
SETTLING INTO THE leatherette comfort of first class, after boarding, Hope took a Xanax and started drinking sweet drinks. Halfway across the Atlantic, orange juice and champagne gave way to Baileys over ice. Between sips of beigey brown cream, she eased herself into her last journey with Abel. This time they were headed in the same direction.
Twenty minutes later she and the plane were high. Part of what Abel had loved about Rome, and what, eventually, Hope loved best about Rome, was the fact that, in a Casablanca kind of way, Rome was all that remained of the long day of their marriage. Rome, a short (not even two-minute) Mississippi John Hurt song, “My Creole Belle,” a promise, and Ajay.
She had promised him, that first summer in Rome, that she would bury him in Europe. The conversation had begun after she had showed him her mother’s grave and he had asked that Hope bury him “beyond America, out of Dixie.” She had promised. And he had prodded to make sure she understood the significance of the promise. He had reminded her of the Road Mangler, the legendary roadie said to have kidnapped Gram Parsons’s body and buried it at Joshua Tree. And she had said, “Even if I have to go to jail I promise.” Then he had asked her where she wanted to be buried, and she had said, speaking seriously because she finally understood that he was speaking seriously, that she didn’t want to think about dying.
Abel had liked the way Canary’s freedom, her life beyond stereotypes, expectations, and America, had looked on Hope. He had wanted that one day for his own child. And they had achieved it.
How could she once upon a time have known a man that well, then known him not at all? Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe it was just like when a scientist gets a key fact wrong and all the other analysis goes haywire. She had gotten a key fact wrong. Abel had been competent.
And she had gotten key facts right. Abel had been raised in a time and place of terror. It had provoked a permanent wariness. She understood that. She knew what it was to be weary from worry.
Flying literally and figuratively, she understood another thing that had changed on September 11, 2001: Abel had never again enjoyed flying. His safe, optimistic place had been removed. And somehow the way it had been removed, the way the damage had touched all, blindly and equally, had made him finally feel more American than black. But at the last he hadn’t been American, or black; he’d been a daddy.
As the plane made preparations for its final descent, Hope started thinking about gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In the little crèche that Hat had whittled for Hope, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar had approached Jesus with gifts in their hands.
As a c
hild Hope had loved wondering who had carried what. Later Hope and Abel had debated both what the gifts meant and what had happened to them. Had they been stolen by the men who later hung beside Jesus on the cross, as some folks said, or stolen by Judas, as others insisted? What Hope knew for sure about the gifts was that they were remembered.
Gold. Frankincense. Myrrh. The gifts were remembered and so was the trip. And so was the Wise Men’s change of mind. Matthew 2:12. “And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.” Staying true to the baby, the Wise Men had betrayed Herod. Hope didn’t know how Abel had done it, but she sensed that Abel had passed into his own country another way. Abel had changed masters. She couldn’t prove it but, half high and sobering, she knew.
He passed. That’s what the aunts would have said. They would have meant he died. And they would have meant he pretended to be white. And they would have meant he lived before he died.
You pass away, and it is a vanishing and an estrangement. You pass on and move into another realm. You pass for white and wear a mask of manners and skin. You march. You parade. You are present. You are seen. You pass. You are not a zombie.
American black people, quiet as it’s kept, fear zombies. She remembered the day the aunts let her in on the secret. Her toes had stung where Hot had used the nippers too vigorously before attacking with the nail-polish brush. The old fashion curling iron that had been heated up in the open flame of a gas stove top was perilously near her cheek. It radiated an itchy heat that reminded Hope of Inkwell Beach and the scorch marks that adorned her skin her first summer on U Street. Three faint brown dashes— one near her widow’s peak, one at her nape, one near her ear—were all she had left of the moments she had jerked her head in an unexpected direction before Sweet could jerk it back and away from the burn. The little scars itched when she refused to know what she needed to know. She remembered Hot concluding, “That’s how you tell if someone’s black or not. You figure out if they know ’bout zombies.”
For a minute Hope had thought the aunts had been pulling her leg. Then she had realized they hadn’t been. They had been pressing curls and painting her toenails, wondering if she wasn’t really white. The aunts knew you could be the color of Alabama honey, a most pleasing shade of brown, and be snow white.
Abel lived before he died. Abel passed. Finally it was sad.
She was in a cab driving away from Rome’s Da Vinci Airport. The cab was just exiting the grounds of the airport when the phone in her purse began to sing, “Oh my darling, Clementine.” Waycross was calling. He and Ajay would be home the day after next. She promised she would be waiting at home when they got there. Another promise she would keep.
She urgently wished to give up her polyandry. Though she was intensely interested in the most intimate of all speculative fiction, what might have been if the love had been better, larger, truer, somehow different, she would let a fondness for presence, presents, and the present win out. She was a practical and passionate woman.
The cab came to a stop outside the walls of Vatican City. She was wearing the same clothes she had worn at Arlington, but now the coat was across her arm, her sunglasses were on her face, and she had thrown out the underpants because they didn’t wash and dry as quickly as her body did. The gold locket Abel had bought Antoinette, in which Antoinette had placed the first lock of Abel’s hair ever cut from his head, was around her neck.
She was on the Vatican garden tour. People chattered around her in English. She leaned over to smell a yellow rose, she touched the earth. The tiny loop of curl was in her hand. Hope took the lock of hair Antoinette had clipped from Abel’s head and she buried it in the Vatican garden.
Sheltered by the Swiss Guard, Hope buried a little bit of Abel in the green gardens that had known and outlived every kind of crime, political and private, in the name of God and in the name of greed, in the name of plea sure and in the hope of pain, confessions spoken and unspoken, in every language of the earth, near the pope’s own hotel and helipad.
In a place where she knew prayers would be spoken as long as prayers were on this planet, Hope returned a bit of Abel to earth. This place would best mark the length of his journey.
The place where he had said, so silly, so slyly, so simply, “Popes come and go, talking of Michelangelo.”
Long before he read, or met, or denounced Edward Said, Abel had chosen Rome. Rome had fed his southern bred-in-the-bone taste for a kind of numb classicism, for the unbreaking frames that absorb pain.
Having shattered so many promises she had made on her wedding day, Hope kept another: she buried Abel in Rome.
In the end what it meant was that he knew she knew him. Once upon a time, the ends of the universe had met in their kiss. Once upon a time they had redeemed everything, and then it had all fallen back to war. But he knew she would know what he meant by black sand and a Ringling Brothers ticket, the prisoner of Saint-Pierre. The fountain in the park had been sculpted by Emma Stebbins, a friend of Alice Williams. That had pointed Hope back to Rome along a new path, as had Where the Wild Things Are and the Epitaph of a Small Winner. They all pointed to S———’s friend who had helped found the Lampadia Foundation, who had always wanted Hope to write a novel about a black Confederate. There was a black Confederate in Arlington Cemetery who had been carved by a Jewish Confederate, and that had meant something to the boy from Nashville with German-Jewish ancestors. There was a place, once upon a time, where they had met. Abel had trusted she would remember the place and find her way back to it. Trusted she would seek him by the Spanish Steps drinking coffee, or maybe he would just be laughing. At the end Abel would have imagined Hope chasing it all down, imagined Hope connecting some unconnectable dots for him one last time, and he would have smiled. He would have imagined a scene just like at the end of The Age of Innocence except that it would be she, not he, who had to sit out on the bench in the park and not go in, because someone had seen and cared, and that someone had been a wife.
Abel had attained this height: a woman had loved him.
THIRTY
HER MEN WERE on the road home. She prayed she didn’t still smell of aging dandy. Abel was buried. When the moment had come to put Abel first, she had put Abel first.
Waycross was at the wheel driving south. He and Ajay were listening to a bootleg CD titled Idlewild Mix, a whiplashing playlist of jazz trios and early Motown that they had purchased at a one-pump gas station.
While Ajay had pumped the gas, Waycross had called Ruby. He had told her “it” was over. She had hardly known what he’d been talking about. It had been a good little while since they had last been together, maybe before he had married Hope. But they had left the door open. Now it was closed. Ruby had made it easy for Waycross. “Let’s just pretend we had this conversation fifteen years ago, and we’re fifteen years into ‘just good friends.’ ”
Waycross would miss the same thing Ruby would miss: holding someone who remembered the world that was segregated, black, and southern— the world before Hope and Abel’s world, a more vicious but less bruising world. A vanished world.
Ajay and Waycross had gotten back on the road. They had gotten the music going. Waycross was telling Ajay about Ziggy Johnson and the big-legged beautiful women who had danced at the Paradise Club. He had already told him about Lottie the Body and about how once a year a dancer had been painted to look like a gold statuette.
“Why did he love black Confederate soldiers?” asked Ajay.
“He thought predictable responses were pathetic,” said Way-cross.
“Daddy told me if anything strange ever happened to him get to Idlewild and I would find him there,” said Ajay.
“I guess he meant metaphorically,” said Waycross.
“I understood literally,” said Ajay.
In preparation for her son’s return, Hope changed the linen on Ajay’s bed and picked up the clothes that had been lying across his floor since before he’d le
ft. Then she poked through his CD collection to see if he had a copy of Prince’s Purple Rain. He didn’t. She would buy him one. And some Talking Heads. Hope wanted Ajay to know who Abel had been the day they had made him.
Humming softly the melody to her favorite Prince single, “Kiss,” the part that hung under the words “act your age, not your shoe size,” she put the four books she had found on Abel’s bedside table, Epitaph of a Small Winner, Eugénie Grandet, Man’s Fate, and Where the Wild Things Are, on Ajay’s.
Into the Balzac she slipped the photograph from Bohol. On the back she had written, MAMA AND DADDY 1986.
She shuffled the Epitaph to the top of the pile. Abel had been proud of Machado and she wanted Ajay to believe what Abel had believed: that the greatest novelist of the West was the grandson of slaves, was brown and brilliant, was Machado.
Hope suspected it would be years, perhaps decades, before Ajay understood that in part Abel had loved Epitaph because it suggested that Big Abel had lost simply by playing the male role necessary to conceive a being born to taste and swallow the sorrows of the world. What she wanted Ajay to understand soon was what she had learned so recently: Abel had won by creating Ajay.
She picked up the book on the floor beside the bed, a book Abel had given their son years earlier. A silver bookmark, a circle that slipped onto the top or the side of a page, had been, Hope remembered, the significant present. The book, Black Southerners in Confederate Armies, was, Abel had said at the time, just the wrapping the gift came in. Hope opened the book to the page marked and read aloud the words that had been underlined.
Bob, I will never forget you and our trip home in 1862 through the mountains of New Mexico, when you had the smallpox and no one would go near you in the wagon but myself. And afterwards when you had gotten well and I had the measles, you stayed by me as I had you. On our trip alone from San Antonio you stuck to me when I was sick. And this trip, Bob, is heart bound one white man and one negro together. You had lost your master in the battle of Glorietta, I had lost my health, but to each other we stood true, and are today enjoying the blessings that were bestowed on but few of those old boys. Long life Bob. Nora and the boys all send love to the “Old Rebel Negro.” Write soon to your old comrade and friend.
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