Disturbed by Her Song

by Lee, Tanith

  “No,” said Emily. “I can’t. Not now. Not after the letters.”

  “Shut up,” Jaidis screamed at her. In amazement Emily turned to see. Jaidis’ face was full of a fearsome savagery. Her eyes were wide. She looked capable of killing Emily on the spot. Far away, a dog barked; it had heard the roar of the lion in the wood. “Those letters,” Jaidis said. She lowered her voice like a weapon. “Those letters were to you.”

  “To me?” Emily asked politely.

  She was not going to die. She was not dreaming this. It was not mildness but uncouth lies.

  Nevertheless Jaidis looked as if she had been badly hurt, mauled perhaps by her own persona, turning.

  Emily said, “I’ve made an awful mess of this. I’m sorry. I’ll just go down. It’s all right.”

  “Emily, listen. The letters were to you. Things I couldn’t say. So I wrote to you. It started years ago.”

  “How can it have?” asked Emily. She felt numb and temporarily quiet, between onslaughts, as if after some successful minor surgery of which the outcome remained unsure.

  “What do you mean,” said Jaidis in turn, “how?”

  “I remember the letters,” said Emily. “You met her two years ago.”

  “I met you two years ago,” said Jaidis, her eyes flat as inverted stars. “I met you in a restaurant, and you waited on my table. I tried to find a way to talk to you, but the place was full and I was with two other stupid people. When I went back, you’d left.”

  Emily, surprised, said, “Yes, I was a waitress. And you—”

  “You didn’t even see me,” said Jaidis. “And then you’d gone. I wrote you the first letter then. I wrote you three songs, too. I thought you were gone for good.”

  “I did a lot of horrible jobs,” said Emily, vaguely. “I never stayed anywhere for long. But – how can I not have seen you?”

  “You didn’t. Have you ever?” Jaidis said.

  “You’re all I see,” said Emily. She lowered her eyes. Perhaps it did not matter if she told the truth at last. For what Jaidis spoke could not be the truth at all.

  “You don’t see me,” said Jaidis. “You see skin and hair and eyes and bones.” She struck herself in the upper stomach, hard, a blow. “I’m here.”

  Emily flinched, frowned. “I know. I see that you, too. “

  “I wrote you the letters because I didn’t dare say those things to you,” said Jaidis. “I didn’t know what you’d do. So quiet and controlled and well-mannered and gentle. I could make you come. That was good. That was the only time the guard went down. But did you pretend? No, not with that heartbeat. That was real. So I wrote about that.”

  “You said you loved me – her – since you were a child,” said Emily. She was abruptly defiant. She raised her head and stared into Jaidis’ face. “Even if I did meet you two years ago, how can I have known you as a child?”

  “I didn’t say you did,” said Jaidis. “I knew you. I had a fantasy friend when I was little. I loved her. I told my sister and got a lot of shit because my secret friend was white and had blonde hair. I learned to shut my mouth. When I was about fifteen, I started looking for her, Emily, looking for you. And once or twice I thought I found her. But I hadn’t. And then, I did. I did, Emily. Once, and you were gone. But then, that second time.”

  “At the shop,” said Emily. She considered how Jaidis looked at her, and they had shared the wine. It was not like a first meeting. It was as if prearranged. Fate.

  “The second letter,” said Emily, harshly now, also lifting her voice up to meet the voice of Jaidis, so cruel and iron under the trees: Duelists. “That love letter—”

  “To you, when I went away. After our first time. Another typewriter I borrowed for some business letters. The spacebar kept jamming.”

  Emily said, “The words ran together.”

  “That’s why.”

  Emily raised her fists now. She cried out. “You wrote she was inked in – inked in – she’s black, she’s black, Jaidis. You wrote it—”

  Jaidis said, her voice falling back now through the air, “A line-drawing. Your whiteness on the darkness of the sheet. You seemed to have a line drawn round you.”

  “Dark as night,” said Emily, “that’s what you said.”

  “You are,” said Jaidis. “I don’t mean skin. I mean the bloody cloud in you. The dark cloud that I can’t get by.”

  “But I love you,” said Emily. “And you never said that you loved me.”

  “Neither did you,” said Jaidis.

  “Why did you never tell me—”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Emily stepped back. She drew down her hands and folded them, like a good child. “When I saw you at the shop, when you played your guitar, I thought you were the queen of night. I’m sorry that I love your blackness, I don’t mean to be insulting. I never even had a real friend who was black. But when I saw you, you were like – a black torch, a black fire. All right, it’s the outer casing and you’re inside. But I love both. The look and smell and taste of you, your eyes like that sky up there, but with red stars, Mars stars – and your hair that’s so soft and so – so almost sticky – and alive – and the paler lovely line behind your ears, and the pink flush behind your knees, and your nails and your palms like the inside of a rose – a black rose – and in your vagina, there, flames in a coal – and how white your teeth are, and your eyelashes, and how your spine looks like a snake under your skin. And I love your music that you play in your room when I creep up and lean on the door to listen so I won’t disturb you. And the way you listen to a book when you read it – yes, I can see you listening to the words – and the way you breathe when you sleep, and the thoughts behind your eyes. And all of you inside I love, all I know. But I’ve never known very much, you’ve never told me. And I want to be told. I wish I’d been there when you were a child, I’d have made them like me, even your sister, or I’d have made them put up with me. And we would have been together all the time we could. I never had a proper friend. I wish it had been you. I want to be with you now. I want to be with you when I’m old and you’re old, some cranky old lady, thin and stooping and graceful and bony, and your hair grey. And if there’s anything when we die, I want to be with you then. For as long as there is. And for ever if there is for ever. And if not, for now. At least, that. Please.” Emily undid her hands. She said, “Please.”

  Jaidis stood before her and was silent.

  Then at last she said, “Of course we’ll live forever. You only really want what you can have.”

  They went down the hill not touching, and when they were at the bus stop, they began to brush the mud off each other, and made it worse. It looked as if they had been coupling in the wood, rolling and biting and shrieking in a sexual frenzy. By the time the bus came they were laughing so much that the driver grinned. Two pretty girls come from some office party. Well, live and let live.

  In the dark, Emily sentimentally murmured, “And the dear kisses on the letters.”

  “Not kisses,” said Jaidis. “The X’s aren’t kisses. They were the times I came. Alone, the first time, thinking of you. And then the times with you.”

  “Like the marks on an airplane,” said Emily. “Shot down.”

  “Little deaths,” said Jaidis.

  “Five tomorrow,” said Emily, “if you write to me.”

  To herself, as Jaidis slept, Emily mused dreamily on and on, and round and round, easing towards sleep as if across a smooth deep pool.

  Emily thought, The X’s are not kisses. They are the unmarked and uncharted lands on a map, the map of the heart. Yes, that’s it. And in those lands we must always speak the heart’s truth, to be understood. Whatever the cost. And if you speak this truth and someone strikes you in the face for it, you must turn to the next one the other cheek. Yes, you must, over and over. For one day it may not be a blow, but a kiss.

  Alexandrians

  Judas Garbah

  My mother gave parties. Or, they were soirées. Ch
eap, shoddy soirées – and only gentlemen attended, though her maid served the drinks.

  I was three or maybe just four. The maid bathed me angrily and washed my hair, getting soap in my eyes, and hurting me. I was a nuisance. Sometimes, though, she was gentle in her way, Chushi – the name I called her, probably remembered wrongly. When gentle, Chushi would smother me to her bosom, cradle me, saying that I was a poor child, a poor neglected child. My mother, in moments of what she herself called ‘Tenderness,’ did something similar, but she touched less. She would put me back and stare at me, murmuring, “So pretty. What a pretty little boy.” So the poor child, the pretty little boy, learned early, as do we all, his nature and his names.

  We’d lived before in a crumbling tenement, and been saved from it to live in this other crumbling tenement, whose greenish walls decayed down into a river, which – presumably – was the Nile, or some off-shoot of it. I had played in the mud sometimes with Arab children who found me unwholesome, too pale, and slow to learn. They’d jeer at, beat or trick me. Now and then they drove me off completely and I lurked at corners, watching them. Their dirty vibrant solid world looked good to me. But I was already better fed, and I stank of being occasionally bathed. Mariamme, my mother, always tried to stop me playing with Arab boys; Chushi therefore did the same. But mostly they didn’t like me in the way. I spent a lot of time in my own room, which was narrow and damp. A tutor came at irregular intervals. Rather than teach me anything, he told me stories of his life. But I had no complaints. Everything different was of interest to me.

  Tonight’s party, or soirée, for which I was being bathed, was apparently important. I was taken out of my room for important ones. I would make a brief appearance, or longer, if the guests showed approval. But my character often changed. I wasn’t always Mariamme’s son, but sometimes the son of her sister, or an orphan boy she’d seen and bought, with French banknotes, from his destitute parents.

  Mariamme came into my room at sunset, when the mystic Cry was going up from the prayer towers.

  She wore a beaded coppery dress over her satiny amber skin. Mariamme had a tendency to fat. She would eat nothing but sweetmeats if left to herself, and she liked cocktails, too. At other times she starved, taking only water. The general effect was voluptuous, very attractive and honeyed, for certain men. She had a hooked nose, black eyes, black hair thickly curled. A salamander, yes that fits.

  “How lovely,” she said, looking at me. “Judas, you’re a little doll of a boy. Yes, you are. Made all of loukoum.” Then, frowning, “What’s that on his cheek?”

  “A scratch,” said Chushi.

  “Powder over it. Powder his face. You careless boy!”

  “He fell,” said Chushi laconically. Actually, she had caught my cheek with the comb. She was always rough, even in her gentle hugs and rockings, which made one seasick.

  “Never mind,” said Mariamme. Dismissing not the scratch but my discomfort.

  She stood looking at the rubber-red sun sinking behind moody water, dim domes, and cut-paper-fronded palm trees. (This marvelous view, for which a tourist might have committed murder, we rarely appreciated.) She gulped her current cocktail down, and burped, an indulgence allowed only before us.

  “Your dress is creased,” she said to Chushi. “Didn’t you iron it?”

  “Oh, yes,” lied Chushi, who only ironed her hair.

  There were three gentlemen that night. They sat in a half circle, round Mariamme’s divan. I sat on a stool to one side fencing uneasily with a monkey one of the men had brought with him, his pet. It kept trying to bite me – Oh, familiar scenario. Everyone hated little Judas. I was frightened of the monkey, though the man had put us together at once. As if being both small, that should make us friends. He had also added slyly, “Watch he doesn’t bite you. Only me he never bites.”

  Chushi clucked disapprovingly at the monkey. She equated all animals as vermin, rats, cats, monkeys. Only animals that could be eaten were worth anything. She’d often praised to me a goat of her father’s that was so very intelligent, and had tasted delicious.

  The cocktails were sweet, reminiscent of kerosene. Sometimes Mariamme made me taste one, or she gave me as a treat the cherry from her drink. When I was two she slapped me before her guests for gagging and crying at the burn of the alcohol. Someone quipped I had been born an abstainer. Was it after that party Mariamme tried to lose me in the city? (Maybe not. Anyway, it happened many times.) She would drink heavily; and next day a madness of depression set in. She would then lead me out, her eyes leaden, looking like what at first she must have been, an inexpensive whore of the alleys. In the midst of a busy street she told me to wait, by a Jewish shop. Then she went away. An hour later, the old Jew came out and found me there. You expect now I’ll tell you he was kind, gave me a cup of milk, and bore me home, to my unwilling mother. But oh no. He drove me off, lashing with his arms, cursing me in Hebrew. I then spent some hours roaming about. I think I cried, but can’t remember. I should have been swept away, grabbed for some brothel or simply killed in passing by someone or other. Instead, by peculiar accident, I finally saw Chushi, creeping back to the flat from some villainy, and running up, grasped hold of her skirt. “You!” she exclaimed. “She won’t like you being here.” And home we went. Mariamme, when she woke from her drugged sleep, seemed to have forgotten everything. But afterwards, like the children in fairy tales, I memorized landmarks on every outing, and now and then found I’d needed to. Twice she left me in the same café. I stayed until midnight, when I was put out, both times to clear the place for a band of robbers. The apartment doors were locked when I got back, and no one would let me in until dawn, when the sweeper came.

  It was a sort of amnesia with Mariamme. She forgot me, and then forgot she had forgotten me.

  One of her men asked her one day (night), why she gave me this doomed, Christian name. She shrugged. She had some ridiculous reason. But really she had forgotten who Judas was supposed to be.

  In the end, the monkey noticed something moving behind the cabinet, no doubt a rat, the large black kind from the building. The monkey stole away, and I was able to relax a little. It was then I saw one of that night’s beaux was watching me.

  When he saw me looking, he smiled, but I didn’t smile back. I knew no one was to be trusted, that I was pretty, neglected, and quite unlikable. If they hated me, and tried to pretend the opposite in order to trick me, why help them? Presently he put the smile out and glanced away.

  Soon after this my mother asked me to recite a poem the tutor had, in a moment of aberration, taught me.

  I saw all the faces in the room but hers set in a ghastly rigor: The reciting child.

  Quickly I shuffled the verses in my head, selected one that was short, and said it clearly, putting in the commas, as my tutor had expressed it.

  “Alexandre te veut...”

  It took one minute. I was applauded, obviously for being so quick. Mariamme looked disappointed. “No, no, there was more, about the horse – you’ve left it out—” “He did very well, Madame,” said the man who had smiled at me. “But I too know this poem. Boucephalon, with his eyes of blackest flame – the Ox-Star on his brow – that Alexander loved more than his lovers, who – never bore him with that pride – not truly knowing him to be a god.”

  “And the boy’s been taught that?” asked the fat man with the monkey. “No wonder he left it out.”

  From behind the cabinet came screeches. The monkey had met the rat and probably they had both bitten each other.

  Everyone jumped up, my mother screaming, the fat man in great fear for his pet.

  I found myself left behind with the man who had smiled.

  As the others scrabbled at the cabinet, hefting it so things inside fell over with a crash, coaxing and shouting, he said quietly to me, “Do you understand the poem?”

  Under all circumstances, I must be polite. But I need not smile. I said, “Alexander loved him, but only the horse loved Alexander as he should be lo
ved.”

  “Loved whom?” asked the man, who was old and straight and smelled clean and fragrant. By which I mean he seemed all that. And he was probably about twenty-six. The fat man had brought him with the monkey.

  “Loved—” I stumbled on the Greek name, “Lukestion.”

  “Does that seem strange to you?” asked the old young man.

  I was silent. No. It didn’t seem strange. I hadn’t thought about it.

  “For a man,” he said, “to love another man – in that way.”

  “What way?” Who cared?

  He said, “I’ll teach you two new words. A woman who loves another woman is called for an island, Lesbos, a Lesbian. But a man who loves another man is called for Alexander, who was the son of a god, and loved men, and for his city by the sea, Alexandria. An Alexandrian.” He touched my head softly. His hand was cool in the hot, cocktail-fumey night, and he cool and calm, keeping us beyond the noise and upheaval, the monkey-business at the cabinet. “Will you be an Alexandrian, Judas?”

  I glanced up at him then. His face was intent, actually innocent. Do I mean naïve.

  “I’d like,” he said, “to take you to a courtyard that has a beautiful green cistern, and lamps that shine in the water. But you’re much too young, and he’d kill me. He likes women, too, you see. But we must all be faithful. Can you imagine it for me, one night, Judas, sitting by the green pool with me? Je te veux... By the time you’re ready, I’ll be old. It took me by surprise. I didn’t know one could fall in love at sight, and with a child. Will you tell her this, what I’ve said, your mother? Please don’t. I don’t trust your mother. She might bring you to me— Don’t. Whatever you do, don’t tell her.”

  From his hand resting on my hair a wave of tingling newness poured all through me. I wanted to fall down asleep or otherwise unconscious at his feet. Have him pick me up, myself boneless. Take me to the courtyard with the pool. There we would be, and do what? Flickerings moved in my belly. Something stirred, a snake. Then I felt very sick, and ran quickly out of the room, to the place with the bucket, where I threw up violently. Chushi would curse me when she found it, my sick in her bucket. One more mess.