PEARL LOOKED again at the letter from Mae Ann and knew she would not open it. Not with what had happened earlier. She just couldn’t risk it. Not today.
The apartment was sweltering so she turned on the fan, placed it in the window and kicked off her sandals. She went into the kitchen and opened the freezer in a vain attempt to cool off. From the street below the sounds of children playing filtered into the kitchen along with the sounds of an electric piano from somewhere in the building.
She walked the dark narrow hall to the bathroom and began to fill the claw-footed tub with cool water. As she undressed, Pearl gazed in the mirror and saw her face, still young yet strained and unquiet. She recalled standing beside the road outside Columbus waiting for life to come by and claim her. She hadn’t had this face then. Could never have imagined, standing on that road, what her eyes, caramel-colored, clear and sharp, would see, could see that they had not already. Pearl rubbed her hands across her cheeks as the sounds of a drum and a saxophone drifted into the apartment and whispered for the last time, “In my mother’s house there is still God.”
Lincoln arrived several hours later. The apartment had cooled off and Pearl lay on the bed, sleeping lightly. He lay beside her and kissed her gently, afraid, yet hoping, that he would wake her.
She opened her eyes and he kissed her again. He and Raj had eaten dinner at a Jamaican restaurant and then gone to Raj’s place and smoked several joints. Now Lincoln was pumped full of longing for Pearl.
But before he could even say hello, she moved out of his embrace and said simply, “I didn’t get the part.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.” She turned away from him as though ashamed.
“I’m sorry, baby,” Lincoln said, reaching for her, trying to pull Pearl close to him to comfort her and to comfort himself. “You worked hard. Damned hard. Hell, we worked hard.” He never knew what to say to her at moments like this. He, who had scripted a thousand moves and emotions for Pearl, could not script an adequate response to her pain. And so, bereft of words, he said nothing, merely turned off the lamp beside the bed and removed his clothes and lay beside her. The apartment was as cool as it would get and her body was damp with a light film of perspiration. He kissed her, his tongue deep, rummaging inside her mouth, sliding across her teeth. He could feel her sadness, her defeat. When he kissed her neck, softly, gently, Pearl hugged him tightly and sighed, the sigh wrenched from that place inside her that she never allowed him to touch. He pushed up her slip and his hands were full of her hips. He kissed her stomach and shifted her body beneath him, thinking how perfectly she fit. He was inside her and she was sobbing gently, the way she sometimes did when he loved her, as though his love was too much for her. A breathless moment of release seized her body and it made her cry louder but he knew he had not really touched her. Spent, Lincoln turned away from Pearl, for she had, as always, turned love into a performance in his arms. For that he would never forgive her.
They slept awhile and then Pearl woke, suddenly, perfectly, the way she often did, finding that she could not get back to sleep. She eased out of the bed, slipped on her robe and went into the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of wine and sat at the table listening to the sounds of the night—motorcycles roaring down Lenox Avenue, music from boom boxes on the front porches of houses on their street and an occasional police siren. Quiet, that was the only thing she missed from the south. Quiet. She could not say peace and quiet for she had never known peace, but she missed the quiet. For the deep, unremitting quiet, the heavy blanketing darkness of the rural south, had always made her think that peace would come next, although it never did.
She wondered why he stayed. Why, when Lincoln walked out the door in the morning, he came back in the evening. Why, when there were times she could not stand for him to touch her. Why, when she woke up in the mornings baptized by a rage so clear and dangerous she wondered why she had not yet committed murder. She slept alone at times like that, on a pallet on the floor or in another room, as though Lincoln’s mere presence was an offense.
Once, in Atlanta, she had thought he would leave. There was an affair with a wealthy white woman who had sponsored a number of fund-raisers for the theater. She lived in Scarsdale and Lincoln began taking frequent trips to New York on business and then Pearl found out the trips were to see the woman. When she asked him about it, for she would not have thought to confront him, he told her, “At least she trusts me. She shares her feelings. She’s not locked, sealed against me like you.” His charge had begged her for a defense, but she had denied Lincoln even an argument in favor of their love. Pearl merely turned from him and his words, brushing them aside because they hurt too much and rang with a truth she was determined never to touch. Macon had assured her that it was probably a flirtation, a fascination on Lincoln’s part, a seduction by the woman. The affair ended shortly after she told him she knew. It ended as though Lincoln had been merely waiting for her to discover that she could lose him.
They had survived that. She didn’t know how, but they had. They had also survived the night when, in a rage, she looked at him and saw her father’s face instead and came at him with a knife.
SHE WAS DRINKING. He knew it. Lincoln lay in the bed listening to Pearl in the kitchen. She was drinking again and there was nothing he could do. Nothing he could say. Once he thought he knew her. He thought this mostly because he loved her. Loved her intelligence, her fragility, loved the way she made him want to take care of her and how self-sufficient she was on the stage and how she honored his plays. He had thought once that he knew her. But he knew now he never would. Just after they arrived in New York, and shortly after she changed her name, she told him about her father. They had spent that day hunting for secondhand furniture in the dusty thrift shops along upper Broadway, and they lay on sleeping bags on the floor because their beds wouldn’t come until the next day. And she told him. He lay beside her feeling as though something vital, necessary, had been ripped out of him, stunned, flushed all at once with a complete understanding of everything. And when he was able to fight off the feeling of dread and horror that had shrouded him like a veil, he asked, “Pearl, why didn’t you tell me before? We’ve been together six years. Why did you wait all this time?”
“I didn’t think you would want me if you knew. I didn’t think you could love me,” she whispered into his chest, holding him so tightly, her grip so strong, he could barely breathe.
And as much as the revelation arrived like some terribly belated gift, it changed everything. Now he knew why she was a phantom in his arms, why she often seemed to barricade herself against him. And, as Pearl had feared, the knowing was unbearable. At first he felt betrayed by the years of silence. Then he fell in love with her all over again, because she had borne what she had borne, because she could laugh, could make jokes, could offer affection despite all that. He was determined not just to love her, but to save her. To save her for himself. One day she would mend. He would be the cure.
He heard Pearl moving in the kitchen, putting the wine bottle back in the refrigerator. He saw the light go out and heard her return to the bed. He closed his eyes and turned on his side, pretending to sleep.
WHEN LINCOLN offered her a role in the play Raj was producing, Pearl rejected the idea. She was hungry for affirmation of her talent from another source, and longed to play roles different from the ones Lincoln created. An orphan, he wrote domestic dramas whose characters fled from, rather than found, solace in the family circle. Misunderstandings, petty betrayals, reconciliations that came too late marked the thematic tapestry Lincoln Sturgis had created. His men were strong-willed, capable of raging with a kind of oblique grandeur, like the man who had in the end become his father, J. R. Sturgis. His women were elusive, flighty, seldom bound to home and hearth. Pearl had played a hundred roles Lincoln had created. And now she wanted to see if she could do something more, something different.
But sitting in the audience next to Lincoln on opening nig
ht, she wished she had taken the role he offered, for the voice, the tone, the core of the play he had written was richer and more powerful than anything he had done before. Watching it unfold, Pearl could hardly wait for the play that would follow this one. The audience was rapt, silent with breathless waiting. There were no listless coughs, no one shifting in seats, only an articulate union between audience and actors that Pearl wished fervently she was a part of.
During the reception afterward, in a large hall in the same building as the theater, Pearl watched as members of the audience came up to shake Lincoln’s hand, and theater friends congratulated him on the play. Then Raj entered the room, pushing his way through the crowd, moving toward Lincoln like a hurricane, and shaking his hand mightily in congratulations.
He always made her feel afraid. When she was around Raj, Pearl felt as though she were strangling. He came to their apartment sometimes and he and Lincoln would sit talking, laughing, plotting their artistic strategy. The muscularity of their movements, the intensity of their conversation, always drove her from the room. Raj wore his maleness as starkly as a confession, Pearl thought. She hated the condescending tone he used when addressing her, the way his voice dropped a register, the way he always seemed to be joking with her, never taking her seriously. She hated most the way he looked at her sometimes as though he knew everything about her. Pearl could almost feel herself shrink, disappear, when she was around him. She told Lincoln how Raj made her feel, but he convinced her that her instincts, this time, were wrong. She could sense the respect that he held for Raj, how he thought he was a genius, mostly, Pearl thought, because he wrote plays nobody could understand, but nobody wanted to admit to finding indecipherable.
Suddenly Pearl felt Raj beside her. It was always like that. She felt him before she saw him. He smiled down at her, familiar, too comfortable, too easy, and said, “You should be proud of your old man.”
“I am.”
“He’s gonna go far. Are you ready for that?”
“I think that’s really a question Lincoln should ask me.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right about that. Maybe you’re right.”
He was dressed in splendid green and gold African robes and a fez capped his bushy Afro. He folded his arms across his chest and in that one movement made Pearl feel trapped.
“Lincoln tell you I’m thinking about putting together a company?”
“He mentioned it.”
“Why don’t you try out for it?”
“Maybe I will,” Pearl said, hoping the lie would get him to leave.
Instead Raj’s eyes swept her face with a surgical look. He laughed, saying quietly, “Don’t shit me. I know you got no plans to audition for any company I put together. I know you don’t like me. I just don’t know why.” He turned and left Pearl standing in the corner alone, headachy and tense. She joined Lincoln then, making a great show of kissing him and smiling in happiness, hoping Raj would see.
——
THE PLAY RECEIVED favorable reviews and ran for nearly three months. Lincoln got an agent and began work on his next play. Then in the spring, Pearl got her first stage role in a play being developed by a theater group in Rutgers, New Jersey. She was chosen for one of the three roles in the play after her third callback. She quit her receptionist job and threw herself into the rehearsals. The play opened and closed after four weeks, but her work had been seen by a director casting an Off-Off Broadway play who asked her to read for a supporting part and she got it.
THIS WAS LOVE. Forget about songs on the radio. Poems. Valentine cards. Scented letters scripted in a passionate, precise hand. This was love—the audience on its feet, arrayed before the actors like a roomful of flushed supplicants, so full, so satisfied. Pearl thought the applause would never stop. The audience was content just to stand and gaze upon them, the source of their surprise, the reason for the utter fulfillment that they feared would evaporate once they left the theater, once the lights went down, and the actors marched off the stage. So they clapped to honor the life that had surfaced on the stage, and filtered into the recesses of something they knew, suspected, denied, cherished, hid. To receive this homage, they stood with their hands clasped, like loving brothers and sisters, forgetting the dressing room fights, the on-stage competition. This sound would ring in her head for days. When a bill they couldn’t pay came in the mail, or Lincoln asked again for what she could not give, Pearl would remember this sound, and this feeling. She would open the magic box and take a whiff. The muscles in her cheeks were sore from smiling, her fingers ached from holding Jason’s bony hand, but she could stand here forever. Yes, this was love.
IT WAS 5 A.M. and Lincoln and Pearl sat in the kitchen waiting for the sun to come up. They had stumbled into the apartment an hour earlier, from a party in Queens that was catching its second wind as they left. They had driven from Queens in the used Ford Lincoln had recently bought, sharing a joint of marijuana, stopping at McDonald’s, eating their fries and burgers in the car. Now they sat across from each other at the kitchen table, tired, dazed, but too pumped up by contentment to sleep.
“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the sun come up, at least I don’t remember if I have,” Pearl said, sipping a cup of tea.
“You’d remember if you had.”
“I wish we had a camera so you could take a picture of it,” Pearl said.
“The sun comes up everyday, honey; if we don’t get a picture of it now we can get a picture of it tomorrow.”
“The sun comes up every day. I like that,” Pearl said, smiling so easily that Lincoln could not bear the happiness he felt just looking at her.
“Pearl, you ever thought about getting married?” he asked, easing the words out gently, casting his eyes down at his hands, measuring the rhythm of his voice.
“Married?” she asked, as though she did not quite know what he meant.
“Yeah, you know, married. You ever think about us getting married?”
“Do you?” she asked.
“I have been lately.”
She had been leaning toward him across the table, her hands touching his, her breath close and warm on his face, and then she pulled back, as though stung by his words.
“Well, why, Lincoln?”
“Why not?” he asked, growing queasy with distress.
“Why do we have to go and do that?”
“Why wouldn’t you want to?” he pressed her.
Pearl shifted in her chair and looked out the window without answering. For a long time she watched the sun filling the sky, while Lincoln sat watching her, hating the way she made him feel powerless in this moment of truth, the way she reduced his desire to an afterthought. And when she turned back to him she said quietly, yet with certainty, “I wouldn’t make a good wife, Lincoln. You deserve better. Better than me.”
“You’ll never forget, will you?”
“How can I?”
“I want to protect you, Pearl. I want to take care of you. I want you to be mine.”
“Lincoln, it’s too late for that. Too late. It was too late when you first met me.”
“Then what has all this meant?”
“I don’t know.”
If he could have moved at that moment he would have slapped her. But he couldn’t move, he felt too awful. He watched her walk to the window and stand there gazing out at the street. At last Lincoln found that he could move. He walked up behind her and said, “Just think about it, Pearl, think about it, that’s all I ask.”
“All right, Lincoln, I’ll do that,” she said, her voice as bright as the sun that had just come up, promising absolutely nothing.
When the play ended its run, after nearly ten months, Pearl didn’t work again for almost a year. Then in quick succession she got a few roles as an extra for a television drama, and was offered an understudy role in the touring company of a prizewinning drama by a black playwright that had run on Broadway for two years. When the play hit Boston, she spent as much time as she could wi
th Macon, who was working on her master’s degree in sociology at Boston University.
“HE WANTS TO marry me. Can you believe that?” Pearl asked as they sat on the sofa in the living room of Macon and Courtland’s South End apartment. There was a tentative, groping quality in Macon now that Pearl had sensed over the phone when she called to tell her that she had arrived and what hotel she was staying at. She had heard it in the eager breathlessness with which Macon had said over the phone, “Girl, I’m so glad you’re here.”
“I think you’re the only one who can’t believe he wants you,” Macon said. “Of course he wants you.”
“I just didn’t expect it, that’s all. Especially not after all this time.”
“I gather you told him no,” Macon said, questioning Pearl like a dissatisfied prosecutor grilling a witness for the defense.
“I didn’t really tell him yes or no.”
“Do you love him?”
“As much as I can, I do.”
“As much as you can?”
“That’s right. Probably the most important thing Lincoln’s given me is a home. I remember him telling me that J. R. Sturgis, the man who adopted him, gave him a name, and how much that meant to him. Well, Lincoln gave me a home. A home where I could feel safe and wanted and that has meant everything to me.”
“But, Pearl, you both made a home together. It wasn’t just Lincoln. It wasn’t just you. That’s what he wants to hold on to. That’s what he wants to make special. He’s a good man, Pearl.”
“I told him I can’t belong to anybody.”
“Oh, Pearl, how could you say that?”
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