The Healing

by Gayl Jones

  I took my shoes off and put my feet upon the bed. Maybe I was trying to behave spontaneous and witty, if that was the sorta woman he liked. The odor-eaters in them were worn, I shoved them under the bed.

  I bet you like her singing, I said. I bet you’re a closet fan. I bet it ain’t true that you don’t listen to her, at least her recordings, I bet you’re a closet Joan Savage fan. I love your crazy quilt.

  Let’s go downstairs, he said.

  I’d rather stay up here.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  After her recording session Joan wanted to come back and have dinner in the room, so I ordered up. She sat on the corner of the bed, brooded and ate a ham and cheese croissant. I sat in a chair, a bowl of chef’s salad on my lap, and turned on the television. The Comedy Club, Then on another channel they were talking about a bidding duel at a yearling sale, a bidding duel between a Saratoga breeder and another man, a foreigner. Then they referred to the other man as a German, but when they showed a closeup of the man’s face, I almost dropped my salad.

  That’s the guy, I said, pointing.

  What guy?

  The guy I spent my summer vacation with. Up in Saratoga. Didn’t I tell you about that guy? He’s from Germany. You know I told you I met this colored guy from Germany. Did I tell you about this colored guy from Germany? African German.

  I asked you who’d you win in Saratoga, but you didn’t tell me. African German?

  I don’t know if that’s what he calls himself, though. Like those Portuguese friends of yours from Rhode Island, they don’t call themselves African Portuguese, they just call themselves Portuguese. You know, those Portuguese friends of yours, you said when you first met them in Rhode Island, you thought they were jigs, but they’re Portuguese.

  I didn’t tell you that. Jamey musta told you that. They’re his friends, not mine. I did sing in a club owned by one of them. I think Jamey got me a gig in that club. He didn’t want me to sing in just anybody’s club, you know. He won’t admit it, and he never came to that club to hear me sing. ’Cause that friend of his said, How come Jaime never comes to my club anymore—I think he calls him Jaime. He had this club fixed up to look like a little fishing village in Portugal. Well, upstairs looked like a little fishing village in Portugal, but the downstairs part of the club looked like a regular Lisbon nightclub, which really looks like a nightclub anywhere. Anyway, so it was because I was singing there. I mean, that Jamey wouldn’t come to the nightclub anymore. So this friend of Jamey’s just thought it was because Jamey thought I’d be nervous, you know, with him being my lover in my audience, but I knew the true reason, that he didn’t want me to be a singer anyway, he just got me the gig there so’s he’d have some control, you know. I did think they were jigs, though, then found out they’re Portuguese. A lot of them my own complexion, you know, but calling themselves Portuguese. Like the people from Cape Verde, you know. But you know, the Portuguese all over Africa and the New World, and the Portuguese the first colonists, and wanting to hold on to their colonies longer than anybody else, except maybe the English in Ireland. I learned to sing a few songs in Portuguese. That’s when I first got interested in singing in other languages. . . . He’s from Germany?

  Yeah. They been in Germany since the seventeenth or eighteenth century or some shit. I thought maybe he was the son of one of those African or African-American soldiers that stayed in Germany after the war, you know, like you know after the war a lot of African-American soldiers, well some of them, stayed in Europe and the Pacific and married foreign women, you know, after the different foreign wars, rather than just be second-class citizens in America, you know, but he says they’ve been in Germany since the seventeenth or eighteenth century, not just since the war. That they’re as German as the Germans. In fact, during the war they fled Germany, he says, and went to Switzerland, but then they returned to Germany after the war. But he says they’re as German as the Germans.

  I don’t think anyone’s as German as the Germans. I usedta have this German professor for chemistry. He’s one of the leading chemists in the world. I think he’s a former Nazi or some shit, Jamey thinks he’s a former Nazi, but they still consider him one of the world-class chemists. He said he spent some time in Argentina after the war, but that don’t mean he’s a former Nazi. There were Germans who were in the Resistance, the Germans had a Resistance just like the French, but you just hear about the Nazis, and Jamey thinks every German of that generation was a Nazi, I don’t think he’s a Fascist son of a bitch or anything like that, though Jamey thinks he’s a Fascist if not a Nazi and wouldn’t take any classes with him. I think he started to take one class with him and then walked out, I remember he gave me this reading list. I thought it was going to be chemistry, but it wasn’t chemistry, it was German philosophy. He said it would help me to develop my rational mind. And he usedta listen to Wagner all the time. You know what listening to Wagner means. That’s probably why a lot of people rumored him to be a former Nazi, because the Nazis usedta love Wagner. But then when he’d listen to Wagner, he’d look all romantic, you know. I remember I saw him in the pub—the Graduate Center had a pub—in the pub listening to Wagner, earphones in his ears, but I knew he was listening to Wagner. He curved his little finger for me to come over, and when I came over he bought me a beer and asked me whether I thought in pictures, whether when I thought I thought in pictures, or whether I thought in words or in numbers or in abstractions. That was all he asked. I didn’t answer, of course, because I thought everybody thought in pictures and words and numbers and abstractions, and that a scientist, even a true scientist didn’t just have to think in abstractions. But I knew what he was trying to suggest, that if I thought only in pictures, that I must truly be a primitive. And I knew he was listening to Wagner because of that romantic look. . . . and he never called me by my first name, like the other professors. He called me Miss, well my name wasn’t Savage then, but it might as well have been, the way he said it. But I liked the way he said it. And he asked me once why I hadn’t chosen him for my advisor. Because I had this African-American professor for my advisor, you know, even though he wasn’t a chemist, but a physicist, and he, the German professor, he was the most renowned of the professors in our department, more renowned than the advisor I’d chosen, and’s got chemistry textbooks used in all the major universities and could’ve done more for me. I remember his study was some type of fish that was supposed to have healing powers or healing substances. I keep thinking the remora, but it was another fish, some type of tropical fish. I remember his colleagues thought he was a lunatic or something, thought he’d already made his reputation, so he could pretty much do any type of research he wanted. I remember I envied his freedom, though. A free man among free men. He worked with only a few graduate students, and only those he wanted to work with, and he was free to pursue his research. A free man among free men. He helped me decide what I wanted to be.

  What do you mean? Free? A free woman among free women? I joked.

  By helping me to decide what I didn’t want to be. He said I could come and work with him and just pursue my own research. That was what I wanted. That was my ideal. I was developing this spectroscopic theory that I thought had real potential. I don’t remember anything of it now. He knew I was having financial worries. He knew I didn’t have enough financing for the sort of research I wanted to do. My scholarship barely paid my tuition. I could have gotten more money if I’d agreed to teach after college, but I didn’t want to be a teacher, I wanted to do research. He said I wouldn’t have any financial worries. He offered me money. He asked me whether I needed money. He asked me how much money I needed. He’d won prizes, he said, and so he didn’t have any financial worries himself. And the university was quite generous, and he was always receiving grants to pursue his own research. He simply asked me how much money I needed for my research. He had a wife, he said, but he wasn’t making any proposals to me that she wouldn’t consent to. He had helped other students
who needed money. And then he asked me whether I thought in pictures. . . . African German. I didn’t know they had slaves in Germany. But I guess they’ve had slaves everywhere in Europe, made slaves out of Africans as well as each other.

  I think they just came over to Germany, not as slaves. I don’t know their history. I think he said he’s part Hottentot or something. I found that interesting, that he actually knows his African tribe, that he could say, I’m part Hottentot. He said they weren’t slaves when they came to Germany, they came as free men. Hottentot, I think. I think he said Hottentot.

  I read about that somewhere. That they usedta bring these Hottentots into Germany and put them on exhibit. One of those countries. I took an anthropology course once and they were talking about the relationship between the Hottentots and the Germans, but I don’t remember exactly what they said about the relationship between the Hottentots and the Germans. I know they used to bring Africans into. Europe and put them on exhibit, you know, when they weren’t making slaves of them. Like the Hottentot Venus. I read somewhere about the Hottentot Venus. Somebody wrote a poem about her, but I read it somewhere else, in one of my nonfiction books, so I know it’s real. But I think that was France. I know, they used to put Africans on exhibit in France. You know, in those intellectual saloons. I like to call them intellectual saloons, Zooing them, you know. That’s what I call it, zooing people, when you don’t treat them like human beings. I think that professor would’ve zooed me if I’d let him. If I must be zooed, then I’ll zoo myself. There’s a famous African man they put on exhibit like that too. I forgot the name of that man. A pygmy, I think. Somebody wrote a book about him, though.

  Anyway, he’s got all these bodyguards. I don’t know if he’s paranoid or what. Real wealthy, you wouldn’t believe. That African German.

  Yeah, I’d believe, she said. When I was playing that club in Paris, you remember that group of wealthy freaks we met. From New Orleans, I think. I read about them too. The free coloreds who used to go to school in Paris.

  They weren’t freaks.

  You mean he didn’t give you the bum’s rush?

  No. Maybe he thought I had money myself. At first anyway. He was treating me like he thought I had money. You know how people treat you when they think you’ve got money, and then how they treat you when they find out you ain’t got shit. Or when they think you ain’t got shit, and then they find out you got money, or they think you got money. Like this woman working in this company was talking about how her bosses were treating her like shit, but then when she moved up in the company, the people started treating her like sugar, and the same people used to treat her like shit, and then she became their boss. They were like bossing her around and then she became their boss. I read that in one of those books of yours on management styles and techniques. That’s why, they say, you’re supposed to treat everybody like sugar.

  I treat everybody the same, she said. She straightened and watched the screen. The announcer was talking about the German buyer, how the German buyer had driven the bidding up to the largest it had ever been. The yearling he’d purchased had sold for five million dollars.

  This is the largest that’s ever been paid for a yearling, said the announcer.

  Ain’t he cute? I asked.

  Naw, he ain’t cute.

  I mean Josef, not the yearling.

  He ain’t cute. He’s beautiful. She sulked and bit into her croissant. How’d you meet him anyway?

  I told you.

  Tell me again.

  I told her again.

  Maybe he ain’t paranoid. You know what they say about paranoia? How’d he get to be so rich anyway?

  I don’t know. I never asked him.

  You wouldn’t. Maybe he’s a gangster.

  I don’t think so. He just breeds horses is all I know. Breeds and races horses. Gotta farm in Kentucky. Thought I was spying on him. I told him about you.

  You told him about me?

  Yeah. We listened to some of your music. He likes Wagner, though. You know, Mozart, That sorta music. I don’t know what sorta business he was in over in Germany, though. He was telling me about some sort of business negotiations, but I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. I didn’t want him to explain what he was talking about because I didn’t wanna sound ignorant, you know. I think he said something about arbitrage. That’s when he thought I had money, and there ain’t too many people who’s rich and stupid, and least whilst people thinks they’s rich they usually don’t believe ’em to be stupid. But poor people can be as stupid as they wanna be, I mean even when they ain’t stupid people thinks they’s stupid, ’cause they’s poor, you know. Like when people say, If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich? He says he’s in arbitrage. What’s that?

  That’s some kinda mediator. Arbitrage, you know. Maybe he’s a mediator in different business disputes, you know, disputes between different businesses. Somebody Jamey went to school with does that shit. But he’s a lawyer, though. I guess you don’t have to be a lawyer, though, to do that. You can be a regular businessman and do arbitrage for other businesses. I know there are businesses that are just in the business of doing arbitrage for other businesses, contract negotiation and that kinda thing. Or maybe he’s just a gangster and telling you that shit.

  Just because somebody tell you a incredible story don’t mean it ain’t the truth. Like I remember when Norvelle and I went to this cocktail party at his university. He don’t like to go to them university cocktail parties, but he went to this one, ’cause some famous African anthropologist or anthropologist of Africa supposed to be at the cocktail party. I thought it was gonna be a man, but turned out to be this woman feminist anthropologist. He thinks she has a lot of interesting things to say about Africa from the feminist perspective. There’s another feminist anthropologist he thinks is bullshit, but this one he seems to sorta respect. She’s sorta a Afrocentric feminist, though. I don’t think that’s the same as a feminist feminist. Or maybe she don’t even call herself a feminist. She just look like a regular woman to me, though. So somebody asked me what did I do, ’cause people always wants to know what it is you do as if that tells ’em who you are, and I said I’m a beautician. And they thought I was lying or joking, you know, ’cause they didn’t believe that Norvelle would marry a beautician, him being a university professor, that he would have hisself a professional woman, you know, maybe like that Afrocentric feminist anthropologist woman, you know, being a university professor and publishing in the scholarly journals puts him in the middle class, you know. Now you know you’re not a beautician, this woman says. The provost’s wife, I think. And somebody else told her, She’s a photojournalist. Because Norvelle had used some of the photographs that I took when we were over there in Africa in some of the articles that he’d published about medical anthropology, you know, and got them published in a more popular magazine than his usual little articles that he publishes in the little professional journals ’cause most of them don’t use photographs, you know, Norvelle says the more popular the magazine the more photographs they use, that’s why the most scholarly magazines don’t got no photographs in them, and that’s even anthropology, ’cause the scholarly magazines don’t want you to confuse them with National Geographic, though he uses some of my photographs in some of the books he writes, but they usually print all the photographs together in one section so that the books still look scholarly. So anyway they preferred to believe that I’m a photojournalist ’cause that’s a more credible story, you know. Even though Norvelle’s origins is supposed to be inner city in Memphis, you know, he’s supposed to be middle class. They do own this renovated boardinghouse now, though, then that sorta makes them the landlord class, though he grew up in the inner city of Memphis, the Memphis ghetto, you know. But being a university professor that’s the only type of woman that they could imagine that Norvelle could love, a photojournalist, you know. And I guess you prefer to believe that he’s a gangster, that African German, ’cause I suppose for y
ou that’s a more credible story of how a African, even a German African or a African German, that ain’t no gangster or entertainer could get to be a rich man. Like that friend of yours from Chinatown, that girl you said you went to school with in that private school in Connecticut, you know, when you were in undergraduate school, who you said everybody thinks is a gangster ’cause she owns all those restaurants and shit.

  You mean Isabel Kong?

  Yeah.

  Isabel Kong and Little Lady Kong. That’s her daughter. I think she is some kinda gangster, to tell the truth. Some kinda bandit, but very urbane, the urbane type of bandit. She was an art student when I knew her at school, and had all these ambitions of becoming a great artist, you know. I thought she was really good myself. They’d have these student exhibitions, you know, exhibitions of the student artist, her painting and sculpture. She thought I was an artist, when we first met, because it was at a student art exhibition, and she asked me which of the paintings and sculptures were mine, and couldn’t believe it when I told her I was studying chemistry. We had only one African-American artist there, or who had aspirations for being an artist. And at first she thought I was her. And she comes over and says, Are you so-’n’-so? Because she was going to tell me she liked one of my sculptures, but I said that I’m not an artist, you know. Anyway, I saw her again when you got me that gig in Amsterdam. She said she was opening a new restaurant there, and she also wanted to open a new restaurant in Hong Kong. I think she makes false passports now, though, for illegal Chinese. I hear all sorts of stories about her, but it’s not the Isabel Kong I knew at school. When I started singing, she thought I was being truer to myself, though, than when I wanted to become a research chemist. I remember when I started singing in the clubs around school, she’d always come to hear me. Then she had Little Lady—she’s one of those little girls that you want to say your ladyship when you see her, not that she’s conceited or anything; her real first name’s Javana—out of wedlock and left school and opened her first restaurant. She still paints, but she just puts her paintings on the walls of her own restaurants, you know. Sometimes people’ll see a painting of hers on the wall and want to buy it, but she says she doesn’t know whether they want to buy it because they think it’s good, or just because she’s the notorious Isabel Kong.