“You know this chalk?” the first voice asked.
“I seen this chalk shot with a flare,” the near man said. “I seen this chalk get just about melted, man.”
It was the man from the crap game. Ordinarily I might’ve been pleased to be remembered by someone so antithetical to myself, even if it was just for being shot. But they’d come up and broken into a privacy I wanted to prolong.
“Is this guy bothering you?” Goat said idiotically, meaning me.
“He okay,” Shida said. “I was just showing him how to do that.”
“You wan show me, too?” said the first man, who had called me a chalk, a thin anonymous figure with an entitled drawl. In the dim he looked like the universal ballplayer, so without memorable characteristics he’d need to wear a special headband or elbow sleeve to distinguish himself.
They all went quiet, waiting for her answer. I watched her, feeling shouldered aside, wanting her to say she only slapped me, but she seemed to find the situation familiar, and I watched a look of resignation flit across her face.
“Okay,” she said, and suddenly stood, and I watched in disbelief as her arm bent back and her open hand flew out.
The thin man caught her by the wrist and held her, watching her carefully. He laughed his dry hunh of a laugh, once. Then he just took her away. I couldn’t believe she would really go. Her arm remained fully extended, like a proud prisoner, but she walked along behind him. The rest of the group turned and trailed after the couple, Goat striding excitedly to keep up.
“I can’t slap all you,” I heard her say.
Somebody told her she could try.
As they moved away, I saw Belmont was with them, and he turned to me a moment with what must have been sympathy.
“But I was talking to her,” I said.
“You could come, too. But it’s best you don’t.” And then he melted away and was gone.
I stood and looked around at the laughing, cordial faces of the drinkers who had stepped aside for this rough procession. I felt my face screw up in judgment and in condemnation of them, of their automatic politeness that did not know what it was condoning, yet I felt paralyzed but to condone it myself, by my own uncertainty about what would happen to her, and her resignation to it. The fire stung my face, the roaring pyre turning before my eyes from a festive backdrop into the killing, consuming element it had always been.
I needed to see Calyph. In his absence he seemed a slumming angel who would know this moral terrain surely and instantly, and I wandered the estate after any sign of him with a glass in my hand, and then another, feeling only sicker and more sober with each drink. I went out to the cliff and found no one and looked down at the obliterating waves. Coming back again, I ended up by the fire at the table with the masks. Feeling by that point that my knowledge of the secret going on up in the house, in some bed in some little room, had disconnected and banished me from the society of the party, I put on the mask of the Clinton family cat, hoping to be comforted.
The two women came past with their own masks pulled up flat on top of their heads.
“Socks!” they said.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Have you seen Calyph?”
“Who?”
“The basketball player.”
“Ha-ha,” one said.
“Be more specific, cat.”
I opened my mouth against the flat of the mask with further impatience but felt a strange blankness in my mind. I could not describe him.
“He needs a haircut,” I said finally. “He’s proud. When he laughs he looks crazy.”
They looked back at me blankly.
“The injured one,” I said.
“Oh,” they both said swiftly. But they shook their heads.
“Come back, Socks,” they called after me. Stumbling beyond the edge of the light, I almost bumped into Joseph Jones, who sat primly at a wrought-iron table in the gloom, a thick binder open in front of him as if he were auditing the party. He frowned at me, and as soon as I was by him I peeled off my mask and tossed it away.
When I could wander no longer, when there was nowhere left to go but after her, I squared myself and went slowly back toward the house. Lit from within with soft and ordinary light, it had a solid and almost monastic look after the pavilion. Walking toward it, I tried to instill in myself the hope that I was moving out of the backyard wilderness into a more ordered world.
The whole main floor was empty. In the dining room, the food lay covered in its dishes, present only in its smell. In the white living room, a pot of tea sat next to two clean glasses. I cupped the pot and it warmed my hand.
Then he came up the stairs, from where our rooms were, buttoning his cuffs, the universal player. I straightened and moved toward him, looking for signs, for scratches on his neck or who knew what, but he looked only bored and flawless and entirely composed.
“’Sup, chalk,” he said, and nodded as he went past, moving without slowing, acknowledging and dismissing me in one gesture, out toward the wilderness.
And then I heard voices from below. Even as they broke out in argument I was moving, and yet as soon as I saw Ras appear he was speeding toward me and past me already at an impossibly brisk walk.
“Do not come down heah,” he said in a loud, fussy voice. “Do not come down.”
Below in the low, narrow hall, Belmont leaned against the wall opposite a closed door, frowning. As I watched, Ras took him by the shoulder, then stood in front of the door, angrily composing himself. Inside it was quiet but for a heavy jerking sound, like a bed being moved by two people who disagreed about where to put it.
“We told him it won like that,” Belmont said. “She okayed the first brother, you know? We told him you can’t just go in. You gotta wait for her to say. But he didn’t wanna hear it.”
“Just go, please,” Ras said. “Just please go back to de party and enjoy yourself.”
He straggled away, troubled but reprieved, too willing, and I followed him out of the hall and then stopped around the corner.
I heard Ras take a last square breath, making himself ready, and then the knob of the door turned and I heard three voices rise up all at once, protesting one another, the men arguing indistinguishably beneath a woman’s sudden, powerful, repetitive cry of no. It didn’t go on long—what was there to argue, next to that cry—but the man inside the room demanded his say, and so a dispute sprang up, and continued even out into the hall, as Goat limped past me shirtless and smelling of fresh rubber, bleeding from the ear and pulling with all the dignity he could summon at his loose unbelted slacks. As Ras shoved him along, Goat was using, in the maintenance of his own defense, the same phrases he had so recently come to favor, between bottles of champagne, as organizing principles for his life as it culminated in parties, that this, just this, this was how you knew you had a sweet time, this was how you knew what to remember, and even after I lost sight of him, herded away in the passage toward the pool, he was still doggedly negotiating the prospect of being allowed to return.
I crept up to the dark, half-shut door, listening. I wanted to go in but the bitter smell in the air repelled me.
Inside, a lamp clicked on, and in the sudden light I pushed through. She was sitting in bed, clothed, opening a book. She looked at me firmly, as if willing me to accept the normalcy of this scene, and I could think of nothing to say or even to look back at her. I just stood. She wore a loose turtleneck sweater and an overlarge pair of square, plastic-framed glasses. There was only the bitter rubbery unmentionable smell of aftersex thickening the air.
“Fun’s over,” she said finally.
I went and sat at the end of the bed.
“You think you gonna hold my hand through this?” she asked. “We got people for that.”
“Let me see that book,” I demanded.
She handed it over with a scornful look, but readily. It seemed to relieve her a little not to be pitied, to fulfill a simple and immature demand. The novel was some historical Mormon th
ing about somebody’s twenty-seventh wife or so, and I flipped dismissively through its pages. I read it for a few minutes, making a show of it. I was deeply pained by its every imagined transgression. She wanted to read her way back to normalcy and I hoped to do my part.
“I wish we could have kept talking before,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I was going to whup you with those balloons.”
“I’d have slapped you again.”
“Do you want to?”
There didn’t even seem to be time for her to parse the question before I felt her palm again and my face break out tingling. I looked up at her, amazed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Was that like rhetorical?”
“No,” I said, and she slapped me again on the other side.
“Okay,” I said.
“Your glow’s balanced now,” she told me. “Don’t that feel better?”
“Take it out on me,” I said. “Whatever you got.”
She looked at me flatly. I was not even in the same world as her trouble. “I took it out on him. I about ripped his nutsack open. He didn’t even get it in, weak little crooked-dicked bitch. Now gimme my book.”
I heaved it at her carelessly and it splashed against her knees. Again I saw her palm flash out, but this time I was just ready enough to deflect her enough to get hurt, and her nail raked the corner of my mouth. I felt my head jerk in surprise, and my hand shot up, all out of proportion, as though to ward off permanent disfigurement.
“Poor baby. Did I hurt you?”
I tongued the spot and tasted blood.
I felt her hand again on my face, tenderly now, brushing my lip. Her face was poised beyond the blockade of her wack glasses. I heard the air going in through my nose loudly.
“The white man’s skin . . .” she began, like she was narrating a nature documentary. “Feel like a newspaper nobody wanna look at.”
Her fingers traveled on, pressing lightly on my cheek. Her eyes were curious and unafraid, as though she were making a purely scientific inquiry. I felt myself holding my breath, in order to still myself, that I too might be controlled to this point of delicate sensitivity. I felt myself submitting to the scrutiny of her sad, almost pitying eyes and the touch of her impersonal fingers. I felt understood.
And then a strange, ripe smell caught in my nose. Her fingers brushed across the pores on my inner cheek, and I smelled faint spices from her cooking, but beneath, at the heart of the smell, there was something rank, something rotten or raw, as though the odor of bad meat had been pushed into the pores of her fingers, or that caught within her nails was some bit of pork fat. The bitter stink of aftersex from the first man again flooded my nose, smelling like rubber and the absence of love.
The smells seemed to join together in her then. They seemed to be coming from her very skin. I gave a hard involuntary cough. I’d never been that near to a black woman before—perhaps that was just how they smelled. I coughed again, and I saw her sadly curious eyes widen and then focus, and she leaned back swiftly, her face questioning and flattening already into defensive derision.
“Boy, you think this is that? After him?”
I sat there a moment, smelling her. I could feel it acrid in my nose. I exhaled, trying to suppress my revulsion, thinking of my own stink, of Calyph’s sweat, of all the smells that had been pressed into her that night but her own. But I couldn’t get any hold on myself. That’s how they smell, some part of me whispered. I stood and turned away.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, but I just left her there.
I felt a desperate need to wash my face, but the bathroom on the servants’ floor was occupied—as a detainment center, I guessed, for I could hear Ras’s low voice from within. Dazed, I wandered on, toward the pool, picking up a towel from the stack with the vague notion that in submerging myself altogether I could become so cleansed as to have my instinctive responses altered, so I was no longer revolted by the very blackness in her that was what drew me to their men. It had always been there, I knew, that fear, that a black woman should want me, or even just let me close to her, unrealized only because of the utter whiteness of my world. I thought of Shida’s nose and the texture of her hair, and how when she bent over I saw her as a fieldworker, and felt all the narrow, frowning men of my lineage, their faces behind my face, angry and impotent and wasted, men gone from the earth and the earth better for it, myself the last of this dying fallacy.
The poolroom was darker the higher you looked, the walls wavering in the upcast of its submerged lights. The rock wall where earlier in the week the Pharaoh had led an afternoon of cliff diving was pocked with black that glistened like volcanic glass, and beyond the pool a curtain of steam hung still above a raised stone tub. I was about to strip off my shirt when I heard a sneeze.
I edged forward until I could just see through the steam. Odette was sunk deeply in the tub, the ends of her loose hair floating around her, the water lapping at her throat.
“It’s you,” she said, the words echoing rounded and childish.
“Shouldn’t you be at the party?”
“They don’t need me tonight,” she said, the lisp filtering coolly out of her voice. “I’m just for when there’s nothing better.”
I stood before her with the mist around me, wishing I was more compelling. I could almost feel her trying to summon some interest as she stared up at me.
“You’re bleeding,” she said suddenly. Her hand came out of the water and I could see the straps of a demure, black-and-white one-piece.
“I’m a man of violence,” I told her.
“It’s very soothing in here.”
I kicked off my shoes just to see how we would feel about it, and then I went from there. I got down to my undershirt and trousers and decided it was far enough. The trousers had been torn a little that day I’d been flared and I was grateful to be seeing them to their ruin. Throwing the clothes to the ground, I felt a flash of disdain for myself, at my relief in settling back so immediately into unexamined lust for my own people.
I’d stepped up on the platform when I saw a second towel and a wallet laid out beyond her own discarded things.
“Who’s that?” I asked, sliding into the water.
“Who?” she asked innocently.
My foot brushed hers a moment beneath the water and she kicked out at me playfully. “It’s only me,” she said.
Watching my shirt pull away from my skin and bubble with the surface, I leaned back and tried to look comfortable. As I stretched my legs out I could feel hers entwine with mine—it was like the sight of my blood had announced a new physical magnetism.
“Who hurt you?”
“Some lady,” I said, knowing this was the right answer.
“There’s just one drop, and it doesn’t fall. It gets bigger but it just hangs.” She reached out and touched my face. No one had ever liked to touch me and suddenly I was irresistible. She put her wet hand on my chin but avoided the wound, which she seemed to revere.
“Have you ever been married?” she asked suddenly.
“I haven’t even been born yet,” I told her.
“Really?” Her eyes lit in admiration. “I bet you’re the oldest person here but me.”
“You?”
“Look,” she said. She lifted herself a little out of the water and ran her hand over her side where the suit curved away. As the skin pulled taut, two stretch marks purpled out.
She held the fabric back for me to touch the marked skin. I traced my finger across, but I couldn’t feel anything.
“They’re all children,” she pronounced. “But they’ve already lived full lives, and we’re gray and wrinkled and full of potential.”
She smiled at me, wryly. When she spoke again her lisp had dried up entirely, and her voice was cool and exact. It was an affect, and it was shocking to hear this honed, grown woman’s voice. She seemed almost a different person.
“We had a fight, Savier and I, about marriage. We talk a
bout it all the time, but I know he won’t. He says it’s me; he says I always want other people. But I don’t. If I was set up I could just let all that go by. What can I do but give myself to someone, before I get old? I know it won’t work, it won’t make me happy forever. I know we’ll end up in hate. But I’ll do it just the same.”
Slowly she submerged herself. For a moment she peered up at me through the water’s churn, and I knew I’d seen her before after all, on some pinup website. She was on a gray beach much like the one beyond the walls. There were about thirty pictures of her, in which she was captured walking down to a rocky shore in what looked to be an icy spring dawn, wearing a simple black dress. Her hair was much longer then, and black—it must have been her goth phase. What made the pictures most memorable drew the focus off her: the errand captured in the photoset was the “walking” of a puppy, made of bones. It looked like a done-up veterinary skeleton, leashed with a red ribbon and set off through the chill dew as though it were a necromancer’s best friend, and she casually possessed of a few of the more fashionable black arts. Toward the sea they went, in somber procession, stopping here and there so she could scratch behind its vanished ears and carefully dry its feet. As the pictures progressed, the bone puppy led her to the beach and then down, stone by stone, to the edge of a tidepool. In the last photograph she stared up at the camera from beneath the water, clutching the puppy to her chest. By then the set had become a full nude.
She looked up at me then as she had looked at all of us, all the round world of men, through the tidepool. The world was full of naked people getting older. It was true, what she said: in the presence of men who’d been tracked in scouting magazines since the fifth grade, who’d been the new names shouted by overexcited color guys during thawing March days, when I was feeling really sort of a big deal now for having got a prime slot on college radio, one felt older, like talent already wasted. Our eyes were failing, our spines were curling in, soon we would be thirty, and thirty-five; we were graying in the womb of our undefined future excellence. To love sports, to love music, to love how young women in blinding bloom sat on old gray rocks and opened their arms, was to live in a world where it got late early. The sunken-eyed coach only now approaching mastery, the craggy composer of the sublime concerto, became irrelevant; how unhappy they looked, for all their wisdom, like they scratched their balls and got ashes on their fingers, on this elemental earth next to which even our ancience is fleeting. But, oh, old enlightenment, your business is nice, but while a man can yet jump so high his breath snuffs a candle on the back of the rim, while Odette unfolds her arms, then, old enlightenment, go somewhere and wait for us to need you, we will live forever as long as this lasts.
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