“The final thing is to love each other. It's so easy to get caught up in these rules and work and life, but if you're going to go through with this wedding, you have an obligation to God, yourself, and each other to make it work. I'm dishing out all of this advice, and I hope that it's good. Maybe next time around, I'll get it right.”
I reached out and hugged my mother, and she kissed me on the forehead.
“It's your choice, baby. You do what feels good to you. Laurence is a great guy, but don't marry him just because you have a past together. History is history, but you can make the future right.”
“Okay.”
The next Saturday was Valentine's Day, and as I sat at the vanity, looking at myself in the mirror, I took a deep breath.
“You're beautiful,” I said. “And you deserve the best. So go out there and claim your man.”
I pulled the veil down over my face, stood up, and said a prayer.
An Act of Faith
DAVID ANTHONY DURHAM
JOYCE HAD JUST TURNED twenty-one when she first met Calvin, in the fall of 1967- It was a fair day at an outdoor shopping center, where she worked in a flower shop. She stood behind the counter, her concentration focused on the cash register, whose jammed drawer she was trying to pry open with a screwdriver. She moved gently, eyebrows close together in concentration, scared of scratching the paint and yet angry because the stupid thing was always messing with her.
Business had been light all day. Perhaps that was why her head snapped up so forcefully when he strode through the entrance, bringing with him a gust of air that ruffled the leaves of the plants around the door. He held a clipboard in one hand, a small package under his arm. A pencil stuck out from behind his ear. He was a slim, dark-skinned brother in his early twenties, with an athletic body like a mid-range sprinter. His tight-fitting brown slacks hugged the muscles of his legs and outlined the firm shape of his behind. Joyce took him in with one quick glance and then shoved the screwdriver under the counter.
He skipped-slid toward her and handed her the package. “Hey, girl, you working here or tossing the joint?”
“It's jammed,” Joyce answered. “Should I sign?”
Their hands touched as he handed her the clipboard. Though Joyce was shy by nature and circumstance, she found her gaze lingering on his for a few long moments. His eyes pressed heavy on his lower lids, but instead of looking tired they gave off a bemused sensuality, as if he were watching her from under the bed sheets, contemplating her after a moment of intimacy sprung on her by surprise. Joyce suddenly remembered that she hadn't brushed her teeth after lunch. She feared that a bit of lettuce was wedged between her lower front teeth. With her lips shut tight, she looked down to sign for the package. She could feel his eyes watching her, almost like a physical touch that slid down her arm and focused on the bones of her wrist.
Joyce handed the pad back to him. “I have something I'm supposed to mail out with you-all. I just need to find the address.” She searched through an address book below the counter, then began filling out the tab. She again felt the touch of his eyes on her. She couldn't fight the urge her eyes seemed to feel to look up. When she did so—just for a moment—he was indeed gazing back at her, with the oddest look of enchantment in his eyes.
He said, “I'm having the strangest feeling watching you. It's like … I mean, it makes me think … I just might fall in love with you.” He waited, as if he knew Joyce would need a moment to weigh the full import of the statement. “I don't know if you'll believe me on this, but I have this sort of sixth sense. My grandmother used to call it the touch. It means that I always know my destiny. All I have to do is keep my eyes open, and if I do, sometimes I can see my future clear as day.”
Joyce cast her voice dry and humorless. “You're telling me you're touched, are you?”
“I'm saying something just hit me like a flash, just when I was watching you.” He eyed her for a moment, ran his fingers over his chin, and seemed to consider his words carefully. “When I look at you, a bunch of different things pop up in my head. I see us getting old together. I see me scraping the bun ions off your toes. I see a whole mess of grandchildren around us, and a big ol’ dog sitting at our feet as we watch the sunset, thinking about how fabulous our life has been, and how glad we are that we didn't let the love slip through our fingers back in ‘67 when we met straight out of the blue. Same thing didn't occur to you?”
Joyce finished writing and handed him the envelope and mail form. “What makes you think I have bunions?”
“Okay, I'm not sure about the bunion thing, but … do you like dogs?”
“Allergic. One whiff and I'm spitting and hissing.”
He smiled thinly and acknowledged his tactical error with a shrug. He reached out a finger as if to touch her chin. He didn't do so but motioned as if he were lifting her face up toward his. Which, in fact, was just what happened.
“Listen, I don't know your name or anything about you, but I'm not hustling you. My name is Calvin Carter. I'd like to know you better. That's all. People gotta connect in this world, and sometimes it takes a little faith to let that happen. Sometimes you gotta pull out a couple blocks in that wall and let some air through and look a brother in the face and just give him a moment. That's all I'm talking about. I could tell you my life story; you could tell me yours; then we could see what comes of it. Think we could do that?”
Joyce, as if she heard this question regularly, said, “Let me think about it.” And despite the fact that she told herself Calvin could only be another young hustler doing what young hustlers do, and despite the fact that his invocation of the word love was as subtle as knocking on a door with a battering ram, and despite the fact that her common sense told her she should handle him with the curt, cold civility that she usually reserved for religious fanatics carrying clipboards … Despite all this, think about it was just what she did.
For each of the next five days Calvin waited for Joyce after work. He would rush into the store breathless, still in his work uniform, pluck a flower from one of the bouquets by the door, and present it to her with courtly formality The first time she charged him for the flower and refused to let him walk her home. The second she allowed him to walk with her but wouldn't let him touch her bags. The third she told him he was getting on her nerves. The fourth she asked him if he knew what he was getting into. And this day, the fifth day of his assault, she allowed herself to laugh out loud and look, for long periods, straight into his eyes. They were the kind of eyes that had a certain glint to them, as if the light were always catching them just right.
A few hundred yards from her apartment building Joyce stopped walking. “Where did you get eyes like that?” she asked.
He grinned. “Eyes like what?”
“Eyes like … I don't know like what. That's why I asked.”
He stepped closer, shifting the grocery bags that he carried tucked under his arm. “Why don't you describe them to me? Maybe we can figure it out.”
Joyce opened her mouth as if to say something but then shifted her jaw a little to the left and resumed walking. “You are vain. Get something a little good and it goes straight to a Black man's head.”
Calvin kept up with her. “They come from my momma if you want to know the truth. People say she was part Indian.”
“Where was she from?”
“South Hill, Virginia. Tobacco country.”
“You're a country boy?”
“Born and raised. Most of my family still lives down there. That's where I'd be if I hadn't come up here to find you.” He flashed his smile again, but Joyce just pursed her lips.
When they reached the steps to Joyce's row house, she took one step up and paused. Calvin glanced up at the large structure behind her. The house sat on the corner and was shaped in a strange, triangular design, like a wedge cut out of a cake of red brick. He stepped up as if to look into the lower windows.
“You live here? You share it with someone?”
“It's my parents’ house,” Joyce said, her businesslike tone returning.
“Uh-oh, you still live with your folks? I guess that makes you one of them wholesome-type girls. That's the kind I like. You gonna let me meet them? I got a way with parents.”
Joyce reached out for her bags. “Let's not worry about that. Now, I suppose I should tell you that I don't work tomorrow. So don't go showing up there worrying Mrs. Goldstein with your crazy self. She will call security on you.”
Calvin shifted both bags to one arm and stepped forward. With his free hand he gently reached up and touched the chilled skin of her cheek. “I'm not crazy,” he said. “I like to joke and all, but about some things I'm right serious. Like I'm serious that your face may be the only face I'll ever need. It's that beautiful.”
Joyce's lips crinkled into a crooked smile, defensive even though her words were plainspoken. “How can you be so sure? I can't see things beyond tomorrow.”
“Faith, baby. You need to open yourself up and let what has to happen happen. How about this? From now you don't have to be sure. I'll be sure enough for both of us. Okay? All you have to do is do what you know you want to, and I'll take care that everything else is all right. Okay?”
Her head moved in the tiniest indication of a nod. “Maybe we should start getting to know each other.”
Calvin straightened up and inhaled the cool evening air through his nose. “Yeah. That's what I'm talking about.”
After parting a few moments later, Joyce stood alone inside the house. She leaned her back against the door and listened to the uneasy silence around her, hearing the fading tones of Calvin's voice. When Joyce said that she lived in her parents’ home, she spoke the truth, but a somewhat incomplete truth. She lived in her parents’ house, but the old couple had passed into the next world some nine months before. Robert and Caroline Johnston had had their daughter late in life. They raised her in that drafty old row house that they had correctly prophesied they would live in until they passed on. They had aged into one of those old couples we might all wish to emulate, so used to each other that they seemed to speak from different regions of the same mind, move with different limbs of the same body, and look upon each other with the casual acceptance that one looks upon one's own reflection. They dealt with life's trials with a resigned reliance on each other, on their daughter, and on God. If there was any irony to their lives, it was that they produced a daughter who seemed incapable of inheriting any such trust.
For Joyce, her faith in most things ended one breezy winter night. The house's rattling windows had been sealed with plastic, and the doors stuffed with old rags. These were their customary insulations, and that fateful night they worked so well that the old couple slept their way into death, quietly asphyxiated by a carbon monoxide leak. Joyce had stayed the night at her friend's and would never truly come to terms with why her life was saved by something as frivolous as a sorority dance. Guilt gnawed hard at her, the unshakable belief that she could have saved them had she been home. For many nights she dreamt of waking to the smell of gas, rushing through the house, crying warnings and throwing open the windows, finding her parents sound asleep and shaking them, shaking them, shaking them …
Upon waking from these dreams she often wished that she had been allowed to die with them, instead of being left alone in this empty house, with all her memories, with the vague fear that the world was not to be trusted and that love was a burden too heavy to bear. Thoughts such as these were just a few of the many things held trapped inside her, the bits and pieces of the real her, the things she wished desperately to get beyond, but that she could never imagine sharing with another living person.
Joyce walked alongside Calvin through the damp air of the Capital Mall. She wore a light blue knee-length coat, whose large collar spread across her shoulders. Her face was carefully made up, her straightened hair wrapped tight around the top of her head, pinned in the back with a seashell brooch. Her eyes studied the Washington Monument as they approached it, several hundred yards ahead of them. It was near sundown; the sky was dim and overcast. All day long it had threatened to rain, but they decided to walk anyway, as the streets were less crowded than usual. The air had a moist taste to it that was almost sweet to inhale. As usual, Calvin talked.
“I was over at my buddy's house yesterday watching the Jets game. One of the hardest things for me to do is watch a football game these days. I should be out there myself.”
“Out there yourself doing what?”
“Playing ball! I was good enough. I was better than good enough. I played varsity from the time I was a freshman. Had the fastest hundred yards in the county—would have been a state record, but they didn't recognize my time ‘cause they said it wasn't official. I even had some colleges coming out to look me over. Can you imagine that? Coming all the way out to South Hill?”
“So, what happened?”
“My knee blew. Some fool slammed into me from the side.” Calvin indicated the blow with a chop to his left knee. “And that was that. Ripped the joint apart, tore up the cartilage, did a job on it. You can't mess with a knee, not when you're talking about going pro. Man … It's a shame too. When I was on my game, wasn't nobody that could touch me. It was like I was moving at a different speed than everybody else, always a step ahead.”
For a moment, Calvin hunkered down into a running position. One hand came up before him, and his body indicated slight, subtle weight shifts, as if the walkway before them were full of invisible opponents. He dropped the stance when he noticed Joyce smiling at him. “But I guess that's payback, or something. That's the way the world comes back at you for your sins.”
“What did you ever do that was so bad?” Joyce asked. “You act like you did something unmentionable.”
Calvin looked down at the ground. “Eventually I did. I left South Hill. That was all I had to do to hurt my momma. I ran away, like a thief in the night. When my oldest brother, Marshall, was alive, everyone figured that he and Jefferson would take care of the farm, and I might be the first one to get out and travel or go to school or something. There's some beautiful things about living at South Hill, but it feels so far from the world. Nothing's happening there but small things, close-in-on-you things.”
They had reached a cross street and stood waiting for the light to change. Calvin shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket. “I haven't told you about Marshall, have I?”
“No.”
“He got killed.”
“Murdered?”
“That's the word. Murdered the old-fashion way—out in a field at night, a good, honest southern lynching. After that everybody just knew that I was supposed to stay, help Jefferson and run the farm and get married and that would be my life. But shit …” The light changed, and they started walking. “When I was little, we got National Geographic. I used to read that magazine from cover to cover. All those animals, and countries, and naked little African girls. I spent all that time reading that stuff and just waiting to get out and see it all, and then Momma just expected me to forget about it. How was I supposed to forget? It just never felt like farming was supposed to be my life. So I packed up a handful of stuff and snuck out one night, caught a bus up to D.C., and I've been here ever since. I guess I didn't get that far, really.”
A moment before, when she'd named the method of Marshall's death, Joyce had felt a quick tingle in her lower back, the fear that this was where the truth began to come out, the secrets that might begin to chip away at the image she'd built of Calvin. She'd never been as near to crime as she was with his casual mention of a killing. But a few sentences later he'd moved the conversation along and she'd followed. This was not a man to be afraid of. He'd done nothing to others, and yet the world had done violence to those close to him. She felt her shoulder brush his and had a sudden desire to slip her arms inside his coat and press herself against the heat of him and tilt her head and open her mouth to his, to break through that wall he mentioned and to start consum
ing and being consumed.
Instead, she said, “That's not that bad, Calvin. You have to live your own life.”
“That's not the way Momma sees it. I started writing her letters as soon as I got a place to stay, trying to explain to her and tell her about all the things that were going on around here, the Movement and all, being in the center of everything. She never wrote me back, not once. I don't even know if she read them.” He stopped walking and looked Joyce in the face. “It's been three years. Three years. And it feels like it'll be forever. Like I can't go back there and she'll never come to me here. That gets to me more and more. People got to have connections, don't they?” He reached out, took Joyce's hand, and held it loosely in his. “What do we have without connections? Sometimes I know I had to leave; other times I feel unhinged from everything that made me who I am. You ever feel that way?
Joyce didn't answer. She looked down at his hand and then intertwined his fingers with hers. “Come,” she said, and pulled him on.
Calvin and Joyce's next date began well enough. They ate dinner near Dupont Circle, in a restaurant that specialized in tomato dishes. Afterward they walked to a movie theater and caught a cheap showing of Doctor Zhivago. Calvin enjoyed the film more than Joyce. He liked its grand scale and its focus on one man moving through large historical forces. And he liked the fact that—despite everything else—it was still just a love story.
Joyce nodded as he spoke, agreeing mutely with his enthusiasm. She wasn't thinking much about the movie. Rather, she found herself wondering who this man was, where he came from, and why she so enjoyed listening to his voice, why her eyes so liked to wander over his backside, and why she felt that his hand fit so naturally into the small of her back. She recognized in him many of the same traits that so turned her off in others. It was obvious he liked to hear himself talk. He had a certain vanity that he showed when he smiled. And he, like so many men, looked at the world with a boyish naivete that he both disguised and betrayed by his musical flow of words.
It's All Love Page 12