“You’re okay,” Coco said to herself, smiling kindly at her face in the mirror. “You’re okay,” she intoned in the same voice she used for the children when they fell and scraped their knees on the sidewalk. Medicinally she administered a little more gin into her mouth, which periodically for the past few hours had been going bone-dry.
Why don’t you put on a little makeup, her pre-lib consciousness suggested. Put a touch of Yardley’s London Gold on your lips.
Coco’s fingers clawed some cosmetic equipment closer to the edge of the dressing table so she could begin decorating her face. But the paints and powders couldn’t disguise her expression. Within half a day, Coco’s feisty look had changed to fear. But of course. Why not? Coco was no longer a reckless young wife and mother, charmingly chafing at the bit, contemplating Capri or Corfu. Now she had joined the ranks of x-ed-out women—ex-maidens, ex-prom-queens, ex-wives—the realm of the formerly. Now she was a desperate, unemployed, aging, unwed mother with four children and no expectations. Frantically Coco began gluing on her best nighttime-length Revlon double-fringe lashes. (Why hadn’t Gavin phoned yet? Why hadn’t he called to apologize or to tell her to meet him downtown at a bar so he could give her a deadly serious lecture about reformation rather than repentance so he’d come home again?) The surgical glue smeared along the nylon spine of the lashes was so clumpy that the other ends kept popping up. Impatiently Coco tore both off and tossed them down on her dressing table where they began to curl up and wilt like black widow spiders with rigor mortis. But without her false lashes Coco felt naked and unprepared. Immediately she experienced an urge to apply eye liner. Was making-up now going to be like another long career of counting course credits? Was an unmarried woman who omitted her lashes now required to use both liner and shadow? Was making-up now going to become a crisis like choosing nine credits of social science or three quarters of a foreign language to meet a B.A. requirement?
Call me up, Gavin, you dirty son-of-a-bitch, she ordered.
The phone remained sullenly silent.
Please come back now, Suede, she requested more politely. Now we have enough time and space to get this little affair of ours institutionalized. Coco felt an extraordinary desire to enroll Suede as a Permanent Life-Long Lover right away. But then her pre-lib counselor sent out a special-delivery message. Since Coco didn’t look her ethnic best this evening, it might be advisable to present herself as a wild adulterous housewife rather than a déclassé divorcée.
Coco colored her lips, painfully aware that her beautification ritual was no longer a gratuitous preliminary but a very serious and prosaic preparation—like studying for final exams. Making up was no longer a frivolous glossary to her charms, but rather a necessary and essential introduction to the text. Just like Gavin said, no more fun and games. No longer would she dare to identify or inspect her imperfections. From now on everything was deadly serious. A single woman had to deny any flaws or failures, fears or fat.
And then, suddenly, involuntarily, an unsummoned parade of single women began to march through Coco’s head. One by one, all her female acquaintances—whose singleness was their singularly most outstanding characteristic—appeared in review before Coco’s eyes, smiling bravely as they moved desperately through life. The stage was a small apartment where Mennen’s foot powder was never exposed in the bathroom, where there were no telltale whiskers stuck to the sink faucets, no damp towels balled up in the tub, no extra-firm tooth brush parked in the soap dish, no ties lassoed around doorknobs, no coats draped over chair backs, no shirts drooping over the banister railing, no vacant shoes under the sofa, no newspapers dropped on the floor. Coco saw a woman whose name had been relegated to the Burman’s kitchen telephone directory eating dinner alone, unable to sit down at her round butcher-block table in one of her two ice cream-soda chairs, standing up and snacking at the counter next to the breadbox, the way Coco did when Gavin was out of town. Did single ladies live on sandwich-thin slices of white bread, scooping peanut butter out of a miniature-sized Skippy jar with a stiff but trembling forefinger? Did they eat thick slices of onion on buttered bread and rain garlic salt on their vegetables with impunity? Did they peek through the mailbox every time the bell rang, wait for best sellers to arrive at the Discount Bookstore, check the week’s late movies first thing Sunday morning when the television guide fell out of the paper, and cry when they came home alone after a party?
Oh, no. Please, no. Perhaps in these post-lib days, ad-libbing was easier. Maybe ladies-in-waiting were better off now. Optimistically Coco saw a vision of brussels sprouts defrosting picturesquely next to the colorful ingredients for a hollandaise sauce beneath a sunny kitchen window. Perhaps the single life had become more graceful. Perhaps single ladies spent glorious weekend afternoons walking along the C & O Canal, biking out to Seneca, attending piano concerts at the Phillips Gallery, playing tennis on private courts with semi-faggoty architects from Georgetown. Oh, no. Perhaps they became D.C. Democratic-party delegates to national presidential conventions, housed attractive university professor protestors in town for peace demonstrations, and went shopping for lingerie at Saks Fifth Avenue in Chevy Chase on Monday nights before 9:00.
But then Coco remembered Maiden and suddenly saw herself haunting and hunting in the swinging singles bars—Luv, Clyde’s, the Crazy Horse. Was there a cover charge or a maximum age limit? Would the maître d’ check her ID to ascertain if she were over thirty? And what about those beastly ski weekends for singles? Would she have to buy all that expensive equipment to sustain the inevitable humiliation of singing college songs on a chartered Trailways bus bound for the pathetic Poconos? Was she going to spend the rest of her nights polishing her nails, her shoes, her silver, her menorah, her doorbell, the knobs on her brass bed, and her teeth?
But then again, perhaps Coco would suddenly be swept up in a series of elegant Georgetown dinner parties and become the toast of the capital, the woman most sought after by America’s political establishment, pursued by Maxine Cheshire and other gossip columnists, while trying to slip away for a weekend with … who? Widowed congressmen? Lecherous Supreme Court justices? Philandering journalists? Arch anchormen?
I have made a mistake, she said to the frightened face in her mirror.
Well, so be it, answered her Raised Consciousness.
So be it? Was that like “And So It Goes”?
“I’m going to bed now, Ma,” Mike shouted.
Coco jumped up and ran into the hall to kiss Mike good night. Then she continued on downstairs to the living room. She adjusted the air-conditioner, emptied the ashtrays, tilted several lamp shades so as to avoid direct lighting, and prayed: Dear Lord, please send Suede back here right now. She made herself another drink, picked a small percentage of the lint off the carpet, and resolved not to go near the telephone. “I will not start calling people,” she said out loud. After one phone call the entire city would know she was trying to track down her husband, that she was the injured-and-deserted party, that after all her bitching about Gavin for so many years, she was the terrified and hysterical, leftover wife. Only Glenda could understand and she was gone.
Coco pulled her chair closer to the front window and stared down into the street while she gulped fresh icy gin from her glass. I have not yet determined my position or posture, she thought. My future can be destroyed by a few badly handled phone calls to the wrong people. Besides, I do not want to keep the line tied up when Suede might be trying to call. It’s almost eleven. Also, Gavin might be trying to get through.
But the phone hadn’t rung for hours. The last call had been for Mike.
Across the street Coco saw a neighbor sitting outside on the stoop. The woman was tall, slim, and crowned with an enormous Afro that seemed to diminish the size of her body. Coco knew that the woman had three sons and no husband or rather, she had always known that fact unconsciously, as an irrelevant piece of gossip. But tonight, as Coco sat alone in her house with her sleeping children, hearing for the first ti
me in years the sounds of her own existence, she suddenly realized that solitude was not a tangential consideration. Suddenly she was aware of the harsh irregular sounds of her own heavy breathing, the pout of her lips when she released a cigarette, and the slightly perceptible noise of the alcohol sliding down her gullet. The sounds of her body made her feel extraordinarily solitary, and suddenly she was curious about the black woman whom she had seen coming and going for the past four years out of the apartment across the street.
The woman lived alone—without a man. She came and went a great deal, often looking tired, but seemingly eager about her life. There were always lots of visitors—relatives and friends and boyfriends—who came over and disappeared into her basement doorway or horsed around with the kids outside on the front stoop, or played ball with them in the street or fished change out of their pockets when the Good Humor truck came by. But Coco had never paid that woman tribute (they waved to each other or said hello but never spoke), so that now, as the woman sat alone on her front stoop, drinking a bottle of soda pop, probably tired from having just put her sons to sleep, Coco felt admiration because the woman had brought a transistor radio outside with her to set on the top stair. And as she sat there, sipping the soda and kicking one leg back and forth against the gray-brick stoop, listening to music, Coco felt humble because the woman had enough spirit in her solitude to want to hear a little sound. Coco wondered if she was waiting for a man to join her; the expectation of a friend could explain the radio, but that idea felt fearsome and wrong. Coco wanted to believe that no one was coming to visit, and that the woman was playing the transistor radio just for herself. And if, somehow, that were true, it was a clue to something, a partial answer to the enormous question that was developing within Coco’s soul.
Please don’t be waiting for anyone, Coco urged through the window, gently but persuasively. Just be playing the radio for yourself. Even if someone’s coming by later, when you’re back inside, even though you have to work every morning, year after year, and take care of your boys alone, and have such small windows in your basement flat, sing to yourself, so I won’t be afraid.
Why should that black woman have to make it alone? a more rigorous voice roared through Coco’s head. Just because she’s black and supposed to be stronger and not as middle-class as you? Maybe she has even more needs than you do, because she’s poor and black.
Impossible.
But then Coco remembered two other moments.
She and Gavin had taken a train to Chicago the day before Christmas of 1960, and as they walked through Union Station, Coco remembered remembering how Scott Fitzgerald had done midwestern train depots, so well, so long ago, that there wasn’t much left that needed doing on that subject in American literature. Outside it was snowing, and there were no taxis. Since they had splurged on a sleeper from Washington, they had had the privacy and opportunity to quarrel constantly across half of the country. Coco had lain flat on her back all night, tucked beneath her husband’s berth, hating the lump in the middle of the mattress that was him. When they finally reached Chicago, the tiniest details seemed pristine and precious because she hadn’t slept enough and she felt like running away from Gavin and rushing back to the South Side of Chicago, to Hyde Park and the university they had left only one year before and which still remained perfectly intact in her mind, permanently idealized by the heady feelings she felt when she had lived there.
But instead, they had just walked around the dirty train station, looking at magazines, drinking coffee twice, finally holding hands because they felt so alienated by anger, and that was when she saw a group of porters standing next to a freight car unloading a big crate. (Why am I remembering this, Coco wondered, alarmed at the possible significance of such a long-buried image surfacing, full-blown and insistent, on this particular night.) But the memory continued, replaying the scene of her witnessing something dreadful happening before comprehending what it was, feeling something fearsome go wrong with the environment without understanding why.
For, then a lady whom Coco had seen on the train sitting alone in an open-doored compartment, came to stand nearby and then she too was watching as the men struggled with the box, and suddenly Coco knew there was a casket inside the wooden crate and that the woman’s husband was inside, and that it was the day before Christmas and Coco had simply forgotten that people went on dying, while she went on struggling to live. So she had stood there helplessly, holding Gavin’s hand, watching another porter roll up a flat wagon, and finally they got the box on top of it, and one thin black porter began to push the wagon slowly, and the woman ran along beside it, sort of hopping like a bird, watching the crate with the casket inside, trying to keep up with the wagon that separated the crowds of people and crying. But the whole time the woman looked confused because her husband couldn’t help her with her two little satchels plus a handbag, and because he was causing all this trouble, causing her to hop alongside the flat wagon rolling along next to the train tracks, making her hop across the slippery wet pavement without any help because her husband had become the transportation problem.
“Shit,” Coco said out loud. She got up, went to the bar, reconsidered, scooped two ice cubes out of the bucket, and then hurried back to her chair.
The black woman was still sitting on the stoop. The soda bottle was empty now, tucked safely in the corner of the top stair. The radio was blaring, and the woman was still leaning back against the dirty gray-brick wall, staring into space, maybe waiting for a breath of cool air, and yes, yes, she was still listening to the music. Coco could see her foot marking time.
Thank you, Coco whispered, fearing the fear that was coming up strong now in her chest.
Where is Suede? she moaned silently, confronting the truth of her terror from a lateral perspective. Was he still doing research at the Library of Congress? But the L.C. closed at ten. Maybe he was in some congressional office rapping with a legislative assistant or having drinks in a bar? Or was he over at a restaurant with some friend whom Coco didn’t even know existed? Or had he picked up a girl at the Senate cafeteria, at lunch time some summer intern from Nebraska, a pale-haired creature with a crooked part in the center of her hair and luminous gray eyes, and a flat hipless body in love-and-peace-patched dungarees that slid down over a concave tummy while her soft round breasts undulated in a faded tie-dyed shirt.
Or was he with Sylvia?
Come back now, Suede. I need you. I need somebody very badly, her heart blurted.
But she kept staring out of the window, because now she was remembering another morning, more than ten years before, when she and Gavin had lived in a rodent-infested apartment building right behind the Supreme Court. Since she didn’t have a job, she made a ritual of watching the justices come to work in the mornings, after Gavin had left, when she had nothing to do. Was she pregnant with Michael then? No. Not pregnant. Just out of work, with nothing to do. So she had spent long hours feeling messy and grouchy, peculiarly morningish all day long, because the day never developed for her, and she dreaded Gavin coming home for dinner from that mysterious organized world outside her apartment where there was work to do and coffee breaks and lunchtime and a sense of morning, afternoon, evening—a sensate progression of time that somehow escaped and evaded her, locked alone inside the apartment, feeling totally aimless.
So that morning she had been sitting on the radiator, drinking coffee and looking out the ugly crooked bay window, when she saw a cat stalking something in slow motion. Shortly a little robin, too sick or hurt to fly, appeared on the sidewalk in front of the apartment. Nearby the crippled robin’s mate was hopping along the curb, hopping and chirping and launching quickly aborted flights that caused great wing shudders, trying to distract the cat, doing everything a little bird could do to save its mate. But nothing mattered. Because very soon there was a fluttering of fur and feathers, and then the cat had the robin in its mouth, and the bird’s mate was still hopping up and down on the curb, chirping and squeaking whil
e the cat killed the robin, and it was all over.
Coco walked to the telephone, paused, and then dialed Gavin’s office number. There was no answer. She pulled the telephone directory out of the closet, looked up Sylvia’s number, dialed it, and let the phone ring ten times. Then she made herself another drink and went back to the window. The woman across the street had disappeared.
But suddenly a taxi that was moving slowly down the street, stopped in front of the Burman house. With an explosion of relief, Coco watched Suede climb out of the back seat and reach through the open window to pay the driver.
Now … now Coco was safe. She was safe. She wouldn’t spend the night alone. She ran wildly down the stairs and through the hallway toward the dark hulking shadow outside the front door, and the moment Suede walked inside, she lurched violently against him.
Startled, he recoiled, reflexively jerking away from her.
“Hi,” she said breathlessly, and then, seeing his alarm, instantly began to explain. “Gavin’s gone. He went out of town. He’s going to be gone most of the week. We’re alone.”
She pressed up against him again, making her body hard and insistent, pulling in her stomach so that the bone of her pelvis dug into the softness of his groin.
Suede folded his arms around her automatically, without enthusiasm.
But Coco’s gratitude for the nearness of his body, blurring the boundaries of her own consciousness and reducing her panic by offering external definition, voiced over his coldness. Her pain couldn’t be infinite if it didn’t extend indefinitely into space.
Loose Ends Page 19