Jude said nothing, and his father said, “Lord knows I’m no lover of the race, but your average Negro could outrun any white boy I know.”
Jude again said nothing but avoided his father and didn’t make him an extra steak when he cooked himself dinner. He still wasn’t talking to him when his father went on an overnight trip and didn’t come back for a week. Jude was used to it and didn’t get alarmed until the money ran out and his father still didn’t come home.
He alerted the secretary at the university who sent out a group of graduate students to where Jude’s father had been seen. They found the old man in his tent, bloated, his tongue protruding from a face turned black; and Jude understood then how even the things you loved most could kill you.
At the funeral, out of a twisted loyalty for his father, he avoided his uncle. He didn’t know if his mother knew she’d been widowed; he thought probably not. He told nobody at school that his father had died. He thought of himself as an island in the middle of the ocean, with no hope of seeing another island in the distance, or even a ship passing by.
He lived alone in the house. He let the mice die, then tossed the snakes in high twisting parabolas into the swamp. He scrubbed the house until it gleamed and the stench of reptiles was gone, then applied beeswax, paint, polish until it was a house fit for his mother. He waited. She didn’t come.
The day he graduated from high school, he packed his clothes and sealed up the house and took the train to Boston. He’d heard from his uncle that his mother lived there and so he’d applied and been accepted to college in the city. She owned a bookstore on a small, dark street. It took Jude a month of slow passing to gather the courage to go in. She was either in the back, or shelving books, or smiling in conversation with somebody, and he’d have a swim of darkness in his gut and know that it was fate telling him that today was not the day. When he went in, it was only because she was alone at the register, and her face — pouchy, waxy — was so sad in repose that the sight of it washed all thought from his head.
She rose with a wordless cry and flew to him. He held her stoically. She smelled like cats, and her clothes flopped on her as if she’d lost a lot of weight quickly. He told her about his father dying and she nodded and said, “I know. I dreamed it.”
She wouldn’t let him leave her. She dragged him home with her and made him spaghetti carbonara and put clean sheets on the couch for him. Her three cats yowled under the door to her bedroom until she came in with them. In the middle of the night, he woke to find her in her easy chair, clutching her hands, staring at him with glittering eyes. He closed his own and lay stiffly, almost shouting with the agony of being watched so.
He went to see her once a week but refused all dinner invitations. He couldn’t bear the density or lateness of her love. He was in his junior year when her long-percolating illness overcame her and she too left him. Now he was alone.
There was nothing but numbers, then.
Later, there were numbers, the great ravishing machine in the laboratory into which he fed punched slips of paper, the motorcycle Jude rode because it roared like murder. He had been given a class to teach, but it was taken away after a month and he was told that he was better suited for research. In his late twenties, there were drunk and silly girls he could seduce without saying a word, because they felt a kind of danger coiled in him.
He rode his motorcycle too fast over icy roads. He swam at night in bays where great whites had been spotted. He bombed down ski slopes with only a hazy idea of the mechanics of snow. He drank so many beers he woke one morning to discover he’d developed a paunch as big as a pregnant woman’s belly. He laughed to shake it, liked its wobble. It felt comforting, a child’s pillow clutched to his midsection all day long.
By the time he was thirty, Jude was weary. He became drawn to bridges, their tensile strength, the cold river flowing underneath. A resolution was forming under his thoughts, like a contusion hardening under the skin.
And then he was crossing a road, and he hadn’t looked first, and a bread truck, filled with soft dinner rolls so yeasty and warm that they were still expanding in their trays, hit him. He woke with a leg twisted beyond recognition, a mouth absent of teeth on one side, and his head in the lap of a woman who was crying for him, though she was a stranger, and he was bleeding all over her skirt, and there were warm mounds of bread scattered around them. It was the bread that made the pain return to his body, the deep warmth and good smell. He bit the hem of the woman’s skirt to keep from screaming.
She rode with him to the hospital and stayed all night to keep him from falling asleep and possibly going into a coma. She was homely, three years older than he, a thick-legged antiques dealer who described her shop down a street so tiny the sun never touched her windows. He thought of her in the silent murky shop, swimming from credenza to credenza like a fish in an aquarium. She fed him rice pudding when she came to visit him in the hospital and carefully brushed his wild hair until it was flat on his crown.
He woke one night with a jerk: the stars were angrily bright in the hospital window and someone in the room was breathing. There was a weight on his chest, and when he looked down, he found the girl’s sleeping head. For a moment, he didn’t know who she was. By the time he identified her, the feeling of unknowing had burrowed in. He would never know her; knowledge of another person was ungraspable, a cloud. He would never begin to hold another in his mind like an equation, pure and entire. He focused at the part of her thin hair, which in the darkness and closeness looked like inept black stitches in white wax. He stared at the part until the horror faded, until her smell, the bitterness of unwashed hair, the lavender soap she used on her face, rose to him and he put his nose against her warmth and inhaled her.
At dawn, she woke. Her cheek was creased from the folds in his gown. She looked at him wildly and he laughed, and she rubbed the drool from the corner of her mouth and turned away as if disappointed. He married her because, during the night, to not marry her had ceased to be an option.
While he was learning how to walk again, he had a letter from the university down in Florida, making a tremendous offer for his father’s land.
And so, instead of the honeymoon trip to the Thousand Islands, pines and cold water and his wife’s bikini pressing into the dough of her flesh, they took a sleeping train down to Florida and walked in the heat to the edge of the university campus. Where he remembered vast oak hammocks, there were rectilinear brick buildings. Mossy pools were now parking lots.
Only his father’s property, one hundred acres, was overgrown with palmettos and vines. He brushed the redbugs off his wife’s sensible travel pants and carried her into his father’s house. Termites had chiseled long gouges in the floorboards, but the sturdy cracker house had kept out most of the wilderness. His wife touched the mantel made of heart pine and turned to him gladly. Later, after he came home with a box of groceries and found the kitchen scrubbed clean, he heard three thumps upstairs and ran up to find that she had killed a blacksnake in the bathtub with her bare heel and was laughing at herself in amazement.
How magnificent he found her, a Valkyrie, half-naked and warlike with that dead snake at her feet. In her body, the culmination of all things. He didn’t say it, of course; he couldn’t. He only reached and put his hands upon her.
In the night, she rolled toward him and took his ankles between her own. “All right,” she said. “We can stay.”
“I didn’t say anything,” he said.
And she smiled a little bitterly and said, “Well. You don’t.”