The real family, how they smell. The real rainbow family. The real rainbow family stinks. The dried liquid of dysentery streaks the legs of babies and old men and the women smell of their monthly blood. They smell of lack of water. They smell of lack of food. They smell of bodies blown up by the expanding gases of their corpses’ innards, lying in the bush in the sun. Find the acronym for her real family.
Housewarming
Bradley was her own age, like the men the young alumnae had. He was an economist with a promising position in a multinational company. His grandfather had been one of the editors of The New Republic, an associate of Edmund Wilson, and a victim of the McCarthy hearings. The leftist tradition was a family heirloom sufficient in itself; a claim to a way of life that no longer actually need be practised, just as the painting of an ecclesiast ancestor in ermine on the wall is prestige enough for descendants who never go to church. It was adequate for the family image to be brushed up from generation to generation during the youthful period when the social conscience, along with spontaneous erections, naturally evinces itself. Brad had done his stint — in opposition to the Vietnam war, and a year with an aid agency in India. Now he could settle down with the complete set of The New Republic published during his grandfather’s years, on display in his study — handed down to him as a housewarming present when he found his own brownstone.
Of course people with his parents’ background would not show any reaction to the appearance of a black child with their son’s new friend. And when the explanation came, bringing into the big living-room with its grand piano (Brad and his mother played), New England samplers and bowls of tulips, distant horrors the Burnses were accustomed to being able to shrink with the flick of a switch to blank on the face of the television, this provided proof by association that they were still on the right side, just as, conversely, guilt by association provided danger for those other parents, Pauline and Joe. The parents’ house was a generous thoroughfare where the adult children made their long-distance telephone calls, cooked, borrowed cars and electrical equipment, used the basement laundry, slept over with friends or lovers; snatches of their independent lives were enacted there — before Hillela, or even drawing her in — whose contexts were elsewhere. Brad’s ‘find’, brought home (good for him!), was just such a snatch of his life. The brothers and sisters chattered with her, regaled themselves with laughter when they encouraged her cute little black girl to be sassy, and were lavish with invitations for brother to bring her along to jazz clubs, sailing trips, cinemas and parties.
Only Brad was quiet. He watched and listened to the girl and her child he had contributed, getting on so well with his siblings. The pair represented him in the way he could not represent himself, now that these brothers and sisters were no longer children.
He was quiet when he made love the first time. Nothing in the room, in the world, would distract him from the act of worship now approached, and his trance produced blind excitement in which only the body knew its way. When she was seeing with her eyes again she smiled appreciatively, cheekbones lifting a little fold under her dark, lazy gaze. And he spoke.
— Was it the first thing you saw.—
— Yes. I thought of a puppy, the kind with a velvety patch over one eye. — She withdrew her lax hand from between his arm and side and stroked the dark birth-blot that all his life others pretended was not there.
This man talked after love-making. Not the mumblings of dreams and names in a Slav language, but a wide-awake fluency, entered by way of her body. He told again and again: —Hillela, I don’t care how many lovers you’ve had, no-one can have loved you as I do.—
She did not ask how he knew she had had many lovers; it was simply one of his qualities that he knew things about her without troubling her with questions, sensitive to the repetition of certain names in her conversation and able to read changes in her expression when certain subjects arose. She did not answer; sometimes smiled at him as she did at her child, but never in disparagement or disbelief. The fact that she believed him, when all that he could find to express so great a conviction was something like the line from a stupid song — this tortured him. He had to try and follow her reasoning; there must be a reasoning, and the reasoning would establish the state of the emotions between them.
— I’m not saying anything about him … And not just because he’s dead. (A gesture, acknowledging that unchallengeable rivalry.) I’ll never pry into your feelings for each other. Whatever they were. I’m talking about the nature of mine. That’s what I mean. — But then he saw to what he might be leading. — No, no, it’s not because of what you think, Hillela. The puppy isn’t licking your hand.—
And again, in her apartment, with the door slightly ajar because the small girl in the next room insisted it be so: —Hillela, I really cannot live without you again. Not what you think, no. It’s because there’s something a bit frightening in you; it’s that I can’t do without.—
This time she laughed.
— How can I say that to you. You’ll tell me one can live without anyone. You know. Lying here in bed with me, you’re the proof, aren’t you—
She was propped on one elbow, listening to him. She fell upon him and he rolled over with her.
Without explanation, there were times when she took up something he had approached in some other room, some other night.
— Whaila had another wife. Nomzamo’s got brothers and sisters she hasn’t seen yet.—
— A divorced wife.—
— I don’t know if they were divorced, really.—
— What if he’d lived, and one day gone back to her and the other children? That’s the kind of living without I mean.—
— We had our time together. She must have had hers … If we had been able to go back! — She stopped and slowly her hands made fists, came to rest on her naked thighs; the unselfconsciousness with which she accepted her nudity in moods and situations now removed from sex reminded him strangely of the women in Pascin and Lautrec brothel drawings seen in art galleries. — If he had lived to go back — oh, that would have been another time, that would have been … that would have been …—
— More than love.—
— Oh why this measuring, how can you measure?—
— Yes. Something I’ll never know: exaltation. And awfulness. The way you have. Yes, you are a bit frightening. But I’ll get used to you. No — I don’t want to get used to you, I never shall.—
He had a long face with a slender nose the everted curve of whose nostrils was exactly repeated in the upward and downward curves of his upper lip. The skin of his throat below the shaving line was tender and fine down to the breastbone and its cup where a few glossy curls of chest hair began. The pulse in the throat was always visible and the network of nerves round the mouth and nose seemed like those of some sensitive plant — every face has them, but they are sluggish or hampered by a layer of fat or a thickened hide, while his changed his expression with every nuance of atmosphere generated by the people around him.