Faith breathed in deeply. I could feel the grip on my hands tighten ever so slightly.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“That was me and Bonnie. The way we came together was everything I had wished for but never known. In a way, she created my desire and then satisfied it.”
One of Faith’s hands moved up to my wrist. It tickled, but I didn’t want to laugh.
“And then I found out about him and everything was tainted. And even though I loved her more than I ever did anyone else, the fact that she wasn’t all there meant that I was always gonna be unhappy when I looked at her and thought about him. . . . And then I met you.”
“Me?” Faith moved closer, an effect of gravity as much as anything else.
“Yeah,” I said, thinking about shadows negating the darkness in my life. “You gave your love to a man despite his flaws. You gave him a chance and then he betrayed you, but you didn’t, not even one time, say something bad about him. You listened to that man who wanted the loan while he bad-mouthed you and shouted, and you still smiled; you even felt for him.
“That’s what Bonnie taught me. She taught me that you can care for somebody and it isn’t the end of the world. That’s why I loved her.”
“How did you know that Mr. Schwartz was looking for a loan?” Faith asked.
“You were just talking,” I said. “The other guy, the one with the glasses —”
“Mr. Ronin.”
“Yeah. He was looking over forms and stuff and giving his guy a passbook and a checkbook. You were saying no.”
I suppose that insight was reason enough for Faith to kiss me. Her mouth was the texture of a ripe fruit that begged to be eaten. I tried to put my arms around her, but she held them away.
“Craig was always so, so brutal,” she said as she pushed me down on the sofa, kissing me and unbuttoning my shirt.
“You want me to just lie here?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. I felt her tug at my zipper and then reach inside.
I realized I was getting older, not because I didn’t respond to her caress but because for the first time in a long time I had the erection of a teenager.
Smelling the sweet peach-scented shampoo in her hair, I said, “I need to take a shower.”
Holding on to my manhood, she guided me to the shower in the bathroom. I reached to take off her clothes, but she shook her head. I understood. She took off the gray dress, revealing one of those bodies you see only in magazines and on movie screens. Her nipples were the size of apricots; she was beyond gravity’s reach.
We didn’t talk for a long time. I stood in the small shower while she hunkered down, washing me with a soft sponge. My erection got harder and harder, but I didn’t feel urgent at all.
“Do you want me to powder you?” she asked after we were dry.
“Can I touch your face?”
I let my fingers travel from her temples to her breasts. She shuddered and wavered.
“Let’s just go to bed,” I suggested.
I LAY BENEATH HER while Faith moved up and down slowly, holding my face so that I would be looking up at her. Every time I got excited, she’d say, “Not yet, Easy. Not yet, baby.”
I don’t even remember the orgasm, just her looking into my eyes, asking me to wait for her.
27
We held hands walking along the beach under a crescent moon. No one could see us clearly, but we were there. Faith Laneer’s concerned observations made me feel safe. There she was under the protection of Christmas Black but at the same time sheltering me.
We had been talking about Jackson Blue for quite a while. Actually, I did most of the talking. I liked telling stories about the cowardly whiz kid, about how most of his life he had done everything wrong.
“He’s a genius, but he’s twisted,” I was saying. “Like if he was a caveman, he’d invent the wheel and then use it to escape from the head Cro-Magnon because he’d been sleepin’ with the boss man’s wife.”
“Is he a good friend?” Faith asked.
“I didn’t used to think so. He’s a liar and a coward, but one day I was telling a story about him and I realized that I cared about him enough to laugh at his faults. That made him a friend.”
Faith hugged my arm, bumping into my side as she did so.
“I like the way your skin smells,” she said. “I want to rub my face against it and breathe you into me.”
As we stood there kissing under the sliver moon, I felt a howl in my soul. There I was, a black man kissing the epitome of northern European beauty, with a gun in one pocket and a short fuse in the other. There was no sex in the world better than that.
We didn’t make love again. I walked her home and stood with her in the doorway, talking about any number of events in our lives. I liked to cook. She used to be a painter before becoming a nun. I’d seen the northern lights over Germany while a cannon battle raged. She married a homosexual named Norman after giving up her vows.
“That way I thought I could maintain my celibacy,” she told me. “But I found myself wanting him in the night. I would come to his door and listen to him and his lovers. . . .”
After more than an hour, she brushed her lips against mine and went in. I stumbled away in a kind of daze.
I was completely enveloped in darkness now. My family was hidden. I knew the identities of my enemies. Faith had shown me without trying to that there was love for me somewhere if I wanted to take it. My stupor was akin to the feeling you have when waking up from a night of jumbled dreams. At first you wonder if all that nonsense really happened. Was I arrested and sentenced to death? Did I come upon two brutally murdered men in a house that wore a disguise?
I GOT HOME AT MIDNIGHT and found the front door of my house broken in. Even though I knew the kids weren’t there, I rushed inside and turned on the lights.
Nothing had been touched or stolen. The contents of my dresser drawers were orderly; my mail was unopened. All Sansoam’s men wanted was blood.
I tried to remember the moon and Faith’s lips on mine. I tried to dismiss the break-in and what it meant. For a while I worked on the door, reattaching the hinges and clearing away the shattered portions of the jamb.
I sat down in my favorite chair and turned on the TV. From the outside, everything would have looked normal, except for the door sitting crookedly in its frame and the .38 in my hand.
There was a Western on. John Wayne was blustering his way through a story I’d seen a thousand times.
I was thinking that nothing had changed, that Christmas and his henchman would kill the men who had broken in on me. I told myself that all I had to do was go to ground and wait until it was over or the right moment came. But my heart would not listen to my mind. I felt the way I had in World War II when we were preparing to engage the enemy. Death, my death, was a foregone conclusion. I couldn’t think about survival. All I could comprehend was the promise to rain down wrack and ruin upon my enemy.
I wanted a drink. The biting scent of sour mash whiskey seemed to waft into my nostrils. I looked around, thinking that maybe there was a bottle nearby. It was too late for a liquor store to be open, and I didn’t want to go to a bar.
I wanted a drink to settle my raging mind. It would have been like balm against the murders I was contemplating. But then I decided, with my heart, not to go after alcohol. I didn’t want to become calm or numbed. What I wanted was to kill Sammy Sansoam before Christmas got the pleasure.
I was already drunk.
Just the idea that those men, whoever all they were, would break into a house that my children called home shattered every covenant the civilized world lived by.
This thought made me laugh at myself, thinking that I lived in a civilized world where lynchings, segregation based on race, and all the men who died for freedom’s lie were somehow under the umbrella of enlightened concern.