I don't know how long we lay like that. Once a nurse started peremptorily into the room, fetched up stock-still just inside the door and backed out without a word.
When LaVerne sat up, the fabric of her satin dress crackled. She wore her hair long then, cut straight across front and back.
"Maybe this is different from most of life, Lewis. Maybe this is something we can fix."
I put my hand on her waist.
After a moment she stood. Began tucking things in. Breast, hair, slip. Her sadness.
"Have to go, Lew. Late enough start as it is."
"If it's as hot as you say it is, things'll be slow on the street."
"You never know. Sometimes heat just brings the beast out."
"Take care " She was almost to the door. "Verne?"
A pause. "Yeah, Lew."
"Is it dark outside?"
That's what bothered me most. Where things were, the shapes of rooms, finding my way to toilet and lavatory-all minor problems. But being suspended in time, out of the gather and release of the day, was something else entirely, an immeasurable loss.
"Almost," she said.
"A clear night?"
"Pinpricks of stars in the upper window. Moon will be full in another day or two."
"And city lights stretched out below us."
"Yes."
"Diminutivefires of the planet, Neruda called them."
"Sure he did. See you tomorrow, hon."
I remembered lines from a Langston Hughes poem: Night comes slowly, black like me. Once LaVerne was gone, I nudged tape into player. Sure enough, Hughes's poem was there, right after one about a lynching. Further along was another, by LeRoi Jones/Amira Baraka, that would haunt me for years.
Son singin fount some words. Son singin in that other language talkin bout "bay bee, why you leave me here," talkin bout "up under de sun cotton in my hand." Son singing, think he bad cause he can speak they language, talkin bout "dark was the night the ocean deep white eyes cut through me made me weep."
Son singin fount some words. Think he bad. Speak they language. 'sawright I say 'sawright wit me look like yeh, we gon be here a taste.
I think that may have been the first time I thought about all these different languages we use. Danny Barker used to talk about that, how with this group of musicians he'd talk one way, that way with another one, uptown and downtown talk, and still he'd have this private language he'd use at home, among friends. We all do that. To survive, our forebears learned dissimulation and mimickry, learned never to say what they truly thought. They knew they were gon be here a taste. That same masking remains in many of us, in their children's blood, a slow poison. So many of us no longer know who, or what, we are.
2
Her hair had come out of a botde. So had courage, gait and gestures. But somehow it was all of a piece; it worked.
"Hope you don't mind if I tell you you're a good-looking man," she said as she sat down beside me. She'd successfully crossed troubled seas between her seat at the bar and my table, listing but slighdy starboard. Now here was this new challenge: a fair distance (as my father would have said) from up there to down here. Heroically she made it.
Matter of fact, I didn't mind at all. A lot of my own life was coming out of a bottle those days. This white woman made her hobby drinking bad whiskey and picking up bad company in cheap bars, what business was it of mine. Lord knows I'd fished often enough in her pond.
Never question what Providence spills in your lap.
She wanted Scotch and got it. Sat swirling it around in her glass the way stone drinkers do that first hit or two, savoring color, body, bouquet, legs, letting those first sips roll across the back of her tongue, equal parts anticipation and relief. Before long she'd be slamming it back. Not tasting it at all, just letting it take her where she needed to be. Before long, too, her conversation would start to narrow, go round and round in circles like someone lost in the woods. I knew. But for the time being she lay warm and safe in the bosom of that wonderland alcohol grants its acolytes, a zone where, for a short time at least, everything fell back into place, everything made some kind of sense.
When I was a kid my mom would drape these pinned-together cutout paper patterns for clothes she was sewing us over the kitchen table. She only did that when I was very young and soon gave it up-just as she gave up most everything else. But I loved sitting there looking at those paterns: some kind of thin, opaque paper you saw nowhere else, pins holding it together, half on the table and half off. Destined soon for the trash; but briefly it pulled one small part of the world together, gave it rare form.
Dana, she said, shaking hands rather more fiercely than the situation called for. A journalist. Wrote a column for one of the local papers. Maybe I'd even seen it. Society stuff mostly, who was seen where wearing what in the company of whom and where they'd all gone to school, leaning on connections an uptown family, a couple of society marriages and her Newcomb degree gave her. But now and again, hanging out in bars like this one or dredging her way through the Quarter, The Seven Seas, Lafitte's, La Casa, she'd get on to something hard.
Hard news, she meant.
I remember-or imagine-or I dreamed-her leaning across the table, breasts pushing up towards her blouse's undone top button as they came to rest on the tabletop.
You understand, Lewis?
Guess I did.
But I had to wonder how provisional all our understanding is, finally. Look, I told her: I'm a black man, still young. You're a white woman, what, halfway along in life? We've come up in different worlds. Hell, we exist in different worlds. Always will. You think there's some secret passage behind the bookcase like in old movies, lets us get from one to the other?
Felt for a moment like I was back at UNO, one of those embarrassingly intense late-night sessions debating such topics as the problem of evil, whether to order pizza or burgers, and whether black folks had souls.
'What I think there are," she said, "are doors. We only have to choose to-" Her hand made the gesture of reaching out to push a door open, hesitated, then fell on mine.
"In and out of lots of doors, are you, then?"
She nodded. "Had a few slammed behind me, too."
"Bet you have."
Then-seemingly without transition-we were talking about King Lear.
I remember throwing back a drink and lowering the glass to shout out (voice ratcheting up along the whole of the line, glass thumping down on the final word; I'd suddenly become Sir Lewis Gielgud):
And my poor fool is HANGED?!
For all I know, I may have done the Canterbury prologue as well. Or gone on at untowards, unoccasioned length about Pushkin's black grandfather.
Shortly thereafter we found ourselves on the street bearing aloft the opinion that we could do with food.
Streedights were shelled in rainbow. Buses heaved their way up out of the fog like mythical, half-remembered beasts and fell back into it. Winds blew in across Lake Pontchartrain, bearing the infant Change in their arms.
When I turned to ask what she'd like, to eat, I meant, she came into my arms.
Then it got really strange.
At some level I'd known all along, I think, that I was dreaming, but till this point the dreams had clung tenuously enough to reality that I could elect not to question, simply to go along. Now those bonds were forfeited and I was apart, at once in the dream and above it looking on.
Had I ridden my bicycle here? Apparendy so. And left it outside the bar, where now someone briefly squats down to remove the rear wheel and tucks it beneath his arm as though this were his usual morning baguette, striding away untroubled. I follow him into a nearby art gallery where he's about to hang it around the neck of a bronze ostrich and demand its return. He shrugs and hands it over: no big thing.