Long white curtains were drawn over all the windows.
Inside, the house was just a big room with a fallen-down spring-bed on one side and a two-burner gas range on the other. There was a table with a toaster on it and four spindly chairs. There was a big stuffed sofa upholstered with a dark brown material that had giant yellow flowers stitched into it.
“It’s just beautiful,” Daphne exclaimed.
My face must’ve said that she was crazy because she blushed a little and added, “Well it could use some work but I think we could make something out of it.”
“Maybe if we tore it down…”
Daphne laughed and that was very nice. As I said before, she was like a child and her childish pleasure touched me.
“It is beautiful,” she said. “Maybe not rich but it’s quiet and it’s private. Nobody else could see us here.”
I put her bags down next to the sofa.
“I gotta go out for a little while,” I said. Once I had her in place I saw how to get things moving.
“Stay.”
“I got to, Daphne. I got two bad men and the L.A. police on my trail.”
“What bad men?” She sat at the edge of the bed and crossed her legs. She had put on a yellow sundress at the motel, and it showed off her tan shoulders.
“The man your friend hired and Frank Green, your other friend.”
“What does Frankie have to do with you?”
I went up to her and she stood to meet me. I pulled my collar down and showed her my gashed throat, saying, “That’s what Frankie done to Easy.”
“Oh, honey!” She reached out gently for my neck.
Maybe it was just the touch of a woman that got to me or maybe it was finally realizing all that had happened to me in the previous week; I don’t know.
“Look at that! That’s the cops!” I said, pointing at the bruise on my eye. “I been arrested twice, blamed for four murders, threatened by people I wished I never met, and…” I felt that my liver was going to come out between my teeth.
“Oh my poor man,” she said as she took me by the arm and led me to the bathroom. She didn’t let go of my arm while she turned on the water for the bath. She was right there with me, unbuttoning my shirt, letting down my pants.
I was sitting there, naked on the toilet seat, and watching her go through the mirror-doored medicine cabinet. I felt something deep down in me, something dark like jazz when it reminds you that death is waiting.
“Death,” the saxophone rasps. But, really, I didn’t care.
Chapter 26
Daphne Monet, a woman who I didn’t know at all personally, had me laid back in the deep porcelain tub while she carefully washed between my toes and then up my legs. I had an erection lying flat against my stomach and I was breathing slowly, like a small boy poised to catch a butterfly. Every once in a while she’d say, “Shh, honey, it’s all right.” And for some reason that caused me pain.
When she finished with my legs she washed my whole body with a rough hand towel and a bar of soap that had pumice in it.
I never felt drawn to a woman the way I was to Daphne Monet. Most beautiful women make me feel like I want to touch them, own them. But Daphne made me look inside myself. She’d whisper a sweet word and I was brought back to the first time I felt love and loss. I was remembering my mother’s death, back when I was only eight, by the time Daphne got to my belly. I held my breath as she lifted the erection to wash underneath it; she looked into my face, with eyes that had become blue over the water, and stroked my erection up and down, twice. She smiled when she finished and pressed it back down against my flesh.
I couldn’t say a word.
She stepped back from the tub and shrugged off her yellow dress in one long stretch, then tossed it into the water over me and pulled down her pants. She sat on the toilet and urinated so loudly that it reminded me more of a man.
“Hand me the paper, Easy,” she said.
The roll was at the foot of the bathtub.
She stood over the tub, with her hips pressed outward, looking down at me. “If my pussy was like a man’s thing it’d be as big as your head, Easy.”
I stood out of the tub and let her hold me around the testicles. As we went into the bedroom she kept whispering obscene suggestions into my ear. The things she said made me ashamed. I never knew a man who talked as bold as Daphne Monet.
I never liked it when women talked like that. I felt it was masculine. But, beneath her bold language, Daphne seemed to be asking me for something. And all I wanted was to reach as far down in my soul as I could to find it.
We yelled and screamed and wrestled all night long. Once, when I had fallen asleep, I woke to find her rubbing an ice cube down my chest. Once, at about 3 A.M., she took me out to the cement patio behind the bushes and made love to me as I lay back against a rough tree.
When the sun came up she nestled against my side on the bed and asked, “Does it hurt, Easy?”
“What?”
“Your thing, does it hurt?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it sore?”
“It’s more like the blood vessels ache.”
She grabbed my penis. “Does it hurt for you to love me, Easy?”
“Yeah.”
Her grip tightened. “I love it when you hurt, Easy. For us.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Do you feel it?”
“Yeah, I feel it.”
She released me. “I don’t mean that. I mean this house. I mean us here, like we aren’t who they want us to be.”
“Who?”
“They don’t have names. They’re just the ones who won’t let us be ourselves. They never want us to feel this good or close like this. That’s why I wanted to get away with you.”
“I came to you.”
She put her hand out again. “But I called you, Easy; I’m the one who brought you to me.”
When i look back on that night I feel confused. I could say that Daphne was crazy but that would mean that I was sane enough to say, and I wasn’t. If she wanted me to hurt, I loved to hurt, and if she wanted me to bleed, I would have been happy to open a vein. Daphne was like a door that had been closed all my life; a door that all of a sudden flung open and let me in. My heart and chest opened as wide as the sky for that woman.
But I can’t say that she was crazy. Daphne was like the chameleon lizard. She changed for her man. If he was a mild white man who was afraid to complain to the waiter she’d pull his head to her bosom and pat him. If he was a poor black man who had soaked up pain and a rage for a lifetime, she washed his wounds with a rough rag and licked the blood till it staunched.
It was midafternoon when I gave out. We had spent every moment in each other’s arms. I didn’t think about the police or Mouse or even DeWitt Albright. All I cared about was the pain I felt loving that white girl. But finally I pulled away from her and said, “We gotta talk, Daphne.”
Maybe I was imagining it, but her eyes flashed green for the first time since the bath.
“Well, what?” She sat up in the bed covering herself. I knew that I was losing her, but I was too satisfied to care.
“There’s a lot of dead people, Daphne, and the police want me behind that. There’s that thirty thousand dollars you stole from Mr. Carter, and DeWitt Albright is on my ass for that.”
“Any money I have is between me and Todd and I don’t have anything to do with dead people or that Albright man. Nothing at all.”
“Maybe you don’t think so but Albright has the talent to make your business his…”