By the time Yahya finished, Amy looked ill. Noticing this, Yahya cut his eyes our way. “I don’t suppose you two agree with me, do you?”
Her words were hardly above a hiss. “I’ve seen good white people who sacrificed their lives on Freedom Rides.
Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were killed and buried under a Mississippi dam right beside James Chaney.”
“Uh-hunh, I heard about that. It’s sad, sistuh, but the way I see it, your average white boy won’t go that far. Some of ’em might fight for colored folks when they’re young and rebelling against their elders, but sooner or later they get that wake-up call from their own people, who pull their coat to the fact that it’s their privileged future they’re foolin’ with, and if they keep acting up, they won’t be on top no more. What that means is they gonna cut their hair, clean themselves up, and put on a three-piece suit with a pair of red suspenders, and shake off the woolly-headed woogies they been hanging out with. Naw, honey, white boys always make sure they got it better than us.”
“And you believe that?” she asked. “Are you saying Dr. King’s life is poorer — as a life — than Richard Speck’s?”
“Speck’s white, ain’t he?”
With that, Amy stood up. “Can we leave now, please?”
“Maybe you’d better,” said Yahya.
Back in the car, she was too exasperated to speak as we pulled away. Finally she brought out, “I’m sorry, Matthew! I would never have taken you there if I’d known what it was about.”
“You don’t have to apologize—”
“Yes, I do! I suppose when he takes over, he’ll drive people like you and me into the gas chambers. Mama Pearl always told me that anybody who tried to get me to hate was my enemy.” Leaning back on the seat, she took a long breath. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. “I’ve dated guys who talked like him. Can you believe that? They’re the reason I wasn’t seeing anybody when we met. I mean, I’d given up. All that hate for the white man turned so quickly — if I disagreed with them — into some of them slapping me hard enough to shake loose my teeth. Or they’d use that excuse about the Man holding them down as the reason why they couldn’t keep a job and expected me to support them — and their drug habits! I was just sick of it, that’s all.” Amy paused, looking me up and down as I pulled to a stop at an intersection. “There’s no hate in you, Matthew. I like that. I trust that. And I’m glad you got rid of that silly pencil-holder.”
“Do … do you want to get something to eat?”
“No, I’m not hungry. Just take me home, okay?”
She’d found a new apartment, this one located on the corner of Dearborn and Huron. After I parked, Amy asked, “Would you like to come up for a drink or something?” I said yes. (I was less interested in the drink than in the “something.”) I followed her up one flight to a door it took her forever to unlock (there were four padlocks and latches on it). Once inside, I saw that sixty dollars a month bought her an efficiency apartment divided into a living room, a kitchen, and a minuscule bath. Her front room was furnished ceiling to floor with bookshelves (I noticed titles I’d given her by Jean Toomer and Claude McKay when we were in college, ones in which I’d playfully signed the authors’ names and written glowing praise for her), and tables and chairs made from driftwood. The floors were bare. A fisherman’s net swung from the ceiling. On the wall over her sofabed were black-and-white movie (Stormy Weather) and theater (A Raisin in the Sun) posters. Amy tossed her purse onto a chair, flipped through her album collection quickly, and put John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme on her stereo. On the kitchen counter she lit a stick of pine incense; then she popped open the refrigerator and filled two wineglasses with pinot noir.
Twilight was coming on, thickening throughout her rooms, spreading inside the apartment like a tone, a touch of the keys on the far left side of a piano, like a stain of teal-blue watercolor that caught along the surface of the wineglass she handed me and reflected off her windows. A whiff of twilight even tinctured shadows in the corners: a base color lying beneath all others as streetlights below us on Dearborn winked on and night’s density gathered in her curtains and — yes — in my mind, because I couldn’t believe I was standing there, sipping wine that flew right to my head, and Amy was kicking off her shoes and looking at me in the way I’d imagined only in my dreams.
“After tonight I feel … soiled. I think I need to take a shower.”
“Oh …” I stammered. “Go ahead, I’ll wait out here.”
“I was hoping, Matthew, you’d take it with me.”
Straightaway, she disrobed, leaving her blue dress and white undergarments on the floor, and walked — I want to say floated—toward her bathroom. Believing I was dead or dreaming, I pinched my arm. Ouch. Then I heard water spurting a room away. I shed my own clothes as quickly as I could, hurried barefoot to the bathroom, and found Amy soaping her shoulders in billowing clouds of steam. I squeezed into the small cubicle with her. Instantly my glasses began to fog. Very gently she lifted them off my face, pressed her lips against mine, then handed me the bar of Lifebuoy. With it I lathered my hands, and as she closed her eyes, lifting her head a little, my fingers traced her forehead and cheeks, then moved down, soaping every crevice and swale, and it was as if I was sculpting her the way Pygmalion did his masterpiece, slowly discovering every muscle and fold, as I massaged from Amy’s chin to her calves, and then she did the same for me, lathering places where I didn’t know I even had places, and then we toweled each other dry, both of us a little drunk by then from touching and pinot noir, and dropped onto her bed, and I said, Tell me what you want me to do, which she did, and for the next two hours — or perhaps it was three — I did everything Amy wanted, in just the way she wanted it, for I do pride myself on my work, whatever it is.
“Well,” she said when we were done, “I guess it’s true.”
I was groggy, squinting at her electric alarm clock: 11:30. “What’s true?”
“Still waters run deep.”
I was trying to figure out what she meant by that when the telephone on a table beside her bed rang. Amy picked it up, pressed it against her ear, and said, “’Lo?” As she listened, her face changed. She said, “Chaym, is that you?” Moments later the phone was dead. Amy placed it back on its base, her expression that of bewilderment.
“Matthew … something’s wrong.”
“That was Chaym? How did he get your number?”
“The same way you did. The phone book. He must have called me from that filling station in town—”
“What did he say?”
She swung her feet over the side of the bed, pulled on an old housecoat, and sat away from me on a chair, squeezing her hands, her knees pressed together. “I don’t know what he was talking about! Something about … a green Plymouth, people watching him. Did you see a car like that?”
I had, but I said nothing.
“I’m worried. I think you should see if he’s okay.”