He has finished showering and calls my name while putting his tuxedo back on. I don’t answer; I don’t look; I just pull the pillow over my head. That amuses him and I hear him chuckle. I listen to kitchen noises as he makes coffee. No, not coffee; I would smell it. He is pouring something — orange juice, V8, flat Champagne? That’s all that’s in the refrigerator. Silence, then footsteps. Please, please just leave. I hear a tick on the nightstand followed by the sound of my front door opening then closing. When I peep from under the pillow I see a folded square of paper next to the clock. Telephone number. FABULOUS. Then his name. I slump with relief. He is not an employee.
I rush to the bathroom and look in the wastebasket. Thank you, Jesus. A used condom. Traces of steam are on the shower glass near the medicine cabinet whose mirror is clear, sparkling, showing me what I saw last night — earlobes as chaste as the day I was born. So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know. I need the shaving brush, the soap. There is not a single hair in my armpit, but I lather it anyway. Now the other one. The lathering up, the shaving, calms me and I am so grateful I begin to think of other places that might need this little delight. My pudenda, perhaps. It’s already hairless. Will it be too tricky using the straight razor down there? Tricky. Yes.
Calmed, I go back to bed and slide under the sheet. Minutes later my head explodes with throbbing pain. I get up and find two Vicodins to swallow. Waiting for the pills to work there is nothing to do but let my thoughts trail, track and bite one another.
What is happening to me?
My life is falling down. I’m sleeping with men whose names I don’t know and not remembering any of it. What’s going on? I’m young; I’m successful and pretty. Really pretty, so there! Sweetness. So why am I so miserable? Because he left me? I have what I’ve worked for and am good at it. I’m proud of myself, I really am, but it’s the Vicodin and the hangover that make me keep remembering some not-so-proud junk in the past. I’ve gotten over all that and moved on. Even Booker thought so, didn’t he? I spilled my guts to him, told him everything: every fear, every hurt, every accomplishment, however small. While talking to him certain things I had buried came up fresh as though I was seeing them for the first time — how Sweetness’s bedroom always seemed unlit. I open the window next to her dresser. Her grown-up-woman stuff crowds her vanity: tweezers, cotton balls, that round box of Lucky Lady face powder, the blue bottle of Midnight in Paris cologne, hairpins in a tiny saucer, tissue, eyebrow pencils, Maybelline mascara, Tabu lipstick. It’s deep red and I try some on. No wonder I’m in the cosmetics business. It must have been describing all that stuff on Sweetness’s dresser that made me tell him about that other thing. All about it. Me hearing a cat’s meow through the open window, how pained it sounded, frightened, even. I looked. Down below in the walled area that led to the building’s basement I saw not a cat but a man. He was leaning over the short, fat legs of a child between his hairy white thighs. The boy’s little hands were fists, opening and closing. His crying was soft, squeaky and loaded with pain. The man’s trousers were down around his ankles. I leaned over the windowsill and stared. The man had the same red hair as Mr. Leigh, the landlord, but I knew it couldn’t be him because he was stern but not dirty. He demanded the rent be paid in cash before noon on the first day of the month and charged a late fee if you knocked on his door five minutes late. Sweetness was so scared of him she made sure I delivered the money first thing in the morning. I know now what I didn’t know then — that standing up to Mr. Leigh meant having to look for another apartment. And that it would be hard finding a location in another safe, meaning mixed, neighborhood. So when I told Sweetness what I’d seen, she was furious. Not about a little crying boy, but about spreading the story. She wasn’t interested in tiny fists or big hairy thighs; she was interested in keeping our apartment. She said, “Don’t you say a word about it. Not to anybody, you hear me, Lula? Forget it. Not a single word.” So I was afraid to tell her the rest — that although I didn’t make a sound, I just hung over the windowsill and stared, something made the man look up. And it was Mr. Leigh. He was zipping his pants while the boy lay whimpering between his boots. The look on his face scared me but I couldn’t move. That’s when I heard him shout, “Hey, little nigger cunt! Close that window and get the fuck outta there!”
When I told Booker about it I laughed at first, pretending the whole thing was just silly. Then I felt my eyes burning. Even before the tears welled, he held my head in the crook of his arm and pressed his chin in my hair.
“You never told anybody?” he asked me.
“Never,” I said. “Only you.”
“Now five people know. The boy, the freak, your mother, you and now me. Five is better than two but it should be five thousand.”
He turned my face up to his and kissed me. “Did you ever see that boy again?”
I said I didn’t think so, that he was down on the ground and I couldn’t see his face. “All I know is that he was a white kid with brown hair.” Then thinking of how his little fingers spread then curled, spread wide then curled tight I couldn’t help sobbing.
“Come on, baby, you’re not responsible for other folks’ evil.”
“I know, but—”
“No buts. Correct what you can; learn from what you can’t.”
“I don’t always know what to correct.”
“Yes you do. Think. No matter how hard we try to ignore it, the mind always knows truth and wants clarity.”
That was one of the best talks we ever had. I felt such relief. No. More than that. I felt curried, safe, owned.
Not like now, twisting and turning between the most expensive cotton sheets in the world. Aching, waiting for another Vicodin to start up while fretting in my gorgeous bedroom, unable to stop scary thoughts. Truth. Clarity. What if it was the landlord my forefinger was really pointing at in that courtroom? What that teacher was accused of was sort of like what Mr. Leigh did. Was I pointing at the idea of him? His nastiness or the curse he threw at me? I was six years old and had never heard the words “nigger” or “cunt” before, but the hate and revulsion in them didn’t need definition. Just like later in school when other curses — with mysterious definitions but clear meanings — were hissed or shouted at me. Coon. Topsy. Clinkertop. Sambo. Ooga booga. Ape sounds and scratching of the sides, imitating zoo monkeys. One day a girl and three boys heaped a bunch of bananas on my desk and did their monkey imitations. They treated me like a freak, strange, soiling like a spill of ink on white paper. I didn’t complain to the teacher for the same reason Sweetness cautioned me about Mr. Leigh — I might get suspended or even expelled. So I let the name-calling, the bullying travel like poison, like lethal viruses through my veins, with no antibiotic available. Which, actually, was a good thing now I think of it, because I built up immunity so tough that not being a “nigger girl” was all I needed to win. I became a deep dark beauty who doesn’t need Botox for kissable lips or tanning spas to hide a deathlike pallor. And I don’t need silicon in my butt. I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it. I have to say, forcing those tormentors — the real ones and others like them — to drool with envy when they see me is more than payback. It’s glory.