“Hey, hey,” says Jane. “Honey, you don’t need a gun. You got a hell of a body. I don’t see how Lawrence could’ve left that.”
The woman lowered the gun. She was dripping with sweat and pale as an egg out there in the bright sun over the sea. Her hair was nearabout down to her ass and her face was crazy.
“Look at her, Lawrence,” said Jane.
The guy turned around and looked at his ex-wife. He whispered: “She was lovely. But her personality was a disease. She was killing me. It was slow murder.”
When I got there, the naked woman was on Lawrence’s lap. Jane and a lot of people were standing around looking at them. They’d fallen back in love. Lawrence was sucking her breast. She wasn’t a bad-looking sight. The long gun lay off in the sand. No law was needed. I was just humiliated. I tried to get away before Jane saw me, but I’d been drinking and smoking a lot the night before and I gave out this ninety-nine-year-old cough. Everybody on the patio except Lawrence and his woman looked around.
But in Mobile we got it going together again. She taught art in a private school where they admitted high-type Negroes only. And I was a fly on the city’s first high-rise parking garage. We had so much money we ate out even for breakfast. She thought she was pregnant for a while and I was happy as hell. I wanted a heavenly blessing — as the pastors say — with Jane. I thought it would form the living chain between us that would never be broken. It would be beyond biology and into magic. But it was only eighteen months in Mobile and we left on a rainy day in the winter without her pregnant. She was just lean and her eyes were brown diamonds like always, and she had begun having headaches.
Let me tell you about Jane drinking punch at one of the parties at the University of Florida where she had a job. Some hippie had put LSD in it and there was nothing but teacher types in the house, leaning around, commenting on the azaleas and the evil of the administration. I never took any punch because I brought my own dynamite in the car. Here I was, complimenting myself on holding my own with these profs. One of the profs looked at Jane in her long gown, not knowing she was with me. He said to another: “She’s pleasant to look at, as far as that goes.” I said to him that I’d heard she was smart too, and had taken the all-Missouri swimming meet when she was just a junior in high school. Another guy spoke up. The LSD had hit. I didn’t know.
“I’d like to stick her brain. I’ll bet her brain would be better than her crack. I’d like to have her hair falling around my honker. I’d love to pull on those ears with silver loops hanging around, at, on, above — what is it? — them.”
This guy was the chairman of the whole department.
“If I was an earthquake, I’d take care of her,” said a fellow with a goatee and an ivory filter for his cigarette.
“Beauty is fleeting,” said his ugly wife. “What stays is your basic endurance of pettiness and ennui. And perhaps, most of all, your ability to hide farts.”
“Oh, Sandra!” says her husband. “I thought I’d taught you better. You went to Vassar, you bitch, so you wouldn’t say things like that.”
“I went to Vassar so I’d meet a dashing man with a fortune and a huge cucumber. Then I came back home, to assholing Florida and you,” she said. “Washing socks, underwear, arguing with some idiot at Sears.”
I met Jane at the punch bowl. She was socking it down and chatting with the librarian honcho who was her boss. He was a Scotsman with a mountain of book titles for his mind. Jane said he’d never read a book in thirty years, but he knew the hell out of their names. Jane truly liked to talk to fat and old guys best of all. She didn’t ever converse much with young men. Her ideal of a conversation was when sex was nowhere near it at all. She hated all her speech with her admirers because every word was shaded with lust implications. One of her strange little dreams was to be sort of a cloud with eyes, ears, mouth. I walked up on them without their seeing and heard her say: “I love you. I’d like to pet you to death.” She put her hand on his poochy stomach.
So then I was hitting the librarian in the throat and chest. He was a huge person, looked something like a statue of some notable gentleman in ancient history. I couldn’t do anything to bring him down. He took all my blows without batting an eye.
“You great bastard!” I yelled up there. “I believed in You on and off all my life! There better be something up there like Jane or I’ll humiliate You! I’ll swine myself all over this town. I’ll appear in public places and embarrass the shit out of You, screaming that I’m a Christian!”
We divorced the second time right after that.
Now we’re in Richmond, Virginia. They laid me off. Inflation or recession or whatever rubbed me out. Oh, it was nobody’s fault, says the boss. I got to sell my third car off myself, says he. At my house, we don’t eat near the meat we used to, says he.
So I’m in this house with my binoculars, moving from chair to chair with my cigarettes. She flies over my house upside down every afternoon. Is she saying she wants me so much she’d pay for a plane to my yard? Or is she saying: Look at this, I never gave a damn for anything but fun in the air?
Nothing in the world matters but you and your woman. Friendship and politics go to hell. My friend Dan three doors down, who’s also unemployed, comes over when he can make the price of a six-pack.
It’s not the same.
I’m going to die from love.
Testimony of Pilot
WHEN I WAS TEN, ELEVEN AND TWELVE, I DID A GOOD BIT OF MY PLAY in the backyard of a three-story wooden house my father had bought and rented out, his first venture into real estate. We lived right across the street from it, but over here was the place to do your real play. Here there was a harrowed but overgrown garden, a vine-swallowed fence at the back end, and beyond the fence a cornfield which belonged to someone else. This was not the country. This was the town, Clinton, Mississippi, between Jackson on the east and Vicksburg on the west. On this lot stood a few water oaks, a few plum bushes, and much overgrowth of honeysuckle vine. At the very back end, at the fence, stood three strong nude chinaberry trees.
In Mississippi it is difficult to achieve a vista. But my friends and I had one here at the back corner of the garden. We could see across the cornfield, see the one lone tin-roofed house this side of the railroad tracks, then on across the tracks many other bleaker houses with rustier tin roofs, smoke coming out of the chimneys in the late fall. This was niggertown. We had binoculars and could see the colored children hustling about and perhaps a hopeless sow or two with her brood enclosed in a tiny boarded-up area. Through the binoculars one afternoon in October we watched some men corner and beat a large hog on the brain. They used an ax and the thing kept running around, head leaning toward the ground, for several minutes before it lay down. I thought I saw the men laughing when it finally did. One of them was staggering, plainly drunk to my sight from three hundred yards away. He had the long knife. Because of that scene I considered Negroes savage cowards for a good five more years of my life. Our maid brought some sausage to my mother and when it was put in the pan to fry, I made a point of running out of the house.