“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For how I behaved on the island. For this morning. You must think I’m a terrible tease. But when I see Josey like that, I feel I should comfort him, even though…”
“What?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Say.”
Her eyes teared; she pressed my hand against her breast. “It’s not him I want to comfort. You know that.”
I told her not to cry.
She drew a deep breath, steadying herself. “That’s how I was brought up,” she said. “I was taught to deny what I wanted, that I had to let it come second to what everyone else wanted.”
“It’s okay.”
“No! it’s not! I watched my mother wither away taking care of my daddy, his brothers, of every stray that wandered by. She could scarcely let a second pass without doing for him. I swore I wouldn’t be like her. But I’m exactly like her.”
I came to realize that we were less having a conversation than engaging in a litany: she, the priestess, delivering the oration, and I, the acolyte, offering appropriate responses. And as we continued this ritual of confession and assurance, the words served to focus me on the hollow of her throat, the pale skin below her collarbone, the lace trim of a brassiere peeking out between the buttons of her shirt, until the only things in the world were the sound of her voice and the particulars of her body. For all it mattered, she could have been reciting a butcher’s list or reading from a manual on automotive maintenance.
“Feeling that way screwed up almost every relationship I ever had,” she said. “Because I didn’t feel that way. Not at heart… not really. It was just a rule I couldn’t break. I resented men for making me obey the rule, but they didn’t enforce it. I did. I couldn’t simply be with them, I couldn’t enjoy them. And now I don’t care about rules, I finally don’t care, and it’s too late.”
I told her it wasn’t too late, we’d pull through somehow.
Tears slipped along the almost imperceptible lines beside her eyes. I propped myself up on an elbow, intending to invoke some further optimistic cliché, wanting to make certain that she had taken it to heart. Lying half-beneath me, searching my face, her expression grew strangely grave, and then her tongue flicked out to taste my mouth, her hips arched against mine. The solicitude, the tenderness I felt… all that was peeled away to reveal a more urgent affinity, and I tore at her clothing, fumbling with buttons, buckle, snaps, rough with her in my hurry. She cried out in abandon, as if suffering the pain of her broken principles. Cities of thought crumbled, my awareness of our circumstance dissolved, and a last snatch of bleak self-commentary captioned my desire—I saw in my mind’s eye the image of a red burning thing in a fiery sky, not a true sun but a great shear of light in which was embedded an indistinct shape, like that of a bird flying sideways or a woman’s genital smile, and beneath it a low, smoldering wreckage that stretched from horizon to horizon, in which the shadows of men crouched and scuttered and fled with hands clamped to their ears so as to muffle the echoes of an apocalyptic pronouncement.
We spent that night and most of the next day in 1138. Every so often I would run up and check on Pellerin, but my concern was perfunctory. We stayed in bed through the afternoon and, late in the day, as Jo drowsed beside me, I analyzed what had happened and how we had ended up like this, who had said what and who had done what. Our mutual approach seemed to have been thoroughly crude and awkward, but I thought that, if examined closely, all the axiomatic beams that supported us, the scheme and structure of every being, could be perceived as equally crude and awkward… yet those scraps of physical and emotional poetry of which we were capable could transform the rest into an architecture of Doric elegance and simplicity. The romantic character of the idea cut against my grain, but I couldn’t deny it. One touch of her skin could make sense out of stupidity and put the world in right order.
About seven o’clock, simply because we felt we should do something else with the day, we walked down to the strip mall, to the Baskin-Robbins, and sat by the window in the frosty air conditioning. I had two scoops of vanilla; she had a butterscotch sundae. We ate while the high school girls back of the counter listened to the same Fiona Apple song again and again, arguing over the content of the lyrics as if they espoused an abstruse dialectic. Jo and I talked, or rather I talked and she questioned me about my childhood. I told her my father had been a saxophone player in New Orleans and that my mother had run off when I was seven, leaving me in his care. Jo remarked that this must have been hard on me, and I said, “He wasn’t much of a dad. I spent a lot of time running the streets. He was primarily concerned with dope and women, but when he was in the mood, he could be fun. He taught me to play sax and guitar, and made up songs for me and got me to learn them. I could have done worse.”
“Do you remember the songs?”
“Bits and pieces.”
“Let’s hear one!”
After considerable persuasion, I tapped out a rhythm on the tabletop and sang in a whispery voice:
“They most of them were like that one,” I said. “The old man was a bear for religion. He’d haul me down to the temple once or twice a week and have me anointed with some remedy or another.”
“I can picture you singing that when you were a little boy,” she said. “You must have been cute.”
In the darkened parking lot, I saw the black car I had noticed a few days earlier, the occupants invisible behind smoked glass. The sight banished my nostalgia. I asked Jo what she had told Pellerin the previous day when she talked to him about Ogun Badagris.
“I told him about Donnell,” she said.
“About the big copper veve and all?”
“Yes.” She licked the bottom of her spoon.
“How about your theory? About the Ezawa process being an analog of possession. You tell him about that?”
“I couldn’t lie to him anymore.”
What’d he say?”
“He was depressed. I told him if we got out of this situation, he’d live a long time. Long enough to understand everything that was happening to him. That depressed him even more. He said that didn’t motivate him to want to live that long. I tried to cheer him up, but…” She pinned me with a stern look. “Did you sic those girls on me?”
“What girls?” I asked innocently.
“You know which ones.”
“I was pissed at you. I’m over it now, but I was seriously pissed.”
“Then you would have been delighted by my reaction.” She dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “Once they came in, that was it for the conversation.”
“So y’all had some fun, did you?”
“Maybe,” she said, drawing out the first syllable of the word, giving it a playful reading. “I thought the dark-haired girl was very attractive. You never know, do you, when love will strike?”
“Is that right?”