“What would I want with a man who’s already gone and got himself married to three other women?” she asked him. He laughed.
“Oh, no. Don’t worry. At the present time, I’m only married to one of them.”
He is in Chicago the following winter to play a gig, and he figures he might as well get his divorce while he is in town. He is making his statement before the judge when he glimpses Lucille sitting in the back of the courtroom. He had not expected her to be there. She is wearing a dark blue coat with a high collar and a hat of the same shade with a small feather on the side. She is trying to be inconspicuous and failing. The eyes of the men in the room swing toward her like the hand of a compass to north.
After the proceedings are finished, he comes to where she is sitting.
“What are you doing here?” he asks her.
“I’m making sure you are really getting a divorce.”
“Well, I did it,” he says. “You saw me.” He looks at her hard. Then he offers her his arm and together they walk from the courtroom. As they are going down the steps, he glances over the balustrade and sees a line of people waiting outside an office on the ground floor. They are chattering happily — a marked contrast to everyone else in the building. It is the office that issues marriage licenses.
“Lucy,” he says. “Honey.” He indicates the line of waiting couples with a soft movement of his head. “Want to get married? I mean, since we are already here.”
• • •
“Buy us a house,” he tells her on the telephone from San Francisco.
“What kind of a house?”
“I don’t know what kinds there are to choose from. Just find one you like.”
The house on 107th Street in Queens is a three-story clapboard affair on a small lot. The street is quiet. Most of the residents are Irish or Italian. Their children are playing kickball in the road when the realtor ushers her up the front steps and opens the door. She follows him around the three floors inside: the bedrooms; the study, which lets out onto a balcony overlooking the street; the big basement. She likes it at once.
She looks out the backdoor into the yard. There is a single broad-trunked plain tree shedding its spiky globes of seed onto the thin winter lawn. She remembers a tree like that from the end of the street where she lived as a child. She remembers crushing the pods under her shoes.
“I’ll take it.”
“Mrs. Armstrong, are you sure you don’t want to see a few more properties before you make up your mind?”
“Yes, I’m sure. This is the one I want.” She doesn’t tell him that she has never lived in a house of her own. Throughout her childhood, her family moved from one rented room to another to another after that. If they left before the rent was due, they called it “Beat the Rent,” It was a game, like Catch the Hat or Go Fish, where winning meant you were gone before the landlord came around on the first of the month to collect. Then in New York, she lived in a ladies’ rooming house: one small room, clean, easy to understand.
Looking at more houses, she thinks, would only clutter her head with too many kitchens, too many front porches and backyards and basements and staircases. She doesn’t like confusion.
Louis arrives at his new house in the middle of the night. He has just come from the station, and before that from engagements in Cleveland, St. Louis, and Detroit. Lucille sends a driver to meet him because he doesn’t even know the address yet. She sees the car pull up by the curb outside, sees him in the back, his trumpet case on the seat beside him within arm’s reach. The rest of his luggage is in the trunk, but his trumpet he always keeps close by him when he travels. She says, you act like it’s your pocketbook, the way you clutch that thing. He says, it is my pocketbook. You get money out of your pocketbook, right? Well, I get money out of this.
He leans forward and says something to the driver and then sits back against the seat. He doesn’t get out. He remains seated where he is in the back of the car. Occasionally he shades his eyes with his hand and peers up at the house through the car’s side window. What is he doing? The car is still sitting at the curb, its engine running, but he shows no sign of moving.
After a couple of minutes, she puts on the porch light and opens the door. She waves down at the car. He waves back and then climbs out and goes around to pull his cases from the trunk. The driver goes to help him, but Louis tips him and then waves him away. He comes up the steps.
“What were you waiting for?” Lucille asks when he gets to the top.
“Well, I wasn’t sure this was the right address,” he says. “I didn’t want to go knocking on someone else’s front door in the middle of the night. What would you think if some strange black man came to your door in the middle of the night in this neighborhood?”
“I would think he probably needed a cup of coffee.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Sure, but I gave you the correct address, baby. I can see you’ve got it right there.” And indeed, he is holding the piece of paper she gave to the driver. It has the address written on it in her own handwriting.
“I know. But, honestly. ” he is looking past her now into the front hall. His eyes look like a child’s at Christmas before the presents are opened. “I didn’t believe that a house this nice was mine. Is it?” She sees that he is crying. He has never had a house of his own before, either.
“It is,” she says. “It’s yours. I promise.”
When they are in Paris during his European tour, a man they meet at a party insists that he wants to paint Lucille’s portrait. He trails Louis around the room, conversation to conversation, explaining that his wife’s is the most marvelous face he’s seen in years and he must be allowed to render her likeness. Such perfect lines. Such wonderful tones. They can have the painting as a gift when it is finished.
She isn’t sure she wants a big picture of herself hanging in her house; there is something that unnerves her about the idea of her own face preserved in paint while she grows older watching it. But Louis loves the idea, and before she knows what has happened, he has arranged for the man to accompany them around Europe so she can sit for him every day. She shrugs. It will give her something to do during the long hours when he is rehearsing and performing. And when the picture is done, it can go in his study, she thinks, somewhere she won’t have to see it all the time.
In Morocco, she sees a carved wooden screen in the bazaar, which she realizes would look perfect by the front windows of the living room. In Berlin, there is a vase glazed blue and gray, all hard angles and geometry, which she finds in an antique shop on Keithstrasse.
“For the shelves in the breakfast nook,” she tells him, when she unwraps it on the coffee table in their hotel suite.
“Looks like you should put square flowers in that, flowers with sharp edges.” He turns it around in his hands.
“Well, you find me some flowers like that to go in it,” she says to him. “But in case you can’t, I think ordinary round flowers would do fine.”
In London, in the window of a shop on Kensington High Street, she sees a child’s mobile made of wood and painted in bright primary colors. It plays a tune when it turns. She watches it through the glass for a while. He comes up beside her quietly and puts an arm around her waist.
“You want that?”
“Not for me,” she says. “No, I don’t want it.”
“If you want it, get it. I’ll go in and get it for you.”
“I told you I don’t want it. What on earth is the point of having something like that. ” She trails off, annoyed at herself for having been caught staring, annoyed with him for pressing the point. He has no children. None of his other wives ever conceived as far as she knows.