“Let’s go,” she says, turning away from the window full of toys. “I think I’m ready for some lunch.”
That evening he brings her a dozen roses in all different colors — red, pink, white, yellow.
“Flowers with sharp edges,” he says, pointing to the thorns. She smiles and puts them in the blue vase.
In Ethiopia, they are given a painting done on leather stretched over a wooden frame, of Moses receiving the commandments on Sinai. The sepia-colored figures have huge deer eyes and muscular-looking halos. They look content.
She thinks it is time to go home.
When he is away she keeps busy. She has lots of friends and acquaintances in New York. She dines out often and has her women friends over for bridge. She volunteers for the Urban League. They talk on the phone from wherever he is, out on the road. She says: Tell me what you can see out of your window. I can see the Seine, he says or, I can see the Nile. I can see Hyde Park corner. I can see that damn wall and all the barbed wire they’ve got to stop people getting from one side to the other. And the guard towers that they shoot people from.
She decides to renovate the kitchen. Louis will be on tour for another couple of months, so she can get most of the work done before he returns. She decides on an ocean blue for all the cabinets. She tells the designer she wants the doors to curve: no corners, just a smooth undulating front. And she wants certain things built into the counter so they disappear, folding away when she doesn’t want to use them: a bread box, a can opener, cutting boards.
When the room is done, she feels like she is on board a ship whenever she steps into it, because no space is wasted, there is no clutter or inefficiency. The feeling pleases her, and for a few days she finds herself drawn into it repeatedly just to admire its clean simplicity, to run her hands over its smooth new surfaces, to inhale the fading odor of fresh paint and varnish.
Louis calls her from Amsterdam.
“I will have to do another couple of nights at the end of this. Another week or maybe two on the road. You want to come out here and join me, honey? We could go to Nice for a while when it is all done.”
She shakes her head insistently no, and it is only after a moment that she realizes that of course he can’t hear this gesture over the phone lines. She doesn’t want to go back to Europe. She has had enough of traveling.
“You just come home as soon as you can,” she says.
“I will. Just as soon as we’re done recording. ”
After they hang up, she goes down to the kitchen and opens the cabinets slowly, one after another. The next day she calls her designer in and begins picking out molded wallpaper for the front room and the hallways. Mirrored walls for the bathroom downstairs. She likes the idea that each room will have its own texture.
“If I go blind,” she tells the designer, “I want to be able to tell where I am by touch.”
• • •
He comes home and the house is full of people. The grown-ups sit in the living room and drink cocktails. Louis takes his little niece on his knee and teaches her how to burp on purpose until her mother makes him stop. Or some afternoons he will stand out on their upstairs balcony and play his trumpet so that the sound carries up and down the block. The neighborhood kids know that this is the signaclass="underline" there will be a movie in their den that night, cowboys and Indians. There will be popcorn and soda served by Lucille. Louis runs the projector and then sits among them in the big, sagging, leather armchair in the middle of the room. Sometimes he will show a reel of cartoons before the main film, just like at a real movie theater. At the end of the evening, all the children go home and the house is quiet and empty. They make their way upstairs to bed.
From one of his trips, this one to California, he brings her a glass tumbler hand painted with sixteen positions from the Kama Sutra. Stick figures of a man and a woman engage in coitus from every angle that she has ever imagined, and a few she can honestly say she never has.
“What do you think?” he asks, barely able to keep a straight face as he watches for her response.
“I love it,” she says, her voice flat. “I love it so much that I may have to break it so I don’t have to share the privilege of seeing it with anybody else.”
He puts it on the low bureau in the front hall and stands back to admire it, hands on his hips, hamming it up for her benefit.
“Oh no,” she says. “Oh no. You aren’t going to keep that thing there, not with all the children we got coming and going through this house all the time. No way.”
“They won’t know what it is. They won’t even notice it. Perhaps it will work its way into their unconscious minds and help them out, you know, when they get older. ”
“Well, that is thoughtful of you. But no way. You put that thing upstairs, somewhere out of sight.”
“Okay,” he says slowly, turning to look at her. “Okay. I’ll make you a deal.”
“What deal?”
“That picture of you, the painting that crazy French man did, the one you’ve got stuck away up in the study where no one but me ever gets to admire it?”
“I know the one you’re talking about.”
“You let me bring that down here. Hang it in the living room. Where everyone can see how beautiful you are. And then I’ll move my pornographic liquor glass up to the study and put it on a back shelf where no one under the age of twenty-one is ever going to know it’s there.” He folds his arms across his chest, satisfied. “Deal?”
“Okay. Deal. But with one more condition.”
“What is it?”
“You have to move that damn picture down here yourself if you want it on display so badly.”
Sometimes a journalist or, more rarely, one of their guests (who is afterwards never ever invited back) will ask about the things that some of the younger musicians have started to say about him. It always begins the same way: People say that your music has become too popular. How do you respond to that? Or, You know, it has been said that your stage persona is too. friendly. Lucille particularly hates this one. What does that mean, “too friendly”? She knows what it means; she heard the comments in their original, uncut form. They say he is clownish, that his good humor lacks dignity, that it panders to white notions of what a black man should be.
Louis always fixes the person with a direct look. What do you think? he asks. The answer is usually deafening silence. He never gets angry about the questions, or not so as anyone could tell. He leaves that to Lucille.
“So let me get this straight,” she says after one of these occasions. “Before it was a problem for a black man to be too serious in public, and now it’s a problem for him to be too funny?”
“That seems to be the size of it,” he says. They are sitting at either end of the breakfast table, drinking their morning coffee. The sun is coming through the gaps in the blinds making frets on the floor. She rises and comes over to him, taking his head in her hands and cradling it against her belly.
“How does it feel to be a problem?” she asks quietly, speaking to the air around her as much as to him. Being a problem is a strange experience — peculiar even for one who has never been anything else.
She isn’t with him when he has his first collapse. He is in the studios over in Manhattan and suddenly he feels lightheaded. Hot and cold waves undulate through his body, and he sits down, abruptly, then falls. He is rushed to the hospital.
This is where she finds him, propped up in bed on a pile of white pillows looking pale but not frightened. She comes and sits beside him.