Families and Survivors Read online

  “But she has a fever—I’m really sort of worried. I really should go.” Desperate Louisa is speaking of Maude. She is standing at the sink, having just finished washing the dishes from King’s dinner, having left the dishes from her own dinner in the sink, with Michael’s and Maude’s, rushed out of the house on some minor pretext.

  “Go, go on ahead. Take care of your little baby daughter and your big baby husband.”

  She wipes her hands on a limp towel. “I guess fifteen or twenty minutes more won’t make any difference. Do you want me to make coffee?”

  “I had something a little more—uh—interesting than coffee in mind for this evening.” He makes this very Southern, very Southern Negro, which he is not, with an evil, white-toothed grin.

  But he is lying; she knows he is lying. He almost never wants to make love, and he never announces such a desire. It is she who persuades him with various blandishments. (They are all degrading, but this is not a word that she can allow into her mind. Not now.) She smiles, although her very facial muscles feel unconvinced.

  “But I know I can’t interest you in any such goings-on as that. Make the coffee—go ahead.”

  One of the myths of their “affair” (it is hardly that) is that of her nymphomania: she is supposed to be insatiable (for him) and at times she believes this to be true—God knows she is unsatisfied.

  She makes the coffee while a small but very lively part of her mind, a part that she subdues, would like to throw it at him, scalding hot.

  Why does she come to this terrible place, to wash dishes and to caress a passive crazy man who for the most part hates her? Louisa doesn’t know; she doesn’t think about it, any more than an addict thinks that his drug might be inferior. His passivity is her heroin.

  He is stretched across the brown corduroy daybed, in his tight jeans, narcissistically bulging, and his white, white T-shirt. She brings the coffee to him there, placing it carefully on an upended orange crate, and she sits beside him—or rather near.

  Suddenly he says, “You do have the nicest long hands and feet that I ever did see.” A present: perhaps it is for such stray moments as this that she comes to him. She thrills to his praise, especially since he has said that the hands and feet of his great love, the vanished blond Bobbie, were chunky—fat. (Or maybe he likes fat feet? This occurs to her even as she is absorbing the compliment.) She also knows that he is using and will go on using any possible trick to make her stay. (When she has more time, he urges her to go.)

  Louisa believes that he is an incredibly talented painter (she must believe). Canvases too high for the room are propped at intervals against the walls. A curious spectrum: shades of gray, and black and white are suddenly slashed with red. Violent and terrifying paintings, or beginnings of paintings: the most striking fact is that none of them is finished. On each canvas there is one small completed corner. But if he ever went on, the painting would be marvelous. (Louisa is sure of that.) Eventually King is to decide that the small corner is enough; he is perfect as he is.

  Stretching toward her, King says, “How about it, baby. You feel like giving me a little blow before you go?”

  She doesn’t.

  She does.

  They met at a life class, at night, in a local art school. In the large cold room the skin of the naked model, who was fat, looked moist and white. Too ugly to draw, depressing. Louisa turned from the platform, looking for relief. And found King. He was seated a little below her, so that she was able to stare at him and to sketch his head without his knowledge. But of course he knew. She could also see his sketch of the fat model, whom he violently distorted: he made her fatter, more sagging, and somehow whiter, even colder than she looked in the flesh, and it came to Louisa that he must actually know and despise that woman.

  Louisa didn’t know King.

  She thought that she had never seen a color as beautiful as the color of his skin. And warm—how marvelous to touch, to be allowed to touch!

  (She assumed that he was a Negro, although she was not quite sure; he could have been something else, even Portuguese—she had never been to Portugal, and he was utterly unlike Negroes from Virginia.)

  She wished that she had changed her clothes before coming to class. If he turned, he would see long dirty hair—she was too tired to wash it, and it took so long to dry—and a baggy sweater, over stained blue jeans. Clothes from college, ten years back. Now she looked like a beatnik.

  After an hour and a half he turned and winked.

  He let her drive him home. He invited her in, he made coffee, and he told her all about a girl named Bobbie. How did Bobbie come up? Later Louisa could never remember.

  “Just a fantastically beautiful young blond chick,” he said. “That’s all she was. Bobbie.”

  And Louisa’s mind saw impossibly jutting, hard pale breasts, and a thatch of blond pubic hair. Did she, too, fall in love with Bobbie?

  “With an inordinate zest for the sack. She had what you might call a veritable genius,” he said, grinning sleepily, remembering God knows what pleasures, as Louisa wondered, Just what did she do that was so special? There are only so many holes, so many hands and tongues.

  “But I had to go and fall in love with her. Up and down and out of my fucking mind in love, when she was thinking of fun and games.”

  Louisa’s tired heart gave a lurch of sympathy; she could have done the same, fallen in love with someone who was having fun. Fun?

  “Of course when I got so serious she pulled out.” (She pulled out?) “Ran off to Europe with a couple of other guys.” He chuckled tolerantly, with affection. “She was what you might call a switch hitter.” Whatever that meant.

  By this time Louisa was in love with King, and possibly with Bobbie as well. (Although later she is to decide that “Bobbie” is fictional—or is, quite possibly, “Bob.”)

  Breathlessly she asked, “Is she still there? In Europe?”

  He gave her a studied, suspicious look. “As far as I know. Why?”

  Cringingly, “I just wondered,” she said.

  They drank a lot of coffee and they tried to make love to each other, and none of the gestures of love worked out. Both those things, the coffee and failed love, kept Louisa awake all night, at home, guiltily listening to Michael’s heavy snores.

  “Are you awake? I didn’t wake you up?”

  Michael has gone off to work, finally, and Maude taken to nursery school. Louisa telephones to King. She has told herself that he will feel badly about the night before, and that he should be reassured. (She is almost always wrong about King.)

  “No, I was awake.” He stretches and yawns; both are audible over the phone—his seductions. “I feel fine. What kind of a day is it?”

  “Bright. Really pretty.” She hesitates. “I thought if it was okay I’d come over and make breakfast for you. I could bring some things,” she finishes vaguely.

  “Well.” He considers this proposition. Will he allow her to come and make his breakfast? He decides in her favor. “Well, okay. But I was planning on getting to work pretty soon.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  She races through the market (she has already washed her hair); she sweeps up delicacies into her cart. Smoked ham and mushrooms and imported jams; she forgets to buy eggs. She rushes across the city in the bright October weather (Thomas Wolfe weather); she parks and knocks on that basement door. Last night, in the dark, she had not noticed that it is painted red. Knocking there, waiting, she vaguely feels that the color is a warning.

  King comes to the door, and in an awkward, embarrassed way they kiss.

  He looks at the sack of groceries and gives her his evil “Negro” grin. “I sure hope you’ve got some good old hominy in there. My mouth is really set for some good old grits. And eggs.”

  Christ! She has never had grits in her life. “Well, no,” she says, lamely adding, “I didn’t know you liked them.”

  “All us poor colored folks like grits—now didn’t you know that?”


  “But you’re not Southern, are you?” She feels brave saying this.

  “No, but you are.” (What does this mean?)

  Then he asks, “How much help did your folks have?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me: how many maids, and butlers and whatever. ‘Help’—isn’t that what you-all call them?”

  “Uh—just one,” she lies, and, as always with King, she has said the wrong thing. He would have preferred her surrounded by grinning echelons of black-faced servants.

  “Oh, poor whites,” he sneers.

  “Well, not quite,” she flickers; she is not quite dead.

  She makes the breakfast, and he admits that it is pretty good. “But I never had any breakfast with no eggs.”

  She cleans up, and then there is an awkward moment during which she tries to look at her watch. She fails.

  He says, “You got time for a quick screw?” He laughs, and then turns, instantly, dramatically (false) serious. “But I reckon by now you know that’s not my style.”

  They meet mid-kitchen, they kiss. He says, “Shall we have an all-consuming love affair? Is that what you’ve got ahead of you, in your mind?”

  She only smiles, feeling fleetingly pretty.

  “Maybe you could take my mind right off that Bob—Bobbie—for me. Could you do that?”

  Reaching, touching Louisa’s tiny limp breasts, King thinks of Bobbie, of perfect generous flesh—or is this in Louisa’s mind? Is it only she who thinks of Bobbie? Kissing her, he remembers a sweeter taste of Bobbie.

  He talks a lot about Bobbie, encouraged by Louisa. “She dressed like a kind of premature beatnik,” he says. (King hates beatniks: a bunch of dirty white kids, a lot of them Jews—what do they know about street life?) “She wore sweat shirts and jeans, old sneakers. I wanted her to dress up pretty, of course. In cashmere sweaters and pearls, and I bought her that stuff.”

  (Did he? Is this true?)

  “But wouldn’t she wear it, to please you?”

  “Are you kidding—Bobbie? Not that kid.” As always, his voice is full of admiration. (But is it true, or is Bobbie his creation?)

  And then there are moments when it seems to both of them that they are involved in a violent love affair (although somewhat fictional). Recklessly she comes to him in the middle of the night, having with no valid excuse abandoned Michael at a party of psychologists in Park Merced. She claims to be exhausted, she is going home, and she forcefully insists that Michael stay on; as usual her hysteria convinces him—she is still powerful over him.

  In her tight black dress that Caroline had sent for Christmas, perfumed and smelling of booze, she comes to King, all out of breath. “I couldn’t stand it without seeing you, not another minute.”

  “Christ, you’re great,” he says. “I couldn’t have stood the night if you didn’t come.”

  Then they make love frenziedly, not removing many clothes; they spend longer over their farewells, their lingering (fictional) lovers’ good nights, than they did in the act of love.

  “You were lovely to come. Dream of me.”

  “Yes, I love you.”

  This is how lovers behave, they believe—passionate lovers. But is that what they are doing, acting out love?

  And then he tells her that he despises her.

  He criticizes the way she has an orgasm. “Most women I’ve known”—and of course he means Bobbie—“most women, it’s like they’ve been struck by lightning. But you—I can hardly tell.”

  How can she say to him that she hardly ever comes with him? She pretends to, and she doesn’t want or dare to overact. She has to be as sexy, as womanly, as Bobbie. And more so.

  “Fucking you is like fucking someone black,” he says, his voice full of anger and despair.

  This makes sense to Louisa. I have a black woman’s cunt, is what she thinks.

  Sometimes she sneaks home to Michael, aroused and unfulfilled, and she manages to arouse him. To come. The smallest twitch.

  She is loathsome to herself.

  The thought of her daughter is unbearable to her. Maude cries a lot. She doesn’t like other children. In the sandbox at the playground she used to throw sand and fight over toys; she was unable to “share.” Nowadays she is listless, watching television all afternoon. No friends.

  And the worst of it is that Maude will have to grow up, grow into being a woman, needing men. She will fall in love with men, over and over. Falling.

  Louisa thinks that it would have been much better if she had had a son. God, she could have loved a son!

  Some innate fastidiousness prevents Louisa from talking in detail to King about Michael (“that fat Jew you married”), but King somehow intuits Michael through her. “I’ll bet he spends a lot of time in the can, doesn’t he?” This is a thing she would never have mentioned.

  She blushes.

  “Ah, you’re blushing. You know, you’re really pretty when you blush.”

  She thinks about Michael as little as possible, even when they are together. Then she is thinking about King.

  She does not think about the rest of her life.

  Once, only once, she breaks down with King; she cries out to him, “I can’t stand my life! I live in a nightmare, I despise Michael. It’s killing me. I’m killing Maude.”

  He eyes her evilly. “Don’t you look at me, baby,” he says. “I can’t help you, not at all. I’ve got my own brown skin to save.”

  She wonders if he is right, that she was asking him to save her. Very likely, but she isn’t sure.

  “How about giving me a little blow before you go?”

  She does.

  …

  A check from her mother, from Caroline. For her birthday. The bottom of her life. She wonders if she could possibly tell Caroline how she feels; would Caroline send her money if she got a divorce and a part-time job? But she doesn’t know how to type.

  She goes to Magnin’s; she buys a pale blue cashmere sweater, a matching tweed skirt, and a rope of pearls. Driving to King’s basement, she has a curious sense of impersonation; she is dressed up to be someone else. And then of course it comes to her: at an intersection where she watches a pretty young blond girl cross the street. (Is that Bobbie? She is always looking for Bobbie, as she imagines that King is always looking.) At that moment she understands she is wearing the clothes that King said he bought for Bobbie (that, even to please him, Bobbie refused to wear). The sick complexity of this weighs her down, so that by the time she gets to King she is not a pretty young woman in pretty, expensive new clothes; she is a terrified anxiety-filled young-old person, perhaps a woman.

  Of course he notices. “That’s a new style of dress for you, now, isn’t it? But I’m not sure you’re really the type for it. I like those classic clothes on a body that’s a little more—voluptuous—”

  Whatever King says has a special ironic undertone; he is almost never direct. Considering this, Louisa is dimly reminded of someone else, someone who also speaks in a stilted way, as though always kidding, which he is not. Who says mean things as though they were a joke.

  And then it comes to her: Jack Calloway, her father.

  Jesus Christ.

  …

  They only see each other in King’s basement. They have given up the art class, King because he decided it was no good (“What do those mothers know?”), and Louisa because she can use the time to see King, pretending to continue with the class.

  The city outside, lovely San Francisco, might not exist at all; they could be in St. Louis, or Iowa Falls. Along Grant Avenue the beatniks are slowly vanishing; it is never clear where they have gone, and their hangouts slowly die: Miss Smith’s Tea Room, the Bagel Shop, The Place. King and Louisa have never been in a bar together, or walked along a street. The city’s skyline is still gentle, more Mediterranean than Manhattan in its aspect—no greedy Mafia-shadowed mayor yet, no greedy builders. Alex Magowan and the other engineers are just starting out. It is the end of the fifties, in a reasonably quiet
city.

  Curiously, King always praises the small sketches that Louisa does; he encourages her to draw. “You’ve got one delicate Southern touch,” he tells her. “And class. Style. You’re a real Southern lady artist.”

  This is praise; she knows that her Southernness is what (if anything) he likes in her, although he often taunts her: “I don’t reckon your folks would be too happy for me to come by for a little visit, now, would they?”

  For some reason, which at first Louisa does not understand, King asks her repeatedly about Kate. Their friendship. She has told him about the naked swimming—the night of sex appeal, and how they laughed. He keeps going back to that night.

  “You just laughed and fell in the water and then got out and dressed?”

  “Well, yes.”

  He makes a sound of disbelief as he looks at her curiously.

  Embarrassed, and not sure why (but sure that she is failing him again), Louisa limply says, “Really. That’s all.”

  Softly: “Really?”

  She understands that he is (of course) suggesting a lesbian scene—and it is not an accusation. It is something he wants very much; he would like to watch her with Kate. And she has a queasy memory of something that Michael once said: “Homosexual … you and Kate.”

  It even, for a moment, occurs to her to improvise, to make up such a scene, as a present for him.

  But then, “Really, that was all,” she says, in total defeat. “Nothing happened.”

  One November morning, in her pretty cashmere clothes, Louisa goes downtown; she has nothing else to wear, and she has to buy a birthday present for Michael. Dispiritedly she enters Brooks Brothers.

  Gazing unhappily at the neat stacks of regimental striped ties at her elbow, she suddenly hears, “Louisa—Lou, it’s really you—terrific!”

  And there is Andrew Chapin, dark handsome Andrew, old friend and former neighbor. Andrew with his heavy crooked eyebrows and his grin. (It is several minutes before she remembers that humiliating party scene; at first she is simply glad to see him.)