Families and Survivors (11 page)

And she tells Louisa.

Andrew called Kate, and reminded her of their meeting; he said that he had an appointment in town, and would she have lunch with him? (“Well, David had been away for so long, and I was so lonely that I would have had lunch with almost anyone.”)

Andrew seemed excited, and much more animated than Kate remembered. He talked a lot about writing, about
wanting to write, and preparing himself for that. All the novels in his mind. (“I had a terrible feeling that they would stay right there, inside his head.”) A pleasant lunch, really, at a good French restaurant. Nothing untoward, nothing that could be construed as a pass (except the fact of the lunch itself, which
was
a pass, of course).

At the end Andrew thanked her for coming, and asked if they could meet again, and Kate said, well, perhaps not.

“I was really scared,” Kate now tells Louisa. “I knew that I was very attracted to him, and I hadn’t seen David for so long. If he’d really made a pass—I wonder. And later I thought about it; suppose we had gone to a motel and made love, would that have been so terrible? I mean if no one knew?”

Louisa murmurs something indistinct.

“He’s very attractive. He reminded me a little of John.”

“John?”

“John Jeffreys. Louisa, really.” Kate muses, “But John was more definite, and God knows less serious, really. That fucking Southern charm. I don’t think Andrew even knew what he wanted. And he kept talking about his children. Such a father!”

“Yes, he is.”

“I don’t see John as a father, somehow, do you? He’d manage to get out of it.”

“I suppose.”

For every reason this story, this conversation, has made Louisa very uncomfortable: it reminds her humiliatingly of Andrew (“Andrew, I love you,” and then the taste of bile). Also how can she talk about making love? (It is a phrase
that she does not use, not yet in her life: Michael has always talked about fucking, and that is what they do. Dan sometimes says, “Okay, kid, care to screw?”) And how can she discuss the possibilities of unfaithfulness?

But for a wild moment she imagines telling Kate about Dan, how awful he is, how he doesn’t love her at all. How terrible she feels, how worried about Maude. How she flinches from Michael’s slightest touch.

She is too far gone, too sick (colitis was nothing to this depth of hopeless malaise) to realize that this would be a possible conversation; she is with a permanently affectionate friend. Who possibly could help.

Instead she begins to feel irritable with Kate, at what seems such a simple, pleasant, and unquestioning life.

And in a mean way she describes the visit to Michael. (The put-down of others is one of their few remaining sorts of conversation.)

“Well, Kate’s become so ordinary. Another mother. I’m sure she hasn’t opened a book for years. I don’t know—she used to have a lot going, even a kind of originality. Or maybe I just thought so.”

They smile at each other, momentarily united in their superiority to Kate and her boring life.

Dan leaves town, and Louisa finds a man who likes her even less than he did: a beautiful bisexual black man, a painter, named King.

“Can’t you see that I despise you? To me you’re an ugly white cunt, with no tits. Christ! I’m used to beauties.”

Thus is Louisa addressed by King on a day near her
thirtieth birthday, a time that she feels to be the bottom of her life. (She is right.)

They are in King’s apartment, a series of low dingy rooms, a basement. “Of course,” he says. “I would have to live in a basement. Where else, outside of the Fillmore district?” King’s color is golden bronze. In exchange for his room he does janatorial chores in the building, which he loathes.

“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.