Listening to Billie (6 page)

“Why are you smiling?” Kathleen asked. They had entered the research building and started down the hall.

“No real reason.” And then Eliza asked, “Kathleen, have you ever thought about going to med school?” As she asked this, it struck her as incredible that she had not asked before—of course, that was what Kathleen should do.

Striding ahead of Eliza, Kathleen had just opened the door. Miriam raised her head from her arms, which were crossed on the desk. To Eliza, Miriam looked as though she had something to say, but Kathleen had begun to shout.

“Have I ever thought about going to med school? Lord, don’t you know the first thing? How much it costs and how hard it is to get in, especially for women? And I’d have to go back to college and get more science credits. Can’t you just see me in the chem lab at William and Mary, with all those darling coeds in cashmere and pearls and loafers? Eliza, you don’t
think.
”

Miriam was indeed trying to say something, but Kathleen was still focused on Eliza. “Besides,” she went on, “I don’t want to be a doctor. I don’t even want to work. I want to be a wife, like everyone else, and have some kids. Just because you’ve already got a kid, Eliza—”

Miriam got out, “Lawry—”

Those syllables reached Kathleen. She turned on Miriam and shouted, “
What?
”

Slowly, Miriam smiled (beautifully); she said, “He call.”

“You black bitch!” But that was affectionate; Kathleen could only have said it in a mood of great warmth toward Miriam. “What did he say?”

“He say he at some place—The Lion’s Share?”

“Lord, that’s in San Anselmo. He played there for a while. Oh, Lord, he could be here in an hour.”

“No, he say he got business to tend to there. He be on along this afternoon.”

For an instant Kathleen’s radiant face was dimmed, but then, “That’s better, really,” she said. She laughed softly. “If I know him, which I certainly do, I’ll have plenty of time for everything.” And in an excited but at the same time methodical way, she began to organize her desk. She picked up her bag, got up and headed for the door; then she turned, and her voice had reverted to its old anger as she said, “Now don’t you girls think you can leave just because I’m gone. And if anyone calls or comes in, you figure out something to say, you hear?”

They both nodded.

“And, Miriam, when Eliza goes don’t you spend the afternoon asleep or talking on the phone. Don’t you dare!”

She opened the door, then smiled in a tentative small way, and in quite another voice she said, “And wish me luck.”

Left alone, Eliza and Miriam smiled weakly at each other—both burdened with the warring emotions that Kathleen always produced. Miriam said, “Let’s us pray,” and they both laughed a little.

When Miriam and Eliza had first met, the previous fall, Eliza had made a few efforts to talk seriously to her, or at least to mention some of the things that were happening to black people at that time. She spoke about the Freedom Riders, Dr. King. But she soon understood that while Miriam thought it was wrong for people not to get to go where they wanted, she did not understand the fuss about registering voters; she could barely be persuaded that people should vote—she never had. Her ambition was to be a Secretary, not a File Clerk. She had never
heard of Billie Holiday. She was crazy about Elvis Presley.

Finally, Eliza understood that Miriam liked her for being “rich” and well-dressed, the owner of a house. Which was not exactly how Eliza saw herself, but those were things that Miriam hungrily aspired to, that were even beyond her aspirations.

Then one afternoon, in her usual soft conversational voice, Miriam told Eliza this brief story: a couple of years ago (she would have been sixteen) she had this boyfriend, Thomas, and they got along real good, she really liked Thomas. And she and Thomas had this friend, a white fellow who lived on Pine Street, near the Project. Jasper. They used to fool around together, smoke some grass, drink beer. And one time they were fooling around with this gun that Jasper had. And Jasper put it up to Thomas’s head and it went off. Thomas fell down and brains and blood spilled out. It looked so—
terrible.

They had an inquest. Jasper was acquitted. An accident.

Miriam thought it was an accident too; she couldn’t really blame Jasper. Still, she had wondered how it would have been if it had been Thomas with the gun, blowing off the head of Jasper, a white person.

(Eliza wondered too.)

What was most devastating to Eliza was Miriam’s acceptance; this was the sort of thing that could happen, any time. At any moment the friend you love could get blown up right in front of you.

Miriam even seemed anxious not to make too much of it. “I felt real bad for a long time after that,” she said. “I don’t know—”

“
Christ
, Miriam, of course you did.”

Miriam never referred to this story again, nor to Thomas, and neither, of course, did Eliza.

And so, when left alone, when not complaining or sighing over Kathleen, Eliza and Miriam generally talked about clothes.

“I was to the Emporium last night,” said Miriam, “and there was these make-believe fur coats?” Miriam’s observations
often came in the form of questions, as though she doubted the evidence of her senses. “Oooh, they was pretty, I’m telling you.
Real
pretty.”

“Miriam, you’d be paying for one of those coats for a year. And long after you got tired of it. You buy too much stuff.” Of course this was true, Eliza had said it before, and it would never take effect. “Why don’t you make a list of what you need for a year?” she asked once more, wearily.

“You right, I reckon I should.”

Outside, in the high noon heat, the slightest breeze had arisen, barely enough to rattle the stiff yellow leaves that had fallen in the gutters. On the other side of San Francisco, along Grant Avenue, preparations were being made for the Chinese New Year. That night there would be a parade, and the sounds of Chinese flutes and mandolins, firecrackers and human shouts would all be audible as far away as Russian Hill, where Eliza’s cottage was. Where, some blocks away, Dr. Branner occupied the penthouse of an expensive new apartment building.

“I’d really like to go on home,” Eliza said. “You don’t think Kathleen will call?”

“Naw, you go on. She call, I tell her something.”

Eliza grinned. “You’re great. Well, have a good weekend. Happy Chinese New Year.”

“Yeah. You, too.”

Eliza started down the hall. As she turned the corner toward the bank of elevators, Dr. Branner—Gilbert Branner—was emerging from his office, as she almost knew he would be. He had bent down to lock his door.

Eliza said, “Oh, hi!” And she achieved with her voice and her stance a remarkable transformation: as he straightened to look at her, he saw suddenly that she was not an office worker (and no one would be more aware of that than Gilbert Branner) but an attractive young blond woman, of a certain education (Eastern), a certain social style.

“Hi, how are you?” he asked, smiling at her, and achieving
at least for himself a vigorous sound of youth. “Hot enough for you?”

“Unbelievable!”

The elevator was there, and together they entered and descended, smiling at each other in a companionable and pleased way. Eliza said, “You wouldn’t be driving over to Russian Hill now, would you?”

“Well, yes, is that where you live, too? I didn’t know—what luck!”

“Yes, marvelous,” she agreed.

They walked out toward his open car, with their separate but momentarily coincident plans, into the unnatural, sweltering afternoon.

By the following Sunday the heat had not abated, nor had the Chinese New Year celebrations appreciably calmed down; to Eliza, alone in her Russian Hill cottage, both the weather and the festive sounds seemed exotic and unreal. And she herself had a curious feeling of suspension, of aimless waiting and undefined need.

Catherine had gone across town for lunch and a movie with her best friend, and Eliza had a free day, with which, uncharacteristically, she could not decide what to do. And it was as though her vague needs were transmitted into the air as messages—and received by various friends, who telephoned.

First Kathleen, in her staccato, nonstop way: “That fucking Lawry, do you know he never showed up on Friday? He calls me in the middle of the night, really stoned. All I needed. Doesn’t want to come up or anything, and God forbid we should screw; he just wants to talk. I hung up on him, and then I went out to a bar, you know, the old body-shop routine, but I really couldn’t take it. It made me sick, and so I went on home. Jesus, men. I may give the whole thing up and get a dildo. Well, how are you? What’s that crazy noise at your house?”

“Firecrackers. Chinese New Year.”

“Oh, really? And then he called me this morning, like we were friends, asking when he gets to meet my secretary. Not you, Mrs. Quarles,
Miriam.
That rotten bastard got a look at her one time—he’d come by the office to see me and she was strutting across the street, high, probably—and ever since he’s been pestering me, teasing me about her. Shit, I think I will introduce them, they deserve each other. Well, see you tomorrow.”

Hanging up, Eliza recognized that the conversation had made her extremely uneasy. Although Kathleen’s anger was never directed at her, still Eliza felt and was vaguely frightened by its force; its hostile weight battered against her. And she truly hated Kathleen’s rage at Miriam. Sometimes Eliza felt so protective of Miriam that she had considered adopting her, and then had thought, Do I really need an eighteen-year-old black daughter?

To combat her unease, she created some minor chores for herself.

She went into the kitchen, where she got out the blender and a bowl of leftover vegetables for soup, a thrifty habit she had learned early from Josephine—to whom frugality was a virtue, if
haute cuisine
was not.

What Eliza really wanted to be doing was any one of three other things: waxing a newly stripped walnut coffee table, walking in the marvelous light air outside or working on a poem. But perhaps she did not want to do any of those strongly enough? she was truly suspended between wants? As she saw it just then, those were treats to be saved for later on. In the meantime, having ground the vegetables and added chicken soup, she cleaned the blender and turned her attention to the inside of the stove.

She decided that when the phone rang next she would not answer it, knowing quite well what was coming: an inevitable and unpleasant call from Gilbert Branner, of whom she had managed not to think.

The previous Friday afternoon had been entirely terrible for him: a humiliation. For her it was sad and embarrassing. And unpleasant: unable to perform, he had commanded help from her, and she complied, despite distaste (and was that why her help hadn’t worked?), despite annoyance at her own compliant, female nature. She ended more annoyed at herself than at him. And afterward she even thought that she would have to see him again, when he asked, as he surely would, just for the sake of his aging and vulnerable ego. But then she thought, No, I’ve done too much of that, too much yielding and pretending, and it’s too expensive for me. Why should I see him again, when I don’t want to at all, and when he can easily find someone who likes and values him more than I do?

She went upstairs with a vague plan about going through old winter clothes, then reminded herself that winter was only in abeyance, that the insane heat was not a sign of spring. Yet it was with a sort of springtime dreaming lethargy that she fell across her bed, looking out the window at the small garden below in which some of the shrubbery had been deceived into a sudden flowering.

By the time the phone rang, she had forgotten not to answer it.

Gilbert Branner said, “Well, what luck to find you at home on such an exceptionally beautiful Sunday.”

She murmured something, and trusted that her sound was polite.

“I was hoping I could persuade you to come out for a little while on my boat. It’s a perfect day for the Bay.”

Not if it has berths, it occurred to Eliza to say. Instead she said, “That’s terribly nice, but I promised my daughter a walk through Chinatown. New Year’s is still going on.”

At that he chuckled. “Say, do you want to hear a good one?” And he told her a joke about Chinese girls that was racist, sexist, unfunny but mercifully short.

“Well,” he said, and he had begun to sound a little awkward; were her unsaid thoughts traversing the few blocks’
distance between them? He attempted a little laugh. “I do think we should have a rerun sometime. A new start?”

She murmured something negative, aware of rising tension—a tightening in her throat.

He said, “Of course it’s entirely up to you, but I do think you’re being a little unjust, if I may say so.” His tone had hardened and grown colder as he spoke, so that the last phrase was pure ice.

“It’s not just that—” It’s not your sexual performance, or lack of it; it’s everything about you, she would have liked to say. I thought you’d be fun for an afternoon. My mistake, not yours. But I really don’t like you at all, any more than—probably—you like most of the girls you screw.

None of which she was able to say to Gilbert Branner. Instead she said, “I’m really sorry.”

“You know, I ordinarily don’t spend much time with secretaries.” Was that his notion of the
coup de grâce?

“So I understand.” Eliza was unable not to say this.

An iced pause. And then the real
coup de grače
: “Well, you actually won’t fall into that category much longer. The grant that supports your job runs out next month. The other two—uh—ladies will stay on, of course.”

Was that true? Could she now be free of jobs, collecting unemployment money? As she hung up, Eliza was breathless with the possibility.

And having said that she was going to walk through Chinatown, that was what she did, in the heat, in the bedraggled remnants of the New Year celebration.

She walked down Vallejo Street to Columbus, and then right, toward Broadway; hurried across to Grant Avenue, to Chinatown. There the old ladies, clutching tattered shopping bags, walked sideways on their ruined feet past the cheap bright Western-style stores and the Chinese markets that displayed exotic vegetables and fish and barbecued chickens and duck. Thin dark young Oriental men, dressed in black business suits for the holiday, sauntered along the street, and almond-eyed
children darted in and out of alleys, while firecrackers spurted like machine guns. The gutters were littered with sodden bright confetti.