Meridian (20 page)

“Why don’t you say what you mean!”

“I mean,” said Tommy Odds mockingly, “it is true that you speaks French when you wants to impress folks, and it is true that you went to college, and it is true that you can draw and stuff and one time lived overseas for six months without pig feet or greens. But that ain’t what won you Miss Lady Fair. Oh noooo ... you’re like a book she hadn’t read; like a town she wanted to pass through; like a mango she wanted to taste because mangoes don’t grow in her own yard. Boy, if you’d had an arm missing she probably would have kidnapped you a lot sooner than she did.”

Truman wanted very much to destroy Tommy Odds. The impulse was overwhelming.

“Black men get preferential treatment, man, to make up for all we been denied. She ain’t been fucking you, she’s been atoning for her sins.”

“That’s not true,” said Truman, sounding weak, even to himself

“She felt sorry for me because I’m black, man,” said Tommy Odds, and for the first time there was dejection in his voice. “The one thing that gives me some consolation in this stupid world, and she thinks she has to make up for it out of the bountifulness of her pussy.” His voice hardened. “I should have killed her.”

“No,” said Truman, “no—”

Tommy Odds stood facing him. He looked terrible. Puny and exhausted and filthy. Dead. “Listen, man, you want to defend her. It’s all right with me. I don’t care, man. You want to beat me up,” he said, “I’m ready, man. You want to kill me. Look, I won’t even complain. You want me to go find you a gun? Or do you want to do it with your fists? Come on, man. Hit me. We’ll feel better.”

But Truman had already turned away.

And so Lynne sat alone, at home always now because she was afraid to go over to the center she had helped create. Afraid and ashamed and not even conscious enough of her own worth to be angry that she was ashamed. She counted the days until she was sure she was not pregnant. When she sold one of her poems—to an anthologist who wanted to document the Movement in poetry, and who wanted the white woman’s point of view—she bought birth control pills. Enough for two months.

Because of what Tommy Odds had done Lynne locked her door, even to her friends Hedge and Altuna and Raymond.

They came back again and again. At first she looked at them from behind a window shade, ashamed and resentful of her fear. Eventually—from loneliness only—she opened the door and soon everything was, seemingly, back to normal. The boys were as courteous and shy as ever. Truman was not at home very much and when he was home he didn’t speak to her. Some nights when she became lonely to the point of suicide, she played checkers with Alonzo, Altuna’s brother, who worked at the scrap yard. A man who appeared completely unaware of the Movement and who never had any interest in voting, marching or anything else, he treated her with the stiff, sober courtesy of old-time Negroes. For his kindness, she invited him to sleep with her. In his gratitude, he licked her from her earlobes to her toes.

On Saturday nights her house became a place of music. She was protected now because she had a special friend in Alonzo. (Everyone seemed to understand that Truman no longer cared.) Men and women came to the house because they heard you could listen to records and dance and smoke reefers. But if she thought being Alonzo’s friend was going to save her from other men she was wrong. They pleaded, they cajoled, they begged. And always, in refusing them, she saw their softening, earnest faces go rigid with hatred and she shivered, and began, over the months, to capitulate. She tried in vain to make them her friends, as Alonzo was. But they began to drive up, take her to bed (or on the floor, upside the wall), as if she were a prostitute, get up and leave. In public they did not speak to her.

Still, the women found out. They began to curse her and to threaten her, attacking her physically, some of them. And she began perversely to enjoy their misguided rage, to use it as acknowledgment of her irresistible qualities. It was during this time that whenever she found herself among black women, she found some excuse for taking down and combing her hair. As she swung it and felt it sweep the back of her waist, she imagined she possessed treasures they could never have.

She began to believe the men fucked her from love, not from hatred. For as long as they did not hate her she felt she could live. She could bear the hatred of her own father and mother, but not the hatred of black men. And when they no longer came to her—and she did not know why they did not—she realized she needed them. And then there were only Lynne and Truman and when her pills gave out she became pregnant with Camara, and finally took a bus to New York, where Welfare placed her in a one-room apartment near Avenue C.

Truman she had magnanimously sent back to Meridian, at his insistence.

T
HE SUBWAY TRAIN
rushed through the tunnel screeching and sending out sparks like a meteor. And Lynne would not sit down while it flew. Ninety-sixth Street flashed by, then 125th, then there was a screaming halt, a jolt as the car resisted the sudden stop, and the doors slid back with a rubbery thump. The graffiti, streaked on the walls in glowing reds and glaring yellows, did not brighten at all the dark damp cavern of the station.

“Legs, man,” a boy whispered to his comrade, pausing on the oily stairs as she passed.

“Right on,” he was answered.

She darted up and around people as she rushed upward to the air, thinking, with a part of her brain, that fresh air was certainly what she needed. Nor did she notice any longer that nowhere in the city was the air fresh. Only sometimes, when she took Camara to the park, and even then ... She turned left as she emerged from the subway, trotting now on her dancer’s legs, thinking of herself already in the apartment, the neat space of quiet light and white walls where Truman worked night and day on the century’s definitive African-American masterpieces.

They would not fight, she warned herself. She would be ladylike and precise and he would respond to her cry of help for their child.

“Our daughter has been hurt,” she would say, with the sweet desperation of Loretta Young. Or, “I mean,” slouching with her hands in her pockets like Mia Farrow looking for a tacos stand, “the kid’s been beat
up.”
Or, looking as if about to choke on her own vomit, like Sandy Dennis, but
cool,
“There’s been … an accident. Our child. Attacked. Oh, can’t you hurry?” And Truman would respond with all the old tenderness that she knew.

She took the stairs two at a time, her hair streaming and unwashed, her face feeling sooty, until she stood in front of his door. Apartment 3-C. Truman Held, Artist

It was only then that she thought to rest, to compose herself, to suck in her stomach, which felt flabby and at the same time inflated. She was no longer a size seven. This mattered, the longer she huddled there.

Even when Truman was leaving her she had been conscious of her size, her body, from years of knowing how he compared it to the bodies of black women. “Black women let themselves go,” he said, even as he painted them as magnificent giants, breeding forth the warriors of the new universe. “They are so
fat,”
he would say, even as he sculpted a “Big Bessie Smith” in solid marble, caressing her monstrous and lovely flanks with an admiring hand.

Her figure then, supple from dancing, was like a straw in the wind, he said, her long hair a song of lightness—untangled, glistening and free. And yet, in the end, he had stopped saying those things, at least out loud. It was as if the voluptuous black bodies, with breasts like melons and hair like a crown of thorns, reached out—creatures of his own creation—and silenced his tongue. They began to claim him. When she walked into a room where he painted a black woman and her heaving, pulsating, fecund body, he turned his work from her, or covered it up, or ordered her out of the room.

She had loved the figures at first—especially the paintings of women in the South—the sculptures, enduring and triumphant in spite of everything. But when Truman changed, she had, too. Until she did not want to look at the women, although many of them she knew, and loved. And by then she was willing to let him go. Almost. So worthless did the painted and sculptured women make her feel, so sure was she that Truman, having fought through his art to the reality of his own mother, aunts, sisters, lovers, to their beauty, their greatness, would naturally seek them again in the flesh.

He would always be Camara’s father, he said, repeatedly. He would never forsake
her.
White-looking though she was.

She rang the bell, long and insistently.

“Why the fuck don’t he answer,” she muttered. She pulled her jacket close around her body and pressed her arms against her sides. She heard the crunch and crackle of a bag of fried plantains being crushed in her pocket. Her other pocket contained a small rubber ball, some string, a sliver of cheese Camara had slipped in when she wasn’t looking. Pennies that she’d collected from Camara’s clothing at the hospital rattled in her purse.

A light across her toes preceded the opening of the door. Truman, his hair in two dozen small braids, looked out at her.

“It’s me,” she said, trying to smile. Smiling, in fact.

He did not throw open the door.

“Who is it, True?” a voice from the bedroom beyond wafted out. Lynne felt a tingling at the base of her neck, like a rash trying to break through the skin.

“Just a minute,” he called back. Warily he loosened the chain. But when Lynne moved forward she bumped into him. He was moving out, pulling the door closed behind him.

“Shit,” she said, stepping back. “Why don’t you just tell Meridian it’s me. We don’t have any secrets, do we?”

“What do you want, Lynne?”

“Really,” she said, still smiling a silly too-bright smile, “I thought I would have a chance to come in and tell you in style, if not exactly in comfort. I’m thirsty, got any sodas?” She knew she was acting like a silly bitch—one of his favorite, most benign descriptions of her, but she couldn’t help it. How could she tell him that his six-year-old daughter—whom he insisted on nicknaming Princess (tacky,
tacky,
she’d told him)—had been attacked by a grown man and was now lying nearly dead in the hospital. How could she tell him she just needed his fucking support, standing on a stairwell in the dark?

“It’s not Meridian,” Truman said. He reached into his jeans and brought out his little cigars. She had leaned against the wall, thinking—like the silly bitch she was—but I gave you up for Meridian. For black, brown-skinned Meridian, with her sweet colored-folks’ mouth, and her heroic nigger-woman hair.

“I am
not
going to make a scene,” she mumbled warningly to herself. “We’re not going to fight like we usually do.”

“Of course we’re not going to fight,” said Truman, his artist’s eye taking her in from white parched face and cracked lips to the thick unstylish bulges she thought she was hiding under her coat.

“Anybody I know?” she sang, with a laugh, as faked as her smile.

“No.”

“I am not going to make a scene,” she began again. “We’re not going to fight....” But before he could stop her she had pushed the door open and stood halfway across the room staring into the eyes of a tiny blonde girl in a tiny, tiny slip that was so sheer she had time to notice—before Truman swung her around—that the girl’s pubic hair was as blonde as the hair on her head.

“Will you tell me why you come up here bothering me? Or is this just some more of your shit?”

Just some more, she wanted to assure him. But she couldn’t speak. She stood between Truman and the girl and looked from one to the other. The girl said “I—” and Truman cut her off.

“Go back in there,” he ordered, twisting his head.

“But I—” the girl began again.

And Lynne began to laugh. She laughed and laughed and laughed. She laughed so hard she got stitches in her side. Then she stopped. She felt that tingle again at the base of her throat.

“Why is it I don’t ever learn
nothing!
” she asked. “Why is it that everybody in the fucking
world
learns what makes it go round before I do? Am I just dumb, or what? What do you reckon, Miss?” She turned to the girl and reached out her hand.

“Don’t shut up, sugah,” she said. “Talk. I wants to hear Miz Scarlet talk.” Truman moved close to her and she waved him away.

“Troo-
mun
?” the girl said, stepping around Lynne as if she had lice. But Truman had turned his back. He stood by the window smoking, looking down into the street.

“Shoot,” said Lynne, and she noticed her voice was now completely changed; she did not sound at all like herself. “Don’t pay that ol’ sucker no mind. Talk. You silly bitch yourself!”

And then the girl’s words, melodious as song, southerly as trade winds, came softly out, like the bewildered mewling of a cat.

“Why, what’s
wrong
?” drawled the girl, and the pine scents of Alabama, the magnolia smell of Georgia and Mississippi floated out of her mouth. “We’ve been livin’ together for two months. Soon as—Truman says soon as he sells some more of his paintings we’re goin’ to be married. I don’t need to tell you how I expect my folks to take it.…” A gleam of conspiracy had the nerve to be observed in her eye. She raised a delicate hand to point to all of Lynne’s lost and grieved old friends gazing down serenely from the walls. “Aren’t they
great
?” she innocently asked.

A
ND THEN THERE WAS
the part Meridian knew, because she had been the first person Truman sent for when Camara died. Lynne didn’t know what had happened to Scarlet O’Hara. It was Meridian they both needed, and it was Meridian who was, miraculously, there.

“Help me through this shit,” Truman had said when Meridian walked off the bus into his arms. And she had, but she had also tried to help Lynne.

She had spent a month shuttling between his lovely bright studio uptown (where a painting of her own face surprised her on every wall) to Lynne’s tiny hovel downtown. Between them they had drained her dry. She could not even think of that miserable month, later, without seeing it as a story told about someone else. She remembered the last days especially as one of those silent movies with Meridian Hill the poor star, dashing in and out of subways, cooking meals, listening to monologues thickened with grief, being pulled into bed—by Lynne, who held on to her like a child afraid of the dark—and by Truman, who almost drowned his body with her own, stuffing her flesh into his mouth as if he literally starved for her. It was then that her feeling for Truman returned, but it was not sexual. It was love totally free of possessiveness or contempt. It was love that purged all thought of blame from her too accurate memory. It was forgiveness.