Temple of My Familiar (17 page)

The children had long been asleep by the time Arveyda came to the part Carlotta most wanted to hear. Arveyda sang softly of how much the mother, far away still, loved and missed the child. How grieved she was that she had hurt her. How she prayed the child would forgive her and one day consent to see her again. He sang of how the mother missed her grandchildren. He sang of the danger the mother was in now in her old country because, working with the gringo movie-production crew as a front, she was trying to find her own mother, whom she had not seen since the soldiers came to her poor little escuela de los indios many, many years ago and dragged her away. This was the only reason she was not this moment embracing her hija, if her hija would only permit it. He sang of Zedé’s courage, of her pride in not burdening her child with an unbearable history. He sang of her true humbleness. He sang until Zedé, small and tentative, was visible, a wisp, before her daughter.

Carlotta had not dreamed her numbed heart could be broken still more, or that breaking the heart opens it.

Arveyda was back. Yes. Singing as never before. Carlotta could see that now he would need neither feathers nor cloak.

Under her piercing, tear-filled gaze Arveyda closed his eyes, so as to ask nothing for himself. He knew he was singing for their lives. A true artist, the one whom God shows, he knew he dared not doubt the power of his song.

E
CSTASY
I
S
U
NCUT
F
OREST
and the Smell of Fresh-Baked Bread.
Suwelo strained to hear the warm, lush music over the telephone, between the icy bars of Fanny’s words. That is what she is still listening to, he thought, surprised. That old album of Arveyda’s. She must have bought a new one after she moved out; the one they’d bought together was one long groove scratch. She’d worn it out playing it. And he remembered how she held the record album to her chest, an album on which there was nothing but a large redwood tree, with a loaf of bread beneath it, and how she swayed in rapture to every note, and how she sometimes became so filled with the sweetness of the music that she cried. And he had watched her as she tottered and danced and wept. The music carried her higher, he thought, than anything else in her life. It was all ecstasy to her.

And once, when Arveyda came to town to play a concert, he’d bought tickets for them. Finally they would see him. And at first Fanny had been very happy, and he’d laughed at her fumble-fingered excitement as she dressed. All her best things. Everything shades of lavender, deep indigo, and gentian. How beautiful she is, he’d thought.

“You might get a glimpse of him,” Suwelo had teased. “He’ll be onstage, and the tickets I bought should get us good seats. But he won’t be able to see you except as a pinhead in the audience.” She’d laughed, dousing herself with a perfume she made that smelled amazingly like fresh water.

But then, just as they were leaving the flat, just as they were entering the hallway, she stopped, and nothing he said would induce her to go further. When he took her arm, she appeared to be rooted to the spot. When he pretended to drag her, she clung to the door frame with a force that broke one of her nails.

She was afraid to see the person who created the beauty that was so much what her soul hungered for it made her weep.

Suwelo vaguely understood this, but he was also annoyed, because now he’d miss the concert—though she begged him to go ahead and take someone else. And he’d spent quite a lot of money on the tickets.

“Isn’t Arveyda old?” she asked hopefully. (He wasn’t.) “I’ll wait until he dies, or until
I
do, and then ... I will see him.”

And what could Suwelo respond to such a love, constricted by a so much greater fatalism and fear?

“Oh, my poor baby,” he’d said with exasperation and helplessness, holding her, knowing without seeing her face that tears of longing were flowing down her cheeks.

T
HE FIRST TIME HE
saw Carlotta, what had he thought? Fanny had accused him of seeing only the amber skin and the long mass of black hair. The shapeliness. A woman of color, yes, but one without the kind of painful past that would threaten his sense of himself as a man or inhibit his enjoyment of her as simply a woman. But actually, he had these thoughts later on, after he had begun his affair with Carlotta. The very first time he saw her, at a faculty meeting at which she appeared restless and trapped, he’d thought she looked like a much younger, Latina Coretta King. There was a picture somewhere he had seen of Mrs. King, looking grief-stricken and betrayed, a beautiful woman, he thought, but slipping inexorably into the quagmire of Famous Widowhood. Run, run, he’d wanted to shout to her. Don’t let them close you up in the tomb! But perhaps this was partly how she felt, as if part of her was entombed with her husband. But surely there was more of her own life to live? Suwelo admired only one thing about Jackie Onassis, whose fate might have been similar, except for her canny refusal to let it be: her absolute success in slipping out from under her dead husband, Jack. In the picture of Mrs. King of which he was reminded, she was standing with a large group of Native American women, and she looked more Indian than most of them. Carlotta, as he studied her, had that same grief-stricken, betrayed look. But as he studied her more closely, ignoring the other faculty members, who were white, and whose university he understood it was, the more he saw that it was really not the look of Mrs. King. Or perhaps it was, but it moved him because he had seen it, felt the pain of it, and attempted to remove it from the weeping face of someone much closer to home: He was attracted to Carlotta because the expression on her face was identical to that on Fanny’s once she knew he had betrayed her. He had spent the entire time he was with Carlotta trying to remove the reflection, on her face, of Fanny’s grief. Without once daring, however, to force her to tell him its cause. Once he knew she was separated from her husband, with two children to raise on her own, once he’d seen her shabbily furnished apartment, and once he’d heard her bitter complaints about the racism of the Women’s Studies Department in which she worked, he assumed he understood her grief. Now he realized he’d probably understood nothing, and it also occurred to him what a superficial, ultimately fraudulent act it was to sleep with a person you did not really know.

He began to appreciate more than ever the story Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie were relentlessly telling him.

“M
Y FATHER WAS NOT
so gay as my mother,” Mr. Hal said. “She was all the time laughing; giggling really. She just couldn’t help it. Everything was funny to her. Over my daddy’s head, though, there was always a cloud. Now you might not want to believe this, but you do live in California, after all. I read the newspapers from time to time, so I know that a lot of the men who go with other men are dying. Every time I read about it I think of my father, because I think he would have been glad. He was not an evil person—don’t get me wrong—but he just hated that kind of person and that was the only kind of person I ever heard him express any hatred of. Even about white people in general he never carried on the way he would about ‘funny’ men. While he was on his deathbed himself, he told me why.

“He grew up on the Island on a plantation that was owned by some white folks from the mainland and run by a black overseer. This wasn’t slavery time—the slaves had been legally freed a long time ago—but it seemed a lot like it, the way things were still being run. Anyhow, on some holidays like Christmas and Easter and always during the summer, these white people came out to their place on the Island. It was cooler on the Island in summer, much more pleasant than on the mainland. They’d sail over on their yacht—they were rich people—and bring everybody from the house on the mainland: the cook, the maids, the horse handler, even the gardeners. My father used to work for them as odd jobber and gofer, and he used to help unload the yacht, and they paid him in oranges, which we almost never had on the Island and which were the taste equivalent of gold. Anyhow, these people had a son, Heath, and he began to tag along with my father. The two boys liked each other right away, but it chafed my father that he always had to stay in his place. Heath had the run of my father’s house, for instance, and during the summers would often eat there, right in the kitchen with the rest of them, but my father, whose name was David, by the way, after little David in the Bible, could never get closer to Heath’s house than the back doorsteps. If you were black and you didn’t work in the house, you weren’t permitted. That’s just the way it was.

“Heath’s father and mother seemed cordial with each other rather than warm, and neither of them talked much to Heath. Still, the father seemed glad that Heath and my father were friends; the mother never appeared to notice it. She drank.

“Heath and my father were boyhood friends, seeing each other for holidays and summers, for many years. Then Heath went off to college and my father married. Eventually Heath also married, and he and his wife came to settle on the Island in the big house that Heath loved and that now belonged to him through his parents. My father was happy enough in his marriage. I don’t know that he ever expected any kind of skyrockets from it. On the Island you married young, you raised a mess of kids, you and your family worked hard, you ate and slept and worshiped as well as you could. You died. That was about it. And that was plenty to most people. Excitement? The stories and rumors you heard about other people, way over there on the mainland, was your excitement.

“Having Heath around again and for good was exciting, and as well as they could manage it, now that they were more than ever unequal in the eyes of society and the law—in other words, they were grown men—they carried on their friendship. Heath, though, had started to drink, and he really didn’t like black people. He was one of those whites who, drunk, would say to a black person he had his arm around: ‘You know, So-and-so, I don’t like nigras, but I like you!’ So you can imagine how this so-called friendship between him and my father had to walk that fine line between anger and fear. Naturally my father hated Heath’s racism. Just as he feared him as a white man, even as they laughed and joked together. My father had no idea—and I don’t think Heath himself knew—that Heath was drawn to him in love. I mean love of that most peculiar kind. It was an understanding that sort of crept up on them both, I imagine, as they saw how much time Heath put in at our house, and how much he and my father, in spite of everything, enjoyed it.

“I can even remember him. A heavyset, stocky, rather than fat, red-faced guy, with his high color sometimes seeming to come and go in his face. Hair that bleached almost white in the sun. Substantial teeth and a minty breath. A Teddy Roosevelt sort of guy.

“It was Heath who encouraged my father to get out of farm laboring and become a furniture maker. He’d seen and admired the things my father carved in his spare time: mostly toys and the children’s beds and cradles. I don’t think he could bear seeing his friend working in the fields like a slave. He didn’t care about the rest of the people, you understand; he thought that working like slaves on his plantation was no more than they deserved. But not David, with his thoughtful expression and always pregnant wife and his houseful of barefoot kids. He helped my father build a shop and bought the very first pieces he made, a table and some chairs. He found a market for my father’s work on the mainland, and we lived very well. Much better than we had on stoop labor, digging potatoes and picking beans.

“He wanted my father.

“Even on his deathbed this was a hard concept—no joke meant—for my father to get ahold of. It was curious, too, how no matter what words he found to tell me about the situation, they always made me laugh. Even he was finally able to laugh, a hollow cackle though it was. He wasn’t laughing at Heath, but at this possibility of a way of life that just seemed totally out of the realm of nature to him. Two men together, like a man and a woman? It was just too much. What would my father have made of San Francisco?

“The long and short of it is, the friendship was soon ruined. There was nowhere for any of their best feelings about each other to go. They couldn’t even sit down at a hot-dog stand somewhere to discuss the problem. They would have been arrested just for that. Heath became more drunken, nigger-hating, and sullen. He talked a lot about how his father had treated him as a boy, ridiculing and beating him for being slow to understand things said to him and slow to learn to read. He spoke of this to explain his ability to understand how ‘the nigras felt,’ but what it really seemed to explain was why he so often tried to make those he knew feel as bad as he’d once felt himself. Around him, my father retreated into what he called his old-time know-nothing niggerisms. Scratching his head and muttering under his breath. ‘Feelin’ like a damn fool.’ And of course you realize he called him ‘Mr. Heath’ from the time they were in their teens. But my father’s pretense of ignorance did not protect him. One day Heath came into the shop, and before my father knew anything he was being hugged drunkenly and, as he put it, ‘cried on from behind.’ My father felt pretty safe, though, because he could see my mother and some of the children playing a few yards away from the open door. Heath had been drinking heavily and fighting with his wife. It would soon blow over. It always did. My father would make coffee, lay on an ice pack, and scramble up something for Heath to eat. But this time, maybe because my father felt so safe, he really let himself feel the weeping body draped around him. Let himself feel the misery and feel the shame. Maybe he felt the love. Anyway, without ever dreaming it was possible, and looking down at himself as if someone had stuck a stick up his pants leg while he wasn’t looking, he responded to Heath, who had begun to fondle him.

“It was a moment that changed his life. Without understanding how it could be possible, my father wanted to be wanted by this man holding on to him, and he wanted to want. He says he saw my mother through the door and called to her, but his voice was so weak it didn’t carry. Then, a few minutes later, as if she felt something was wrong, and he was in trouble, she started briskly toward the door herself. Heath, caressing my father and feeling his response, watched my mother approach, over my father’s shoulder, and said, ‘Tell her not to come in.’ Which my father did.