Temple of My Familiar (30 page)

Obituary writers were funnier in England than in America, Mary Jane thought. But how had Eleanora even known she existed? Perhaps during the times she was involved in scandal in the United States, her aunt had got wind of her, and found something—news of Mary Jane’s blackened bare feet, her uncombed locks, her hanging out with colored lumpen—to applaud.

Back at the library for the last time, she discovered on the shelves double sets of Eleanora’s five volumes, their leaves uncut. She took a set, slipped the books into her capacious shoulder bag, and smiled her way past the recently somewhat thawed librarian. Mary Jane knew she was off to Africa, and was thinking of the two Eleandras, one so eager for experience in life, one married off meekly into oblivion; seven decades had failed to dull her twin’s contempt for her. She also thought of Eleanora, whose books, she hoped, would reveal her to Mary Jane, as the diary of Eleandra, “the Lady Peacock,” had, in a major way, revealed Mary Jane to herself.

She stopped at an artists’ supply shop on her way to the dock—her ship sailed at midnight—and bought enough brushes, turpentine, and paints to last for a year.

Part Four

He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.

—
Virginia Woolf,
Orlando

Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want.

—
Ola

“C
ARLOTTA HAD NO SUBSTANCE,
” Suwelo had said to Miss Lissie’s back. This was before he had sold Uncle Rafe’s house and returned to San Francisco. It was a Sunday in November, and Baltimore was beginning to have an early-morning chilliness that reminded him of Northern California. He’d sat perched on a stool beside the little chopping table in the kitchen, intently cleaning a pile of boiled Maryland crabs. Mr. Hal was at a counter chopping bell peppers and onions and weeping from the onion fumes, and Miss Lissie was attentively stirring a slowly darkening roux, which sent off a buttery, burning-bread smell that Suwelo didn’t know if he liked. He couldn’t quite see how a base of burned flour might taste good in a stew.

“You live in San Francisco, with all that seafood, and never had gumbo?” Mr. Hal was incredulous.

Suwelo had invited them for the weekend. Deep in his heart he was probably pretending they were his parents, but he didn’t mind. They’d showed up first thing that morning in Mr. Hal’s truck and hauled in a half-dozen bags of stuff: tomatoes, peppers, onions, okra
and
filé, a couple of chickens, slabs of bacon and beef, a hunk of pork, long tubes of dark, savory-smelling sausage, crabs almost overrunning a basket, a colorfully stenciled croker sack of rice, and jugs of ready-made lemonade and iced tea.

As soon as they started turning about in the kitchen, opening drawers, sharpening knives, complaining that “that devilish” salt shaker had
never
worked, Suwelo knew they belonged there. Miss Lissie kicked off her shoes and padded about in bare feet, and Mr. Hal made himself comfortable by unbuttoning the front of his short-sleeved white shirt to reveal a peach-colored T-shirt, which said, across the front, “Ecstasy Is Forever.” His hair was whiter and longer than when Suwelo first met him, and with his soft brown eyes, his courtly manner, even in the kitchen, he resembled a comfortable, gentle, and altogether happy George Washington Carver.

“What I mean about her having no substance is that she was all image. She was all image when I first saw her, all image when I met her, and all image ...”

“After you went to bed with her,” said Miss Lissie, completing the thought for him. “Give me the crab shells you’ve finished with. I need to boil them down for stock.” Suwelo passed them over.

From time to time he had told them small stories from his life; though they never asked. He felt he knew them more intimately than he knew his own parents—who had been killed in a car wreck, the result of one of his father’s drunken rages, when Suwelo was in college—and that not to attempt to share his life with them made him feel like a thief. Besides, he needed some help with Fanny.

“When Fanny came back from Africa that first time,” said Suwelo, “we knew it wasn’t going to work, us being married when she really didn’t want to be. She
hated
it. She
hated
the institution of marriage. She said the ring people wore on their fingers symbolizing marriage was obviously a remnant of a chain. She didn’t hate
me
. That much, at least, I was beginning to see. For one thing, when she came back from Africa, where she’d been for six months—the only time in her life she was able to be with both her mother and her father—her love for me was unmistakable. We fell on each other in an orgy of reconciliation that lasted for weeks. And this was only possible because when I picked her up at the airport I told her straight out that I loved her and that getting a divorce was just fine with me.”

“Umm hmm ...
” said Miss Lissie. She turned the pan so Suwelo could see the dark caramel color of the roux. Mr. Hal crossed the kitchen, his hands full of chopped onions and peppers, which he dropped into the pot. There was a searing, sizzling sound, and Miss Lissie said, “Oh, shit, the okra should have gone in first. But what the hell,” she added. “The making of gumbo is like the making of the best music, an improvisational art.” She poured herself a glass of wine and sipped as she stirred.

“We also knew,” Suwelo continued, “we couldn’t live on the East Coast in the suburbs of New York City. We lived, if you can believe it, in a little middle-class enclave called Forest Hills. The houses were nice, and there were trees and broad lawns, but everybody was always trying to make things look older—the houses, the trees. Sometimes I had the feeling that at night our neighbors went outdoors and beat on the walls of the houses with sticks and tugged on the bushes and trees, trying to stretch them to a more imposing height. They kept trying to pin some famous person’s birth to the place but, since people moved away every few years and always had, this was hard to do. They finally found a famous baseball player who’d rented a house there once, and there was talk of putting up a plaque. Our house was actually the oldest one there. We had no trouble selling it. Once we let it be known we wanted to sell, even some of our neighbors, moving up and moving older, wanted to buy. We sold to another black family, because we knew that one of the reasons our neighbors wanted to buy our house was to keep other black people out.

“But where to go? Fanny had spent a summer in Iowa, so she knew she couldn’t breathe in the Midwest. Too far from oceans, she said. And that bullshit about the prairie being oceanlike is for the birds. There’s about enough prairie left to piss in.

“I had once spent five minutes in Wyoming. Another five in Montana. In fact, on the bus once, on my way to Seattle to a friend’s wedding, I spent five minutes in each of those northwest states. Too isolated. Not enough colored. Not enough concrete, either.

“So Oakland really appealed to us. Not San Francisco. Because everybody knew it was full of queers and the parks were overrun with perverts, and besides, it was cold in the summer. But we knew people who lived in Oakland, and whenever they came east they always seemed real jolly at the prospect of going back to Oakland. This impressed us. We almost always dreaded coming home to New York. Pedestrians were rude. Taxi drivers were impossible. We were on edge every minute of our existence, outside our own front door.

“In Oakland, what happened? We couldn’t find an apartment. Fanny didn’t like the heat, and the streets, she said, made her think of L.A., which she had visited once and
loathed.
Trembling with trepidation we crossed the Bay Bridge. The fog was just rolling back off the city, as if pulled by a giant hand. The sun glanced off the white buildings so that we were practically blinded. All around us there was water. The weather was bracingly cool and the light was peculiarly bright. ‘We looked at our hands and our hands looked new, we looked at our feet and they did too!’” Suwelo sang the words to this old black spiritual about deliverance, which made Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal laugh.

“We found a large flat on Broderick Street, up high, with a view of a tiny corner of the
red
Golden Gate Bridge, and a glimpse of the hills beyond it, which we discovered were not in San Francisco but in Marin County. Immediately we started thinking of things to do we’d never done before: tai chi, hiking, learning to sail out at Lake Merced. All this time our divorce was coming along, and we were extremely happy. Then it became final, and I became depressed.

“‘I no longer have a wife!’ I cried.

“‘You have a friend,’ she said. ‘And your friend is moving into her own rooms.’

“‘What?’ I said.

“‘Remember how upset you were when I wanted a divorce?’ she said.

“‘Yes!’ I said.

“‘Well,’ she said, ‘all that suffering you did was for nothing, right?’

“‘But, but, but,’ I said.

“‘But what?’ She smiled.

“‘Does this mean we won’t ever sleep together?’

“‘Always your first concern,’ she sighed. And then she said, ‘No. I hope it means that when we
do
sleep together, we won’t be sleeping apart.’

“But I was angry, I was confused. I was very, very hurt. I felt she’d tricked me. I felt she was rejecting me.

“I tried to get her to say she wouldn’t move into her ‘rooms’—she was taking the back three rooms of the house, leaving me the sunnier, lonelier, ones in front—until I was weaned. She laughed. I
was
trying to make it funny.

“‘Just till I’m
weaned
,’ I said, creeping into her arms and putting my hands up under her blouse. I loved her tits.” Suwelo looked up at Miss Lissie, who was frowning into the gumbo pot. “I couldn’t bear to think of them moving away.”

Miss Lissie took the rest of the crab shells and the crab meat. Suwelo watched as she added them to separate pots. Mr. Hal was now dredging cubes of beef in a small mound of flour. Miss Lissie handed Suwelo a knife and a tube of the sausage. He whacked off a penis length.

“You sounding mighty innocent,” said Miss Lissie.

What did she mean by that, Suwelo wondered. Did she mean this story made it sound like Fanny didn’t love him? Didn’t want to be with him? That he was an innocent victim? Did it make Fanny sound like a lesbian?

“Lesbians were all around us, you know,” said Suwelo, in a tone of facing up to the ultimate challenge. “Beautiful, beautiful women, quite a lot of them, though some of them didn’t look so hot. Just seeing them on their outings together, climbing the hills, sunning in the parks, eating noisily at the largest tables in restaurants in Berkeley, made you want to cry. They’d
left
us! Hell, these bitches were so tough, they’d left
God!
This was when they were just discovering the Goddess, and it was all the time Goddess this and Goddess that. I once asked a black woman on the street where the new bus stop was—the city was repairing the old bus stop part of the street we were on—and she just looked at me, shrugged, and said an easy ‘Goddess knows.’ It blew me away.”

“
Hah
,” said Miss Lissie.

“So I was afraid she was going to leave me for a woman,” said Suwelo. “Listen, I’m not alone. It’s the cry of the times, in case you haven’t noticed it. The only men who don’t have this fear are living in caves and jungles somewhere with their women still tethered to the floor at night by their nose rings.”

Mr. Hal laughed.

Suwelo noticed his own agitation. He sat back, took a sip of the beer Miss Lissie had poured him, and tried to control his breathing. It was hard, remembering what he’d suffered.

“Fanny was always going out with these people,”
he said.

“With
what
people?” said Miss Lissie, sautéeing the beef cubes in oil, into which she’d put flakes of garlic. “Surely not the people with the nose rings.”

Mr. Hal guffawed.

“Naw, Lissie,” he said. “The
other
people. Them that said shit on the nose-ring question.”

“Oh,
them
,” she said, smiling.

This was the first time, oddly enough, that Suwelo felt Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal liked him, not because he was kin to Uncle Rafe, but just because he was himself.

His story took on a somewhat more humorous aspect in his own mind.

Mr. Hal allowed as how he actually did believe—and he hoped the reality wouldn’t make him out a liar—but he thought that just maybe it was possible he had some ... reefer.

But then he couldn’t find it.

“Oh, well,” he said, to Suwelo, “continue the operation without anesthesia.”

“But what I meant by innocent,” said Miss Lissie, “was, what were you doing with yourself while Fanny was in Africa? If you’re a man”—she said “man” exactly as she’d say “dog”—“you played around.”

“I got into pornography,” said Suwelo promptly. “I was
lonely
. I got into prostitutes. But I’m too soft-hearted. I always wanted to know all about the lives of the prostitutes—the one I liked best had
five
children—and in the end I got this terrible dose of claps.” He liked saying “terrible dose of claps;” it sounded the way Mr. Hal or Miss Lissie would put it.

“
Ooo wee!
” they said simultaneously.

And Suwelo thought: When was the last time I heard anybody say “Ooo wee!” He hadn’t heard this expression since he was a little boy. He felt he’d been given something precious—an old photograph, an old letter, or a scent from a time that otherwise did not exist.