The Gilda Stories (24 page)

Skip laughed loudly.

“Aw, boy, what you laughing at, you was still pickin' cotton behind your mammy when that happened. 1945, I think. I didn't even see the goddamned truck. I'ma tell you it was more than just my life flashing before me. Broke both my arms that time.”

Her laughter was infectious. By the time they entered the darkened room they were all laughing. Several people sitting at the bar looked up at their arrival, noted Toya's presence, and the bedraggled appearance of them all. They, too, were soon laughing as the five passed them heading toward the back tables. It was easier than asking questions.

Gilda hooked the weighty ring of keys back onto her belt loop and hung the padlocks from her pocket. Their metallic jangle reminded her of the sound of Savannah's West Indian bangle bracelets as she tapped on the beauty shop door. But that was many years ago. Savannah had opened her own beauty shop in Mississippi, and when Gilda last heard from her, Savannah's hair no longer needed to be bleached white. Gilda reached up, pulling down the ponderous metal gate that protected the theater in a fluid motion.

“Let me help with that.”

Only mildly surprised to hear Julius' voice, Gilda did not turn.

“Thanks,” she said softly, and continued tugging the rusted metal grill. He smiled when it clanged to the ground. Gilda tossed him one of the padlocks, and they knelt to secure the gate. His back was schoolmaster straight as he struggled with the stiff, old locks. She liked him: he was an efficient company manager who had a feel for what would and would not work for a small group with little money. He didn't treat the actors like self-indulgent children nor the technicians like a nuisance.

“All set. Now how about a drink?” Julius said, breaking into Gilda's thoughts.

“Why didn't you go along with the others?”

“It didn't seem right, leaving the stage manager here alone to lock up while we were celebrating a snap first run-through that couldn't have happened without you.”

Amusement sparkled in her face as she looked up into his dark brown eyes. He was fairer skinned than she, a slight sprinkling of freckles crossing his nose that matched the brownish-red color of his close-cut nappy hair. The streetlight glinted on the small sapphire shining in his left ear. His shoulders were broad, his waist slim. With his full lips and polished smile he looked more like an actor than an administrator. They walked across 23rd Street to Sixth Avenue and stood on the corner while Julius waited for Gilda to answer his invitation.

“Let's walk a bit,” she said. Then, after a block, “There's a cafe just opened on Cornelia Street.”

They were silent most of the way. The waning moon cast a soft yellow light over midnight. Gilda was grateful to be moving after sitting in the tiny lighting booth for three hours during the rehearsal. She savored the feel of the night air on her face and smiled at being alive—still. The shine in Julius' eyes rivaled the other light as he took her arm.

Once they were seated in the restaurant he felt familiar, as Aurelia had, and Gilda relaxed into the comfort. He ordered a cappuccino before saying, “Tell me something.”

“Yes, what?”

“Anything. Like where you're from. What you want to do. How'd we end up working our asses off for this little white theater company when we're supposed to be about nation-building?” He laughed wryly at the wilted sound of the rhetoric.

“In my father's house there are many mansions.”

“Oh god, a Baptist!”

The young, white waiter didn't bother to look at them as he delivered their order. He sniffed sharply at the sound of their laughter, then turned on his heel, looking like an eager actor. It was amazing to Gilda how they all seemed to struggle to achieve the same trim body, coiffured hair, and characterless movement, yet still hoped to be different from each other. Since her arrival in the City she had watched them auditioning for each of the three shows she'd worked on—young, stunning, transitory good looks full of edgy ambition. They, more than anyone else, reminded her of the difference between herself and mortals.

She almost laughed when she thought of that word—
mortals.
It had taken many years before she was able to make the distinction in her thoughts, and the demarcation still felt fussy at times, not quite uncrossable.

“I was hoping for something a little more specific.”

“What's to know?” came her sharp response. “I come from a small town in Mississippi no one has ever heard of and doesn't even exist anymore. Not even as a bus stop. I love the theater. I write songs. The world is the world. That's why we're here. When we get tired of it, we'll do something else.”

“That cuts the conversation, doesn't it.”

Gilda immediately regretted being so abrupt. But looking across the table she found it hard to really see him. His separateness as mortal felt like an impenetrable curtain between them, one she wished didn't exist.

“Not really, it's only the variations that make the human story interesting, right?” She strained across the table trying to reignite his enthusiasm. “I mean, it's the same ones over and over again. But the specifics are what make Baldwin different from Hemingway or Shakespeare or Hansberry. Why do you feel uncomfortable being with a white company?” she asked with genuine curiosity.

“I made all the sit-ins for the movement. While I was in college, protest was practically a credit course! Suddenly I look up and find all my dashikis folded at the bottom of a trunk and I'm helping to manage money for a group of middle-class white kids who want to play theater.”

Gilda sensed there was more, so she let the rattling noises of other customers fill the air as Julius shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with the casual way white patrons coming in tried to size them up. Dangerous? Noisy? Exotic?

“I decided to leave off reading the papers 'til the end of the day. I get so P.O.'d I can't get my feet under me, you know? And then I go there and I like it—the work, most of the folks. But shit, man…”

Gilda understood: Attica filled the headlines. She, too, tried to push the news of death out of her mind. She'd seen the pictures of inmates killing and being killed, lined up in the prison yard, and the image was always the same as her memories of the slave quarters: dark men with eyes full of submission and rage. Their bodies plumped with bullets were the same ashen color as those fallen beside the trees to which they had been tied as punishment. She understood his restless anxiety.

“I know people from other companies, black companies. The New Lafayette folks are still around.”

“Whoa! You know the New Lafayette?” he asked incredulously.

“Of course. They were the reason I first came to the City. I thought those guys were going to change the world. The rituals, the spirit. They held black life in their hands; they reached inside me in a way…”

Julius was eager to pursue. “Did you see
To Raise the Dead and—”

“Foretell the Future!”
Gilda broke in and they finished in unison, excited by their memories.

“So what happened to those guys?” Julius continued. “I mean, not all of them could be dying to go to Hollywood. It's like they just evaporated.”

“They wanted to work like everybody else, I suppose. And white people stopped feeling guilty and donating money. Most of the men we marched with ran out of liberation ideas. They had a big dream about black men being free, but that's as far as it went. They really didn't have a full vision—you know, women being free, Puerto Ricans being free, homosexuals being free. So things kind of folded in on top of themselves.”

“Shit, who the hell's got time for all that…”

“Ask the folks you don't hang out with after run-throughs who's got time for all that. You think these companies breeze through life on righteousness? I had a friend, a brilliant woman who devoted her life to a little black company, doing the scut work, the kind that's just got to get done and nobody's willing to pay for it. She figured the brothers would be ready when nation time came. She worked like crazy: grant applications, giving advice backstage when directors got stuck, and housecleaning when they said they were too busy to get to the theater on time. But when nation time came she might as well have been wearing a sheet! Grant money went to every brother in the place but not to her. A row of cotton is a row of cotton, so if you think she felt any different from how you feel, you haven't really been thinking.” Gilda was surprised at the depth of her own feelings, about the disappointment she had seen on the faces of black women over the years.

“Damn, hold up. I get it. I ain't hardly trying to say that.”

Gilda didn't really hear Julius. She struggled to keep herself from slipping backward into the past. The hot rows, their leafy stalks licking at her legs, the heavy sun overhead. Her sisters moved quickly down the rows, making it into a game. She tried to keep up but never could. And the first time she fell into the dirt, face down, almost smothering, she waited for the lash she was accustomed to hearing around her. But her sister's hand had lifted her effortlessly and dragged her along as if she were just another burden like the sack of white cotton.

Looking into Julius' eyes Gilda remembered he could not see these things, and her words felt too sharp. She didn't want to go back into the past; it was too far away, and they were all dead now.

“As long as you, me, and Irene stick wih this company it won't just be a group of white kids playing games. Irene is supposed to direct a play next season,” Gilda added.

“Yeah, I know. I guess I wasn't prepared. Fisk is a far throw from Manhattan and I miss it. You know how it is, you fall into a groove and the roll is long.”

“You better catch a new groove!” She thought for a moment she had been too sharp again.

But then he laughed and said, “Power to the people!” and the past was in its proper place.

“I suppose you want to go somewhere they can pay you a living wage. A bourgeois wage. What do you want to do with all this experience?”

“Right now I want to just hang with you.” Gilda looked at Julius, taking in all that made him who he was. There was a calm assurance in his manner. Also a tentative nature about him that could be read as aloofness. His eyes told her he was lonely in the City. Being with her now was something he had wanted for a long while. And something else she couldn't yet decipher.

“Julius, I don't think it would work. I like you, but let's not ruin a good friendship.”

She saw pain flicker across his face for an instant before evaporating. Gilda hated the way men shifted gears to protect themselves from humiliation.

“Hey, it was just an idea,” he said as if she'd just turned down tickets to a basketball game. He started to pick up his cup, but Gilda held his eyes, probing to see exactly what he felt. The camouflage and subterfuge were sometimes too exhausting for her.

Her gaze caught him up short and revealed his sadness. She saw how alone he really was. His parents were dead; he had no close relatives. Having nothing to keep him in the South, he had come to New York City. Gilda was the first person he'd reached out to in the two years since his arrival. In spite of his cynicism about working with a white theater company, Julius was eager, just as Aurelia had been. He sustained a vision of the world made better in part by his efforts and those of people he respected. Gilda shuffled back through her memories of his interactions with the company, the director and actors. She recalled his swift expertise and grace. He was young yet not easily intimidated. His sense of self was strong, but for the moment he was adrift, needing a friend more than a lover.

She slipped back, releasing the gentle hold she'd had on him and letting him regather his thoughts, then said, “I've got a great and longtime friend who owns a bar in Soho. Will you go with me sometime? We can collect old actor stories and drink fine wine. You tell me your problems, I'll tell you mine.”

“Did you know it, you're a poet?” Julius responded with a wide smile, as eager as Gilda not to lose the friendship they were building.

She said good night to him on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street. Gilda walked north to her small garden apartment in Chelsea, wondering how Julius had survived the harshness of the city. The relationship he fantasized between them could never be, yet his loneliness drew her. It mirrored Aurelia's melancholy in some ways, but was more profound; somehow it suited him in spite of his struggle against it.

As she got to her door she put Julius out of her thoughts. She resisted the confusion he stirred in her, deciding he was best considered when she was among friends. Once out of her workshirt and square-cut painter's pants, she curled up in the large overstuffed armchair that sat in her small living room. Heavy velvet curtains shut out the drafts and what light there was outside. She pulled out her old copy of the
Tao Te Ching.
Lao-Tsu's laconic writings lay gracefully before her. She took comfort in knowing that she could read the calligraphy characters as easily now as did contemporaries of Confucius in the sixth century
B.C.
The pen strokes were warm and familiar:
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

The delicate figures did not soothe her restlessness. She looked at the clock: it was only 2:00
A.M.
Gilda did not have to be at the theater again until six in the evening; the hours yawned before her. So much time. She considered dressing once more and going over to Sorel's club. There were sure to be a couple of her friends there about this time, others like herself who slept through the day and lived at night. The disparate, tiny group who formed a makeshift family were always there.

But she had little patience for idle conversation and was uncertain whether she was ready to discuss her feelings with Anthony and Sorel. The urge to simply escape, to leave and forget the world here for a while, hovered over her. But the play was opening in a couple of weeks. She couldn't go away for at least two months.

She expelled a sharp breath of frustration. How good it would feel to go to San Francisco, she thought. She missed walking the streets of the city, feeling its age and newness, the history curled around her there. It was as far into the past as she ever ventured. And there was an ease among the people. One that Sorel, during his decade here, had not yet been successful in transplanting to the east.