He remembered his ex-wife, Mavis Spivey, and how she was miserable and drunk when they met in a Texas juke. He married her and loved her. He still missed her after thirty-two years and two months.
On the day they were married, Mavis made pig tails and blackeyed peas. All the blues men and women from miles around came to Reverend Crow’s backyard and played music until late in the night. After the wedding Mavis came to bed crying. He begged her to tell him what was wrong until the sun was bright through the lace curtains her cousin had given them. He finally got so frustrated that he left and went down to a friend’s house for two days. When he came back, Mavis had stopped crying. She was sitting at the kitchen table, her suitcase packed and her traveling clothes on.
“Where you goin’, Mavis?” Soupspoon asked.
“I don’t know. Somewhere where I can start up new.”
“Can I come?”
When he asked that question she started crying again. She fell to the floor and moaned. She was saying something but Atwater had to get down on his knees to hear her weak words.
“I cain’t give you no chirren, daddy,” she sobbed. “I had bleedin’ after Cort and the doctor cut me up on the inside. He cut me an’ now I cain’t have no more kids.”
Soupspoon said that he didn’t need any kids as long as she could stay with him.
“I wouldn’t want no kids that wasn’t ours, Mavy,” he whispered to her. “So I guess I got to take you like you is.”
Kiki was sound asleep. Soupspoon moved her hand away from her crotch and pulled her dress down.
He looked at that pale face, pondering a life filled with hardpressed women and shadowy, disappearing men. Ruby and Inez, who had little love or respect for most men but who loved him just the same. Mavis Spivey, barren and childless since her one baby son, Cort, died in a flash flood. Mavis, who married him without joy or dreams. And then this redheaded white girl, drunk and jagged, who thought slaps were kisses and whiskey was milk.
Bannon, RL, Fitzhew, and a thousand other blues boys crushed down into the mud without making a sound. Dead, buried, and forgotten all on the same day. Trampling each other like a stampeding crowd making for the door. Men who sought out love in women’s tears.
He sat on the bed next to Kiki and touched her cheek. She smiled in her sleep. Soupspoon knew that it was a pleasure she’d never remember. The small touch of love and the smile to go with it that she couldn’t know when she was awake.
He thought again about Mavis. How her face hardened year after year. The love of life drained right out of her; her smile went with it. He wondered, looking at Kiki’s ignorant bliss, if Mavis even smiled in her sleep.
Thirteen
From her window she could look down on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Glancing over the clusters of electric light, she was appalled again by the large areas of darkness. Evil-looking patches where people were being slaughtered and raped — right out there, in the world outside her eighth-floor room. She concentrated on the headlights and taillights moving slowly up and down the avenues. The stoplights switched colors at a steady beat, the faint sounds of engines and horns broke through the window now and then. A scratchy seventy-eight on the turntable played early Jelly Roll Morton, more static than sound to hear, but more music for her than all the junk they played on the radio twenty-four hours a day.
All the lights in the one-room apartment were on; were always on. In the closet next to the front door, Mavis Spivey kept a large carton of one hundred 100-watt bulbs. Sometimes in the middle of the night she’d feel a dimming on her eyelids and get right up to change the dead bulb, in one of two dozen porcelain lamps she kept burning. The walls of the living room had been painted antique white; the sofa and love seat were upholstered in almost exactly the same hue. The curtains were pale lace, as was the tablecloth over the round blond table in the dining nook. The kitchen, separated from the rest of the room by a waist-high counter, was a brighter white. All along the wall white-enameled pots and pans hung from white plastic hooks. Above the pots dozens of red roses hung upside down by wire from the ceiling. Fifteen bunches of twelve roses each hung over the sink and drainboard; some still soft and deep red while others had already dried to a spiky, rich black. Nowhere in the room were these flowers on display. Mavis bought the bouquets when they were old and wilted from a fruit stand on Eighteenth Street for a quarter each. Then she “cured” them as she called it and arranged them in lovely bouquets for Angela’s Curios on Madison Avenue near Sixty-eighth Street. Her small earnings along with Social Security paid the rent and electric bill. She didn’t need to eat much. Mavis hadn’t had much of an appetite since Cort had died.
She wore a pear-green housecoat with golden swans embroidered on it and tan house shoes that burst open at the tips, exposing her blunt and ashen black toes. She was darker in old age than she had been as a girl. Her cheekbones were still high and her eyes still shone brightly, even though part of her had been sad since the day of the flash flood in southern Texas.
Raising the window, she first felt the arthritis in her fingers, then the cold air falling from the sill to her exposed toes. Somewhere a woman was yelling in anger; a radio played loud music with shouts and electric drumbeats; a siren got louder from the distance, horn honking every now and then, at the intersections, probably. All of these sounds carried on a river of traffic, along with Jelly Roll playing through the static that slowly, year after year, drowned out the light-skinned pianist.
Just when the cold began to hurt her feet a sound, like a cicada chirping, exploded in the house. Mavis looked at the console next to the door. She looked at it for half a minute and the buzzer blasted again.
“Hello?” she said while holding down the talk button on the brass console that she’d painted white last Christmas. “Hello?”
The sound of shuffling feet and a cough were the only answers; then a door opened and closed.
“Prob’ly lookin’ for somebody else,” Mavis said after a while. It was cold in the apartment. She went to shut the window.
Five minutes later the loud chirping came again. Mavis didn’t even look up from her chair. The bell sounded three more times before she returned to the console.
“Who’s down there?” she commanded.
“Rudolph Peckell, A’ntee Mavy.”
“Rudy? What you want? I ain’t got the time for you now. I’m up here wit’ my flowers.”
“Did you get my checks, ma’am?”
“Yeah. Now I told you not t’come by wit’out callin’ first.” Mavis lifted her finger from the listen button but then she put it back.
“But you never answer the phone and I got somethin’ t’tell you — somethin’ important.”
“What?” Mavis shouted at the speaker.
“I got to come up.”
“I cain’t talk to ya now, Rudy. I got things to do, I tell ya.”
“Uncle Atwater’s dyin’, A’nt Mavy,” Rudy said in a man’s voice. “He’s got cancer.”
A grin and then a frown flitted across Mavis’s face in fast succession. “Oh no,” she whispered. She brought the flats of her fists to her mouth and raised her left thigh to ease the tightening in her stomach.