“Does Atwater Wise live here?” she asked again.
“Who’s askin’?” Kiki said back. She didn’t feel angry but she said it just the same.
“I was told that he lived here by Rudy Peckell. He called me just a little while ago and happened to mention it. You see, I’m Atwater’s wife, Mavis Spivey. At least...” Mavis seemed confused for a moment. “At least I was his wife a long time ago. I got a divorce but he was the only one that I ever actually married.”
“Come in,” Kiki said. She led Mavis to the table that served as the dinette inside the studio.
Mavis looked around at the bad plaster near the ceiling, at the men’s socks and pants on the floor.
Kiki felt embarrassed under the scrutiny. “You want something to drink?”
“No thank you.” Mavis sat in the chair holding the pocketbook tight against her knees.
Kiki poured a little extra whiskey in her glass. “Soupspoon’s been staying here with me for a few months now.”
“Is he your man?”
“No, I think he’s scared’a girls. Did you want to see Atwater?” Kiki asked after taking a sip.
“No. I already seen ’im. Now I wanted to see where he was livin’. And, and if he needed anything.”
“He doesn’t need anything here,” Kiki said. “We got food and we’re gonna get a sofa bed so he could sleep better.” She kicked the pants so that they slid under the couch. “I told him that I’d take the couch and that he could have the bed, but you know Soup — he’s a real gentleman.”
“An’ you know how t’take care of a sick man with cancer?”
“He was sick, ma’am. He had cancer. But we took him to the doctor in time and that’s all cleared up now. He’s all better now.”
“Hm! Well. I’m glad to hear that. I guess these doctors nowadays can do things that we couldn’t even think of when I was comin’ up.”
“Soupspoon, I mean Atwater, just went out,” Kiki said. “I don’t know when he’s gonna be comin’ back.”
“That’s okay,” Mavis said. “I don’t need to see him. You could tell’im that I was here.”
“You want to leave a number or something?”
“He know how to get me... if he want.” Mavis leaned forward in her chair as if she were about to stand up. “I’ll be goin’ now. But lemme tell you somethin’ before I do that.”
“Yes?” Kiki found that she had to hold her head sideways in order to see straight.
“You in the wrong business here.”
“What?”
“Livin’ wit’ a bluesman is bad business no matter who you are or who he is. It don’t even matter that he’s old an’ maybe gonna die soon. An’ ain’t no young white girl gonna bear up under that,” Mavis said. “I’m just sayin’ it. I don’t expect you to hear it.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Miss Spivey. Soupspoon hardly even plays now. And he’s just a man anyway. It doesn’t matter what he does with his time.”
“You could think that if you wanna, honey. But a man like that only know how to be sorry. They broke him down and killed him fifty years ago but it just ain’t caught up wit’ him yet.”
“Atwater’s a good man. He’s better than mosta the trash you find in these streets.” Kiki was trying to be strong against Mavis’s will.
“Yeah, he’s good, like an angel is good,” Mavis agreed. “But we ain’t made t’mess wit’ angels, girl. Angels draw up to all the evil and all the hurt in the world. They watch babies dyin’, that’s what they do. They take all the pain and shout it out. Angels livin’ with evil and with death. That’s their stock in trade. Murderers and thieves and times so hard that you could cry blood. That’s where you find angels. I’d no sooner spend a evenin’ with an angel than I’d whore out here in these streets. I’d kill myself before I’d break bread with a angel.”
Kiki was under the spell of the older woman’s words. She felt as if Mavis had something special just for her. And that something was beautiful and hard like diamonds. The only thing in Kiki’s mind was to keep Mavis there in front of her, to keep her talking.
“Why don’t you stay with me and have a drink, ma’am? Nobody’s coming back for a while yet.”
Mavis got comfortable but she didn’t drink. Kiki asked her about where she was raised and where she first met Soupspoon. Soon came the story of how Mavis had left her common-law husband Rafael and gone out to Texas where she and her son Cortland lived in a house near a levee. She grew red roses all around the house and sold them to white people in Houston on Friday and Saturday nights. Blood-red roses that were sleek and handsome with tight petals and a rich dark scent. She’d sell half a dozen for a dollar and could make up to twenty dollars in a week. Cort was five and spent all of his days like a river rat; out of the trees and into the water. He had friends everywhere and he loved everybody as much as they loved him.
“...he cried when the sun went down and he laughed at the moon,” she claimed. But then one day he was in the storm ditch dug out at the side of the road and there was a cloudburst coming. Mavis saw it moving like a slate wall toward their house. She called out to Cort and then ran. She got there before the rains but the water was already crashing down the deep ditch. Cort was gone. She was going to jump in after her missing son but a neighbor grabbed her and then the deluge hit.
“He’s gone out to sea,” Mavis said as if it had happened yesterday and they might still reclaim his body on the shore.
Kiki went through all of her cigarettes and started on Mavis’s during their talk. She had two full glasses of whiskey and a hard time to keep from crying.
“That’s why I had to leave Atwater,” Mavis said simply. “That’s why he had to go.”
“Why?” Kiki could hear an echo in the room, an echo she’d never heard before.
“Atwater married me, but it wasn’t ’cause’a me. Even when he was lovin’ me it was really Robert Johnson he was lovin’.”
“That man he keeps talkin’ about?”
“Yeah. I met him once and kissed him twice but when Atwater hears that I met Bob Johnson he all over me like white on rice. He’d do anything to feel what Robert Johnson felt.”
“Why’d you marry him then? If you knew that he was bad for you why didn’t you just leave?”
“I didn’t care, not at first. He wanna marry me that was okay. Maybe somethin’ good wanna come from that. It was like I didn’t have no mind’a my own.”
“You just did it? You didn’t even care?”
“That’s how most people live, honey. It’s just your white people got a li’l money think they could plan out a life. Ain’t no plan gonna save them. What do they know? It don’t matter what they say or how beautiful they is. And even if you really love someone, when things get hard everything goes. Everything.”
Kiki sipped her drink. She noticed that there was a small shiver running through the older woman. She wanted to say something, to ask why Mavis was so bitter, but she felt too weak.
“That’s why Atwater here wit’ you,” Mavis said. “He drawn to all that liquor you suckin’.”
“I brought him here. He didn’t come to me.”
Mavis nodded wisely.
Kiki wanted to rip her eyes out. “I did!” she yelled.
“Go back home, girl,” Mavis said.
“Is that why you left?’ Because he was a bluesman?”
The sneer on Mavis’s face showed like a bad taste in her mouth.
“I wasn’t that smart,” she said. “But I knew that somethin’ was wrong. Atwater was out playin’ his guitar all over the place. He was in them foul-smellin’ bars an’ then come home with that stink in his clothes an’ hair an’ skin. He come home smellin’ like whores an’ gunfights and blood.
“That was the first time Cort come to me.”