“I can’t let you hurt me again. You stay in that medieval slave basket if you want to. You will stay there by yourself. Don’t ask me to do it with you. I won’t. There is nothing any of us can do about the past but make our own lives better, that’s all I’ve been trying to help you do. That is the only revenge, for us to get over. Way over. But no, you want to talk about white babies; you don’t know how to forget the past and do better.”
His budding repentance decomposed into a steaming compost.
“If I wanted the editorial page of the Atlanta Constitution I would have bought it.”
“With what?” Jadine’s voice was slick with danger.
“With the money you got from Valerian. The money you fucked your way across Europe for!”
“Well, buy it then. Here, here it is.” She picked her wallet up from the night table and opened it. “Here it is. Your original dime. The one you cleaned sheephead for, right? The one you loved? The only one you loved. All you want ‘in the money line.’ Take it. Now you know where it came from, your original dime: some black woman like me fucked a white man for it and then gave it to Frisco who made you work your ass off for it. That’s your original dime.” She threw it on the floor. “Pick it up.”
He stared at her. The Cheech and Chong T-shirt was up around her waist and her nakedness below embarrassed him now. He had produced that nakedness and having soiled it, it shamed him.
“Pick it up.” She said it again and didn’t even sit up. She just lay there, stroking her raw silk thighs the color of natural honey. There was sealskin in her eyes and the ladies minding the pie table vanished like shadows under a noon gold sun.
He thought it would be hard to do, but it wasn’t. He thought it would be cold, too. Cold and hard. But it wasn’t. It was warm, almost soft, and quite round.
He put it in his pocket and having no place to put himself left the apartment again. He came back the next night to empty rooms and a door key for each of the several locks. He sat down on the sofa and looked at the keys. A pile of mail was on the coffee table too and in it a heavy yellow envelope. He stared at it awhile and then opened it. Out came the photos she had taken in the middle of the road in Eloe. Beatrice, pretty Beatrice, Soldier’s daughter. She looked stupid. Ellen, sweet cookie-faced Ellen, the one he always thought so pretty. She looked stupid. They all looked stupid, backwoodsy, dumb, dead…
Son put down the photos. I have to find her, he thought. Whatever she wants, I have to do it, want it. But first I have to find her.
10
AFTER THIRTY YEARS of shame the champion daisy trees were marshaling for war. The wild parrots that had escaped the guns of Dominique could feel menace in the creeping of their roots. During the day they tossed their branches; at night they walked the hills. At dawn their new formations challenged the wit of the chevaliers. Their brothers over on Dominique knew nothing of the battle plans for they were in a rain forest tamed for tourists that came by bus from the Old Queen Hotel, gallant and royal since 1927. Now she was dying from behind. Her front on Rue Madelaine was still seacap white and the columns at her entrance showed no signs of wear. Yet at her great round-skirted rear among breadfruit trees and lime, the cells of a motel were growing. A concrete Y-shaped thing with patios the size of a card table extended from the dining room from whose forty-seven windows diners once gazed at breadfruit trees and lawn. Now they looked at workmen, concrete and patios the size of a card table. Beyond that were the hills of black Dominiques, and beyond that spectacular mountains of rain forest. The road that cuts through the mountains is a regular tourist attraction. Breathlessly steep and winding, without benefit of guardrails, it offers a view of God’s hair, hibiscus, magnolia and oleander, poinsettia and jacaranda. Away in the distance under pink immortelles is an occasional dead plantation, now a hotel with marble dolphins and air conditioning pumping purity into two-hundred-year-old stone. The mountain road descends on the other side of the island to a coastline of cliffs and grottos where fishing villages lay. No marinas here, no golf courses, for here the winds do not trade. They are hot and capricious and the fishermen design strange sails to accommodate them so they can sell their grouper, tuna and bonito to the dead plantations, and the Old Queen Hotel where Jadine sat alone at a table for four.
“Crème de menthe,” she had said because the words seemed nice and right and she wanted to say them aloud. And when the waiter returned she regretted it immediately and ordered vermouth. She had called L’Arbe de la Croix. Ondine had answered.
“Where are you?”
“Queen of France, but I missed the ferry, Nanadine. Can somebody come?”
“Well, yes, I reckon so. But it might take awhile.”
“I’ll wait. Tell him to come to the Old Queen. If I’m not in the lobby, ask for me in the dining room.”
“You by yourself?”
“Of course. Hurry, please, Nanadine?”
Of course I’m by myself. When haven’t I been by myself. She was alone at a table for four, proud of having been so decisive, so expert at the leaving. Of having refused to be broken in the big ugly hands of any man. Now she felt lean and male, having left quickly with no peeping back just in case—no explanatory, loophole-laden note. No last supper. New York had agreed with her exit. A cab right at the door, an uncommunicative driver who took her directly to the place she was going to; Raymond at home; his studio available for the night; a short line at Chemical Bank and Air France ready to go. Aloneness tasted good and even at a table set for four she was grateful to be far away from his original-dime ways, his white-folks-black-folks primitivism. How could she make a life with a cultural throwback, she asked herself, and answered No way. Eloe. No way. Not for all the cadmium yellow and Hansa red in the world. So what if she was alone. So what if when she went away, no one stayed home and remained there all while she was gone and was waiting when she got back.
But he had put his finger on the very bottom of her foot. He had opened the hair on her head with his hands and drove his tongue through the part.
THE MULATTO didn’t talk; he hummed a Creole hit and drummed a little on the steering wheel. As they passed Sein de Veilles, Jadine’s legs burned with the memory of tar. She could hardly see L’Arbe de la Croix when they got to it, the trees leaned so close to the house. She dashed into Ondine’s kitchen, kissed her and said, “Let me get my stuff together first. I’ll be right back down and we can talk. Is Margaret here?”
“Upstairs,” said Ondine.
No one answered her knock at Margaret’s door, but she saw a brighter-than-hallway light falling from Valerian’s door and went toward it. Inside, heaped on the twin beds, on the dresser, the chairs and even on the bed table were clothes. Suits, ties, shirts, socks, sweaters and pair after pair of men’s shoes.
“Valerian?” she called out.
Margaret stepped from the closet-dressing room, her hands full of empty hangers.
“Well,” she said, genuinely surprised. “The prodigal daughter. What did you do to your hair?” Margaret looked flushed and sparkly, her movements directed and sure.
“Something different.”
“It’s wonderful looking,” said Margaret coming toward her, hand outstretched to touch Jadine’s hair. Then she stopped and snapped her fingers twice. “We used to call it…oh dear…” She closed her eyes. “Poodle-cut! That’s it. Poodle-cut,” and she laughed with such pleasure that Jadine had to smile.
“I’m sorry about leaving you with so little notice. I don’t want you to think I didn’t appreciate your helping me out last winter.”
Margaret waved her hand. “Don’t mention it. It was a lousy time for everybody.” She sat down on a cluttered bed and began to unbunch the hangers.