Blonde Faith

22

Leaving Lynne’s neighborhood, I took Olympic down to Santa Monica. On the way I tried to resolve the differences between people like the Chinese actress and Tomas Hight. Lynne lived an exciting life that was split between black gangsters and glittering Hollywood parties. She was well educated, I believed, and bright as a cloudless day in the Palm Springs desert. Tomas, on the other hand, didn’t have much — maybe didn’t understand very much. All he had was a job working construction and one room to live in. The difference was that Tomas could be president of the United States one day, and all Lynne could hope for would be to give the president a blow job.

This reality had nothing to do with my being black, Negro, or colored, bearing the inheritance of slavery. Lynne came from a culture that remembered itself all the way back before America’s colonizers could even speculate.

While having these idle thoughts, I was driving past palm trees, coral trees, eucalyptus trees . . . a whole arboretum of trees of every species. That was Los Angeles too. We were a desert with all the water we needed, a breeding ground for the contradiction of nature. Any seed or insect or lizard or mammal that found itself in LA had to believe that there was a chance to thrive. Living in Southern California was like waking up in a children’s book titled Would Be If I Could Be.

But the desert was waiting for all of us. One day the water would stop flowing, and then the masters of that land would reclaim their domain.

I PARKED ON Lincoln Boulevard a block north of Olympic. Strolling a block east brought me to Beachland Savings. The building was shaped like a slice of pie, crust side out, placed on the corner. The front was a wide arc of glass revealing the comings and goings of everyday people tending their checking accounts and Christmas clubs.

I walked in happy about the fact that I would not be likely to find a dead military man in that building, happy just to be moving forward.

I was still in my gray suit, still looking presentable, but this was Santa Monica, and all the business in that bank was being conducted by white people. In 1964, I would have been an anomaly walking in there, obviously far from home, looking around at the faces of employees and customers alike. But in 1967, two years after the Watts riots, I was no longer a mere abnormality but a threat.

“Excuse me, sir,” a uniformed guard said as he walked up to me.

“Yes?”

“Can I help you?”

He was shorter than I, red faced and pale eyed. There was a stolid certainty in his stare. His body was telling me that I couldn’t move forward before answering his question, so I considered the different routes to my goal.

After a moment went by, I asked: “You still got them new fans in here? It’s hotter than a oven down at my place. My girlfriend wants me to get a air conditioner, but you know it’s not just what the unit cost but all that electricity it suck down.”

“You have to start a checking account with a hundred-dollar minimum in order to get a fan.”

I took out one of my two remaining hundred-dollar bills and held it out to him as if he were an usher who needed to read my ticket in order to guide me to my seat.

He almost reached for the bill, but then he remembered who he was and where we were. Resentment replaced the indifference in his gaze. His nostrils flared a bit. He waited as long as he could and then gestured to the left, where an old lady and a man in a checkered suit were sitting on a long marble bench.

“You’re third in line,” the guard said, as if reminding me of my place in the grand design of things.

I thanked him with a smile and an exaggerated nod, then went to sit, where the lady and the man ignored me.

Across from us was a paper-thin, waist-high, red-stained pine wall. Beyond this wall two bank officers manned twin oaken desks; a bird-boned man who wore thick-lensed, green-rimmed glasses side by side with a vivacious Hollywood blonde who might have been playing a loan officer on a movie screen.

Both bankers were in earnest conversation with the men sitting before them. I watched the dramas unfold. The bank officer with the green glasses was processing a new account, but he acted as if it were all very official. He checked identification and studied the information his client, a long-haired man in cutoffs and a T-shirt, had written on his form.

The other officer had a sorry look on her face. The businessman she was speaking to had asked for a loan and was in the process of being denied. He was aggressive, kept pointing at her and at other parts of the bank. She made a gesture of helplessness and managed to frown and smile at the same time.

I was taken by her empathy for this rude customer. I could hear his angry voice though not the words. He was arguing with her authority, but she didn’t take offense.

I guess I was staring at her when she began to notice me.

At first it was just a glance, but after a while she was completely distracted. No one else would have noticed. She was still patient with the businessman, she still sat posed and perfect for the camera. But I caught her trying to see me.

This wasn’t an unusual situation for me to be in. I often made white women upset by noticing them. Sometimes I could see them concocting responses to the raw pickup lines they knew I would utter if I got the chance. I thought I had her figured out, but then the woman looked up and right at me, deeply into my eyes. There was frank interest in me, my being there, and I understood what was going on.

She turned her head to the businessman and said something blunt. She was no longer smiling, no longer understanding. The man moved his head as if he had been slapped. He sat up straight while deciding how to respond. There was a momentary face-off, but then the man stood and walked through the red-stained pine gate and left the bank, consciously avoiding eye contact with anyone else.

I watched him leave, noticing that the blue suit he wore was threadbare and that his shoes were so old they had almost completely molded to the shape of his feet.

“Sir?”

The blond officer was standing over me. She had one of those figures that made you look away in modesty. Just her close proximity made my hands hot.

“We were first,” the man in the checkered suit said. He had a mustache and a tic in his right eyelid. I hadn’t looked at his face before, so I didn’t know if the tic was due to the bank officer’s coming up to me or not.

“We’ll be with you as soon as we can,” the curvaceous officer said. And then to me, “Come with me, sir.”

I took the place of the down-at-heel businessman, noticing the officer’s nameplate — FAITH MOREL.

“Thank you, Miss Morel,” I said, “but that gentleman was before me.”

“Mr. Treeman comes in every other day to argue about the rounding of the decimal on his interest,” she said in a pleasant, unhurried voice. “We tell him that it is bank policy to round point five and below down a penny, but he wants to argue. If his time is that worthless to him, he might as well wait till last.

“What can I do for you, Mr. . . .”

“Rawlins. Ezekiel Rawlins.”

I watched her eyes to see if she knew the name, but she didn’t seem to.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Rawlins?”

“This electric fan,” I said, taking out the brochure and pointing. “My girlfriend says she wants a air conditioner, but . . .”

I stopped because I could see the desperation in Faith’s expression. She had seen something in me, and now I became something else. Maybe I was a threat or some fool looking for a free lunch.

She didn’t break down, but the breakdown was straight ahead.

I placed my hand on hers, and she grabbed on to it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to play with you.”

I pulled my hand away and took out my wallet. I opened it to a photograph of Easter Dawn Black that the child had given me five months before, at Thanksgiving. Christmas took Easter to a photographer every three months to have his memory of her documented.

“Do you know this child?” I asked.

She nodded, not crying.

“Her father left her at my house two days ago. I’ve been looking for him since then.”

“How did you find me?”

“I went to two houses Christmas had been staying at. In the second one there was a brochure for this bank; in the first there was a picture of you standing on a yacht named New Pair of Shoes.”

“Oh.” Faith looked up at the clock and then down at her hands.

Faith Morel was disintegrating right there in front of me. Any moment she would break down completely.

“Why don’t we get out of here and go to that diner across the street?” I suggested. “You can tell the boss you need to take a break.”

She nodded and I rose. She watched me as if I were a soaring redwood — a tree that lived on fog, a tree that could not thrive in a desert even if that desert was flooded and lined with the sweet rot of corruption.