The grave released Richard Barrett.
Children, the crypt couldn’t contain his spirit any more than death could end his concern for Sweet Faith Cross. Dutifully, he returned as a wraith, companion, and troubled conscience that would not let her rest. Without fail each Friday and always at midnight he came to her hotel, the stench of Hell’s outer circle heavy in his train. Such resurrections happen nearly every day. Esau Holmes, covered with mold and maggots, scrambled out of the cemetery back in ’26 to attend his daughter’s wedding, and everybody’s heard of how old Annie Bell Finch reared up in her casket when her husband Fred arrived at her wake with that fast young gal from Georgia. Listen, if you die before achieving some long-cherished goal, or before seeing some sight long nurtured in your dreams; if you die before seeing the sun rise red as Satan’s eye over the sea, or before hearing the cry of swallows break the stillness of dawn, or before feeling dew from some enameled expanse of country between your toes, then nature in you, too, will not be stilled at death.
Barrett came back.
The first Friday it happened, Faith had just finished with her final customer, and sat at her table for a spell, mulling over her life’s meaning as she twisted her hair into tight braids, smeared on facial packs the color of thick bottom land clay, and rubbed the ash off her ankles and legs with mineral oil. Her fingers wound her hair mechanically around into tiny curls while she thought, first of Barrett, then of his Doomsday Book, which sat beneath a Gideon Bible on her desk. Then she clicked off the ceiling light, her head burning with the tight braids, and went to bed. By and by she smelled the scent of brimstone, of old clothes scented with moisture and earth. Then: the feathery tickle of ashes in the air. She sneezed, panic bubbling in her chest. Off in the room’s northeast corner she saw a snow-white cat sidle slowly from one wall to the next. It said, “I can’t do anything a’tall until Richard comes,” and passed through her locked door like a spirit.
A much larger cat, the size of a suckling calf, appeared at the same wall, walked the same way, and said, “I can’t do anything a’tall until Richard comes.”
Beads of sweat burst upon Faith’s brow. Faraway she heard, or thought she heard, the rustling of graveclothes and the scraping of bare feet along the floor above the hammering of her heart. Faith lay still as a board.
In the same corner a third cat, this one the size of a pony, appeared; it swayed slowly across the room, looking at her through large, luminous, laughing eyes.
“I can’t do anything a’tall until Richard comes.” But before disappearing, it said, “But I think he’s here now.”
She felt it. Her stomach clenched like a fist around his name. On the other side of her bed, Faith became aware of a form creeping in beside her — she heard the bedsprings groan, felt them settle under a great weight.
“Oh, God—” Her voice shook. She prayed, then glanced to the pillow beside her. It held the indentation of a head. But no head was there, none at all. Floating free in the air were Barrett’s features, just inches above the pillow: turbid, hazel eyes, a toothless smile and crooked nose. She was across the room — uncertain how she’d moved so fast — her braids unraveling in the sweat from her scalp, and her limbs shaking like a leaf. How had it happened? Spirits could not return unless their hosts had committed suicide, or were conjured at their gravesites by wereworkers who, in the new of the , and in the hours of the
and
, said to one of the inhabiter signs of the
,
, or
, the following:
I conjure thee [deceased’s name] by the bloud that ranne from our Lord Jesus Christ crucified, and by the cleaving of heaven, and by the renting of the temple’s veil, and by the darkness of the sunne in the time of his death, and by the rising up of the dead in the time of his resurrection, and by the virgine Marie mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the mysterious name of God: Tetragrammaton. I conjure thee and charge thee my will be fulfilled, upon paine of everlasting condemnation: Fiat, fiat, fiat: Amen.
(All of which must be uttered in utmost piety, none of which sweet Faith remembered.) But somehow she recollected the way to exorcise haints:
“What,” she cried, “in the name of the Lord, do you want with me?”
The ghastly grin widened but did not disappear.
“Please.!”
That mouth, that disembodied, grisly grimace in the dark — spoke. “I. still think. therefore. I am. ”
Faith clicked on the light. He was gone. But four days passed before she stopped shaking or took food. She avoided the hotel on Fridays, wandering instead through the crowded city streets until Saturday morning. But Barrett was always close by — a will-o’-the-wisp glimpsed furtively or felt intuitively in the alarm at the base of her neck before he disappeared. She changed addresses, hoping to escape him. Faith gave Mrs. Beasley twenty-four hours’ notice on Wednesday, and was out of the hotel with six hours to spare. With the money Barrett had given her she moved into the low-rent Eden Green apartments on One Hundred Thirtieth Street.
Children, there’s nothing worse than being haunted by a philosopher’s spirit — waking up in the middle of the night with your heart heaving heavy strokes to hear, next to your ear, something muttering, “You may well be free of Barrett, but not Barretteity,” or worse, “Riddle me this, if you’re so smart: Will an arrow ever strike its intended target if, before it can cross that distance, one-half of that distance must be crossed first, and one-half of that, and one-half of that, and one-half of that—”
Faith feared for her sanity. For months this went on, even after she’d settled in Eden Green, cut back her streetwalking to supply only what she needed to balance her budget, and enrolled in secretarial school. Even this day Barrett shadowed her as she sat across a breakfast table from a clean-shaven, fresh-smelling young man named Isaac Maxwell, her eyes searching the room for the wise man’s haint.
“Everybody wants power,” Maxwell said in a brassy voice trained, he told her, in a six-week course in public speaking. In his left hand he held the op-ed page of a morning paper, his paper, The Sentry, above his plate of cooling ham, eggs, and hash browns. “But few people understand what real power is,” he said, softer now, waving his fork and watching her closely. “It’s directly connected with ethics, with what’s good, y’know. And what’s good is what makes a man feel more powerful.” He was chuckling, his eyes crafty and his shoulders hunched. Some folks might say that Isaac Maxwell looked a bit queer, as though, at birth, he’d been unable to make up his mind about what he wanted to be. There was a little goat in his long head, the look of a cow in his moist eyes and, in his slight figure, you could see the outline of, perhaps, an upright wolf. His chin was weak and peppered with shaving scars, slightly blue at the edges. He lingered over his breakfast, scratching sleep from his eyes, the wings of his nose widening whenever he spoke. The color of his skin, it seemed to Faith, was yellow and had the same chroma as the yolk of his eggs — like urine from enflamed kidneys. Though he was only twenty-four he was balding, which explained his wig and why he tugged at its corners whenever it slipped back on his head, loose like a yarmulke. When this happened Faith looked away. This time she lowered her eyes to concentrate on his editorial, “The Contest of Wills.”
“All that garbage about black and white and gay power misses the mark,” Maxwell said. He paused, his attention remaining on his reflection just behind Faith in the broad glass of the restaurant window. There he saw his bright orange suitcoat and blue butterfly bowtie, and carefully lifted flecks of lint off his shoulders. “Faith,” he said, still looking over her shoulder, “everybody’s out for Number One—Nu-u-u-mero Uno, and anybody who tells you different is a goddamn liar. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Society’s composed of individuals, and every one of ’em’s got an individual will. Society thrives on the clash of those wills.” Faith listened from the back of her head, her chin on the heel of her right hand and a cigarette between her fingers. Maxwell’s eyes flashed for an instant. “Please,” he said sharply, “my asthma. ” She doused the cigarette, hid it in her purse, apologized, and tried to concentrate on his editorial. Which wasn’t easy. The elastic in her underwear cut into her abdomen. She was eating better these days at Maxwell’s expense and it was showing. She shifted forward in her seat, tugged at the fold of her slip, and attended to him. He said, “Power”—still studying his profile in the glass—“is what it’s all about.” He wagged his fork at her. “But everybody won’t get it.” She looked up as if to say, no? “Some people are naturally weak and, to tell it like it is, deserve to be flunkies, others — like myself — are strong,” he tapped his chest with the stem of his fork, “way down deep, I mean. The weak ones go out to demonstrate, march, boycott, strike and picket — they try to change the world, you understand? The point is to use it.” He shook his head, his free hand pressed to his forehead to hold down his wig. “Those people will never know what real power is. You know what it is? You know what’s really good?”
Faith bent forward a bit farther, pushing her tight slip lower down her back; that helped, but the movement gave Maxwell the impression she was straining to hear what he said.
“It’s cash,” he announced, “cash money.” Then he slapped the checkered tablecloth with his palm. “Why, you can be as ugly as a witch, you can be evil and selfish and wicked, but cash money can make you beautiful, right?” He saw her face freeze up and softened his voice. “If you haven’t got talent, you can buy folks who do — whatever you want, whatever your Will points to is yours. That’s what I said in there,” and he tapped the back of the newspaper in her hand.
Faith said, “I see,” but she didn’t. She had changed in many ways, but not so much that she was comfortable with his ideas. In fact, she wouldn’t have recognized herself if she’d seen herself months ago in the glowing waters of the Swamp Woman’s Thaumaturgic Mirror. She would have seen, not a girl married to God in her childhood, or the terrified ethical adventurer who tarried an evening in the Hatten County bogs, but a woman with long artificial eyelashes, light rose lipstick, and crescent-shaped earrings; she would have seen pink nail polish on her long fingers, a turtled sleeveless bodice, navy shirt and jacket, and brown pumps. You wouldn’t know her. Maybe it was her makeup, her mascara, flesh-toned powders, perfumes that recalled the essence of exotic flowers, and waist-long falls that fooled you. You might have seen her legs, or noticed the brevity of her tailor-made dresses and coats, as Maxwell had a month ago when he saw her in this restaurant on Washington Street and invited himself over to her table. At that time he was new on his job as an assistant editor for The Sentry, and new to Chicago, hailing as he did from Columbus, Ohio. He found his new job of editing, rewriting, and sitting through morning news conferences quite a cross to bear. He needed someone to complain to. And like magic there appeared Faith. Once a week he’d find her at the same restaurant, at the same table by the window, looking woebegone as she sipped orange juice and studied her secretarial manual. But seeing her once weekly was not enough. She’d listen to anything you said (he was amazed), she very rarely contradicted you (he found the sense of power unbearable), and she even agreed with you, but not before you’d finished what you were saying. It was too much. He took her to dinner thereafter on Sundays and now, since she didn’t have a job, paid her rent at Eden Green. Strange to say, whenever he left her it was hard to remember anything about their conversations but the sound of his own brassy voice.
Faith finished the editorial, handed Maxwell his newspaper, and stuck a Viceroy in her cigarette holder. This time he didn’t complain, only said, “Smoking testifies to the weakness of your will,” and lit it for her. She would have agreed with him immediately but saw, floating over the heads of the other diners at the rear of the room, a whiff of blue smoke. Tensing, she turned to Maxwell, who had seen her reaction.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“No,” she said quickly. “Go on. I think you’re right about all those things.”
Maxwell broke into a broad grin. “You do?” And he blushed up to his ears. When he spoke again there was confidence in his voice. “Take the death of that professor a while back. The man just lay down on a park bench and gave up the ghost — no Will, no taste for conflict. You remember, don’t you?”
Faith cringed — recovered, and smiled. “No.”
Maxwell broke the delicate film over his sunny-side-up eggs with his fork before filling his mouth. He chewed largely with his eyes narrowed and mouth open. Her focus drew in from the room that framed his pear-shaped head to his face and concentrated on his cheeks, which fascinated her. Pack rats had cheeks like these, as big as overstuffed luggage when full. Maxwell shoveled in eggs and neatly cut squares of ham, slices of toast, and hash browns mechanically like an engine taking in fuel; then he began to bite and chew with a certain rhythm, the distended sides of his face decreasing in size like balloons releasing air. At the end of each mouthful he wiped his lips (yellow egg yolk still caked in his mustache and that area of the anatomy just beneath the nose, which Lavidia always called a man’s “snot-cup”) and gulped so loudly it hurt Faith’s esophagus. She wondered how he managed to taste anything he ate since he ate so fast. But her focus slipped back out again, fixing on the background behind Maxwell and the blue wisp of smoke across the room. It drifted toward them, ghostly, like mist over the fields each morning in Georgia, or gas, and she thought: Damn! Could only she see it? It figured.
“He deserved to die,” Maxwell said between mouthfuls. “I wrote the story on the old man, dug up the information on him and all that. He had everything going for him at one time, you know? — good job as a professor, published some books, but he just left all that behind. For two years nobody saw hide nor hair of that man.” He snorted. “That kind of foolishness makes me mad — I mean, somebody who’s on top of things and just throws it all away! Maybe,” Maxwell chuckled, “he lost his mind.”
Faith laughed politely. All pretense. She’d learned some time ago that if she laughed heartily with her eyes shut tight and her mouth open in a toothy grin for precisely seven seconds, not an instant more or less, she could easily slip away from the attempts at humor forced upon her usually humorless state of mind. It took a lot of training to perfect that smile, it took hours of standing in front of a mirror, timing herself, then testing the reaction on all the customers that she knew at the hotel. And it paid off. People warmed to Faith’s laughter immediately. For a second she thought about Alpha Omega Jones. Had his smile been deceit? It was tricky but she thought it through: there was what you saw — appearance, and there was what was truly real — the Good Thing; but you couldn’t have the latter. So you learned to control appearances, to construct elaborate, well-timed pretenses and lies to get what you needed to survive. Faith clicked off the seconds to the beat of her pulse and looked up at Maxwell.
“I figure I can make fifty thousand a year if my Will Power’s strong enough,” Maxwell said. “I mean, the publisher of The Sentry doesn’t have anything I don’t have, except that he’s white. I watch him a lot, y’know? He comes in that front door every morning and slams it behind him. Wakes everybody up, y’know? When he slams that door the noise says ‘Here I am!’ and everybody snaps up straight at their desks. That’s how you get respect — by slamming doors like Ragsdale does, or by letting everybody know who’s in control around there.” Maxwell reached for Faith’s cigarettes and took one. He took one puff and watched himself exhale in the window’s reflection. Then he abandoned the smoldering cigarette in the ashtray to Faith’s right. “Someday I’m gonna run that newspaper. You watch. Just as soon as I get myself together.” For the span of several seconds he looked at the manicured nails on his right hand and played with two silver rings on his left. “When that happens, Faith, I’m going to be rich.” He winked, foxy. “But I’ll still be my same sweet self!”
Faith smiled. Seven seconds later she excused herself. The mist had maneuvered itself above Maxwell’s head like a storm cloud. Her slip was again pinching her waist, and she hurried across the room to the women’s lounge and, once inside, began struggling with her underclothes. Satisfied, she moved to the mirror and fastidiously reapplied her lipstick. She stared at herself in the glass, wondering if Maxwell would propose tonight after they attended the concert at the Auditorium Theater. She had worked hard toward that end, had pulled every trick from her memory, even ones she only faintly believed in and had had to forage pet shops to complete. Like carrying tufts of his wig in her pocketbook, and the Frog Charm (somewhat complicated, but effective: Kill a frog or toad, dry him out completely in the sun — or bury him in an ant’s bed until his flesh is gone. Among his bones will be one that resembles a fishhook, and another that looks like a fish scale. To win your intended lover, hook the fish bone into his/her clothing; to expel him/her, throw the fish-scale bone in that person’s direction). She was never sure, though, if it was the charms, her charm of listening, or Maxwell’s own fatuity that brought him under her control. He was incredibly slow, but could be cajoled into anything she willed through an elaborate process of innuendo and suggestion that left her fatigued and frustrated, but always victorious. Indeed, he seemed dull to her, as simple as a three-headed treasure-guarding troll, but, she told herself, intrinsically good (unlike trolls — they’ll drink a Christian man’s blood), and harmless in a cowlike way. She bent forward, powdering her cheeks, certain that Dr. Lynch had been so right: everything was stimulus and response. Machinery. She remembered the occasion when Maxwell, set in motion by her elaborate act of submissiveness, made his first advances toward her. He’d been nervous that night, wheezing with asthma, staining his tie with brown steak sauce and spilling black coffee onto his crotch. He’d lowered his eyes self-consciously and slipped his trembling hands under the table.
He’d said, “You’ve got class,” then fumbled in his sports jacket, produced a plastic respirator, and sucked on it while awaiting Faith’s reaction. She didn’t quite know what to say. The air in his apartment was stuffy. She opened a window, but that didn’t help Maxwell’s breathing. His eyes watered; he coughed, closed his eyes, threw back his head, and gripped the edge of the table with his free hand.
Faith stepped behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Can I do anything?”
“Yes.” He took a deep breath, and threw back his head again. “Let me be seen in public with you—”
It was an odd way to put it, but she bit. “You want.?” She watched her timing, controlled the tone, the timbre in her voice. “Why?”
He had seemed to be in some kind of agony, with pain so quick it lifted him from his seat like a puppet. He circled the table, slightly bent, his face pale and sunken with his need for air. She had become afraid then, imagining what it was like to feel one’s chest narrow, tighten, and admit only a thin tunnel of oxygen. Maxwell’s face was blue; he held himself erect by holding the back of a chair.
“You’re. b-beautiful,” he said, coughing violently again and falling back, frightened and weak, fluids bubbling in his stomach like liquid in a shaken jug.
“Please!” Faith cried. “Don’t waste breaths trying to talk.”
He waved her away feebly, forcing out the words. “Can you imagine what it’ll be like if I’m seen with you? People — they’ll turn around and stare with admiration when we walk down the street. That’s important — what people think, I mean. It’s the world of business, and you can help me get ahead if—” His wheezing had become horrible, so deep it frightened even Maxwell. He sank into the chair at the table and lowered his head into his folded arms. “I’m just an average guy. I’m nobody — I’m a cripple! I know you know lots of guys, healthy guys. You don’t need me. I can understand that. I’d just like to be seen with you sometimes. That’s all—”
Standing there, watching him gag and spray the acidic contents of the respirator between his lips, had both embarrassed and exhilarated her. She had power. With one word she could crush him. And, to tell the truth, it did make her feel good. She remembered sitting up with him all night, he lying propped up in his bed with pillows behind his back as she refilled his spray and brought him water. She’d given him what he wanted, smiling when — as he’d predicted — pedestrians turned around to glance at her when they walked down the street. She overlooked his stammering, smiled at his jokes, and approved of his garish ties and gauche sports coats. He, as predictable as a physical law, beamed from ear to ear, fed her, loaned her his car, and swore these ideas occurred to him of his own accord. Yet he was good to her, and though his predictability could sometimes make her scream, she did not want to lose him. Faith looked at her image in the mirror and was pleased. Tonight, if all went well, she would induce Maxwell to propose, pretending to be taken aback, honored, tearful, and left speechless by his proposition.
Then she broke into a sweat. On the surface of the glass of the mirror and superimposed over her own image were two sad, hazel eyes and a knitted brow that scowled gravely at her undertaking. She grabbed her purse and returned quickly to her table.
Maxwell was already at the counter near the door, paying the tab and counting and recounting his change. He took her arm, and they stepped out into a soft and flabby mid-spring morning. But Chicago no longer seemed dismal, not quite as lifeless or ominous. The Good Thing, after all, was here — it weighed about one hundred and fifty pounds, received paychecks twice a month, and would do anything she asked. She was so excited she almost squeezed Maxwell’s arm with genuine affection. Almost.
“You’re wonderful,” she said.
He rubbed his nose until it was shiny, grinned proudly, and perked up when two young men passed them by and whistled at Faith. Maxwell drew her close. “You’re just saying that.”
True, she thought. But she said, “I mean — you’re always in control of things. I feel so. safe when I’m with you.” She could almost hear the click, click, click of reaction as his chest swelled. She decided to say no more. Once, as they drove home from a movie, she’d overdone it, had overloaded the machinery and brought on an asthma attack that had nearly lifted him out of his skin.
“I’ve got to run,” Maxwell said at the corner. “There’s another conference this morning.” Then he rolled his eyes at her. “Most of them are pointless — just meeting with the circulation department or the ad boys, but something important might come of this one.”
“Mmmm?” She hadn’t heard a word. The warmth of the morning was reaching into her and she suddenly wanted to be free of him.
“We’re starting a series on the prison in Joliet. It’s not my idea, you understand. Those characters belong right where they are. But it occurred to me when the idea came up that this just might be my big break. The editors want to feature a column on day-to-day life in prison, but they’ll need someone to organize it.” He swiveled his head toward her, smiling, twirling the edge of his mustache. “Whoever gets that assignment may be moved up a couple of notches.”
Faith was about to speak when she started at a fingertip touching her arm. She turned, stepping back and seeing an old man behind her, his right palm outstretched. In a croaking voice he said, “Can you give a little something, lady?” Cocked over his right eye was a shapeless hat; his shirt was wrinkled as though he had slept in it, and his trousers were loose and baggy and hid his shoes. If he had a face, she couldn’t tell. His nose rested between his yellow eyes as shapeless as a kneecap, his hair was dusty and drawn up into tight little balls like gnats and mayflies caught on flypaper. Two clear streams ran from his nostrils into his mouth. He licked at his lips and presented the pink surface of his palm to her again, his hand trembling. “It’s been four days since I et, lady. ”
“Leave us alone,” Maxwell said almost under his breath. He stepped closer to intimidate him, realized he was a full head shorter than the man, then stepped back, making a great show of reaching into his pocket as if to find a gun.
The old man ignored Maxwell, turning to Faith, his hat off now. He twisted the brim around in circles and looked at her feet. “I just need a dollar to put something in my stomach for a little while.” He sniffled, looked at Maxwell out of the corners of his eyes, and chaffed his face with his slimy coat sleeve. “I can’t lie to you — I got a habit. Do you know what it’s like to be sick and—”
“You make me sick!” Maxwell snorted. He stepped behind Faith, said, “Get going before I call a cop,” and then he went silent and clenched his fists when Faith withdrew a ten-dollar bill from her purse and handed it to the old man. He took it without a word of thanks and turned away, never looking back, and walked a few paces down the street into a bar.
Maxwell’s mouth hung open. “Why didn’t you let me handle that?”
Faith played with the tight elastic band beneath her dress. She felt a headache beginning on the left side of her brow. “I felt sorry for him.”
“I don’t mean that!” Maxwell shoved his hands in his pockets, his nose wrinkled like a puppy’s as he glared at the sidewalk. “You always do that to me — override me when I’m the man.” He glanced up at her, then looked away when their eyes met. “I don’t like it! I don’t like it at all — it’s not natural. You did it at that party last week when I was telling a joke and you said I got it wrong.” He thought about it, colored, and stomped his foot on the ground. “I hate that, Faith. It makes me feel small when you or anybody else does that. I was mad enough to hit you upside your head for embarrassing me in front of all those people.” For a moment he was silent. Then: “And I would have been right if I’d hit you. Women have less Will than men—that’s a fact of nature; they’re less rational and more emotional, and they need to keep quiet until spoken to and let men take the lead.” And, as if to demonstrate this general principle, he walked faster so Faith remained two steps behind him.
She didn’t want to hear it. The sunlight broke between two skyscrapers overhead and seemed to focus on that part of her brow burning with pain. The elastic in her underwear felt as tight as a corset and (she was certain) was ruining her digestion. Holding her head, she said, “I’m sorry, Isaac. I suppose I stepped out of line.” Something inside her laughed but she kept her face straight. “You’re right.”
“Sorry don’t help.” He scowled, trying to breathe as slowly as possible. His throat rattled. “Don’t feel sorry for anybody from now on, especially for lushes like that one. He gave you a line, honey! People like that’ll use you!” He chewed the corner of his mouth, watching the streetlight on the opposite block turn green. “You’re just lucky you’ve got me around to watch out for you.” Then he kissed her for the benefit of anyone who might see by holding her shoulders, pushing his face against her and tipping her slightly over backward. That done, he wiped his lips and crossed the street with a slight swagger, forcing other pedestrians to step out of his way.
. five, six, seven. Faith let the smile fall from her face. He was across the street, strutting like a rooster toward the bus stop. As she stood there on the crowded street, people parting and passing her on either side, she wondered, and not without a sinking feeling in her stomach, Who was Isaac Maxwell? What, after all those evenings sacrificed in snaring him, after all the times she’d tasted the interior of his mouth made bitter by his asthma spray, did she really know about him? Perhaps it wasn’t important. Perhaps it was only important that he was pliable, like soft clay, and at least thought that he loved her. Her own feelings were more nebulous. She remembered that it took three days of looking in department stores before she found the Valentine card she wanted to send him. Not that she wanted to send it, but he considered such things as greeting cards and ties at Christmas to be important. Most of them had said something wholly unacceptable like “I love you.” The thought of it made her shiver. Another had a cartoon figure of a girl with a caption that read “Thinking of you.” Which was a lie. In the end she had made him a card, cutting it out herself and writing her own noncommittal message. “You couldn’t afford to buy me one?” he asked, holding it away from him as if it were a bit unclean. “That’s what you think of me?”
What she did think of him, she could never say to his face. If she loved him — and she had by no means made up her mind — it was the way a Confederate and Union soldier had to love each other, as adversaries who unwillingly draw closer in conflict. The scene of battle was his bedroom (a horrible affair in her mind; there were Ebony pinup girls pasted over the head of his double bed and patterns describing a hundred and one positions for sexual congress on the bedspread). It was touch-and-go, a chess game. The first night she had allowed him to kiss her, there on the battlefield, he felt somewhat victorious. Then he turned sour and stepped across the room from her. “Who the hell taught you to kiss like that?” His face was pinched and sad, like a child’s ready to cry but not wanting to. “I didn’t teach you to do that,” and he demanded to know who did. And so it went each weekend, he trying to possess more and more of her, and she trying to squeeze a proposal from him. He was her object, pure and simple, and she was his, and between them this twirling exchange for supremacy of wills, as he called it, built a tension or bond that she was willing to call, for want of a better word, love. You took what you could get. Somehow it was all right. It worked out even fine (the bills were paid and the worst part of her bondage had passed), even though, late at night when she stood before her apartment’s picture window, barefoot on the thick carpet Maxwell had nailed down himself, and looked at the stillness of her neighborhood, she thought she heard Barrett’s voice just above the wind, telling her all this was horribly wrong. And she would feel grief build in her chest, and for no apparent reason at all, except that she felt filled with some oceanic painful-pleasurable awareness of her own self-betrayal in contrast to her life’s half-forgotten promise. Laughing, she’d wipe away these tears, calling them foolish and feeling astonished by her own weakness of will, which Maxwell so deplored. Weakness, sympathy, faith, love — all these were stupid, surely. She knew she was in bondage (the image of a frog caught in the mouth of a snake came to her, only one of its green legs visible and wiggling in the air), knew herself to be encrusted with the filth of a past beyond her control. The filth of the present beyond her control was understandable then. But at those hollow, lonely hours her thoughts would return to Barrett, then to Reverend Brown, and the terror and closeness she had felt and felt still in the depths of the cave. She would purse her lips, her eyes shut tight to close out even the light of the moon, and whisper, as in days of yore, “Thank You. ” Chills crawled along her spine and a sense of dread or fear stuck in her throat like a cotton hook. Even for this, Thank You, for this confusion and pain because, through pain, I know I can still feel; for this chance to persist, even if in deceit as Todd had done. Thank You — for this clownish, pitifully genuine, but cowlike lover, this good thing of mine.
Tired, though she had only been up a few hours, Faith went home to sleep, certain Maxwell would propose and bring the battle to an end. She could feel it in her throat.
• • •
After a time she awoke in her bedroom, stretched out, and checked the electric clock on her nightstand. Six-thirty. She’d slept late, as much as eight hours, but felt she deserved it. She could have passed the morning in reading her shorthand book from the Mueller Vocational College on the North Side, but why study when she might soon be able to avoid work altogether? Maxwell believed that men were the providers and women should stay at home. Fine, she thought, glad he was so foolish. The idea of work, she remembered, had affected Big Todd in this way, too. Long ago, on one of their walks, he’d told her about the time he worked in a cotton mill. The work wore at his spirit. In a week he’d lost nearly seven pounds from the heat alone. They expected Todd to work five days a week, but he came only three, Monday through Wednesday. This went on for five weeks straight until Todd’s foreman could stand it no longer.
When Todd appeared Monday morning, the foreman cornered him in the locker room. Said, “Cross, what the hell is this? For a month you’ve been comin’ in three days a week! You got an explanation?”
Todd leaned close to him, picking his teeth with a straw. “Listen, I come in three whole days of the week because I really need the money. ”
It was that simple. But Maxwell already earned enough for him and Faith to live on, and that was what it — life — was all about, to hear him tell it. Getting by. No sooner had she thought this than she heard a whisper in her bedroom: “Consider, child. your Good Thing. ” Rattled, she rose to her feet, pulled on her bathrobe, and went to her mirror, angry and refusing to acknowledge the suggestion of Barrett’s sad eyes staining a corner of the glass. “I don’t need advice!” she said to herself. “And I certainly don’t need the Good Thing anymore.” She brushed her hair for one hundred slowly counted strokes, showered, rubbed cold cream on her ashy ankles and legs, and dressed in the living room. At exactly eight she heard her door chimes and, since Maxwell had a key, he let himself in. He staggered into the room, his toes pointed outward as he took long strides to the sectional sofa where he dropped his trench coat.
Something was wrong. Faith waited, playing with a button on her dress.
Maxwell threw his arms around her waist and said, “They went for it!” His eyes were glazed and dilated, two tiny dots in a head swollen, she realized, with alcohol. Also, he had an erection, which he attempted to hide by sticking his right hand in his pocket.
Faith looked him dead in the face, frowning. “You’ve been drinking.” When he exhaled she smelled a good amount of gin on his breath. “What happened?” Then, because she was afraid of the situation, she sat down on the sofa. “Isaac, I said you’re drunk!”
He spoke quickly, clipping off the ends of his words and sliding articles into nouns as though he were speaking French. “Guess who’s going to handle that column and at a raise in pay and starting next month!”
Her eyes were on his ridiculous attempt to keep his profile turned from her. It slowly dawned on her that he wanted her to share his enthusiasm. All right. She stood up, still playing with her button, turning over phrases. Before she could decide on one Maxwell said, “Ragsdale — he’s the publisher, he went for it in a big way.” He was breathing heavily and paced the room, waving his arms and oblivious to the bulge in his trousers. “I didn’t think he would, not with the hell they’ve been giving me for weeks. Hey, I didn’t even think he liked me, you know?” He remembered his condition and turned to give Faith a three-quarter view of himself. “He’s shelved every idea I came up with since I got there. Great ideas! Like switching from their nine-column format to magazine style. Nobody uses nine columns anymore!” Maxwell crossed the room, placed his hand in his pocket, and managed to shove his erection down his right pants leg where it was less noticeable. Then he hurried back toward Faith. “The whole day started off wrong, what with that drunk this morning. And I missed the bus and had to walk the rest of the way to work. Jesus, I must have looked terrible, I mean, unprofessional! There were these big sweat rings under my arms and I was breathing hard and there was dirt under my nails. ”
Faith sat silent, watching him pace like Socrates before the Court. She tried to listen, but there was a pain in her right foot, which had fallen asleep. She’d crossed her right leg over her left; the blood rushing back made her foot feel leaden. She lowered it to the floor and wiggled her toes until feeling returned.
“So they’re all waiting for me, right. When I came in they were looking over my proposal in the conference room — Ragsdale, Cummings, the evening editor, and Lowell, he’s copy editor. Faith, lemme tell you — I was scared enough to pee in my pants. A chance to get over comes, maybe, only once in a man’s lifetime! And if you’re black, it may never come at all!” Maxwell gave a short, knowing laugh. “I mean black folks have been down so long, on the bottom, that our Will’s been weakened. We don’t know how to think big like other people. You know what I’m saying: poverty is a state of mind,” he pointed at his temple, “and I just wasn’t born to be poor, you know?”
Faith wiggled the right toes on her foot cautiously. “Yes, I know.” But she wondered about that, about what she really knew of Maxwell. Her information was scanty. Sometimes, when she looked at him, he didn’t seem to be there at all. She saw a somewhat poorly polished gesture, but never anything she might call Maxwell. Not even when he was naked — even then he seemed heavily clothed with layers and layers of popular culture grafted on but never reaching to that level she could call Maxwell himself. Maybe he was like a suit of armor, empty inside. Regardless, it was easier to pretend he had no past — that they, like two slaves promenading on Sunday in their owner’s old clothes, had just met in the French Quarter in New Orleans, that they needed to know nothing other than that she was a woman and he was a man who would take care of her if they ran away from bondage. A suit of armor, after all, would shield her from the cold. Still, she remembered the salient elements of his life: attending one poorly equipped ghetto school after another, soaking up all the literature, books, and movies that presented an image of a more affluent life, and writing to purge himself of frustration. Unexpectedly, he won a scholarship to a junior college, and, just as unexpectedly, he graduated at the head of his class and gave a commencement-day speech on — you guessed it—“The Power of Will.” Faith closed her eyes. It was easier to pretend he had no past. “I know, Isaac,” she said.
“It was crazy, Faith! Ragsdale looked up from my proposal and said, ‘It looks good.’ ” Maxwell stopped in the center of the floor, his face wooden and his shoulders hunched forward, a queer hitch in his voice. “I wish my father was around right now. It would have meant a lot to him, you know? He never really got off the bottom.” Maxwell pulled at his nose, sober, staring at Faith. “He was a janitor all his life and glad to be one. Sometimes I’d be at home, writing in a corner of the room, and he’d drag in from the plant with dust in his hair and eyes, and ask me what I was doing. And when I told him, he’d say, ‘There ain’t no place for a black boy who does that.’ You understand? He was whipped, Faith — somebody snuffed out the Will in him like you do a candle.” Perhaps Maxwell tasted something bad: he curled back his lips as if he did. “He pandered me! I couldn’t stand it. He thought I was weak and asthmatic and couldn’t do anything else — I mean, do hard work with my back like he did. But he was wrong, you see, because Lowell nodded his head and said they wanted to start the column in about a month, and Cummings told me to pick the prisoner I want to author it.” Maxwell smiled, a warm feeling in his chest. “I’ll get an extra day off — Monday, and about a hundred dollars a week more. ”
Faith’s eyebrows raised. “A hundred?”
“You can’t get rich in media, honey,” Maxwell laughed, “not unless you own the paper. That’s freedom of the press — the publisher’s free to print anything he wants. The point is that they’re finally giving me some responsibility — I can branch out, put some money away and, maybe, in a few years start my own magazine.” He looked straight into her eyes for the first time that evening. “They trust me.”
“Faugh!”
“What was that?”—Maxwell.
“Nothing, maybe someone in the hallway.” Faith felt at a loss. She understood in a cerebral sort of way, not with her heart, his need for this thing. She even wanted him to have it. “I’m glad,” she said. It sounded false; she shot her voice up an octave: “I’m glad!”
He seemed to believe her. “Anyway, I will branch out soon. It takes time, you know? If I show them I can handle this, maybe they’ll let me do a signed column next — on race or something. I’ve got some strong opinions on that. I’ve got time to move up and I’ve got potential. Ragsdale said so, those were his words. You know I wouldn’t toot my own horn.” For a second he was silent, visibly exhausted and a little bit high from so much speech; his shoulders slouched, his arms hung like slabs of beef on meathooks at his side. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s wonderful,” Faith said. “I hope it turns out all right for you.”
“For us!” Maxwell shouted. “I’m doing all this for both of us!” Then he smiled, wily, and laughed as he took her hands and lifted her off the sofa. “But you’ll have to act right, stay in a woman’s place, I mean.”
Faith said, “Right,” and he released her, stepping in front of her living-room mirror to adjust his wig and smooth back his mustache with spittle. “We can talk about what I have in mind later. If we hurry,” he glanced at his wristwatch, “we can make it to the theater in time for the show. I can’t stand being late.”
For the occasion, Faith dressed in a cream-colored, box-pleated skirt, argyle cardigan, and brown pumps, deciding, when she was inside Maxwell’s Buick, that the prospects for a life with him were propitious. She could push him; it wouldn’t be hard. They would work out a comfortable agreement, an unwritten contract involving, on his side, food, furniture, comfort, and security somewhere in the surrounding crime-free suburbs; and on her side, the provision of children, but not at first, cooking until they found someone to cover this inconvenience, and, of course, the obligatory sacrifice of sex Lavidia had found so abhorrent. She looked at his profile as he drove down Michigan Avenue, quieter now with couples strolling along the sidewalks, into restaurants, and toward the lakefront. Would he, at some unforeseen time, expect more than duty from her? She closed her eyes, experiencing first the play of light and patterns along her eyelids, then a vision that was brief but terrifying: suppose after thirty or forty years or so, after a lifetime of duty and coping and ceaseless arguments repeated so often they could start each one up anew at any point, at the beginning, middle, or end; suppose after fifty years they found themselves sitting across from each other in a semidark kitchen overlooking a quiet backyard of peonies, petunias, and sweet-smelling ferns, the sink filled with greasy dishes behind them, the walls lined with shelves of teapots that jingled “Tea for Two,” milk-glass statues, and placards engraved with kitchen prayers like:
Bless my little kitchen, Lord,
I love its every nook,
And bless me as I do my work,
Wash pots and pans and cook.
suppose they stared across that table, looking up from their untouched bowls of salad, glaring at the outlines of the kitchen, at the stark figures of the electric wall clock, the gigantic ornamental spoon and fork made of wood, the calendar they’d forgotten to change, the bulletin board covered with phone numbers with which they could associate no names, no faces; suppose in all that they peered at each other across the gulf between their lives like two duelers facing one another on some misty moor, wondering, in that brittle, graying age, Who is this? And, I—? Would he be openly hostile then? His hairline would stretch back behind his head, ending in gray fuzz. Hard old age would be upon him. He would wear blue-and-red suspenders that strained over an obscenely rotund belly. His toothless mouth would look like a fresh wound, and he would accuse her of his failures, his humiliations so sure to come. Faith smiled to herself, leaned over, and kissed Maxwell’s cheek. She would be just a wrinkle then — old, evil like Lavidia. But she remembered the statistics: 13,500 black men stricken dead as stone from hypertension, one out of every seven, the newspapers had said. They had twice the chance of collapsing from stroke as whites. Maxwell’s life expectancy would, if he was lucky, be no more than 64.1 years. She would outlive him; she could wait. He would begin wheezing and clutching his wrinkled throat at the table; his head would pitch forward into his salad bowl. She saw herself rising from the table, starting to dial the police or the fire department, then stopping, turning around, and descending the rubber-matted back stairs to the yard. She would bend down to the white peonies growing beside the sidewalk, bury her nose in one, and withdraw it filled with a fragrance as sweet as wine. Dew from the petals would be moist against her lips. She would smile, thinking of the insurance.
“I’m almost too worked up to enjoy the show,” Maxwell said. “I should be at home working on the column, you know? Turning over all the possibilities so — ha ha — nothing can slip through my fingers.” He glanced at her sheepishly, sly. “I never did tell you my whole theory of Will Power, did I?”
“No,” Faith said, but she remembered the curious collection of books stacked along the floor of his bedroom. Some belonged to The Power Book Library and were long out of print. She had flipped through a few when he left to buy her a pack of cigarettes. The titles were peculiar: Power of Will, Will for Success, a few books by Horatio Alger, Colin Wilson, Norman Vincent Peale, and a slim one about a seagull. She hadn’t been able to make sense of any of them. “You never told me,” she said.
Maxwell chuckled and began beating rhythms on the steering wheel with his palm. “It came to me when I was watching a Rose Bowl game — sort of like a revelation. All those men in conflict and one of them carrying the ball across the field through dint of pure Will. Beautiful!” He looked at her, all seriousness. “That’s life in a nutshell. Tennyson said it better than me—O living Will, thou shalt endure, When all that seems shall suffer shock. Will Power can overcome anything, you see? I know it for a fact, because whenever I feel an asthma attack coming on, I can just will it right away.”
“You can?” Faith looked at him hard. “How?”
“Pure strength of Will,” Maxwell snapped. He sucked at foreign matter in his teeth and shifted the car into fourth. “Will Power’s a self-preservative principle of evolution. I figured it all out. It’s superior to matter and stronger than mind, and that’s why man’s been able to survive on this miserable planet for so long. If nature threatened him, he could conquer it.” Maxwell’s right hand left the steering wheel; he held it out above the dashboard, drawing his fingers together in a tight fist. “A man can accomplish anything if his Will Power’s strong enough, Faith.” He seemed to remember something and lowered his hand, glancing sideways at her. “But you have to direct the Will toward what’s right and good, of course.”
Faith slid up in her seat. “What is right?”
“Security and comfort,” Maxwell laughed, still sucking at his teeth. “Being on top of things, having nice things, respect, a little authority — feeling like a man. Things like that.”
She left that alone. It hung heavy in the close space of the car, like gas from a sick person’s bowels, until she, to clear the air, said, “I guess.” It didn’t matter what he thought, or if he thought at all, which was still questionable, as long as he was sweet. Sometimes. “That’s your theory?” she asked finally. “That’s all?”
Maxwell reddened a little. “I know it needs some work. I’m not writing it up for Mind or the Philosophical Review, you know! All the implications aren’t worked out — I know that — but it’s how I feel about things and it helps me stay in the race.” He shoved out his lower lip and changed the subject. “You got our tickets?”
She said, “Yes,” and produced them after Maxwell left his Buick in an underground parking lot and led her to the door of the theater. He guided her into an immense lobby embellished with Oriental decorations, then up four flights of red-carpeted stairs. From that height, the proscenium was minuscule, adrift at sea before hundreds of people seated below. Maxwell looked curiously at their tickets, then for their seats.
“Those people,” he said finally, pointing to an old couple, “they’ve got our seats.”
The couple looked nonchalantly at them. They were both nondescript, just an average, portly, moon-faced man and wife dressed in Sunday-service clothing, waiting for the show. Maxwell bent toward the man and tried to explain that those seats, paid for in advance, were his. The man said nothing. His face was like the cement in an old cellar, rough irregular lines lying thick and lumpy along a hard, white surface. He remained rooted in place like an oak. Maxwell perspired, fingered his respirator nervously, and returned angrily to Faith.
“I’m going to get an usher,” he said. “I know those are our seats.” And he was gone, squeezing back out into the crowded, smoke-filled hallway. She waited, irritated by her full bladder, and afraid she’d miss Maxwell if she went searching for the women’s room. The billowing curtains before the stage below parted, and applause thundered around, below, and above her ears. A pianist appeared onstage, animated, his long fingers stroking the keys, his feet pumping the pedals, dark sunglasses flashing with floodlights directed his way and his head nodding with the melody now filling the auditorium. Faith exhaled nervously and pressed her thighs together. It would only take an instant to find the bathroom; she could be back before Maxwell returned with the usher. But she stayed, licking her dry lips and wringing her hands. She crossed her arms, then began to lose her fight with this sudden sense of dread that had no location, no cause; it broke free, not as she stood there pinching all her abdominal muscles together, but when she turned around and saw Maxwell returning with the usher, a six-foot bespectacled man wearing a blue uniform. He licked sleepily at his lips. She wanted to hide. It was Arnold Tippis.
“We’ll get this thing straightened out right now,” Maxwell said. He turned to the usher, but Tippis stopped cold in the aisle, tearing off his glasses and gawking at Faith.
“Where’ve you been hiding, girl?” Tippis cried. “You’ve got no idea what I’ve been going through trying to find you!”
She was going to wet her pants. She knew it. Faith glanced at Maxwell, already halfway down the aisle, then at Tippis, who was sliding toward her. People seated around them began to stare, scowl, and hiss like broken ventilators. She started to back away, but felt herself losing control.
Tippis placed his hand on her right arm and thrust his face near hers, saying, sotto voce, “I need somebody to talk to. You’ll listen, won’t you, Faith? I looked for you at the hotel, but Mrs. Beasley said you’d moved out a long time ago.” In the darkness of the theater she could hardly see his face.
“Please,” Faith said, “take your hand off.” Its pressure was upsetting her delicate equilibrium of tightened muscles, squeezing from her what she knew would be a very embarrassing deluge of. “Please. ”
“Things haven’t been right with me since I last saw you,” Tippis said. “There’s nobody to hear me out like you used to. Where are you staying? Faith, I’ve got to talk with you—”
Maxwell bounded back up the aisle and stopped, swaying at Faith’s side. “What’re you talking about?” He stared at Faith, his face blue, his chest heaving. “You don’t know him, do you?”
“Tell him, honey.” From Tippis. He put on his glasses and stared at Maxwell.
“No,” Faith whispered. She inhaled deeply, imagining her bladder to be as gravid, as swollen and distended as a womb. It was swelling up inside her like a tumor, was about to explode—boom! — and drown them all.
“No?” Tippis roared. He slipped his glasses on again. She could see the pain spring across his face, tightening his jaws and the muscles around his eyes and lips. Why couldn’t he go away before she had an accident? “Faith,” Tippis said, stumbling over his words, “you remember what we used to talk about — about how happiness and peace isn’t possible in society.” His face opened like a trapdoor. “But I was wrong! God, it is possible. When I was with you and when you heard me out I felt something like genuine tranquillity. ” Tippis bobbed his head and his voice shot up. “I see that now! You do need other people to be whole, to discover who you are—”
All the while she said nothing, only held her stomach and groaned.
Tippis cried aloud, “Faith, this is Arnold!” and stepped back, slipping off his glasses again as if they concealed his face. “Look at me, please,” he said, touching his cheek. “You act like you don’t know me!”
Faith turned her head. Maxwell cocked his. Said: “What is this, anyway?”
“You weren’t this cold before,” Tippis said. His voice had an edge on it. “Maybe you don’t need the money, or me, or anybody like you used to, but will you at least speak to me?”
Maxwell had had enough. He squeezed between them, his back to Faith, and his chin lifted. “She said she doesn’t know you, fellah,” poking his finger in Tippis’s chest.
“But she does!” Tippis laughed, short and uneasy, pulled at his blue collar, and squinted at Maxwell. “Girls don’t forget men that once made a difference in their lives, especially when—”
Then it began, the transformation of Isaac Maxwell. Before Tippis could complete his thought Maxwell slapped him — the sound like a shot, the force of it turning Tippis completely around. Maxwell looked at his stinging palm as though in a trance; he held it up to his face, fascinated, then stepped forward, smiling curiously, his legs stiff, and slapped Tippis again, exploring his sudden hatred, discovering himself through Tippis’s destruction.
“Isaac!” Faith shouted. But she could not move.
And Tippis took it passively, wind rushing out of him like a bellows when Maxwell drove his knee sharply into Tippis’s crotch — testing himself, moving from one insight to another. Faith screamed like a wild bird. She raked at Maxwell’s back, pulling away only pieces of yellow cloth as he showered the other with oaths and punches and pulled at his hair until a patch of bloody scalp came free in his hands. He turned, looked at Faith, and the valve to her bladder sprang open. Anger, children, had opened hallways in him, unlocked secret chests, and allowed him to chart in himself dark labyrinths that only the deep key of anger could disclose. So it was, children. So it often is. His eyes frightened her: wild, irascible, drunk, their vision inverted from the world to dark new dimensions Maxwell saw in himself. And enjoyed. The fight had been exhilarating; he’d heard every click, click, click of his confused life with clocklike deadliness during the fight, and felt — it was so obvious — truly whole for the first time, all the threads of his life converging and crystallizing at his moment of anger. But Tippis — his face was meat and blood. Below them, people looked up, and the musician stopped playing to stare.
Faith shouted again, “Isaac!”
The spell of this new side of himself — Maxwell the Berserker — held him fast. Physically lighter, his head clear and humming with a sudden sense of the efficacy of his Will, he did not hear her. Not even Faith might enter into and break the mood of that moment. She dragged him by his arm back down the stairs, the front of her dress and hosiery and underclothes soaking and clinging to her like skin. Once on the street, she stopped to support herself against a waste can, amazed that the air outside was quiet and still, that people passed them by without a single look, ignorant that her world had fallen into shambles.
She hurried Maxwell to the parking lot, and there he found his voice: “Did you see that sonuvabitch’s face? Did you see what I did to it?”
“I saw,” Faith said wearily.
She stopped to catch her breath beside his Buick, then slid behind the wheel, not trusting Maxwell, who shook and seemed too dazed to control the car. She was thankful he had taught her how to drive by letting her cruise around The Sentry parking lot occasionally. But she didn’t have a license. And she wasn’t about to give that a second thought. Faith took the keys in his outstretched hand, and minutes later they were tooling south down the Eisenhower Expressway.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t the faintest idea who he was, really. Isaac. ” She looked at him shyly. Did he suspect? No, or at least it did not seem that way. His eyes were still narrowed, and he held his head in his hands, still swinging deep inside, still reliving that brief but perfect moment in the theater aisle.
Fog had descended on the city like a curse, a gray-green gloom that stuck to the sides of the car. Fog filled up the spaces between trees and bushes on the boulevard; fog bloated the alleys and lay in great formless clouds that blotted out the sky and street; fog hung above the road like an alien intelligence. Down the street a car emerged with glaring headlights from the gloom, blinding Faith, who gripped the wheel tighter and slowed down until she and Maxwell coasted into a small pocket of clarity much like the clear spaces in a dream.
“Are you all right?”—Faith.
Maxwell was staring at his bloody right knuckles. “Did you see what I did to his eye?”
Faith said, “Yes,” and turned her attention to her own problem. Not only were her stockings wet, but her shoes were now slowly filling up, too. She started to cry.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Maxwell said as he came to himself again. “The evening’s ruined. If there’s anything I can do to make this up to you—”
After parking in front of his apartment, Faith slid across the seat and rested her head on Maxwell’s overly padded shoulder. She slid her hand into his open sports coat, and let it rest, rising, falling. Falling on his chest.
“I’m so glad you were there, Isaac.” That didn’t sound soft enough. She adjusted her tone. “That man, whoever he was — he frightened me.”
“That sonuvabitch!”
Maxwell lifted her chin with his right forefinger. He stared blankly for a long while into her eyes, and Faith was thankful that nothing in them could be seen, inferred, or guessed about her feelings. He opened the driver’s door and helped her out, then guided her along the sidewalk and into his apartment building. Once inside, he left the living-room lights out and, directed only by the small bulb over his kitchen bar, fixed them drinks, calling to her in a quavering voice, “He acted like he knew you! Can you imagine? The lines these characters come up with. The nerve! I wish I’d had a gun—”
Her wet clothes were unbearable. In the darkness of the front room, she slipped off her shoes, stockings, and the rest. They were a ruin. She dropped them behind the sofa and sat down. Maxwell returned to the front room and stopped a few feet in front of her, a glass in each hand, his shoulders trembling as he looked her over. His breathing was louder than the whir of the air conditioner, the humming of the electric clock in the kitchen. Slowly he sat down, handed her a drink, and began pumping his respirator between his lips. “It’s a g-good thing I was around. ”
Now.
“Isaac, I really do need you. That’s clear now.”
“What?” Click, click—whir.
“I simply can’t. make it by myself.” As she said it, her right fist closed, as if squeezing some object, then opened, as if she were releasing dust. “I need someone who can control a situation — like you do.”
“You do? Faith!” He grabbed at his throat, and she thought he was about to faint. “No,” he said in a strangled voice, “it’s not that. I never dreamed. You do care, don’t you?”
Click.
“It’s true,” Faith said. She looked away, out the picture window behind them to the shadowy suggestion of trees beyond, to a squirrel peering at them from one of the lower limbs. She remembered having a squirrel once, and that it was so friendly she could feed it peanuts, bread crumbs, and candy right out of her hand. In the mornings it would follow her into the farmhouse kitchen, then eat with her at the table like an honored guest. By and by it came to think everyone was as kind as Faith, and wandered up to Eula May Jenkins one morning to beg for food. Eula May shot him dead — she was skinning him, pulling the pelt off his bones when Faith walked into Eula May’s kitchen to borrow flour for Lavidia. Thereafter, Faith never befriended squirrels again, nor had she given her affections easily, for fear that her loved ones would be snatched away from her by circumstances or, worse, by death. Somehow her affair with Maxwell was different: he could be replaced easily, as an object you loved could not; he could be Isaac Maxwell, Tom Maxwell, Dick Maxwell, or Harry Maxwell — and she wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn.
She could see Barrett’s features in the window, frowning. Poor old foolosopher, she thought. Then she turned to Maxwell and said, “I’ve never cared about anybody but you.” When he said nothing, she turned to him, her stomach knotting as severely as when she had the curse. Suspended like shimmering icicles on Maxwell’s cheeks were tears. He was sniffling and rubbing his nose. Faith looked away; it was going to be harder than she’d thought.
He said, at length, “I can aw-aw-always be with you!”
Her head swam, and she really felt sick now. Thought, What am I doing to him? Then, What am I doing to me? To avoid looking directly at him she placed her arms around his neck, clasping her hands together between his shoulder blades, and buried her face in his chest.
“Yes,” she whispered, “I do need you, Isaac.”
“Faith, I’m nuh-nuh-NOTHING! I’m nuh-nuh-NOBODY, but I–I swear I’ll work for y-you. I luh-luh-love you!” And he heaved a long sigh.
Good, she thought, very good. And she closed her eyes and clenched her fists. Her ear to his chest, she could hear his heart, a loud, throbbing, roiling thing in his breast: Tha-bump, whir-rrr. and the words were on her lips, had been there since the day she’d met him, and now, as he fought for breath and squeezed her tight enough to cause her pain, she could say automatically, quickly and without a thought:
“Be my good thing. ”
“Y-Yes!” shot from Maxwell’s lips. His arms went slack with exhaustion. “Wuh-Wuh-Will you marry me?”
She opened her eyes, casting her gaze upward through the darkness to the round figure of a faded rosette in the center of the ceiling, then to the picture window where Barrett’s disembodied hazel eyes closed in something like defeat. A shiver of triumph swept over her. The contest of wills. She shut her eyes again, relaxed.
“Yes.”