RL's Dream

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.

Jelly Roll Morton hissed out a quick melody from the record player. In the bright whiteness of the wall Mavis caught the flash of Soupspoon’s smile as he looked up sideways from his guitar on-stage. When he was playing was the only time that he was ever happy. And she was only happy in the presence of memories and bright white light.

The intercom cried again.

“I heard ya, Rudy! Go on home now! Call me tomorrah, in the daytime. I’ll put in the phone at three.”

Mavis took her finger from the intercom and went back to the sofa. She wrapped herself in a thin white sheet and reclined, thinking about Egyptian queens laying up in their coffins, wrapped in fine white silks — their hands over their breasts.

She didn’t think about Soupspoon; about him dying out there in all that smelly darkness. But he was out there. She thought about orange peel, about squeezing the skin of the fruit close to her nose, about the bitter sting. She thought about the crisp odor of new leather shoes and, with that, the stale grainy smell of her first lover’s penis.

She thought about flowers.

Mavis folded her feet up under her body and covered her head with the sheet. She closed her eyes and imagined the whiteness of the room. The last Jelly Roll record fell from the stalk-stack. Before the song was over Mavis was far away watching a boychild play with his new spinning top. He wanted to know how flies landed upside down. When she reached out to stroke his head he looked at her with big vacant eyes. The boy was her young son but he was more than that. He was every little boy who had to grow into rough, and finally broken, men. He was happy because he was ignorant.

She started to say something but the boy laughed and ran away.

“Catch me,” he cried.

He ran, impossibly fast, across a field of wildflowers. The sun began to fade. And when he was out of sight, night descended and Mavis was asleep.