Tar Baby

8

THE AIR was so charged with pain the angel trumpets could not breathe it. Rows of them wrinkled on the vine and fell unnoticed right in Valerian’s sightline. He sat in the greenhouse oblivious to everything but 1950 when he heard for the first time his son’s song.

All the years since, he thought she drank, was a not-so-secret alcoholic: the sleeping masks, the clumsiness, the beauty spa vacations, the withdrawals, the hard-to-wake mornings, the night crying, the irritability, the sloppy candy-kisses mother love. He thought she drank—heavily, in private, and that was why she took only wine and sherry in his presence. Nondrinkers take real drinks; only secret drinkers insist on Chablis at every occasion—or so he thought. And he wished it were true. He was devastated knowing that she had never been drunk, had never been “out of her mind,” never in a stupor, never hung-over, never manic from being dry too long. Drunkenness he could take, had taken, in fact, since he’d always believed it. Anything was better than knowing that a pretty (and pretty nice) sober young woman had loved the bloodying of her own baby. Had loved it dearly. Had once locked herself in the bathroom, a pair of cuticle scissors in her hand, to keep from succumbing to that love. Nothing serious, though. No throwing across the room, or out of the window. No scalding, no fist work. Just a delicious pin-stab in sweet creamy flesh. That was her word, “delicious.” “I knew it was wrong, knew it was bad. But something about it was delicious too.” She was telling him, saying it aloud at the dinner table after everyone had gone. His knees were trembling and he’d had to sit down again. The Negroes had all gone out of the room, disappeared like bushes, trees, out of his line of vision, and left the two of them in the light of the chandelier. She was standing there next to him, her cheek white again after the blow Ondine had given her, her hair rumpled but lovely. She was serene standing there saying it, and he agreed with that, thought it could be, must be, true—that it was delicious, for at that moment it would have been delicious to him too if he could have picked up the carving knife lying on the platter next to the carcass of the goose and slashed into her lovely Valentine face. Delicious. Conclusive and delicious. But he could not concentrate. His knees were trembling, his fingers shuddering on the tablecloth. He didn’t want to see them shaking there, but he did not want to see her face either. He thought about that—how or whether to stop looking at her and look instead at his hands. He couldn’t make up his mind and he couldn’t shift his gaze. But he thought about it while she was saying it. “It’s funny, but I would see the mark and hear him cry but somehow I didn’t believe it hurt all that much.” “Mark” she called it. She saw the mark. Didn’t think it hurt “all that much.” Like a laboratory assistant removing the spleen of a cute but comatose mouse.

Suddenly he knew exactly what to do: go to him. Go to Michael. Find him, touch him, rub him, hold him in his arms. Now. He tried to stand but the spastic legs defied him.

“I cannot hear anymore,” he said. “I can’t.”

She stopped then and looked at him with complete understanding and complete patience. Still he could not stand. She understood that too, and without another word walked slowly out of the room, “Later,” her footsteps seemed to say, “when you are stronger, I will say it to you. Share it with you. Make it yours as well as mine.”

Valerian did not move. I will never be that strong, he thought. I will never be strong enough to hear it. I have to die now or go to him. When I move from this table I will do one or the other, nothing in between. I will never be able to hear it.

It was two in the morning when Sydney returned dressed in robe, slippers and pajama bottoms. Valerian was sitting in the chandelier light—legs and fingers finally at rest.

“You should go on up to bed, Mr. Street.”

Valerian gave a small shake of his head. If he went up he might never come down again and if he stood up it would only be to die or go to Michael.

“Get some rest; figure things out in the morning,” Sydney said.

Valerian nodded.

The table was precisely as it was when Sydney guided the sobbing Ondine away. No one had moved a thing while he helped Ondine undress, made her lie down and rubbed her feet until she slept. But he could not sleep at all. The sea spread around him and his wife. They were afloat in it and if removed from the island there was nowhere to land. They had no house, no place of their own. Some certificates worth a bit, but no savings. Just the promises of being taken care of in the will of a man whose wife his own wife had slapped. Sydney started to clear the table and stack things on the sideboard. The suspense was too great, so he asked him outright.

“Mr. Street.”

Valerian showed him his evening eyes, but did not speak.

“You going to let us go?”

Valerian stared at Sydney trying to focus on, then comprehend, the question.

“What?”

“Me and Ondine. You going to let us go?”

Valerian rested his forehead in his hand. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything,” he said, and Sydney had to be content for now with that answer spoken faintly, remotely, for Valerian, holding on to his head, fell back into the waxen horror Sydney had tried to penetrate. He was still there at six the next morning. His eyes closed at last, his mind slowed to an occasional thud. He woke because nature required him to. Not to die or board an airplane headed for his son, but to go to the bathroom. So he did move from the table and he climbed the stairs on frail new legs. Once attending to that call, it was not unthinkable to attend to another—to rinse his face, clean his teeth, brush back his hair with his hands. He took off his shoes and sat on the bed holding them. The picture of the beautiful boy in the laundry under the sink, singing because he could not speak or cry—because he had no vocabulary for what was happening to him, who sang la la la, la la la instead—that picture had stayed with Valerian all night, through fitful sleep, and was there between his stockinged feet in the morning.

I have to cry about this, Valerian thought. I have got to shed tears about this. But not water, please God, may they be blood. I have to cry blood tears for his wounds. But I will need several lives, life after life after life after life, one for each wound, one for every trickle of blood, for every burn. I will need a lifetime of blood tears for each one of them. And then more. Lives upon lives upon lives for the the the the the. Hurt. The deep-down eternal little boy hurt. The not knowing when, the never knowing why, and never being able to shape the tongue to speak, let alone the mind to cogitate how the one person in the world upon whom he was totally, completely dependent—the one person he could not even choose not to love—could do that to him. Believing at last as a little boy would that he deserved it, must deserve it, otherwise it would not be happening to him. That no world in the world would be imagined, thought up, or even accidentally formed not to say say say say created that would permit such a thing to happen. And he is right. No world in the world would allow it. So this is not the world at all. It must be something else. I have lived in it and I will die out of it but it is not the world. This is not life. This is some other thing.

It comforted him a bit, knowing that whatever this was it was not life. He achieved a kind of blank, whited-out, no-feeling-at-all that he hoped would sustain him until the blood tears came. Until his heart, revivified, pumped its way along for a single purpose: to spill out of his eyes throughout the millennia he would have to live. Until then, then.

Margaret awoke very early that morning, having had the dream she ought to have had: it was unspeakable. She rose at once; the wonderful relief of public humiliation, the solid security of the pillory, were upon her. Like the much-sought-after, finally captured, strangler, she wore that look of harmony that in newspaper photos comes across as arrogance, or impenitence at the least. The harmony that comes from the relieved discovery that the jig is up. The parts settle back into their proper places, and the strangler sighs, “Thank God I didn’t get away scot-free.” She had no idea of what would be next, but that was not a problem to which she had to provide a solution. That was the future, her job at hand was to reveal the past. Right now she had to wash her hair, hard. Soap it with mountains of lather, and rinse it over and over again. Then she sat in the sun against every instruction ever given her about the care of her hair, and let it dry.

L’Arbe de la Croix became a house of shadows. Couples locked into each other or away from each other, the murmurings of whose hearts rivaled the dreaming daisy trees. Jadine and Son off together plotting. Sydney and Ondine walking on glass shards, afraid, angry, sullen. Snapping at one another one minute, soothing each other the next. Valerian stayed mostly in his room; the greenhouse remained untended, the mail unread. Silence pressed down on the dahlias and cyclamen—for there was no diet of music anymore. Sydney brought pieces of dinner to the table but no one was there. Jadine and Son foraged in the refrigerator—accomplices. Margaret appeared for breakfast coffee only. Sydney took trays of halfheartedly prepared sandwiches to Valerian’s room and brought them back untouched.

Margaret told her husband in pieces. Little by little, she spooned it out to him a sip here a drop there. A fleeting sentence in midair as they passed on the stairs: “It was not as often as you think and there were long, long periods of happiness between us in between.” But he had stepped inside his bedroom door. Another time she said, “Don’t try to persuade yourself that I didn’t love him. He was more important to me than my life. Than my life.” She had to repeat the phrase for his back was receding fast. He never directed those gloaming eyes her way. She told him in bite-sized pieces, small enough for him to swallow quickly because she did not have the vocabulary to describe what she had come to know, remember. So there was no way or reason to describe those long quiet days when the sun was drained and nobody ever on the street. There were magazines, of course, to look forward to, but neither Life nor Time could fill a morning. It started on a day like that. Just once she did it, a slip, and then once more, and it became the thing to look forward to, to resist, to succumb to, to plan, to be horrified by, to forget, because out of the doing of it came the reason. And she was outraged by that infant needfulness. There were times when she absolutely had to limit its being there; stop its implicit and explicit demand for her best and constant self. She could not describe her loathing of its prodigious appetite for security—the criminal arrogance of an infant’s conviction that while he slept, someone is there; that when he wakes, someone is there; that when he is hungry, food will somehow magically be provided. So she told him that part that was palatable: that she could not control herself—which was true, for when she felt hostage to that massive insolence, that stupid trust, she could not help piercing it.

Finally, Margaret entered his room one night and locked the door behind her.

“I’ve just spoken to Michael,” she said.

Valerian could not believe it. She could call him? Speak to him? Say his name? Did she think it was business as usual?

“He said he sent two cables telling us he couldn’t make it. Two. Neither one was telephoned to us. I asked him to call B. J. Bridges. Obviously we don’t need any guests at New Year’s.”

Valerian was speechless. She was going to go on about it, chatting about things just as if nothing had happened. The blood had not dropped out of his eyes yet, so this still was not life. He could get through it because it was some other thing he was living.

“How dare you call him?” he asked hoarsely. “How do you dare?”

“He isn’t damaged, Valerian. He isn’t.”

Valerian said nothing; he only stared at her. She was even lovelier now that her hair had no spray in it, that it was not tortured into Art Deco, now that it hung according to its own will and the shape of her head. And she wore no make-up. Little charming eyebrows instead of styled ones, and the thin top lip was much nicer than the full one she ritually painted.

“How can you know that? How can you know what is damage and what is not? If you don’t know the difference between between between between.” He stopped, he could not say it. “How do you know the difference between what is damaged and what is healed?”

“I know; I see him; I visit him. Believe me, he’s fine. Finer than most.”

They were both silent for a few moments and then Margaret said, “You want to ask me why. Don’t. I can’t answer that. I can tell you that I was more successful in keeping myself from doing it than not. When it did happen, it was out of my control. I thought at first it was because he was crying or wouldn’t sleep. But then sometimes it was in order to make him cry, or to wake him from sleep.”

“I can’t hear this, Margaret.”

“You can. I have done it, lived with it. You can hear it.”

She seemed strong to him. He was wasting away, filed to nothing by grief, and she was strong, stronger. Talking about it as though it were a case history, an operation, some surgery that had been performed on her that she had survived and she was describing it to him.

“You are disgusting. You are are are are monstrous. You did it because you are monstrous.”

“I did it because I could, Valerian, and I stopped doing it or wanting to do it when I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t?”

“Yes, couldn’t. When he was too big, when he could do it back, when he could…tell.”

“Leave me.”

“He’s fine, I’m telling you. He’s all right.”

“Please leave me.”

She understood, understood completely, and without another word she unlocked the door and left.

Another time she waited for him at the breakfast table and said, “You are angry because he didn’t tell you.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?” Valerian had not thought of that yet; he had been living with just the picture of the boy under the sink and had only been hearing the la la la, la la la, but now he realized that was part of his anger. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

“He was probably too ashamed.”

“Oh, God.”

“I think he is still ashamed.”

Valerian’s hands were shuddering again. “Why does he love you?” he asked her over his shuddering fingers. “Why does he love you?”

“Because I love him.”

Valerian shook his head and asked her a third time, “Why does he love you?”

“He knows I love him,” she said, “that I couldn’t help it.”

Valerian shouted then, at the top of his throat, “Why does he love you?”

Margaret closed her blue-if-it’s-a-boy blue eyes. “I don’t know.”

Now the tears came. Not all at once. Not in the rush of blood he anticipated, longed for; rather a twilight glimmer, a little mercury in the eyes that grew brighter and brighter. That was the beginning and he knew there would be more of them. For now he would settle for this bright burning.

Margaret opened her eyes and looked into his. “Hit me,” she said softly. “Hit me, Valerian.”

His shuddering fingers went wild at the thought of touching her, making physical contact with that skin. His whole body recoiled. “No,” he said. “No.”

“Please. Please.”

“No”

“You have to. Please, you have to.”

Now he could see the lines, the ones the make-up had shielded brilliantly. A thread here and there and the roots of her hair were markedly different from the rest. She looked real. Not like a piece of Valerian candy, but like a person on a bus, already formed, fleshed, thick with a life which is not yours and not accessible to you.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

Every day she asked him, every day he answered, “Tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow.” But he never did and she was hard-pressed to think of a way to ease their mutual sorrow.

ON THE FIRST DAY of the year, Margaret pushed open the kitchen door. Ondine was there as she always was; the braids Margaret had snatched were folded quietly now across her head. Margaret, having had the dream she ought to, felt clean, weightless as she walked through the doors and stood at the oak table. Ondine was napping, her head resting on the back of a chair, her feet resting on another. When she heard the grunt of the door hinges, she woke at once and stood up, alert.

“No, no. Sit back down, Ondine.”

Ondine shoved her feet into her moccasins and continued to stand. “Can I get you something?” she asked out of habit and out of a need to do what was wanted of her and get the woman out of the kitchen.

“No. No, thank you.” Margaret sat down and did not seem disturbed by the painful silence Ondine was keeping after the refusal. She looked past the black woman’s silhouette to a place in the shutters where the sky showed through.

“I knew you knew,” she said. “I always knew you knew.”

Ondine sat down without answering.

“You loved my son, didn’t you?” It was more a statement than a question.

“I love anything small that needs it,” said Ondine.

“I suppose I should thank you for not saying anything, but I have to tell you that it would have been better, Ondine, if you had. It’s terrible living in the same house with your own witness. But I think I understand it. You wanted me to hate you, didn’t you? That’s why you never said anything all those years. You wanted me to hate you.”

“No, I didn’t. You…you wasn’t a whole lot on my mind.”

“Oh, yes I was, and you felt good hating me, didn’t you? I could be the mean white lady and you could be the good colored one. Did that make it easier for you?”

Ondine did not answer.

“Anyway, I came in here to tell you that I’m sorry.”

Ondine sighed. “Me too.”

“We could have been friends, Ondine. Like at first when I used to come in your kitchen and eat your food and we laughed all the time. Didn’t we, Ondine? Didn’t we use to laugh and laugh. Didn’t we? I have it right, don’t I?”

“You got it right.”

“But you wanted to hate me, so you didn’t tell.”

“There was nobody to tell. It was woman stuff. I couldn’t tell your husband and I couldn’t tell mine.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I mean why didn’t you scream at me, stop me, something. You knew and you never said a word.”

“I guess I thought you would let us go. If I told Sydney he might tell Mr. Street and then we’d be out of a job—a good job. I don’t know now what I thought, to tell the truth. But once I started keeping it—then it was like my secret too. Sometimes I thought if you all let me go there won’t be anyone around to take the edge off it. I didn’t want to leave him there, all by himself.”

“You should have stopped me.”

“You should have stopped yourself.”

“I did. I did stop myself after a while, but you could have stopped me right away, Ondine.”

Ondine put the heels of her hands on her eyelids. When she removed them, her eyes were red. She blew out a breath and she was old. “Is that my job too? To stop you?”

“No. It’s not your job, Ondine. But I wish it had been your duty. I wish you had liked me enough to help me. I was only nineteen. You were—what—thirty? Thirty-five?”

Ondine tilted her head and looked at her employer sideways. She raised her eyebrows slowly and then squinted. It was as though she saw Margaret for the first time. She shook her head back and forth back and forth in wonder. “No,” she said. “I wasn’t thirty-five. I was twenty-three. A girl. Just like you.”

Margaret put her forehead into her palm. The roots of her sunset hair were brown. She held her head that way for a moment and said, “You have to forgive me for that, Ondine. You have to.”

“You forgive you. Don’t ask for more.”

“You know what, Ondine? You know what? I want to be a wonderful, wonderful old lady.” Margaret laughed a rusty little bark that came from a place seldom used. “Ondine? Let’s be wonderful old ladies. You and me.”

“Huh,” said Ondine, but she smiled a little.

“We’re both childless now, Ondine. And we’re both stuck here. We should be friends. It’s not too late.”

Ondine looked out of the window and did not answer.

“Is it too late, Ondine?”

“Almost,” she said. “Almost.”

AT SOME POINT in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens—that letting go—you let go because you can. The world will always be there—while you sleep it will be there—when you wake it will be there as well. So you can sleep and there is reason to wake. A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that. So the windows of the greenhouse can be opened and the weather let in. The latch on the door can be left unhooked, the muslin removed, for the soldier ants are beautiful too and whatever they do will be part of it.

Valerian began going back to his greenhouse. Not as early as before; now he waited until after the breakfast rain. He was still telling Margaret, “Tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow.” But he did not change anything in there. Didn’t sow or clip or transpose. Things grew or died where and how they pleased. Isle des Chevaliers filled in the spaces that had been the island’s to begin with.

He thought about innocence there in his greenhouse and knew that he was guilty of it because he had lived with a woman who had made something kneel down in him the first time he saw her, but about whom he knew nothing; had watched his son grow and talk but also about whom he had known nothing. And there was something so foul in that, something in the crime of innocence so revolting it paralyzed him. He had not known because he had not taken the trouble to know. He was satisfied with what he did know. Knowing more was inconvenient and frightening. Like a bucket of water with no bottom. If you know how to tread, bottomlessness need not concern you. Margaret knew the bottomlessness—she had looked at it, dived in it and pulled herself out—obviously tougher than he. What an awful thing she had done. And how much more awful not to have known it. Which was all he could say in his defense: that he did not know; that the postman passed him by. Perhaps that was why he had never received the message he’d been waiting for: his innocence made him unworthy of it. The instinct of kings was always to slay the messenger, and they were right. A real messenger, a worthy one, is corrupted by the message he brings. And if he is noble he should accept that corruption. Valerian had received no message, but after waiting so long, to receive, know and deliver its contents, imperceptibly he had made it up. Made up the information he was waiting for. Preoccupied himself with the construction of the world and its inhabitants according to this imagined message. But had chosen not to know the real message that his son had mailed to him from underneath the sink. And all he could say was that he did not know. He was guilty, therefore, of innocence. Was there anything so loathsome as a willfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore unworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.