“Really? What have you got to show for it?”
“Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.”
“Lonely, ain’t it?”
“Yes. But my lonely is
Nel sat back on the little wooden chair. Anger skipped but she realized that Sula was probably just showing off. No telling what shape she was really in, but there was no point in saying anything other than what was the truth. “I always understood how you could take a man. Now I understand why you can’t keep none.”
“Is that what I’m supposed to do? Spend my life keeping a man?”
“They worth keeping, Sula.”
“They ain’t worth more than me. And besides, I never loved no man because he was worth it. Worth didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
“What did?”
“My mind did. That’s all.”
“Well I guess that’s it. You own the world and the rest of us is renting. You ride the pony and we shovel the shit. I didn’t come up here for this kind of talk, Sula…”
“No?”
“No. I come to see about you. But now that you opened it up, I may as well close it.” Nel’s fingers closed around the brass rail of the bed. Now she would ask her. “How come you did it, Sula?”
There was a silence but Nel felt no obligation to fill it.
Sula stirred a little under the covers. She looked bored as she sucked her teeth. “Well, there was this space in front of me, behind me, in my head. Some space. And Jude filled it up. That’s all. He just filled up the space.”
“You mean you didn’t even love him?” The feel of the brass was in Nel’s mouth. “It wasn’t even loving him?”
Sula looked toward the boarded-up window again. Her eyes fluttered as if she were about to fall off into sleep.
“But…” Nel held her stomach in. “But what about me? What about me? Why didn’t you think about me? Didn’t I count? I never hurt you. What did you take him for if you didn’t love him and why didn’t you think about me?” And then, “I was good to you, Sula, why don’t that matter?”
Sula turned her head away from the boarded window. Her voice was quiet and the stemmed rose over her eye was very dark. “It matters, Nel, but only to you. Not to anybody else. Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don’t get nothing for it.”
Nel took her hands from the brass railing. She was annoyed with herself. Finally when she had gotten the nerve to ask the question, the right question, it made no difference. Sula couldn’t give her a sensible answer because she didn’t know. Would be, in fact, the last to know. Talking to her about right and wrong was like talking to the deweys. She picked at the fringe on Sula’s bedspread and said softly, “We were friends.”
“Oh, yes. Good friends,” Sula said.
“And you didn’t love me enough to leave him alone. To let him love me. You had to take him away.”
“What you mean take him away? I didn’t kill him, I just fucked him. If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it?”
“You laying there in that bed without a dime or a friend to your name having done all the dirt you did in this town and you still expect folks to love you?”
Sula raised herself up on her elbows. Her face glistened with the dew of fever. She opened her mouth as though to say something, then fell back on the pillows and sighed. “Oh, they’ll love me all right. It will take time, but they’ll love me.” The sound of her voice was as soft and distant as the look in her eyes. “After all the old women have lain with the teen-agers; when all the young girls have slept with their old drunken uncles; after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when all the white women kiss all the black ones; when the guards have raped all the jailbirds and after all the whores make love to their grannies; after all the faggots get their mothers’ trim; when Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith and Norma Shearer makes it with Stepin Fetchit; after all the dogs have fucked all the cats and every weathervane on every barn flies off the roof to mount the hogs…then there’ll be a little love left over for me. And I know just what it will feel like.”
She closed her eyes then and thought of the wind pressing her dress between her legs as she ran up the bank of the river to four leaf-locked trees and the digging of holes in the earth.
Embarrassed, irritable and a little bit ashamed, Nel rose to go. “Goodbye, Sula. I don’t reckon I’ll be back.”
She opened the door and heard Sula’s low whisper. “Hey, girl.” Nel paused and turned her head but not enough to see her.
“How you know?” Sula asked.
“Know what?” Nel still wouldn’t look at her.
“About who was good. How you know it was you?”
“What you mean?”
“I mean maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe it was me.”
Nel took two steps out the door and closed it behind her. She walked down the hall and down the four flights of steps. The house billowed around her light then dark, full of presences without sounds. The deweys, Tar Baby, the newly married couples, Mr. Buckland Reed, Patsy, Valentine, and the beautiful Hannah Peace. Where were they? Eva out at the old folks’ home, the deweys living anywhere, Tar Baby steeped in wine, and Sula upstairs in Eva’s
