there doing something difficult but useful in peace. A soothing thought to concentrate on while his own house was prickly with tension and unanswered questions.
He had rattled last night to Jade. And why he had ascribed his exile to the Caribbean to the relationship between Margaret and Michael, he couldn’t imagine. The fact was he’d become a stranger in his own city and chose not to spend his retirement there at exactly sixty-five (or close to) in order to avoid watching it grow away from him. Sidewalks and thoroughfares were populated by people he did not know; shops were run by keepers who did not know him; familiar houses were bought by bright couples who either updated them or returned them to some era that existed only in their minds. They tore out unfashionable shrubbery for decks and patios; they closed in the wide-open porches and enlarged windows that had been tiny, private and sweet. These new people privatized their houses by turning them backward away from the street, but publicized their lives and talked about wine as though it were a theology instead of a drink. The unending problem of growing old was not how he changed, but how things did. A condition bearable only so long as there were others like him to share that knowledge. But his wife, twenty- two years younger and from another place, did not remember, and his friends were dead and dying. In his heart he was still the thirty-nine-year-old Temple alumnus working in the candy factory about to assume from his uncles control of the company, and who had married a high school beauty queen he was determined to love in order to prove he was capable of it to his first wife—that unlovable shrew who was unlovable to this very day. She had died a year before his retirement in South Carolina, where she had gone to live with her sister. When he heard about it, she was already in the ground. He began to miss her at precisely that point—terribly—and when he settled in the Caribbean she must have missed him too for she started visiting him in the greenhouse with the regularity of a passionate mistress. Funny. He couldn’t remember her eyes, but when she came, flitting around his chair and gliding over his seed flats, he recognized her at once. In nine years of marriage she had had two abortions and all she wanted to talk about during these visits was how relieved she was that she’d had at least that foresight. He wished she felt something else. You’d think in death, in the Beyond, she would have felt something else. Or nothing at all.
He was not alarmed by her visits; he knew he conjured them up himself, just as he conjured up old friends and childhood playmates who were clearer to him now than the last thirty years were, and nicer. But he was astonished to see—unconjured—his only living son in the dining room last night. Probably the consequence of describing the sink business to Jade. Michael seemed to be smiling at him last night but not the smile of derision he usually had in the flesh; this was a smile of reconciliation. And Valerian believed that was part of the reason he invited the black man to have a seat, the forepresence of Michael in the dining room. His face smiling at him from the bowl of peaches was both the winsome two-year-old under the sink and the thirty-year-old Socialist. The face in the peaches compelled him to dismiss Margaret’s screaming entrance as the tantrum of a spoiled child, the deliberate creation of a scene, which both father and son understood as feminine dementia. Michael had been on his heart if not in his mind since Margaret had announced the certainty of his visit. He could not say to her that he hoped far more than she did that Michael would come. That maybe this time there would be that feeling of rescue between them as it had been when he had taken him from underneath the sink. Thus when the black man appeared, Valerian was already in complicity with an overripe peach, and took on its implicit dare. And he invited the intruder to have a drink. The Michael of the reservation and the Michael of the sink was both surprised and pleased.
It was easy not to believe in Margaret’s hysteria; he had seen examples of it many times before and thought she was up to her old combo of masochism plus narcissism that he believed common to exceptionally beautiful women. But when, in a flash too speedy for reflex, he saw his entire household standing there, and in each of their faces disgust and horror, and all together triumphant, and all together anticipating his command, already acting on it in fact, just waiting for the signal from him to call the harbor police and thereby make him acknowledge his mistake in not taking Margaret seriously, having to admit that he was not capable of judgment in a crisis, that he was wrong, that she was right, that his house had been violated and he neither knew it or believed it when it was discovered and it had been Sydney who had the foresight to have a gun and the legs to ferret out the intruder, when he saw Margaret’s triumphant face, Jade’s frightened one, and Sydney and Ondine looking at the prisoner with faces as black as his but smug, their manner struck him as what Michael meant when he said “bourgeois” in that tone that Valerian always thought meant unexciting, but now he thought meant false, but last night he thought meant Uncle Tom-ish. He had defended his servants vigorously to Michael then, with aphorisms about loyalty and decency and with shouts that the press was ruining with typical carelessness the concept of honor for a people who had a hard enough time achieving any. What he had said to Jade, he believed: that Michael was a purveyor of exotics, a typical anthropologist, a cultural orphan who sought other cultures he could love without risk or pain. Valerian hated them, not from any hatred of the minority or alien culture, but because of what he saw to be the falseness and fraudulence of the anthropological position. The Indian problem, he told Michael, was between Indians, their conscience and their own derring-do. And all of his loving treks from ghetto to reservation to barrio to migrant farm were searches for people in whose company the Michaels could enjoy the sorrow they were embarrassed to feel for themselves. And yet, in the space of that flash he felt not only as Michael must have when he urged Jade to do something for her people (no matter how silly his instruction), but something more. Disappointment nudging contempt for the outrage Jade and Sydney and Ondine exhibited in defending property and personnel that did not belong to them from a black man who was one of their own. As the evening progressed, Valerian thoroughly enjoyed the disarray that his invitation had thrown them into. Margaret ran from the room—foiled. Jade was at least sophisticated about it, but Sydney and Ondine were wrecked while the intruder himself didn’t even look “caught.” He walked in with his hands raised and clasped behind his head and looked neither right nor left—not at Jade or Ondine or Margaret, but straight at Valerian and in his eyes was neither a question nor a plea. And no threat whatsoever. Valerian was not afraid then and he was not afraid at noon the next day, when Sydney tapped quietly on his door and brought his mail and his baked potato. Valerian could sense the small waiting in Sydney, some expectation or hope that his employer would give him a hint of what had been in his head last night. Valerian felt a twinge of compassion for him, but since he could not tell him about faces that looked up out of peaches, he said nothing at all.
Actually he had no plans. He was curious about the man, but not all that much. He assumed he was what he’d said he was: a crewman jumping ship, and his roaming about the house and grounds, hiding in Margaret’s closet, was more outrageous than threatening. He had looked into the man’s eyes and had no fear.
Digesting his potato and sipping wine, he was rewarded for his serenity by an expansive “Howdy” followed by the entrance of the stranger wrapped in a woman’s kimono, barefoot with gleaming wrought-iron hair.
Valerian let his eyes travel cautiously down from the hair to the robe to the naked feet. The man smiled broadly. He looked down at himself, back at Valerian and said, “But I don’t do no windows.”
Valerian laughed, shortly.
“Good morning, Mr. Sheek,” said the man.
“Street. Valerian Street,” said Valerian. “What did you say your name was?”
“Green. William Green.”
“Well, good morning, Willie. Sleep well?”
“Yes, sir. Best sleep I ever had. Your name really Valerian?”
“Yes.” Valerian shrugged helplessly and smiled.
“I used to eat a candy called Valerians.”
