Tar Baby

She didn’t move, so he put his arms around her to shield her from the eyes of the second-story people and bank her fire. The girl bucked, but he wouldn’t let her go. “You’re going to freeze to death,” he said. “Let me buy you a drink.” She tipped her forehead onto his chest then, and began to cry.

“Come on,” he said. “There’s a place down the block.” Arm around her shoulder, he led the way to a Chinese restaurant and ordered her gin. She drank and began to tell him about the man, but Son shook his head. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t think about it. You got a place to stay?”

She said, “Not tonight, I don’t,” so he left the job hauling boxes and took her home.

All three, Nommo, Jadine and Son, went to a delicatessen where, after much discussion, they bought potato chips, A & W root beer, and three Payday candy bars with Son’s last ten-dollar bill. They ate it all in the snow. Cold and giggling they trudged back to the apartment where Son and Jadine slept like puppies and Nommo made off with the change.

Yet he insisted on Eloe. She agreed but before they could make plans, she stubbed her big toe on a metal plate bolted to the middle of Sixth Avenue. By the time she got home, her toe was the size of a plum and very painful. Son made a splint for it out of emery boards and the ribbon from a Valentine candy box. All night he woke at half- hour intervals to bathe her toe in an Epsom salt solution. In the morning, the swelling had decreased and he left for work while she slept. When she woke and hobbled to the bathroom she saw that he had drawn a happily obscene picture under the toilet lid. At his coffee break he called.

“How’s your toe?”

“Lonely.”

“Mine too.”

“Come home for lunch.”

“I only have thirty minutes for lunch, baby.”

“Come anyway.”

“I won’t be able to get back in time. I’ll lose a half-day’s pay.”

“I’ll make it worth your while.”

He came home and didn’t report to work again until she could walk effortlessly. In the meantime they ate Chinese food in the tub. She read True Confessions stories to him with appropriate “white girl” voices and gestures and he laughed until his chest hurt. She read Cesaire to him and he closed his eyes. She read the sexy parts of the Bible and he looked at her.

Gradually she came to feel unorphaned. He cherished and safeguarded her. When she woke in the night from an uneasy dream she had only to turn and there was the stability of his shoulder and his limitless, eternal chest. No part of her was hidden from him. She wondered if she should hold back, keep something in store from him, but he opened the hair on her head with his fingers and drove his tongue through the part. There was nothing to forgive, nothing to win and the future was five minutes away. He unorphaned her completely. Gave her a brand-new childhood. They were the last lovers in New York City—the first in the world—so their passion was inefficient and kept no savings account. They spent it like Texans. When he had a sore throat so bad he could not speak, she put him to bed and drew a checker board on the inside of a Bergdorf box. They played the game with M&M’s. It didn’t work because the crowns wouldn’t stay still, so they used her Enovids instead, partly because of their plane surface and partly to keep her from eating the pieces jumped by her kings. She told him straight brandy was good for his throat and made him drink so much so fast, he passed out. She didn’t like his being unconscious without her so she drank the rest and passed out with him. He woke first and vomited the strep away. After bathing and dressing, he watched her sleep. She woke unable to see, speak or move and he put his huge hand on her forehead until she could. They didn’t go to parties anymore—other people interfered with their view of each other. They stopped going to Suggs and Across 110th Street. They stopped laughing and began to smile at each other. From across the room, across the mattress, across the table. Their language diminished to code at times, and at others ballooned to monologues delivered while cradled in the other’s arms. They never looked at the sky or got up early to see a sunrise. They played no music and hadn’t the foggiest notion that spring was on its way. Vaguely aware of such things when they were apart, together they could not concentrate on the given world. They reinvented it, remembered it through the other. He looked at her face in the mirror and was reminded of days at sea when water looked like sky. She surveyed his body and thought of oranges, playing jacks, and casks of green wine. He was still life, babies, cut glass, indigo, hand spears, dew, cadmium yellow, Hansa red, moss green and the recollection of a tree that wanted to dance with her. It was difficult to be sober, to take anything other than themselves seriously, but they managed occasionally. She thought about calling her old professor who said he could always find work for her. But maybe May would be a better time to ring him—after exams. They discussed opening a retail flower shop and boutique that they could call Jade and Son; they discussed bank robbery and an agency for black models; they discussed the New School and Empire State and figured out a way to collect Gideon’s unemployment checks.

But Jadine was not worried. She had $1,940 in the bank, $5,000 in Paris and connections. If push came to shove, she’d go permanent with an agency and work her behind off.

The check scheme worked, but he had time to pick up just one check before they left hand-in-hand for Eloe.

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.