“If she’s there. If she’s not, I need an address.”
“Christ,” said Gideon, and snapped his cloth in disgust. “I knew it. The yalla. What did I tell you? Huh?”
“I have to find her.” Son’s voice was flat, stale.
Therese sitting by the record player was rocking her head as though she were at a wake. When Son said “I have to find her” in that emotionless voice, she began to accompany the rocking with soft grunts, “Unh, unh, unh, unh.”
“Stop that!” said Gideon. “Fix some food, for Christ’s sake!”
Therese stood up slowly, caressing her airplane food and, after placing it on top of the dead record player, put a pot of water on to boil. She busied herself picking stones out of the rice while Gideon told Son that the yalla was gone.
“She was here? How do you know?” asked Son.
“What black girl can take a plane here I don’t know about? Besides Alma Estee saw her go. She cleans up at the airport. She saw her and spoke to her in the toilet there. Therese, go call Alma Estee.”
“I don’t know where she is.” Therese was reluctant to leave.
“At her mama’s. Go on now.” Then he said to Son, “A week ago, maybe less, Alma saw her leave.
Son looked at Therese as if to question why she tarried. She saw his impatience and, leaving her rice half- picked, left the house. Son was deeply depressed at that news. He had waited in New York too long before coming here. But he had been convinced that she was not really gone as in “never coming back.” He thought before long she’d come banging in as she had done before. So he couldn’t leave the apartment except for short spells. She’d call and he would not be there. She’d ring the bell and he would not be there. It took a week of silent pacing—of sleeplessness for him—to decide to go looking, and from what Gideon said it was a week ago that she was here; she must have left almost immediately.
Gideon opened his paper bag and took out a bottle of beer. He sat down next to Son and offered it to him.
“You can get used to it,” he said. “After all those years in the States I thought that was the only way, cold. Ice-cold. I still prefer it that way. But now I can drink it warm again. Like before.”
Son looked at it. The very notion of warm beer in his empty stomach sickened him. He refused.
“You sick, man. Not just your head either. Why can’t you let her go?”
“Let her go?” asked Son, and he smiled a crooked smile. Let go the woman you had been looking for everywhere just because she was difficult? Because she had a temper, energy, ideas of her own and fought back? Let go a woman whose eyebrows were a study, whose face was enough to engage your attention all your life? Let go a woman who was not only a woman but a sound, all the music he had ever wanted to play, a world and a way of being in it? Let
Gideon swallowed his beer and they were both quiet until Therese returned and the girl stepped in the door. Son grew dizzy as soon as he saw her. He looked at the red-brown wig on her head and the blood ran away from his own. It was all mixed up. He had it straight before: the pie ladies and the six-string banjo and then he was seduced, corrupted by cloisonne and raw silk the color of honey and he was willing to change, to love the cloisonne, to abandon the pie ladies and the nickel nickelodeon and Eloe itself and Frisco too because she had given him back his original dime, the pretty one, the shiny one, the romantic ten-cent piece, and made him see it the way it was, the way it really was, not just a dazzling coin, but a piece of currency with a history rooted in gold and cloisonne and humiliation and death, so what was he doing loving Frisco and his dime when it had no value and didn’t belong to Frisco anyway? And what was he doing thinking that Drake and Soldier and Ernie Paul were more precious than Catherine the Great’s earrings or that the pie ladies were in danger unless he alone protected them and kept them alive. So he had changed, given up fraternity, or believed he had, until he saw Alma Estee in a wig the color of dried blood. Her sweet face, her midnight skin mocked and destroyed by the pile of synthetic dried blood on her head. It was all mixed up. But he could have sorted it out if she had just stood there like a bougainvillea in a girdle, like a baby jaguar with lipstick on, like an avocado with earrings, and let him remove it.
“Oh, baby baby baby baby,” he said, and went to her to take off the wig, to lift it, tear it, throw it far from her midnight skin and antelope eyes. But she jumped back, howled and resecured it on her head with clenched fingers. It was all mixed up. He did not know what to think or feel. The dizziness increased and played a middle ear drone in his head.
Gideon tapped him on the shoulder and he sat down.
“Leave her be,” he said. “She want to look the fool, let her. Ask her about the American girl. Alma, tell him.”
Alma told him, but from a distance so he could not get his hands on her head again, so he could not deprive her of the red wig which she had to buy herself because he had not sent her one as he promised to do, and had not brought her one either when he came back, but had come, in fact, looking for the American girl whom he loved and remembered, but not her. He had forgotten all about her and forgotten to bring her the one thing she had asked for. Oh, she was good enough to run to the store for him, and good enough to clean the toilet for American black girls to pee in, and to be tipped by them but not have her name remembered by them and not good enough to be remembered at all by the chocolate eater who did go to the trouble of knowing her name. She told him then that she worked in the airport cleaning, and that she had seen the American girl getting on a plane bound for Paris with a huge bag on her shoulder and a black fur coat and that she had been met by a young man with yellow hair and blue eyes and white skin and they had laughed and kissed and laughed in the corridor outside the ladies’ room and had held hands and walked to the plane and she had her head on his shoulder the whole time they walked to the plane. She had seen it, and Son saw it too: the mink-dark eyes staring greedily into blue ones, another hand on the inside of her raw silk knee the color of honey. Not being able to go further with those pictures, he diverted his mind to the irrelevant. Who was it? Was it Michael who met her, Valerian’s son, the one that didn’t show up for Christmas, but who came later? Was that the Ryk who sent her the coat? Or was it someone in New York who had come to the island with her? Or was it someone she met in the airport? It was all mixed up, like when he ran out of laughter ammunition and kicked an M.P. in the groin, but the thing that was clear was the thing he knew when he stood wrapped in a towel gazing out of the window at this same man’s back: he had not wanted to love her because he could not survive losing her. But it was done. Already done and he was in it; stuck in it and revolted by the possibility of being freed.
Gideon interrupted his questions. “What will you do?”
“Find her. Go to Paris and find her.” He pressed his temples with his fingers to stop the drone.
