“A l’il bit.”
“A lot. But then I went to this doctor, and now it’s like I’m a whiz kid on the radio. I know everything I ever known. I know things that I didn’t know fifty years ago when they happened. Who else but the Devil gonna give you all that?”
“The medicine make you hot?”
“Yeah. It sure does. Tell me sumpin’, Shirley.” He squeezed her hand and she smiled at the tabletop.
“What’s that?”
“Who are you?” It was a question he had never asked before. Naked and unadorned, it was like something Coy would have asked a young girl he was courting.
“I ain’t nobody.”
“Now, I know that ain’t true ’cause I can see you right there in front’a me. I feel your fingers, see your pretty face.”
“Mr. Grey,” she complained.
“You know, Shirley, I wouldn’t push you if I was a young man. Back a long time ago we would’a been up in a bed before I asked you ’bout your favorite color or what you do when they ain’t nobody else around.”
“Please, Mr. Grey, Ptolemy, don’t say them kinda things to me. I’m a shy woman.”
“Men like me like shy women. We see ’em an’ wanna tickle ’em, you know?”
“I was born in Tulsa,” Shirley Wring said. She brought out her other hand to hold his. “But there was a depression and so my daddy took us to California. We got to a rich man’s estate outside’a Santa Barbara . . . lookin’ for work. But instead he let us live in a big cabin by the ocean that was on his land.”
“What your father do for that man?” Ptolemy brought out his other hand.
“Oh,” Shirley said, “he didn’t do nuthin’. That rich man was a Communist and he just wanted to do somethin’ nice for his fellow man.
“We lived there for ’leven years. My first memories is the sound of waves and things that washed up from the sea. My first boyfriend was a little blond-headed boy named Leo who lived in the big house with his sister. They were the rich man’s grandson and granddaughter. We’d swim in the ocean every day, almost.”
Shirley smiled, her eyes gazing backward in time. Ptolemy knew that look. He’d spent many years watching his own youth. He had stared so hard that the vision blurred and the memories were shut away.
“That’s wonderful,” he said. “But how did you eat or get the other things you needed?”
“Mr. Halmont, that was the old white man, he gave us food and anything we asked for. My mother made our clothes and my father drove one of Mr. Halmont’s old cars.”
“Eleven years,” Ptolemy marveled. “Eleven years livin’ by the ocean an’ you didn’t even have to lift a finger. Did they make you go to school?”
“Leo and his sister had a tutor, and they let me sit with them. We studied in English and in French, but don’t ask me to speak French. I lost that tongue a long time ago.”
Ptolemy rubbed his fingertips across the back of Shirley’s left hand. Their skins were wrinkled and brittle, two tones of deep, earthy brown. Ptolemy’s heart stuttered, partly because of a feeling that he’d forgotten, and also because he sensed a tragedy.
“Why you leave that house on the beach?” he asked.
Shirley shook her head but said nothing.
Their hands moved together, tangled, Ptolemy thought, like seals playing in the surf of Shirley Wring’s long-ago ocean yard.
“My father and Mr. Halmont used to talk about the world of communism. Every night Daddy would come home and tell us about how in Russia men was just men and there wasn’t no difference in the races or anything.”
“And your father believed that nonsense?”
“My mother was scared, but finally one day Daddy decided to move to L.A. and get a job in a defense factory and work with Mr. Halmont to organize the workers—black and white.”
“Did they kill him?” Ptolemy asked.
Shirley put her forehead against his hand and nodded.
They left the sour taste of their talk and went into the living room. When they were seated on Robyn’s couch, Ptolemy took Shirley’s hands in his, pressing his fingers against her palm.
“What’s this?” she said.
Looking into her hand, she saw the emerald ring she’d left with Robyn.
“Will you be my friend for the rest of our life, double-u ara eye en gee?”
She kissed his lips and threw her arms around his neck. It was the embrace he’d always run after. It was his only chance and his downfall. There was nothing like it in the world.
“You’re hot, Ptolemy.”
“Woman like you in my arms, it’s a wonder I don’t burn up.”
“I like it, because I’m always so cold,” she said.
They sat back, facing each other as well as their ancient bodies would allow. Their arms and hands were tangled up together, their shoes were touching.
