“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, suddenly angry. “Black people in America have been free for a hundred years. Those of us from the Caribbean and Africa still feel the bite of the white man’s whips.”
It was an odd turn of a phrase–—“the white man’s whips.” I was reminded that when a couple first become lovers they begin to talk alike. I wondered if Jogaye’s speeches concerned the white man’s whips.
I didn’t respond to what she said, just inhaled some more smoke and looked at her.
After a brief hesitation Bonnie picked up her suitcase and carried it into our bedroom. I returned to the big chair, put out the butt and lit up another, my regimen of only ten cigarettes a day forgotten. After a while I heard the shower come on.
I had installed that shower especially for Bonnie.
If someone were to walk in on me right then they might have thought that I was somber but calm. Really I was a maniac trapped by a woman who would neither lie nor tell the truth.
I’d read the note, steamed it open, and then glued it shut. It was written in French but I used a school dictionary to decipher most of the words. He was thanking her for the small holiday that they took on Madagascar in between the grueling sessions with the French, the English, and the Americans. It was only her warm company that kept his mind clear enough to argue for the kind of freedom that all of Africa must one day attain.
If she had told me that it was a gift from the airlines or the pilot or some girlfriend that knew she liked lavender, then I could have raged at her lies. But all she did was leave out the island of Madagascar.
I had looked it up in the encyclopedia. It’s five hundred miles off the West African coastline, almost a quarter million square miles in area. The people are not Negro, or at least do not consider themselves so, and are more closely related to the peoples of Indonesia. Almost five million people lived there. A big place to leave out.
I wanted to drag her out of the shower by her hair, naked and wet, into the living room. I wanted to make her tell me everything that I had imagined her and her royal boyfriend doing on a deserted beach eight thousand miles away.
The bouquet had been sent to her care of the Air France office. Her boyfriend expected them to hold it there. But some fool sent it on, special delivery.
I decided to go into the bathroom and ask her if she expected me to lie down like a dog and take her abuse. My hands were fists. My heart was a pounding hammer. I stood up recklessly and knocked the glass ashtray from the arm of the chair. It shattered. It probably made a loud crashing sound but I didn’t notice. My anger was louder than anything short of a forty-five.
“Easy,” she called from the shower. “What was that?”
I took a step toward the bathroom and the phone rang.
“Can you get that, honey?” she called.
Honey.
“Hello?”
“Easy, is that you?”
I recognized the voice but could not place it for my rage.
“Who is this?”
“It’s EttaMae,” she said.
I sat down again. Actually, I fell into the chair so hard that it tilted over on its side. The end table toppled taking the lamp with it. More broken glass.
“What?”
“I called Sojourner Truth,” she was saying, “and they said you had called in sick.”
“Etta, it’s really you?”
Bonnie came rushing out of the bathroom.
“What happened?” she cried.
Seeing her naked body, thinking of another man caressing it, holding onto the phone and hearing a woman that I had been searching for for months—–I was almost speechless.
“I need a minute, baby,” I said to both women at once.
“Hold on a minute,” I said to Etta while waving Bonnie back to her shower. “Hold on.”
Bonnie stared for a moment. She seemed about to say something and then retreated to the bathroom.
I sat there on the floor with the phone in my lap. If I had a gun in my hand I would have gone outside and killed the yellow dog.
The receiver was making noise so I brought it to my head.
“…Easy, what’s goin’ on over there?”
“Etta?”
“Yes?”
“Where have you been?”
“There’s no time for that now, Easy. I got to talk to you.”
“Where are you?”
She gave me an address on the Pacific Coast Highway, at Malibu Beach.
