Eva's Man

telephone out. I said I wanted a telephone. But he said naw, I couldn’t have one. I asked him why and he said he didn’t want my lovers calling me. I thought he was joking at first and then I looked at him, and he wasn’t joking. I told him I didn’t have any lovers. He said every woman had lovers. He said he wasn’t going to have a telephone in the house so that my lovers could be calling me up and then meeting me some place. I stayed with him for two years. I can’t explain it. It was like the tenderness was still there, but he didn’t trust any move I made. And then he would come down to the school and pick me up after classes. I didn’t even think of him as an old man until I was at college. He was good to me, though. He would do anything in the world for me. No one believed that he was my husband because he was older than a lot of the teachers there.

He called the telephone company and told them to take the phone back because he said he didn’t want my lovers calling me up at all hours of the day and night.

The house we lived in had four rooms and a bathroom. He said he was too old to have children. He said he didn’t want to be an old man raising children. We would sit in the front room evenings and he would tell me stories, or we would listen to the radio. He was a watchmaker. No, I mean he fixed watches. He could fix any kind of clocks and watches. He said he learned how to fix watches when he was in the army.

I don’t like to talk about my husband, though. He was fifty-two years old when I knew him. I was eighteen. No, he never once showed me his temper. It was just the thing about the telephone. No, Alfonso said he wouldn’t hurt me because he didn’t hurt the people he liked. Alfonso said he liked me. I spent two years at Kentucky State, and then I went to P. Lorillard to work. I thought he would come after me, but he didn’t. Since then I’ve been going from one tobacco factory to another. You get tired of one place and then you try another. In the summer, though, most of the times you get laid off anyway.

James put his head inside my blouse, and kissed me between my breasts.

PART TWO

1

“We need bread,” he said.

“Let me go get it this time.”

“No.”

“What’s there about keeping me here?”

“Where I can find you.”

“Did you lose her?”

He didn’t answer. He looked at me hard. I didn’t ask again. “What else do you want from the store?” he demanded.

I just stood looking at him.

“What’s the matter, baby, won’t talk?” he asked, smiling. “Nothing,” I said.

He stopped smiling, turned away and went out.

James asked me if I liked the house. I said yes. I said it was good to come in the front door and see the front room instead of the kitchen. He said he’d never seen a house where you saw the kitchen first. I said that was where I spent most of my life.

He said about the telephone, “We won’t need this.”

I said I’d like to have a telephone, I’d never had a telephone before, why couldn’t he keep it in.

“No, I’ll have them take it out tomorrow,” he said.

“Why?”

“I don’t wont your lovers calling you.” He didn’t say it like a joke.

Davis brought home bread and bacon.

“We’ll have scrambled eggs,” he said coldly. “Here’s a hot plate.

Here, you make them.”

I stirred them, saying nothing, watched them harden. “Eva, why won’t you talk?”

I turned with a smile and handed him his plate. “You meant to tell me, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Yes, I meant to tell you.” He watched me fix my own plate. He was watching me when I sat down beside him on the bed, the plate hot in my hands.

“I like to feel the heat against my lap,” I said. I put the fork in my eggs.

“My mama used to say, ‘Davy, there’s mens that ain’t got no ambition except chasing womens. You got to do more than chase womens.’ You don’t think I’m like that, do you?”

“Naw, I don’t think that.”

“I thought you were the kind of woman who’d understand.”

“I understand.”

“I thought I could turn to you for something I needed. Not romance,” he said.

I closed my eyes. I said nothing. The eggs were hot in my mouth. Then I opened my eyes and swallowed the eggs, my tongue still feeling them.

“Yes, I know how you feel,” I said.

“Where are you from?” he asked again. He probably thought I would answer this time.

“Here and thereabouts.”

“You still won’t answer?”

“No.”

“Eva, Eva, Eva.” He grinned. His hand went to my shoulder. When we finished eating, I undressed again. I turned back the sheets.

He asked me if I’d been hurt in life. He said I looked like a woman who’d been hurt in life. I didn’t answer. He said I didn’t have to answer. He leaned back in his seat. I was on a bus on my way to Wheeling, West Virginia. He was going to Denver. “My father used to carry a jackknife around in his pocket all the time. Guess what it had printed on it?” he asked. “What?”

“In big gold letters,” the man said. “‘Trust in God.’”

I asked him why he was going to Denver. He said he was thirty-five years old and liked to run with people who were twenty, twenty-five, but he said, when you’re thirty-five people who are twenty, twenty-five don’t trust you. “I mean they look at you like you don’t belong with them . . . I used to teach school around when