'Good luck to you, Mr. Griffin.'
'And to you.'
He went out the door. Not much by way of sound out there now. Hall lights bright like a sea around the dark, dark island of his form.
That night Laverne stopped by on her way to work with a cassette player and a recording of black poets reading their work.
'Something I thought you might like, Lew.'
I did. And must have listened to it thirty or fortytimes over the next several days. Something about being cut off from the visual world made that tape so much more real to me, so much more substantial. I began living in those words and voices-living through them.
LaVerne had heard the album, from a New York label that put out a steady stream of Southernfieldrecordings, folk music by aging Trotskyites and suburban youngsters, klezmer, polka, at a client's home.
'Thanks.'
My arms went out and she was there, in them.
'You smell good.'
'I won't for long. Seven at night and it still has to be a hundred degrees out there.'
'You could take the night off.'
'And do what? You just get yourself well and come home. Then I'll take the night off. Maybe several nights.'
'You mean like a date?'
'Yeah.' Whenever she focused on something close, her eyes seemed to cross. It gave her face a vulnerable, softly sexy look. Broke my heart every time. I couldn't see her then, but I knews he was doing it. 'Yeah, like a date, Lewis.'
She stretched out on the bed beside me, smoothed her dress back under her. Neither of us spoke for a while.
I don't remember this, of course. Verne told me about it later, some of it. The rest, I imagined into place.
'It's been a while since we did this, Verne.'
Turning, she tucked her head against my arm. I felt the warmth of her breath on my chest as she spoke.
'I miss you, Lew. Miss you sometimes even when you're there. But I miss you a whole lot more when you're gone.'
I don't know how long we lay like that. Once a nurse started peremptorily into the room, fetched up stock- still just inside the door and backed out without a word.
When LaVerne sat up, the fabric of her satin dress crackled. She wore her hair long then, cut straight across front and back.
'Maybe this is different from most of life, Lewis. Maybe this is something we can fix.'
I put my hand on her waist.
After a moment she stood. Began tucking things in. Breast, hair, slip. Her sadness.
'Have to go, Lew. Late enough start as it is.'
'If it's as hot as you say it is, things'll be slow on the street.'
'You never know. Sometimes heat just brings the beast out.'
'Take care ' She was almost to the door. 'Verne?'
A pause. 'Yeah, Lew.'
'Is it dark outside?'
That's what bothered me most. Where things were, the shapes of rooms, finding my way to toilet and lavatory-all minor problems. But being suspended in time, out of the gather and release of the day, was something else entirely, an immeasurable loss.
'Almost,' she said.
'A clear night?'
'Pinpricks of stars in the upper window. Moon will be full in another day or two.'
'And city lights stretched out below us.'
'Yes.'
'Diminutivefires of the planet, Neruda called them.'
'Sure he did. See you tomorrow, hon.'
I remembered lines from a Langston Hughes poem: Night comes slowly, black like me. Once LaVerne was gone, I nudged tape into player. Sure enough, Hughes's poem was there, right after one about a lynching. Further along was another, by LeRoi Jones/Amira Baraka, that would haunt me for years.
Son singin fount some words. Son singin in that other language talkin bout 'bay bee, why you leave me here,' talkin bout 'up under de sun cotton in my hand.' Son singing, think he bad cause he can speak they language, talkin bout 'dark was the night the ocean deep white eyes cut through me made me weep.'
Son singin fount some words. Think he bad. Speak they language. 'sawright I say 'sawright wit me look like yeh, we gon be here a taste.
I think that may have been the first time I thought about all these different languages we use. Danny Barker used to talk about that, how with this group of musicians he'd talk one way, that way with another one, uptown and downtown talk, and still he'd have this private language he'd use at home, among friends. We all do that. To survive, our forebears learned dissimulation and mimickry, learned never to say what they truly thought. They knew they were gon be here a taste. That same masking remains in many of us, in their children's blood, a slow poison. So many of us no longer know who, or what, we are.
2
Her hair had come out of a botde. So had courage, gait and gestures. But somehow it was all of a piece; it worked.
'Hope you don't mind if I tell you you're a good-looking man,' she said as she sat down beside me. She'd successfully crossed troubled seas between her seat at the bar and my table, listing but slighdy starboard. Now here was this new challenge: a fair distance (as my father would have said) from up there to down here. Heroically she made it.
Matter of fact, I didn't mind at all. A lot of my own life was coming out of a bottle those days. This white woman made her hobby drinking bad whiskey and picking up bad company in cheap bars, what business was it of mine. Lord knows I'd fished often enough in her pond.
Never question what Providence spills in your lap.
She wanted Scotch and got it. Sat swirling it around in her glass the way stone drinkers do that first hit or two, savoring color, body, bouquet, legs, letting those first sips roll across the back of her tongue, equal parts anticipation and relief. Before long she'd be slamming it back. Not tasting it at all, just letting it take her where she needed to be. Before long, too, her conversation would start to narrow, go round and round in circles like someone lost in the woods. I knew. But for the time being she lay warm and safe in the bosom of that wonderland alcohol grants its acolytes, a zone where, for a short time at least, everything fell back into place, everything made some kind of sense.
When I was a kid my mom would drape these pinned-together cutout paper patterns for clothes she was sewing us over the kitchen table. She only did that when I was very young and soon gave it up-just as she gave up most everything else. But I loved sitting there looking at those paterns: some kind of thin, opaque paper you saw nowhere else, pins holding it together, half on the table and half off. Destined soon for the trash; but briefly it pulled one small part of the world together, gave it rare form.
Dana, she said, shaking hands rather more fiercely than the situation called for. A journalist. Wrote a column for one of the local papers. Maybe I'd even seen it. Society stuff mostly, who was seen where wearing what in the company of whom and where they'd all gone to school, leaning on connections an uptown family, a couple of society marriages and her Newcomb degree gave her. But now and again, hanging out in bars like this one or dredging her
