And Do Remember Me (14 page)

“Now’s not the time to think about them; that’s one thing we both agree on. But you know sometimes I wonder. I’ve never even had a pregnancy scare, not once. I wonder but I’m afraid to go to a doctor to have myself checked out.”

“Why do you think the problem’s with you? Why not Courtland?”

Macon shrugged in discontent. “A feeling, an instinct, a fear, I don’t know. But I
do
know that sometimes I sit in my classes at the university and listen to the garbage these professors spew out about black folk and I could vomit.” Macon made this pronouncement boldly, clearly relieved, Pearl could tell, to change the subject. “Nearly all the texts need to be rewritten, especially the ones they rely on for their version of our truth. I’ve had ferocious battles with theory professors. To put it mildly, I’m not too popular in the department.” She smiled mischievously.

“Why don’t you transfer?”

“And miss a good fight?” Macon asked with a laugh. “I couldn’t sleep at night and Courtland would disown me if I threw in the towel.”

S
HE HAS NO
idea, absolutely no idea, how good she is, Raj thought, as he sat near the back of the theater, watching Pearl on stage. She was playing a prostitute. A young educated girl forced onto the streets of a southern African nation by the ravages of war and the disruption of the life she had previously known. She was the strongest actress he had seen in years—elastic, assured. She held nothing back. Her body was serpentine in its agility and she could mimic anyone, brilliantly affecting perfect pitch accents.

She claimed and filled her space on the stage with gracious composure and when she was absent from the stage nobody could take her place. Yet she had turned him down flat when he
had asked her again about trying out for his company, turned him down cold as though she could afford to say no to the possibility of steady work.

He wanted her more than ever because he now knew she was afraid of him. He could smell her fear. When he came to visit Lincoln, she hardly pretended anymore; she’d just leave the room as soon as he arrived. When he tried to find out from Lincoln what really made her tick, Lincoln was reticent, joking with him about the chameleon quality of great actresses, laughing him out of his curiosity. Sometimes he wondered if Lincoln knew the answers to the questions he asked so insistently about Pearl. He knew all wasn’t well between them. He could sense the tension and sometimes it seemed as if Pearl was even afraid of Lincoln, of what he wanted, what he could give.

For all this, Raj was sure she didn’t have a rebellious bone in her body. Not one. She was an easy mark. He could read people, had developed a kind of X-ray while doing time, and Pearl was an easy mark. It was like she wore a sign. He wondered who had put it there.

He wanted her. He just had to decide when. And she would be good. She would say yes, then, to anything he wanted. He had thought about what he would make her do, what he would do to her. She would be compliant, obedient. He would make sure of it. He knew the value of keeping a woman on a short leash.

Three weeks ago he had come home to find his wives in bed, making love, their veils on the floor, the children asleep and them wrapped inside the sheets on
his
bed. Walking up the stairs, he had heard their moans, muffled yet unmistakable, seeping beneath the closed bedroom door, dripping from the bedroom walls that he would never look at the same way again. And it was all he could do not to kill them. It was only Ismail,
his oldest son—big, tough, strong—like him, who had managed to pull him off Malika, had pried his fingers from around her throat, while Fundi shouted at him, cursing and screaming, hitting him with books, pillows, the bed stand lamp. The neighbors had called the police and he’d been taken to the precinct and booked on charges of assault. By the time he made bail, he came home to find the women gone and his children with them. He could have called Malika’s parents in Teaneck, Fundi’s sister on Staten Island, but every time he thought of the two of them together he got so sick that he could not bear to think of hearing their voices.

Nothing that had happened had caught him by surprise. Not really. He had seen and envied how Fundi and Malika got along, how they communicated, always talking, sharing, as if they could read each other’s minds. He had thought it was a woman thing, the way women were, nothing to threaten him as a man. For what men gave women was, in the end, what mattered most, he was sure. In fact he had been glad for them, glad they had each other. He was away at the theater so much, he had not had time in his life, on the streets, in prison, to learn the gentle things, the soft things, the woman things. Besides, they weren’t for him to learn anyway. He had listened to their conversations trying to hear what they heard, feel what they felt, but had always come up empty. It was like that sometimes with the children, too; not the boys, really, for he was training them to be warriors, not to cry, to respect his word as law, not to lean on their mamas. But the girls were a different story; he felt as if he’d lost them already.

Fundi had been his first wife. A nurse in the intensive care unit at Kings County Hospital, she was married to a junkie when he met her, and she told Raj she wanted a strong man. Serious, steady, the oldest of nine children, who had worked and studied her way out of a Bronx tenement childhood, she
was devout, patient, yet strong-willed. He considered her his rock, his staff. Much of the time her salary fed them all.

Malika, barely twenty when he met her, was a dropout from Sarah Lawrence who had brought him a play she had written, asking him to read it. She had attended a private all-girls prep school where she was one of only two blacks; the summer before she met Raj she had spent hitchhiking across the country with a boy whose father owned a third of all the real estate in Manhattan. But when she discovered she could write she changed her name from Eleanor to Malika.

She sat facing Raj across his desk the afternoon of their second meeting, her pale, near-white skin glowing like a translucent mask. She wore a nose ring, and huge, circular earrings dangled almost to her shoulders. She was dressed in a turtle-neck sweater, blue jeans and a vest made from a blue and orange swirl of batik, with a matching swath of cloth wrapped around her head. Her green eyes blazed with curiosity, sparkled with the hint of permanent surprise.

The play was as good as anything he had read in the last year. Almost as good as some of the dramas in professional production. But, pushing the manuscript across his desk, he said, indifferently, “It’s not bad. There’re some weak spots in the second and third acts that I could help you with. And the conclusion falls flat. But for a first try, it’s not bad at all.”

“It’s my third play, actually,” she said, a tremor of defiance frosting her voice, and exciting him. “The second one I wrote was produced at school.”

“You been in the belly of the beast a long time, sister,” he said, folding his hands before him on the desk, implying by that act a judgment of which he knew she was aware. “And now you decided to come home.”

“I didn’t want to lose who I am,” she told him shyly, as though admitting a folly for which she was not sure she could
be forgiven, moving the green eyes that three generations of women on her mother’s side had prized, and been married for, away from his face, to the manuscript in her lap. “That’s why I left Sarah Lawrence. And when I discovered I could write, and what I wanted to say—”

“You came to the right place,” he said, interrupting her, hurrying to quiet her, to yoke the onslaught of confessions that would inevitably follow. Looking at her he knew everything that was important. There was nothing more for her to say.

He rose from his desk and walked to the office door and locked it, the sound of the lock forcing her to turn and look at him. But the eyes, which he now saw shifted imperceptibly from dark to light green, held no fear, only expectation. And she sat still beneath his hands as he unraveled the galae around her head, letting it fall to the floor, bunching at their feet. She threw her head back and sighed gently when his hands rummaged through her auburn hair—long, thick—massaging her scalp. And her delicate, fine-boned fingers traveled up his arms, beneath the sleeves of his dashiki, when his palms cupped her breasts. He took her on the floor beside his desk, amazed at the blondish hairs between her legs, under her arms, and the pinkish ivory cast to her skin.

Malika didn’t resist, convinced, as she told him later, that this act was the first of many that he would use to initiate her into an understanding of what she’d lost, had been denied in all the years before he discovered her.

Two weeks later he asked her, over Fundi’s objections, to move in with them, to be his second wife. Her obstetrician father had written her off for dead when he found out she was pregnant by Raj and living in a polygamous arrangement.

The respect Raj felt for Fundi was balanced by the passion of his relationship with Malika. In time the initial jealousy the two women had felt toward each other had dissolved. They
made no distinctions between the children, both women caring for and loving them all. He’d thought everything was perfect. Malika had grown restive lately, saying she wanted to go back to school, despite his desire for her to stay at home. Fundi had threatened to leave him if he hit Malika again. But these brushfires were nothing he couldn’t handle, he’d thought. Nothing he couldn’t put out. Now it was poisoned. All the time he’d thought it was
him
that they loved, when it was each other. He would never be able to imagine what they could have given each other that was strong enough to extinguish his hold on them. But he had to get some remnant, some part of it back. Every time he turned around, people were talking about women, about their rights, like
they
were all that was happening. The white chicks calling all men pigs, acting as if they just discovered they were oppressed and more and more of the black women trailing along after them, like lapdogs. A man couldn’t hardly get no attention for the women grabbing it all: writing, complaining, picketing, protesting. And some of the black chicks writing shit about black men that was positively subversive. He had to train the next woman right. Show her who ran the show, who called the shots. Maybe he’d begin with someone who was smart enough to already fear him.

A
FTER A DECADE
in the theater Lincoln Sturgis was discovered. The second play of Lincoln’s that Raj produced received equally favorable reviews and ran for four months before being moved to a larger theater off Broadway. It was nominated for an Obie Award for best drama and best supporting actor. Lincoln was profiled in the
Drama Review
and his agent began
receiving calls for Lincoln to write movie scripts. Suddenly, anything was possible. Pearl watched Lincoln carefully, hesitantly, for signs of change that would alter what she felt for him. But Lincoln wore his success easily, as though merely relieved that the world had discovered what he always knew; he could tell a good story.

One evening while preparing dinner together Pearl asked Lincoln, “You’re not the least bit scared by what’s happening, are you?”

“Why should I be? This is what I’ve worked for, why should I run away from it now?” Lincoln stood at the sink washing a head of lettuce.

“I guess now the struggle is over,” Pearl said, wondering aloud.

“Naw, honey, the struggle just begins. I just hope that for us things won’t be such a struggle from now on.”

Pearl knew that Lincoln was not talking about their persistent need to pinch pennies, to put off until tomorrow the purchases that they needed.

She could not bear the hope, the desire, framed on Lincoln’s face, flickering like sparks at the edge of his words, so she turned from him and looked in the refrigerator, although there was nothing there that she needed.

“How’s Raj taking all this?”

“He’s warning me that I’ll sell out if I set foot in L.A. He says Malcolm didn’t die so I could write trash in Beverly Hills.”

“Is that what you want?”

“What? To write trash in Beverly Hills?”

“Lincoln!”

“Pearl, I want to write, for the stage, for films, for whatever. And I want to earn what I’m worth.”

“How much are you worth?”

Lincoln stood drying off the lettuce leaves in the spinner and said, “How do you put a price tag on imagination? How do you put a value on the magic you create on the stage?”

“But if you had to?”

“I’d choose a value that had six figures instead of five. I wish you’d go with me out to L.A. next week.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Four, five days. Come with me, Pearl.”

“I’d only be in the way. Besides, I have some auditions next week and I’ll be here when you come back,” she said with a gentle smile. “I’ll be right here, waiting for you.”

T
HERE WERE
no auditions, no tryouts for which she had to stay in New York. She stayed behind to see if he would return to her from L.A. The four or five days grew into a week and then two. He called her nearly every night, his voice cautious, excited, outlining proposals and story ideas he was discussing with producers.

S
ITTING IN THE
apartment one evening, Pearl heard the buzzer, and immediately wondered if Lincoln had decided to surprise her and come back earlier than he said. He was not scheduled to return until the weekend, but she allowed herself to imagine that he might be in the vestibule, announcing his return over the intercom or saying he had lost his keys. She
approached the intercom with hope and anticipation. “Who is it?”

“Raj.”

“Raj?”

“Yeah, I brought Lincoln’s typewriter back. We’d been using it down at the theater and don’t need it anymore. I been promising to bring this thing by here for weeks.”

“He’s still in L.A.”

“And I’m still standing outside your apartment with a five-hundred-pound IBM Selectric in my arms, bout to develop a hernia. Will you let me in? he shouted through the intercom.

She wanted to tell him that she was on her way out, or ask him to bring the typewriter back when Lincoln returned. But then how long could it take him to put the typewriter down and walk out the door? In the midst of these thoughts, Raj pressed the buzzer again.