And Do Remember Me (15 page)

“Come on, sister, let me in, this thing is
heavy.”

She buzzed him in, and heard Raj enter the downstairs hallway, his steps staggered and heavy. Pearl opened the door a crack and heard Raj’s labored breathing, as he carried the typewriter up the stairs, stopping on the landing between the second and third floors to rest. The sound of his raspy wheezing seemed to fill the hallway, and floated ominously up to her door.

When he reached her apartment, Pearl stood behind the door, which was slightly ajar, and Raj stood in the hall, drenched in sweat, his face gleaming with perspiration, his arms filled with the typewriter. To Pearl he seemed to take up the entire hallway.

“Open the door, Pearl, unless you want me to croak right here?” He lumbered past her into the apartment. “Where do you want me to put this thing?”

“Over there in the corner on the floor will do fine for now,”
she told him, aware as she spoke of the trembling in her voice, the breathless, ragged sound to her speech, almost as though
she
had brought the typewriter up three flights of stairs. Raj thumped the machine onto the floor, took several deep breaths and plopped onto the couch, his bulky frame setting the springs off in a chorus of protest, his arms and legs sprawled in a blatant form of surrender. Pearl had hot counted on this, that he would become, in an instant, an immovable object. She knew her eyes reflected the sudden distinct fear she felt. The door remained open and Pearl stood in front of it, her hands behind her back, gripping the doorknob.

Raj pulled a soiled handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead.

“Thanks for bringing the typewriter, Raj,” Pearl said, trying to control her voice, and instead, making it sound false, edgy and entirely unconvincing. “I know Lincoln will be glad to have it back.”

“Sure, no sweat, no sweat,” Raj said, then added, “I don’t mean that literally.” He laughed, his face erupting into a grin that seemed to devour the rest of his face. “Can I have a glass of ice water before I go?”

“Sure,” Pearl said, releasing her grip on the front door and hurrying past Raj to the kitchen. As she got a glass out of the cupboard, Pearl tried to think of something to tell him to speed his departure.

Returning to the living room, the first thing Pearl noticed was that the front door was now closed. Raj relaxed on the sofa, his fez on the coffee table, his face awaiting her return with an easy proprietorial stare. When Pearl handed him the glass of water, she was careful not to allow their fingers to touch.

“Lincoln will be back in a day or two,” she told him firmly, confidently, looking straight at Raj as she said the words, for they helped, she noticed, to calm her.

“Yeah, the brother didn’t even call me once since he’s been out there, not even once,” Raj said, feigning hurt as he placed the glass on the table. “How’re negotiations, as they say, going?” he asked.

“He’s talking to a lot of people, discussing ideas but there’s really nothing definite yet.”

“Yeah, I can dig that. Babylon. I’m sure he’ll have some stories to tell when he gets back. What you just standing there for, Pearl?” Raj asked. “Standing up like a guest in your own house.”

“Well, I was on my way out when you came.”

“Really?” he asked, his eyes hot with disbelief.

“Really,” Pearl said defiantly.

She had hoped her attitude would encourage him to begin to leave. But Raj settled back even more comfortably on the sofa and asked her, “Why do you always want to leave the room when I come around? Why don’t you like me? What did I ever do to you except try to be your friend? Even tried to give you a gig, but you turned me down, like you was Liz Taylor or somebody. Like you was in demand. Like you could afford to say no.” His voice was spiraling, curling, slowly reeling into an anguished vortex of tightly controlled anger. Pearl moved to the bookcase on the other side of the room to reach for her handbag. From that vantage point, fear animating her with an unfamiliar courage, she miraculously heard herself say, “Raj, it would take me all day to tell you why I don’t like you.”

“Because I have two wives, perhaps,” he said, standing up, the move propelling Pearl backward, quickly, reflexively. “Yeah, I’ll bet that’s what it is. But you don’t look like no damn feminist to me. Not at all. Come and sit down over here next to me, Pearl. I can give you a lift to wherever you’re going. I won’t make you late.”

“I already
am
late,” she said, daring to look at him, feeling the apartment close in around her as she did.

“So you don’t want to talk. What do you want to do, Pearl?” Raj asked, moving toward her. Pearl stood in front of the bookcase, fighting the fear that had rooted her to the spot. When he was two feet away from her she ran for the door. But he caught her, easily, grabbing her neatly, in his arms, lifting her off the floor, while she reached hungrily, uselessly, with arms and hands and fingers for the door.

“Please, Raj, please,” she screamed, her voice frantic, belonging to someone else.

“Please, Raj, please,” he mocked her. “Please what?” He threw her on the sofa and pinned her there with his hands. And when she looked at his face, Pearl thought in that moment, of Lincoln, wondered why he was not here. Knowing how alone she was, how helpless, strengthened her resistance. Yet she was impotent against him, her slender arms flailing, hitting air instead of him. Her screams came out hoarse, choking, the fear constricting her throat. Raj’s hands had pushed her long madras skirt up to her waist and she felt the rough rub of African cloth against her thighs. She heard her panties tear and his fingers invading her, peeling her like fruit and then wordless and determined he was inside. Pearl surrendered, moving to the secret place inside her, crawling there, curling up, her hands against her ears, making herself small, so small, hoping she would disappear. Some part of her lived, always in the secret place, always there except when she was acting. Except when she was somebody else.

Even the secret place didn’t help now, the smell of him, the smell of her, broke through. The walls were not holding. She prayed for total, complete disintegration when he turned her on her stomach and entered her from the back, and when he made her hold his member, now slick, wet and cruel, made her hold it in the palms of her hands, hold it tight, and renew its life. Her teeth chattered from a cold whose ferocity surprised
her. But she did not disappear. And when he was through with her, and he rose to rearrange his clothes, she managed to whisper, “I’ll tell Lincoln,” and he said, “I’ll deny it. Who do you think he’ll believe? I’m his friend, you’re just his woman.”

Pearl lay on the sofa after Raj left, paralyzed with fear, too terrified to move, silently watching the darkness filling the rooms. Then around ten o’clock she finally got up. She took a shower and called Macon. But Courtland told her Macon was in Mississippi doing research for her thesis. She did not think to call the police. Who would believe her? And in the days before Lincoln’s return she realized she could not tell him. She could not say what Raj had done. Pretense. Make believe. Fabrication. Her personal history was built on triangular towers of deceit. No wonder she’d become an actress. She’d been lying all her life.

L
INCOLN RETURNED
excited, filled with stories of the balmy West Coast. He told Pearl he had received several offers that he wanted to spend some time considering. She said she was happy for him. She said everything had been fine while he was away, but he was dismayed to find that she had started drinking again in his absence. And he did not know why. She slept fitfully beside him at night, and he found her one morning, huddled on the bathroom floor, shivering, her face streaked with tears. And she was suddenly afraid to be in the apartment alone. Yet when he pressed, asking over and over if there wasn’t something she wanted to tell him, she said no, everything was fine.

They didn’t have much longer. Lincoln knew that now. When
telling Pearl about his time in L.A., he’d told her about directors, screenwriters he’d met, projects he’d been offered. But he hadn’t told her about the hours spent in his hotel room alone, stretched out on his bed, wondering why he should return to her. He went through the meetings and discussions over lunch, dinner, drinks, the whole time, on automatic. Lincoln read the body language and facial expressions of the men he met, for bullshit, deception and promises they most likely could not keep. Sure, he wanted to work on scripts for Hollywood. Why not? But he wasn’t going to kiss ass, shuffle or sell the part of his soul New York hadn’t devoured yet. And through all the talk, one moment promising, the next inconclusive, he thought about Pearl.

They were locked in a dance that they had both mastered, and which, with the repetition of each step, felt more and more to Lincoln like death. He loved her. And she was killing him. Her silence. Her scars. Her refusal to once and for all let him inside where it was cold and windswept, but where, if she relaxed her vigilance, she need not be alone. Alone, encased in a history that imprisoned her and that she clung to, was who she was the day they met. It was who she remained.

He thought her life on the stage would save her. It merely momentarily obscured the horror of the past. Lying on his hotel bed, night after night, in L.A., Lincoln realized he had to leave the woman he loved if he was going to live. He knew this, feeling it slam into him like a wall. What he didn’t know was how he was going to say good-bye.

And now, she could audition, study her lines and get hired for a role, all while she was drunk. Drunk, she now knew, was not always the sloppy, mumbling, awful, falling down out of control syndrome she’d seen in the movies. She could be attentive, articulate, funny, thoughtful, while drunk and most times nobody knew. But Lincoln knew. He could see it in her eyes, in
the slight, endless trembling of her hands, in the furtive way she walked around the apartment as though her whole existence was something she wished she could hide in the nearest closet. No, nobody could tell. But him.

She forgot nothing, remembered everything. The remembering, after she was sober, was worse than before. Finally Lincoln confronted her, saying to Pearl one night when she was in the kitchen washing dishes, while he sat at the kitchen table, “I won’t stay with a drunk. If you want to destroy yourself, go ahead. Feel free. But you’re fucking up my life too, and I won’t let you do that.”

They were almost like strangers since his return. Standing at the sink, soap bubbles up to her elbows, Pearl heard him confirm what she already knew; he didn’t love her. How could he? They hadn’t had sex in weeks, because she had been afraid for him to touch her. She found herself barely speaking to him because she didn’t know what to say. Lincoln stayed at the theater a lot now, where he had an office. She was once again pounding the streets, looking for work from one end of town to the other, and was often asleep when Lincoln got home.

“I won’t have it, Pearl, I just won’t have it.”

She heard him shouting this, as though the liquor was killing him instead of her, as though
he
were the one who woke trembling and afraid, who went to sleep the same way.

Pearl dried her hands on a towel and sat at the table across from him, seeing judgment and pain in the eyes that, she remembered distinctly, had once long ago, gazed at her with something like love.

“You’re betraying everything I thought you were working for,” he said evenly, sternly. “Your talent, our future.” Listening to him, it struck Pearl as perfect, inevitable, that he would say betray, for she had never trusted him with her heart, or her love.

“Why, Pearl, why?” he finally asked. And she sat before him dumb, mute as a child.

“It helps me forget,” she said, after a long while.

“You can’t live life as an amnesiac, or is that what you want?” And when she didn’t answer, Lincoln told her, “Pearl, I’ll give you six months to straighten out your life. Six months and that’s it.”

Then she found her voice, found it suddenly, totally, fully. “Six months! Six months! To do what? I never promised you I was perfect. I’m not really a character in one of your plays, Lincoln, who you can force to cry, laugh, grow up, walk straight into the ending you choose. I think you’ve got me confused. Sometimes I’m Jessie Foster, sometimes I’m Pearl Moon, but I’m me. Take your six months and go to hell.”

In the aftermath of this fight, Lincoln put it all together. Figured it out, though what he suspected depended much more on feeling, instinct, than fact. He noticed how whenever Raj called, and Pearl answered the phone, she refused to say his name, handing Lincoln the phone as though the receiver was a dead animal. When he talked about the theater, complained about Raj, he could feel Pearl withdraw, pull back something tangible. He invited Raj to the apartment and for the first time ever, he refused to come. And when he asked Pearl to stop by the theater one evening, she told him, “I can’t. I just can’t ever again.”

When all the pieces fell together, like cowrie shells in the sand, he didn’t know exactly what to feel, because he was unsure what had really happened. He only knew that if it involved Pearl and Raj, it had been awful.

Since Malika and Fundi had moved out, Raj had begun to hole up in his house, not coming to the theater for days at a time, trying to track down his children, whom he was determined to take from their mothers. The afternoon Lincoln went
to see him, he felt ill at ease, on edge, and stood thumbing through a pile of magazines on a table in the hallway, as he asked, feigning a casualness he did not feel, “Did something happen between you and Pearl while I was away?”

“Happen? What do you mean happen?” Raj asked, turning away from Lincoln, entering the living room.

“Like an argument, a disagreement of some kind?”

“Naw, brother, why you ask? She say something?” Raj asked, now settled on the sofa.

“That’s just it. Every time I mention your name she gets uptight. And she told me she couldn’t come by the theater ever again. Now why would she say that?” Lincoln walked into the living room, still refusing to sit, feeling more in control through the sheer act of remaining on his feet.