And Do Remember Me (16 page)

“Man, the sister’s tripping. You know women. Maybe she
imagined
something. Took me serious when I was joking,” Raj laughed huskily, shaking his head in bemused disbelief at the possibility.

“Did you touch her, Raj?”

“Touch her? Touch Pearl?”

“Don’t shit me, man, please don’t do that,” Lincoln said, walking closer to the sofa.

“That’s
your
woman.”

“Yeah, and I come back from L.A. and she’s terrified to be where you are or even to hear your name, and I’m supposed to ignore that? Just tell me what you did. Who said what. What happened?” Lincoln asked reasonably.

“You crazy, man. What are you accusing me of?” Raj sprang from the sofa, belligerence crackling in his voice.

“What’re you denying?”

Suddenly, he was pushing Raj, his palms flat, hard against the man’s broad chest. And to his surprise, Raj didn’t move, just murmured softly, “I don’t want to hit you, Lincoln.”

“What did you do, Raj? Did you beat her like Malika? Did you touch her?” Lincoln shouted.

“No, man, I didn’t, I swear.”

Lincoln looked deeply, for the last time, in Raj’s eyes. Pearl had tried to warn him long ago, but he had brushed her fears aside. He had chosen to ignore the intuition in Pearl that had sometimes saved them and never let them down. Still, after all that, he had failed her, left her exposed. And so she had said nothing. Denied him even this. Denied what he could see embedded in Raj’s eyes. In this moment he hated them both.

Lincoln’s fist slammed against Raj’s chin, slitting the skin on his knuckles. Raj fell onto the sofa, like a tree plummeting onto a forest floor. He lay rubbing his face, cursing Lincoln, vainly trying to rise. Instinctively, Lincoln cradled his fist in his left hand, looked in amazement at what he had just done and turned and left the house.

But the knowledge merely granted them a reprieve. For the etiquette that bound them required him to say nothing, to nestle against, not challenge Pearl’s silence. And for a while things improved. And beneath the canopy of silence which spread over them like a protective sky, there were days even weeks now and then when they recaptured what they sometimes had at the start, but it never lasted. He made two more trips to L.A., for story consultations, he told her, and then in the summer he said he was going out there to spend a few months. He was working on a script he’d been offered, and he needed to be close to the studio. Despite everything, he asked her again to come with him. She responded by saying, “Since you’ll just be gone a few months, I’ll wait here.”

Pearl did indeed wait, although she soon knew she was not really waiting for Lincoln’s return. He didn’t call this time, but sent her numerous postcards that she didn’t answer. Eventually,
the postcards became shorter and shorter and then stopped coming at all.

T
HE CALL CAME
at 2
A.M
. and Macon let the phone ring. The jagged, nearly psychotic sound of the rings finally slit the seams of her sleep. She was afraid to answer, yet she felt that she must. She lay for some time, hoping that Courtland would awaken and answer it, but when he continued to snore deeply and persistently beside her, Macon reached over him to the bed stand and picked up the receiver. Pearl’s voice, wrenching, yet amazingly clear, summoned her from the possibility of sleep or repose for the remainder of the night. Pearl kept saying over and over, “He’s not coming back, he’s not coming back.”

“Who are you talking about, Pearl?” Macon asked.

“Lincoln, he’s gone.” Her sudden intake of breath sounded like a sob.

“Gone where?”

“Gone for good. I drove him away.”

Macon took the phone into the living room and listened to Pearl for the next hour. Her recitation of her fears was morbid, confused, yet in the framework of her life, completely plausible, Macon knew.

“I’m alone and I’m afraid,” Pearl said over and over. “I’ve never been alone like this before. Never.”

The careening, off-center sound of Pearl’s voice prompted Macon to ask her if she had taken any pills. Pearl said she had not but kept repeating over and over, “I’m alone now, I’m all alone.” Macon promised that she would come to New York right away, catch the first plane she could get.

Now she sat heading to New York. She had roused Courtland from sleep at 6
A.M
. to tell him what had happened, where she was going. He had mumbled a groggy good-bye. She had asked him to call school and cancel the class she was scheduled to teach. She might have to cancel classes for the rest of the week, depending on what she found in New York.

She was nearing completion on her doctorate and teaching at Simmons College. Two years earlier she had been awarded a Ford Foundation grant to conduct a study of the impact of the civil rights movement on the lives of a group of young girls growing up in three Mississippi towns. The study had required frequent trips to Mississippi but Macon was now in the midst of writing her findings, which would be the basis for her thesis.

On the weekends, twice a month she volunteered to spend twenty-four hours in a battered women’s shelter in Cambridge, and had been having long conversations by phone with several women from her movement days who wanted to form a national black feminist organization. It was not lost on her that the dynamism and purpose that characterized her professional and political life were sporadic in her marriage. She had fought so hard for political change that she could not understand why she did not feel the same desire to fight for her marriage.

When he finished Harvard Law, Courtland took a job with Legal Aid, turning down the lucrative offers from law firms looking for overqualified token blacks. But he felt defeated by the hopelessness of his clients and the bureaucracy he had to deal with to get them help. So Courtland became increasingly involved with a group of black Boston politicians and community activists who were concerned with issues of police brutality and low income housing for the poor. He journeyed to the south several times a year, to visit his mother and to gauge the political situation in the new south, the south that had produced a liberal Georgia peanut farmer who looked like he had a good chance of becoming president.

It was hard for Macon to say when she had first felt them losing it, losing what had kept them together. She was terrified of the idea that perhaps, in the end, it was the movement that had kept them together, that without that they had nothing. She could not remember the last time they had gone to a movie or out to dinner or talked about something that was totally inconsequential. They had spent their married life fighting various political battles and had lost the marriage in the process, it seemed.

She had no idea what Courtland’s favorite color was, or his favorite meal. They were so busy studying or organizing that they ate Chinese takeout, or microwaved something out of the freezer most nights. Courtland often left his offices at Legal Aid and went straight to a community meeting that might not end until eleven or twelve. The marriage had been a studied, consistent movement toward progress and freedom. But for whom? More and more Macon found herself just wanting to lie on a beach somewhere beside her husband, yet she was afraid to because she had no idea what she would or could say to him in a setting like that. The women at the shelters came in bruised, beaten, battered. They were beaten because they didn’t prepare a meal fast enough, or because they had not been obedient enough, or because their husbands had seen the seeds of betrayal in a friendly smile given to a stranger. These women had been battered because their existence, their femaleness, set husbands, boyfriends, on edge, inflamed them with doubt about who they were.

Leaving the shelter exhausted, drained by her shift, Macon drove home remembering that she and Courtland had not argued in months, or was it years? They had no time for the accumulation of discontents, the small brushfires of anger, to spread and consume them. She wanted to raise her voice sometimes in passionate release of some emotion held dear, to argue and then make up by making love, hating and loving all at
once, all jumbled together in a solid, terrible mass that was sometimes love too.

Maybe it had started to fall apart when they found out, as she had long suspected, that she could not conceive. Courtland had started talking about children last year. Since Macon would be finished with her doctorate soon and Courtland had plans to set up his own practice, they agreed that now was the time to start a family. When they found out about her problem, she suggested adoption. But he did not want to adopt. He had looked at Macon and said, “I want my own child, not somebody else’s.” Macon took the words as a kind of declaration of war, for they now knew that he could not have
his own
child with her.

It had all come to a head during the drive home from the doctor’s office. Courtland was staring straight ahead, as though afraid even to look at her. The silence between them was the worst she had ever known. Earlier, as she walked beside him on the way to the car, Macon had already shifted to a solution to the problem, refusing to let the situation imprison or derail her. Fifteen minutes into the ride home, she suggested that they consider adoption. That’s when Courtland had looked at her then as they sat stopped before a red light, and said, “I want my own child not somebody else’s.” She sat biting her lip to keep the tears from falling. She would not let him see her cry, could not, no matter what. For years they had had long talks with their friends about how important it was to adopt the black children warehoused in foster care. They had talked about the need for the black community to take care of its own.

During the time they had tried to have a child, and approached lovemaking as an act of faith and renewal, Macon had often wondered what their child would look like, what kind of mother she would be. She joked with Courtland, as they lay in each other’s arms, about reading the Fourteenth and Fifteenth

Amendments to the Constitution to their child at bedtime. He had laughed at the stunning perfection of that idea. Macon was sure they were happy.

And then, when it wasn’t to be, she was utterly surprised at how much it had mattered to her to be a mother. While Courtland felt he could only be a father to his specific seed, Macon was eager to love any motherless child. Her husband had left her with no way out, no way to win.

B
Y THE TIME
the plane arrived in New York, Macon was plagued by a distress that congealed in her stomach and pounded in her head. How would she comfort Pearl? What would she say?

She found Pearl drained but coherent and she told Macon everything, about Raj and the break with Lincoln. Macon sat on Pearl’s bed amid the rumpled sheets, the close, humid air of the room pressing around her, and stifled a sob as she listened to Pearl’s story. The rape horrified her, and she was not surprised when her efforts to convince Pearl to press charges, even now, months after the fact, failed.

“I’m terrified, Macon. I’ve never been on my own before, not since Lincoln and I met. I’ve never been on my own at all.”

“It’s easier then you think, being on your own,” Macon said bitterly, flash-forwarding to visions of herself alone. Lately, she had been haunted by her own fear of the future. “Lincoln wasn’t your Svengali, Pearl, he was your lover. You can go on and you will. Everything he taught you, everything you learned, you’ll use it now, because you have to.”

“But, Macon, I’m not sure I want to go on. With any of it. The
acting, living, feeling. I live only when I’m onstage, Macon. It’s the only life I have.”

“It’s the only life you want, Pearl, and it wasn’t enough for Lincoln. There wasn’t enough room for him on that stage you’ve erected in your head.”

“Why should I go on, Macon, why?”

“You’ll go on, Pearl, with all of it. Because you’re just like me. No matter how much I think I want to die, sometimes, it’s moments like this that convince me the only thing I can do is live.

T
HEY MADE A
list of all the people Pearl knew in the city and Pearl was amazed at the number of her contacts, in her work, people she could go to for money, for advice, for a job to tide her over.

That evening Macon took a bubble bath while Pearl sat on the toilet plaiting her hair. Slowly, Macon began to tell her about her inability to conceive, and about Courtland’s reaction.

“And, Pearl, you know, it hurts, it hurts so bad.” Her face was haggard, bewildered. She reached for the glass of white wine on the floor beside the tub.

“Because of Courtland?”

“No, because of me. Why was I working all this time to make the world a better place, if it wasn’t to make it safe for a child?”

“But, Macon, the world isn’t safe,” Pearl said emphatically.

“I know, it never will be, but hell, I’ve done my part. I’ve cleared a patch of ground where my child could stand in pride and dignity. I earned that for it.”

“Are you saying you feel incomplete?” Pearl asked.

“Don’t try that game on me,” Macon said angrily, draining the glass of wine and handing it to Pearl.

“I wanted a child,” she said defiantly, sinking lower in the tub, a wave of bubbles rising to her ears. “I wanted to teach, to write, to love my husband, save the world, be your friend and somebody’s mama too. Hell, Pearl, I don’t feel incomplete, but I do feel cheated.”

Macon raised her leg and watched the water, soap and bubbles, glistening and fresh, slide slowly down her leg. “I had more love in my heart, Pearl, than I knew,” she said, easing her leg back into the water. “And I feel it inside me now about to burst. My husband doesn’t want it. What’ll I do?”

“What’ll happen when you go back?” Pearl asked. “To you and Courtland?”

“I don’t know, Pearl. I only know I can’t continue to live stalemated, with my dreams on hold.”

Macon stayed five days and during that time, she took Pearl down to Macy’s and they bought new curtains, new sheets and pillows and new pictures for the walls. The night before her departure, Macon told Pearl, “Only one person lives here now and that person is you. But just because there’s only you here, doesn’t mean you’re alone. You’re only alone if you want to be. Will you remember that?”