And Do Remember Me (17 page)

“I will,” Pearl promised. “Macon, I will.”

——

P
EARL SAT
staring at her face under the unforgiving glare of the harsh fluorescent bulbs rimming the dressing table mirror. Skillfully, meticulously, she applied makeup, as though headed for the stage, rather than a dinner with Lincoln Sturgis.

Only in the last year had she been able to look at herself in the mirror without flinching. Her thick, willful dreadlocks, tied back from her face by a green and gold swath of cloth, were home to gleaming, slender threads of gray that had arrived presumptuously, prematurely, when she stopped drinking. At first, she had tried pulling the gray hairs out, then she tried dying her hair, but in both cases, the gray grew back triumphant, sturdier than before. So Pearl had called a truce and found a kind of poetry in the combination of her gray hair and the still staunch youthfulness of her face.

It was an odd face, a face that would always tell on her. Tiny crow’s-feet pinched the skin around her eyes, whispering to anyone who looked closely, “I used to be a drunk.” At some point, the makeup had to come off, the sun had to come up, the lights had to be turned on; then you got stared at straight on, with no possibility of retreat. Yet her face still contained—no matter how fleetingly, the questing, startling innocence that nothing had been able to destroy.

Time had passed as though it were capital squandered in an overnight binge of gambling. The future arrived and became the past, Pearl now knew, whether you were ready for it or not. She looked at the array of eye shadows lined up before her in the makeup case and chose the color that matched the green and gold dress she was wearing. When Lincoln had called and told her he was coming to town on business and wanted to take her out to dinner, she had spent three days searching in her favorite boutiques for this dress.

Tonight she would be beautiful. She would hide every trace of anything ugly, terrible, all the things she convinced herself she couldn’t remember, in order to survive.

The rape had congealed, hard and unmovable in her memory. There were times when it festered, aching and sore, throwing a curtain between her and the rest of the world. Other times, most times, it lay ticking, synchronized and lethal, its poisonous qualities camouflaged by an inert exterior. She had done well in the years since the break with Lincoln, the horror with Raj, that’s what she told herself. There had been numerous national and local TV commercials. She had performed each summer for the past three years in Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park productions. And she had acted steadily on the stage in New York and on tour around the country. A one-woman show on the life of Ida B. Wells, which she had put together with Macon’s help and that of a writer she met through Simone, had taken Pearl to college campuses across the country during Black History Month. But best of all, she was beginning her second year as a defense attorney on a highly acclaimed TV courtroom drama.

Pearl played Jasmine Holloway, a dreadlock-wearing (because she had insisted on keeping hers and the director wanted her for the part badly enough to say yes), politically savvy lawyer. Pearl had fought with the scriptwriter all the first season for a lover for Jasmine. When shooting started next week, Jasmine Holloway would be the only black woman on prime-time TV who would have an almost nude sex scene with her lover. And if Pearl had anything to do with it, she would try to get more than one scene like that written into the script this year. There had been a time when she could hardly bear to go to the movies or watch television. The roles for black women had hardened into stock roles of prostitute, caretaker or confidante to a major white character. Pearl looked back over her career and could not remember once having played a love interest.

She had done well. The need to defy her designation as damaged goods had propelled Pearl to work with furious determination. Several years ago she had decided that if there was a
role to be had she would get it. When there was no work, she would make some. She cultivated directors, casting agents, made peace with former enemies, prayed, whatever was required.

Her most transcendent, fulfilling moments still occurred on stage. She had to work if she was to do more than just survive. Macon had told her that it wasn’t as hard as it seemed to be alone. But it was. She continued to choose men, when she allowed them in her life, who would dominate or direct her. Her relationships were most often short, intense, unsatisfying affairs, ending in recriminations, fraught with scenes as full blown and traumatic as anything she played on the stage. She had become a master at approaching her life as a script she had been handed that still needed work. When emotions got messy, or out of control, there was either an intermission or a denouement. Soon the scene ended, the run was over.

All this was convenient, efficient, and left Pearl’s soul as thirsty and parched as a stretch of desert sand. There had been two abortions. And several months ago she had had her tubes tied. While Macon had tried to make the world safe for a child, Pearl knew the world never would be. Never. All she had to do was look at her own life to see that.

Yes, that color would do. It would do fine, she thought, as she applied the eye liner and then the lash builder. She was starring in a play when she fell off the edge, a drama in which she was a murder victim. She died six nights a week. That’s how she thought of the role. Slowly, she had been requiring more and more alcohol to sustain the numbness she needed to get through each day and to separate herself emotionally from the character she played.

Each night, she had to give raging, potent life to a young woman who became the victim of a gang assault. The play hit so close to home that there were days when Pearl felt she could
not go on stage. Still she dredged up the backlog of her own pain to give one of her most powerful performances. In the third week of the run, with the house packed every night, she suddenly could not go on stage. She had been drinking heavily all day, feeling morose and brooding over the ways in which her character had begun to infest her own thoughts, echoing an end for herself that had haunted her imagination for as long as she could remember. At the very moment that she was to walk onto the stage, she could not move. She stood paralyzed, voices reigning in her head that told her if she stepped on the stage, she would die, this time for real. Her understudy went on and she resigned from the production and checked into Bellevue, showing signs of exhaustion. That’s when her doctor told her she had to stop drinking. Stop drinking or die, he’d said, as though the latter prospect was supposed to frighten her. He didn’t know how close she had come to choosing it.

She told no one, not Macon, not Mae Ann, that she was in Bellevue. She lay in the narrow bed, terrified, some days hoping she would never have to move again; other days, suicidal at the thought that she might not ever act again. During her hospitalization, her brother Junior was killed, shot in an alley in Jackson, Mississippi, in a fight over one hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of heroin. When she left Bellevue and returned home, the telegram informing her of his death was the first thing she saw when she entered the foyer. It had been shoved under her door more than two weeks before.

For a year Pearl attended Alcoholics Anonymous, listening to the stories of the people in the meetings, their tales of defeat and humiliation, sure that she was different, convinced that they were stupid or just plain unlucky. When she did stop drinking, she stopped not so much because she wanted to live, but because she wanted to continue to act. She auditioned for a role in a new play by a veteran, award-winning playwright.

The play was to be the major drama of the fall theater season and was to be nontraditionally cast, fully integrated. But after her audition the director pulled her aside and told her that he had heard about her drinking, her hospitalization. She was the one he wanted to hire, but he just couldn’t take a chance on her. That’s when she stopped. She hadn’t had a drink since.

F
INALLY SATISFIED
with what she saw in the mirror, Pearl stood and reached for the new dress. As she examined her figure, Pearl smoothed the dress around her hips and stomach. She was weak with anticipation and excitement. In the years since their breakup she and Lincoln had talked often, but she had always managed to be out of town or unavailable when he came to New York. Taking one last look in the mirror, Pearl smiled with genuine delight, certain that before the night was over she would be in Lincoln’s arms once again. If asked, she could not have said, however, what she expected to find there.

W
ORDS HARDLY
mattered anymore. Once he had used language as exorcism and explanation. He had thought words were incorruptible, sacred. But that was before Hollywood taught him how cheap, and even sinister, language could be. He was a script doctor now, overhauling the unworkable, the unredeemable, pulling it all together, pumping the requisite humor, drama, violence, into stories too expensive to write off.

Lincoln didn’t know whether he was a hired gun or a hired hand. He had reached the mid-six figures and he still felt each paycheck was an act of theft. The endless story conferences, the team editing, the intrusion of brand-name actors and brand-name directors into the process, threatened every time to defeat him. Six figures for what? After the bastardization of his dialogue, the cannibalization of his ideas, what was left? Six figures for fourteen lines? He had written a script on the life of Paul Robeson that was locked in the safe deposit box in his bank in L.A. He hadn’t shown it to anybody. He didn’t know if he ever would.

He kept waiting, finally, to be happy. He was holding his breath, waiting to exhale and breathe in contentment. He had married and would soon be a father but he felt more trepidation than joy. He had spent years trying to get over Pearl; to conquer the feeling that it had all been a waste, she a hopeless case, he a fool.

He had waited all that time, all those years, for her to love him. When he finally left, he tried so hard to forget her. But he could not. Something of her echoed in the manner of all the women after her. He called her every few months, afraid that without him she’d crumble, some part of him hoping that was true. Clutching the phone during those calls, he waited to hear her say she needed him, to come back. He waited, viciously, angrily sometimes, to hear her say nothing had been right since he left. Oddly enough, he never expected to hear her say she loved him; that was too much to ask. But she hadn’t crumbled. Her talent hadn’t disintegrated, rather it had spiraled into a thunderous shout that drowned out whatever personal demons had tried to bring her down. He sometimes wondered painfully, what would have happened to them if he had stayed? Where would they be, if she could have loved him?

——

“Y
OU LOOK GREAT
!” Lincoln said, as Pearl settled in the booth where he sat waiting for her. He leaned over the table and kissed her gently on the cheek, his eyes gazing with approval on what he saw.

“And you, you look …”

“Older,” Lincoln finished for her, laughing broadly.

“Older, but great,” she told him. Pearl knew she was blushing but she didn’t care. Being face to face with Lincoln again made her feel wonderful and she wanted never to stop smiling. His face was heavier. Pearl had seen evidence of a paunch when she sat down. He had shaved his beard and heavy bags were lodged beneath his eyes, but he looked healthy and prosperous.

Lincoln reached for Pearl’s hands and caressed her fingers. Each time he tried to speak, he found himself unable to find the words. Finally he said simply, “Pearl, it’s been too long. Way too long.”

“I know.” And she meant it.

“There were times when I felt like you were hiding from me. You were always conveniently out of town or indisposed when I came back. You weren’t hiding, were you? Not from me?”

“Would you forgive me if I was?”

“I’d forgive you if you’d help me to understand why you avoided me.”

Pearl eased her fingers from Lincoln’s hold and said, “I just wanted our reunion to come at the right time, the right time for both of us.”

This admission saddened Lincoln, Pearl could tell. He shifted in his seat, moved his gaze from her face to his glass of bourbon.

“It was never about that with us, not then, not now,” he said quietly.

The waiter came and asked Pearl what she would like to drink.

“Soda water is fine,” she said. When the waiter departed, she told Lincoln, “I haven’t had a drink in five years.”

“Was it hard to stop?” he asked.

“Everything was at stake, Lincoln, I had no choice,” Pearl said.

“I wish you could have stopped when we were still together. Who knows what might have happened?” Lincoln said. There was an awkward, though not uncomfortable pause before he said, raising his glass, “Congratulations on your sobriety and on the show. I’m one of your biggest fans.”

“We just got renewed for next year.”

“I’ve been hearing wonderful things about you.”

“Every time I pick up
Jet
I see you,” she joked. “But tell me, how is it out there? I know you’ve been doing scripts and I saw the two films you directed.”

“You want to know what it’s like?” Lincoln asked, taking a swig of his bourbon. “I got out of Mississippi and the movement without a scratch. I managed to remain nonviolent in the face of ignorant, red-necked sheriffs, but last week I got into a fight with a man who sits behind a desk as big as this room just because his uncle owns the studio. That’s how it is.”

“But what about the scripts?”

“I’ve written a dozen, but only two have been made into films. It’s frustrating. The films I directed didn’t do well—the reviews didn’t translate into box office—and, Pearl, they never forgive or forget lost profit out there,
never.”

“I heard you’d directed some TV.”

“Now and then. Here and there,” he shrugged.

“So, will you be directing the play? How’d the meetings go today?”

“You know, it’s like negotiating the Paris Peace talks. Today
it looks possible, tomorrow, who knows.… Did you hear about Raj’s death?” he asked.