And Do Remember Me (19 page)

T
HE HOUSE LOOMED
around her, reeking of loneliness and neglect. Entering the foyer, Macon set her briefcase and several envelopes from her mailbox on a table in the hallway. Shadows from the sudden arrival of evening filtered in through the sheer curtains at the front door window and intensified the momentary hesitance that frequently gripped her when she entered her house. At times like these, she had an eerie, fleeting desire to go no further. This was the house where she had fought the possibility of death. This was where she had begun to heal, only to find the process more daunting than she had ever imagined. In the living room Macon turned on the light and gazed at the newspapers strewn on the floor beside the sofa, the stacks of videos atop the television set, the yellow legal pads, the books on the coffee table and the coffee mugs on the side tables, as though assessing the handiwork of a stranger.

Once she had been almost fanatically neat. Now she had grown used to the disheveled atmosphere that prevailed in nearly every room of the house. The disorder that once could threaten a headache, now soothed her, took on a presence of its own that she respected. It was merely an extension of her life.

Sitting on the sofa, Macon reached for the remote control and turned on the television, which she kept on now virtually all the time. The face of one of the city’s most popular black anchormen sprang into view. Gazing at the screen with the sound off, Macon realized that she was hungry, but the thought of trying to decide what to eat sent waves of fatigue through her. Instead she removed her jacket, tossing it into a nearby chair, and stretched out on the sofa. She would rest a few minutes, she told herself, instantly falling asleep.

Three months after her forty-fourth birthday, Macon discovered the cancer while examining herself after a shower. The hard tiny lump felt like a bullet lodged beneath her skin. A biopsy of the lump revealed that the cancer had spread so rapidly that a modified radical mastectomy was immediately performed followed by chemotherapy. Within a month of discovering the lump, she had only one remaining breast. How, she often wondered, could her body have been plotting to kill her without her knowledge. Except for the tiny lump, she had no other signs of the illness.

Two weeks after the surgery, Macon attended an American Cancer Society seminar on breast prostheses. Entering the room, she saw five tables lined with thirty different types of prostheses on display. There were breasts made of silicone gel, cloth and plastic. There were breasts the color of deep chocolate, breasts with brand names like Bosom Buddy and Nearly Me. How suitable, Macon thought, when she picked up several prostheses shaped like teardrops. The hour spent looking at these prostheses had depressed her so much that she had considered not wearing one at all. Her doctor had not been able to give her a medical argument for its necessity.

She had challenged the conventional wisdom in the classroom and in her life, but, even after a long talk with a friend who had chosen not to wear a prosthesis, Macon had decided to wear one. It changed nothing. She remained a one-breasted
woman living with cancer. Yet how important it had become to fool the world, if not herself. Her hair had begun to grow back and she had symbolically burned the wig she’d had to wear during the chemotherapy treatments. She was determined not to have to wear one again.

Pearl stayed with her for a time during the worst of the ordeal, which Macon now recalled as the entire time. Macon, so independent, so self-sufficient, had subtly tried to resist Pearl’s competent, nurturing hand. But after a while, her protests that she was fine had exhausted her. During the chemotherapy treatments after the operation, she was home for three months.

While watching a movie on TV one night, Pearl turned to look at Macon during a commercial and said, “It’s only a tittie. That’s all they took. A tittie.”

“But it was
my
tittie, mine,” Macon said, feeling the inevitable, hot tears well quickly in her eyes. Pearl hugged her gently and Macon thought, It wouldn’t be just a tittie to you.

As an actress Pearl valued her body, her looks; she cherished her physique, her attractive face. How she depended on it, even as she had sought to destroy it over the years with alcohol and men.

“I wasn’t making light of what’s happened,” Pearl apologized, turning off the television and huddling at the foot of Macon’s bed. “I was just trying to put it in perspective.”

“I know, I know,” Macon said.

“At AA,” Pearl began carefully, “they told me I’d have to learn to love what I’d been through—waking up with a head the size of this room, the crow’s-feet around my eyes from the alcohol fucking with my veins—I’d have to learn to look back on all that as just
stuff
that had my name on it, that belonged to me and my past but that couldn’t claim me now. You’ll have to learn to love that empty spot on your chest. Besides, you’ve been more scared than you are now, I
know. Tell me something that scared you as much as what you’re facing now.”

“It’s not just having one breast, it’s the cancer, it could come back.”

“Tell me,” Pearl insisted. Macon stared at the walls, her lips pursed tight, as though reigning in a potential explosion, and refused to speak.

Pearl said, “When I had my second abortion a couple of years ago, I thought if I have to go through this again I will die. The anesthesia always took me out. I felt like I was having DT’s. And with this last abortion, it took me a long time to come out from under the drugs. I felt like I was stuck inside this dark horrible tunnel.”

“When that dog bit me outside the courthouse in Greenwood,” Macon said slowly. She coughed and wiped her eyes with a tissue. Sinking back against the pillows, she said, “Believe me, girl, I was scared. That business about your life passing before your eyes is true. I was only what, twenty? There wasn’t much life to recall but it zipped by when that dog’s teeth sank into my right arm. I’d never felt such terror.”

“Terror, my dear,” Pearl pronounced solemnly, “is also the first day of sobriety, the longest most gruesome day of your life.”

T
HEY SAT UP
the remainder of that night, trading horror stories, sharing near misses. The retelling of stories they both already knew—old miseries, old defeats, redefined that which made them friends.

Pearl had helped Macon pick out a wig when her hair began to fall out because of the chemo, turning the wig-hunting expedition
into a farce, prancing around the shop in a suburban mall, assuming a different identity to match each wig. It was Pearl who was there when Macon was sick to her stomach from the chemo, holding her head while she wretched in the bathroom and it was Pearl who cleaned up after her as if she were a baby.

M
ACON WOKE UP
still tired, still hungry. When she turned on her answering machine, there was a message from Courtland. He was coming to Washington next week, and wanted to drop by to see her, he said. She had finally reached a point where she could be in the same room with Courtland and not feel herself drenched in regret. It had taken a long time but she liked to think they’d backtracked to the beginning and were friends as at the start. The last year of their marriage had been a protracted stalemate that neither possessed the courage or good will to break. Macon had wanted to adopt a child and shape a marriage that included greater intimacy, the possibility for surprise. Courtland insisted that he could only father his own child and that his political work was still paramount. The divorce was the only thing they were able to agree on in the end. After it was over, Courtland returned to Mississippi where he had been marshaling support for a run for Congress.

For several years after the divorce she had thought about adopting a child. She had gone so far as to make inquiries with public and private agencies. But the depth, the weight of the need of the children she saw overwhelmed her. They had been battered, beaten, born to drug-addicted mothers, shunted from one often abusive foster home to another. Their need for love and stability struck Macon as bottomless. She gave nearly a
dozen lectures during the school year at colleges around the country. Her research required frequent travel, sometimes abroad. The world had become her village. What would she alone, with no partner to lean on for help, be able to give to a child who needed someone who could always be there? If she were married, if her life were more predictable, if she could afford and live with the decision to hire live-in help—the ifs piled up around her desire to adopt and soon left it quietly buried under a blanket of doubt.

There was also a message on her machine from Noble Carson. He was at a meeting he said but wanted to stop by to see her that evening. He would call back later to see if she was in.

T
HEY HAD GONE
out for dinner twice in the last month. The sound of Noble’s voice on the machine filled Macon with a familiar mixture of fear and desire. It had been a long time since she was involved with a man.

Around the time she discovered the lump, there had been the beginnings of an affair with a black dean at Jefferson College. When she found out about the cancer she simply told him that everything had changed; she could no longer see him. She had not even given him a decent explanation; she had felt that her disease allowed her to be thoughtless and rude. She did not care about his feelings or his sincere hurt when she hung up abruptly during a call to see how she was.

During the actual battle against cancer, her body had been poked and probed so much that the thought of a man’s touch had totally dismayed her. But since the doctor had confirmed that she was in remission, she had continued to live a life of celibacy. First, she had not wanted to be touched, then when

Macon realized she was out of harm’s way, she wanted to avoid the emotional disarray and confusion that love always seemed to bring. But in the wake of Noble’s promise to call her tonight, she felt desire stir in the pit of her groin, unmistakable and full-fledged.

N
OBLE CARSON
was one of the first people Macon met when she moved to Washington. She knew him before his divorce, before his fall from grace, before his time in prison. An aide to a senior black congressman, Joshua Fairbanks, Noble was a member of a group Macon worked with mobilizing against investments in South Africa, demonstrating in front of the South African embassy against apartheid. Their arrest during a demonstration sealed their friendship.

A compact, whirling dervish of a man, Noble was prematurely gray and glided across a room like a panther. As the oldest son of one of Washington’s most respected black preachers, Noble had inherited his father’s eloquence and genius for rallying others to action. Often after long meetings plotting the defeat of apartheid, Noble asked Macon to join him for a drink or a late night snack. Noble Carson talked the way James Brown moved his feet. His conversation was incisive quick-witted poetry. He told her all the dirt about congressmen and senators on the Hill and viewed his job with a pragmatism that sometimes disheartened Macon.

One evening Macon met him in his office on the Hill. As they strolled down the halls of the Longworth Building, he said with a sweep of his arms, “Just look around, Macon, this is why blacks get elected and are never heard from again. This is Disneyland,” he said, a wicked, raucous laugh echoing gently down
the hall. “This is a place so comfortable, so nice, you never want to go home, and some of these guys never do.” He told her about the Capitol gym, the bank, the medical services and the myriad perks that ensured congressional privilege and encouraged abuse of power. “What’s a black politician gonna say when he gets stationed here except Thank you, boss?” he’d asked, squeezing her tight for emphasis and kissing her cheek playfully.

“Oh, Noble,” she’d protested.

“Come on, Macon,” he’d said as they left the building and headed for her car, “when was the last time you heard a member of the Black Caucus criticize Israel? Say anything about a subject that doesn’t have to do with race? Rock the boat? Just like the white boys, they’re bought and paid for. After a while you could do this blindfolded.”

S
HE LOVED TO
listen to him talk, savored the sound of his laughter. She had been falling for him even then. Macon just hadn’t known it.

N
ONETHELESS, SHE
was really not surprised when he was arrested for stealing three hundred thousand dollars from the campaign chest of Joshua Fairbanks. She had heard rumors about his weakness for gambling. Macon had seen him in the eight-hundred-dollar suits he wore in the “glory days” as he
called the period when he talked easily and casually with Senator Kennedy when he ran into him in the halls of the Rayburn Building. Those were the days when he twisted arms and made promises, all to raise money for Fairbanks. He had answered virtually to no one then, not even Fairbanks himself, so much was he trusted by his boss. The world, to Noble Carson, was an orchard and he entered it every day with an appetite and two skillful, fast-moving hands.

Sentenced to five years in prison, Noble served two and had been out on probation for the last year and a half. When Macon went to visit him at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, she asked him why he stole the money. As she sat waiting for his answer, she wondered if his was a political mistake or a personal tragedy?

“It was so easy,” he told her. “So easy. It was there. I could do it. And I did. Lots of times the contributions came in the form of cash. Sometimes checks were made out to me, since I was the main fund-raiser. Josh trusted me. I cashed them.”

Even in his prison uniform, Noble Carson looked suave, fashionable. Staring at him across the wooden picnic table in the visiting area, Macon thought that he looked better than she had seen him look in years. The haunted, hunted look of the weeks preceding his sentencing had given way to an unperturbed mellowness.

Yet beneath his calm exterior a furtive combustibility still lurked, a warm, radiant heat that Macon knew had fired both his political commitment and his greed. But it was this contradiction, this studied conflagration of cross purposes that defined Noble. Even sitting across from him in Lewisburg, Macon battled with the passion that shot across her heart like a meteor. Noble’s arrogance and pride offended and seduced her. He would not admit to a moment of remorse; his only regret, he said, was that he had betrayed Fairbanks, who had been a
mentor and friend. In the clubby, familial atmosphere of Capitol Hill, Fairbanks had relied so much on Noble’s expertise and political skills that Fairbanks had vainly tried to cover up the theft. But a congressional committee got wind of the crime and forced Fairbanks to press charges.