Black Silk (12 page)

They were eyes she recognized all the way back from the fifth grade in the country, Auntsville, North Carolina, where he had
been a miserable boy, an undesirable, someone about whom rumors were spread containing words like
pervert
and
bang.
It was said that his first girlfriend was a dog; when Rhonda once passed his house and saw the lone hound tied to the mulberry
in the parched red yard, she felt a certain amount of pity and jealousy.
How was it he could put his finger on desire and name it so painstakingly?
Desire was not crystalline; it was murky, unfettered, gargantuan. In the schoolroom, loneliness and foreboding were her sole
allies.

Years; and he had grown into a man. Rhonda set the dress down on her bed and (from sheer force of habit) slipped her whole
hand between her unpantied legs and tried to relieve herself. His tobacco field cap and armpits entered her mind—all that
glorious history, a Greek statue, just like in the book!—and she went to work. Everything down there was wet and swollen,
impossible to get through. She stuck her finger as far as it would go. Though she herself was not religious, she now and then
stopped her business to ask God why Christmas couldn’t come more than once a year.

As usual, Billy took the Belt Parkway once he made it to New York. He rather hated Long Island and what he perceived was box
living, but then there was nothing much going on in Auntsville this time of year, the supply of women being at a low. He was
a man who loved love. He loved sex, touching, bedroom camaraderie, the predominance of false intuition. And since Rhonda offered
this and more, he would just have to deal with the squared communities and endless strip malls advertising the baby clothes
and automotive parts and Laundromats and cavernous supermarkets offering everything and nothing. At the end of the line she
would be waiting for him.

As a child she was so wanting, and now she’d grown into a woman not at all his type: tall, meandering, wistful, always meaning
something she could never say. She wore the same dress year after year, thinking it something special. A pitiful girl. An
even more pitiful woman. Seven years now he’d made the trip—seven, an unlucky number. Yet here he was, on his way.
Here he was.

Those being the disadvantages. What was good about traveling to the North was that Rhonda had a house all to herself, unlike
the women he knew at home. Not a room, not an apartment in a city project, but a real single-family house with many rooms
in which to fuck. No matter it looked like a box, all fenced in by the same Adirondack posts everyone else had, or that by
twilight her roof was indistinguishable from the rest of the land. This woman didn’t answer to nobody. She didn’t have to
cook or clean if she didn’t feel like it; there were no obligatory greens pots simmering on the stove, no tobacco-stained
clothes waiting in wicker baskets. It was so different from Auntsville, with its large dilapidated faux-antebellum homes,
wringers, double-wides, televangelists blaring trumpets. There were no memories on Long Island. Here Rhonda and Billy were
new and improved; they could make love until the early hours of sun and never worry about angry lovers barging in, or incapacitated
relatives. He and Rhonda (a woman normally too alpine for his taste) could sit naked at the table and nibble chests, breasts,
toes, and elbows, ripened bodies instead of the usual coffee, butter, and grits they had grown up on.

This night, Billy Merry had a plan. He felt stung by ambition as he drove the highway, thinking of the plan in all its glory.
And this was his plan: that seven years would end tonight. It was time to learn from the past.

Billy gripped the steering wheel in fury, and relief—even though the past was a million miles away, and now he was not just
some ignorant boy in the field. He had been deciding what to do for quite a while.

How funny that all roads eventually lead to Asenath Fowler!

Rheumy eyes, arms and legs resembling spiderwebs, a time-worn mouth tasting of cinnamon and juniper bark. Time to learn.

She was an old woman back when there were hundreds of beauties in Auntsville, thousands even, lining up to his door. Nothing
more than a scarf of skin, or a heart that beat like an African drum. Why had he listened to her? Why had he even trusted
her? But then you would have to ask: Why does moss grow on the north side of trees? Why is the earth at the center of the
universe?

Outside the snow fell in soft pillows of sky around him. He stared ahead at the highway, whispering to the windshield,—Rhonda.
Rhonda. It is time to learn from the past.

The woman waiting in the house, however, was ignorant of his ideas. She did not hear his whispers from the Belt Parkway or
see the particular arrangement of clouds in the night sky. She was sewing, breathing, conceiving, reconceiving, imagining,
reimagining; but ignorant, all the same. She knew she was in love, but unfortunately could not read the signs overhead, heavenly
signs that admonished her for sewing that dress again and that informed her that tonight, Billy Merry was planning on leaving
her for the woman of his dreams.

She picked up her dress and resumed sewing. If only he were here already. At the door, she would immediately rise out of the
doldrums which had all that month whispered to her: Ain’t Christmas a family holiday? Ain’t you supposed to have some turkey
wings, some biscuits in the fry pan? Where your real people?
A man alone is not real people.

Her thoughts turned to yesterday, the last day of school: the silence of the hallways as the aged janitor glided his sweeper
across the floors; Rhonda standing at the school entrance, waiting for the last child to leave the building. When she went
back to comb the rooms for leftover children, she noticed the clock in Mr. Wool’s classroom, and the
indecent
way it hung over the map of the United States, almost insulting her with its arcane ticking. (What was it trying to tell
her?) The janitor had entered the room and surprised her by pushing a potted Christmas cactus in her direction. —Moo moo, he
seemed to say to her, only she couldn’t understand his country talk. —Moo moo. Moo.

What was the message?
Rhonda took the cactus and pulled her coat tightly around her shoulders. The old man had already acted the fool in the yard
that afternoon—now what did he want?

As he got ready to open his mouth again, she quickly wished him a Merry Christmas and left the building.

The old man fell into a rusted folding chair by the door and watched as she walked away. During the day she was in his thoughts
as he pushed his broom down the school hallway, or as he swept away gum wrappers and coils of lint and hair, or as he poured
a scalding bucket over vomit or a lake of urine, or as he locked and unlocked his myriad cabinets. He had seen many a pretty
teacher come and go at Featherstone, but had never met anyone as
gainly
as Miss Robinson.

Earlier that day, the last before Christmas vacation, he’d found her during cafeteria and cornered her with babble, a stream
of something unfocused and heady, but incredibly lovely (he imagined) to listen to. He suddenly adored the sound of his own
voice, so deep and baritone. Mr. Blank talked about children because he knew that women were always impressed by men with
feeling. He talked and talked—an amazing baritone! (Why hadn’t he noticed it before?) Often he’d lain in bed, chirping wildly
like the birds on the suet. It was only on that day before Christmas vacation, however, that he had become aware of his depths.

It was all quite natural. As he spoke, he thought about the way her breasts would taste in his unencumbered mouth, and how
he would love to see her in that pink-and-black gingham just to erase (by hand) the seams that had been crudely stitched and
opened and restitched together. He was an old man but he still could make a girl scream; it hadn’t happened that way in years
(or maybe it had never happened, he couldn’t be sure), but something in him, a distant memory of prowess, convinced him of
the possibilities of lust that has layered over time.

Through a thicket of words, Mr. Blank found himself admitting to Rhonda that though he’d had his share of grief, it was now
time to move on. Keep on keeping on, as the young say. In truth, he rarely thought about his former grief: the gang of unloving
kids he had raised, his wife, eternally grim. All of them had left him long ago. Now what remained was to push his broom,
clean up after the schoolchildren (bless their nasty little hearts), and watch the teachers come and go. Never anyone as
gainly
as her.

Mr. Blank stopped speaking, and suddenly wondered where he was. His memory sometimes played tricks.

Rhonda Robinson was frowning at him, a deep (but possibly ecstatic) frown. The janitor sank to his knees in the cafeteria;
everyone turned and looked. He focused on Rhonda Robinson’s legs as though they were the first he had ever seen in his life.
Round, slightly knobbed, caramel colored, drenched in pantyhose.

—Rhonda, he suddenly said. —Oh. Oh.

—Mr. Blank, please!

He took her hand. —Please hear what I’m saying, he whispered. —
I want to feel you, Miss Robinson, it’s this dream I have.
He could not finish his thought, his sentence. Like the birds on the suet.

Rhonda opened her mouth to say something (he knew it would be harsh, but looked forward to it) and then stormed off, leaving
the old man floundering in a pool of children’s giggles. He rose slowly and planned his next course of action.

The house on Long Island had belonged to her grandmother when she came up north, and then the old woman sold it to Rhonda
and went to live in a nursing home called the Plantation. It was just down the road in East Amity, but the granddaughter was
never seen visiting.

Billy, too, rarely made inquiries about Asenath when he came up. He never even mentioned her by name—until this night, he
believed the past should remain in the past. He knew, however, that treachery was ugly; that it made you as alone as a dog
tied to a tree, cooling the body into parched red earth. When he was with Rhonda, and when he was in that sort of mood, he
referred to her grandmother as the old woman, the battle-ax, the crazy bitch. They laughed. They rolled on a bed and then
onto the floor and then down the hallway and down the stairs past the slipcovered couch. They grew splinters in the dark knots
of their bodies, chestnut locks, and undone frizz. Nothing but laughter.