RavenShadow (14 page)

Delphine

O
ne more time I’m going to tell a chapter from Delphine’s point of view. I base it on what she told me, what she wrote in her journal, and what others saw.

Delphine gave a disgusted shake of her shoulders and slipped out of bed. She zombied into the dining area, picked up the bottle of cabernet, advanced to the front window, held the bottle against the street light. Dead soldier—not the smallest angle of liquid. She looked down at the dark street. Then she cranked open the tall, sideways-opening window, and leaned out. There was no one to see her in her Dead Head T-shirt and underwear, no one on the street at three
A.M
.

I am a sweet rich li’l nigger girl in her silky La Perla panties. Don’t you wanna take a gander?

She resisted throwing the dead soldier down onto the sidewalk. Like a good girl she retreated to the kitchen and
klunked
it into the waste basket. Then she got a hard pack of Shermans, fingernailed one out, and lit it with the Ronson lighter. She plopped onto the sofa and stretched out. Another bout of darkness in the darkness.

Since before Thanksgiving, she had been waking up like this. She would stay up late, drink half a bottle of wine to kick
her head toward sleep, lie down and doze an hour or so, and sit up wide awake. She didn’t know why. She spent the hours filling her journal. Or she spent them brooding in the darkness.

She stubbed the Sherman out half-smoked. She smoked little except during these brooding sessions. She lay back on the couch and flung her arms and legs wide. Scrunching against the thready texture of the sofa, she pictured her own crotch, a dark shadow encased in smooth, pearly cloth. She half wished the couch threads were nails so they would hurt.

Abruptly, she flung her feet to the floor and sat up. She levered another Sherman out of the box, lit it, sucked the tarry smoke into her lungs, and settled back.
A long winter’s night, while visions of sugarplums rot in my head
.

It wasn’t that she was worried about anything in particular, she told herself.
I mean, only a fool wouldn’t worry, given that life is a train wreck anyway
. She worried constantly about social justice, poverty caused by racism, unemployment, lousy education for the poor, the destruction of minority cultures, the drinking and drugging caused by despair—what was not to worry about?
But I don’t worry about myself
.

She fanned some copies of
Cosmo
on the glass-topped coffee table and stared at the covers. One model wore a tight dress, leaned into the camera, and squeezed her shoulders together to create far more cleavage than seemed possible for a size-five body. Stories were teased in short headlines:

The Frankest Discussion of Intimacy We’ve Ever Published

Why Sex Was More Fun When It Was Considered Wicked

How Holding Back (a Little) Can Restore the Big Bang

8 Color Pages of Girls in Their Clingy, Sensuous Nightgowns

24 Questions Crucial to Your Love Life

The New Chastity–Why More and More (Desirable) Women are Dropping Out of the Sexual Rat Race

I’m not important enough to worry about. I do have an image to keep up: young, bright mulatto bearing the banner of success into the world of the New World. I need to look like a success. Unfortunately, I can’t spend my days in a shooting gallery
.

Delphine had never touched hard drugs—she knew that if she did, she would dive in and never come out.
I long for oblivion
. And would swim into it, except that it would make her useless for the forces of change.
I mean, who gives a shit about me? I certainly don’t
.

At first she’d thought she was an insomniac because she was afraid to ask her father for the big favor. She’d dreamt over and over about the moment of asking. Always she was ushered by a secretary into her father’s office, not his office downtown, or his study at home or on the island, but a silly parody of an office. Her father dismissed the secretary with the words, “That will be all, Delphine.”

Then Delphine—the real Delphine—would walk across acres of deep grass-carpet, up to her chest, toward his desk. The grass-carpet was marshy, and she had to watch out not to get mired down, to sink forever into the swamp.

In front of the desk she clambered with difficulty up onto some rocks, stood up tall, and looked toward her father. Her eyes were at the level of the desktop, and her vision obscured by his nameplate—
MICHAEL RYAN
. Somehow the letters were made from statues of great presidents and founding fathers—
M
was Washington and Lincoln shaking hands,
I
was Jefferson,
C
was a roly-poly Ben Franklin, and so on. She commanded herself to rise taller, and she did, though not up to the level of her father’s eyes.

She drew a deep breath and began. “Great White Father …” She spoke at length, but in the dream she never heard
her own words—she only saw her face, composed in a brittle way against fear, and her father’s face, noble as a statue, smiling eternally, omnipotent and benevolent. When she finished asking to enter the hallowed halls of government with her paternal aid, he smiled even more broadly, lovingly, indifferently, and enunciated these words in the voice of the Burning Bush: “The touch of the tarbrush.”

That was all he said.

When she knew that would be all, the marsh opened and sucked her through a wet hole. Abruptly she found herself in space, falling. Slowly turning head over heels, she fell through infinite reaches of space, and she was as an angel, a dark angel cast out of heaven, deprived forever of light, and the sight of the face of God.

Now she had a reason to be an insomniac. “I promised it to your white, red-haired, capped-teeth, yacht-club-elegant sister.”

I sure as hell can’t sleep
.

I am a strong person
. She wouldn’t ask for help, not with this sort of thing. She wouldn’t go to Blue, and least of all to her parents.
I have to handle this. And I will
.

In the last couple of weeks she’d drunk so much wine after Blue went to bed that she’d considered giving up booze.
But I don’t have to. Not yet. Probably not at all. That’s not the problem
.

She thought of Blue in the bedroom, stretched out like a giant and gorgeous sea lion on the bed, clutching the pillow to his chest like a shell with delicious meat inside. He was
so
big and silky, he never realized, and she liked to sleep next to him, curling in a ferret space beside his long bulk. That part she had liked.
Innocent Blue
.

Anger spasmed through her. She sat up.
Why am I angry?
She couldn’t think.
Innocent? What does that mean?

She was alert now, wired. She hated that.
No sleep tonight, and feel like shit tomorrow
. Her hands would fidget, her feet would fidget, her mind would fidget.

She lit a Sherman. She went to the front window and gazed
down at the street.
Empty, empty
. She gazed at the shadows.
Empty, empty
. Shadows were supposed to be places where creatures lurked, perhaps rapists, perhaps adbuctors, at the very least black cats doing the bidding of their mistresses. These shadows were empty.

A bolt again—anger
.

She felt riven by shots of anger bolting into her body. The anger gathered in her, ran strong as an electric current, forcing action. She hurled the cigarette down on the polished wood floor and stubbed it out with her bare heel. She didn’t even notice the pain. She marched into the bedroom, not bothering to be quiet. Innocent would never notice. She got out her creamy beige dress with the short skirt, a true fuck-me dress.

Insane to wear this at three
A.M
.

O, I love the dark-side boys. Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger. I will be one of the grateful dead
.

She put on her matching Gucci belt and high heels, got her small evening bag, clicked into the bathroom, pinned her hair high on her head, her ultrasophisticated look, at least ultra for this time of night. She went to the hall closet and got the knee-length sheepskin coat Mike and Poe had given her when she went to South Dakota. The coat showed fur at the collar and cuffs, and had pewter clasps shaped like feathers. Coat and dress were an outrageous combo, but
I
am
outrageous
.

She stored the car keys deep in the pocket of the sheepskin coat and locked the door behind her.

She’d been thinking of this for weeks. Samuel Johnson. Dr. Johnson, she called him, and he didn’t get it. That was worth a chuckle. He didn’t get it.

She clickety-clacked across the concrete floor of the underground parking lot without even a glance around. She scooted into the 240 Z, slammed the door, varoomed the engine, and gunned the car up the ramp and onto the street.
Well, Dr. Johnson, you are going to get something you like, oh, ain’t you now?

She rolled down the windows of the car and flashed through the empty city streets at sixty miles an hour. The cold felt delicious.

She had met Samuel Johnson at a party her last year of high school. She’d gone with Pamela, a black girl from the same girl’s finishing school Delphine went to—maybe they were the school’s gesture at racial balance in the senior class. “It’s my cousin’s birthday,” Pamela said, “over in central district.” It was the mention of the central district that intrigued her. That was probably in the black slums, where Delphine had never been, except to drive through—they were a foreign country to her, an enticing foreign country.

Samuel Johnson was a tagalong. She never did figure out exactly why he was there, a dude in his thirties at a birthday party of college kids. She also didn’t know why she was attracted to him. Later she admitted to herself that she thought maybe she would meet a fantasy black guy with a big ’fro, or dreadlocks, a guitar genius, Jimi Hendrix come back from the dead. She would have been fascinated. But Samuel Johnson was just a guy who spent his day working on cars and hoped to inherit the garage from his dad one day. Though he was big in every direction, his three hundred pounds were mostly fat. His fingernails had dirt that would never come out. He had no prospects. What he had on his mind was nothing.

She started by sitting on the arm of the big stuffed chair where he was planted and popping Olys. “You want another beer, Dr. Johnson?” she purled out. He snorted. “Am a grease monkey, ain’t no goddam doctor. I do like a beer.” She cursed herself for thinking he had heard of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the literary man, and brought the mechanic a beer.

She talked to him for a long time, though it was mainly her talking and him grimacing or giving one-syllable answers. Samuel Johnson, it turned out, was one angry man. He was getting divorced. His wife was giving his kids a new father, and she told
him, “Don’t bring your sorry ass around here, no matter.” Samuel Johnson didn’t have time or space for Delphine or anybody—he was busy being pissed off.

She found his anger exciting, and knew that was trouble. She sat on the chair arm and popped Olys with him all evening. When everyone was leaving, he said roughly, “You wanna come up to my pad?” He didn’t even offer an excuse like a nightcap. She understood, and said casually, “Why not?”

In the years since, at odd intervals, she had gone back. It took a certain mood, it took a certain blackness. But Samuel Johnson was not a nice man, and he would honest-to-God, honest-to-the-Devil, fuck her.

She pulled into the Starlight motel parking lot, took the ticket, and went down ramps to the bottom. She always parked here, two blocks from Samuel’s place, because her car would be left alone.

She watched the street as she walked. Three
A.M
.—this was the one risky part. Then she clicked up a half dozen steps to the entrance of the apartment building. When the elevator delivered her to Samuel’s floor, she clicked smartly to his door and rapped confidently four times. The way he answered he must have been awake. The TV glowed phony color in the background. The way he looked at her made her self-conscious about her legs descending from the cream-colored skirt that barely hung below her bottom. “You look good,” he said. “Damn good.” He put a big paw around her waist and drew her to him.

“I don’t want nobody here when I ain’t here,” Samuel Johnson growled. Delphine reflected that was the longest sentence he’d spoken in her hours there. He stood in the bathroom with the door open, pissing. So she slipped out of bed, flung on her fuck-me outfit, and scurried out of his apartment ahead of him. She clutched her evening bag in one hand and car keys in the other, rode the elevator alone, and emerged into the bright daylight of
New Year’s Eve day, 1978. The miniskirt made her feel self-conscious before eight o’clock in the morning, among people who were going to work.

She walked two blocks back to the motel and paid. She redid her makeup in the rear view mirror.
I look impeccable
. Studying her face, she felt grateful to Samuel. In his unpleasant way he was perfect, and he had never known that.

She gave a twisted smile at the mirror.
I’m impeccable. Unmarked. Perfect
.

Beyond the little go-up-and-down gate she left rubber and slid left onto the one-way street. It felt damn good.

Blue, I’m sorry to worry you
. He would have been awake an hour or two by now, alone in the house, wondering.
Soon you will understand
.

She knew now.
It’s good to know
. She pushed the accelerator with her knowledge. She felt a weird exhilaration.

On the way to the ferry she stopped at a drug store and bought a legal pad. While she waited in the car in line for the Bremerton Ferry, she wrote a note to Blue. She wished she had some of her own stationery, but there was no way. She folded the yellow sheet in half, wrote Blue’s name on the blank side, and put it on the passenger seat, carefully squared to the sewn lines in the fabric.