Stolen Pleasures (18 page)

Delia waited.

“That wasn't why,” said Fleur.

“It was because he was a Black Sheep, that's why,” said Delia.

“You remember the night they took Papa away to that charity hospital?” said Fleur. “I went with him because Mama couldn't and I was the oldest and you stayed with her, and in the ambulance they said he'd better sit up, that was best if you had a heart attack. I held his hand. He was cold but he was sweating, and I thought he was sweating because he was afraid he was going to die. When we got there they wouldn't take him up to the ward until he answered questions. I wished the nurse would stop asking so they could take him up and take care of him. He was sitting up like they told him to and his chest was bare, it was glistening. The nurse was asking him what his mother's maiden name was, and he said it was Taubes, and she said ‘No, that's your name, that's not your mother's maiden name,' and he said it again, and finally she took down that name. I thought he gave her his own name because he was so afraid he was going to die he couldn't think of the name she wanted.”

Delia tried to recall how old Fleur was, that night their father died. Eighteen? That night, years ago, Fleur had found her way home from that distant hospital, showing up at dawn. Delia, afraid
that Fleur was lost, was gone forever along with their father, stood away from her when she appeared at last. Stood away in grief for Fleur and for their father, both. Pale Fleur, saddened by life and by death.

“I went up to where he was,” said Fleur. “He told me he wanted a drink of water, and I told the nurse but she said he wasn't allowed any water, and she told me to go home. I didn't go. I stayed out in the hall and I looked at him from far and he could see me. I think I saw when he died.”

Fleur turned to face the wall.

They did not go to concerts, not even to the free concerts in the public groves. Nor did they go into the churches where you could sit in a pew and watch the choirs sing or listen to the organ. Music in churches was for those who saw God differently than the way Delia saw Him. They had a radio but seldom turned it on. Once, in a store, Delia caught sight of an entire orchestra on a large television screen, and she paused to watch. The pianist, under the grand piano's slanting wing, was grimacing as if in pain, and so were some of the other musicians, as if they were striving to keep up, as if the performance were an ordeal. She did not hear the music, she was put off by the faces. Some musicians Delia passed on the street, carrying their black instrument cases, seemed troubled by a problem she'd never know anything about, unless it was about making a living, and that one she knew very well.

A friend, a man who had been her lover, gave Delia two tickets to a concert at the Opera House, tickets that had been handed on to him, and she took Fleur with her into that marble palace where neither had been before. They sat in the grand tier among hundreds of
strangers in rustling clothes appropriate for the occasion. Everyone must have known beforehand what the music was to mean to them or they would not have packed themselves in so tightly, on so many levels, all the way up to the ornate ceiling. While everyone else basked in the tumultuous river of sound, Fleur seemed drowned by it, so much more defeated by the uncountable number of instruments than she'd ever been by the one violin in her own timid hands. The music was so meaningful yet without any clues, except for a single clue once in a while, one instrument alone trying to tell them something that everyone else already knew.

“We'll go soon as we can,” Delia whispered, close to Fleur's ear.

When they lay down that night, Fleur asked, “The man who gave you those tickets, who is he?”

How do you say to a woman who has never had a lover,
He was my lover?
How do you say,
He's my friend
to a woman who had no friends?

Delia waited to answer until she had switched off the lamp. Then she said, “Do you remember Virginia, the day she brought her boyfriend for you to see? She came all the way to where we'd moved, and you put on your coat and walked out on them. You didn't come back until they were gone.”

Over there in the dark, Fleur's reflective voice of remorse. “Did I do that? Did I really do that? I'm sorry if I hurt her feelings.” The mortal pain of envy lay buried under the years.

After a while Fleur said, “You remember that job I had? That one in the dime store?”

“I used to go in after school,” Delia said, “and you'd slip me a chocolate. I was so proud I had a sister who worked there.”

“A man used to pick me out,” said Fleur. “There were three girls but he'd always ask me to wait on him. When I think about him now, he must've been what I am now, near forty, and I thought he was old. I mean I was frightened, he was so handsome. One day he wanted to walk partway home with me. I couldn't say he couldn't do that, so I walked in the wrong direction, a long way, with you and Mama waiting for me to come home. You know what I told him? I told him our mother was beautiful and our father was dead, and I said she liked to go out. Why did I say that about poor Mama?”

Fleur, who seldom spoke, whose thoughts were so concealed that people figured she had none, told her lie about their mother to entice that stranger away from herself, down a wrong path away from Fleur, crazily struggling with desire, one evening years ago.

“After you left,” said Fleur, “she never wanted me to even go to the store, but I had to go and I tried to be back as soon as I could. Once a man in a car drove up alongside me as I was coming home. He asked me to go for a ride with him. It was summer, I had on a little sleeveless blouse, and I wanted to go. I wanted to know. Mama was afraid of what could happen to me and she'd be left alone. When you were with us, when we both had jobs and took care of her when we got home, and locked the door at night and put a chair up against the knob, she wasn't so afraid. But when you left, she said we just had each other. She said you'd forsaken us.”

“I didn't forsake you,” said Delia. “I came back when I was between jobs and that was often because all I could find were temporary jobs. When I came up here I was sure I was going to be punished for leaving you and Mama. I was afraid there was going to be an earthquake just to punish me, and buildings would fall on me,
and you wouldn't have anybody to rescue you when Mama died. I wanted to stay alive to rescue you.”

Fleur had already turned toward the wall. If she forgave anyone in her life, she was so quiet about it you never knew.

Fleur came to the city in old clothes. Some things were patched in many places. She had spent her evenings over meticulous little stitches, years of stitching that women didn't do anymore but that Fleur did, living in a remote place in time, kept back in the century before she was born.

With new clothes on, with a haircut, with lipstick on, Fleur went out to look for work. She never criticized the persons who turned her away. She accepted their indifference to her, their effacing of her, their edict that there was no place in the world where she was needed. She ate hardly anything, because, she explained, she wasn't earning anything. Delia offered delicacies she had never bought for herself.

“Mama told me something,” Fleur said one night, a voice from out of those isolating, effacing years. “I don't know why she didn't tell you. Unless because you went away. She said Sophie had a baby.”

Delia sat up to hear. The world was opening wider than it had ever opened before, and closer than ever in that widening world was her sister Fleur and Fleur's voice.

“She said that baby was Papa. She said the man who was his father was a married man, she said he was a doctor. She said when he was dying he begged to see Sophie again, but they wouldn't let her go to him. That's all I know and I don't want to talk about it anymore.”

Nothing more was needed to fuel Delia's imagination. At the turn of the century, a doctor's waiting room in a prospering city, atop silver mines, must have had a long leather divan, rugs, heavy curtains that he closed across the windows, shutting out the late afternoon light. Sophie never came to him at night. He'd be home with his wife, and she, chaste young woman, home with her parents and her brothers. Delia, entranced in her bed, slipped Sophie again and again into her lover's embrace. No brief embrace, no cruel embrace, and not just one embrace. Long embraces, while the century turned them over and over together.

Out on familiar streets, Delia saw strangers of every age who could be related to her, no matter how distantly, because anyone might be related some way to the unknown man. She knew she was exaggerating that possibility, but the world was wider, and she could imagine whatever she wished.

One night Delia asked just one question, saying she wouldn't ask any more. “Did Mama tell you what became of Sophie?”

“I guess she died,” said Fleur.

Delia could imagine Sophie, if Fleur could not and did not want to. A captive Sophie, raging along the dim hallways of that threestory house, deprived of her son though he was there, at table with her, or anywhere in the house. Did she never go out into the street with him, holding his hand, setting his cap aright, pointing out this and that, her voice light and lyrical with the pleasure of his company? Was she carried away to an asylum or did she take her own young life?

Delia took a closer look at furtive old women, alone in cafés, their gaze kept down on their pastries. Clothes like Fleur wore
when she came to live with Delia, faded and mended. Sophie might have become one of those old women. Nobody knew what pleasures life had stolen from them or what pleasures they'd stolen from life, if any. Delia was afraid that Fleur and herself would grow old that way, each alone in a little café, or alone together at a table in a corner, Fleur more alone than herself because Fleur was the loneliest person in the world.

One evening on her way home, passing under an open window close above her head, Delia heard a woman singing. The music was from a radio, and the woman's soaring, silvery voice brought back her mother's laughter when their father swept her off her feet and carried her around in his strong, muscular arms. Then she felt a wave of love for them that she had not felt so overwhelmingly when they were alive. She listened until the song came to an end, not caring if the person inside the house were to look out and find her there, under the window, like a beggar or a thief.

“I heard a woman singing,” said Delia that night. “It was so beautiful it made me cry.”

“That last night I was alone with Mama,” Fleur said, “I was sitting by her bed, waiting for them to come and take her to the hospital, and I was singing quietly to myself. She asked me, ‘Why are you singing?'”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said I didn't know I was singing.”

Never had Delia heard Fleur sing. Nobody else had ever heard Fleur sing. Only their mother had once heard Fleur sing.

Often a young woman will marry an old man just because she likes his soul. But you don't see this happen vice versa. You don't often see a young fellow marry a sixty-three-year-old woman. When this happens, which is once every twenty years, you see their pictures in the newspapers all over the country. They live in Oskeegee, Georgia, or some place like that, and he looks moronic. Nobody marries an old woman because she has a soul.

At noon today I was fired from my job of cafeteria substitute helper at the Eunice B. Stratton Grammar School. I was told by my supervisor to go and see a psychiatrist. But I would rather argue with God. God costs nothing and His arguments are weightier. But I confess that after I was fired, this very afternoon, I strolled into a clinic but the social worker told me it would have to be group therapy because so many people came for help and I was not a
desperate case, so I strolled out again without leaving my name. I don't want to talk about my quirks to other people with quirks. It wouldn't be so embarrassing if we were all alone together, but a psychiatrist sits there listening and I've heard he doesn't say a word. You get the feeling that the ones who talk about themselves are the crazy ones and the one who sits silent is the sane one. Contrary to what I said above, God doesn't answer either. It's myself answering myself and sounding weighty, doing the job for Him. In my room I talk about my quirks to God with no embarrassment or not much. I threaten Him or disown Him, and then I answer for Him. If He'd answer, I'd die. But a man with a college education, why you expect an answer. I would rather write things down as I've decided to do in this diary and, besides, that immortalizes me, like Leonardo da Vinci. The psychiatrist takes notes, I hear, but that's not the same as keeping a journal by yourself. He can't take down the real meaning, just the cryptic stuff he swears by. He translates the quirks into a code and never knows he's forgotten something.